The first BBS came to life in 1978 during a particularly bad Chicago blizzard. Its inventors, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, wanted a way to keep up with their computer club without having to gather together in person. So they figured out a way to do it with computers. The resulting software, called CBBS, allowed personal-computer owners with modems to dial-in to a dedicated system and leave messages that others would see later, when they, in turn, dialed up the BBS.

When first connecting to a BBS, the service typically displays a splash screen with the BBS’s name or some associated image rendered in ANSI graphics—colored, text-mode graphics using the IBM PC's extended ASCII character set. After that, the typical login or registration process. The latter usually requested a user’s full name, mailing address, phone number, birthday, and more. It's quite probing by today's standards, but was not as intimidating in a time when one couldn’t instantly look up a photo of someone's house online

After signing up or logging in, the service might present a list of bulletins—messages from the sysop—or else go straight to a main menu. From there, the user enters single character selections like “R” to read messages, “E” to send email, “T” to see the file library (to download programs), or “G” to log off.

BBSes once numbered in the tens of thousands in North America. These mostly text-based, hobbyist-run services played a huge part in the online landscape of the 1980s and ‘90s. Anyone with a modem and a home computer could dial-in, often for free, and interact with other callers in their area code. Then the internet came along in the mid-1990s. Like a comet to the dinosaurs, it upended the natural order of things and wiped BBSes out.

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References

1. Benj Edwards (November 4, 2016) "The Lost Civilization of Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems" The Atlantic