Do people still run dial-up bulletin board systems (BBS), and do YOU use any?

I don’t know but I used to love visiting them. That’s where you could play all of the great door games like L.O.R.D (Legend of the Red Dragon), Junkyard Wars, Global War and have great chats.

A few years ago I was looking for Doors games so I could play Global War and I found a number of BBS’ that supported them but I was never able to dial in and connect.

For once, I’m too young in a discussion about the internet…I’m scared.

@InspecterJones – This was before the internet even existed! People would run “sites” very much like Fluther on their home computers (only using ASCII text—no graphics). There were literally tens of thousands of them across the country. Instead of an internet connection, you would use your modem to make a dial-up phone call to each one individually by calling that BBS’s phone number. The BBS would run idle and wait for its modem to detect an incoming call, and then make the connection. Then after participating in the message boards and playing the door games, you would disconnct and dial the next BBS’s phone number. Most BBSes served a local community, because it was a long-distance call to call a far-away BBS. A popular BBS might be difficult to get through, because its phone line would be busy all the time, and people used “demon dialers” to keep calling over and over again while the line was busy until the BBS answered.

@HungryGuy Seems like it’s a good thing I missed out on that haha.

@InspecterJones – Not really. They were tons of fun. Though nobody knew it at the time, they were the precursors to today’s social web sites.

@HungryGuy There was definitely an internet just no world wide web (www).