Comments
From my days... this is what an old photo of a "proper" BBS looked like https://beeline.org/beeline/?view=a29ed68f4f4d53 (note the wire wrapped custom modem controller) - the description is "Original Apple IIe with 11 modems and two 4-port homemade serial cards"
And to keep better time, https://beeline.org/beeline/?view=c0a8000daa11ca
It was later upgraded to a 486 https://beeline.org/beeline/?view=188870d0bbc894
By officeplant 2026-03-1318:10 Yeah this is a lot closer to the home BBS I grew up around. We had 20+ phone lines coming into our house all in a bundle going through the attic and dropping down into my dads "office" within the house. That led to a shelf full of modems, where I had to go find an inactive one and shut it off to free up a line. All so I could go turn on the modem in my room, because it was time to play a game with a friend across town.
Over time the BBS grew into us being a local dialup ISP as my Dad dug deeper into self employeement in the computer age.
By flopsamjetsam 2026-03-1321:061 reply I fully appreciate the horizontal "stack" of modems underneath the desk in the second photo :)
By flopsamjetsam 2026-03-1322:18 An absolute mess of cords!
By flopsamjetsam 2026-03-1321:05 Ah, I was wondering what that was. My knowledge of terminals is not good (I just guess VT100 for everything :)
By SneakyMission 2026-03-1220:1211 reply Higher resolution photo https://web.archive.org/web/20230531042903im_/https://static...
By pseudohadamard 2026-03-136:041 reply That's not a real BBS. A real BBS is one where you dial in at 20:50 and the sysop's mum answers and says it's not 21:00 yet and you need to call back a bit later when the phone line is switched across to the modem.
By hollywood_court 2026-03-1314:44 That brings back memories. When I was aged 9-12, I made enough money mowing lawns during the summer to afford to have multiple phone lines to support my BBS. I made a bit of money during the fall raking leaves as well. But when winter time came, I had to always disconnect all of the additional lines because I could not afford them.
But I also kept one extra line just for my PC because it was always a pain to dial out to another BBS or chat room when my mother wanted to use the phone to talk to her long distance boyfriend.
By myself248 2026-03-1222:04 Thank you!
In the alcove on the right, I think I'm seeing 66-blocks, breaking out the phone lines that must be routed to each machine. Two blocks stacked, each with a fanout of wire on the right side.
By ralferoo 2026-03-1315:18 Interesting. I thought that looked like a frisbee between the 3 disk packs (?) just below the ceiling next to the cupboard with the brown slatted doors. But then the original picture was so small I thought it must be a desk fan, but in the larger picture I'm going back to my original guess of a frisbee!
Oh that's a breaker box (or a box of wiring of some sort), not a mirror!
A mirror? I first saw it as a common (US-centric) exterior metal door, with a window -- and with a shelf blocking the opening.
The blur does interesting things.
By cheschire 2026-03-1221:10 yeah the shine in the top left of the rectangle was what led me to think it was a mirror, which from my experience would have been really strange for the types of nerds that would work in windowless rooms back in those days.
The black cable underneath looked like the shadow of an oval frame
Glorious. This must be what is like when old people long for the hot car they lusted for in their youth.
> Glorious. This must be what is like when old people long for the hot car they lusted for in their youth.
Absolutely. The blog post goes to great lengths about why it's stupid to run a cluster, and I run a NAS in my house that has more horsepower than anything from the 90s, but there's a part of me that's still a teenager who wants to run a monster multi-node BBS
By tracker1 2026-03-1317:33 I get it... FWIW, you can run a telnet/ssh based BBS today over relatively modest hardware, though self-hosting at home given common blocking of regular server ports is a pain.
I've got a nas and a relatively powerful mini-pc for most of my home lab server stuff... but all the same, juggling about 6 BBS related projects I'm hoping I can bring all together later in the year.
By cvwright 2026-03-1318:00 Or maybe this is like fondly remembering the busted economy car that you drove around with your friends? I have my first 386DX sitting on my desk right now and it looks exactly like the top left of that photo.
The hot car that we all lusted after was maybe something like a SGI Indy or an O2.
By SpaceNoodled 2026-03-1221:281 reply I recall old people being glad that air conditioning was invented.
By bombcar 2026-03-1314:06 Life with air conditioning is nice, but life without it wasn't as bad as it is now when the a/c fails.
Cars had vents that would blow outside air right were it was needed without using the heater/fan system, or wing windows that you could direct "relatively quiet" air at you.
Now if your car's a/c fails, you get to roll the window down and that's about it.
By syncsynchalt 2026-03-1221:541 reply Pretty standard option for any home with a teenager, to be honest. Long enough to drag the handset into the nearest coat closet when needed.
By netule 2026-03-1223:07 Mom’s listening along on the other phone with her hand covering the receiver.
By cucumber3732842 2026-03-1310:30 We have them at work on our voip phones so we can roll around to each other's cubes while talking to a client without putting that client on speaker. We have headsets and the like too but you're not always wearing it when the phone decides to ring.
By themafia 2026-03-1221:35 Apparently "Software Creations" BBS, which ran PCBoard BBS software and was operated in cooperation with Apogee games.
Hmm, that is interesting, why was that version originaly hosted on 3drealms site? Probably nothing, somebody there just wanted to share a cool picture. But what if that were an early apogee shareware distribution bbs?
it was 3D Realms official BBS
https://nitter.privacyredirect.com/ScottApogee/status/159372... Scott Miller - Apogee/3D Realms Founder :
>BBS's (bulletin board systems) were the backbone of the online world before the Internet came along in 1995. Apogee teamed up with Dan Linton's BBS, called Software Creations, and we poured $200k+ into it to grow it to nearly 140 call-in nodes with a T3 (high bandwidth) line.
By whatthe12899 2026-03-1221:043 reply wait, are you OP? or did you happen to find a high res version of the same paper-copy picture that OP supposedly was given 30 years ago and then scanned and then threw out. or did OP make it up? or is OP just a bot?
maybe i'm a bot.
anyway i used to call into BBSs back in the early 90s and the thing I'm remembering is that they survived mostly on donations, and now that I am seeing the infrastructure that supported those systems and recalling the price of hardware back then I'm starting to second guess everything I thought I knew.
By layer8 2026-03-1221:31 Click on the HN “past” link for this submission near the top of this page, then you’ll get to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565 (see the top comment there) from when the original image link was still working.
By hamdingers 2026-03-1221:32 Many sites including Google offer reverse image search. You give it an image and it gives you a list of places it appears, sometimes in higher resolution or with more context (or different context, which can be interesting).
By DetroitThrow 2026-03-1221:121 reply Rachel says she had the photo as a postcard. It's likely that more postcards were printed, and that other people had owned those copies, rather than people being bots.
By manarth 2026-03-1310:48 postcard-sized photo
By louwrentius 2026-03-1220:561 reply In this picture it seems that all machines have a 3.5" floppy disk inserted. Maybe they had no hard drive and only booted from floppy and then ran software over the network?
By EvanAnderson 2026-03-1221:02 A lot of network interface cards had a socket for an option ROM that would allow network boot, but you could definitely fit a client on a floppy and boot that way, too. Novell Netware server would be the mostly likely server for that vintage of rig and a Netware client fit easily on a floppy.
By 486sx33 2026-03-1220:59 [dead]
Nobody mentioned the smell of that time yet.
An acrid air, stingy for the first few seconds but then somewhat enjoyable because of the ozon. The smell of stale coffee and cigarettes lingering. The smell of wood for cabinets (instead of pressed and glued materials).
This is how I remember the university where my father worked (more coffee), the teachers room from my moms school (more cigarettes) and the IT department of the university (very strong in the 'IT-smell', but also hard on coffee and sigarettes).
You don't find those smells like that anymore. I'll leave the description of the sound in this room to the next one. This was a loud room!
By guenthert 2026-03-1315:15 You forget the toxic brominated flame retardents. No, I don't miss that smell so much.
