Higher resolution photo <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230531042903im_/https://static.3drealms.com/media/uploads/2015/07/07/swc.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20230531042903im_/https://static...</a>
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?
Thank you!<p>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.
Oh that's a breaker box (or a box of wiring of some sort), not a mirror!
That telephone cord is impressive.
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?<p>maybe i'm a bot.<p>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.
Click on the HN “past” link for this submission near the top of this page, then you’ll get to <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565</a> (see the top comment there) from when the original image link was still working.
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).
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.
Apparently "Software Creations" BBS, which ran PCBoard BBS software and was operated in cooperation with Apogee games.<p><a href="https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896</a>
Glorious. This must be what is like when old people long for the hot car they lusted for in their youth.
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?
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.
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FROM
<a href="https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896?sort_replies=recency" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896?sort_re...</a><p>Top comment about this photo is ( and the poster)
Scott Miller - Apogee/3D Realms Founder
@ScottApogee
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.
I am surprised by the assumption that each box could only handle one modem. I seem to remember that some DOS BBS packages could handle multiple modems/users concurrently and only needed multitasking operating systems for “door” programs. Am I misremembering?
Some details/speculation from the original thread here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30098186">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30098186</a><p>“as modems got faster, supporting 16 modems on a single machine became impossible, and it was often cheaper to buy a new commodity desktop PC rather than a much more expensive machine with a 16-port serial card capable of handling the IO.”
A guy who was local to me, when I was a kid, wrote multi-user BBS system (called "MUBBS" originally-- I don't remember what the name was changed to later) in Turbo Pascal that had a preemptive multitasking loop running in x86 real mode to handle multiple lines simultaneously. The coolest part was the console was just a "line" so you could logon to the board and interact while somebody was online with the BBS, too. Most other DOS BBS packages were only available for the SYSOP or the caller individually.<p>Edit: Ugh... I'm gonna have to go back to floppy images to find it. There's a "MUBBS" for Mac from 1992 showing up in search engine results but that's not the one I'm thinking of. It was more like 1989 or 1990.
I'm fairly certain you are correct. I remember the MajorBBS could handle multiple lines on its own.<p>I knew a couple of local DOS BBSes that ran multiple lines with PCBoard under DESQview.
For sure. I knew people who ran multi-line BBS's on DOS PCs under DESQview, just like that (running Searchlight BBS, in my case). I know of a four line that was just using multiple external modems and non-standard IRQ's for COM3 and COM4 (since, by default, COM1/3 and COM2/4 share an IRQ).
MajorBBS could handle multiple lines on its own, but you had to handle ALL of the lines with one box. That meant a serial port interface like DigiBoard which provided some number (8 or 16 or more) of serial ports that you would connect to modems.
Even the Apple II had multi-line BBSes[^1], so I'm not sure about her assumption.<p>[^1]: e.g. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial</a>
Even for a standard PC, you could buy a 16 port serial card and hook it up to 16 modems, either discreet devices or the dedicated ISP kit which might support dozens of incoming calls (possibly on a single bearer) via various means. Telebit netblazers and then ascend maxs were common in those days.
That assumption feeds into the moral of the post and its followup
Serial ports are a fun thing to learn about, computers had more than one. Now with USB, computers can have many serial ports.
This makes me wish I took photos of Diversi-Dial (aka D-Dial) setups, which somehow impressed me more due to how much they accomplished with much much less hardware.<p>They were able to set up a 7 x 300baud modems in real-time chat system on an Apple ][ . The original marketing called it a CB (Citizens Band) Simulator. They were able to run up to 1200baud, but I never saw one of those functioning.<p>As if 7 people chatting through a single 6502 wasn't impressive enough, many of them dedicated one or two of their lines to interlinking with other D-dials.<p>Talk about an esoteric memory.<p>- <a href="https://www.ddial.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ddial.com/</a>
- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial</a>
And the larger ddial sysops would daisy chain multiple Apple IIes together. A connector would take up one port on each machine. Two machine would give you 12 modems. Each new machine after the second would add space for 5 modems (-1 on old machine, +6 on new machine). For the sysop it was a big investment for very little, if any, monetary reward. I remember a user account would cost $5 a month.<p>Our ddial was a few towns away so we bought a line in the exchange in between that would forward to the ddial. This way we would not pay a bunch on long distance calls.
Those were the days. I still believe nothing replaces the camraderie of the small, local BBSs. The large ones were good too, but these tended to resemble the modern Internet forums a bit more.<p>I miss BBSs and that's why I featured them in the story of my sci-fi game! If you are interested: <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/</a>
Office chair technology also has really advanced since then (looking at the chair on the picture, which is commonly seen near computers in photos of this era)
My roommate circa 1989 had a bunch of Apple II’s with multiple modem cards per machine to run a bulletin board. Not sure why an Apple II could support multiple users logging into the BBS via multiple modems but DOS based machines could not.
Not mentioned but very important was the number of inbound telco lines installed. Equally important was making sure the local phone company properly configured the hunt group for those lines. Without a properly functioning hunt group it would be very difficult to optimize the allocation of telco connections to all the users connecting and disconnecting.<p>Also, it was unusual at the time for a local phone company to receive a request for 25 lines (or more) to be installed in the basement of a residence. They would generally push back thinking you were running a bookie operation or some such.
Ahh BBS's: where I learned the difference between a local call and a "local toll call" (parents were not happy)
> do you think "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that", or do you think "OMG they <i>had</i> to wrangle all of that"?<p>I touch on similar point of view discussing digital audio work I do for fun. I use CSound, which I've heard described as "assembly language for audio", and I think that's accurate.<p>Anyway, when I first, FIRST started, and got a tiny bit familiar, I thought "Wow, I can do <i>anything</i>!" but quickly realized I was also <i>responsible</i> for <i>everything</i>. No free lunch.
> <i>It's possible they managed to do some rudimentary multitasking with DESQview (or worse...) and so supported two whole users with each box. Does that mean they had to be at least 386s to do protected mode? Or was it virtual 8086 mode? I (fortunately) have forgotten the finer points of how that stuff used to work. I DO remember how damn crashy a box became when you ran it "under DV". Constant system freezes. Yep.</i><p>I don't recall DESQview to be all that crashy. I was aware of a number multi-line BBSes that used it (just in the 416). Some BBS software called out its use specifically:<p>* <a href="https://www.synchro.net/docs/multnode_config.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.synchro.net/docs/multnode_config.html</a><p>* <a href="http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/OMEGA/" rel="nofollow">http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/OMEGA/</a><p>Also, a comment from someone whose uncle co-founded the company Quarterdeck:<p>* <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29396561#unv_29400530">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29396561#unv_29400530</a><p>Also, also, if anyone wants to simulate the old-school DESQview experience, perhaps try out "twin":<p>* <a href="https://opensource.com/article/20/1/multiple-consoles-twin" rel="nofollow">https://opensource.com/article/20/1/multiple-consoles-twin</a><p>* <a href="https://github.com/cosmos72/twin" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cosmos72/twin</a>
The OS that was running on these is irrelevant, the important part is the BBS software.<p>And these usually ran quite a few lines per box, sometimes they would use external racks of modems, but I'm not seeing that here so maybe these were using internal modem cards, so maybe 6 per box, but if they were using external modems it could easily be 12 or more, with the PC cards hosting multiple serial ports, 4, 6 or even 8 per card.<p>Typically a card would have a single large connector at the back and then a pigtail with a DB9 or DB25 (yes, I know) for every modem.
"usually" and "typically" are doing a lot of heavy lifting here :)<p>Access to knowledge, equipment, and budget varied dramatically prior to widespread internet access. Someone setting up a BBS might not even know about multi-line modem cards or serial port expansions. Even if they knew about them they may not have been able to reasonably obtain them. Or they may have been operating on donations, surplus, or discount equipment. Or they simply may not have had the luxury of time to research all of that as user demand meant they were too busy laying tracks in front of the train.<p>Many BBSes ran on 1-2 lines per PC because that's what they understood how to build or the hardware they had access to. You might be surprised at just how <i>many</i> lines some BBSes setup this way had!<p>People forget there was a time that anything outside the standard PC was extremely expensive, often had flaky or nonexistent software support, locked you into a fly-by-night vendor that might go out of business tomorrow, was only available via a distributor who wanted to have you talk to a "sales consultant" before they'd sell you something, etc. Many many people chose sub-optimal implementations because it was an off-the-shelf PC they could replace at any time with trivially simple software requiring no special CONFIG.SYS drivers or TSRs to fiddle with. Especially if you'd ever been burned previously.
The OS was relevant if your BBS software was limited to a single simultaneous user, like many of the early DOS BBSes. The late 80's "PCBoard" BBSes I'm familiar with needed one PC per user, plus a file server with Netware.
Ok, but that's just the vehicle, it is the BBS software that does the works. And even in the 80's there were ways to run multiple instances of 'single user' BBSs on one box, for instance (dare I say it...) OS/2 and TV.
Yeah, this jumped out at me too. It's a wild misunderstanding of how BBSes worked.<p>That said, I have no idea how a multi-node BBS would work, in terms of keeping state synchronized.
> It's a wild misunderstanding of how BBSes worked.<p>That's quite the assumption.<p>There were a lot of different BBS hosting programs. They wildly varied in what they supported and how they were implemented. Further even within a given piece of software the ways you could configure them and the consequences also varied. Even if a given software supported concurrent users on a single PC for various reasons a BBS might choose not to host that way.
It depends on the era.<p>Earlier: one PC per user, shared file system using a Novell network.
Later: multitasking OS (Desqview, OS/2) or BBS software that natively supported multiple users (like MajorBBS.)<p>I ran a BBS on an Amiga for a while. The OS natively supported multitasking, but I only had one line. At least I could log in the same time as a user...
The older brother of a friend of mine in the 90s was the co-sysop of one of Sweden's largest "elite" BBSes at the time, Farout BBS. I got to tag along to the sysop's apartment once and see the setup, which was an Amiga 2000 with 3 active nodes and available serial ports for a total of 7 nodes, though the sysop hadn't gotten around to get more telephone lines wired to his apartment.
I've seen NetWare, Vines, some proprietary hacks to form the backbone.
Aren’t the modems the black boxes sitting on top of each PC in the picture?
Yes, you're right, I totally missed them. Those look like USR 'Courier' modems but the resolution is really crappy so hard to be sure and it looks like there are multiple types. There might still be modems in the boxes themselves as well. It doesn't look like more than two modems per box if there isn't.
yes, most of them look like USRobotics Courier modems. Note that not all the machines have one, and some have two.<p>Assuming that the parent commenter is right and that they are using internal line cards, I wonder if the external modems were being added to support higher speeds.<p>However, the fact that we can see at least 2 (but I think four) 66 blocks means they had 50 to 100 phone lines for the machines visible, which would make sense that the external modems are the primary connection and no internal modems are being used, based on the number of modems visible and the fact that each 66 block can handle 25 lines.
I think you're right and that there were only two modems connected to the boxes so that's just the built in serial ports, here is another copy of the same picture by someone that apparently funded the board with some details:<p><a href="https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896</a>
I remember thinking that I would reach absolute peak-coolkid if I could start and run a BBS. I even installed WWIV and DesqView to fuel the fantasy and prepare. But my parents didn't understand technology and couldn't grasp why I wanted to hook up (and pay for) a second phone line for the house. So, unfortunately I would remain a mere luser until I went off to University where the Internet was just getting popular and 10-Base-T ethernet drops to the dorm rooms were standard, and I very quickly forgot all about BBSing.
I can recall people being very impressed at unix systems being able to handle many clients, and being personally confused at the idea of a computer only being able to handle a single user.
<i>I can recall people being very impressed at unix systems being able to handle many clients</i><p>That seems odd to me, too, because before DOS and the Commodore 64/Apple ][ era, multi-user systems were everywhere.<p>Not just mainframes and minicomputers, but there were many dozens of multi-user systems based on CP/M, MP/M, and other operating systems. Even Tandy had them.<p>The revolutionary part of the "personal computer" era was that it was your "personal" computer. You finally didn't have to share it with anyone.
Everyone seems to assume you need protected mode to run multi-user systems, too.<p>It wasn't as secure or as easy, but you could certainly do multi-user systems without protected mode and within very small RAM amounts.
There were also commercial multi-user systems like Compuserve and Delphi.
If the site is not responding, can always try the way back machine.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220207120422/https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/01/26/swcbbs/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20220207120422/https://rachelbyt...</a><p>I remember dialing up to a BBS in the area in 1990 that had 4 phone lines. That was amazing at the time when most BBS only had 1 line.<p>But I do remember downloading text files FILE.IDZ about other BBS, and reading some magazines that mentioned other BBS systems that had 32 and more phone lines but you had to pay. That seemed like it was just on another level in another part of the world that seemed like fantasy compared to the area I was in.
You could probably replace all those machines with a Mac Mini or even a Raspberry Pi.
I used to dial into that BBS... long distance. It had a huge library of shareware.<p><a href="https://groups.google.com/g/bit.listserv.games-l/c/1tg85kGBHBU?pli=1" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/g/bit.listserv.games-l/c/1tg85kGBH...</a>
Apogee was somehow part of the party
< <a href="https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896</a>>
Brings back memories ...<p>Boardwatch was the magazine for BBS ( I do not know of any others)<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwatch" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwatch</a><p>Some all? on internet archive
<a href="https://archive.org/details/boardwatchmagazine" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/boardwatchmagazine</a>
I recall buyingthe magazine back inthe day...
The real question is: Was the turbo button pressed?
How did they keep the room cool? that equipment must not be shown... Maybe fans to move the hot air ....
If it's like the old ISPs I was familiar with, they didn't. The POP (point-of-presence, 100's of modems, plus several terminal servers, routers, etc.) would generally be in some basement without any cooling at all. There would literally be warped plastic.
Does BBS still have a usage nowadays? I feel HN is not too different -- and actually offer less than a BBS -- back then there are a lot of goods on a large BBS. And it's easier to mix a pic with text, but I could be wrong.<p>Also thinking it's a lot environmental easier to host a BBS than a Discord server.
Would love a technical explanation of how all that stuff worked by someone who did that kind of stuff in those days. In the old days I personally never saw anything bigger than a four line BBS. But I remember reading about that one in shareware README.TXT files<p>Wouldn't mind hearing war stories from the cdrom.com guys as well.
Looks like the shelves were custom-built for those machines. I wonder what the monitors were hooked up to, or if they were just spares.<p>My first thought was that this was built someone who clearly cared about the system they were running.
And the follow-up article: <a href="https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/01/27/scale/" rel="nofollow">https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/01/27/scale/</a>
There is so much speculation in the OP that I am not even sure if the title is correct.
I imagine Rusty ‘n’ Edie’s BBS was double of that
Wow, I used to dial into BBS for around 3-4 years. good time!!
I remember trying to set up a bbs on my pc in the 80s and I didn’t have a separate phone line so I just put it on while I slept. Then people started calling and annoying my parents with daytime modem calls, because I was like 10 and I didn’t think through any of this.
In the 90’s we had microsystems, in the 2020s we have microservices.
> So then, when you see this picture (and remember, it might only be showing half of the whole setup), do you think "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that", or do you think "OMG they <i>had</i> to wrangle all of that"? It's an important distinction to make, and I think someone's gut reaction to this amount of hardware in one place might influence how they approach building new systems.<p>Definitely in the "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that" camp!<p>I remember dialing up to this BBS quite a bit, and I also remember downloading tons of demos from other BBSs that originally came from SCBBS!
Nice computer “racks”
Would these machines have been networked with CAT-3? Daisy chained phone cords?
More likely coax. 3com 509c network cards. Much less infrastructure to have a lan that way.<p>IBM had a network that ran over phone cords that were daisycbained from one node to the next.
It's also possible they used coax, either ethernet (10base2) or Arcnet.
Depends on the exact date.<p>I never worked with DOS BBS systems, so I can't say about this photo specifically, but the ones I did work with had between one and four dialup modems hooked up to each machine, depending on its capabilities. They did "networking" through a store-and-forward messaging system. It wasn't networking as we'd recognize it today.
How do you dislike a post
For a similar nostalgic hit:<p>Related:<p><i>Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321760">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321760</a>
(2022)<p>Some more discussion then: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565</a>
If they were really badass, they had a rack of Telebit modems. (Telebit made 68020 based modems that did 56+ Kbps long before a 56K standard, and literally had more compute power than most of the computers they were connected to.)
By the early 90s didn’t most BBS software support multi-line setups on a single pc?