From lkosov@tilde.town Tue Feb 7 14:43:29 2023

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From: ""lkosov"" lkosov@tilde.town

Newsgroups: tilde.text

Subject: Two very old, interesting, BBSes - and their UIs

Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2021 16:32:56 -0000 (UTC)

Organization: tilde.club

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If you go on a modern BBS (Vertrauen, Pharcyde, etc) running one of the

popular, currently-developed systems, the user interface is generally fairly

similar. For all the primitiveness of it, the fact it's text-based, for all

the nigh-inevitable ANSI prettiness, it's pretty simple,

user/beginner-friendly, and straightforward.

Software like Synchronet actually gives the option to let users choose their

UI (though not all BBSes support this), and typically the options are all

clones of mid-1990s BBS software, which probably makes sense given the

prevailing demographics of the BBS community today.

If you play around with these options, you'll likely be struck by how

similar they all are. It makes sense, in a way, I guess; the original

programs were all competing against one another, and likely "borrowed"

inspiration from each other. (Or at least the suggestions of users, who

would have been exposed to a plethora of choices.)

I don't think that BBS users back in the heyday of the 1990s would have

that kind of choice of UIs on a single system (save perhaps a full menu and

an abbreviated "expert mode", in some cases) but I could be wrong.

Poking around online recently, I found two still-active Internet BBSes from

the '90s, each running what is essentially a custom system. One is

Mono/Monochrome (telnet mono.org); the other is the Iowa Student Computing

Alumni (ISCA) BBS (telnet bbs.iscabbs.com). Both allow guest logins that you

can poke around with.

They're both very different from the kind of tidy, streamlined, ANSI-rich

BBSes that seem to have prevailed in the dialup era. The UIs are brutally

minimalist, trying to be simple and unobtrusive rather than pretty.

I don't know what either looked like 25 years ago, so I can't say how much

they've changed. But they definitely haven't been influenced much if at all

by, say, Synchronet or WWIV. With ISCABBS, I feel like there may have been

some influence from MU*s of yore, particularly in the help system.

There's a message board on ISCABBS for nostalgia, memories/anecdotes of the

early years of the system, and reading it gave me an interesting insight.

When we talk about BBSes we usually refer to dial-up systems that people

accessed from computer in their home, probably typically something with a

GUI (be it Win 3.1 / early MacOS / etc). I feel like that probably

influenced the look and feel of the software, in an attempt to feel familiar

to people.

ISCABBS was on the 'net, not dial-up; in its early years it was

overwhelmingly accessed from VT100 dumb terminals connected to

shell/terminal servers. It was designed, I think, for (and by) people

familiar, comfortable, with the command line.

I don't know for certain but I think Mono's early years were similar. And so

with that kind of context, the seeming weirdness of both systems, the

initally daunting UI (I've poked around on Mono a bit, and I think, only

half-jokingly, that no part of the system is ever more than about thirty

keystrokes away...), make perfect sense. For people used to a CLI, to the

• user-friendly commands* of emacs or Pine, who perhaps had experience with

the cryptic commands and statuses of IRC or a MOO, it's all reasonably

intuitive and simple enough to remember and use.

Anyway, both are interesting systems with fairly active users, and worth

checking out in their own rights, but I think they'd also be fascinating to

a lot of people here because they offer not only a glimpse of an Internet

free from the influences of 20 years of Web design but very possibly one

never meaningfully influenced by even desktop GUIs.

--

Inanities: gopher://tilde.town:70/1/~lkosov/ (with netmail address & GPG key)

He/him/them/they/whatever. If in doubt, assume the above post contains sarcasm