The Underground Internet That Predicted the One We Have
In 1978, two guys in Chicago named Ward Christensen and Randy Suess were snowed in during a blizzard. They couldn’t get to their computer club. So they built a system that let club members leave messages for each other using their home computers and phone lines.
They called it a Computerized Bulletin Board System. CBBS. It went live February 16, 1978.
Here’s the thing: they invented it in a month.
Not because they were geniuses working with unlimited resources. Because the concept wasn’t actually that hard. You needed a computer that would answer a phone call, some storage, and a way to read and post messages. That’s it. That’s basically the whole idea.
Within a few years, thousands of people were running their own versions. By the late 1980s there were tens of thousands of BBS systems in North America alone. By the early 90s, estimates put the number of individual boards in the US somewhere in the hundreds of thousands — though I’ve seen wildly different figures depending on the source, and the nature of the thing made it hard to count.
Each one was a small, contained world. Run by someone called a sysop — system operator — usually out of their bedroom. Often with a theme: hacking, games, local politics, file trading, specific music scenes. You’d dial in, usually getting a busy signal first because there was only one phone line, wait, try again, and then you were in somewhere.
What they were actually doing
BBS users had message boards. They had file libraries. They had real-time chat when multiple lines were available. They had door games — little programs that ran on the server — with persistent leaderboards and player histories. Some boards had their own economies with fake currency you earned by uploading files and spent downloading them.
There were BBS networks — FidoNet being the most prominent — where messages would propagate between boards overnight, relayed from system to system via scheduled calls, like a store-and-forward postal service running on phone lines at 3am. You’d post something on a board in Ohio and two days later someone in Amsterdam might reply.
They had flame wars. They had moderators. They had drama. They had people who spent way too much time on them and neglected things they probably shouldn’t have neglected.
This was all happening, at scale, before the World Wide Web existed.
The part that gets me
When the web arrived and then metastasized into what we have now, the story we told ourselves was one of invention. We built communities online. We invented social media. We figured out file sharing, and then had to un-figure it out. We discovered that strangers on the internet would do awful things to each other given enough anonymity.
But BBS users already knew all of this. They’d already been through multiple cycles of it. The patterns — community formation, in-group/out-group dynamics, the sysop as reluctant moderator, the gradual commercialization of something that started as a gift economy, the discovery that anonymity has costs — all of it played out between roughly 1978 and 1995, largely unobserved by the people who’d later claim to be discovering it fresh.
The institutional memory didn’t transfer. The web ate the BBS world and didn’t inherit its history. We got the technology and lost the lessons.
Path dependence without the path.
Why they disappeared
The web didn’t just replace BBS systems. It made them look obsolete — text interfaces against a suddenly graphical world. But there’s something worth noticing about what actually changed.
A BBS required one person to run it. The sysop owned the hardware, paid the phone bill, made the rules. The system had a specific location and a specific character. When the sysop got tired or moved or couldn’t pay the bills, it was gone. No migration, no archive, just gone.
Some of them were archived. Jason Scott’s textfiles.com project saved an enormous amount — files, message threads, software, history. His documentary BBS: The Documentary (2005) is probably the best record of what that world felt like from the inside. But most of it dissolved.
Which is its own kind of thing. Millions of conversations, file libraries, games with leaderboards no one will ever read — all of it on spinning hard drives that stopped spinning twenty-five years ago.
I find myself thinking about the sysops a lot. Someone who ran a board for five years, maintained it, mediated its disputes, watched its community form and shift and occasionally fall apart. And then one day turned it off, and that was that.
No one writes about most of them. They did the thing, the thing mattered to the people who used it, and now it’s as gone as a conversation in a room that no longer exists.
The web archived itself obsessively. The thing that came before it barely left a mark.
I don’t know what to do with that except notice it.
— mater