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 --- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

lkosov <lkosov@tilde.town> wrote:

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.

Oh this is fascinating, thank you!

I logged into Mono and felt like somebody trying to find `:q` in vim,
but in the meantime while I looked for that poking around was a lot of fun.

~petra
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

petra <petra@tilde.town> wrote:

I logged into Mono and felt like somebody trying to find `:q` in vim,

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of that.

Poking around some more, I found and read some of the help and FAQ files,
and they're such a product of another era it's kind of mind-blowing. "How do
I access the command menu if my terminal doesn't have an escape key?", and coded-in workarounds if your Internet connection is so slow the software misinterprets arrow keypresses as escape-(letter), and... yeah.

I noted previously how little the UI resembles any popular BBS software. Reading through the help files, I realized that technologically the whole system has similarities to Gopher; it's all a giant nest of directories and flat text files. New posts are just appended to the end of files...

It makes me wonder if the design, the UI, was influenced by Gopher? I don't know of any archived Gopher sites from the pre-WWW era (or even the pre-ubiquitous-WWW era) so I don't know what they looked like. One of the
help files describes the design as (intended to be) "intuitive"; if you're looking for something, keep drilling down from broader category menus to narrower ones until you get to the right spot (which might be like seven or eight levels deep). A bit like how FTP repositories from ye olde days were organized.

I just realized, and this is definitely something I'd like to look into
later, that people (rightly) talk about the WWW as a design influence, but
that if we get back to 1990-1991, which I think is where both Mono and
ISCABBS date to, we're looking at a time before Visual Basic as a design influence, hm.

(On a related note, Analog City is a modern SSH-based BBS that aims for a
retro cyberpunk aesthetic seemingly heavily inspired by Visual Basic; ssh lowlife@45.79.250.220 )


--
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 --- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

hey,

On 2021-04-30, petra <petra@tilde.town> wrote:

I logged into Mono and felt like somebody trying to find `:q` in vim,
but in the meantime while I looked for that poking around was a lot of fun.

same here hah. but very interesting indeed.

thank you lkosov for the links :)

-f6k

--
~{,_,"> gopher://shl.huld.re/1/~f6k
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

lkosov <lkosov@tilde.town> wrote:

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.

Nice find, thanks.
I believe the idea was to be accessible using whatever weird or old Sun,
VMS or Linux default client and having always a working VT100 fallback option. ANSI support was much better in specialized BBS comm packages PC (Amiga,
Mac) people used to connect to dial-up systems.
There also seems to be a focus on being a bulletin board and less on DOOR games or downloads. Influenced by Gopher? Possibly! Or the other way
around.
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

lkosov <lkosov@tilde.town> wrote:

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.

I was a BBS user back in those days, and I didn't care for the ansi-rich
BBS's because it would take longer to load. They were long distance, and expensive to connect to. (Back then, "long distance" was a thing, you
had to pay by the minute to call outside of your area, spending $$ to
see the same slow-loading screen again and again kind of sucked)

One of the largest "BBS's" was compuserve, and it was very plain text. Compuserve was large enough that people designed dedicated "clients"
such as Ozcis.

Speaking of which, that was one area I spent a bit more time than I
should have. Telix (my terminal program at the time) had a language
called "salt", the idea was you could script your session and save
money by automating everything. When these scripts worked... rarely!
it meant you wouldn't even see the interface or the ansi artwork.

ASCII graphics have a place, as does ANSI. I often browse asciipr0n and
other ASCII art sites because I like them. (I'd really like to see a
teletext style service on the internet!) I also really like petscii, but
when we used BBS's, what mattered most to me was a decent editor
interface. I preferred the ones that were plain, and I could compose
offline (cheaper) and upload the ascii text using the "ascii mode
transfer". It was easier to script stuff that was predictable, too.

I liked simple pick a number interfaces, (still do, actually)

BBS's were a way to share posts. Download games, documents, porn,
shareware, etc.. they weren't toys. We actually used them!

There were some cool ones, but I honestly don't remember seeing that
much ansi art.

I personally ran a WWIV board for awhile, I don't remember mucking about
with any artwork. It was a Ross Perot fan BBS with one phone line and
once in awhile, someone would call it. :-) I don't remember much about
that, though. Except it ran on an XT 8088 machine I had.

I've thought about setting up a BBS today, but I can't really imagine
how many people would appreciate having to figure out how to run 'rz'
via their telnet connection.


--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

hi i know there r a taiwan bbs from 90s that still popular in taiwan at nowaday. it call ptt.it domain is ptt.cc.the telnet version is closed
but it is has web version n ssh version. also there r ptt2.

--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

they still work in 2022 :)

--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113