It’s mostly old computer and gaming magazines at this time.
Yup. I was reading one of them and I was like wow. It kind of makes me wish I had experienced that tech era in the early 90s, but I was only a toddler at the time. Today we have Tildes (https://tildeverse.org/) that try to resemble that old BBS community vibe.
In the first volume of the BBS magazine I have available there, I was surprised with how many women were involved in the BBS scene. There were at least three women who were column authors in that issue and one woman on the BBS development team (they have a photo in the beginning of the issue). I’m sure they had to contend with even worse casual sexism and misogyny in those communities than there is today. Nowadays it seems like more men are aware of the sexism we’ve internalized and are trying to be better.
I thought the same thing when I was looking at the first volume! It was a really weird time to grow up in. I was about 12-14 when my friends introduced me to BBSes. We had a main one that was really small and you could only stay online for a short period of time every day for free, so we would try to catch each other there after school. I can’t remember how many concurrent users it supported, but maybe it was 8. There were a few bigger ones we would use too after our minutes ran out. The news paper had a BBS as well that supported a lot of people, but it didn’t have fun games or other kids to talk to, so that one was boring.
There were women that used the BBS regularly. I went on a blind date with a girl at a pizza place. Her friends were there too and it was about as uncomfortable as a blind date can be. I also became friends with a girl at my school from the BBS. We talked online and realized we had some classes together. I was surprised she was into such a nerdy hobby at the time because she was a cheerleader and a “cool kid.”
The craziest BBS memory for me is that, 10 years ago, someone at my work recognized me from a BBS. A lady stopped me when I was walking to the break room and said she knew me and my friends from back in the day. I didn’t remember her or all the details of the BBSes that she was talking about, but she threw out names of a lot of people. She was one of the older teenagers that hung out online. Some of those kids would have IRL meetups at pizza places and stuff. We didn’t really interact much online with the older kids, but we knew a little bit about them and they knew about us. You definitely wanted to talk to everyone and figure out who they were and if they were someone you could be get along with. New users were exciting.
I miss that old era. I remember the day that our main BBS had a connection to “The Internet”. I didn’t know what it meant at the time. But I think it basically connected you to IRC or something similar. You could join hundreds of chat rooms and talk to so many people. It was overwhelming. Up until then, I only talked to people in my city/area code. Sometime later my family signed up for an internet provider (never AOL thankfully). There was a period of overlap where I would log into the old BBS after using up my daily minutes on my family’s dial up internet plan.
Tildes sounds intriguing. I will check it out.
