The prehistory of cyberspace: how BBSes paved the way for the Web
Author: Reason
In the antediluvian '80s, when mass participation in the Internet was still but a gleam in Al Gore's eye, an enthusiastic network of avant-garde geeks was exploring an embryonic cyberspace. By the hundreds of thousands, they created in miniature the precursors of the vast communication system that today envelops our social and professional lives.
They were called bulletin board systems, or BBSes: communities that allowed users to dial in at crawling modem speeds--usually only one at a time--and exchange private e-mails, public messages, and software files. The first of the boards appeared in 1979, when a snowstorm provoked hobbyists Ward Christensen and Randy Suess to hack together something they called EBBS, the Computerized Bulletin Board System, for their Chicago-area computer users group. By the mid-'90s, the BBS scene was all but defunct: The Internet had siphoned off its early-adopter members like a newborn insect devouring its mother.
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