Happy Birthday BBS
I’ve never run a BBS. And I’ve barely ever used one. Yet, I’m sentimental about the BBS.
A Bulletin Board Service represents the essence of what turns me on. Communication. And community. People connected together via technology. To learn, share, help or just plain mingle.
Oct 15, 1995. QuantumLink Communications came into existence. Ajit Menon (my friend & partner) and me came together in a bid to break away from corporate slavery. We wanted to do something on our own. Something online. An online service for the people of Bombay city.
The logical first choice was to use a BBS. Buy a commercial software package for a couple of hundred dollars and get rolling. But that was too easy. It lacked excitment and would have robbed me of a sense of satisfaction. Besides, Suchit Nanda (an acquaintance and a fine tech man) was already running a neat BBS (Livewire!) So what next?
The WWW had happened. And the media was going ga-ga about this new technological wonder, which allowed people to jump across documents and see colorful images inline. Around that time VSNL had opened up Net access to the public. But it cost Rs. 15,000/- to get a TCP/IP account. That was expensive and way out of reach of the common man. That kind of settled it.
The plan: Build a web-based online community. Using technology that was powering the world wide web. And throw it open to the citizens of Bombay.
Next stop: Computer Book Shop. Picked up a book on Linux which besides the convenient documentation also included a critical component of my plan. A Linux CD. Kernel v1.x with a Slackware distribution. To cut short the tech steps, we ended up with a Linux server, the NCSA HTTPd webserver (on which the early versions of Apache were based) and a local website, with varied content from several contributors marked up in HTML 1.0 (if my memory serves me correctly) and created in vi.
The home page highlighted the TOC in two columns and this look emulated Yahoo. With the exception of an spider dangling from a web, moving up and down. Yessir, animated gifs were the cutting edge of technology then!
We hustled to get phone lines and managed to acquire five state of art, Practical Peripherals modems (thanks Sureshji), supporting the then blazing speeds of 14.4 kbps.
The service was named “The Virtual Community” (after and inspired by Howard Rheingold’s book) And we threw open the digital doors to our kingdom. At the cost of a local telephone call, anyone who cared to, could dial into India’s first web-based dial-in system and experience the magic of HTTP and HTML.
Lyndon Cerejo, who had started a column in the Bombay Times about everything to do with the Net, covered The Virtual Community. And our modems lit up like a X’mas tree. The thrill of hearing a modem shriek and scream during a connection and seeing the digital presence of a visitor on the server is difficult to put into words. Hmmm… those were the days.
Fast forward to the present. On Feb 16, 2003 the BBS celebrated it’s 25th birthday! Here’s the BBS timeline entry for this event (1978). And here’s the story from the creators of the worlds first BBS - Ward Christensen and Randy Suess.
Here’s to them. Cheerz guys. Way to go!