Westserve

The BBS Documentary

This is real geek territory – or should I say old geek territory!
I stumbled over this via SlashDot but the idea of a documentary on the precursor to the internet is just fascinating.
Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were the first taste of being ‘online’ for many people. I ran one myself for a few years in the mid to late 80’s. It was called MSG – Ministy Support Group – and was focussed on sharing resources for people in Christian ministry.

Being pre-internet, only one person could dial in directly at a time (I couldn’t afford multiple phone lines, like some). They called in to a Netcomm Trailblazer modem. This was an amazing device for it’s day. It could talk to another Trailblazer at the unheard of speed of 19.2K! Normal users had to be happy with 2400 baud (2.4k) connects.
Of course, it was entirely text based, web-type graphics were years away.
The system ran on an IBM compatible, running DOS 6.x, with an 8088 CPU clocked at 8Mhz. It had 16Mb of RAM, and a 40Mb hard drive. Backups were made to 5.25” floppies.

You may laugh at all that, but lots of people benefitted from that BBS, and it was one of my first efforts at linking ministry and technology together in a productive way.