<\/p>\n

On January 1st, 2015, I shut down my BBS.<\/p>\n

(Yes, you read that date right. 2015, not 1995.)<\/p>\n

I’ve been messing around with BBSes for almost 35 years now. When I was just a little kid, my dad and his friends ran multiple BBSes. There was PC-X (which ran on a PC XT), the Backdoor BBS (which ran on our PC Jr.), and many others. In the mid-80s, several of my friends ran Commodore 64 BBSes (I think Jeff even ran one after hours for a while). <\/p>\n

My BBS, The Gas Chamber, didn’t go online until the 90s. It ran on a PC. It had tons of files available for download (including a six-disc CD-ROM changer!), great message boards, a few online games, and two phone lines (both of which were always busy). There was a time when I thought nothing could kill The Gas Chamber’s popularity. Then the internet came along and killed not only my BBS but the hobby in general. Things coexisted for a while, but when I realized I was constantly using the internet to pull down new files to put on the BBS just to entice callers, I knew the writing was on the wall.<\/p>\n

With nostalgia removed from the equation, there’s not much that BBSes did better back then than the internet does today. Anyone who says spending hours downloading a file over a phone line (and hoping it didn’t arrive corrupted due to line noise) is better than grabbing a free game for their phone from the app store in a matter of seconds is full of shit. Back then, you might wait days for someone to call a BBS, read a message you had sent them, and respond. Today, if someone in another country doesn’t respond to a text message I send them on my phone within 10 seconds, I’m pissed.<\/p>\n

There are still BBSes up and running today. It’s a niche thing, not unlike people who mess with short wave radios or CBs. Up until a couple of days ago, I was one of those people.<\/p>\n

A couple of my friends still run BBSes (Icbrkr’s Particles BBS<\/a> is one). Reeling with nostalgia, I decided to set up my own in 2012. I spent a lot of time configuring things and importing old graphic files from my original dial-up BBS. It was fun. In two years I had 40 users sign up. Of those, 33 never called back a second time. I suspect they called for the same reason I set it up — because it was neat and because it brought back old memories. But not because it technically offered anything the internet doesn’t offer.<\/p>\n

My goal for 2015 is to focus like a laser on the projects I want to finish. Unfortunately, sometimes that means putting other ones to rest. The BBS was a fun experiment, and I greatly enjoyed it while it was up, but now it’s over. Here’s to regrouping and refocusing my time in 2015.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On January 1st, 2015, I shut down my BBS. (Yes, you read that date right. 2015, not 1995.) I’ve been messing around with BBSes for almost 35 years now. When I was just a little kid, my dad and his friends ran multiple BBSes. There was PC-X (which ran on a PC XT), the Backdoor BBS (which ran on our PC Jr.), and many others. In the mid-80s, several of my friends ran Commodore 64 BBSes (I think Jeff even ran one after hours for a while). My BBS, The Gas Chamber, didn’t go online until the 90s. It ran… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7499\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}