The BBS era was also long before public doxxing and spammers scraping any and all personal info. At least before the Internet made such things easily amplified and trivial to do.
That and getting banned actually hosed you.
> "Thanks to local toll or long distance fees your local BBS was literally local. Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face."
If the phone number was long distance, you had to pay more - just as it is today. Local calls were usually free. Hence the GP's comment :)
He knocked on my door 45 minutes later to talk to me about it.
So just by nature of tolls you wouldn't call many out of area BBSes. If you did it was brief calls for a post or to check mail but not sit around playing a door game or downloading some big file.
That all meant BBSes were very local for most people. This is in addition to the fact only a small fraction of homes had computers, a fraction of those had modems, and a fraction of those actually called BBSes. That aspect also meant the populations were relatively small. A small web forum might have a hundred users spread over a large area while a BBS would have a dozen in the same town.
And in the late 80s long distance rates meant something like $4/minute inflation adjusted. Even "local" toll calls were up to $1/minute. Of course the billing scheme was far more complex. The paper phone book would usually have a page or two to determine the rate between various exchanges.
What some use to do is put a 1-800 on a 1-900 number. By calling a 1-800 number you could connect to a sexline for free. We had so much as kids calling and making fun of the operators.
A few years back I got a tv for Christmas. Christmas night I setup it up and it scans the cable channels available. Next day I notice some channels with fractions like 88.2 were programmed but the screen was blank. I rescanned and discovered new channels at different freq and they were playing really new movies. I watched a movie and when it finished there wasn't any content. I rescanned often and new movies would popup during the night. Then sex movies started to show up. I realized whatever anyone ordered via ondemand in my building was being broadcast and my tv could pick it up. If someone paused the movie I would have to wait. Mornings were a mix of cartoons and fast-forwarded porns. Day was mostly cartoon. Evenings were when people would order the hit movies.
Interesting things are constantly happening no matter what era you are in.
That pausing thing was annoying - on Friday or Saturday nights though you could usually change to another channel and find someone else watching the same movie at almost the same spot that didn’t have it paused.
Oh and around 1985 and 1986 I wrote my own software to guess calling card numbers between midnight and 6 am. I would either use Sprint or MCI access numbers and get about 20 working codes per night.
I still use the phreaking files from that era today - the phone number I use has rung busy for at least forty years. You can still use those automated callback numbers as a convenient exit for long meetings “oops, I’ve got to take this…”
This is one of the craziest things I ever saw. It’s mind boggling.
One of the members (Skippy) literally had everyone's birthday and there was a celebration or meeting just about every weekend. When my apartment lease ended but I didn't want to move home and had no money for a deposit, Vermithrax Pejorative let me sleep on his couch. One of the guys (Dorothy) came to every event dressed exactly like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. My point is we were a very friendly and non-judgemental crew. Sort of the polar opposite of the modern-day internet.
I was eventually lucky enough to date Sredni I think in part because I actually knew who Sredni Vashtar was. LOL. She called me incredibly excited after I gifted her a Spider Robinson novel and it had a word she'd never seen before on page one. It was an elegant community for a more civilized age.
Didn't stop folks from flaming and trolling. The BBS Documentary [1] has an example of a kid who follows around and threatens a BBS owner who owns a computer so because he didn't like the computer it ran on.
Definitely not but the prevalence was far less. The local nature of BBSes inspired a lot of prior restraint we don't see a lot on the Internet anymore. That's not to say anonymity or pseudo-anonymity is bad. It just creates a different environment than what you'd typically find on BBSes.
Or afford to do. Trolling is a lot less attractive at 1200 baud for a dollar a minute.
But I agree that I was so much less concerned about privacy back then. Likely that was out of ignorance, but also because the threat to privacy is different on the internet. In a widely networked world, the .001% of people who are malicious actors still amount to a huge number of malicious actors that didn't exist in a community of a couple hundred people.
I visited big warez bbses locally/Europe.
What would so many have done without Cott Lang democratizing creating BBSes without commercial software.
There were a lot of non-commercial options but Renegade was one of the early ones to bring in a lot of the commercial features into it.
It's a sad truth of bulletin board software that sysops often didn't know what other software was capable of and blindly engaged in the sort of bit-bashing people engaged in when it comes to hardware... not because the other guy's stuff was genuinely bad, but because the sysop didn't want to admit that maybe they wasted a bunch of time and effort on a piece of shit.