Posted by From the year 1985 to the year 2000 the Cleveland based bulletin board system was thriving. After 2000 it was not as big anymore, but recently it was just restored to the Cleveland, Ohio area code. This bulletin board system was actually the longest active Atari 8 bit in the 216. On the date of december 23, 2017 this part-time bulletin board system made a return to the world because of Telnet. Included in this bbs was restored messages and message bases from the years 1988-1990, online video games and file sections. With this bulletin board system you see a culture of wanting to communicate via online, play games, and be able to save files that were important to them.
Part-time was a breakthrough in computer technology. When it came to communication between people of the Cleveland area code (216) people were loving it. Basically you were able to post a message through the system about a certain topic and people could respond back to you. Also, you could print out the messages to keep or pass on to other people if you wanted. If you posted a message though it was public so everyone could read it, there was no private messaging yet. Playing video games was also possible through this system as well. Obviously though these games were not as advanced as the games today. With saving files goes in the same category as messaging in a sense because you are able to save your messages and you can upload whatever you want.
A bulletin board system I was reading about that takes place in Ohio talks about at least 30 different bbs’s. Jonathan Gaw, the author of this article, says that these 30 bulletin boards systems are connected to a research group called Concentric Research Corporation. The use for this system was to cheaply link computers users over very long distances. These 30 bulletin boards systems have around 600,000 subscribers and 280,000 of these subscribers are dialed up long distance. These people literally are spending more than 10 hours a month using these bulletin boards. Unfortunately, there was no direct link to this source, you can find it on proquest http://proxy.library.jhu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/docview/291646723?accountid=11752.
In one article called Bulletin Board Systems: Social Media Before the Internet we see it talks about how bulletin boards systems were the birth of social media. David Cassel writes this in the year 2016. He states, all of this craze about bulletin board systems started about 30-40 years ago when one Chicago computer club decided to create an archive for their own newsletters which were able to be accessed by a modern equipped computer. This then created the bbs known as CBBS or, “Ward and Randy’s Computerized Bulletin Board System”. This funnels us into the fact that the people who are the most targeted it seems are teenagers, “gregarious geeks, and random experimentalists”. These people would actually connect personal computers to a phone line which was available. Then they would wait for other people to connect who were also other “PC owners who wanted to access their bulletin board software”. Social media was basically started right here with this system. It’s a glimpse at how social media was literally social because of setup phone calls and meetings. You can find all of this on the article right here https://thenewstack.io/bulletin-board-systems-social-media-internet/.