Bulletin Board Systems – Page 3 – Cultural History of the Internet

“Couldn’t have been invented on the West Coast” The Origin and Influence of CBBS

Long before the internet, there were systems connecting computers to each other, allowing users to join chat rooms, post

For years, hundreds of students, tourists, and locals walked to Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts every day. However, in 1986,

In the US, BBS slowly faded out as other web based services took its place. This is not what happened

BBS allowed text-based information to be shared between individuals and groups: you needed a modem, a functioning telephone line and

The summer of 1984 brought a great surge of interest in “phreaking” and hacking, bringing the creation of many

The Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s-90s served as a sort-of precursor for the Internet as we know it today.

With the large-scale rise of commercially-available computers into and through the 1980s, millions of people across the globe were

Imagine it’s 1992. Personal computers have been around for almost two decades, but they have only recently become widely available

Before the internet became widely available at around 1994, many computer users were already sharing files, messaging each other, and

Bulletin Board Systems. A term that means as little to the younger generations as the floppy disk, and yet it