Before the Web: Bulletin Boards, FidoNet and Usenet
Long before websites, people dialed into each other's computers one phone line at a time. A blizzard helped start it.
By the InterStalgia history desk · November 14, 2026
In January 1978 the Great Blizzard buried Chicago in record snow. Two computer hobbyists, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, suddenly had what every side project needs: time with nothing else to do. They used it to build CBBS, the Computerized Bulletin Board System, a homemade machine that let other hobbyists call in with a modem, read messages and leave their own. Its official birthday, settled by tradition more than paperwork, is February 16, 1978.
One caller at a time
A bulletin board system, or BBS, was often a single computer run by a hobbyist, with a modem on a phone line. Callers dialed in with their own modems, and a small board could only take one call at a time. The person who ran it was the sysop, the system operator, and the board reflected their taste: a board about ham radio, a board for a local high school, a board that was mostly games. Bigger boards with several phone lines added chat rooms so callers could talk to each other live.
Cheaper and faster modems kept the scene growing through the 1980s. By the early 1990s there were software companies that did nothing but make BBS software, and magazines like Boardwatch were full of ads for kits that let anyone become a sysop. That is when the number of BBSes in service reached its peak.
FidoNet: mail by relay
A single BBS was a small town. Around Christmas 1983, a San Francisco programmer named Tom Jennings started writing a new bulletin board program, Fido, and in 1984 he added a way for boards to pass messages to each other. Boards called one another over the phone and handed off each other's mail, and because long-distance calls were expensive, the software was built to move messages as efficiently as possible. By June 1984 nodes were being added to the network quickly. FidoNet gave hobbyists something close to email years before most of them could get on the internet.
Usenet: the internet's message board
On the university side, two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, came up with Usenet in 1979, and it launched in 1980. It ran over UUCP, a dial-up system Unix computers used to copy files to each other, and it organized conversations into newsgroups by topic. The mainstream groups had serious names in hierarchies like comp.* for computers. The alt.* groups were for everything else, and they got very specific.
Usenet gave the internet a lot of its vocabulary. FAQ, flame, sockpuppet and spam all became common words there.
The September that never ended
Every September, Usenet got a wave of new college students who didn't know the rules yet, and every year the regulars taught them. Starting in late 1993 and into 1994, online services like AOL opened Usenet to their members, and the newcomers never stopped coming. The old-timers called it the Eternal September.
The web, and later social networks, eventually replaced most BBSes and newsgroups. A lot of what people do online today, the arguments, the in-jokes, the moderators, the threads, was worked out first on a hobbyist's computer, one phone call at a time.