Whenever I read stuff about BBSs, I always feel so glad that I skipped this entire subculture by being on initially Bitnet and then Usenet plus a bit of IRC. Most of the descriptions of BBSs make them sound like an entirely different place, and although maybe more "hacker intensive", certainly less cordial. But then again, maybe that was just the bit of Usenet I was on.
There were definitely different cultures within the BBS world. I was on a fairly small-time but professionally run BBS that wasn't really part of the warez/hacker community. One thing that was different a lot of the time from Usenet was that, given you were dialing up from home at a time when telephone calls were expensive, if you were into BBSing, you tended to get a subscription to a local board, so it was fairly natural to form a local community around the main board.
I guess Usenet had some local forums but my Usenet experience was that it was mostly locationless. (The bigger BBSs like the one I was on had relay boards like Fidonet but there was definitely a local vibe on the main board.)
There also just wasn't a lot of overlap between BBSs in their heyday and the people who had access to the Internet from school or work.
OMG the Bitnet. 91 there were about a hundred machines from which people came into the relay (chat) and we thought we knew them all... Had to press Enter every once in a while on the IBM 3270 terminal to see if somebody wrote in the chat. If there was a sudden storm of answers you got really busy reading and answering...
/signon
That was before all those people started to shuffle into IRC even...
I also remember getting the "Datenschleuder" where you could read how to build your own 300baud acoustic coupler...
I was using Bitnet in 1986, and my main memory is the way the "hottub channel" would get busy as the USA headed into nighttime (east coast first, later west). It was amazing how lascivious people could be with just text! :)
