"If you are sticking with the 2022 equivalent of MS-DOS and machines that do exactly one thing at a time, then yeah, you are going to have a whole fleet of systems all sitting there busy-waiting on something stupid."
"Don't recreate the basement full of PCs when the problem can actually be solved with a single box sitting in a cabinet somewhere."
If they really were just PCs to act as a modem-to-network bridge, this seems to be remarkably cost-inefficient. I remember around 1997 helping the university chuck out a few serial line concentrators (no idea what they were actually called), each of which had 32x RS-232 ports that worked up to 19200 baud and a 10Mbit coax network connection at the back. The on-board computer (wouldn't be at all surprised if it was much more than a 68000 or two) interfaced with all the serial ports and translated it to telnet on a remote machine. You could also send it an escape code and then via a primitive command line connect to any arbitrary IP address and port over TCP. I remember in my student days (so maybe 1995) using finger and SMTP directly from these text terminals without actually logging on.
No idea when these became available, but we were chucking them out in 1997 or 1998 as we were upgrading the labs of text terminals to PCs, so they probably at least a decade old by then.
The BBS software itself would have likely ran on the PCs, one instance per simultaneous user, and because it's a single-tasking OS, that means one simultaneous user per PC. They aren't just bridging packets to a single central multi-user server that serves everyone.
Okay, but what did you use for a multiuser backend database back then? One that could handle multiple threads reading and writing to it? A lot of these old BBS systems were just slapping together endless directories of flat text files.
DOS / Desqview support filesystem locking with "share.exe." Honestly I am not sure how well this worked, but I knew guys who ran multi-line BBSes under DOS and Desqview (and later OS/2) without issue.
Even with multiple PCs you would also have similar "shared filesystem" issues. You'd need some sort of fileserver and a shared, network drive. Novell was popular at the time.
"If you are sticking with the 2022 equivalent of MS-DOS and machines that do exactly one thing at a time, then yeah, you are going to have a whole fleet of systems all sitting there busy-waiting on something stupid."
"Don't recreate the basement full of PCs when the problem can actually be solved with a single box sitting in a cabinet somewhere."
If they really were just PCs to act as a modem-to-network bridge, this seems to be remarkably cost-inefficient. I remember around 1997 helping the university chuck out a few serial line concentrators (no idea what they were actually called), each of which had 32x RS-232 ports that worked up to 19200 baud and a 10Mbit coax network connection at the back. The on-board computer (wouldn't be at all surprised if it was much more than a 68000 or two) interfaced with all the serial ports and translated it to telnet on a remote machine. You could also send it an escape code and then via a primitive command line connect to any arbitrary IP address and port over TCP. I remember in my student days (so maybe 1995) using finger and SMTP directly from these text terminals without actually logging on.
No idea when these became available, but we were chucking them out in 1997 or 1998 as we were upgrading the labs of text terminals to PCs, so they probably at least a decade old by then.