30 Years Ago: How Hayes Modems, Bulletin Boards Presaged the Web
eWEEK 30: Before the always-on World Wide Web, there were bulletin board systems that people dialed into via 1,200-baud modems to exchange messages and information.Long before there were Websites, chat rooms, email accounts and social networks, there were computer bulletin boards. Bulletin board systems were a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web and social networks in the way they allowed people to share information and ideas. This was 30 years ago, and it still would be years before Sir Timothy Berners-Lee came up with the concept of the World Wide Web and Vint Cerf and others helped put together the components of the Internet that we now know and love. Telecommunication via text—photos and graphics took far too long to transmit over 1,200-baud modems—was all about bulletin boards. Some of the more well-known bulletin boards were The Source, The Well and PCMagNet (which eventually morphed into ZDNet, now owned by CBS Interactive). While email prevailed inside corporate LANs, bulletin board services were the way most people exchanged messages and information before Web-based email systems sprung up. "I'd say there was a confluence of two things [that eventually led to the Internet and World Wide Web]," Tom Geller, a longtime IT journalist and video producer who used bulletin boards in the 1980s, told eWEEK.
"The technology for what we know as the Internet absolutely came from ARPA [Advanced Research Projects Agency], the government and universities—official channels like that. The social world of today's Internet? I'd say its parents are the old bulletin board systems," Geller said.