Actually, I was a co-founder of a computer club in, oh, let's say, 1976 and, with members of another club, had discussed the idea of a bulletin board so that different computer clubs could exchange ideas, using an analog whatsamacallit (can't remember the name... Oh yea, accoustic coupler) a phone (land line back then) which was placed on the accoustic coupler after dialing the BBS or university or other sites at the time then using the server to do things like write messages, reading public messages, reading and writing private messages ad infinitum. No photos, no music or other audio stuff, no files, no links to other messages and so on. We exchanged writings at a whopping 30 characters per second... Ahhhh the good ol days.
I eventually wrote my own BBSs, one was the "language forum", a play on words since in Quebec, there was a big todo about French versus English but, my BBS was about programming languages where each forum discussed things like Pascal, Basic, Assembler, Forth, C(ugh), AI and such. Ran it for 10 years, sometimes kept in my bedroom, listening to the modem kick in as someone called into it.
I had experimented with a graphics supported BBS where you could draw circles, squares, triangles, lines and others inside of your text messages which was done quickly, even at 30 baud by sending coded data to a host which was written as well, to be able to decode the codes. The server would determine if the host supported the graphics or not and either send text only or graphics with text... Those early years of experimentation....
Then there was a HAL9000 based BBS which carried on a conversation with the caller via text where it would have responses like: "I'm sorry chuck but, I'm afraid I can't do that" and other HAL9000 sayings which were randomized based on the interactions.
Then there was another BBS that consisted of several blocks of codes which would be called upon by each program so that, if you wanted to write a private message, the program would call that particular block of code, if you wanted to read a public message, another block of code was called (more specifically, would be passed on to from the caller block of code) and so on. One block would answer the incoming call, another would hang up etc. etc. THIS WAS NOT WINDOWS BUT IN DOS USING QUICKBASIC. I had also wrote it so that it could actually handle multiple callers, in DOS. Each block could be written in different languages, even DOS COMMANDS and also a few blocks were written in PROLOG (remember that one?)
Then came AL GORE who popularized the internet for the masses and at that point, BBSs simply died out.
I miss those early experimental systems and designing my own programming languages...
