MotoFox wrote:
And it came to pass that Bill in Co delivered the following message unto
the people, saying~

As I recall, some of the BBS services were used to get updated program
files, or for some add-ons for the program, and were often hosted by the
manufacturers.

Some of them were, particularly if they were operated by computer game
companies or others. I recall Micro$oft even having such a service in the
mid 80s-mid 90s, parallelling their FTP system, in addition to providing
help forums like this Usenet hierarchy probably was back in its heyday.

These were (as I recall) pretty much DOS-based services, with basic text
screens (character displays only, limited to the basic ASCII set, like in
DOS), although I think some later programs allowed you to run it in a DOS
window, like Procomm Plus. But my memory may be off.

Some were DOS, yes, but they weren't strictly limited to it. Some ran off
Linux or BSD (mono.org is one that does.) Our BBS, "Ring of Thundera" ran
off Wildcat (surprise surprise) which was a very popular DOS BBS server in
the 90s-early 2000s.

And remember the different protocols available, and needing to know which
one was best to use for different cases? Like XMODEM, YMODEM,or ZMODEM, or
whatever?

One might say, in a sense, that BBS was a forerunner to Usenet. You
don't know what you were missing. :-) I guess it seems primitive by
today's standards.

Not strictly the forerunner to the Usenet, since Usenet and BBSes pretty
much co-existed for much of their existence.

Ooops. I must have forgotten that too.

I'd say they were more of a
fore-runner to the World Wide Web, although many had services similar to
what you'd find on Usenet ("talkers", we used to call those.)

Most were accessed via a direct dial-up line (i.e. a regular f0ne number
you'd call with your modem), so they definitely had a sense of localism,

Yup. (now it's starting to come back a little bit better to me :-)

since most, if not all, I've known about of were never made available via
WATS or 0800 numbers. In later years many BBSes added TCP-IP connectivity,
effectively making them available to anybody in the world with a telnet
client.

--
MotoFox
Originator of the word "enubulous"
...!i84w!exit210!304senye!motofox