A Trip to 90s Kansai: Exploring the XD FirstClass Network BBS

I was in Kanto, not Kansai, and a rock guy, so didn't know about this BBS. But this article is quite interesting to someone like me who has experience of using a BBS at that time. I'm writing this listening to the playlist.

The FirstClass BBS software itself was something I'd found extremely interesting back in the nearly pre-Internet days.

Single dialup connection, multiple virtual connections over that serial connection (you could open multiple Windows in the client and have them all updating), non-blocking communications (did some nasty stuff in the client to give a progress bar in the title bar of each window as the contents would load), object database on the server based on the Mac's filesystem (took advantage of file system IDs mapped to folders, files, etc. - copying your server to another drive was a nightmare).

It was almost like a remote, multi-user Finder for Macs. Unfortunately it never transitioned to the Internet well - the license cost for the server software was cost prohibitive for most hobbyists once discussion forum software started showing up everywhere back in the day.

Really neat technology at the time though, and inspired some early communications work of mine before the Internet became ubiquitous.

Japan? Techno music? Pre-internet electronic communication?

This is one of the coolest things ever! It's the next best thing to being straight out of a Gibson novel!