alt Hacker NewsBark: The Toll-Free BBS for 90s Teens
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Thank you for this!
I grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere and there were zero BBSes or AOL access points or anything that wasn’t a long distance number and there was no practical way for me to pay for that at that age. Bark was the first time I communicated with another person using my computer.
I found an old Bark Music cassette tape at my parents house recently and went looking online for any mention of Bark and couldn’t find anything at all, as if the entire thing had been a fever dream.
Gosh. I had forgotten what the QWK reader was called. Blue Wave’s UI is burned into my childhood memories. Thanks for the nostalgia :)
I at one point had {COMMO} custom auto-scripts set up to dial scan all 300 local BBSes each night, auto-login and grab their QWKmail packets, and then drop into Blue Wave so I could read through all the forums whenever I eventually woke up with key imprints on my forehead while waiting for the dialer. Best forums experience ever, lifetime to date.
QWK mail was what RSS could have become if phpBB had implemented two-way messaging over RSS rather than one-way: you download the RSS forums packet and then you upload your RSS replies packet, and use a reader app to track all your forums so that you can work through your reading and writing queue while offline and it all just worked, no drama and only 1 GET and 1 POST necessary per site per day to stay connected to all of them :)
Did you see those windowlings hovering over the background and casting a shadow? Later user interfaces may have had more pixels, but they never had that coolness.
I loved QWK! I was a Silly Little Mail Reader person.
Blue Wave? I'll reply with: BlueBEEP.
If you know what it is, you know what it is.
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Pretty sure writing PROCOMM scripts (Aspect?) was, like, my second or third programming language after BASIC and MS-DOS batch files. I was that nerd in 4th grade 40 years ago reading "Advanced MS-DOS Batch Programming".
Thanks for taking me back on this; fortunately, I grew up in a large city and I didn't need to rack up long-distance phone bills to have a huge population of local BBSs to play door games and suck down text files.