Mar. 9, 2010 - From the Land of the 10,000 BBSs

Remember the old days of BBSing? Here's just a snippet of a much larger document, showing how widespread BBSs were back in the day in Minneapolis. Note the baud numbers ... isn't that quaint?

There were no BBSs listed specifically for the purpose of connecting Realtors with consumers.

Mar. 9, 2010 - RE: From the Land of the 10,000 BBSs

And all running Wildcat! BBS too no doubt.  Interesting to see so many allowed 300 baud when 14.4k or 28.8k was around.

Mar. 10, 2010 - RE: From the Land of the 10,000 BBSs

 You have to remember, Geoff, that when bulletin board systems were the rage, most users started off with a 300 baud modem, as they were *way* less expensive than the 14.4 or 28.8 modems. And for some of us, 300 baud was the only thing around when we started.  

I know if I had cut off my board to only allow the higher speed baud rates I would have lost over half of my user base at the time. That was something that I didn't want to happen, as some of my best users used 300 baud modems. And, on my system anyway, there weren't any downloads available, just forums for discussions. So the only drawback to the 300 baud connections was the time they were on the system. 

And then DoubleDos came along, which allowed multi-tasking on a DOS system. I was in heaven then!

Mar. 10, 2010 - RE: From the Land of the 10,000 BBSs

Yeah you're right.  That was kind of my point of how the 300 baud user would tie up the line(s) for longer.  Discrimination I suppose.

Maybe I'm discriminating against the 300 or 1200 baud users as I finally got my first modem at 2400 baud.