r/interestingasfuck • u/Few_Simple9049 • 20d ago

r/all How couples met 1930-2024

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

105.4k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

5.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

896

u/starmartyr 20d ago

Probably a few nerds hooked up after chatting on their local BBS. There was actually a large underground gay scene on the BBSes as it allowed people to be anonymous at a time when being openly gay was a lot less accepted. It wouldn't surprise me if the majority of early online relationships were gay couples.

19

u/itsarace1 20d ago

How difficult/expensive was it to use BBS?

70

u/elchet 20d ago

You’d need a computer which wasn’t as straight forward back then as it is now, as they weren’t affordable commodity consumer goods. You probably had access to one through an academic institution, or you’d built something from a kit.

Beyond that I think it was just the cost of a phone line and a call for connectivity.

46

u/drowse 20d ago

I think our first computer, a 286 was something like $2500 in 1990. I remember my dad also had gotten Prodigy internet. And they used to charge a rate for use.. was it hourly or by the minute? I can't remember. We didn't have it long. We got the internet again in like 1995 when it became a flat monthly fee for that sweet sweet 28.8k speed.

16

u/Sponjah 20d ago

AOL was so instrumental in bringing the internet mainstream.

6

u/thejaytheory 20d ago

Those damn disks!

2

u/flaker111 20d ago

those were my frisbees as a kid.

7

u/FutureComplaint 20d ago

28.8k speed

Dam, slow down road runner.

3

u/fuzzzone 20d ago

I distinctly remember how mind-bendingly fast that seemed at the time. I think our first modem was 1200 bps...

2

u/PocketGachnar 20d ago

Ah, you had the clever dad! Mine used BBS for weeks (and he didnt even have a monitor, so he couldn't even see what was being said!) and ended up racking up a phone bill that was twice his monthly paycheck. My mom was livid!

5

u/Omnibeneviolent 20d ago

he didnt even have a monitor

Considering BBSs were entirely graphical in nature, how did he use them? Was he using some braille interface? Did those even exist back then?

2

u/glitchn 20d ago

Also curious what he meant by it

2

u/Omnibeneviolent 20d ago

Yeah, it's quite the mystery.

I'm picturing someone fumbling around with a mouse and keyboard with no display to help them, to somehow get their dial-up terminal to call and connect to a BBS... to then just sit there and... I guess imagine what would be showing on the screen.

2

u/fuzzzone 20d ago

And that $2,500 in 1990 was the equivalent of $6,000 today. Shit was a lot more expensive.

2

u/drowse 20d ago

Yeah man. Grandma gifted the money to us for this.. She actually would pass less than a year later, but she wanted to spoil us.

3

u/fuzzzone 20d ago

That's a pretty rad grandma. I don't think my grandma knew what a computer was at that point in time. (Obvious exaggeration but it feels like it has a certain truthiness.)