MEDIAART 3D03: BBSes, Usenet newsgroups, and Gopher

bulletin boards

• wikipedia article
• interesting that as of 1994 there were still more BBS users than those of major online (i.e. Internet) services!
• Wikipedia article points to availability of dial-up internet AND the Mosaic web browser as factors leading to a sudden decline in BBS usage
• mentions that "surviving BBSes are accessible over Telenet", there's a list of ones that can be tried here https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/
• while most BBSes were entirely local, there were networks of them, with interesting systems of forwarding messages between them one or more time per day (FidoNet was the largest such BBS network)

Usenet newsgroups

• wikipedia article
• Network New Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is a protocol that allows for users to post messages to a server, but also for servers to share messages with each other
• this is a pretty good diagram by Daniel Brun (public domain) of how Usenet worked
• huge list of free NNTP servers: however I couldn't find any of them working (using the slrn reader), as of the 19th Jan 2026
• here's a public domain image that is possibly useful for understanding the basic user experience of Usenet (even if that is somewhat difficult to do directly nowadays)

gopher

• wikipedia page
• "menu-based" - some text information plus a menu of links to other places in gopherspace with text information, or links to other types of resources (such as addresses supporting telnet interaction, image files for download, etc)
• overlaps historically with the early world-wide-web - and it seems uncontroversial to say it is an influence (to some extent) on the development of the web, even if the web ultimately supplants it in terms of adoption
• can be installed on Debian/Ubuntu (i.e. WSL) with: sudo apt install gopher
• on MacOS there are gopher clients available in the App Store or you can use homebrew to install a gopher client
• in early 2026, it's still fairly easy to directly experience what gopher is/was like using a gopher client