THE HISTORICAL BBS LIST
108,078 dial-up boards, and the world before the web
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Before there were websites there were boards. You dialled a
telephone number with a modem, one caller at a time, and reached a
computer in somebody's spare room. This is the directory of them -
every dial-up bulletin board system its compilers could account
for, across 268 North American area codes.

There is one thing in here that no web archive can help with:
these have telephone numbers, not addresses. Nothing in this list
can be looked up in the Wayback Machine, because none of it was
ever on the web at all. It is the generation immediately before.

  Boards listed                              108,078
  Area codes                                     268
  With a named sysop                  80,433  (74.4%)
  With years of operation            105,619  (97.7%)
  With the BBS software named         28,096  (26.0%)
  Carrying notes or magazine excerpts          4,257
  Earliest and latest listed              1978-2020


A NOTE ON THE SPELLINGS
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Some entries show a corrected name with the original beneath it,
marked "listed as". That is deliberate. This list was assembled
from many separate 1990s BBS lists, and each one carried its own
typing errors - Inveriont Factory for Invention Factory, Manhatten
Transfer for Manhattan. Those mistakes are evidence of which source
an entry came from, so they are never overwritten. 995 names carry
a correction, and every one of them still shows what it actually
said.

Corrections are made a single word at a time. Invention Factory
Node #3 is not silently turned into Invention Factory - that would
lose which node it was, which is information, not a mistake. And a
board numbered #1 through #4 is four boards, not four misspellings
of one: a typo does not politely increment.


WHICH OF THEM BECAME WEBSITES
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That is the question this collection was built to ask, and it has
two answers that disagree with each other.

Matching board names against a catalogue of 30,164 early websites
proves seven. Reading what the sysops themselves wrote about their
boards finds ninety-three more. The gap between those two numbers
turned out to be the whole finding: a join between two collections
can only surface what both of them already contain, and 96% of the
addresses the sysops named were in no catalogue at all.

There is also a larger group nobody was looking for. Forty-four
boards in this list never became websites and are still answering a
telnet port thirty years later - Sursum Corda, relocated to
Meridian after Katrina and still the Region 19 FidoNet gateway; The
Basement Underworld, resurrected in 2017 from floppy disks written
between 1990 and 1993; The Cave; Bandit, back since July 2007.

The full account, with every figure and every correction, is in
Recoveries 002 on this server.


WHERE THIS CAME FROM
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Every entry belongs to the TEXTFILES.COM Historical BBS List,
compiled since 2001 by Jason Scott and a great many contributors,
from sources listed on that site:

  http://bbslist.textfiles.com/

What is added here is the search, the cleaning, and the
cross-reference. The searchable directory - by board name, sysop,
town, area code, software or year - is on the web version, where
every row links back to the area-code page it came from:

  https://ge97.com/bbslist.html

The notes, memories and magazine excerpts are reproduced as
published there, and belong to the people who wrote them.

The numbers are long dead. Please do not ring them.

Khalid Alshaikh, 7Z1FP
https://ge97.com/

.