The directory of the world before the web
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, memories or magazine excerpts | 4,257 |
| Earliest and latest listed | 1978 – 2020 |
Search all 108,078
| Number | Board | Where | Years | Sysop | Software | Src |
|---|
A note on the spellings
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.
Where this came from
Every entry here 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. The right-hand column of every row links back to the area-code page an entry came from. The notes, memories and magazine excerpts are reproduced as published there, and belong to the people who wrote them.
What is added here is the search, the cleaning, and the cross-reference: an attempt to work out which of these boards went on to become websites. Seven can be proved. That story, and why the number is so small, is Recoveries 002.
The numbers are long dead. Please do not ring them.
