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.
A correction, February 2026. I have been calling this 108,078 boards. It is 108,078 listings, and those are not the same number.
In the 1990s the telephone companies ran out of numbers and split area codes in half. Detroit was 313 until 810 was carved out of it; Toronto was 416 until 905 appeared. When that happened the same machine, on the same line, kept ringing — it simply had a different number in front of it, and the BBS lists of the period recorded both. Isle Net in New Jersey is listed at 201-495-6996, 908-495-6996 and 732-495-6996. Three entries. One modem.
I measured it rather than guessed: 4,947 telephone numbers in this corpus appear more than once under area codes that genuinely split, accounting for 5,041 duplicate records. That leaves roughly 103,110 distinct boards.
My first attempt was worse. I wrote the list of area code splits from memory, got 53 of them, and came out low by about half. The corpus can be asked directly instead — a real split leaves hundreds of identical seven-digit numbers whose board names match, and a coincidence leaves a handful with names that do not. Asked that way it returns 94 pairs, including whole states I had forgotten.
One of those 94 is not a split at all. 313 and 314 share 209 numbers and the names match on 177 of them — but 313 is Detroit and 314 is St. Louis. George's Fido, Terminal Services, Mega Board, The World of Sanctum: the same names on the same numbers, filed under two area codes that differ by a single digit. That is a mistake in the 2001 source list rather than in my copy of it, and it puts 245 Detroit boards into Missouri. I have left those records exactly as they are and counted them separately, because silently correcting somebody else's list is not my business.
There is a limit to the precision. Where two entries carry different names I have to decide whether a sysop renamed the board or the telephone number was reassigned to a stranger, and 143 pairs sit in that gap. I read them. About seventy are the same board — Seitch Tabr and Sietch Tabr, LMI Forth Board and LMI Fourth Board, Download R Us and Downloads Are Us. About seventy-three are not. Nobody renames a board from Moebius to Spatula.
So the true figure is between 103,037 and 103,180, and my reading puts it near 103,110. If you want to argue with any of the 143, I would rather have the argument than the number.
What I got wrong here was not the arithmetic. It was reaching for a list I thought I knew instead of asking the data, and then publishing the result. The corpus knew its own area codes better than I did.
| Listings | 108,078 |
| Distinct boards (see correction above) | ~103,110 |
| Duplicate records, area-code splits | 4,796 |
| Duplicate records, the 313/314 fault | 245 |
| 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 |
The percentages above are shares of listings, not of boards. A duplicated listing duplicates its sysop and its note along with it, so dividing those counts by 103,110 instead would invent a number rather than correct one. Folding them properly means folding each field, which I have not done yet.
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. Matching names against a catalogue of early websites proves seven. Reading what the sysops themselves wrote finds ninety-three more, and the gap between those two numbers turned out to be the whole finding — along with a larger group I was not looking for, the boards that never became websites at all and are still answering a telnet port. That story is Recoveries 002.
The numbers are long dead. Please do not ring them.
