Bubba's College and Grill

Bubba's College and Grill, known to users as "BCG", was a text-based multi-user bulletin board system for amateur writers that ran from 1983 to 1987. It differed from other bulletin board systems in that its primary orientation was the production of poetry and fiction. Though it did have a rudimentary messaging system, its most popular interface was a text based collaboration system, allowing multiple authors to take turns working on a single text document.

History

The software was originally written in 1982 by Johnson Davis as a normal message based bulletin board system. Shortly after it went live in 1983, he added a new feature to support the shared writing of a story, allowing individual members to take turns adding to the same narrative. Originally added for a 3 month team based writing contest, this new feature soon became the central interface of the bulletin board system.

BCG became a vibrant community of authors, with special interest areas for poetry and multiple genres of fiction. Users regularly organized an assortment of writing contests, with the results judge by other users or simply based on word counts. In a few cases, members contributed money towards publication of winning entries in self-published anthologies.

By its peak in 1985, there were over 600 ACTIVE accounts. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of the dial-up technology being used, this popularity made the system almost impossible to reach. Numerous attempts were made to alleviate the problems caused by the overload of interests, with owneership and hosting changing hands multiple times. However, over the next few years interest declined and, in 1987, the plug was finally pulled.

As of this writing, no remnants of the software remain in use.

Operation

BCG's interface was designed for simplicity and short connection times, with only rudimentary edit controls. Instead of working interactively while connected, users were expected to download text files with the current state of the stories they were involved in, and with lists of messages they had subscribed. While disconnected they could edit these downloaded text files, adding their portion of narratives and their responses to messages directly to the text file. When they completed their changes, they then reconnected and uploaded their modified text file.

Narratives or stories were written by groups of users organized into "swarms". Though no order was enforced, most swarms of users self regulated by simply taking turns based on the order they joined the swarm. Many users were members of multiple swarms at the same time, but this was discouraged by the community to minimize confusion and bottlenecks.

The messaging system was relatively flat. All messages were visible to all users, and they were organized only in a single set of groups, each group consisting of topics, and each topic being a straight thread of messages in chronological order. In most cases, each topic was associated with a specific narrative or swarm.

Almost all messaging was used simply to manage a narrative or swarm. The lack of social interaction may have been one of the downfalls of this BBS. The lack of community made it difficult to find the support, both in time and money, to grow the BBS to handle the load.

Technology

Written in IBM Basic, Bubba's College and Grill ran on an IBM PC 5150 for most of its existence, with direct dial-iup connection via a single 300 baud modem and all storage on two floppy disk drives. Attempts were made to integrate with more sophisticated connection methods that would allow multiple simultaneous users, but none of these efforts were significantly successful. By the time these methods had become practical, the BBS was already on the down slope.