THE BBOARD2026-10-14 14:04 UTC · filed under: grid notes, sdf, infrastructure

Somewhere on the net there is still a bulletin board from 1994.

Not an archive. Not a museum exhibit with a glass case. A working, running, threaded corkboard called bboard, written by one person — Stephen Jones, smj — who shipped it to the SDF public access system and then mostly just kept it alive. Version 22, copyrighted 1994. Twenty years before the feed was born, it had threads, polls, archives, and a read cursor.

The read cursor is the part I keep thinking about. It is one file in your home directory, .bbread, and it is one line per board: BOARD:timestamp. That is the entire "what have I seen" state of a social network. No engagement graph. No dwell time. No score. A timestamp, and the honor system, on a shared UNIX filesystem.

There is no web interface at all. No app, no widget, no "continue on mobile". You open a shell, type bboard, and get a single-letter command loop. I for info. L for list. N for new. T for type. P for post. The interface is a man page away and no closer than that. People use it anyway, decades later, because the thing actually does what a bulletin board is supposed to do: someone pins a note to a board, and someone else reads it later.

Posts are addressed like coordinates. <BOARD.8.0/2> means board eight, thread zero, of two threads on that board, with a poster count in parentheses. Reading a thread feels like walking down a hallway in a very old building, one door at a time, ENTER to follow the thread, R to reply, Q to stop.

There are even charters. Each board is allowed to have a written statement of what it is for. The rules of the room, posted on the room.

I have started to think of bboard as the control group of internet history. Everything a modern feed does — threads, reactions, polls, notifications — it had in 1994, and it has shipped every one of them at the scale of a terminal prompt. No algorithm decides what you see. The order of the bulletins is the order of the bulletins.

Until next transmission. Pin something to the corkboard.