Monochrome BBS, known to users as "Mono," is a text-based multi-user bulletin board system featuring thousands of discussion files, along with games, user messaging, and a talker. it is one of the few BBS's still in operation and actively used on a daily basis by its community. Monochrome runs on custom software, making the platform and user experience distinct from other bulletin board systems.
History
The underlying software (mono - lowercase m) was originally written in around 1990 by David Brownlee, then a student at City, University of London, for his final year project. Monochrome BBS (uppercase M) is a specific instance of mono; another instance of mono was used for a few years as the official user interface for students in the Information Science department, but usage declined around 1996. Once the Monochrome board was up and running, fellow students were given accounts and word began to spread. The first non-City users were admitted in 1991-1992. Eventually Mono's userbase became international, although the majority of those joining were UK university students.
The server was originally sited on the university campus, with the address mono.city.ac.uk.
By its peak in the mid-1990s over 8000 accounts had been created and there were often more than 150 people logged in simultaneously, making it arguably the most popular Internet-based BBS in the UK at the time.
The artist Alan Sondheim has written of his experiences of Mono:
However, with the advent of web forums and GUI-based instant messaging, Mono's text-only format was already seen as nostalgic even in 1994 when it appeared in the first issue of .net magazine. Within the Mono community there were discussions about moving the content to a web forum, but the consensus was to retain the format. Activity declined over the years, particularly as LiveJournal became popular, but remained fairly strong even to the present day, when 30 or more members may be logged on during a typical day. In 2010, Mono was noted by Eileen Brown as an example of a bulletin board that is still in use. Most of those now using the system are long-time members.
Content
Mono has thousands of discussion files, along with multi-user dungeon games. Discussions are on a wide variety of topics, including technology, science, arts, music, sports, work, family, news as well as general chat. These are organised hierarchically by topic; individual sections are maintained by different users. Each menu can be highly customised, thus each section has its own "personality," conventions and sometimes codes of conduct. Section moderators are able to create animated banner ads which rotate on the main menu.
Mono's animation programming language ('manim') allows for simple ASCII animations, and interactive scripts such as quizzes and 1980s-style adventure games.
Mono also contained a built-in Telnet client ('mtel') that was used to provide access to MUDs such as GodWars that were hosted on the mono servers.
Community
Mono members can express their online identity in a number of ways: namelines - short messages that appeared next to a users name in edits and on the main users-on screen. infotexts - short text sections on a users' profile which could optionally be edited and animated using Mono's animation language. talker customisation - including description of user, user's home room and actions within that room
As there are no other identifiers such as avatars, colour schemes, signatures, etc., as used on web-based forums, personality and identity are often expressed through comments files, namelines and in personal diaries, a feature which was launched in 1997.
Early on, Monochrome established a dedicated section for "Meets," where users regularly organised weekend-long events to meet up at various places around the UK (and occasionally in other countries where there were clusters of users). These were often attended 50 or more users, with accommodation offered by local hosts. These were often the first opportunity to put a face to a name, and made other users less anonymised on the BBS. Towns with several users sometimes had local chat files and regular meets.