Hello World: Why I Built a BBS Homepage in 2026

Some things deserve to stay simple. The modern web is a bloated mess of JavaScript frameworks, cookie banners, and autoplaying videos. Meanwhile, the most honest form of self-expression on the internet was always the BBS - a single phone line, a dedicated machine, and a SysOp who cared. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The real reason ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── I grew up in Alanya, a small town on Turkey's Mediterranean coast. No internet. No software community. No one to ask when the code didn't compile. I taught myself MS-DOS, GW-BASIC, Pascal, C, and x86 assembly from books I bought on summer trips to Ankara. Alone, in a bedroom, in a town where nobody else cared about computers. Then I bought a 14.4k modem. I was in middle school. I dialed a BBS in Ankara and watched text scroll across my screen from someone else's machine, hundreds of kilometers away. I found HitNet, Turkey's FidoNet-compatible network. I found echomail conferences full of people who cared about the same things I did. I found a community. That modem changed my life. Not metaphorically. Literally. It turned programming from something I did alone into something I did with other people. It showed me that computers were not just machines you typed into. They were bridges. Everything I was doing on BBSes, I was self-taught. But the more I learned, the more I realized how much I did not know. The BBS world pushed me to get into Computer Science. I wanted a top school so I could get the most out of this computer and software world that had already taken over my life. The kid in Alanya who taught himself GW-BASIC went and got a proper CS degree, and the BBS had everything to do with it. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Why a BBS homepage in 2026 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Because I wanted to build a tribute to that era. The technologies from that time - FidoNet, echomail, ANSI art, offline readers, the sound of a modem handshake - had a huge impact on who I became. They deserve better than a Wikipedia article. And because the constraints of that era produced something that the modern web has lost: ► Loads instantly. No framework, no build pipeline that takes longer than the content is worth. One HTML file per page, pre-rendered, ready to go. ► Respects the terminal. Monospace. 16 colors. Every character in its place. No layout shift, no responsive breakpoints, no font loading jank. ► Doesn't track you. No cookies. No analytics. No third-party scripts. The SysOp doesn't need to know your browsing habits. He just wants you to read the echomail. ► Makes modem noises. Because some experiences are worth preserving in their original form, including the ten seconds of screeching that meant you were about to be connected to something bigger than yourself. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The stack ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The site is built with bbs-build, a Rust CLI I wrote. It reads markdown and a YAML config, renders everything to BBS-style inline-span HTML, and outputs one page per URL with proper SEO metadata. The modem sounds are synthesized in real time via the Web Audio API. The font is PxPlus IBM VGA 8x16, the authentic IBM VGA font that makes the box- drawing characters align. No npm. No React. No webpack. Rust compiles the content, the browser renders it, and the caller reads it. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── What this site is for ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── It's my homepage. It's a blog about the BBS era. It's a working demonstration of a framework that anyone can use to build their own BBS-style site. But mostly it's a letter to a kid in Alanya who plugged a modem into a phone line and discovered that the world was bigger than his town. --- END OF MESSAGE ---