A Japanese BBS From 1994. On a CD-ROM. How Cool Is That?

Every now and then, I stumble upon something on the IndieWeb that makes me stop whatever I’m doing and just start reading. This is one of those things. Someone at CD-ROM Journal has written a wonderful post called A Trip to 90s Kansai: Exploring the XD FirstClass Network BBS (https://cdrom.ca/games/2026/05/30/xd.html). It’s about a Japanese bulletin board system from 1994. A BBS. From the days before the web became the thing we now spend so much of our lives on. And the really cool part? Someone preserved a working snapshot of this BBS on a CD-ROM. How wonderful is that?

Before everything became the web

I’ve always had a soft spot for BBSs. There’s something fascinating about the idea of people connecting their computers to other computers, using modems and ordinary telephone lines, long before the internet became part of everyday life. You didn’t open a browser and visit a website. You dialled a telephone number, connected to another computer and entered a little digital world.

And those worlds were often remarkably local. Calling a BBS in another city, let alone another country, could become quite expensive. So people tended to gather around systems in their own region. In a way, these were little digital communities long before anyone started talking about online communities.

And unlike today’s enormous social media platforms, each BBS could have its own character, interests and atmosphere.

A little piece of Japan, frozen in time

The BBS in this story was called “XD FirstClass Network”, based in Japan’s Kansai region. In 1994, its users were talking about music, synthesizers, computers and all sorts of other things. Apparently, the local electronic music scene played an important role. There were discussions about techno, MIDI equipment, analogue synthesizers and favourite albums.

And here’s where the story becomes even better. The CD-ROM, called XD-submit Vol. 1, wasn’t originally intended as a historical archive. It was a promotional disc, designed to introduce potential new members to the BBS. It included the original Macintosh client software and a selection of actual conversations. You could explore the BBS offline, see what people were discussing and perhaps decide to join.

More than thirty years later, that same disc has become something entirely different. A little time machine. You can browse the old conversations through the original interface, almost as if you’re sitting behind a Macintosh in 1994. And because the CD also contains music from artists connected to the community, you can even listen to some of the sounds that were part of that little digital world.

You can actually listen to it yourself here: https://cdrom.ca/games/2026/05/30/xd.html.

Digital archaeology at its best

What I particularly like about this story is that the CD-ROM preserves something that would otherwise probably have disappeared completely. We have the Internet Archive, of course. And that’s fantastic. But BBSs existed before the web and didn’t necessarily leave behind websites that could be archived. A great deal of early digital culture has simply vanished. Not because it wasn’t interesting or important, but because nobody thought to preserve it.

And then, decades later, someone buys an obscure Japanese CD-ROM, starts exploring its contents and discovers a little community that has been waiting all this time to be rediscovered. There’s something rather beautiful about that. Especially when you realise that these weren’t famous people making history. They were ordinary people talking about the things they loved. Someone complaining about having too many CDs. Someone else discussing synthesizers. People sharing files, exchanging ideas and making friends. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Maybe the internet was always about this

I don’t think we need to romanticise the early days of online communication. Modems were slow, connections could be expensive and getting things to work wasn’t always particularly easy. Today’s internet is infinitely more capable.

But stories like this remind me that the appeal of connecting computers was never just about technology. It was about finding other people. People who shared your interests. People who knew something you didn’t. People who might live just around the corner but whom you would probably never have met otherwise.

That’s also one of the things I enjoy so much about the IndieWeb today. All those independent little places, created by people who simply want to share something with the world. A Japanese BBS from 1994 and a personal blog in 2026 might be very different technically. But perhaps they’re not so different after all.

And there’s one more thing I love about this discovery. In 1994, someone thought it would be a good idea to put a small part of their online community on a CD-ROM so that other people could explore it. More than thirty years later, someone actually did.

I wonder what little digital worlds we’re creating today that someone might rediscover in 2056. Hopefully, a few of them will still be around. And hopefully, someone will find them just as cool as I find this Japanese BBS.