A Trip to 90s Kansai: Exploring the XD FirstClass Network BBS

A Trip to 90s Kansai: Exploring the XD FirstClass Network BBS

May 30, 2026

This post is going to do something a little different. I recently came into a very unusual CD and I'd like to explore its contents with you.

If you've been reading this blog, you can probably tell that I buy a lot of CD-ROMs. I usually do my research ahead of time but if something is cheap enough, or has a cool-enough looking cover, I'll take a chance on it just in case. This was one of those discs, which I stumbled into while browsing the Mac CDs at Suruga-ya; I could find almost nothing about it online, but something struck me about the sketchy cover art and the "XD FirstClass Network" title.

XD-submit Vol. 1, as it turns out, is a promotional disc for a Kansai-area bulletin board system (BBS) called XD FirstClass Network. As I started digging into it I assumed this would be sort of a basic information kit, a digital pamphlet or something, but it's something a lot more exotic: a functioning archive of the BBS with its original client software for Mac. This was supposed to be a demo so you could browse it offline and decide if you wanted to join, but here in 2026, when this BBS has been offline for three decades, it gives us a chance to actually see what it was like when it was alive.

I've read plenty of archived web forums before, but I've never seen a BBS archive quite like this before. 1994 is before the Internet Archive started collecting webpages, but these aren't webpages anyway: BBSs are a pre-internet technology, and BBSs really weren't being archived in the way that webpages are. The idea of being able to browse a period BBS like this using its original interface, just like an archived webpage, is incredibly cool to me and I didn't think I'd ever get the chance to see it.

In 1994, XD seems to still have been a pretty young BBS. It had a small but highly engaged, tight knit community that we'll get to know by reading these posts. These kinds of communities tended to skew pretty small back in the day, but they clearly wanted to grow: they've presented themselves here on this CD for us and chose these posts specifically to show to us so that we might consider joining. They'd like us to be their friends. 30 years on we can't, of course, actually join their community but at least we have the chance to get to know them as they would have liked us to.

Before I tell you that story, though, I have to tell you this one. You see, if you ask the internet about the XD-submit CDs, they'll tell you they're albums. They are that too—put them in your CD player and you get a set of tracks from Kansai area electronic/techno artists, all of whom seem to have been connected to this BBS when it was alive. It's good music, and I absolutely see why people interested in the Japanese underground techno scene have latched onto that angle, but I think it's a bit of a shame it's the only part people want to discuss. After all, this isn't just promoting the musicians but promoting the community that they were a part of. So let's bring the two together: I've embedded a playlist with as much music as I could find on YouTube from across the four volumes of XD-submit. Consider hitting play and enjoying the music while you read their posts.

Imagine yourself, in 1994, wanting to talk to someone else over your computer. You probably won't have the internet (most computer owners didn't, even if they had a modem). Even if you did, the web, which had only been open to the public for three years, had very little on it, and web forums didn't exist yet either. You did have a few things to use your modem for, though, and one of those is BBSs like the one we're looking at today.

When we look at a BBS like the one we're looking at today, just keep in mind this is a pre-internet technology[1]. When you use a BBS, you're dialling directly into one server, not a worldwide network. And since you're dialling, using your modem's telephone line, you're probably connected to a BBS somewhere close to you. Long distance calls cost money, after all. You're doing something online, but it's less global than you're used to on the internet. It means that a lot of BBSs were populated by people in a specific area, sharing locally-relevant information, and you'll be seeing a lot of that here.

BBSs gave way to the internet once internet- and web-based systems showed up in the 90s, which makes this specific snapshot an interesting time to look at. The very first web-based forums launched in 1994, but they wouldn't widely used for awhile. The web itself had only been available to the public for three years, and most computer owners still didn't have access in 1994. This archive, from 1994, is at exactly the point when BBSs were still being widely used[2] and right before users would start moving over to new services. XD is a young enough BBS that we're not really seeing what the BBS scene as a whole looked like at...