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Communications The Internet

Re-Discovering The 'Lost Civilization' of Dial-Up BBS's (ieee.org) 181

Posted by EditorDavid from the connection-lost dept.
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Two new articles take a look at "social media's dial-up ancestor" from back in the 20th century. First a new article in IEEE Spectrum remembers a time when tens of thousands of dial-up bulletin board systems kept modems busy all around the world playing chintzy "door" games, downloading textfiles and ANSI art, and reading messages left on FidoNet's "echo" forums. "To understand how the Internet became a medium for social life, you have to widen your view beyond networking technology and peer into the makeshift laboratories of microcomputer hobbyists of the 1970s and 1980s...amateurs tinkering in their free time to build systems for computer-mediated collaboration and communication." And the former sysop at "The Cave" has also written a new article about visiting the few surviving BBSes, some still in operation since 1983, many now accessible via telnet, and some still even delivering messages over FidoNet's phone-to-phone network.
Anyone else have fond memories of visiting (or running) a BBS?
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Re-Discovering The 'Lost Civilization' of Dial-Up BBS's More

Re-Discovering The 'Lost Civilization' of Dial-Up BBS's

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  • I still telnet for usurper (Score:5, Interesting)

    by damn_registrars ( 1103043 ) <damn.registrars@gmail.com> on Saturday November 12, 2016 @11:39AM (#53271227) Homepage Journal
    Every so often I find a BBS still in operation over telnet, and log in to play Usurper. For those who didn't play it, Usurper was a D&D-style RPG that had a little more in it to do than the better known Legend Of the Red Dragon (LORD). A while back the source code for Usurper was released under GNU by the original author [dangarden.com].

    This also reminded me of an even more complicated game called Exitilus. According to at least one group, the code for this is lost to history, as it the original author of the game. [exitilus.com]

    • Re:I still telnet for usurper (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sproketboy ( 608031 ) on Saturday November 12, 2016 @11:54AM (#53271283)

      Cool. Here's a video of the gameplay:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      • Ugh! Dark blue text on a black background. What were they thinking?
      • Wow, some people really will post a video of anything they can think of online. I enjoy playing Usurper, but watching someone else play it - especially while watching them narrate it - is about as enjoyable as watching someone do math homework (and similarly, I usually know what I want them to do next well before they do it).

      • Can anyone explain why so many pronounced Sysop as Sigh-sop, considering Sysop meant System Operator?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by arth1 ( 260657 )


          ----
          Sysop is coming online.
          ----
          "So many" didn't. Likely a local phenomenon where you are.
          I have run BBSes in multiple countries, been to BBS conventions and never ever heard it pronounced that way.
          ----
          Sysop is going offline.
          ----

          • Definitely not just local. Sure, I heard it locally in the various places I've lived; but what brought up the matter was the host in that Usurper playthrough video mispronouncing it.

        • Can anyone explain why so many pronounced Sysop as Sigh-sop, considering Sysop meant System Operator?

          I always pronounced it 'sis-op'...

        • Can anyone explain why so many pronounced Sysop as Sigh-sop, considering Sysop meant System Operator?

          Same reason people pronounce Linux "Line-Ex"

    • *EVERY* door game I ever saw was a D&D style RPG. Were there any other types? (scifi, western, fantasy)?

      • Re:I still telnet for usurper (Score:4, Informative)

        by Pikoro ( 844299 ) <{hs.tini} {ta} {tini}> on Saturday November 12, 2016 @12:56PM (#53271557) Homepage Journal

        TW2002

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by CODiNE ( 27417 )

          I remember there was a limit to how many planets you could get into a single sector... people would find cul-de-sacs in space and block up the entrance with bunch of powerful planets and ships. Someone desperate enough could max out one of their own planets, add movement to it and get it into the other guys blockade. BOOM. No more planets. Takes a few months to do it though.

        • I vaguely remember Usurper (mostly the name), however I vividly remember playing TW2002 daily... Had to get my turns in! It was amazing how great that game was and how much depth it had. Probably still better than a lot of the prettier games of today. Sand box, be a trader, a pirate, a Fedlaw, a bounty hunter, or a little bit of some or none or something else... Start a planet, build a colony, park extra ships, form factions, war with other guilds, simply explore trading along the way, steal, donate, all so

      • *EVERY* door game I ever saw was a D&D style RPG. Were there any other types? (scifi, western, fantasy)?

        There was every kind of door game imaginable. I disagree with TFS that these were chintzy, at least not uniformly, although some were for sure. They had quite an appeal at the time. I ran a BBS for a number of years and it was a lot of fun.

    • I thought I was the only one. I fell in love with Usurper about 22 years ago. I used to play it religiously.

      When BBSs went away, I downloaded the door and played it on my local system.

      I tried a telnet BBS or two but I couldn't re-capture the magic but every few years, I try it again.

      LK

      • There simply aren't many people connecting to BBS any more. Back in the day I used to dial up (first on a 2400 baud modem) to local numbers in my area, I kinda felt like Matthew Broderick in War Games. Much more recently I used to use telnet to play on x-bit, but that closed. I've found a game of Usurper on convolution.us, but there are generally only about 4 players on there total (and almost never more than one online at any given time). It's cool that synchronet is free and makes it easy to run a boa

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday November 12, 2016 @11:40AM (#53271229)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:BBS (Score:5, Interesting)

      by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Saturday November 12, 2016 @11:53AM (#53271281) Journal

      Same here. Ever play GTW? That was fun.

      But honestly, I don't miss the whole BBS thing except as an exercise in nostalgia. I had a 300 baud modem on an Atari 800 and you could literally watch the characters coming across the phone line slow enough to read. You could also turn the baud rate down to anything you wanted, and sometimes it was fun to turn it down to 10 or 20 baud so we could laugh at the data stream between bong hits.

      256 colors, 8-bit music, 720K disks, 2 count em' 2 joystick ports, holy shit.

      Then we got 1200 baud modems and damn if we weren't livin' in the future.

      • Re:BBS (Score:4, Interesting)

        by crashumbc ( 1221174 ) on Saturday November 12, 2016 @01:27PM (#53271711)

        It's weird I'm reading this today.

        I've been thinking about my Atari 128 ? (I think, it was the later model grey one with 128k memory)

        Anyway, I decided I was going to dig out of my parents house this afternoon while picking them up for a family gathering. And then I log on here to see someone talking about it!

        then off to find a power supply for the disk drive, it disappeared. I wonder if the disk s are any good anymore?

        And of course figure out a way to hook it up to a TV...

        • Re:BBS (Score:4, Interesting)

          by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Saturday November 12, 2016 @02:40PM (#53272129) Journal

          I have a complete system Atari 800 system with loads of software and one of the "Happy Drives" (used for duping copy-protected software). Everything is there, power supplies, tons of carts, manuals, plus all the cables and joysticks and stuff. It's all packed into some well-sealed boxes. I don't know if the disks are any good anymore though since it's all been packed away for about 35+ years or so. Maybe a collector would want it.

    • Ditto. Don't forget that old BBS Documentary too. (Score:4, Informative)

      by antdude ( 79039 ) on Saturday November 12, 2016 @05:47PM (#53272933) Homepage Journal

      Same here. IIRC, I started with local BBSes when I was a teen(ager) with internal 2400 dial-up modems (ZOOM and Hayes). It got so addicting that I got in trouble with long distance calls (didn't know same area codes can be toll calls based on the phone service), prank calls for being a r0d3nt/n00b, etc. :/

      Don't forget that rad(ical) old BBS Documentary [bbsdocumentary.com] -- Watch it for free on The Archive [archive.org]. Even old /. [slashdot.org] has a few old stories about this documentary:

      Good memories. I'd like to see an updated version!

    • I never liked them. I had access to the arpanet, USENET, and such, so going home to use a slow modem to get to a server that abused you because your upload to download ratio was too low was not needed.

  • BBS (Score:3)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Saturday November 12, 2016 @11:41AM (#53271235)
    I had a BBS, but it was down most of the time because I wanted to play simcity and my XT couldn't multitask yet. Who remembers the big BBS platforms? Opus comes to mind.
    • I was a WWIV man myself. Ran some RBBS-PC for a while too, but WWIV was where it was at.
      I do remember Wildcat! That was a good one, but the sysop role was much more difficult on that platform.

    • Re:BBS (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Minupla ( 62455 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `alpunim'> on Saturday November 12, 2016 @12:10PM (#53271341) Homepage Journal

      I ran a bluedoor BBS on my C-64 until I moved on and ran a OMMM enabled Opus fidonet node, and was network coordinator for my town.

      It was a great way to prepare for being a sysadmin. "Did the mail go out last night, because your system didn't make the pickup" "Damn! OMMM crashed. Let me get on that"

      • The thing about Opus was that it had the concept of distributed messages.. I don't know how many had that at the time.

      • It was a great way to prepare for being a sysadmin. "Did the mail go out last night, because your system didn't make the pickup" "Damn! OMMM crashed. Let me get on that"

        I couldn't get a paper route until I was eleven (and my parents weren't springing for a 300 baud modem) and there was never a chance of me getting my own phone line (zmodem resume must've been invented by somebody whose mom kept picking up the line and dialing touchtones) so I never got to run a board but I still owe a debt of gratitude to a

    • I ran the Political BBS on Spitfire for 10 years. I am working on a telnet version of it once again.

    • I originally started using OS/2 for that very reason. I was running a Waffle BBS, which, with a decent modem and UART driver, was a pretty resource-friendly BBS. So I through OS/2 2.1 on my machine, got that UART driver installed, and I could even play Windows 3.1 games while the BBS ran. It did slow down sometimes, but all in all, I could run my BBS in the background. The biggest problem I had was paying for the phone line.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bronney ( 638318 )

      Renegade :) oh man this is still the best place to find you people :)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sa1lnr ( 669048 )

      PCBoard.

      • I ran a PCBoard BBS for almost 15 years, mid-80's to late 90's. Wrote a door game called Imperium and made a few thousand dollars from it. Used to have a folks running online-RPG's in the forums... I think that was why my board lasted as long as it did, the GM's and players just kept calling in and playing their games after most all of the door gamers had moved onto live-network games.

    • I had a Pentium 90Mhz with 8MB running OS/2 Warp so I could run RemoteAccess and FrontDoor with FidoNet and a whole bunch of doors. I was in high school and my dad got me a seperate phone line for it. OS/2 allowed me to keep the BBS running while I did other stuff and nothing slowed down (much). My friends with Windows 95 at the time didn't have such luck. ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Myself ( 57572 )

      Most of the early boards I called were Renegade, one was WWIV, one was Telegard.

      Then I discovered a board running Excelsior! and the rest quickly faded. Inherently multi-line, and supported inter-system links, so I was calling one Excelsior! BBS with 6 lines, and one of them was a dedicated linking line to another board the next city over (still a local call, but itself was local to different folks) with 12 lines, and that was linked to yet another with 8, and everyone could communicate. It was... phenomena

  • I suspect it'd be hard to get RIPTerm 1.54 or anything fully compatble running over telnet (that I know of, anyhow). This is a pity - near the end of the BBS era, a lot of them used it (depending on the software - I ran a Searchlight BBS, which had good support).

    • You would be WRONG! (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      DOSBOX. You have to manually configure it, but the serial support in it (and only it, dosemu, etc all don't currently have similiar support!) has a virtual modem builtin that can use 'atd' to connect to a remote telnet port that provides access to a BBS. The only thing I have found that DOESN'T work with it is ROBOBBS. The terminal app side works fine, but the BBS software never properly initiates a connection after the RING signal shows up.

      Besides all of the clearnet telnet bbses still running, there are a

      • In fact with a low latency VOIP connection you can even emulate a dialup connection today. 19.2-28.8k maximum connection same as attempting to connect over POTS on AT&T's network today.

        Do you have any tips on setting this sort of thing up? There are plenty of tutorials on VoIP, but once you have the channel, how do you run a "virtual modem" over it?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Monkey ( 16966 )

      I remember playing Operation: Overkill [blogspot.ca] and Land of Devastation (LOD) [smbaker.com] using RIPTerm. Compared to the standard ANSI interface, the RIP graphics were mind-blowing at the time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lowen ( 10529 )

      There are many serial port redirectors out there, typically used with telnet server (ethernet to serial) boxes like the SitePlayer Telnet, some of the Lantronix stuff, and stuff from Equinox and Digi. These are very common for remote out-of-band console port admin of switches and routers.

      I never used RIPTerm; on the PC I later used Telix, but I used ANSITerm on my TRS-80 Model 4D with hi-res card. I still occasionally fire up the old Tandy 1400LT 8088 DOS laptop and use Telix for console work, and I still

  • Long before The Pirate Bay (Score:3)

    by elrous0 ( 869638 ) on Saturday November 12, 2016 @11:43AM (#53271243)

    I had a friend who used to run a BBS back in the mid/late-80's that specialized in doc files for game manuals, back when Commodore 64 and other computer games adopted a primitive form of DRM by asking you questions from the game user manual. You would pirate the game from a friend, then go download a manual for it from the BBS.

  • Oh so many good memories (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 50000BTU_barbecue ( 588132 ) on Saturday November 12, 2016 @11:56AM (#53271295) Journal

    Back in the 80s I was in high school in Montreal. I was socially very awkward and shy and flat out dysfunctional. The local dial-up scene was a way to socialize with a bunch of people. I only ever met a few of them IRL.
    My favorite BBS was SASSy. It was a one-user-at-a-time wall-of-text board with no logins. It was GREAT. I wish I could find the entire text archives but the sysop, Tim Campbell, was a very strange dude and never released them, because he felt it was worth thousands and thousands of dollars.

    On the other hand you had the whole "warez" scene for the C64, got a lot of software that way and met a few people also. Often I would come back home with boxes full of floppies and hundreds of terrible games to play through!

    At some later time multi-line BBS were a thing, and I met a woman at the time due to this BBS. (Linq) She was a mental ward head case and combined with my own terrible issues she set me on a path of virginity and loneliness.

    Lushh, I still hate you. Every day.

  • For a taste try SDF.org. you won't need a modem or Kermit. Anybody have a Gandalf box?

  • Only having a 300 baund modem, with no auto answer made running a BBS a bit on the difficult side, but I managed.

    When I got my own phone line put in, I had them put the demarc point inside my 2nd floor bedroom.

    At the time, I had a Tandy Coco 3 running OS-9. I ran the phone lines through the cassette drive control port on the computer, then from their out to the modem.

    my software would "pick up" the phone by toggling the cassette relay, listen for keystrokes, and if it got them, proceed with the BBS software

  • The Greene Machine, 8/N/1, Eskimo North, RIME,.... (Score:3)

    by lowen ( 10529 ) on Saturday November 12, 2016 @11:58AM (#53271305)

    Lots of good memories meeting lots of interesting people. More interesting than Facebook; typically more civilized than Reddit, Slashdot, 4Chan, or pretty much anything else of today.

    I ran a BBS in Atlanta in the mid-80's. Was very fun. Until joining Eskimo North (still online!) had not used a multi-user BBS. That was one of the draws of the BBS scene; single-user by nature, most of the time, and replies were far slower in coming..... 8/N1, The Greene Machine, Tandy Trader, Cornucopia, among many others. I still have a print of a 1987 dial-in list from Atlanta, and I was involved in many of them.

    BBSing got me into uucp and running my own C-News leaf node attached to Eskimo North. Fun days. Usenet was the next step, really, beyond the dial-up BBS. Especially in terms of loss of civility; alt.flame, alt.barney.must.die.die.die, etc. Discussion of new group creation, some of the interesting things in alt.folklore.computers, and good times in comp.sys.tandy.

  • 2:251/56.10

    Hairnett BBS, was all I used it for!

    • 2:346/201.9

      Improva BBS, i started phoning it for download and trade disney cartoon "porn" on the SysOP :D

  • Xanadu (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Saturday November 12, 2016 @12:13PM (#53271353)

    Being an old fart, I used them a lot in the day, beginning with a 300 baud acoustic coupler before getting a 1200 modem.

    But the last time I used one, was during the Compuserve days, I was member of Borland's TeamB and patches and beta versions had to be downloaded from an old BBS named Xanadu, which did cost me a lot, since I had to dial internationally from Europe.

    A few years later, during one of the TeamB meetings at the Borland campus, I visited the server room, where they showed me the old BBS Xanadu in the rack, still running there for years after the last use, because nobody knew it still existed and hence nobody ever gave an order to dismantle it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      The fun of the acoustic coupler. Mail flowing in as a series of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs and finally getting the full message :)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • I didn't write anything for it, but I used to dialup with a Kaypro 4 with an internal 1200 bps modem. Fancy! adm3a ugh

  • I learned the ropes being a Point, then became a Node (2:292/853) and was briefly even the Region 29 Coordinator (2:29/0). That was before I was conscripted into the army.
  • I used BBS's in the early 90s roughly like I do facebook now. Chatting/arguing w/ folks about religion and politics. Except, I also played door games (SRE/BRE and the Risk clone) and occasionally downloaded files (Wing Commander was 6 MB and took like 6 hours to download over 2400 baud).
  • I remember staying up way too late in college because the BBS I was dialed into was two timezones away and I wanted to be on at midnight their time so I could get my new set of turns on my various games. LORD, Falcon's Eye, Trade Wars, Usurper... So many good memories and fun times. I've been tempted to try some of these modern BBS's but I haven't found a good one that's a mix of active, but also casual. Then again people who are still playing these games after all these years are mostly bound to be pret

  • Door Games (Score:3)

    by Tempest_2084 ( 605915 ) on Saturday November 12, 2016 @12:36PM (#53271451)
    One nice thing about Door games back then was that everyone got the same amount of turns each day, and when those were spent you were done. This made the games a bit more fair as 'Pay to Win' hadn't been invented yet. There was no 'Buy extra turns for only $x' or 'Upgrade to an elite account for more turns per day'. About the only way to get an unfair advantage was schmooze the Sysop into giving you more, but that rarely worked. :)

    • Yeah I mentioned in an earlier post I'd love to see a remake of TW2002, but then thought that they would probably ruin it with micropayments...

  • Montreal's PopNet (Score:3)

    by MouseR ( 3264 ) on Saturday November 12, 2016 @12:41PM (#53271469) Homepage

    PopNet is where I took my alias from, in the late 80s. I actually had a CompuServe account but dang, that was useless for the most part. PopNet is where I spent much of my time. PopNet used your first name initials and last name to coin up a user name. I used Mouse UseR because I wanted to buy a Mac in those times (I was still under Apple //e) and because Muser was already taken, system added an initial and ended up with MouseR. Capitalisation on the trailing R, I dont remember if it was just for visual design or an accident. At the time my english wasn't good enough to know that "mouser" was a mouse-chasing cat.

    Anyhow, my zircon.net dialo-up provider user name ended up being mouser@* and my PopNet account was MouseR.

    PopNet was hooked up on FidoNet and usually synced in the night There was a great community and great games too. Fond memories.

  • C64 BBS Scene (Score:3)

    by leptons ( 891340 ) on Saturday November 12, 2016 @01:25PM (#53271703)
    I was one of the first guys "in the C64 scene" to get a 2400baud modem, but quickly found that the RS232 i/o code in the C64 was inefficient and was causing errors, it couldn't handle 2400 bits per second. So I modified one of the most popular C64 terminal programs with my own assembly code that was fast enough to handle the new speed.

    Also worked on code for a few "elite" BBSs for C64 importing/cracking groups. I still have the print-out of the C64 BASIC code that ran one of these sites, tattered and faded. I'm still writing code today and looking back, the line lumbers make me shudder.

    Shout out to TychoB who ran TCE - good times with multi-line C64 BBS fun!

  • My first modem was 2400 baud. The hand-me-down computers I had before that didn't have modems and I couldn't afford to buy one sooner.

    I dialed into a bunch of BBSs with that 2400 baud modem but honestly didn't get the appeal.

    When I discovered Usenet via college Sun servers it was a totally different story, but BBSs just never clicked for me. Maybe the ones in my area weren't any good. I couldn't afford long distance and although I wasn't aware of phreaking I wouldn't have considered BBSs access a good enoug

  • I ran my own bbs back in the 80s/90s running my own software. I do t remember if anyone in here remembers this website asking for contact from old bbs operators but for nostalgia, http://textfiles.com/ [textfiles.com] (including its list of bbs that existed through the years)

  • Zoltrix 14.4kbps with BananaCom, downloading all those sweet .mod files after midnight, chatting around with friends in telecomference rooms...

  • I started w/the C= 64 like so many others, 300 baud modem. Got a 1200 at some point.

    But my claim to fame (in my own head) would be running what I believe might've been the first multiline BBS on a personal computer, an Amiga 2000 with four Supra 2400zi modems (as soon as they were available) with BB/OS software which was designed for multiline.

    At the time PCs and Macs didn't generally have multiple serial ports, and the systems that offered multitasking aside from the Amiga were the NeXT and OS/2, Macs did

  • I loved BBSs, used them from 300 baud on up in Winnipeg. They were great for the local scene, but it was the advent of store-and-forward networking that really blew me away. Mail and newsgroups to and from my home system, through a guy working at an ISP (hi Greg!), and off to the world.

    By batching up messages together and sending them in a periodic squirt, you didn't need to tie up the phone line for long. Sending email meant storing it in the spool, and it would go out soon enough when the connection next

  • For those of us whose formative years were spent on BBSs, the different modem sounds while connecting is quite nostalgic. I'm sure that everyone from that era can easily differentiate the sounds between a 300, 1200, 2400, and 9600 baud modems connecting.

    • We had a 2400 baud modem. Very familiar with the sounds. Most users are probably familiar with the exact sound of their BBS's phone number:

      Click-dial tone-phone number-busy signal-clunk-click-dial tone-phone number-busy signal-clunk-click-dial tone-phone number-busy signal-clunk-click-dial tone-phone number-busy signal-clunk-click-dial tone-phone number-busy signal-clunk-click-dial tone-phone number-busy signal-clunk-click-dial tone-phone number-ring-ring-carrier.

      Always very exciting when you finally heard

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • ...just to chat with you.

    I remember that, 2 o clock in the night, ping...ping...ping...

    Sysop coming online...

    And then the chat was initiated. Spent so many hours chatting with people calling MY bbs. I used a BBS system for the Amiga, I had an Amiga 2000 with a seriously big harddisk for the 90s. I remember how hard it was to write a mounting script for it (yes, we couldn't just plug shit in, we had to write mounting scripts for literally everything). 200 whopping megabytes of sheer fun when everyone e

  • I still remember the clicking sound the maxtor external hard drive made when there was an incoming call. Yes, that was one sick drive.

  • I dearly miss the BBS experience, both as a user and sysop.

    A guy in Biloxi, MS got me into the sysop side of things, he ran QuickBBS, I ended up with RemoteAccess Pro with FrontDoor handling the mail. Two nodes, one on a built-from-spare-parts 386, one on a Packard Bell 486 that had been demoted from desktop use. One 28.8 line, one 14.4. The 14.4 handled ZMH.

    The menus always evolved, first garish, then I toned it all back down to something simple, elegant and quick. I did admire ACiD and their crazy ans

  • I would say that the hobby of BBSing and running my own BBS was one of the few things that really defined my childhood/teen years.

    I became fascinated with the early home computers in the 1980's, growing up. I think the first one I ever really got a chance to use was a Commodore VIC-20, which one of my best friends' dad bought. His parents were divorced so he was only at his dad's place every other weekend, but I spent much of that time on those weekends hanging out with him. He had a 300 baud "VICmodem" wit

  • 1992-1995. Made a decent chunk of change actually. It was a lot of fun and inspired me to build a business.

  • I got into the BBS scene around 1985, and I loved it. The height of it for me was around 1994, when I was one of the sysops on a friend's Amiga system running C/Net. Eight lines, a gig of file storage (huge at the time), FidoNet, and I wrote a little shim to allow the Amiga to talk to an ancient PC/XT running Remote Access so we could offer PC doors on the system. Toward the end we started offering Internet mail access through a SLIP gateway at a local college. I miss the BBS days a lot, and it's hard to
  • I downloaded my first Internet porn from a BBS.
  • It was about 1982 or 1983 - a good friend convinced me to get a modem. There was one BBS in the area at the time called NYBBLINK. Well a month or two after I got the modem NYBBLINK was disconnected.

    So I cajoled my friend into writing a BBS platform on the TRS-80 Model III - thus was born Syslink. Syslink in turn spawned PowerNet and PowerCore which morphed into Intelecom Data Systems (IDS) owned by another friend.

  • It was running Fido, and was part of Fidonet, 163/5, before there were zone numbers! I named it after one of my favourite songs, Solsbury Hill by Peter Gabriel. Our hub for Ottawa was run by a guy named, I kid you not, Al Hacker! He had to pull out his wallet and show us his driver's license at the first Sysop gathering we had! l I started carrying "Echos", which were sort of like Newsgroups on Usenet, and I remember when the nodelist of Fidonet BBSs broke 1,000!

    I also met some truly wonderful people, and a

  • running a bbs required some dedication, i ran a 2 node bbs and that cost me a lot of money. as a high school student, all the money i could earn went into it.
    you wouldn't and couldn't do it, unless you were really dedicated. it was worth it though, i loved the interaction with users. when i first got a demo from the internet, i was not impressed - because i couldn't interact with the user...

  • I started on what was known back in the 80's as 6485-BBS (later renamed to Ivory BBS), written by Ivory Joe (a piano player out of Corpus Christie. Later I moved to the Commodore 128 running C-Base 128 (written by Dan Drury). Those were the days...

  • I ran a BBS for 9 years and it was great. Eventually, the internet overtook such programming fun for me and I switched to programming a MUD for 18 years.

    Door games I wish were actually still around:
    SI Droids
    Tradewars.
    Quizzors Mountain
    Power Struggle

    Those games may have been text based, but they did consume a lot of time and brain power.

    Also, the additional fun part of that time was:
    Which was better transmission method? Better BBS software? Best way to use your 1200baud modem? Zmodem, Qmodem? How to get lon

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