Slashdot Mirror
Every BBS That Ever Was
Jason Scott writes: "With a collection of over 30,000 textfiles from the 1980's, I suddenly got a rather weird thought: Why not start taking all the BBSes mentioned in all the textfiles and create a really, really huge BBS list? A few weeks later, I'm up past 77,000 BBSes listed, with many including the Sysop's name, software used, and if you're lucky a relatively accurate timespan for the years that BBS graced the telephone network. I've imported FidoNet nodelists, WildCat! customer lists, and a whole range of other lists as I find them (USBBS List, Darwin List, etc.). Come by and remember what places sucked up all YOUR long distance calls and sleepless nights, trying to get past the busy signals. I'm also making an open call for everyone and anyone to send me old BBS lists to integrate. With luck, we can have some sort of permanent record of all the BBSes we ever knew."
...because you cling to the past, fear the future, fear change. We razz you because you cant move on.
BBSes are gone now and best forgotten.
It sounds like you at least have an inkling at how awful all those things you mentioned were. Relax. It's all over now. Thanks to graphical web browsers and online Quake, we live in a technological golden age -- one where we can safely forget about Ansi art and cryptic command lines. We've got better stuff now! The world's move on!
Yeah, but he also claims that he has imported the Fidonet nodelist. So why are there no systems outside the US? Fidonet was huge, at one time nearly fourty thousand nodes, not even counting the point bbses. At that time the European part of Fidonet was larger than the US part.
ThomasAnd today there are still over ten thousand systems listed, most of them outside the US, eg. Russia and other former Sovjet Union states.
I for one nearly cried. I know this list really serves no prctical purpose but it does remind me of all the sleepless nights I spent messing with DOORS and MUDS not to mention the drudgery of a 1200/2400/14400 Baud connection, thank you DSL. I say kudos to the list complier and shove off all you people, probably to young to remember anything but the internet, blowing "raspberries" at us nostalgic old farts.
There is still something interesting about a SMALL community, where you know a lot of the people. A large community is more anonymous. You don't know who's making various proclamations. You don't care about anyone and you don't get to know anyone.
I really miss the forums, especially the old inet ones. I was actually hoping the the textfiles site would have more archived messages as I'd hoped to find some old FTL messages.
Anyone else from FTL on /.?
MAC | A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Was an early member of the Fidonet, one of the first 500 or so nodes. And was a founding member of Magicknet, which later became PODSnet. Information on PODSnet mailing lists, echos that have made the jump over to the Internet is available. Email me...farrellj@sympatico.fnordca Take away the fnord to get the real address.
ttyl
Farrell
SysOp, Data/SFnet & Solsbury Hill BBSs
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
ahh...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Fidonet: 4:920/35 and later 1:280/127 (IIRC, was very brief)
The more you know, the less you understand.
2:203/244
That felt good ^^
They seem to be missing the entire NW Indiana thing... My board was "The Attack Zone".. ran WWIV in NW Indiana. I loved the days of SysOp'ing... Dialing Texas to get my feed everynight ... damn.. the good ol' days.. Sometimes I wish they were back
ChiefArcher
Well I got myself a DSL connection to the net and wammo.. back up to 100+ calls a day. 90% of them are using the doors, which is fine. I didn't put a board up to force Message ratios or file ratios on people. Its nice to say that I can look at my board and see that people are enjoying themselves.
telnet://clockworkorangebbs.org
http://www.clockworkorangebbs.org
TradeWars, Lord and many other games.
FidoNet and a few other nets...
- Xabbu - Sysop: clockworkorangebbs.org
- Tradewars - LoRD - FidoNet and much more!
- Jimbob
Wow! What a huge rush remembering the old 300 baud days...you know, when you could whistle into the phone's microphone and actually get it to connect!
Perusing the list for the 312 area code brought back a TON of memories! It's amazing how many look so familiar even after not connecting to most for over a decade!
I would LOVE to see more listings from the early '80s.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Just an FYI, renegade was based of a copy of the Forum BBS code if I remember correctly. Along with Telegard. I'm pretty sure that was in Pascal because I saw the Forum source once. Oblivion, Cheese and host of other crappy systems were based of WWIV source code, which was in C. At least if memory serves me correct.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
You're not kidding. I used to run a system from 1986 until about 1990 in northern NJ (201 area code) called Dronefone, and I have some wonderful memories from those days. One thing is that I even still maintain an excellent and very dear relationship with one of my users; he's been one of my best and dearest friends for years ever since the day that I voice answered my BBS line to tell whoever that it was going to be down for about 30 minutes.
I have every piece of software that I ever ran for my BBS and I have also archived most (if not all) of the data files (read: remaining email, message boards, etc) that existed on these systems. I intend to put it online at some point (even registered a URL), but it will be one hell of an archive organizational effort, not to mention the work converting it all to a readable format.
If anyone who reads this message remembers by BBS, please feel free to drop me a line. When I get the archive up (or if you want bits and pieces that I've extracted), I'll let you know where to find it.
-Drone
Proprietor of Dronefone ('86 - '90)
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I was in San Diego running a WWIV board in early '92 - how great was it all then? ComputorEdge's BBS listings... aaah. Nostalgia.
thenerd.
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
The system only allowed for real names for user IDs. I really wanted to use an alias, one which caracterised me as a "mouse user" (I had just bought my first Mac: a Mac SE with a *built*in*hard*drive, SCSI no-less!).
Not only did the system only accept full names, it would catenate the first letter of the last name to the first name. So, all I could do was to create myself a false name, and let the system catenate the names.
I chose "Mouse Rancher", and the system assigned me
- MouseR
I've been using this nickname since. Nostalgia, maybe. But also a way to more easilly keep in touch with people, shall they see me roaming around.I still remember, from POPNet, people like, Chuckles, Disk Notcher, Blue Shift, Riddle, ShaggyCarpet, Zappa Lady and Zop
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
I trudged through the list, saw some familiar names. But what's missing -- and what'll probably be next to impossible to find -- are the old standalone BBS's from the early- to mid-`80s, running on Apple II's, 8-bit Atari's with a rack of floppy drives and a 300 or 1200 baud modem, or 16-bit Atari ST's with a 20 or 40 MB hard drive and a 2400 baud modem. Some of the best ones I saw back then weren't networked with any other BBS or Internet node with fidonet, UUCP, or any of those goofy protocols that never took off. They didn't have the latest "k00l warez." But they did have message boards that were egregiously active and had more of a sense of a community than anything I've seen on the Internet in the 13 years I've been using it.
They actually managed to get me on the list! Dylan Mathews
Y'know, I'm getting quite tired of hearing the Slashdot editors always refer to BBS's as if they are completely a thing of the past. Some of us are still running our BBS's, often just for fun instead of for profit. Inexpensive DSL with static IP addressing makes it possible for the hobbyist computer enthusiast to once again put up a public access system without requiring a revenue source. the software continues to improve and become ever more integrated with the modern Internet.
Dialup BBSing is dead -- for that matter, the days of dialup Internet are numbered, what with DSL and cable becoming ever more prevalent. But BBSing in general continues to go strong.
In fact, with the web becoming ever-more controlled by corporate interests, and UseNet rapidly approaching a zero percent signal-to-noise ratio, BBS sites will probably rise in popularity as the more enjoyable places to frequent on the Internet. Many BBS's are reminiscent of the way the Internet was before Corporate America dumbed it down.
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Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
It's 1:29am PT and already it's gettin slashed... :-) too bad some of my old faves aren't listed... :-(
ahh the memories...
---- Fight to protect your right to keep and arm bears! ummmm... ya I think that's right....
I know the telcos would not like it... along with phone owners... but it would be interesting to dial all the numbers to see how many actualy answer and are still a bbs... :-) I know my friend's board in NYC will still anser... it's been there for like 8 or more years, last i remember it was a citadel board running on an OS2 system... :-) good stuff....
---- Fight to protect your right to keep and arm bears! ummmm... ya I think that's right....
ce399 here, now a pxs3. I'm an alumni and currently a staff member. Those were the good old days for sure. :)
Boy that list brought back memories....especially since there was an inaccurracy.
The list only shows the period when I was connected to Fidonet.
Lunatic Haven BBS started in 1987....it was an Empire online game system...later it became a Citadel system and eventually joined CitadelNet (had to get a modem that observed DTR).
Then in 1990 after I graduated, I moved to Medicine Hat to work for a defence contractor....I continued the BBS there....first I became a UUCP node and introduced the locals to Email and Newsgroups. At the peak of that I was spending $1500 a month on long distance alone. I lived in a rundown apartment where most of my neighbors were on welfare, etc....me I was too busy spending my paycheck on my BBS obsession to afford essentails like housing. Around 1992, I twinned the system to support the Praxis Society...and bought a house to accomodate my growing BBS. At one point I had 6 phone lines running into the house...among other things.
I had powercords snaking around from other parts of the house to supply power to my computer setup.
Also around 1992, I joined Fidonet/K12Net, and then a bunch of Othernets. I also found a cheaper feed for UUCP (when I started I was calling San Jose, CA....eventually UUNET.CA came online, and I called their POP in Edmonton....Calgary was closer, but Edmonton was more reliable...I'd call Toronto as fallback...of course this was still before the deregulation of the phone company...so long distance in Canada was the same whether it was in the same province or between provinces.)
Finally, I was laid off in 1997...and the system didn't survive the move back to Calgary....actually, I think turning off the harddrives is what killed it. Plus I was losing poeple with the competition of local ISPs. Since the bulk of my content could be accessed over the Internet and it was faster and better than what I could offer. Plus most of the locals were more interested in online games than participating in discussion boards.
My system was not without its controversial periods....in early 1990 when I was still in Calgary...infact an Eingeering student at the University of Calgary. I voluntarily pulled the plug on my system to scrub the message base and users, and temporarily imposed a policy of getting real names with the aliases. An unidentified user was arranging deals in illegal firearms...and using the University campus for the meets. The police were very sensitive (as was I) to this since it had only been a couple months since the Montreal Massacre.
Boy the memories.....to think I used to run a networked BBS only a 512K Amiga 1000 with two floppy drives. One floppy drive had Kickstart/Workbench and the core of the BBS...the other floppy drive was the message area. Depending on the quality of the floppy disk I was using, I was replacing the message area floppy every 2-3 weeks.
Check out a picture I took of my system in 1996.... http://www.lhaven.net/
You may be a dreamer, but I'm The Dreamer, the definite article you might say!
Ah, the memories...
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Yeah, just like Americans to lump a whole group of people under one label then make a derogatory comment about them...[BG]
Place has hundreds of different door games, most of them registered!
link to The worlds favorite place to play TW2002, LORD, and BRE - <a href="telnet://bbs.mincus.com">Skiddish Underware</a>
link to The worlds favorite place
to play TW2002, LORD, and BRE -
Skiddish Underware
Actually, it wasn't a bad read - it had fairly eclectic columns on things like the Forth language and the like, and it was written by obvious computer enthusiasts rather than journos turning their hand to something they had no affinity with.
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I did connect to a large number of Fidonet (And Alternet or something like that) BBSes, back in the day with my 1200 bps modem (then 2400, then 14400!) here in Southern Alberta (403). However, there was one other one, DEBUG Computer Systems, which had a UUCP connection, and gave Internet email addresses ( @debug.cuc.ca ), and had a "bang path (!)" to UUNet, around 1992. I wonder if there's a list of these as well, or perhaps purists don't consider UUCP connected BBSes to be real BBSes.
I learned C so I could modify a friend's copy of WWIV. That's also why I got my own PC. (And THERE was an early bazaar community if ever there was one, the WWIV .mod file community.)
The last BBS I wrote was in, a multinode fidonet compatable bbs written from scratch in c++ including my own fidonet message processing routines that were WAY more efficient than anything else I'd seen. A friend of mine ran a copy that's listed on there (xblat, under the 609 area code). Strangely, my own bbs (The Conversation Pit) is listed as "unknown". :)
I had xblat multitasking under desqview with no synchronization primitive except file locking. I had the capacity to do 9 nodes (8 FOSSIL driver ports plus one on the keyboard), plus the mail tosser running. Not that I had that many phone lines. :)
And the mail tosser processed 30 messages/second on a 386/33DX while updating a text mode display of what it was doing. And I eventually got it to where it would handle outgoing messages posted by a user on another node in the middle of digesting an incoming fido packet without ever having to look at the same message twice. All done without resorting to Turbo C's "huge" pointers, I might add. :)
Those were the days...
In 1995 I started porting it to 32 bit OS/2 code under EMX, but I had a day job and I'd found the internet anyway. (Strangely, my BBS work never impressed IBM. :) Kept meaning to write a BBS in java, but I wanted to make it internet based and I couldn't find a hosting service that would let me run actual daemons instead of just CGI on a web page. Eventually I moved on to other things...
Rob
But I tried to contact the people at Steve Jackson Games but hey still haven't gotten their shit back from Big Bro' who's analyzing it over 5 year old jelly donuts.
:-)
Maybe not, but they did get a six-figure settlement that turned them into a large ISP and sustained them through a dip in the gaming industry, allowing them to keep producing new material at a blistering pace while other companies were cutting back.
All in all, Uncle Sam did 'em a favor.
Hey, I remember CFN! ai177, right here...The old Cleveland Freenet was my first gateway to internet email. I remember using ftp-by-mail to snare the latest and greatest, all through Freenet.
You could probably argue that Usenet killed CFN -- why chat with locals about Star Trek when you could read Tim Lynch's reviews and get the latest news from Usenet?
And I had hair back then!!! That S-100 bused Vector Graphics box is sitting next to my rack of Unreal Tournament servers holding up the UPS's now. My apartment is down from 18 fone lines (fone company would send investigators out every few months to see if I was running a bookie joint) to just 4 lines and a T1.
More than 3/4's of the 8 inch single sided floppies we sent out with the source went to European contries the first few years. Mostly Scandivian countries, but a few to England and Germany. Those were the days of Demon Dialers and call packs. First 300 baud modems, then 1200 to 2400. 2400's were the mainstay. After 9600 modems came out, the Internet started in ernest and BBS's started to fade. Remember the Telebit Trailblazer and 19200 baud downloads for news feeds? That was heaven.
I know not all the boards have the software listed, but I see none of the WWIV boards I used to frequient in the San Diego area listed. My old board (The Far West) is listed, I believe, only because I experimented with PCBoard for about a month. I then went back to WWIV. I tried another system as well, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was called. It was written by a couple of guys on the East coast, but it never really caught on in the West.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
After looking for all the warez boards I used to frequent back in the day, I couldn't find a single damn one of them. Not that I'm particularly proud of my l33t d00d days, (hey, my income was a whopping $60/year, and I *did* use it to buy software) I think warez boards are an important part of BBS history too. I'd be happy to contribute my own list but alas.. the drive it's on is long dead.
Cool, you were on Computrek? Me too. Remember playing Tele-Arena? That game rocked. We used to have some good times playing that.. I remember once figuring out how to win free credits on that board as a monthly subscriber in the Casino game... What was your handle? Remember Jaxom? Athena? WeaponX? Cyric? Zor? Gwar?
I just want to say this is one of the coolest things I have ever seen anyone waste time on. Why?? Because My BBS is on the list! (and no I'm not in the USA either)
Anyone out there from the 515 area code? I noticed that most of the 515 numbers are only for 90's BBS's. I was wondering if anyone had BBS lists from the mid 80's for 515? I probably do buried somewhere, but they are probably all on Apple II media, and I'd have to dig a machine out of storage to read them! :-)
I used to run a mail-only Fidonet node (Koosliam, 2:259/7) - it was only online from 23:30 to 07:30 GMT. However punters wouldn't recognise this even thou it was stated in the nodelist and it had no BBS online, and no files anyway.
My parents still get the occasional 'hen scratching' on the phone in the middle of the night... Quality.
Also, remember the boards that would call you back to verify your phone number? Remember the ultra high security boards where the Sysop would actually voice verify new users? New User Voting? You fill out some form answering a quiz that determines if you are 'leet enough to be a member, then the old users vote on whether you get an account. It was a status symbol just to have an account on some boards!
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Whether it was the level of technical knowledge you needed to even connect to a board, geographical / area code barriers, or just the fact that nobody would DREAM of spamming a BBS, I think those days are over. I'm not saying the online community is dead, you just have to look harder. Isn't the Well still around? The Internet makes it so easy to reach the critical mass where you have to whore your site out to an ad network just to pay for hosting. Throw a million lamers shouting "a/s/l" into the mix, and the chance of a real community emerging is pretty low.
I do agree that there was an art to the BBS culture..
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Does anyone remember the two competing networks for WWIV? I thought they were named Net and Link.
I was amazed at the ability to have nationwide message boards and send email from one BBS to another.(I got a university account soon afterwards and was introduced to MUDS and usenet...) I can even remember sending an email on vacation from CA and receiving it at home in VA about 6 days later.
If there were old records of the Net and Link, they would provide ALOT of WWIV BBS. I can still remember the name of one in Richmond, VA - Dr. Boo Boo's Purple Palace of Pleasure (and no, it was pr0n - Damn!)
Glutious
Jeremy
"Opinions are like assholes; everyone's got one..."
I wonder if the culture was very different due to the different dial-up costs?
:)
:)
I remember paying alot to the local ma bell here in norway, while the americans had a flat fee all along?
I don't think i was connected more than 10-15 minutes at a time, just enough to use my offline newsreader (blue-something) to fetch the new news.
I'm just curious what the 'vanilla' american bbs-users were like, i mostly read news and downloaded files.
The coolest bbs's even had USENET, and i do recall using ftp-through-email to fetch new wads from cdrom.com
But i digress.. those were the days
Connecticut is like that too. My BBS is listed in the 203 area code, when in fact the hartford area had long since changed to 860 when it started. Also my high school BBS is listed in both 203 and 860 for the same years...
1:124/2342.4
Bless those memories. :)
---
When I started nibbling on the edges of this project, I was sure it could never be pulled off. But the idea was just too cool to avoid, and after a while, I started coding some ideas. Then I discovered the FidoNet nodelists, and I was suddenly up to 35,000 BBSes, and away I went. You're seeing the THIRD WEEK of this project. Obviously, just as the Gnu Project or Apache started out as single FTP sites or web sites and are now massively mirrored projects with many maintainers, I could see this project doing the same.
The intention, ultimately, is to branch out into all the major countries that I can. However; focusing on just the United States is a daunting project in itself. Along the way to adding the many thousands of BBSes, I am putting together a killer group of scripts to maintain and run the BBS list. These scripts can later be modified to handle another country, probably with a different split, like, say, bbslist.textfiles.com/sweden or the like. Then you would be able to have the BBSes listed there.
To be successful at this, you need to know how a certain phone system is set up. My system is very geared towards the phone number pattern of XXX-XXX-XXXX; it will take modifications for the suite of scripts to allow anything else to function. Small modifications, but still modifications.
Over time, I think all countries will be handled. And yes, the story of BBSes is HARDLY OVER; I know that there's still thousands and thousands of very active BBSes all over the world.
I chose an arbitrary mark and and working up to it. That mark is not permanent.
- Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM
Before people blame Michael, I wrote that headline.
I wrote the headline like that because it catches the eye, it gets your attention, and people get involved and want to make it live up to that. 14,000 visiting sites later, my approach is proven right.
This is NOT currently "Every BBS that Ever Was". But there is nothing stopping it from being that. I am refining the scripts such that they will work with any given country, and as new countries are added (with maintainers to help collect the information?) then this will truly be a Global list.
In other words, assume this is the "North American Coordinator" speaking. Assume there will one day be a "European Coordinator", "Australian Coordinator", "Sealand Coordinator", etc. It can come true!
I hope people don't think what it's about. It's about documenting and remembering the past, maybe thinking back to those times and the experiences we had. It's about coming up with a body of knowledge that exists in tiny, month-by-month fragments (buffered BBS lists) that people naturally considered throw away and bringing them together to show the universal information they provide, about all the BBSes there have been.
There is an entire other aspect to the message that is inaccurate as well; to say that no-one is putting up new BBSes and BBSes get zero callers. Not every country has bridged "the last mile" with Cable and DSL. In fact, not even the United States has done so. So in many, many places the networks such as FidoNet represent cost-effective, efficient ways to bring information to masses of computer users. They're a long way from dead...
As for the implication that might arise that this site is my way of saying the present day is worse than the past, I'd like to include a quote from... myself! Being interviewed by Wired News for this article, I made this statement:
This isn't about trying to reinstate BBSes as the most popular and world-wide form of communication used by computers; this certainly isn't about acting like we're not living in some technologically breathtaking times. Quite the opposite; this is about trying to document and remember the centuries (as in "man-centuries") of work we put into Bulletin Board Systems, and maybe come away knowing how truly far we've come and how far we can go.
Here's my current thoughts about user comments: No and Yes.
No, I will not be putting up message bases under each BBS for people to post about. I think it would be clunky, prone to abuse, and not very helpful. There are plenty of places to discuss BBSes; my current preferred place is the 1980's BBS Discussion List which is where a bunch of people are discussing aspects of BBSes and saving the past and the good times and, well, pretty much everything you'd expect such a list to have. I think this would concentrate things a lot better... imagine the process of trying to scan for new comments on the site!
Now, what I do want are STORIES written by people who used a specific BBS or set of BBSes, so that I can put links into a "story page" that is going to be going up on the site very shortly. I think that will really encourage people to write well-thought-out essays about different places instead of just throwing out one-line messages saying "XXXX BBS was G00D" and leaving it at that. We want to remember, not throw out little one-line accolades for BBSes we all agree we liked being on.
It's a usability thing, and that's where I stand. Use mailing lists for discussions; use this list for memory and narratives.
An excellent story, TheDreamer. I would invite you and others to submit these stories to the site so that I can put them together on a story page, with a link from your location on the BBS list to your story, and from there to places like your lhaven.net web site which lets people see even more about your past.
If enough people did this, we'd have a real resource on our hands.
Congratulations on making it to the first revision of the list, but I want to stress to everyone (and I say this on the site in the FAQ) that just because you're not listed does not mean you're being excluded! It just means that I didn't find you in the first two weeks of work. Since this article came out, I've added verification, further information, and addition of over 8,000 BBSes. !!! This is from people who saw the list wasn't accurate or missed something, wanted to make things right, and mailed me corrections.
:)
And I want everyone to know I appreciate these corrections very, very much. I also know what I'm doing for the next week.
Here were the sources I used for the initial revision of the list:
1. Fidonet Nodelists. Everyone's figured that out and I credit where I got them from. I used something like 16 years of lists, so that gave a lot of information about timespan, sysop name, different BBS names, and the like.
2. The USBBS List. This was also called "The Darwin List" and was a very popular BBS list that's been around for well over a decade. I used this to import timespans as well, since in one case it would list the first year the BBS showed up on the list! Very convenient.
3. Smaller BBS lists done here and there. I found a lot of old (1991-1995) lists on the internet in searches for a couple days. This isn't old old, but it was definitely a way to get some names and numbers down. In some cases, I had BBSes that were around since the beginning of the 1980's that had survived in some form to the 1990's, and these 1990's lists had them listed, but with inaccurate (smaller) timespans.
There's probably an entire field of study for the methodology I'm using to construct the list; basically it throws out redundant information and focuses on what's new. This means that if a BBS was listed in one place as "The Slashdot BBS" and elsewhere as "Slashdt bbs", both are listed. It will take a human going through the list by hand to fix this up further. And I will do that when I get the next set of scripts ready for me to do "Housecleaning".
I think you're just being contrarian here.
You're mistaking nostalgia and historical perspective for clinging to the past and rejecting the wonder of the present. In fact, I make no assertion that the past is better than the present, in any way except that it gives us a perspective on what we have now. The speed of today's home computers, the ability to transfer files, the coolness of Peer-to-Peer and for that matter Instant Messaging and all sorts of neat new technologies seem that much sweeter when you think of where you've come. Although, reading through your note, I don't think it's a place you've personally come from; you seem rather young.
Please don't speak for others that they don't want to look at ANSI Art or look over old documentation or even to browse old BBS List Entries... everything has its place, and history shouldn't be burned and destroyed at the first opportunity just because you think the time before you got on the scene was neanderthal and useless. People spent years and years working on these BBSes; I'm proud to have brought some memories back for them.
The Fire Escape BBS has been sent to me by a ton of people, with many different copies, and that's really helped to have 314 shoot ahead of a lot of the other area codes in terms of completeness (for the 1990's period) and accuracy of information. Thanks for all your work on that list; I'm sorry it didn't end up as positive at the end for you.
The reason for this is that I only have datestamps for the times of the BBSes. Very few of the BBS lists (with the exception of the USBBS List) gave anything like a "time span" when describing a BBS, and the process is somewhat complicated for determining the time span in the USBBS list! As people have given me more accurate years, I've added them, and the time-span has grown.
I hope people don't call these numbers. Some are 10 years in the past.
Many of the listings now include the e-mail addresses and websites of the sysops who used to run the BBSes. I'd suggest sticking with those.
My friend Mudpuppy was going to port/rewrite WWIV with a web-front end. His web BBS software would be called WWWWWIV: "double-uh double-uh double-uh double-uh double-uh eye vee". He had to abort the project because the name was just too difficult to pronounce.
cpeterso
A group of us based in Cape Town South Africa used to fone phreak into Orange country CA and download the latest phrack and other misc hacking/phreaking texts. We used a BBS running Renegade called DnA systems run by a guy called Pazuzu. Initially we used the x.25 networks to connect to a dialout PAD in Orange country where you could send ATDT style hayes modem commands to dial any local (modem) number. Later on we started blue boxing (phreaking using CCITT5 signals on the international lines - like cap'n crunch on USA 1800's except the international version).
One of us became famous - got interviewed on national television when it was still cool to be a hacker. Another got arrested by Interpol and the local telco working together. Thankfully we were all under 18 at the time so no one took the charges seriously.
And then the Internet made phreaking obsolete. Ah yes, the good old days.
What I'd really like to see is 'bbsmates.com', modeled after clasmates.com. You could look up your old BBS haunts (or add them if they're not there already), register your handle on the BBS, and see who else has signed up. This would be a great way to find those people you lost when you went to college, ditched the BBS for the net, or when the BBS was unexpectedly shut down because dad needed his dedicated fax line back.
I'd love to se where some of my teen geek friends wound up after the net explosion.
Kevin Fox
--
Kevin Fox
Indeed, I actually just found a BBS listing of mine from '98 which had at least 15 active bbs's on it. Speaking of which, is anyone from victoria interested in reviving a small BBS? ssh/telnet on a Linux system, naturally. I was thinking small close nit sort of thing like dark side, vortex, tigers or such... Or even just getting a bunch of the old bbs people/sysops together for an oldstyle meet. sshack at cln.etc.bc.ca if anyone is interested.
HOUSTON
SUBURBAN, TX
Houston OS/2, North Shore(1992-1993)
Byron Miller
Not only was that an OS/2 BBS but the very same BBS listed in the first Linux big linux book every geek should remember "The Linux Bible". Go ahead, crack that open and my BBS is listed in there. I had all 12 1.44 megs of the GNU Operating system available to download at the amazing speed of 2400 bps. aww yeah.
The years are wrong though, i ran it for four years from Opus up to Wildcat under DESQview and then PCBoard 15.1 under OS/2 using a linux box as my irc, email, lynx and usenet gateway. (Back when usenet meant something as well!. Hell, back when Yggdrasil was the only distro! I bought a CDROM just to load Yggdrasil.
PS, you can find my BBS in the big arse "OS/2 Unleashed" Book as well as "Linux Unleashed".
I did my community service when i was 13 :) 11-12 years later its paying off. Now own my own house, got a great family and still work in the technology sector. To top it off, it all started with the BBS's my parents bitched i spent so much time on. Muahahahaha
Several years ago around 93 I was adminning one of canadas largest online services. The internet was this thing on the horizon we knew we had to deal with. we examined our options and figured hey ... we've got to get on this bandwagon before it passes us by ... and well that created an ISP called cybertrends www.trends.ca ... well that didnt bode well, unfortuantely for us sparc 20's at the time were small fortunes and so were phone lines and bandwidth costs. We had a 256k link with a company called worldlynx (think Bell Canada) and the BBS was still running strong. THis was a pay use BBS with 32 lines and a subscriber base in the thousands. But then came the internet ... people had two accounts, we offered them dual accounts an account on one system with access to the other but why pay for access to something thats free on the net right? well yes alot was free then ...y ou could find pretty much anything for free on the internet those days. Whether it be porn or pageantry ... you could find anything without an add popping up or poeple asking you to pay for it ... there was online chat (IRC) but it was a pain in the ass, channels were constantly taken over and it just wasn't alot of fun being on the internet between 14.4 and 28.8 so we figured we'd do one better and opened our lines up reduced our rates and added telnet access to the online service. It worked well for a while. We had a booming membership. We had hoped that opening it up to the internet would give us a larger customer base. But then things began to dwindle ... customers that were paying for telnet service from other locations, at the time didnt think they should have to pay there additional prices to access our chat services or our file base and message boards. Hell they had IRC, UseNet and the web. But Now i look around and I see a convuluted mess of online offerings. Everything is advertising, pay per use (at astronomical rates) membership fees. Nothing is private and organized any more. Online communities are a rag tag bunch of people. Look at slashdot ... look at the mess its in. try and find a valid comment relating to a post ... nope its 12 replies beneath your threshold.
... round is round is round. BBS' were and are great.
... and well we'll see what happens
In recent months I've been debating about pulling out my old software and reinstalling it on a system. Lord knows I could run an effective system again. I think people (with the advent of linux) are learning that some times the KISS rule still does apply. Why reinvent the wheel
Anyways I'm off to go make some screens in THEDRAW have fun
GTs were kewl in 514 - of course different groups of boards would have different GTs - some in the evening at popular watering holes, which are the ones I remember best. By the way, The Walden of 85-93 was not on the list. Sent an email to correct that situation. Wonder why he didn't use Steblublu's Big List?? Nex
Nuts.
--
Pretend there is some witty statement here.
I always thought that I had been lucky to have so many BBS's to choose from when I was a youngster living in St. Louis. Looking at that list of the 314 area code, I can see there were more BBS's in Missouri than almost anywhere else.
Having gone through the list of over 1700 boards, I found quite a few who's names I had forgotten over the years and desperately tried to remember. Brought back a lot of fond memories of my start in the online community.
There's still a list maintained in St. Louis of active BBS's, both dial-up and telnet. It's been maintained since the early days by the same good folks at Fire Escape's BBS.
I moved away years ago, but it's still fun to occasionally telnet into a BBS where I used to spend way too much time playing online games.
I can't find in the list the Metal Shop BBS, the BBS of one of the phrack magazine founders, Taran King.
Check the original announcement
-------------------------------------------------
Programming is good for health
WWIV is at least still being actively developed.
http://wss.wwiv.com
To misquote Churchill, never has an operating system (FreeBSD) used by so many been administered by so few. - NetCraft
Oh okay, it would be hell, but I can dream. Honestly, wouldn't it be nice to drop by this site, with a per-BBS message board, and find yourself chatting again with people you haven't typed to since you got an ISP?
Biggest problem: anachronisms.
It looks like when guessing location, Jason went to a current exchange-to-locality database. Unfortunately, a lot of ACs have changed since the big BBS days, so that while 617-581-XXXX is now Cambridge MA, it used to be Lynn MA (now in 781 [and 339]).
--
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
I can think of at least 30 BBSs that ran in Victoria in the early 90s that aren't listed.
Absolutely! In fact, most of the longtimers weren't listed at all. Most notably missing were Camelot, Forbidden Night Castle (and the Torture Chamber... ummm, not that I ever visited it or anything), Tommy's Holiday Camp and the two biggest commercial BBSs in town, FarWest and Big Blue & Cousins.
Well, even though my BBS isn't on the list, I have saved practically everything from it all these years, packed in boxes full of floppy disks.
:)
Anal you ask? Probably. But I figured some day it might all be useful. Although a lot of what I had has been lost or was never saved due to HD crashes and the like, I still have some of the useful information.
Most specifically, every year I was running the BBS I would write up a little history file of what had happened. Looking back on it now I feel I was probably an immature, arrogant little brat, but I never remember it being that way....
Anyways, while I proudly posted these files while the BBS was still in operation, its practically an embarassment to even read them now, let alone post them for all the world to see. Still, I might put them up someday for posterity.
For anyone who BBS'ed in the Dallas, TX area in the early 90's, I ran the BBS named "Highway to Hell". Perhaps you'll remember.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I ran 1:261/1093, "Outside the Wall" in Baltimore, MD for seven years (the list states '92-97, but I went online August 1990). I met a number of friends who I still talk to and of whom I still have many fine memories. It's kinda neat to see that name pop up again after so many years.
I remember the thrill of getting everything working right for the first time. I remember marvelling at the fact that echomail really worked. I remember spending more time editing batch files than was healthy. I remember pulling consecutive all-nighters to reconstruct a crashed system. I remember begging for donations for a drive upgrade!
... and I remember, sadly, pulling the plug after seven long years. The new wave of ISP's wiped out the BBS world around 1996. I stayed around for another year, hoping it would pass. It didn't. I went from 20 calls/day to the board to one or two in a week.
What a shame - gone were the user group parties, the sysop picnics, and the fidonet bullshit meetings. Since then, I've yet to duplicate the experience. The internet is Mardi Gras in New Orleans. BBS's were the corner beer joint where you could just drink with your buddies.
At 3 A.M. you can see people's auras; at five you can see their contrails...
Anne Madison! (Rob Novak - 1:261/1093)
It's there. It's under area code 410. I found OTW. Keeping Room's listed as well. Oh, the days of Opus Message Reader and BlueWave!
At 3 A.M. you can see people's auras; at five you can see their contrails...
---
I'm sure I'm not the only person with a total archive of their BBS. Heck, I have DSL now, I could probably run a telnet BBS...but why would I want to?
Renegade BBS, where art though?
Great software...
:wq
Possibly some insider @ the telco's? Eghad.
How indeed...
Specifically, I can't explain -my- name outside of telcoland.
:wq
I ran VBBS, too, but I don't think you can consider it a "decent" piece of software. I had about 50 patches I would apply to the source code of every version - not to modify the board, but just to make it work correctly. It was very ugly. Things just didn't work right on it.
The vscript idea was very neat, though. I extended the vscript language several times, and found it to be an awesome way of adding "small" add-ons.
--
joel.maslak@p1.f17.n316.z1.fidonet.org
(remember those addresses?)
I'd like to take this opportunity to advertise
:)
that I'm also a sysop of a BBBS. It's called
Missy and it's been up about ten years. Can be
reached at +358-3-3183424 (24h, Finland).
BTW. I also used Fix for a while
I'm too lazy to read through all the comments to find out if this has been posted yet, but hit up http://archives.thebbs.org if you're looking for old BBS software. That and what seemed like endless pages of Tradewars 2002 add-ons.
:)
Thank god for the internet.
I knew those old lists I was keeping would come in handy some day...
I started BBS'ing in 1986/87, with my first modem, a DC something or other (it was from Radio Shack, 300 baud, no auto answer, just the basics - you basically dialed, waited for the carrier, then hit this red button on top - I still have it, and it still works) hooked up to my CoCo 3, running UltimaTerm.
I noticed that he doesn't have many of the BBS's I visited during that time in the 805 area listed, so I am going to have to dig out some lists (in some cases, I will have to fire up my old CoCo and pray that the disks hold up). There were also a few BBS's in the 602 area he didn't have listed that I am going to have to dig out (one was Smash the State - great message BBS, rumored to have been run off a C=64 on a hacked phone line).
I remember doing a report in highschool for my economics class, where we had to interview a "businessman" of the area (805), and while most of my classmates did friends parents, or people their dads/moms knew - I went out and actually got an interview with one of the founders of Mustang Software - visited the place (was in awe of the setup for the system - at the time, only having a simple CoCo 3 with 128K of memory, and here were rows and rows of machines and phone lines, some answering, connecting), and did a taped interview - I still have the tape, I should MP3 it. Anyhow, got him invited to the school, and he actually came to the class and described his business and how it started from nothing and grew (I only wish I had the postmortem, now). I don't think any of my classmates at the time realized what they had seen...
Anyhow - the list brings back memories, certainly - I have one list I doubt he has much info about, a friend of mine was big into the hacker boards of the 80's, calling long distance on "obtained" phone lines (yeah, he was lucky enough to have the phone junction box for his neighborhood right outside his bedroom window!) to various BBSs across the country, and he would print out these "anarchy" and "boxing" text files for me, which I just loved to devour...
[maudelin music in the background]
Memories...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Aparently, according to the author of the list of 'all BBS there ever was', the BBS I grew up with don't exist.
I wonder if that has something to do with them being outside the States.
-
We had a gateway that handled Usenet (no binaries, though) as well as mail. Since the gateway was local, it took less time for mail to hit the Internet than if it had to wend its way through "Fight-o-Net." I was running an early version of Linux at the time, too...getting sendmail and cnews to talk to Fidonet was, um, interesting. :-)
1:209/263, or skunkworks.genesplicer.org through the gateway. In 1993, it was kinda cool to have mail arriving from the Internet on my desktop.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Sounds like the system I built in early '91 (or was it '92?) to run my BBS, only I snagged a 125-meg drive from another sysop in town pretty cheap (I thought $200 for an ST-1144A was cheap, anyway).
BTW, the N suffix on a Seagate drive means it's SCSI, not MFM. This page on Seagate's website describes the ST-251N. Maybe you meant ST-251, which was MFM.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Bandwidth was the main reason binaries weren't made available. I think the Usenet feed for Net209 came in by satellite as well, and they didn't want 75% of the bandwidth to be chewed up by pr0n (MP3 didn't even exist, so mp3z wouldn't have been a factor :-) ). I didn't complain too much as I had full-feed access through UNLV until I quit for a while and they mothballed my account. After that, I signed up with a local ISP. Usenet was a nice extra to be able to offer callers, and it didn't cost anything more than the $10/month that we already paid to move the mail and echoes.
Squish is what I think you meant, unless I'm remembering things incorrectly. That's what I ran the Skunk Works on, though I didn't use Blue Wave as (1) I was cheap :-) and wanted to run the BBS with free software (as in beer, if not as in speech, though the eventual migration to Linux fixed that) and (2) I thought the authors of Blue Wave had a rather puerile attitude WRT their format vs. QWK (the default taglines bundled with their reader were a bit of a turn-off). Besides, there was no Blue Wave reader for the Apple II (yes, there were QWK readers for the II), and that was one of the machines I explicitly supported (hey, I was still using a "stealth GS" up until '94 or '95 for everyday computing tasks).
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Damn look what Galacticomm morphed into. I remember back in the day when it was the shit if you sported MBBS. They even had a demo BBS in fort lauderdale you could dial in or telnet to if you feigned interest in the product. I had interest, just not the $$$ :)
There were several listed in our craphole little town, that were labeled as being in Nashville instead. I may get off my lazy ass and try to come up with a Clarksville area BBS list on my own.
Or maybe not.
Oh, baby! This is cool. My old BBS is on here, my friend's BBS that inspired me to make mine is on here (err, that's rather glorified-- "I wanna start a BBS. I really wish I had enough money for another line" and two years later, with my vision of BBS perfection almost forgotten, "Well damnit, if he can afford another line, so can I!")!
/40.14 just for the hell of it...
I may not be insightful or interesting right now, but I do want to publically state that my ego is stroked. Now I'm waiting for somebody to cut me down and remind me how pointlessly insignificant this is, and how it's actually rather pathetic to be excited by such things. Alas...
And, for the record, I miss FIDONet... 1:105/40.14? Maybe? And later, the BBS was 1:105/300-something, I think, though I believe I kept
I'd love to start-up the WWW-equivilent of a BBS, with door games et al, but other web-games always seem so... webish... and I just don't like it. (And uhh, vinyl sounds better than reality, though not as good as one of those old funky cylinder phonographs) And I wouldn't have the joy of a file area (what would be the point?). A usenet gateway would be just stupid. If you wanna "chat with the sysop", use AIM or ICQ or something. Things just seem so dead these days. I might as well kill myself...
Incidentally, is there an equivilent of textfiles.com for other sorts of BBS files? Twelve-hundred different versions of Renegade, VBBS, Telix, Telemate, Terminate, cute little shareware games of varying quality, silly image views somebody on the BBS made learning C, mod files, and so on and so forth?
:)
What I need to find me is an old copy of "The GRIND", an old mod player with girls dancing to the beat. Maybe I can remake it as a visualization plugin for XMMS or WinAMP or something.
Mr. Gus [TEAM OS/2] | 1:105/40.14
I noticed that the dates on one of my favorite BBS's was very inaccurate, having been listed as running for only 2 years when in reality it ran for about ten years.
Nonetheless, it brought back good memories. I wonder how many people reading this list are going to try connecting to some of those old BBS numbers just for kicks and the off-chance that one of them might still be running.. -lol-
I miss BBSing, playing games like LORD and BRE. Does anybody know of any good web-bbses? (Telnet-style is preferred.)
Yes, it's an impressive list. But the reasons why people are bitching is because of the headline. And if "Every BBS That Ever Was" is a US only list, then they really have a good reason. The claim is just plain wrong, so either change the headline or accept the bitching.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
Besides all I can add to this project would be a crapload of Jolly Roger files
<humor>
</humor>
Want Root?
Plenty of very good BBBS's
Plenty of very good BBS's
Incidently, the BBBS home page is locatedhere.
Mong.
*
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
Dude, this is hardcore flame bait! ...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
*
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
I was just using FIX (my fav BBS) as an example. I used it as an example to point out that the old BBBS software is struggling to keep up with today's BBS needs. Or maybe it's becuase established BBSes (like FIX) have gotten to the point where they want to make changes, but can't becuase of sware limitations.
...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
I was also just pointing out that many very important BBSes (like FIX) reside quite happily outside of the US.
It wasn't intended as an advertisement and I'm sorry if I gave that impression.
Mong.
*
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
I raeva! ...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
*
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
FIX was one of the first internet-based BBS's, and continues to do very good business. We have over 5000 registered users, with about 200 who are regular on a dialy basis (with hundreds or thousands more who swing by a couple of times each month).
:-)
...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
We're currently developing some serious new software, as the BBBS software can't really handle what is thrown at it these days - FIX has performed some serious mods on the original BBBS code, but it's getting a bit flaky now.
Oh, and despite the "retro" look of the webpages, we finally decided it was time to update them
But anyway, back to the point: Plenty of very good BBBS's live outside of the US. Hell, we even have regular US users at FIX!
Mong.
*
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
You're off by a couple of years on my BBS. I ran mine from about mid 85 to the end of 87.
Two 60 meg Quantum drives at the end. One MFM, one RLL both running at RLL and giving me a grand total of 180 or so megs of space.
My BBS had more files that just about the total of the entire Stafford VA area.
I still have a tape backup of my data files and a couple of floppies with my main files on them. (And the tape drive and the archive board, hell and the system in pieces in boxes at my place now.)
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Call me a Troll if you want, but what is the point of this exercise? I might be more meaningful to get everyone to count the number of pink cars that drive past their house each day.
I know of at least two in NH that are not on there. I'll have to look and see if I still have the numbers. These were between 1983 and 199x.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Mine wasn't listed.... yet some little-craphole in my same town was, go figure.
Fuse!Box?/Kallisti Gold BBS
(1992-1999)
10 lines
AMIGA Cnet 3.05c
Circle MUD
Those were the days.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
WOAH!
I was going to ask you to do that -- but seems you found this message thread on your own!
I figured you of all people would have the list laying around on some old computer somewhere.
For that matter, I probably do too... but I'm even lazier than you.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Yey, I'm on the list. A couple of my friends are too. Pretty cool, brings back alot of good memories. Mostly staying up till 3am rewriteing buggy code in my custom version of the Telegard 2.5g source. Pascal rocked :)
Someone else who remembers the old CNET days. God I remember spending hours keying in arcane key sequences to create Graphics file for C-Net BBS's. All of the boards I frequented were C-Nets, but the old DMBBS's were so colorful and had such "nice" graphics (Commodore keyboard graphics that was) I remember eventually writing my first real program to convert color Pet-SCII screen dumps from theDraw into C-Net format graphics. Man...the memories
I think....therefore I am
I reject your reality
Legend Of the Red Dragon is playable at this location:
:)
http://lord.nuklear.org
it's on the web, telnetable, and is powered by good old linux
I was looking at the list for 805, and man, I just can't remember. All the names sound the same. It's a total formula. Scientific term, or something from some fantasy novel, or reference to computers. Damned if I know. I couldn't remember the name of the Dominion, but I remembered Trent Lillehaugen's unusual name. Sadly, I didn't make it on there. I suppose I should run it through a script to get the right years and then maybe I'll see more. In any case, my BBS, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, didn't make it. I can't even submit it for inclusion, 'cause I don't remember the phone number.
The software i used for the system was Remote Access, originally written in Pascal if i remember correctly. The theme of my system was mostly multiplayer BBS door game inspired, including a famous play by email game called VGA Planets. I remember using Frontdoor for the Fidonet daily exchange, and The-Draw a lot, to build nice looking (and friendly) ANSI menus.
I only used DOS for the time it lasted (single line, anyway), with as low as a 2MB 12-Mhz 286 with an old 5 1/4" 40MB Seagate (ST-251N) MFM Hard Disk (the N was the 28MS version, not the 40MS :) with mono HGC like card for disply. It didnt change very much, at the last days it used an AMD 386SX-40 with 4Mb ram and a mighty (IDE/ATA :) 80MB seagate hard disk (uhm.. ST-3096A, still fully operational :) and those CPU upgrades were to minimize the downtime required per day for the turn process of the VGA Planets games. (which could easily take 1 to 2 hours on the 286! :) Hmm btw that AMD/Intel 12Mhz 286 (still functional!) was an old DTK *full size board* (i have the large desktop DTK case) with the memory on 256byte chips... (hence, the full size :).
Ah the old days, only thing needed was a decent terminal (with ANSI :) program and preferably a good protocol (zmodem). Who cared what OS/platform had the caller, as long as it were a modem, which, were all true (non soft) modems back then.
--
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
...first of all, let me pimp SynchroNet BBS. Even for a retard like me, I had it up and running on an old box with 6 doors and files and whatnot in an evening or two. (for the more rabidly fanatical of you, SynchroNet also is out on SourceForge, is available for Linux, and is GPL... I think)
As far as fast, latency was never an issue when you were dialing directly into a BBS.
As far as my experiences go... well. When I started it up, it was a fun bit of nostalgia, and I could watch as my computer scrambled to keep up between 12 and 12:30 AM, when my doors did their daily reset and everyone rushed to get in there. Within a few weeks, the people who knew what they were doing in the doors started dominating, so most people started slacking off. Message boards on our website meant people didn't post much to it.
So, uh. Yeah. Nostalgia does wear off sooner or later.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
SynchroNet (also, visit the home page) is easy to set up and stable as a MUTHA. Does FTP for filesharing, doors are easy enough to set up (more or less); it's ready to rock and or roll right out of the box.
If you're one of those curmudgeons blathering about how BBSes aren't dead, go out and prove it. I did, and have proven to myself that they really are dinosaurs. Ask yourself how long you'd sit around punching away at your TRaSh-80 or your old Apple IIc before you ran screaming back to your jacked-up P3/Athlon? You may be one of the small subset of folks that enjoys that sort of thing and for you, a BBS is a winning proposition. Just that, in my experience, we really are a small subset.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
The list doesn't go back very far, unfortunately.
//gs served only as a terminal to dial into the Unix lab. :-)
Back in the 1984-1986 timeframe I wrote a BBS for Apple ][s called CMS. There were a bunch of them running in San Diego trading mail back and forth. It used adresses of the form user@sytem%area. Every once in a while the system would call out to its neighbor to pass the traffic along. Each system had a route table for the next hop to a particular destination. If I remember properly, there was even support for file attachments. The mail moved around via xmodem, which I had added for file transfer areas and seemed the easiest thing to do.
In 1986 I shut down CMS-Point Loma, which was the node I ran, and left for college. There I got introduced to Suns and from then on my
I hadn't thought about it for a long time, but back when I was a kid, and was all over the BBS scene, I used to enjoy time on The Dojo. It's since passed away, though they seem to think his website is here, I think they're wrong.. doesn't seem like the old SysOp's style to me. Anyway, the most remarkable thing about being on The Dojo was the NirvanaNet FidoNet-style feed, which was headed up by a few boards, including &TotSE (The Order of the Screaming Electron). Sometimes I miss those BBS days; the web seems to have become more impersonal as it's progressed.. or maybe I'm just getting more cynical. All the same, BBS's were great fun :)
(Shameless plug): ProcessTree - Put your idletime to use.
Slashdot finally linked to a story that included my name.... three times even.
Now that I'm "Big-Time[tm]" I can stop Karma Whoring and Trolling.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
I remember the Major BBS software that we used when logging on to Computrek BBS here in Columbus, OH. Their multi line teleconference was better than irc with canned emotions/actions, in conference gaming (Gunslinger RULED in chat!), and towards the end, right before the web hit, they had their own graphical interface! I talks to MANY people and arranged MANY parties when on that machine. I used to log in during a party trying to get folks to come over. Forums were where we voice our opinion before most of us had even heard of Usenet. One thing that IRC will NEVER have over Major BBS or any other software's multi line chat was the local flavor. I wish it was still there. Computrek, once connected to the internet, you could telnet into it. I would still telnet to it now, and even pay the fee (10 bucks every few months or every month depending on usage). Those where the days. I remember loggin in when I could not sleep and I got some folks together to go have breakfast. That's what made BBS's great was the local flavor and the internet pretty much doesn't have that.
Gorkman
How do you suppose they handle area code changes? I mean, back when I was BBSing in the Central NJ area, our area code was 201. Then it got changed to 908. Now it's 732, with, I'm told (I don't live there anymore), another one on the way.
Hence, The Dark Planet (which has a telnet BBS up here) could be in any of the three area codes.
Now if only we could get in contact with people FROM those BBSes... (Weirdo from Ajerbijan, WHERE ARE YOU?)
Zaphod B
Zaphod B
When duplication is outlawed, only outlaws will have
http://www.jps.net/foxnhare/cbbs.html
It's from the April 1980 issue of "Kilobaud Microcomputing" (love that name), and the subjects of the interview are Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, the founders of the first BBS ever. Interesting musings on networking ("nationwide netting might become complicated and expensive"), early modems ("We are running the Potomac Micro-Magic and are really happy with it"), starting new BBSs ("you could easily do it for $2000"), etc. Check it out, and marvel how things have changed in the last 20 years...
Cheers,
-j.
A buddy Ken and I wrote the Spence XP BBS for the C-64. He's bought a C64 and has actually managed to track down a copy of the program. 300 baud here we come! Being a BBS enthusiast back then I wrote BBS columns for Toronto Computes, Canada Computes and The Computer Paper and kept the official Canadian lists used by these publications. They may be around somewhere in the archives: http://www.tcp.ca
A capitol idea, unfortunately a lot of the software used to run those BBS's is no longer being maintained and isn't Y2K compatible.
Even Brazil had a few BBS's in the late 80's and early 90's too... That's how I developed this fascination about computers :) In about 1989, 1990 there were like 4 or 5 important BBS's in Sao Paulo, and some others minors. Some had as much as 600 users.
Oh, those good ol'days... X-Modem transfers at the astonishing speed of 300bps... Now, do you remember when Zmodem Appeared? Wow...
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
He claims to have searched text files he has thats all I see. Again my last point stands, Why not ask him why only the US is listed before shooting him down. Or make your own site. Its like /. is full of "arm chair quaterbacks" I don't see anyone else attempting to do this. Isn't this what Open Source is all about???? Just like all the people who shoot down Linux because it dosen't do something they need. If something is missing do something about it or sit down and shut up!
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
Read before you bitch your bbs is not on the list be it in the US or outside!!! He never said the list is complete, he knows it is not complete list, if you read the last lines he is asking you to send in any bbs's he dosen't have listed. So don't whine, just send him an E-mail with the info.... Is it just me or has the norm of most slashdot readers become to bitch about a problem, instead of doing something about it!
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
Holy CRAP!
:-)
:-) :-) :-)
Just as a joke, I thought I would search for me... I ran a tiny little (pathetic) BBS for a couple of years on my only computer. Much of the time it was just on my one phone line (i.e. my primary voice line). It would answer after like 3 or 4 rings if I wasn't there, or I would manually answer if I happened to answer the phone and it seemed nobody was there.
Can you believe it? I'm on the list! I can't even begin to imagine where my number might have been listed, since I only gave it out to a small number of people. That is the funniest thing I've seen for a while. Creepy, when you consider just how much obscure information is floating out there on the web, but this is still cool.
Thanks, you've just made my day.
sig fault
My good old BBS Xypherion Systems. It up there! and I'm happy. Unfortunatly they have the date of operations of the BBS wrong it was 1992-1994 (Then I started to use Linux and at the time couln't run DOS BBS on it) and wasent skilled enough to make Linux work as a BBS. I rembmer the days of drawing the ANSI graphics with programs like THEDRAW. and My BBS was the 2nt BBS in the area to have a SVGA graphical Interface (I used Roboboard which other then the graphics it just sucked, but I was to aragent to admit that to myself and to others). Yea as a 13 year old I was young and cocky, I thought I knew it all, and now I have grown to hate people who are like me then. Still it was fun those good old days of watching people use my BBS playing Red Dragon. The Fun of setting up FIDO net it was all cool. I met a lot of instering people. But then I entered my JR. Year of High School then I had to stop the BBS it was taking over my school work. Plus I was learning about Linux and I was humbled and must learn this new OS which was nothing that I have seen before. I closed down my BBS just as I was arguing that Linux will outpreformed Windows 95. And I beleave that I was right.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Damn,
I thought my little BBS would be lost in obsurity, but there it is! Thanks guys for keeping the historical record of digital communication before the Internet age! It was a lot of fun back then tinkering around with communications.
Patrick Carroll
I used to run a BBS called "Project Amiga" in Christchurch New Zealand. IIRC I was fido node 3:770/350, I was also an Amiganet node (but the node number escapes me now), and nodes of couple of local New Zealand networks (including my own network with some other BBS in Christchurch (AJNet, for Andrew-James Net :-) originally).
:-)) onto an old 250Mg SCSI drive so I might have to dig that out and see what I can get off of it :-)
I closed the BBS when my old A3000 died miserably about, err, umm, 4 1/2 maybe 5 years ago. I intended the shutdown to be only a few days, it ended up being forever.
I also had it setup for telnet access during the night (when usage was low, not that it was very high ever, but hey..) and had a few users from around the place. I remember beginning to setup a gateway over the net to another DLGPro BBS (the name I forget) to provide a quicker FIDO path to the net for my users.
On the bright side, I'm in the process of rebuilding my A3000 and I think I saved everything important (the DlgPro setup I was using, scripts, user lists, and the all important "Trapdoor" FTN mailer setup
Ahh, memories, almost makes me want to get Project Amiga back online, almost.
---
James Sleeman
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
But if you miss him that much, there's the Rod Speed Generator for hours of authentic insults
---
---
Silence is consent.
I too was fooled and started looking for my friends old BBS (located in Sweden) on the list.
On the other hand, I couldn't find the place where the author said it contained every BBS in the world. I'd rather blame the guy who put the topic to the story (michael?).
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
And yes, to say this all is redundant, but I am feeling nostalgia for the days of 1200 8/N/1 and a 12" amber CRT, and dammit, I think I need a beer.
*sniff*
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
You critize someone for saying that only US counts (the title is "Every BBS That Ever Was", not "Every BBS in the USA That Ever Was") and you're called a flame bait.... nice.
I didn't insult anyone, i just said the obvious. USA thinks the rest of the world is just a suburb, everyon wants to be just like them and if something happends in the US it will affect everyone everywhere.
/.
Now that's more of an insult, but it's true.
I just like to say that i didn't complain about the dude that wrote the thingie, just the header on
Just like Americans to not understand that there are other countries then their own. And all BBS aren't dead, there are some alive, i know since i use one regulary, albeit it's not really a BBS in the true sense since you don't call to it, you telnet.
well, i thought i had been running a bbs here in switzerland for a couple of years. apparently i haven't :)
Too cool. I'm a member now.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Or, kinda like pro-Gates revisionists planting doubt that he actually said some of the less-than-brilliant pronouncements he's made...like taht 640K quote...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused
Slashdotted, huh?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I remember when those v.Everythings were ~$500 in the Computer Shopper. Like you, I still have mine sitting here, it's been flashed over time to a full x2/v90 unit.
:) ..or corporations..)
I remember when they bumped it from 28.8 to 33.6, and I got my first 33600 connect -- from the FIDO mail hub.
*sigh*
--
Don't trust your Government. (Update:
*kerchunk* *beep* "...Operator."
This is quite true. It's even nicer when they're still up. :) I'm a sysop of the Salt Lake City area's largest BBS, and It's been up for over 10 years, and we're still operating. Those interested can check out the Lower Lights BBS at lowerlights.com, or, the telnet lines are still open, so telnet lowerlights.com will land you here. :)
get 0wned. irc.w30wnzj00.com
Ah! I had forgotten the days of upgrading to a 117200 baud external modem to be able to down load the fiodnet mail quicker. Remember DESQview? TradeWars? man, what a flash back.
Personaly I love the recording of an age long lost. What would be amazing is if you could make it so that the owners of now defunct BBSs could list thier users so old friends long lost can be found again.
:)
Or.... Even better would be to list the BBSs that are still around. Hell, i'd be willing to run a BBS just for the nostalga of it.
What? me have a sig? don't be ridiculous.
Collecting the same kind of information for all the BBSes around the world sounds like a pretty big job. I don't think the guy can be blamed if he's not interested in taking it on.
Where does it say that he's not interested in taking it on? If you RTF post that michael put up, you will see almost instantly that "Jason Scott" has a bigass list of BBS's, and he's hoping people will help him add to it, in an effort to build a list of "every BBS there ever was".
Nowhere does it say anything about the project being U.S.-centric.
Seriously, I'd rather the idiots just stick to moderating, please.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Also, Connecticut was split into two area codes in the mid-90s. All the BBSes I dialed in to were in the 203 area code in Hartford, which then became the 860 area code. Those old BBSes are listed under the old 203 numers, but have the new 203 prefix locations associated with them. For example, a BBS that was in a Hartford prefix (say 241) back in 1993, is show as being in New Haven now (where 203-241-XXXX) would ring today. If that BBS was still around today, the number would be 860-241-XXXX. The old BBS list needs to be crossed against the old prefix location lists. The current version of the list is somewhat misleading, as to the locations of the old boards.
==
Man, that brought some smiles to my face! Now if we could only add notes on them to the list! It would make a great history
There was a BBS in MA called "Davey Jones' Locker" which I actually managed to get on a few times (difficult enough, especially as it was a long distance call.
Little histories like that would be great to see. To perhaps see postings from people with odd handles which you once bumped into every now and then!
Not a bad list, but some on there are/were pretty underground. How did he get full names and relative locations?
There's a reason for this. We've got the internet now...it does everything BBSes did, only about 50 quintillion times better.
/.'d site won't respond.
Let's see. In the 80's, you dialed up, got a busy signal, tried again, wrote a wardialer program, got through, played games with the upload counter to keep from being kicked off.
Now, you enter a url, and the
That must be progress.
So if I called it the World Wide Wait, no one would think that was funny?
Oracle and unix guy.
I thought it interesting they hadn't thought up the idea of a FAQ yet.
Oracle and unix guy.
Workers on strike again?
Oracle and unix guy.
Damn right. If they could find a FidoNet node list, they must logicaly have had all the other FidoNet zones. Not to mention all the other weird and wonderful BBS networks; BBSNet springs to mind, UK bassed network homed on Ooh! BBS, which was actually still going when I checked last year. *thinks* Peter Friedlos was the SysOp iirc.
Remember having to download a world FidoNet node list for the first time when you set youself up as a point node? :) Downloading 3Mb files on 14.4k or 28.8k modems was fun.
--
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Indeed, I used to run a BBS in the UK.
:-)
Apparently, I wasn't the only one.
I fail to see how this can be the "all the BBSes there ever were" if we don't look outside the US too.
It would have been more accurate to say it was a definitive US list.
M.
C'mon, you know you'd rather be playing word association than arguing politics on slashdot.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Yep. It was called Pyroto Mountain. In fact, it's still alive and well on the WWW. You can find it here.
Keep your friends close. Keep your enemies in a little jar on your desk.
What's going to stop someone from making up a fake BBS and submiting it for the list? Kinda like the Bill Gates 640K quote huh?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Made the list. Though my board was up for more than the two years it states... it's all good. Telegard hacker. 3o3 Supernature!
...18...19...20 Submit
Browsing through the 714 list (south california)... I found many bbs's that I once used.
:)
:).. I forget the name of the bbs package... It was pretty interesting though.
:/
:). Well I thought someone might find this usefull so I uploaded it to one of the bbs'es I used...
:)
One was a bbs (in cali of course) Called Jims World.. I was a Co-Sysop on that bbs for some time. Used to have the tele# memoriezed
I eventually ended up making all the ansi/rip graphics. However, the prefered interface was actually a windows client so I dont think many people had a chance to use my ansi/rip screens
Also tried to find an old christian bbs I used to visit, but I could not remember the name of it
This does remind me of something interesting though. Back when windows 95 was in beta,.. I descided to write a program to manage autoexec.bat/config.sys and msdos.sys files.. I think I called it boot95, or something
A few years later (98?) I accedently ran into that very same program... on the internet.. how it got there I dont know. I guess someone found it usefull
Luke
> My old address was 1:2260/140 :) haven't typed that number in years.
Ditto! 1:249/128
But Usenet was around before FidoNet -- it just wasn't as available to the masses.
--
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
http://www.intergate.cx for Linux BBS software. dosemu for doors..
--
Aitvo
Systems Administrator
Intergate - The finest in online ansi gaming
--
8vO
Actually, I was looking through this, and I couldn't find any of my old haunts... then I remembered that our area code changed in like 1995. My God, it's been a long time.
Alakaboo
My friend ran the Deemon's lair here in Iowa and it rocked! There was a coolness to bbs's that the 'net never had; Ironically, when the net came, we thought it was cooler than bbs's... (at the time, it probably was... ;)
I never ran one of my own, but it was great being in that era; being excited with each new "hacking" textfile...
yeah. Bring 'em back!!!!!
"But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo..." - William Gibson I'm a signature virus. Please c
I ran a BBS in Northern Virginia in 1995. It was called Dahlgren Online. I can't believe it is on the list. Thanks for the great memories!!
Please don't heap Canada in with the United States! I'm going to assume that you only took a momentary glance at the listing of locales, although, I know it can be a little difficult to discern between our peoples, what with our similar foreign policy, indistinct political systems, shared currency, and strong relations!
Wait a minute...
-Medgur
Why is it that it's ok for the US to demand free trade on water, fish, and other strong US industries, but wrong for Canada to refuse to place tarriffs on US bound lumber?
I called one a few years back and I could hear a teeny tiny pissed-off voice coming out of my modem speaker (after the dial tone and ring) saying "Hello? (shit) The BBS is gone, man! Hang up! "
To add to the list...
(909) area code The Enchanted Forest and The Keep.
I miss Flash Attack, BTW...
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
That's BBS in Sydney, Australia for ya!
G
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
That's what I did, to a degree. I managed to create an online chat server that was heavily inspired by the one used on Loreli BBS (heavily modified MajorBBS system in South Florida). Unfortunately, I'd already lost touch with all the users, so instead it wound up populated with people from where I went to college.
You've got a number of options:
Figure out what date setting'll give you the most correct years of operation (if you can set it back to today's date in 1973, you should be golden -- both 1973 and 2001 start on a Monday and both modulo 4 are equal to 1 so the leap years'll be correct).
Recreate the software (in some cases, someone's already done the work for you).
Go with one of the packages that is still around. For example, MajorBBS became Worldgroup which then became NetVillage (the site seems to currently be down). From what I've seen, the prices they're charging are a little too steep for a hobby system, as they're trying to sell the software as corporate groupware. Personally, I could care less about MBBS itself -- the games, on the other hand, carry lots of nostalgia. I know I'd be interested in a project to port or recreate them.
Well, it looks like the site has been slashdotted.
Is there a BBS number I can dial into to get the list?:)
The scary part of this to me is how many of these phone numbers are still etched in my head from the mid-late eighties. I'm sure I could have something useful in the space those are taking up...
-
-
Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
Collecting the same kind of information for all the BBSes around the world sounds like a pretty big job. I don't think the guy can be blamed if he's not interested in taking it on.
Of course, in the spirit of the old BBSes, you could always do it yourself, since it is such an issue for you, rather than just bitching about it.
-
-
Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
Hey, I had an uncensored Usenet feed *with* binaries! Of course, I had to limit the users and myself quite a lot so that the line wouldn't be tied up all the time receiving packets. But our local FidoNet Net had all pitched in for a satellite feed of Usenet. Great stuff. 1:105/39 Gravity's Angel BBS (503), 1993-1994 386DX/40, OS/2, Maximus/Binkley/Squash PS: I used BlueWave to read Usenet for many years after. :) Still might set it up again...
All your BBS are belong to us!
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
I don't see any BBSes listed for Rochester, NY! When I lived there back in the 80s there was a flourishing BBS scene.
For those who are interested, there's an 80s-BBS yahoo group, too.
sabine, who used to be a regular poster on the FidoNet WRITING echo...
Wow. I feel really old. I was calling BBSes in CT (mostly local so my parents wouldn't scream) in '84-85. I couldn't get through to the list of the BBSes now, but I intend to check the Hartford/New London list. Ahhh the blazing 300bps speed of those logons! And moving up to a 1200bps modem in .. uh '86 I think? Yeah, musta been '86. And all those C-64 games... I was a very naughty boy.
Meh.
The list also covers BBSs in Canada, so it's not merely a US list. Interestingly, the largest concentration of BBS systems in North America in the early 1990s was in British Columbia (area code 250) with more than 2,000 systems listed. They even have mine (Fear the Sky), although they got the dates wrong -- I ran it between 1990 and 1992, not just in 1991. It ran on a 386sx with a 40 MB hard drive and by 1992 I had one of those spanking new USR Dual Standard HST 14.4K modems (which cost me $1200 Canadian). The list isn't nearly complete, though; I can think of at least 30 BBSs that ran in Victoria in the early 90s that aren't listed.
--
www.kitchengeek.com -- Nosh for
It wasn't the art. It was the content. Many fourm BBS'es were almost exactly like Slashdot. That was a great attractor. You could find out about game copy protection, how to get rid of device= in your config sys to use a 720K floppy drive by editing PC DOS, and the biggie, E-mail. Don't knock the BBS'es. The internet only allows faster connections and faster downloads. The better pictures are a result of better computers and higher connection speeds (bandwidth), not the internet. BBS'es is where the content and services were at the time. Most of the stuff the internet does now was done on BBS'es. Even pictures that would make your mother blush were online. 300 - 1200 buad wasn't much fun when calling a BBS with only 3 lines, but you could connect and most were free. For the same fun now, try using one of the free ISP's. It will simulate the trying to connect to a busy number and slow connection speeds due to limited bandwidth, and yes the time limits.
The truth shall set you free!
Well, actuaklly, you can look up the area code and first three digits. See http://www.nanpa.com/ or http://www.dslreports.com/ to look em up - eg my city uses 32*,494,914,220, etc.
Ie., the same BBS shown as operating in two different places, during the same years!
This is because what is now 334 was once part of 205. The split took place in (IIRC) 1994, so any BBS that operated in the old southern part of 205 before that time will show up (confusingly) in the 205 list. Any BBS that operated continuously through the change will show up in both lists.
For example, when 334 was split off from 205, Pep's Data System in Mobile changed phone numbers from 205-626-7447 to 334-626-7447. But because 205-626-xxxx is now re-assigned to the Birmingham area, the list shows Pep's as being in both Mobile and Birmingham.
Considering how many new areas codes were created in the recent past (it was not until the early 90s that area codes were allowed to to have a digit other than 0 or 1 in the second position) , I seriously doubt that Alabama is the only state in the list that has this kind of duplication.
where there's fish, there's cats
I used a few BBS's in my time too, at least three of them were in GREENLAND where I grew up :) Yes, Greenland, far north, HUGE island, app. 55.000 people, biggest city: Nuuk, population app. 15.000 - We didn't use BBS's outside of Greenland much, since the cheapest phone rate was for Denmark, which at the time was >US$ 2 a minute :P
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Why not resurrect the BBSes themselves? Seriously, look at some of the most popular websites out there. They're often community-based. There was a real art to virtual communities that has been lost since the internet was taken over by commercial interests.
I mean, pr0n sharing, ASCII art and muds aside (or maybe even with them), BBSes (BBSen?) often embodied the best of what the internet could be.
And considering how low-end these things often were, can you imagine how fast they'd be?
Just a thought. I guess even though I've become a bit of a karma whore over here, Internet browsing has just become a bit too much of a passive experience for me. I remember many of the BBSes I visited as having been a bit more engaging.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
There's a difference between missing BBS's and actively not importing anything from outside the US.
He claims to have used FidoNet as one of his sources. Well, that included several regions, the US being just one.
If he only want's to bother with US ones, thats fine but then call it "Every BBS that ever was within the USA"
[)amien
[)amien
Does anyone remember a BBS system from the late '80s that was like a combination MUD and proto-Slashdot?
It had Karma points which were earned for posting messages or correctly answering Trivia questions (how much more '80s does it get?), and a series of plateaus where you were given more and more administrative access (in the form of 'spells') based on your Karma?
I have fond memories of the one in my area (Windsor, Ontario - I think it was called "The Mountain of TSOTL", but maybe that was the name of the software) - I can remember being blasted down to 0 karma for casting harmful spells on newbies. Heh, thinking about those days makes me a little more forgiving of the immature behaviour I see online ...
Had my own BBS, too. Wrote the software myself in AppleSoft BASIC as a practical exercise in programming to my 300 BPS Hayes modem. Never got more than a few friends on board, but I don't think I have very often matched the feeling of accomplishment I had as a 15 year old kid when the first callers logged on to my "homegrown" BBS system...
Oh, I feel old! I remember connecting to these back in the pre-internet hayday, with my trusty 14.4 and my little black book (no, not an shady/illegal one). It was the only place to go to get my software fix--I mean, I just had gotten my 486/33 with 8MB RAM and aimed to fill up the colossal 250mb hard drive. And as to the posts about not having any listings outside the US, don't complain and compile your own list if you want to. It's not all-US either--the list has all the BBSes I ever connected to up in Toronto, Canada (still not a part of the US so don't even start...)_ ___________
______________________________________
NO CARRIER!
nuff said!
===sam=== free nessus vulnerability scan = www.vulnerabilities.org
The site seems to be slashdotted. Did anyone have a chance to mirror it? Thanks.
I was a fidonet point in italy, but i've lost all the nodelists I had at the time. why don't we contribute with a worldwide bbs tracking system?
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
http://www.tdavis.org/memphisbbs/
--
It's kinda funny when I get jokes emailed to me that I first saw on a BBS in the mid-late 80's.
It's much like a BBS, except served off a webserver. It preserves alot of the best community aspects of the old BBS while using the flexibility of HTML for display.
It's GPL'd, and available at sourceforge.
-
It's working pretty well. The code behind it is GPL'd and is easy to setup.
Anyway, check out The Machine, which is my personal site that runs it. The software is on sourceforge at http://cogunity.sourceforge.net
-
We are running MajorBBS with a 256 user copy.. We have all the forum addons, entertainment teleconference, MajorMUD, games, and WorldLink.
We used to cost $10 a year. Now we are free.
We used to have 25 phone lines. Now we are connected to the internet.
We used to fill up our phone lines (25) at peak hours.. now, well.. we don't fill up the 256 user limit, but I wish we did!
Feel free to telnet to mboard.com and make a free account. It's on us! :)
-Matt (Binky, one of the Sysops)
Its a bit americo centric
I kept all my bbs files in the mobile base in Land of Devistation. I even upgraded it with a black orb.
:~(
I stashed some in the casino locker room too, I was the only one with a key, best watch out!
I miss LOD
Computational Madness in a round package.
How far back in the 70s? This article (gotten from another comment here) is an interview with the guys who started the first BBS, and they started on January 16, 1978. When did you start?
-Kraft
-Kraft
Live and let live
I thoroughly miss Bulletin Boards where there was _always_ a good conversation on topics common to all visitors. Lucky we have /., but it still isn't the same as the likes of Star Ship BBS and other tacky-named Star Trek ones :) Not to mention all of the free games!
same thing here, a friend and I ran a board about 7-10 years ago. According to his mom, that line STILL rings.
.kb
Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right-- But They Make Me Feel A Whole Lot Better
There are very few BBS systems out there. This year will be my 13th year running the Jungle BBS out of New Jersey. 973-694-5081 72 phone lines www.jungle.net telnet to Jungle.net I really miss the bbs days. I always ran very large social systems and they have dwindled to almost nothing at this point. I also run and host several other bbs systems telnet entconn.com telnet realmud.com I found the efforts for the bbs list to be genuine but highy erroneous. Definetly old school memories coming back. marc@jungle.net
In fact, I'm sure many of them continue to thrive. I found it funny that, like others have mentioned, it has only listed BBSes on the continent of North America, not only that but it failed to list, in the 801 area code, the Lower Lights BBS (which I grew up with). Which suprises me considering it was the largest BBS/chat board in that area, has been around for the past 15 years, AND continues to thrive today. (However, it *DOES* list 295 OTHER BBSes. Heh.) =} It can be connected to via dial-up, or you can telnet to it at lowerlights.com.
Lower Lights has shown, and will continue to show that the days of the BBS are, indeed, *not* and probably never will be entirely over. At least not in this particular case.
Still, I think this is a great idea, and one that many of us should contribute to. =} What I'd also like to see on this page is a seperate list of ones that are still around today.
Bad Spellers of the world UNTIE!!
Well after a few years I didn't want to do this and stopped, then I tried to use my phone line as a regular line again.
But for YEARS (at least 3) afterwards that line would still ring on weekends with people trying to connect... Even after I had tracked down every BBS list in Hong Kong and got my number removed.
R.
Really! Both of my BBS's were listed on there... Even though one only lasted a little over a year, and the other only a few months.
:) haven't typed that number in years.
Back in 1993-4, before my area got Internet, BBS's WERE the net... I set up on FidoNet, allowed access to hundreds of Echos (the precursor to Usenet) and even had a way for users to send Internet E-mail (via the FidoNet-Internet gateway)... basically you could do much of what you can on the Internet today, it was just much slower.
There definately are some that are missing, looks like they used old FidoNet nodelists to get their information.
My old address was 1:2260/140
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
I am affronted!
Anne
(Proud former sysop, The Keeping Room 1:261/1055 HST)
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
and i still have my $300 'SysOp Deal' USR Courier v.Everything. works like a charm when i need it, after 6 years
Yep...I still have my old USR Courier 14.4 with the big metal plate screwed onto it that says "Not for retail sale!" I tell ya what, I tried many a modem for hosting a BBS, but that USR Courier was the only one that ALWAYS worked.
I work for the MIS department of an insurance company. The few years I've been working here, I've become highly irritated and acutely aware of the AGONY of dealing with and servicing obsolete crap technology. Having to keep a small fleet of 486 systems going (for some reason?) has given me a particular bias on this issue. As far as I'm concerned, any hardware or software more than 3yrs old should be thrown away....no, OBLITERATED. permanently...to save everyones sanity, and prevent good money being spent preserving old junk.
I dunno about everyone else here, but I've never had any problems keeping older systems running. I believe the phrase to keep in mind is, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Perhaps it's your skills that are lacking rather than the old hardware? Being on the "bleeding edge" has it's problems.
You seem to be obsessed with the notion that "newer is better." That's not necessarily the case. In my home environment I have been far happier with my system running Windows 98 than I am now that I upgraded to Windows 2000 Pro. I've looked at the Windows XP beta, and I like that even less. Programmed obsolesence is not a good thing. Everybody likes to throw shiny new features at us that we probably don't even need. Don't get me wrong, progress is a good thing, but it's incredibly short-sighted of you to believe that everything that isn't the "latest and greatest" is junk.
BBSes died out because they SUCKED. The internet came along and swept the BBS scene (and rightly so) overnight -- it thoroughly kicked its ass to death.
That's not really true. BBS's died out because the Internet came along and was the next big thing. Though the Internet can't be centrally controlled, access to it was generally controlled by several large service providers in the beginning. It was packaged and mass-marketed to the world and the world bought into it. You can't market an individual BBS to 100 million people like you could Compuserve or AOL or Netcom. ISP's became like a utility company and BBS's were like the corner pub or coffee shop.
Now, I'm not saying that BBSs are better than the Internet, because that's a subjective judgement. But there are some areas where BBSs excelled and the Internet does not. Like forming a community of users who are not tied together by any special common interest, but only because they enjoy the company.
As far as you personally, it's truly sad that you have so little respect for the past. You might actually be able to learn something from it.
I guess one thing they forgot is that 503 area code in oregon in the early 90's was the whole state, not just the northern half of it.
It doesn't list my old BBS from '90 ;)
I mean, so what if it ran on a modified Atari 130XE at 2400 baud?
I've actually thought about running a telnet BBS on my other machine.
Does anyone know of decent software for Linux?
...doors of ports for Linux?
I'm not that old.... what are we talking about?
--- My Karma is bigger than your...
------ This sentence no verb
or i must have logging onto some fake system for all those years :-)
karma capped
ComputorEdge????
Don't you mean Byte Buyer??
Kind of funny in that Jim Trageser is back doing the equivalent of the BBS column.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Does anyone know whom I may be able to email to have them modify the informatino on this list. In the Philadelphia listings, under Somerton Telecomm, they have me listed as having it from 1995 through 1997, when in all reality, it was full time from 1987 through 1996. And 12 lines to boot, with a Unix style Mud (Diku_mud) running an a Single Amiga 2000.. (Ah, to pay $400/meg of ram, and $1400 for a 1 gig hard drive (in the 80's)).
If anyone does have information on contacts, please let me know. eparkin@op.net
/* eparkin - Software Architect, Perl/Python Coder, Ex-SCCA Rallycar Driver, FreeBSD & Mac OS X User */
damn skippy.
... the good ole days. renegade, intermail, os/2, and vmodem.
phone number is still valid, but now it's for my mom's internet =)
ahhh
and i still have my $300 'SysOp Deal' USR Courier v.Everything. works like a charm when i need it, after 6 years
I see a whole lot of people complaining that their favorite BBS isn't on the list. Don't bitch at the guy because he worked to build a list of 70,000 BBSs and yours isn't there. Help him out!
There's an email link (bbslist@textfiles.com) for sending updates. I just sent him an email telling him about two BBSs I used to run that aren't on the list. Why don't y'all do the same?
Well, A.C., it's pretty clear that you "missed out" on the point here.
Of course the Internet is far more capable overall than BBSes, because of the infrastructure and speed. But some of the functionality was certainly lost in the translation.
BBS software like Wildcat! (the program I used) made it relatively easy to set up a full community, with message boards, file areas, chat, announcements, and a consistent navigation/menu system. Most Web sites still don't offer it all, and it's more difficult to find a single software package that handles the whole task.
Speed? Many of us are still using modems (no cable TV where I live, and I'm too far from a CO for DSL). That means my access speed to the Internet is the same as it is to a BBS. All of the overhead of HTML/PPP/FTP... is cumulative. I can pull up the information I'm looking for in a good text-based BBS faster than a Web site laden with useless navigational graphics.
The problem, of course, is that the Internet is always a local call. That is what spelled the death of the dialup BBS.
Ahhh well, everyone needs their pet projects. :)
Mark
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
TDH.com its still alive, still well, and the only place i can find so far that has FREE MUD! wahts more, you dont have to dial in if you dont want to... telnet tdh.com
BAH! Wave of Paw
While I was in Houston, I connected to the Univ of Houston (uhnix as I recall). After a move to Atlanta, I connected to UUNet (for a fee - about a dollar an hour, I think) and to a local unix box, gwinnett.com.
In 1994, I moved to Phoenix. Due to a temporary living situation that went on for 3 months, the rise of the Internet and just a general fatigue, I didn't bring Ed Hopper's BBS back up in Arizona.
I did just register my old domain, however, ehbbs.com, just for fun. Maybe I'll do some nostalgia stuff on it.
Wow, good article, I was a CBBS user from the earliest days, I'd forgotten all about them. But these guys weren't the first BBS, they existed on mainframes long before they were implemented on micros.
I got ahold of the Apple BBS software, I was one of the first people to get the public release. This must have been around mid-1978 or 79.
I used to run Apple-based BBSes in the late 1970s. The list only goes back to the 1980s.
What??? They're dead... ??? Damn, I wish someone would tell me so I would take down http://bbs.2bit.net || telnet://bbs.2bit.net
I'll have to tell my handful of "callers" to stop playing LORD and Tradewars and BRE then.
For a BBS near you checkout: http://www.thedirectory.org/telnet/
Anybody remember this game? All I have to say is it made BBS'n great for me and nothing has replaced it yet ..
I'm done with the internet, let the rest of the world have it. Lets all go back to BBS's and play tradewars again. I miss the good ole days. :(
- Pharao
My bbs isn't on that list, and that's probably cause none of the BBS's that i called did much file distrubuition (where I'm guessing a lot of the advertising came from) Still the list is cool, it reminds me of how much fun it was to run the BBS and how much time i spent (wasted) on the "art" scene then. Man those were the days. (course the internet is so much more fun)
I know somewhere on a 170k floppy, I have a monster list of them..
It had a bbs listed that I had ran and forgot about for my work!. (Too bad it didn't have any of my pre Fidonet bbs's listed) Later, dabone
I had a system up briefly in the 1980's....for a while in Louisville in 1989. Brought it back up in 1991, and it has moved a couple of times since then. It is still up and running in Frankfort, KY, USA. It is now called Capitol City Online and can be reached at 502-875-8938. It'll probably be down off and on today, due to the threat of thunderstorms, but it is usually up and running at that number.
I can remember when there were 30+ BBSes up and online during the same time frame in the Louisville, KY, area. The GT Power Network was just as popular there, if not more so, as there were about 10 nodes online at once. I am now one of two nodes left in the "local net," and am no longer a local call to the area.
I have copies of the GT Network nodelists from way back, if you are interested in using them to "grow" the list.
Michael
I've made my mark on the world!!! My BBS is actually in the list!
if anyone of you slashdotters are interested, i'm creating an online bbs with a web-based LORD game. create an account at www.vaper.org... it's not 100% complete yet, but just give it a try & send me some feedback.. -nullvalue
If you "missed out" on BBSes, dont sweat it -- you didnt miss anything good. What we've got now is *WAAAAAAY* better...so much better it's not even funny. And that's the truth. Wow, as a former Sysop of a BBS in the S. California region (1983-1994), I really resent this comment. Obviously this person was a) too young to remember the days of BBSs, or b) was digging trenches back in the late 80's. I, too, was very young when I started my RCP/M (13 yrs), but I must say that running that BBS helped me technically more than just about anything I ever did. You see, a 386 or 486 is not old. Try working on an Z80-based S100 bus system with 64k (yes, that KILOBYTES) of memory. Try hacking CP/M to remove dangerous commands from the user interface (like DEL and REN) so people couldn't hack your system. Try getting something as complex as ZCPR3 working on that beast, when you've got only 4-8k of memory to work with. Assembly language was all you had! C++ (or even C for that matter)? Forget it. I was writing 8080 and Z80 assembly back in 1984. Running a BBS or RCP/M back in those days too dedication and a lot of discipline. Those are the things that I learned during my late teenage years and early into my 20s. And yes, those things have helped me tremendously in my career even today at the ripe old age of 31. So to sum it up, you are an idiot... go mess with your plug-and-play Windows system so you can feel like a bigshot. The rest of us will enjoy looking back on a time when us "computer geeks" *really* had some experience under our hats.
Many have thought that the BBS is dead. But there is still quite an active group of users, SysOps, and developers. Come IRC with us on the official BBSNet IRC Network (here are the links): irc.lordlegacy.org irc.thebbs.org irc.bobobbs.net irc.tdmonline.com This is the -definative- source for all your BBS needs. Many of the existing developers IRC here regularly including the current developer for LORD, LORD2, TEOS (The Exploration Of Space)EleBBS, Nexus, Beemail and the director of Micronet mail network. And many other developers dealing from php, perl, C++ variants, pascal (lots), delphi, visual basic. Good place to get help on starting a BBS. For the official source on the BBS industry goto: http://archives.thebbs.org/bbsnews/ http://archives.thebbs.org/ Don't hesitate. Relive those old great memories, and make new ones. Come IRC with us today on BBSNet in Channels #BBS.inc and #BBS
I must say, it is a great pleasure to see an effort of providing a memory for BBSes. A friend of mine showed me your site, as both rendentions of my BBS while dial-up was mentioned. What doesn't say is if any of these BBSes are still alive and kicking. I know that in the (913) area code, two BBSes still thrive, tho you can no longer dial up directly to them with a 56k speed modem or slower. I am one of those BBSes. Midnight Star BBS went down on dial-up in 1998, but in October 2000 after obtaining Cable Modem and decent computers, it is back up for people to telnet into. Along with Midnight Star, there is also the Santiarium kicking alive and well. You can get numbers to various BBSes that have been around for a long time and even new ones still by going to http://www.thedirectory.org .. listed is the Telnet BBS list that's updated monthly.
.. I used to run Remote Access and then Renegade (tho I believe it was Renegade when I went public), but now I run Synchronet. I could sit down and verify who is still around and who isn't, but that's just too much of my time.
Midnight Star can be reached by telnetting to midnightstar.dns2go.com, using an ANSI compatible Telnet program such as MTEL. The website for Midnight Star is http://home.kc.rr.com/ladywolfstorm
I wrote a bbs program for linux and telnet from scratch, its very pretty with alot of simple text Ascii. If you'd like to visit my creation, telnet to: toga.cx PS -> featuring the game, Hunt The Wumpus
tHe sHacK! bBS (telnet://velvet.ath.cx)
looks as though my old one is listed as well... of course I couldnt resist the urge to fire it back up again... gargoyleslanding.thebbs.org
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...