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A Documentary About Bulletin Board Systems
Windrip writes: "Jason Scott is compiling a history of the BBS. The BBS documentary is a virtual park bench waiting for people who want to reminisce about the good old days of FIDO, 9600 baud, zmodem. /. had an earlier post from Jason about textfiles.com, now he's looking for a few of the million stories in the naked net."
Having had the joy of broadband for three years, the simple thought of BBSs brings back memories of modems. Starting with the accoustic coupler 300baud with those unforgetable suction cups, to the advent of the Hayes smart modems (AT command set), all the way to v.32/v.32bis/v.34 modems and 16550 UARTs. Man, we've come a long way. When was the last time anyone had to worry about data bits, start bits, stop bits, flow control, etc...
Where are all the references to iCE and ACiD?
I wish! I was lucky I had a 2400bps modem.
Woo-hoo.
My first modem was a 300 baud I bought at a garage sale and used with my Mac Plus and it's whoppin' 20MB hard drive. ('Course I later upgraded to a 1200 baud modem).
Them wuzz the dayz.
Curious George
(clearly not an english major)
***General Consultant to the Human Race*** My opinions are free. You get what you pay for.
You have no idea how painful it was to play LORD on a 300 bps connection. I think the modem was 1200 but it wouldn't work right. I could probably beep into the phone faster...
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
I can't wait to spend hours searching for usefull stuff on that boards!
i remember when i ran a WWIV system off of a 386. we were on chunkynet for email and boards, and we had games (tradewars and foodfight). and ansi art (i miss TheDraw). i bought a 14.4k modem through a vendor that gave discounts to sysops. after that, i downloaded pirated games that used DOS/4GW at (what seemed like) smoking rates. i even got my first internet account through a bbs (the transformer room).
<abe simpson>
you kids with your gigahertz and flash and dsl and tcp/ip don't know anything about zmodem or slurp or busy signals. back when i was your age, we used to get our email once a day. and we liked it.
</abe simpson>
i've got to go post to this site.....
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
It was a cold, bianary day on the naked net. At least I think the 'net was naked, all the URLs I visit seem to be that way, even the White House. Just pics of girls so hot they'd melt the GLH* off of Ron Popiel. But of course there were also lots of pics of girls so ugly I'd swear my monitor whinced. Pics of guys looking like girls, girls looking like guys; it was obvious to me that the naked net was a dangerous and confusing place to be...
To Be Continued...
*GLH = Great Looking Hair - "Hair in a can" kind of thing
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
it's saturday night, looser. you are the king of the "cant get laids".
Luxury.
We used to have to redial the BBS until 3 o'clock in the morning because it only had one line. And then we had to connect at 300 goddamn bits per second and every slightest click on the line would appear as garbage characters because there was NO ERROR CORRECTION.
But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
The scariest thing is that I'm not just paraphrasing Monty Python's 4 Yorkshiremen - it's all actually true...
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I was on FIDOnet when 9600 was only a wet dream. I was so 1337 that I had a 2400 baud modem. In the beginning I mostly ran it on 1200 because it felt strange to run 2400 unless you really needed it. Also many of those BBS were designed from the fact that the modems were no faster than you could read the text as it read it on screen. Later on, the concept of a "more" function was introduced. :-)
Ah those were the days.. and lets not get started on the 75 baud modems, yes 75.
There was a nice BBS called the Timewarp BBS in Atlanta back in the day. I've never found an online community which was quite as interesting, though E2 does come close sometimes. BBSes, with the games, like Trade Wars 2002 and various forums, really gave you some interesting things to do. Since modems weren't as popular, and one had to know where to dial any way, there was much more of a regular community, so you got to know people better than is generally true with Internet web boards. I think I liked Timewarp better than I do the Internet today.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
I used to be quite active on the local BBS scene. Operators would get the latest archive CD-ROMs of the day, and then post them online for others to access.
Nowadays, no one really uses BBSes anymore. Everyone has direct links to the resources BBSes used to offer. Most of Walnut Creek's old content was available from ftp.cdrom.com (now run by simtel.net). Want music from the Hornet Archive? You can't purchase the CD anymore; you go online to hornet.org.
This extreme centalization of content worries me. Instead of colleges purchasing CD-ROMs of technical abstracts, they now subscribe to an ever-changing online service that provides them. Should said service go under or lose their data, humanity as a whole is at a loss.
Call me a troll, but one of the biggest reasons we should be against DMCA, SSSCA, and other such acts is because they require all content to be managed from a central authority. Should that authority go bankrupt, millions could lose access to a variety of works.
While peer-to-peer is one extreme the industry does not like, centralization is another problem. We need to start up the BBS era again; anyone have money for a spare phone line?
i remember when i had to log into compuserve with a 300 baud bell & howell connected to my atari 400. so what do i win? this was before the fucking vic-20 damn you, and no body knew what a CBM PET was.... so what do i get? i actually hacked the 400's shitty chicket keyboard with a nice touch type keyboard and maxed it out to 32k give me fucking props. you peices of shit.
I often connect through my GSM mobile phone, and I'm lucky if I get 9600 through that! 9600 is very real for me...
at least things then were optimised for 9600 or slower
Fido was a lousy system for communications. The message format and controls just got in the way of discussions. It was, in short, not well-designed for "talking."
It was great for files, though. Really kicked ass there. And it was good for pure information sharing, of the question-answer style.
Now, what was (and is) great for communication -- that is, discussion and discourse -- was/is the Citadel-style BBS. Man, that thing was honed for chatter: streaming sequential messages, closer to dinner-party conversation than anything else.
I do hope that this documentary doesn't ignore the discussion-based BBSes. There were a lot of people who shared a lot of opinions on those systems... and some of us even had our minds changed because of their persuasive arguments!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
sounds like someone hates how pathetic his life was and is... if you want sir, I could quickly and very painfully put you out of your obvious misery
Here is my BBS reminiscence,
I was nice normal American boy. It was 1991. I logged into the Windy City BBS. Some of you may not remember the WCBBS, 70% of all the porn on the Internet posted before 1998 originated there.
Two hours after logging in I was versed in fisting, wife swapping, water sports, bestiality, etc etc etc... I was then ready for college and the brave new world of connected systems.
I blame BBSs for horrible person that I am.
God bless the Windy City BBS! Cheers!
Cott Lang, release under GPL or rott in Hell!
:wq
I think it is funny and as usual will piss off the loosers out there that don't understand the irony when they call someone 'newbie' yet this newbie has probably designed most of the shit these punks are using, but just doesn't go around flaunting it like a tool.
I remember when I was 12 in '85 and playing around with my Commodore 64. I borrowed a 300 baud (back when a baud was a bit... time flies) and quickly got my own 1200 bps. A little time went by and I managed to talk my mom into getting a second phone line -- thus Ground Zero BBS was born. Working for all of 1 meg online: a 1541 and 1581 floppy drive. Ran the thing off of CNet BBS software if I still remember. Phone number at the time was 216-381-6550. Don't bother calling 'cause it's long dead though.
Lasted for around 4 years, which was a fairly long time as far as BBSes went. I still remember the first couple of callers. Watching them sign on and leave messages. I got to know everyone on there. It was like a close group of friends -- maybe 30 or so regulars. We had a couple of get-togethers. By Co-sysop started dating one of them too.
Sigh...
Times are changing. Back then I knew almost everyone that was online in the 216 are code. Now most everyone is on. Heck, the code split twice because of all the new phone lines being put in.
It's something that I'm sure to tell my future kids some day. Back when we were on the cusp of something big. Back when computers were as uncommon as rotary phones are now.
I remember learning the basics of programming by creating .PPE scripts for PCBoard bbs'es.
Those were the days...
I used to write PPE's for PCBoard in a group called TMS (The Mod Squad). Bunch of good guys. But the best PPEs were probably by Drew of PWA. Pirates With Attitude, baby!
I remember getting a PPE decompiler to remove stupid shareware nagscreens in the program that would allow users to access files in a QIC80 tape drive.
I ran a pretty popular BBS on Maximus under MS-Dos - originally on a timeshared 486 (someone else would use it during the day - I'd use it at night for the bbs) at an office - then it was downgraded to a 286. This was in Coos Bay Oregon - it was called Lidpoint 1:356/24 (was its fidonet address). It was eventually shut down because a crackpot dork named les lemke became the net admin (for net 356) - he not only treated me like crap (because he hated me), but he continually set me duplicate nodeiffs - and I was too stupid or lazy to modify the batch file to extract the nodeiffs without confirmation :(. Those were the days when if you wanted to write a script you really had to know what you were doing mostly because a dos based fido capable BBS was a huge mess (literally) of batch files that would run at specific error levels etc. Batch files were also used to execute doors - like games. You're really a scripting god if you can figure all that out. I guess it wasn't all that complicated if it was layed out properly - errorlevel x bink has to go fetch mail etc.
My second board was actually on an Amiga 3000 - what a difference. For one thing no archaic scripting languages - everything was Arexx - and it was nice, virtually unlimited amount of devices. In fact it was eventually on the internet via the telserd.device - a modem emulator device driver for telnet in the early 90's. Not to mention you could use it while the bbs was running and you - nor the bbs user knew it.
Even tho this server is telehoused in an underground bunker with dual T1 connections, something MIGHT happen. SO I will risk having a huge rise of Karma by posting this..
Thank you for taking a deeper interest in this project. Whether you're a potential interviewee, staff member, or just an innocent bystander, I appreciate you taking the time to read what I have to write.
You don't just wake up one day and decide that you want to do a massive documentary about all aspects of something like the history of Bulletin Board Systems. In my case, it's the next stop in a journey of nostalgia that has turned into a bit of a crusade to save a piece of my past, and the past of many others.
Introducing Again: The BBS
A Bulletin Board System, if you've not encountered one before, was originally a single computer hooked up via a modem to a phone line. It had special software running on it such that anyone calling the phone line with their modem would be connected to the computer. Once logged in, this user could leave and read messages, download files, and generally have a place to hang their hat and meet other people. The first BBS was started in 1978 and it has continued to the present day, although the Internet has done an excellent job of diverting the BBS audience elsewhere. Most BBSes that were around during the 1980's have disappeared or mutated into something completely different.
I started logging into BBSes around 1981 and continued to do so for many years, stopping pretty much for good around 1990, when the Internet finally took my own interest completely away from the world of one-line, one-user BBSes and into the world of international networking, multi-user communication, and ultimately, the World Wide Web.
Years passed. In 1998 I suddenly wondered what happened to a BBS that I used to log onto in the 1980's called Sherwood Forest II. I'd spent many hours on this BBS, leaving and reading messages, getting involved in discussions, and most importantly, downloading all the neat and informative textfiles that they had up for their users to read. I figured that pretty much everything had moved onto the Internet at this point, and if you couldn't find it on the web, it probably wasn't worth knowing.
A Horrible Gap
A few hours later, I came to the conclusion that I had been wrong. As far as the Web was concerned, it was if Sherwood Forest II had never existed. In fact, it was like most of the BBSes I'd ever known had never existed! I'd strained to remember this System Operator, or that user, and my searches were coming up absolutely fruitless. This didn't make any sense to me; I knew that many of the people now running the machines of the Internet had cut their teeth on Bulletin Boards; where had the information gone? Where were the stories? Was anyone even trying to save the history?
The answer, in a general sense, was yes; over time, people had put up a few memories in the form of textfiles from their youth. In the occasional paragraph of someone telling an autobiographical story, you might see a mention of a BBS in that person's past. You might even find a page or two by a group of people who had met on a BBS, and who all kept their webpages linked together so they could continue to find each other. But a wholecloth, This Is What The BBS Was Like page with all the wonderful writings and messages and title screens and flotsam of twenty years just didn't exist. And many BBSes were falling in between the massive cracks, never to be heard from.
Within a short time, I started working on a web site that would be different. I grabbed a cool domain name, started writing cataloging scripts, and scrambled through my old 5 1/4" floppies to find every last file I'd saved from my childhood.
Thus was born textfiles.com, one of the largest sources of BBS-era textfiles on the web. Now at over 30,000 textfiles, I get thousands of visitors a day, some looking to relive the past, others who are discovering this whole new subculture for the first time. I have recieved hundreds of letters from people who tell me about their favorite file, or how glad they are to find the site. It's very energizing, and part of what drives me to continue finding and adding new files.
The Infinite BBS List
In 2001, well into the project of collecting textfiles, and after getting some attention from other websites about my efforts, I suddenly had a very odd idea. It occurred to me that throughout the thousands of textfiles, I had the phone numbers and related information for many of the BBSes that I called when I was young. Maybe if I wrote some program to yank this information out and present it as one big list.....
It was too neat a thought to put down. A couple of days later, bbslist.textfiles.com was born, and I started collecting the thousands of numbers of BBSes that I could find both on my site and elsewhere. While nowhere near complete, the site is well past 80,000 BBSes listed and continues to be improved and expanded.
This site also, got some significat attention, this time from a much, much wider audience of BBS users and system operators from the 1980's and early 1990's. Soon, my mailbox was flooded with hundreds of messages giving me corrections, updates, suggestions for improvement...
....and stories.
So many stories! People who were sysops told me of the times they had running their BBSes. People who called BBSes let me know which boards were their favorites, and how they missed those times. Emotional stories of a time past, and excited, poorly-written letters to let me know that while the writer had missed out on the BBS era, they wish they could know more.
While I did my best to ask folks who had written letters if I could put their writing up in a special section I'd set up for just that purpose, I knew that I'd never get all of the story out of them, or be able to inspire them to generate the tomes of memories they had from that time.
So I had another neat idea.
A Documentary Begins
I currently work as a UNIX System Administrator for a company in Boston, a direct result of the years of computer experience I'd gained from my youth. Before I got into "the industry", however, I attended Emerson College in Boston (Class of 1992) and graduated with a film degree. Needless to say, I'd always thought it an amazing waste that I'd spent so many years learning about the process of making a film and then never actually used it outside of a number of small projects. While I always thought it would be nice to make films, the cost of doing so always seemed prohibitive for what would inevitably be a lark, a sort of high-end home movie. So I shelved my training and got deep into RAID arrays, network performance, scripting, and all the other gimgaws of the computer geek.
Meanwhile, the cost of filming and editing a rather good-looking film has come down dramatically. Assuming you can live with something appearing nearly professional as opposed to undoubtedly professional, you can make a film for what used to be the price of a camera. As a matter of inspiration, I kept finding myself browsing a site of homemade Star Wars films and looking over the process that these filmmakers were using to shoot, edit, and add special effects. Some of these short films truly rival what you would see in a theatre. But what would I make a film about? (These folks have the whole "Star Wars Next Chapter" market all sewed up...)
And sometime in June of 2001, the thought hit me. Take the incredible story of the rise of the Bulletin Board System and use all my learned skills to make the best documentary possible about it. I'd already done tons of research in the process of making the textfiles.com site, and I now had the addresses of hundreds of BBS sysops who had professed an interest either in talking about their past or wanting to remember it with me. It all just clicked together, like a puzzle that was chaos moments before and now presented the clearest picture I could imagine.
I sat on the idea for a while and thought about the pros and cons of the process. It meant a lot of time, but it was time I knew I'd enjoy. It meant a lot of travel and the gruelling schedule of a filmmaker, but I know I need the excercise and to get out of the house more on weekends. And it meant a single-minded purpose for a good portion of my waking hours as I scheduled times, places, people, and all the other tiny details of putting this project together.
It would be tough, but I could do it. With a lot of help, a lot of favors, and an awful lot of time. Years, it would be. I'd have some sort of results nearly immediately after the first few interviews came in, though, so it wouldn't be so bad. And think of the things I would capture on film! Think of the people I'd meet! This will be so exciting!
The General Idea for This Site
Besides being energetic and excited about the project, I am also a realist. I know that there will be times that I'm pushed to the edge of despair or sadness as this opportunity falls though, or that financial or technical factor works against me, and I know I can't do this alone. So I've registered the BBSDOCUMENTARY.COM domain and have created this site, a kit of information and explanation for what I want to accomplish with this documentary, and a way for people to check on the project as it progresses. As I pursue interview subjects and track down information, I want a central place where I can refer folks so they'll have all they need to make decisions about whether to participate.
A Little Bit about the Actual Documentary
In this early stage, it's very hard to tell where the road will take me; I intend to put a ton of energy into the project and infect a lot of other people as well. I'm not a "professional" at documentary filmmaking, so that might work in my favor as this isn't just another job; this is a story I want to tell right.
I have a very strong opinion at this point that the BBS story needs to be told in parallel, not as a linear story. This means that the documentary will very likely have different separate parts. It is distracting and unhelpful to go into depth about the large UFO/Conspiracy/Science BBSes that populated the landscape in the same linear story that discusses the underground BBSes and piracy/hacker boards that have been around almost since the beginning. It would be better for everyone if I treat them as different lines along the same general "meta-story". So this means I can fit everything in without having to "shoehorn" an unrelated individual or chapter. For example, I know that I want to tell about the advances in Modem technology and how they led to BBSes. I want to start with the telephone system, go into the earliest modems, segue into the first of the BBSes, and maybe bring together some of those pioneering spirits and both have them talk about the past and weigh in on the present. This means tracking down a lot of those pioneers, who have scattered to the four winds (and in some cases, died) and do my best to piece them all together again. One of the things I'm very concerned about is achieving as complete a picture as I can about BBSes and all the ways they affected people. I have my own personal interests (I liked Apple II BBSes, "Phone Phreak" boards, and a specific subset of machines in the San Jose area) and I'll be sure to get them in, but there's simply so much that happened that I have to keep a real open mind and spend a lot of effort on research. It would break my heart to wrap up filming and discover that an entire huge subset of BBSes were completely looked over. It also won't surprise me if it happens regardless of my efforts and good intentions as a researcher. But I can do my best anyway.
One way to prevent this is to be very, very OPEN with my research and facts that I'm finding, and that will happen on this website. As I and my cohorts discover new facts about a BBS subject or subset, I will post some reference to it on this site. I am working to make companion sites that give the sort of information that bbslist.textfiles.com does; a good global sense of the way things were, with people able to contribute improvements or changes as they see fit or know better than I.
Into the Fray
So now I'm standing at the head of a multi-year project, and I feel both scared and excited about what this will lead to. I'll be seeing a lot more of the world (via travel), maybe meeting some personal idols, and hopefully I can help bring to life some of the things that made the Bulletin Board System so special to so many thousands of people.
There's a lot to do on both my side and the side of anyone crazy enough to get involved with me; but this is work I will enjoy and I intend to make the best documentary I can. I want something that will last, that will let the next generation after the "Napster and Broadband" generation understand where this all came from. I think it's going to be great.
Thank You For Reading This Far
I appreciate you reading the longer version of the pitch. If this sounds at all like something you want to get involved with, in any way, be sure to contact me. My e-mail address is jason@textfiles.com and I have a phone number set up at 617-269-8696 (COW-TOWN). I look forward to hearing from you.
Also, feel free to browse the rest of the site for additional information and opportunities for input.
Jason Scott
Ha ha, you suck. Fr0th p0st indeed, faggot-biscuit.
Some of you who followed it to the end saw what happened to most of the BBS packages. Clark Development went belly up. Searchlight and MSI sold their software to small companies who squeezed every last dime from the software (and still try to market it!). I don't know what Galacticomm ended up doing with MajorBBS/Worldgroup. Lesser-used packaged like TAG and WWIV dropped off the face of the planet.
In all this, there is a neat story, involving Rob Swindell and his Synchronet BBS software. His company, Digital Dynamics, sold Synchronet for a noteable price "back in the day". They had full page spreads in Boardwatch along with Clark, Galacticomm, MSI, and the other big players. However, when the bottom fell out of the market, instead of squeezing every last dime from the product, Rob Swindell cleaned up his code and released everything into the public domain at which time he himself ceased all development.
It gets even cooler than that. About a year ago, Rob picks up the project again and turns it into open source with the release of a Linux version. Synchronet now supports Windows, OS/2, and Linux versions, all free and all GPLd. You can check it out at www.synchro.net .
If anyone here used the ZChat chat door, that was my "child".
maru
www.mp3.com/pixal
...once the Internet has become an unusable, proprietary, virus-plagued and outlawed Big Brother hell.
It might be quite different from the former Fido BBSes as far as technology is concerned, but the users and sysops will have the same spirit: freedom.
It's odd coming to Slashdot then suddenly seeing Jenni, in the JenniCam window, being fucked, quite literally.
Anyone remember compressing entire disks into a file on the Apple II with DDD so they could be transmitted?
Cat-Fur? AE boards? Cider hard disks? GBBS?
Anyone remember this one? Kinda made that $600 Hayes 9600 modem earn its keep.
After reading this artical I did a google search on my old Alias & a few other unique terms to the Melbourne group that I used to hang out with, and to my amazement came up with the following: (which was published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 5th April, 1993)
The names the hackers use are, as always, interesting. In a review by iNFiNiTY, a bulletin board management program, credit is given to Transvamp, Country Distortion, Death Wish, Bit Byter and others.
I actaully wrote the Infinity BBS software with a few other people in Turbo Pascal, which I was coding when I was around 14-16 years old, and my alias as one of the ones above.
The moral of this story, type your old Nic into google and see what you come up with!
USRobotics had a deal where they'd sell sysops a Courier v.something for a pretty cheap amount compared to the normal price. The only catch was you had to plaster "Powered By USRobotics Courier Modems" all over the place and some other stuff. But it was worth it considering the Couriers were always flash-upgradable to the latest standards.
I had a smallish 4 line BBS (CNet Amiga) here in Tacoma, WA.. it was once called Lost Sword of X-Calibur, then X-Calibur, then Shards of Sanity.
I really miss the sense of 'community' that the BBS brings. Calling up your few local favorites to check your email and the message boards.. trading *ahem* files with your friends. Spending massive amounts of money on phone bills at times.
Mine was going for a few years.. the last year I even had a brand new dedicated 28.8k link to the Internet offering PPP/shell access for my users (one 28.8k line was fine because 14.4k was the norm, 3 users max) - but then came a HD crash that I never really recovered from, or wanted to recover from. My own Internet usage got to me.. and I saw the 'future.' - too bad it was largely owned by AOL and the faceless corporations that we hated.
Jason Fisher
(Lord of Flies, King Arthur, BloodHawk.)
Many of the smaller BBSs were programmed in Basic (with console i/o routed thru the modem port and ctrl-c etc trapped). One problem that many of these systems had is that although they had error trappng and recovery via "on error goto", floating point overflow and underflow errors were not handled properly because the author never thought about that happening. These systems could be brought down by typing something like 9e99 or 9999999... (>75 nines, if they stripped out non numeric chars) when the system asked for a number, like a message number to read.
What I really miss is being able to talk to people in my area, usually within the 8 mile band A radius, that spend as much time with their computers as I do.
What do we have now.. LUG meetings? Except for some of the famous ones like SVLUG, the ones I've heard about and been to are just a bunch of people who can't get Red Hat installed.
I've been content to talk to coders from around the world. I find them because they're part of an OSS project I'm working with, or they're on IRC, or they post to the newsgroups I read. But I will probably never meet them, go find some decent bars in the area, or talk about the local CompUSAs and which ones have the best selection. I have to do that alone.
I also had a pet iguana who liked to clamber on top of the nice warm CPU. Somehow, the lizard managed to hit the right keys to change the system password, and I was never able to manage the system from the console again!
Ahhh, the good old days...
Atari was my dream computer in the late 70's. After all, who could afford a IBM-PC?
Compuserve @ 300 baud was my link to the "world".
Much of what I remember was the problem that if you had a program on tape, you could not transfer it to a floppy, because the file headers were different. Thus, you had to either type it in again (booting with the floppy active) or download it from the Compuserve forum. The file (not gonna dig to find it) was about 64k. Again and again my connection would choke, and I'd have 2+ hours of long distance phone charges for nothing. This would always happen when I had 95% of the damn thing downloaded!
Finally, since I already had typed the thing in assembly from Compute! magazine, I found a way to get it onto a floppy and gave up on Compuserve. They were the AOL of yesteryear, anyway. Bastards! (although they deserve credit where due - pioneering and all that)
Using the Computer Shopper, I ran my phone bill up terribly calling and subscribing to any BBS I thought would be cool.
I once ran into one that scared the bejeezus outta me with some satanic crap...I immediately wiped all references to my visit and took a long deep breath before I called another BBS, thanking my lucky stars that I wasn't *posessed* from logging on to that thing.
I thought that this might interest someone, or I wouldn't have bothered typing it...
db
Cig:
ôô
If only I can figure out how to restore my Norton Backups of my old WWIV BBS. I wonder what texts and files lurk in there...
My copy of Norton Backup is long gone, and I can't find any info from Norton about how to restore it. One day though...
The above is not worth reading.
Man o man ...
... just look and RIME is still alive: http://www.relaynet.org/. Wow and I found Ilink as well :-) http://www.fonix.org/public/ilink/index.html
I don't necessarily miss the BBS action. I was a fan of PC Pursuit. The PC Pursuit service allows you to dial through local modems, across a packet switched network, to a bank of modems in a far away city for $30.00 a month. It support 2400 baud modems and was awesome.
What I really miss, and I mean this in all sincerity, are the message networks. Fido, WWIVnet, Ilink, PC Relay, RIME, InterLink, etc. The idea was that the local messages on your BBS were packaged and sent to another BBS to be distributed. This could be hub and spoke or it could be chained.
What was great about the message areas is that they were moderated and the moderation was supported by the public at large. Moderators were appointed by the networks.
This worked out well because unlike USENET you had real, meaningful messages that were on topic. I could literally get an answer to any question I had in a matter of hours.
Since the communication was back and forth it was interactive with a slight delay. You could lobby your sysop to add the channels you wanted and you could read your mail offline! Who remembers EZReader or QMail?
Offline mail reading allowed you to grab all your messages in a packet, download them, read them offline, then upload replies. It rocked!
Interesting
It was like zmodem protocol, but with a fancy statistic screen and you could chat in real-time with the SysOp (laggy though). :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Don't forget there are heaps of BBSes still running these days on the Internet. They are still a lot of people's main portal to idle, chat, news... and they're still cool!
If you have the source, you have the whole world...
Or was that his chat bot? I actually fell for that when I was a BBS newbie ;).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
This is a bit off-topic, but a request. I seem to have lost my copy of a cool ant ANSI that Terminator2 (Baud Town user #2692 I believe?) made back in the old days (early 1990s). Has anyone seen it in any ANSI archives?
Thanks in advance.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I was absolutely hooked on Card Guppies... a great game that played on our local Redwood BBS. The game was over at midnight at the end of every month so lines were jammed trying to be the last to play and jump to the top. 2400 baud! My husband thot I was nuts.
Renegade (hello backdoors!)
Scroll to the bottom for Cott Lang's response.
in 15 years ill be telling my kids how lucky they are to have terabyte internet access...
Escape
I run one, actually. Nobody uses it though (except me), as this is the first time I've mentioned it since it went up again a month or so ago. OK, I'm lazy. :)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
You'll be in prison grabbing your ankles while being pounded in the ass with a monstrous cock for violating the DMCA, SSSCA, PATRIOT, etc!
I worked at Galacticomm from '90 to '92 doing development. I dragged them kicking and screaming into the world of "286 or better required" when I based version 6 on the PharLap extender. Those were the days.
Tim Strkyer, the owner, was a... um... "unique" individual. His first company, Strkyer Pipes, failed. The product? A modular water bong (do a patent search on Delphion some time for "Smoker's Pipe" by Timothy Stryker of Danbury, Conn.) His children? Named Asia (like the continent), Ace Terran (like the playing card and Earth), and Mars (like the planet).
Tim committed suicide back in '95... to rephrase the song "Internet killed the BBS star".
--Rob
When I first got on the Net, it was via an Amiga 1000, dialing from Kansas City to Boston to call The World, the first dial-in ISP at 1200 baud. I then moved to Chicago, where I looked around for an ISP, and joined Chinet. This was run by Randy Suess who, with his friend Ward Christensen (who wrote Xmodem) and they created CBBS which launched in 1978, considered to be the first BBS.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Geesh, I remember before we had shared message areas, there was just what we called "netmail", the ability to send a message to another BBS on Fidonet...and that was cool. Then this guy name Jeff Rush came up with a way to take the new messages in a special message area and ship them to another BBS...way cool! It was called Echomail. Then we started doing it between a bunch of Fidonet BBSs, there were less than 500 of them at that point. It was Echomail that really made Fidonet take off...and the worst of it was that us Sysops bore the brunt of the funding for it...we ran the systems, sometimes bought the software to run it on, and paid the long distance bills to bring in the echo we wanted. Eventually, we banded together in areas like Ottawa, and pooled our efforts. Then one person got permission to use the ir companies bulk long-distance, and started pulling in all the echos for free! Then, we started to really grow in the Ottawa area..net 163. For the longest time our net host was a guy named Al Hacker...really, that was his name! He even showed us his driver's ID and all! And then the evil politics started, and we splintered into nets 163 and 148.
So, I will leave the story there...
ttyl
Farrell McGovern
SysOP Solsbury Hill BBS
(originally Fidonet 1:163/5)
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Absolutely. And we'll have some nicer tools to play with like 802.11b and Bluetooth. That way your average mug punter won't even need a phoneline - he just uses the card that talks to his digital camera and PDA.
:v)
I hope someone is working out the protocols for this. Very few people realise that the wireless Freenet is going to be as big - if not biger than - the internet we know today.
Vik
There's still a number of BBS's around, they've just moved to Telnet. Check out http://www.thedirectory.org/ for a listing...
Omnes arx vestrum sunt adiuncta nobis.
9600 bps didn't even exist when I first started 'modemming'. Heck, XModem was the univerasl download protocol. I remember discussions about the ymodem protocol on some tech boards, and then the zmodem protocol started to get talked about. So few systems actually supported zmodem at the time, though, I never really got a chance to play with it.
Anyways, my first modem was a 110 bps acoustic coupler. I remember my parents being absolutely confounded at this gizmo that I spent 4 months of my paper route's salary on. I was only allowed to use it after 11PM. I decided then and there that I needed my own phone line. My parents were reluctant to let me have one, however. It took almost a year to convince them.
Right after I got my own phone line, I went out to WestWorld computers, and bought a Hayes Micromodem for the Apple ][+. It could do 110/300bps, and could even autodial! (although it could not do tones, only pulse-dialing.) I remember being the first person I personally knew to have an autodialing modem. (gloat, gloat, gloat) There were a few people I knew _of_ that had autodialing modems, and I had even heard of people having 1200bps, but at the time I had never personally met any of them. I had seen 1200bps modems at the computer store where I bought my modem, but they cost way more money than I could afford.
That summer, the sysop of one of my favourite systems at the time decided to hold a BBS-BBQ. It was the first time most of the users on that system had heard of something like this, and there were about 60 of us that said we would come. Actually seeing the faces for the first time of people who I had formerly only known as "Happy Hacker", "Robin Hood", "The Illuminoid", or what have you, was an experience I still don't have words to describe.
I had to grow up sometime, however... we all did. The modem ended up getting stored into a closet as I became too busy for that kind of socializing. I had brief flings with assorted groups on usenet in the passing years, but I can sincerely say that no place in cyberspace has ever felt as much like "home" as those old BBS's of the early 80's.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The only BBS I really got into was run on an 8088 and named, odly enough, 8088 ("8088: the BBS that's as good as a doorstop."). This BBS is still alive and kicking, but in a different form. It was originally Cit86, but now it's running on BeBS ( telnet://bebs.net:8088 http://bebs.net ).
/., only not. Read it daily.
I'm sure Xaroth (the sysop) wouldn't mind a few visitors if anyone wants to relive the past. There isn't any dial-up, but at least we have regular users that are across the country. Everyone point to http://bebs.net and read up a bit. It's fun. It's like
They forget that in every bbs, there was a lot of interesting activity such aD!*"/$&!")( NO CARRIER
Is boardwatch still aronud? I actually saw an issue around when BBSes died(mid '90s), and I Must say it was quite a disappointing issue. All it was was basically a nationwide listing of dial-up ISPs.
It was sad.
--
a beowolf cluster of th%£±£
NO CARRIER
And you say:
Jason.
you fuckin own man!!
Troll
If you guys remember, in 93/94 Microsoft was pushing its brand new MSN service. Yes, initially it was a BBS system (Bill Gates was probably the only person on Earth that, in 1994, thought the Internet would never happen).
.NET
Bill got a lot of idiots to sign up and pay several thousand dollars for the development tools and license to develop to MSN. He thought he could compete with AOL and CompuServe. Then he parted from those same idiots and "signed up" for the Internet idea.
He is certainly a genius and he certainly knows "The Read Ahead". Hmmf. He wasn't able to see the Internet coming.
PS: If you wanna know who were those idiots that signed up for MSN, look no further than the guys signing up for
I remember HSLink, but does anyone remember BiModem? I think it came out before HSLink, I htought it was better, but really hard to set up, both at the BBS end, and especially at the user end. You could chat during the up/download as well, and you could even use it to update files with just the changes, and not have to download the whole file, a big advantage when very fast modems were 96oo bps, and most people had 2400 bps modems. I ran a BBS called The Brweery in the San Diego, CA USA area, I had BiModem running briefly, but I modded my source code (WWIV) and was never able to get it going again, and since no one used it, I didn't bother putting a lot of time into it, to get it (bimodem) running again.
Brewmaster64
i remember a program i wrote once on the apple ii in the high school library(dont remember the exact values for the variable though). YOu would run it then walk off:
10 for x=1 to 10000:next x
20 print chr(7)
30 goto 20
Anyone else remember what i'm talking about?
In the smallish town where i grew up, there were probably about 50 kids roughly my age (early teens) who would pick up the mic on any given night. We'll never know how many were just lurking. It was a fantastic party line. Jokes, stories, and sometimes endless guitar battles (Stairway to Heaven).
Stay off the emergency channel, and don't piss off the truckers too much, and don't aim your beam antenna with 100 watt linear amp at your neighbor. Don't ask me how i know!
A beam antenna, a sideband radio and the right sky made for some interesting transcontinental conversations.
We weren't as 31337 as hams, but we didn't care. They were mostly pipe-smoking oldtimers with whom we'd have had nothing to talk about. Any slob could get ahold of a CB if he/she wanted. It was an open place. A few had modified radios with extra channels, some had better antennae, some had really cool sounding amplified mics.
Alright, i'm just rambling now. If the moderators read this far then i guess it wasn't completely off topic. I wasn't into the BBS scene, but i can relate. Thanks to everyone else for sharing their memories.
I used to run a BBS on an Apple II. It was based on GBBS. It occurred to me that that software is still on my hard disk. (well, it was last time I checked, which was about a year ago). It would be pretty easy to put that software on my Linux box and run it in an emulator. That would be kinda cool. But it occured to me..
If I actually ran an old-school type of BBS in this day and age, would anyone actually call it? Or even telnet to it? It would be kinda a waste to run a BBS if nobody uses BBSes anymore.
its all about legends of the red dragon. bbs doors brought people together in a way no one could imagine.
People were all about playing a game with people they didn't know in real life.
and it was all about flirting with the girl in the bar, in LORD. best game ever.
I'm drunk, and going to bed now.
I dont have anythng else to say.
beer.
sig?
One thing that I like about Jason is that he doesn't equivocate "BBS" with "the past" the way some other people (*cough*CmdrTaco*cough*) do. The BBS community is definitely alive and well; it's moved to the Internet, of course -- dialup is what's dead. And with modern BBS software giving users a choice of text or web interfaces, there's little chance that it's going to go away anytime soon. (Click this link to go to UNCENSORED! BBS, which I run on a Linux box in my basement with a DSL circuit.)
The role of BBS's is what has changed. The "make the sysop some money" boards all turned into ISP's in the mid-1990's. The "download information/drivers/etc." BBS's were properly replaced by web sites. But the online community BBS's are still here. The ones run by people who love to get a great group of people online to enjoy each other's company. The places where spirited, friendly discussion is the meat and bones of the medium. No, it's not exactly like it was a decade ago, but few things are. Some things aren't quite as charming, but some things are actually better. No more endless busy signals to get on your favorite BBS, since the Internet is by its nature multiuser (right now I'm counting 10 people logged into my BBS).
With the mainstream Internet becoming more and more the playground of the corporate elite, I'd expect small, hobbyist-operated sites like BBS's to become even more popular, as users get disgusted with having pre-packaged crap shoved at them through the big channels, and go around looking for something a little more "folksy."
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Are you really trolling here? 'Cause that was my experience too... lots of those turds would delete messages, cut off users, etc etc etc
When I started my first BBS back in 1981, virtually all of the callers (the small handful there was) were using 300bps modems with acoustic couplers.
;-)
The system was written in Pascal MT+ and ran on an Epson QX-10 using the CPM operating system (anyone remember any of these names?)
I remember getting my first 1200bps modem and thinking "wow -- this is so fast!"
However, things were so slow at 300 and 1200bps that I ended up writing a "smart terminal" program and BBS support module which borrowed the 20,000-word spelling dictionary from Wordstar (more names from the distant past) and replaced words longer than 3 characters with a two-character lookup key and added error correction.
This significantly improved the throughput of plain-text messages -- and forced people to make sure their spelling was up to scratch.
A couple of years later I got a 2400bps modem and thought "wow -- this is so fast" (again).
In 1985 I wrote and ran a multi-user BBS that operated under MSDOS and was written in Modula 2. It supported three simultaneous users -- woo-hoo!
In 1989 I switched to using the QNX OS and wrote a BBS system in C that supported 12 concurrent users on a lowly 386 box while also providing fax-gateway capabilities.
Then the Internet came along and it's all history now
Geeze I feel old!
Check out this immediately before there's a fix for it
http://www.tacoinspector.com/?goon=Vandall
Well, we have a website about it...
http://www.716bbs.com/
Run by the cool guy AMPro, it covers BBS'es in the Western New York area... (mostly Buffalo.)
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
bimodem rocked. I agree -- hs/link wasn't as good as bimodem. 232 cps typical at 2400 bps; DSZ was faster at 239-240 cps, but it was easier to up your ratio with bimodem, cuz you had all this time to decide what else to upload. Then I started to use TeleMate, so I didn't use BImodem as much. *sigh* I can't remember if hs/link's only advantage over bimodem was full-duplexed HST support....
Boy do I remember those days. It was all about TRS-80's, Apple II's, Atari 400 + 800's and Commodore 64's. For most of us, it was also about hacking MCI, Sprint, and other phone codes so you could call all the good BBS's around the country without running up a huge phone bill.
In those days, most people had 300 baud modems, and maybe 1200 baud if you were rich!! Most of us started out innocently, calling local boards, usually spread by word-of-mouth. at "Computer Interest Groups." Then after getting into it, most of the more serious "hacker-types" would prove themselves worthy and get into the hack-and-phreak secret sections that many boards had. It was all about sharing hard-won info on telecommunications, etc...
This is the route I followed. I was on Shadowland, Metal Shop, Metal Shop Private, etc.. I actually helped start Phrack magazine. I often spoke with Craig (Knight Lightning) on the phone and online, and remeber all the arguments about freedom of speech, and how it would be perfectly OK to make an online magazine compiling the best articles and textfiles found online. I wrote the TMC Primer for Phrack #10. (I went by Cap'n Crax then as well). I also cracked the protection on many games for the Apple II, Atari 800, and Commodore 64, maybe you've played some and seen my name. Those were the days.
Of course, a few years later came "Operation Sundevil" and the arrest of many hackers in the scene. Most everyone probably know the case of Craig and the infamous E911 document, and the later dropping of the case after it was found that the document was available from Bell itself for like $13.99. But it sure cost him in legal fees. Myself, I never got in any trouble whatsoever, and now the statute of limitations is up, so I don't mind telling all about it. I think I'll have to mail this guy doing the documentary, I remember a lot, and have much more to tell than the little I've shared here!!
PK: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Start a website for local people to converse, start something. I'm sure all the people you used to talk to feel the same way. I agree the sense of community is missing. It might not work but maybe you could start something.
NO CARRIER
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Even though I'm not that old, I remember trying to figure out pretty much the basics of how computers worked with my 8088 (they had much better by the time I got into it...but I was a po' kid). I remember when companies first started putting web addresses in their commercials and thinking how cool such a big BBS would be...
:)
Oh, and thanks for the memories
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
I wrote a package entitled COG that is more or less a web based bbs system (my own site linked to).
-
For those of you who remember the Pagan BBS Scene (now there was a small niche lemme tell ya, probably no more than 20,000 boards in all), I have still got a lot of the text files I had on my BBS (The Cauldron 1991-1995) when it was part of PODS (The Pagan/Occult Distribution System) and Fidonet, available on Omphalos.net in the Resources Section.
I really loved the BBS days, and although the Internet is more efficient at communications than BBSes were in their day, there is not the sense of community that there used to be with a BBS. Something was lost with the demise of the BBS as a medium. Oh, I know they still exist but the average internet user will never see one in their entire lives - they are a dying element of modern communications. I am still tempted to set up one again though - perhaps a telnet bbs this time, since dialup is not feasible.
Any other PODS users or Sysops out there?
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I sure remember how good bbses were for co-ordinating hacking activities:) I had mine going, always was afraid of the cops coming back then, not now:) if you've got anything going or are interested, by all means come to telnet://solarflow.dyndns.org
So...Are you taking a break between having boisterous sex with bouncy babes, or are you an even bigger loser, who likes to sit at home and call other people "loosers" for the doing the exact same thing you are doing, minus the compulsive dry-hand masturbation?
Back in the day, we didn't have emulators. We had to pay $200-300 get a box from taiwan that sit on top of you nintendo. And we downloaded roms onto floppy disks! And you have to pay the long distance charges to download it. All so you could have the latest releases!
I remember people were actually scared that nintendo would sue them. Sega actually did sue one guy. Now nobody gives a shit, you just type 'romz' into a search engine and you find plenty. Back then, sharing roms was for an elite club and only those in the know had access to.
Nowadays newbies get an emulator and ask where do roms come from. ha. You people have no clue where roms really came from!!!
You know what I miss most about those days? NO FRIGGIN ADS!!!! No pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-overs, pop-you-in-the-mouth, banners, animations, Shockwave, etc... Except for having to deal with an upload/download ratio, I could pretty much spend my hour downloading a pirated copy of Doom II in peace. Now I get to pay over $20.00 a month for the privledge of having an appreciable percentage of my bandwidth dedicated to advertisers.
You know what else I miss from those days? NO SPAMMERS!!!
My God, BBSes of days gone by are seeming downright civilized when compared to what we have today. Even the flamers stuck to their own little topic area on the boards.
Digi terminal? If so there are still PLENTY being sold and used
so let's do this
course..I'm still playing doom & doom2 (and heretic and all that) ...except in gl now :)
but it would be fun to do locally, not to mention easier to do locally than some web based international thing
I remeber first going online at a friends house, he had 300baud...I thought wow, this is cool. My first modem for going to BBS's was a hayes 2400, nice modem...still works ;)
But a few BBS's stick out in my mind, there was Hogman and I think Mitch Cole was his name that owned it...maybe your reading this, if so...email me. Bunch in town, I remeber the old Empire Boards 4 nodes at one point, before it disapeared. I remeber the weekly stradegy for BRE, and Tradewar's where the guys in the city would get together in the local coffee shop to plan the weeks stradegy. Ahh there was one run by a nice guy named bill, whom I haven't talk to in year we were friends, then the "inner" sanctum of BBS owners going awol on each other, spreading lies and rumors...basicly brought down this great community we had.
Oh well, I still play BRE on a couple of leages, one out austraila and one out of germany. Though I fondly remeber dialing up the music archive, of MP3's to get the best ones...such a shame when they went to a paid service.
Sometimes I wish I could trade my childhood back, sometimes I'm quite sure I missed the most importan point...and that was the fun of it all...but running a BBS myself...that didn't leave too much unfortunatly. But such as life, and it was a good experiance.
---
"A human being should be able to change a diaper,
plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship,
design a building, write a sonnet, balance acounts,build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
Om, nomnomnom...
My BBS began its life as a 386-40 running five nodes of PC Board under Deskview with 14.400 modems (very expensive at the time). Later we upgraded it to a 486 SX-25 with a whole 16 megs of RAM and two hard drives: a 202 meg WD Caviar and a HUGE 1.275 meg Conner (that cost me over 400 bucks on big sale at the time!). I had a five disk CD rom (1X) changer and even internet email/newsgroups/fido using a UUCP connection that dialed the ISP five times a day.
We called it Board 25 because of its access number: 252-5252. It was based just outside of Providence, RI in Massachusetts. The BBS was a local call from most of southern RI (thank you permissive dialing!). It had about 500 members and got at it's peak about 700 calls a day.
It covered it's expenses (mostly) and all profit went into equipment upgrades. A true labor of love. Chat was the most popular feature followed by email and the local town forums (moderated by people from the towns).
Alas, we shut it down four years ago today....a victim of AOL and the Internet. It sits collecting dust below a table in my partner's cellar. We will never dispose of it.
Here's to the good old days.......*clink*
oh yeah..so what..we don't want you in our NEIGHBORHOOD based FREE network
so fuck right off, thanks.
are you trolling or not? damn funny still.
sorry...damn lameness filter...but that's great..thanks..I laughed out loud..alone..
Nice work. Props from your friendly-neighbourhood AC.
try ssh, and with today's OVERPOWERED computers..we could have a ball serving all kinds of files...no more long searches through some bbs...let's do it right...post about it here..let's talk about this !
I'm still on fido (2:206/233), though you'll mostly find me in R20. A nice complement to the larger use[less]net.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
With the exception of the missing-from-usenet To: header, of course.
I miss UltraBBS.
:)
For those that don't know it, it was a complete BBS program written by a (then) 16-year-old. A lot of nice sysop features, like "noise log-off" that would simulate line noise (btw, why did line noise on 1200/2400 bps almost always translate into square-root-symbols (alt-241 i think)?) and then kick user off, so pretending that it was not the sysop, but the line noise that had killed the session
Of course, when error correction arrived it was kind of obvious..
Does anyone know what Bob Farmer does these days? I'd have UBBS running via telnet now if it didn't require fossil (and I can't seem to find a decent telnet2fossil sw)..
Yan
I think this line's only filler
As the subject implies, I still do visit a local (Athens, Greece) BBS system that I still love.
[Note: Don't click this link, it will all be -literally- greek to you]. It's called Acrogate (or Acrobase and GATE). It still has some visitors that gather at nights and talk. It still has F2F meetings. It still has messages in its SIGs.
And best of all? It is running Megistos, a complete -and better, in many aspects, rewrite of the Major BBS system, running in Linux. :-) [Do check this out, if you're interested ANW].
Some established BBSs still have their own, loyal people, and they are not there as competitors to the Internet, but rather complement it.
Recently I was helping to empty stuff out of one of our offices, in a pile of old junk I found the purchase orders for two modems circa 1985.
These were Racal Milgo 2400 baud units, with the (then) leading edge MNP4 error correction... looks like we paid more than 700 GBP per modem! (1000 dollars or so each!)
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
That was a network, like Tymnet or something, that sold their after business hours capacity to hobbyists for an affordable price, about 1985-7 or so. With PCPersuit you could expolore the BBS scene in anyone of 35 or so major matropolitan area from any town with an dialup access # w/o running up a huge long distance bill. You connect your 300 baud modem (1200 if your cool) to a local access #, then issue some commands to a dial OUT modem in, say, Atlanta, to connect to a BBS there and viola, your online long distance cheaply, flat rate. Every BBS you find usually had a list of other local BBS's so it was a quickly expanding tree of boards to connect up with.
One time I got a modem in, say, Atlanta to dialup, not a BBS but the PCPersuit access # there, and got dialout in Chicago, connected to the PCP access # in Chicago to connect to Denver, and daisy chained THAT to LA, etc....
Any, for a modest monthy fee it really opened up a huge world of BBS's you could really waste tons of time on...
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Fellow slashdotters,
I have seen many of you write your memories of the BBS time. Please submit them to the history archive at www.textfiles.com also! These memories are worth saving.
My history in brief (from the Finnish BBS scene):
I got my C64 around ~1990, no disk drive, no modem, no nothing. 1992 I got a Hyundai 386SX/20Mhz/2MB/80MB. Soon I got a 2400 bps modem and started my own BBS, which would be open only at night time (our family had only one phone line). I started with Waffle (?), then moved to SuperBBS, later to RemoteAccess.
I quit BBSing finally somewhere in 1995-1996.
Those were the times...
I was active in Charlotte and Asheville, NC, and in Japan (within the US Army).
First pass in Charlotte, I had bought my father a 300 baud modem (couldn't afford the 1200 baud ones available at the time) which he plugged into his Kaypro II... but I got the most use out of it. I was in my early teens, and heavily intrigued with this nifty technology.
For a while, we had to convert binary files to hex (so they were ASCII), then download the ASCII without error checking to convert back to binary again on the other end. It was the worst way imaginable to transmit files.
Eventually, Ward Christensen's (sic?) protocol became available. This is either the precursor or the same protocol that later became known as XModem. This made file transfer significantly easier.
I joined the Army, and moved to Japan. While I was in Japan, I got involved with FidoNet. Our computer club maintained a FidoNet node, communicating mostly with other BBSes in English-speaking Japan.
Eventually, having lost an election to become the system operator of the club's BBS, I started my own using an old Amiga and Citadel. I had tried a variety of BBS software for the Amiga, eventually settling on Citadel because of its emphasis on textual communications over files. I had the most unique BBS in Japan.
Then, I finished my term of service and returned to Charlotte, where I tried to get Machine's Machination running again. I caused a couple of other people to start Citadel BBSes in an area where WWIV seemed to have become the dominant player.
Ah.. WWIV. I spent far too much time on WWIVNet. Eventually, we had a kind of contest where you could vote for various WWIV community members, and see who won at an awards ceremony that was held in some sports bar or something.
I won three awards. The first was for the best TradeWars handle (Fearless Fleeb, flying the Garn Blooie Drekship, establishing Garn Blooie Dreksectors and Garn Blooie Drekports). The next award I won granted me status as the most eloquent user, a title that stunned me. I was asked to give a nice speech, but not having prepared, I did not have much to say (a pity, in retrospect). Most amusingly, however, was finding myself with the third award, voted the most verbose user (where those who asked me to give a speech told me to shut up).
I eventually ran Machine's Machination in Asheville, and for a little while networked with Citanet, but eventually had to take it all down. I wouldn't dream of running one now, with the Internet as it is and all.
But Citadel, from my perspective, had the best user filter available; only those people clever enough to figure out the peculiar user interface could 'join', and those people tended to also be the ones that liked signal over noise. Hence, my BBS of choice.
And so it goes.
I CRUSHED these two BBS systems! Yup, crashed and messed them up so often they went dead for good! Yipee!
Yo, Michael Baker of the E.T. Wilson BBS... I turned your BBS into my bitch! Too bad there was no caller id back then, eh? BTW, my name is Battle Clone!
I ran a two node TriBBS board ( 1 14.4K line, and 1 2400 line). I was on FIDOnet, and used to really make my FIDOnet uplink mad, because I would download my mail using my 2400 baud modem, so that my 14.4K would stay up for logging on. I had so many door games. I usually set one up once a week. The only people who knew about it were the people in my high school, but it was a lot of fun!
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
Im still running one, telnet only mind you, using synchronet 3.10e beta I have set up about 20 door games and have about 350 users... if you all want to play LORD, BRE, FE, Clans, Tradewars and others drop on by (the addressis in the sig)
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I fondly remember running my first bbs...
a Tandy T1000 with 384K of storage and a HD floppy...
The days of fighting with Frontdoor (a mail tossing package for those of you too young to remember. A cross between procmail and a MTA) and Remote Access 1.01. The Days spent glued to my CGA and Hercules monitors creating Ansi screens with TheDraw! and trying to keep people from screwing with the door games (LORD, Overkill (I miss that one), FantasyLand (anyone remember this one?), Lotto and the like.) The days of totally tripping at getting more than 50 messages for the board from the FidoNet feed (Net 391)
Those days are gone now, at least in some regards, I thing the 'Blogs are taking thier place, but the desires are the same. A place to hang out and learn about cool stuff and where "everybody knows your name" (with apologies to Cheers).
BBS's wont come back and indeed the Telnet based ones are slowly dieing as time goes on, but the *IDEA* they represented will live on, be it in 'Blogs or ListServs or simply 'Underground' (I use this in the sense we used it back in the pre 1992 days) sites that offer the sense of comradarie (sp?) that people need.
Tadghe
Sysop The Cyberfreedom Project (1994-1997) (501/513)
Sysop Dr StrangeBrew's Tavern (1991-1994) (501)
Sysop EDU2000/Gateway 2000 (1993-1994) (501)
Co-Sysop Godzilla's Tree (1992-1993) (501)
Bugs Bunny was right.
started off w/300 baud. use to visit a BBS which had text based Godzilla v. Bambi. Before using the site, had to watch it. kinda of a splash screen, i guess. took about 5 minutes to complete. site wasn't meant for 300 baud. went to a computer show. got a ruler from hayes advertising their new modem with: Speed Limit 2400 on it. done up like a road sign. funny, eh?
I spent a summer taking courses at RPI's High School Summer Program in '87. In the Assembly Language program, we had to talk to an ancient DEC machine with a 50 bps paper TTY! AND type in the bootstrap program every time we powered the system on. Until we did that, we'd be unable to read our 8" floppy disks!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I started my first BBS on a Tandy Color Computer with a 300 baud modem. I wrote my own BBS software in BASIC.
Later updated the BBS to a Tandy Color computer 3 with 256 RAM and a 20 Meg Hard drive.
The system ran under OS9 (a UNIX like operating system).
Which let me run my own programs in a Mac like GUI and my BBS ran as a back gound task.
I thought it was cool that my 2Mhz Color Computer smoked the IBM clones running windows at 16Mhz and 4 times the RAM......
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
Hmm... I believe 300 baud/bps is 30 cps.... you have 10 bits per character. (start & stop bits)
As for your 'steady stream of characters'.... uhh...that's irrelevant. You don't wait on rts/cts unless either end is saturated.. and even then, they are plenty fast enough not to interfere. Using HW flow control does not slow down your connection. The modem would drop CTS to the computer when it's buffers are full, and can no longer accept bytes from the computer.. and would raise it again when it's ready.
The modem can keep up with your typing, to be sure.
I believe it's general to assume the average word is 4 characters.... so 30cps/4=7.5wps.... * 60 seconds is 450 WPM. That sounds high.. someone find a flaw in my math? Looks right to me though...
So you say don't even really touch-type, and you can type 450 words per minute? I don't think so.
I remeber when I got the upgrade. Downloading porn went from an all day event to just around a half an hour. Yippy!!!
Here's my karma whoring troll for the day...
A Baud is not a Bit. You don't have a 9600 Baud modem.. you have a 9600bps modem, operating at propbably 2400 baud.
The maximum theoretical baud rate on a phone line is about 3200 baud or so.. I'm not positive what's used for each bps rate.
I believe 28.8k modems use 9bits per baud... making the line 3200 baud...
96kbps modems use 4 bits/baud...
If this guy wants to know hear good BBS stories, he should talk to the users of that board.
Those were the fun days, my first modem was a 300 baud, you never knew if the BBS was gonna kick you off for being too slow.
I had to save to upgrade to a 1200 baud. It was even more difficult because owned a Tandy 1000 EX. It was a funky PC-XT clone that had a "turbo" mode--7.16 MHZ.
I remember buying Computer Shoppers in the days when they about an inch and a half thick and had Spectrum, Timex sinclair and Amiga sections inside, as well as BBS phone numbers in the back. This was a good starting place for picking up numbers, because they also listed supported baud rates like: 3/12/24/96 etc.
Thats when you knew the sysops and would play dungeons and dragons with them and other BBS users on weekends, and tradewars and other "doors" games on the boards the rest of the week.
Sigh, the web just isn't the same.
RTS/CTS were not even used on many 300 baud modems.. there was no need.
RTS/CTS became popular as people started to use higher serial speeds than modem speeds... (using 56k port speeds for 14.4k modems, etc..)
I remember spammers.
Dear friends,
My name in David Rhodes. In September 1988 my car was repossessed, and I was forced into bankruptcy, blah blah blah... but today I am living debt-free and building a million dollar house on the beach, all thanks to this great money making system. You too can enjoy such wealth for an initial investment of just five dollars. Just send $1 to each person on this list....
It's funny, I got that spam so many times I almost remember it word for word. But we didn't call it spam back then. Actually back then it was kinda amusing that people were stupid enough to fall for that kind of scam. Nowadays it's just annoying.
Anyone remember ByteBrothers? Not the Seattle company that makes security products, but the ILink discussion group that got so filthy and silly (very funny too!) that ILink pulled the plug! They started LuciferNet to keep it going...eventually BB made it onto Usenet. Jimmy Pearson, Goddess rest his soul...when he died of Cancer nothing was the same.
The old BBS discussion groups seemed to have a lot more civility, more friendliness, than anything that replaced it on the Internet, AOHell or IRC. Maybe it was because most of us were talking to our neighbors, and face-to-face meetings were more part of the scene.
Mysteria is still alive and kicking...reachable via Telnet. Phil Hansford is a national treasure. Treat his board well.
BBSen...god I miss those days...
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I ran a few ChicagoLand BBS systems... All using renegade, some even using the "newest and greatest" bbs software called iNiQUiTY.. some canuk coded it, it was halfway decent for what it was... Boards I ran : UAIOE, Damage iNC., Sub Atomic Slime 708 area codes mostly I was also an active member on : Ripco, Lunatic Phringe, (GinsuTalk chat BBS) Moo 'n' oink, Poison pen Anyone from around that area? it'd be great to hear from someone..
There are still hundreds of BBSes all around the world with thousands of users. I have my own BBS, Down The Rabbit Hole BBS (telnet://dtrh.cjb.net) and there are still many companies making door games.
We are not dead, we just moved to telnet. Unlike many websites, we don't need 30,000 users to live.
FIDO.NET, DOVE.NEt, HELL.NET, MICRO.NET, there are still many inter-bbs message networks out there. Chatting with hundreds of users all arounf the world, yeah baby! Sure, the 36,000 BBSes in the US, at his peak in the early 90s, are over, but we're NOT DEAD!
All Hail Discordia. Hail Eris. Fnord.
I think slash should auto-convert URLs to hyperlinks and *fetch the page and follow redirects* to give the domain name.
Not to mention conning sweet teenage girls to have sex with them in exchange for being able to moderate a message area. I think the warez sysops were the best, those guys just wanted warez.. and maybe weed. Much more noble pursuits than manipulating people.
not consistently. you're forgetting physics.
people type faster when they're in the middle of words. basically, humans don't stream text at a fixed rate. that beating the 30 cps rate happens when, for example, you do things like hitting a few characters in a row which are close to each other.
there is, of course, one exception: holding down the space bar. centered sigs were incredibly difficult in 300 baud. without common support for the HT character. but I digress.
also, as I said, I don't hunt and peck. I know where all the letters are on the keyboard. it's just that I don't always use all my fingers, especially for stuff near the middle of the keyboard. I touchtype badly would be the most accurate way to describe it.
finally, there is indeed something wrong with your math. the average word is not four characters. much higher. let's see... one of my recent essays has 1,086 words, and counting spaces and punctuation (remember, modems have to transfer those too), totals to 6,546 characters. A little division gives 6.0276243094 characters per word. You're right in a sense though; that still gives 300 WPM, and I don't type that fast - not sustained. But the reason why you don't is because you... take breaks.
4 characters per word would make "the" an average length word though. Huh.
As for HW flow control: Ever actually do any RS-232C programming in the '80s? Like, for example, writing a terminal program? I did. (OK, it was primitive; it didn't have any support for XModem or Punter, just text; but it did have a really badass dialer which I hand-coded to match my modem's exact timing to get more redials than everybody else. one sysop told me once that he could tell it was me on the line, 'cause the OH light just flickered for a brief moment before my call came in. I had to re-code it when I upgraded modems though. :)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Yeah.. I have done quite a bit of rs232 programming, both past and present.
You can change your calculations by a character or two.. I just chose 4 off some web page.. I don't know what the 'standard' is.. but it's not far off.
I still doubt you can type fast enough that the only thing slowing you down is the 300 baud modem... that's my point.
So... what's your point about HW flow control? You talk about how you are some kind of expert because you wrote some terminal program.. but what's your point?
RTS/CTS is not going to slow a 300 baud modem down enough so you can type faster than it can eat.
Yes.. for a few characters in a row, you MAY exceed 300bps.....but that's still not 'typing faster than the modem'. You may experience a delay while waiting for the remote echo from whatever software you are using.. so you might think you are going 'faster' than the modem.. but you aren't.. you're just waiting for processing & return on the other end.
>I believe it's general to assume the average word is 4 characters
Thinking back to seventh grade typing class and the few typing tests I took at temp agencies before finding a real job, the "standard" for a "word" is five characters.
I was last clocked at 130wpm (after correcting for three errors over a five-minute sustained transcription of data) at a temp agency in Austin in the late '80's, and had the testers and assorted staff of the agency standing watching open mouthed. I've only met a handful of people consistently faster than me, and even those that are faster have been 10-20wpm faster, TOPS.
Now you wanna tell me that someone is typing consistently over 400 wpm without significant errors?
My next paycheck says they're full of shit.
-l
Aww, gee fish, you mean you miss the rrRRRrRRrRoCK!?
Anyone remember the TProBSS software (Apple)? Certain versions had an integrated online RPG where you could fight other users...? Unlike other system's online games (doors?) it was completly intgrated into the entire system (to create a new account, you created a new charater)...
;)
This was way better then Everquest!
ISCABBS (telnet bbs.isca.uiowa.edu), one of the first Internet-based bbs systems, is over ten years old, still alive, and fairly healthy. At its peak in the mid-90s, it often had close to 2000 users online at any given time. It can still pull a few hundred when it's busy. It was the original DOC (Dave's Own Citadel) version of Citadel, and is fairly robust. The Citadel system of "X" messages (private messaging) and public forums is still the best online *community* form i've seen.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
Anybody else remember this religious war?
BTW, I was firmly on the Modem7 side of this one...
This page accidentally left blank
Oh wow, I remember those!
Those Gigis would indeed be horrendous for looking at JPEGs. They only had 8 colors I think, and the color resolution was less than the pixel resolution (i.e. every "on" pixel in groups of 8 or 12 (or something like that) had to all be the same color).
They were neat in other ways, though. They were actually full-blown microcomputers, not just terminals. (This was pretty much necessary due to the complexity of Regis, the graphics language thingie.) The ones I used had their own BASIC interpreters, and they could execute code locally. One thing I always wanted to do was download code from the host computer (a PDP11/34 in my case) to the "terminal" so that a program could execute locally, in parallel to the host. This would have considerably improved my games. It would have also been great for playing pranks on people (which was always desirable), much like macro viruses these days. ;-)
Alas, I never figured out a way to do it. :(
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
http://www.grnet.com/cyber/
or
telnet:grnet.com
or
(616) 454-4040 / (616) 454-7800
Family online entertainment since 1989. We're still the most populated system I'm aware of.
We started providing internet service back around 1993-94.
We use Galacticomm Worldgoup 3.0 for our main machine, and some 2.(something) licenses for some of our games.
What's this Submit thingy do?
I got into the BBS thing in the later part of the 80's. For almost a decade the majority of my personal life revolved around those I found worthy on Inferno BBS, in San Jose, California. I'm not ashamed to say that I was thrilled to be able to dial into that BBS at 300 baud. I'm not ashamed to say that for so many years that BBS was the center of my life. And I'm not ashamed to say that: THAT BBS cured me of extreme clinical shyness, furthered my interest in computers, and finally later in life was THE reason I decided to make the internet my career.
Inferno became my home inside my home, and when people I was too shy to meet had patience with me, I began to feel like I had a place in society..a local society. The internet will NEVER feel like that, and sometimes I long for those times when I could log into chat, or visit the the message boards. Here would be local, interesting people talking about themselves and their daily lives. Making jokes. Posting interesting news. Acting the clown in chat. Later on, as we grew up, we partied, married, divorced and had a grand ole' time. And I really miss that close knit type of society.
telnet://villagebbs.dhs.org
I'd like to remind everyone that the Village BBs is still up and running at telnet://villagebbs.dhs.org ! woooo!!
telnet://villagebbs.dhs.org
funk
aka Nittany Lion from 813
telnet://villagebbs.dhs.org
--- rapper/producer/bachelorette party stripper
Wally! Hugz, man!
--
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