BBS Documentary Starting To Film

Jason Scott writes "Well, the BBS Documentary, after years of research and 4 months of pre-production, is set to film starting the first week in January. Once the filming starts, it's a solid year or more of interviews, travel, and hopefully some great footage of some very unique and interesting people. I'd like to thank Slashdot for the burst of letters and support, and I really appeciate the contacts they've helped me make with an amazing spectrum of folks to interview. The list is not complete, but I've so far gotten a great list of interviewees who helped make the Dial-Up BBS what it is in history (and today, I rush to add). Of course, the research is never done, and I encourage people to check out the BBS Software List and the timeline to help me flesh them out even more."

Comments

Long live Telegard!

[reaper20]

..because TAG-clones ruled 313 ... :)

Re:Long live Telegard!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah except Telegard was based on WWIV. WWIV begat telegard, Telegard begat renegade, and renegade was a whore and had about a dozen bastard childred.. Vision, Celerity, Oblivion (aka OBVX) to name a few.

Re:Long live Telegard!

[Chester K]

because TAG-clones ruled 313 ... :)

TAG? Ugh... 517 had a couple TAG boards, but by and large it was owned by Renegade and its various cousins. The few larger, multiline boards generally ran Synchronet or Major BBS.

Re:Long live Telegard!

[Anonymous Coward]

and renegade was a whore and had about a dozen bastard childred.. Vision, Celerity, Oblivion (aka OBVX)

I thought it was OBV/2?

Re:Long live Telegard!

[JabberWokky]

Depends on the era. I think it was c-net (the Amiga client) that ruled 407 for awhile - and also WWIV for awhile, Searchlight, and Renegade towards the end before I left the community. Early on (circa 1981), they were all custom built. At least three Apple ][ BBSes in the 407 area all were based on the same code, a few hundred lines of GOSUB routines (remember, Apple ][ had a *very* good Basic in ROM), and all menus, functions, etc were hardcoded.

I still like how Searchlight worked - redirect BIOS and DOS display routines (basically stdout), and emulate color changes and positioning using ANSI. Any program that used BIOS calls for i/o could run under it - in fact the core BBS program itself was just a regular program with no modem handling routines whatsoever - you just loaded the TSR, and told an init style program what to use as the inital login program.

I SysOped a half dozen boards from 1981 to 1993. I even got paid for two of them, and did many installs and configurations, some for friends, some as consulting work. My Dad got me into it - he was logging into some system via TeleNet back at the very end of the 70s for something having to do with Scientific Products. The community was still mostly Ham types who could soldier, and one threw a big BBQ twice a year at his small farm. One party he unveiled his new creation - one of the first BBSes in the area.

Ironically, I'd like to point out that at one of those parties somebody showed off a horribly slow but fun game that had you running around a 3D maze and shooting stick figures (the crosshair was always in the middle of the screen, and I believe that the stick figure moved back and forth). Some people still think Wolfenstein 3D was the first FPS. :)

--
Evan

Re:Long live Telegard!

[saihung]

Yeah, and one of the nice by-products of Searchlight's display system was that if you tried to use a multi-DOS program on your brand-new NEC Powermate 286/10, someone logged into the BBS would see everything that you did in your other DOS shell. Of course, back then it was considered acceptable behavior to run a BBS only at night, so it didn't really affect my usage ;)

Re:Long live Telegard!

[Saige]

For the longest time TAG had the overwhelming presence in the 517 area code. It was probably '91 or so that Renegade really started to show up. I found it disappointing, because I preferred TAG boards to Renegade - perhaps that was just because I associated Renegade with annoying kiddies trying to run 'Elite' boards and running them for seemingly two purposes - to talk about how cool GWAR was and playing LORD.

*sigh* - I was a regular user on The Gamer's Forum and Abacus... such memories...

Re:Long live Telegard!

[bdowne01]

same here. I ran a TAG board from 91-95 in 313, and i found that if you put at least a little effort into it, it could be made to look as good, if not better than renegade. I also felt more solid on TAG than renegade (tried switching at one point). ahhh...those were the days: when 14.4 modems were $299.

Re:Long live Telegard!

[Nemesis][]

JabberWokky wrote: I still like how Searchlight worked - redirect BIOS and DOS display routines (basically stdout), and emulate color changes and positioning using ANSI. Any program that used BIOS calls for i/o could run under it - in fact the core BBS program itself was just a regular program with no modem handling routines whatsoever - you just loaded the TSR, and told an init style program what to use as the inital login program.

Since we're on the subject of Telegard and how things work... I remember hacking the hell out of Telegard; the ANSI screens were too friggin SLOW (it used ansi.sys/ansi.com (if anyone remembers that from PC Mag..) for drawing. So, what does a good geek do? That's right, he codes his own! I wrote my own ansi parser (ok, NOT ansi music but alas...) that did direct screen writes w/o going thru the bios. Boy did that thing FLY; over 300% faster displaying nice animations and 20-150% faster on "flat" ANSI (just colors) on the local console. But I wasn't happy; it was still slow for the end user! Anyone remember the screen protocol AVATAR? That's right! On-the-fly ANSI->AVATAR conversion! Even the RLE (^Y[char to repeat][byte for times to repeat]) part of the protocol! Talk about SCREAMING at 1200 or 2400 w/MNP5 compression!

Sigh,

Those days were fun!

Obviously the only rational solution to your problem is suicide.

Re:Long live Telegard!

[DerekLyons]

Depends on the era. I think it was c-net (the Amiga client) that ruled 407 for awhile -

The era and area I should think.. I'd wager that most localities ended up with common software across BBS's because of the simplicity of getting help (support). FWIW in what's now 360, PC-BOARD dominated from 89-95 with a strong showing of RBBS-PC in second place.

Re:Long live Telegard!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not forget the dearth of Atari BBS's. The BBS was the lifeblood of Atari computers from at least 1979 when Atari offered their first mass market home modem.
The ATASCII character set was introduced at the same time. ATASCII is the ASCII character set plus 128 more special Atari characters that included building blocks of graphics and animated motion.
There are a good number of ATASCII artists who made great online movies using this character set and I believe www.atari.org has links to where to view them.
Oh and lastly - Atari online chat boards. With an Atari computer, and seven modems & phone lines, up to eight people could chat to each other from anywhere in the country (7 users + SysOp). ATASCII was a lot of fun on those chat systems. Can you imagine how IRC would be like if everyone could control where the cursor could go on the screen along with each message they typed? When people figured it out they were changing what the people above them said. Hehe.

Re:Long live Telegard!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or checkout a great BBS Modding group by the name WOE -> www.wasted.nu

Re:Long live Telegard!

[Sabby]

That was because TAG was made here in the 313. TAG was better than Telegard in many ways, in the early days, back when Carl Mueller ran it. But, TAG had a tremendous problem of using .CHN files (a Turbo Pascal artifact where your "currently unused" routines were stored on disk, and only loaded when needed). Swapping to .CHN files was much slower than Telegard's "Always in memory" model, since Telegard ran with the assumption that the SysOp would have more than 64k free memory. (Yes, 64k. TAG used a .COM file then.)

When Eric Oman started working on Telegard, he was a spitfire of energy. Amazing, just amazing. It was almost like an open source project: "Hey, Eric, can you add THIS new feature?" Poof. It would be there. (Surprised the hell out of me when I found out he was only about 12 or 13 at the time...) I got to be one of his Beta sites, and got to play with the source code (nothing of mine of import is in the BBS anymore).

I was out of BBSs by the time Tim Strike took over Telegard again, but it definitely looked like a step in the right direction, but by that time Cott Lang got ahold of the source code that a buddy of mine took from my disk box and posted on a lot of BBSs. (He was trying to hurt Telegard, for some odd reason.)

This story and more amusing Telegard nostalgia is available on e2: I miss BBSs, Telegard.

Oh. And wow. I just checked the Timeline of the article above. And um. Wow. Martin Pollard lost it back then. I knew he had "retired" from the programming of Telegard, but I never did catch his "farewell" letter - I was too busy in college at the time. Check it out: Martin says "goodbye"

donations

[elizard2k]

please donate your 2400 baud modem now to help out this cause :)

pretty good that they're making this documentary, it'll help some people (such as myself) learn of what the old days were like .. that is, of course, hoping they do a good job of it ..

Re:donations

[anacron]

I actually remember the day I wanted to upgrade the modem on my BBS from a 24oo to a 14.4. I remember fondly going to CompUSA, plunking down $200, and spending 2 hours flipping DIP switches and fixing Telix so it would all work. WWIV was pretty relaxed about the new modem thing, but I do remember getting G-modem (or was it H-modem) to work properly took some time.

Now it's just $10 bucks, and a quick PCI port install. Man I miss the good old days -- the days when it actually took some (not much) skill to run a computer.

My BBS ran on a 386/sx (16mhz) with 2MB of memory and a 120MB hard drive. I think with all my downloads, messages and such I still had nearly 60MB free. I thought 120 megs was impossibly huge. I still have the disk image burned onto a CD. It's fun going through messages that are 8 years old and remembering the good times.

.anacron

Re:donations

[elizard2k]

yea .. i wish it took skills to operate computers

at least i wish my job involved people who have some BASICE skills .. and a bit of common sense
but that's too much to wish for .. i guess i'll just go back to wishing they made stronger tylenol

Re:donations

[commodoresloat]

2400 baud!! I remember how fast that looked the first time I saw a 2400 baud modem. Those lines just screamed across the screen!!! (one line at a time that is). I still have my 1200 baud hayes somewhere... Talk about slow. Imagine, downloading pr0n at 1200 baud, on a Mac Plus!! I never downloaded an entire picture on that thing; I would always get bored halfway through and play Daleks instead.....

Re:donations

[ergo98]

I have a US Robotics 9600 HST in the junk pile downstairs that I'd happily donate. It could connect at 9600bps with another US Robotics modem using the HST proprietary protocol, but connected at 2400 with all others. Because of this, and the relative popularity of USR, most big BBS' had separate dial-in lines for HST modem users to get super-quantum speed.

Re:donations

[Anonymous Coward]

My BBS ran on an 8088 with (all) 640K of RAM. Since I ran WWIV 3.21d, It didn't require the whole 640K to run, so I made about 300K of the RAM into a disk cache. That sped up accesses to the 5 meg hard drive.

1200 baud modem, of course. I was cheap.

Re:donations

[gpinzone]

I can beat that :)

I remember going from an Atari 300 baud acoustic modem to a US Robotics 2400 baud courier modem. The acoustic modem was a lot like the ones in used as props in movies and TV. You had to plunk the telephone handset down on a pair of rubber gaskets. The "answer" and "originate" modes were controlled by a hard switch. Ironically, the cable needed to connect an RS-232 device to the Atari 850 interface was a 25-to-9 pin cable, which was hard to find in those days.

I first found out about BBSes from a magazine. Before that, I thought the only online worlds were Compuserve, the Source, Delphi, and the WSJ. My Atari 800 computer came with the world's crappiest terminal program ever made: Telelink. Thank God some local SYSOP took mercy on my soul and snail-mailed me a copy of Atarimodem. ATASCII graphics! Xmodem upload/downloading! W0007!

I paid $400 for the 2400 baud Courier which was considered a steal in those days.

Re:donations

[jwhyche]

I remember plunking down 120 bucks on a packard bell 2400 baud modem. Yeah, I know thier computers sucked but that modem was built like a tank. I could download a meg in 1 hour. Had a Amiga 500, 3 meg of RAM, and a 40 meg harddrive, thought I was hot shit....

Re:donations

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember upgrading from my old VenTel 300 baud modem (non-acoustic coupler type, fortunately) to a Hayes 1200 baud modem. Man was that a giant step. That thing could almost keep up with the rate of my typing!

First transatlantic phone call

[rde]

At the risk of turning your BBS history into a telephony history, I'd include the first translantic phone call (Virginia->Paris, 1915) on any list of communication milestones.
Oh, and I'm getting no route to http://software.hostnet.net/

That reminds me..

[zcat_NZ]

I did finally manage to track down the Waikato BBS list that I used to maintain.. in google groups! And then I suddenly realised that as well as 20 years of usenet, google has archived at least a few years of the usenet-gated fido groups and I managed to track down a few other Fido articles and discussions that I thought had gone forever..

google is pretty damn useful sometimes..

Re:That reminds me..

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't remember the name of the BBS I used years ago, but Google helped remind me. Taranaki's Midnight Express closed last year. It was fun.

Re:That reminds me..

[Anonymous Coward]

And to add to these lists, I still have sitting in my desk draw the Wellington BBS list, printed from my 9pin dot matrix ;) And in good style, username and passwords written in biro beside each listing!

Re:That reminds me..

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, shut up and listen. I'm screaming. Can you hear me?

OK, no? I'll continue screaming incase you haven't read this message yet (I live in Newtown)

LORD

[Traxton1]

A special section of the movie should be dedicated to Legend of the Red Dragon. I know that's what kept many friends and I on BBSes away from the internet back in it's developmental stage.

Re:LORD

[hysma]

Amen! I can recall getting up early before school to log in first thing in the morning to play... and that BBS also brought me my first email address -- @plywood.victoria.bc.ca which was extremely cool at the time since friends at other Universities could send me email :)

Re:LORD

[Lord of Caustic Soda]

What about BRE? Can't remember the ammount of time I've spent playing the damn thing.

And I wonder who still have those ANSI graphics and animation lying around on a hard drive....

Re:LORD

[ErisDiscord]

No Way!!

Trade Wars 2002 was, and is, the coolest door game ever. Nothing beats blowing the shit out of a little Scout Marauder with your Corporate Flagship. Ahh, those were the good old days, when MM0G was 2 guys on a BBS mothing each other's quasar cannons...

*sigh*

M

Re:LORD

[motardo]

LORD is still around, and still in development at http://lord.lordlegacy.org. And guess what? It's being ported to linux!!! :D

-motardo

Re:LORD

[motardo]

Oh yeah, there's also going to be native Win32 and OS/2 ports also (but who uses OS/2 anymore?)

-motardo

Re:LORD

[Anonymous Coward]

If you would like to see how I got lord and dosemu to play nicely together take a look at lord.linuxcoffee.com

Jack

Re:LORD

[Saige]

TW2002? I would have to disagree... sure TW2002 had more features, but I always felt the simplicity of Trade Wars 1000 made for a better game. That, and I used to have so much fun when there would be a 99% sale on planets when logging in, and go around making planets until the max number was reached... then finding ones hidden in dead end sectors months later with production up to high levels and fighters sitting and waiting...

Though the scramble to be the first to log on after maintenance run to defeat the Cabal was a bit obnoxious.

(I also wish I could find a copy of Power Struggle...)

BBS door game

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't remember the title of this game, but the premise was you're a warrior of some kind, outfitted with your standard fare of weapons and armor, but the places you could go to gain gold and exp. was in a dungeon where taking five steps took you to a set of stairs, leaving you with the option to go back to town (cuz the number of fights you're allowed per day is used up) or to continue and fight progressively more difficult monsters (with stairs appearing something like ten steps afterwards). There was also a 'Joust' option where you could find opponents of certain rankings (came in above, equal, or below). It kinda played like LORD tho I'm sure it's not. Alas, games like this will probably fall into obscurity as everyone rushes to buy the newest eye-candy game that's released.

Re:BBS door game

[zcat_NZ]

That sounds like a pretty good description of LORD to me, although there were some other very similar games about too. LORD was really addictive with most BBS users, although I can't understand why because it was to me very simple and repetitive. One of the local bbs'es (TooNTowN) even imposed a ratio; you had to post a few reasonably intelligent messages (no "first post!"'s allowed) before you got access to the door games because people were calling to play LORD all day and nothing else.

There was also a similar game (written by the same people iirc) set in a lunatic asylum. You had to fight the other inmates and eventually guess the code on the door to escape.

And then there was "Food Fight" and "Booger Flick" and about a million other really lame games, mostly written in BASIC because speed didn't matter when you're playing over a 2400 baud modem.

I helped set up the second BBS in Hamilton (it was supposed to be the first, but someone else beat us to it by about a week!). We got some help from a posh private school, so we had a 286 with a -huge- (40M) harddrive and a -very fast- (2400 baud) modem to run it on. There wasn't a great choice of software to use back then either; I can't remember what we used, that was a long time ago. Much later I ran my own BBS using Maximus for a few years and maintained the local BBS list. For a while I ran something under Linux too, wrote my own fido-to-usenet gateway, and gave up the scene a little while after when "the scene" had become just three fairly lame systems. (I admit.. my BBS was fairly lame too :)

I should post anonymously because this is a content-free rant and everyone will realise how OLD I am now.. but I won't.. go on, mod me down damn you!! :)

Re:BBS door game

[Torinaga-Sama]

It sounds like "Legend of the Red Dragon" true, but the game you are thinking of is called "USURPER". It had more classes and weapons than "LotRD", as well as the Dungeon where you could select your level of difficulty (instead of the forest in "LotRD" where you pretty much got whatever the game threw at you). It was also much more difficult.

It was my favorite door game second only to "Tradewars" which could get gruesome, nasty and an extreme amount of fun with the right crowd.

Re:BBS door game

[bdowne01]

Ah yes...Tradewars 2002. And back then, did we really think we'd be talking about it on the brink of 2002?? :)

That truly was an amazing game for it's time. Given the facts that they could only use ANSI art, and everything had to be done remotely it was an in-depth game, and just plain fun. Man..I miss it!

Re:BBS door game

[Torinaga-Sama]

I just discovered that Tradewars is alive and well.

http://www.tradewars.org/

I even found a place to play.

http://www.telery.com/

My goodness. There goes my weekend of converting my box from Red Hat to Debian.

Textfiles...

[Anonymous Coward]

I always found this website good in reminding me of 'the old days'...

SOFTWARE.BBSDOCUMENTARY.COM, not HOSTNET.NET

[Jason Scott]

Sorry, I'm a moron. I meant software.bbsdocumentary.com and not hostnet.net. Just goes to show that 5 previews is STILL not enough.

Re:SOFTWARE.BBSDOCUMENTARY.COM, not HOSTNET.NET

[sigsegv_11]

Thanks for the clear-up. I thought it had already been slashdotted. :) -Dave

Re:SOFTWARE.BBSDOCUMENTARY.COM, not HOSTNET.NET

[mESSDan]

What, no Obv/2 software? In my last days of BBSing, most of the boards I was on were obv/2, of course, they were mostly art scene boards, but nevertheless, it should be listed. It was last in development by Murray Stokely (Shivan Bastard), the last I heard he works at cdrom.com for walnut creek.

Actually, as I wrote this I went a did a search on google for obv/2 bbs and found that as of 01/2000 it was still under active development. Here's the link.

Obv/2 came with some awesome default setups, all drawn by the main art scene groups, mainly Acid (Lord Jazz was awesome), and Ice.

Just a little history.

Re:SOFTWARE.BBSDOCUMENTARY.COM, not HOSTNET.NET

[Anonymous Coward]

hehe, and you get 4 karma points for that mistake. Cool.

BBS Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone remember RoboBBS? It was a fully VGA gui based bbs that ran on DOS. You could even preview pictures before you downloaded them.. It would convert the pic into a B/W jpeg so it wasn't even that bad on a 2400bps modem. Now pointing and clicking online is just mainstream.

PPE and other coders..

[Anonymous Coward]

Props to those who spent their time making silly scripting code that made the whole BBS experience a blast!
Especially to Brutal P. Coders (Russia) and PWA (USA) and DOD (Russia).
I miss those times.. ehhh :(

Re:BBS Internet

[sigsegv_11]

Yeah, but IIRC, you had to download a special client for it. You couldn't just dial in with any old terminal program. That's why it never went mainstream. I remember it being kind of a pain in the ass, too. I tried it once.. In order to test it, I had to get one of my friends to download the client, then dial in.. and if something went wrong, I'd have to call back and tell him to dial again.. It was just too much of a hassle.

On a somewhat unrelated (to this thread) note, I find it odd that they didn't have much (or any) information on the most popular BBS software. I remember WWIV, MajorBBS, and Renegade being pretty popular, at least around here.

-Dave

RBBS-PC, anyone?

[aussersterne]

I ran my BBS with RBBS-PC and was into it enough to have hacked up the source pretty good. I even shelled out for QuickBasic so that I could compile my modified versions.

By the late versions, RBBS-PC was so configurable and scriptable... add to that the available source code, and my BBS looked like no other, had a completely unique interface and did things like automatic virus scanning and conversion of uploads into multiple compression formats. Not like a lot of those WWIV systems which were all identical.

Come to think of it, RBBS-PC was really my first introduction to the fundamental concepts of open source. I don't even know if it was "open source" by modern standards, but having the source available allowed me to do my own thing and spend hours joyously hacking at little things I wanted to modify.

Re:RBBS-PC, anyone?

[Lumpy]

I still have my origional manual and floppies of RBBS. Gotta love any BBS that was written in BASIC!

it was a blast, I think I had more fun runn ing the BBS (I was one of those advanced BBS's I had 2 2400Modems and 2 legal phonelines. Basically, I was pretty sucessful at the subscription system. You paid to get access to the neat stuff, Doors and the bulk of the downloads, and double the amount of time per day to be online.

I just wish I was able to get my copy of Xenix running with a decent bbs (I tried to port RBBS over to Xenix.) then I could have offered internet email to my users....via UUCP of course. Oh well.

Re:RBBS-PC, anyone?

[wolruf]

I was a frequent user of RBBS running in DOS session within OS/2 because of multitasking. RBBS was really great !

BBS's only?

[snake_dad]

The software I remember best from that time is the stuff I used to communicate with bbs's, in my days as a point. Software like Frontdoor, fmail, gecho, GoldED, and the like.

But maybe that would be more appropriate for a documentary on the history of fidonet, even though most bbs's in the Netherlands were(are?) a part of Fidonet, and all its clones. In those days there was a new network every month, because there was yet another person who had a fight with the fidonet "officials".

I also remember that Quarterdeck Desqview/386 was very important for many bbs's. Real multitasking waaay before windows nt :-)

Re:BBS's only?

[MadCat]

Heh I ran a 2 line BBS in the Netherlands in '95 - got my ass kicked off FIDO too for some reason or other. Not that it mattered since I had another 7 networks I was exchanging mail with.

Desqview never got on my machines, first I ran on OS/2, later on I went to 2 computers, and as of late I've had the urge to re-start the thing but then on Linux. Lord knows what could happen :)

Re:BBS's only?

[rjch]

It's funny... OS/2 ran a number of multi-line BBS's in Victoria, Australia. I've got *many* memories of running my BBS... first running my own FTS mail network, then joining Fidonet... becoming a hub, then being elected N632C... then being involved in the Australian BBS Registry as Victorian Co-ordinator...

I was always a stirrer - particularly over the geographical net rule, which I saw no logic to in Australia, and getting myself into *real* trouble by publishing a FidoNews article proposing the abandonment of the rule just after the disasterous reorganisation of Germany's Fido networks...

Seeing FidoNet as it is today is somewhat depressing... last time I saw a nodelist, N632 had gone... :-( Melbourne, which used to have 5 networks was down to two, both with less than 10 nodes.

Re:BBS's only?

[Jonny Ringo]

It seemed to me that the most common bbs systems being used in 206 were "Renegade" and "Wildcat".

Which I found weird that there was no info on them on the site. They were on the list, but they just didn't have any back ground info

Re:BBS's only?

[MadCat]

I'm still not quite sure what caused me to get booted off FIDO - I think they weren't too happy with my other networks (h/p/a/v/c like shit) and decided that I oughta go.

Then again my boss never notified me, just cut the whole feed off. Which sorta blew since at that time I was also a hub to 20 nodes (ISDN line bay-beh, back in those days I could suck down all of FIDO in 5 minutes). Oh well.

I think if I'm going to re-do the BBS it'll basically be a community thing, probably a MUD attached to it or some door games. Citadel/UX comes to mind as the software of choice :)

(as long as it runs on OpenBSD)

Too much centered text

[selkirk]

There is just way way way to much centered text on that BBS Documentary website. Long tracts of centered text are completely unreadable. It sounded interesting, but I could only read about 2 lines of centered text before giving up.

Re:Too much centered text

[Jason Scott]

If you use the text-browser Lynx to browse the BBS Documentary site, the centering goes away. And if the idea of a text-based web-browser isn't of interest to you, you probably wouldn't have liked the documentary anyway.

Brian's BBS

[upt1me]

I use to run TriBBS, a DOS shareware bbs software package.

Want a new car for free?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Our car-manufacturing company has developed a new revolutionary business model for making cars.

We give away the cars for free and then we sell services for those cars! If you want to we can clean your car, wax it or you can use some of our other services.

We get cash from a couple of VC's, the rest of them simple don't "get it". If we need more we just call "the suits".

Re:Want a new car for free?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can copy those cars for a thousandth of a cent then you may have something there, buddy!

Re:BBS Internet

[Jason Scott]

There's certainly some information on those packages, in both the timeline and software information sections:

http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/MSDOS/WWI V/
http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/MSDOS/MAJ OR BBS/
http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/MSDOS/REN EG ADE/

I admit that sections themselves are thin, but this has been because my biggest concerns have been retrieving information on more more obscure BBS packages, for example those that predate the Internet. I'll go by and flesh out these sets of you.

Looking for info

[Com2Kid]

Used to be in the seattle/puget sound area there was an art group headed up by a BBS called Rat City.

They produced some nice music and artwork, but I cannot find but an old telephone number as a trace of them on the net.

Anybody else still remember this highly obscure BBS? Insane stuff at times

Maximus forever

[Anonymous Coward]

Long live BBS - The cradle of all modern hackers :) special hello to all 2:5020

Anyone use Mono BBS?

[mccalli]

When I was at Lancaster University between 1990 and 1992, the BBS to be seen using was Mono.

Still going strong - grab your telnet client and have a look, or go here to connect via a Java client.

Cheers,
Ian

Remember Excalibur?

[alsta]

Anybody remember the Excalibur BBS system? The sysops were promised a 32-bit version from Excalibur Communications but never got one. I don't remember what the last release was though. Anyway, for those that don't remember Excalibur, it ran on Windows. It was a gui BBS system with a gui client. You never really typed anything to navigate in menus. Some sysops made a whole page a big gif picture. Took forever to load the damn thing. Anyway, Excalibur Communications went out of business and I've been trying to find someplace that still has the server. For nothing else than nostalgia.

Excalibur died because of the web. The web was cheaper, faster and pretty much always better. And of course, the content wasn't tied to the sysop of a system. So in that respect one can say it was a failure. But other than that, it was pretty cool.

Re:Remember Excalibur?

[nob]

Ah yes, Excalibur. I remember they had some security device that would only allow one login name on each computer. I could never make dummy accounts or anything. I never did figure out how they did it. Anyways, the Excalibur BBS in my area was so full of bugs. If you went forward two menus then back one, it'd drop you to the Sysop only area. I used to make my nick "Sysop " (note the space) and wreck havok. There also was a bug that allowed 20 minutes a day free internet (which was the greatest thing ever, because they charged like $30 a month and there was no way I could pay that as a kid.) You could even replace files in the download section by just uploading a file with the same name. I uploaded a picture of Elle McPherson over the sysop's picture, and got myself banned. The dude even called my house and yelled at my parents. Ah, those were the days.

Re:Remember Excalibur?

[King_TJ]

Yeah - I remember it too. Before I had a PC clone though, I owned a Tandy Color Computer (CoCo), and they had a similar BBS product for it. You had to call with a special terminal package that only ran on CoCo machines. Needless to say, it didn't last very long.

Re:Remember Excalibur?

[Woodmeister]

Ah, the Tandy CoCo 3. Released in 1986, this baby was a beauty. From very simple to highly "scaleable", the machine offered up to 512kB in memory and additional add-ons in hardware to give you true RS-232 serial, "IBM" Floppy controller, SCSI h/d (or whatever) even! The machine was VERY hackable, and many owners have popped the cover several times to do neat tricks, such as upgrade to 2 MB of memory. I learned how digital electronics worked and, for that matter, learned a great deal about how computers work in general.

Anyways, getting back to BBS's and such, The native ColorBASIC DOS that came in ROM in all Coco's was a little lame (neat, easy to program, but limited power), so I decided to check out this "real" O/S that was available for the coco3: OS-9. This is where I first tasted the flavour of UNIX. Imagine a REAL-TIME multiprocessing multiuser O/S on an 1.89 MHz 8-bit MC68B09E machine in 1986!

After several years of obtaining hardware and learning the "ropes",(this was the mid-late-80's; most people using computers for the fun of it had a lot to learn) I learned to program in BASIC, dabbled in ASM, built my own hardware, installed another phone line and.....

ColorNET BBS, 2400 bps(8-N-1)

...powered by OS-9 Level 2, and a Tandy coco3. The software used was CoCo Pro! Software's OS9BBS. Alas, the machine is resting in silence now, and the BBS is long gone...... but it gave me a sense that a computer is only as powerul as its operating system, and while not a true UNIX, OS-9 was very UNIX-like. When I was eventually "forced" into the intel platform, it was quickly decided that MSDOS+Windoze was most definately NOT an improvement over what I had before (functionally speaking) and a look for OS-9ish alternatives was launched. It was 1995. I remember many,many floppies... (guess which distro ;-)

Emulex/2 owned. Shout out to Leech Modem & Lee

[rigor6969]

werd.

Wanna 300 baud paperweight ?

[Taco Cowboy]

Wanna my 300 baud paperweight ?

Re:Wanna 300 baud paperweight ?

[kbeast]

yeah, seriously..no mention of ddial? Apple ][ with 6 modems and phone lines..woohoo..that was the best...

.kb

Go for KaraNet too :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the biggest german speaking BBS on the net today: http://www.karanet.at Automated User Numbers are now at 53000. About 2k active Accounts. Telnet or SSH to www.karanet.at and give it a try. Or try the Java Client on the Website. They know how to party too :) Check out the gallery at http://www.karanet.at/party

NZ Auckland BBS

[sonicb]

Ahh the words BBS bring back memories I thought long dead; 300baud modems, spitfire. wildcat. telegard. logging on at 12am every morning so I can play those 'leet door games. Legend of the Red Dragon ;). I remember when Auckland had over 30 BBS online. Then the modems got faster and the internet assimilated all. and those cool comms programs! procomm - telix - terminate!
and it always made me smile when i saw...
###NO CARRIER

software

[Punto]

How come there's no mention of 'Terminate', wich was by far the best terminal emulation software for DOS? I still keep all my porn on c:\ter400\download\pictures

And LORD2 was very cool too.. Too bad it doesn't work under DOSEMU on linux.

I still miss the > sign to address a msg to someone on a public teleconference channel. IRC sucks.. ;)

Re:software

[Peter H.S.]

How come there's no mention of 'Terminate', wich was by far the best terminal emulation software for DOS? I still keep all my porn on c:\ter400\download\pictures

Terminate is still around, now in a 5.0 version (www.terminate.com).
I don't claim to have tried a lot of terminal emulation programs, but Terminate was really outstanding.

Re:software

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved terminate too. I went from pcom to telix to ProComm to Terminate. The only thing that got on my nerves at first was I had to modify all my Tradewars and MajorMUD scripts to run on it

Re:software

[Anonymous Coward]

To this day, I still save all my downloads in \modem\bbsfiles

BlueWave, FidoNet vs. current discussion systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anybody remember the Blue Wave offline mail reader?

I have participated in FidoNet discussions for years using it, altough I have never became a "FidoNet point".

Also, what about an UseNet vs. FidoNet vs. mailing lists comparison? FidoNet had some advantages.

I belive that FidoNet was superior, because public messages (echo mail) included a To: field.

When I downloaded a new mail package and opened it in my mail reader (Blue Wave) Blue Wave would show me all the messages addressed to me, listing the private messages (NetMail) first, then the public (EchoMail) messages. This is just not possible with mailing lists - I never know which of the public messages on the list answered my messages.

The quoting style used in the message areas was better than the quoting style used by today's e-mail programs. If you quoted a message by Anonymous Coward, the lines of the message were preceded by AC> (the initials were used). In large group discussions, this allowed us to know who wrote certain quoted lines.

Also, when downloading FidoNet mail, the mail packets were compressed using an archiver.. which could be ZIP, or ARJ, or RAR, or whatever the sysop provided. You could usually choose between compression methods. This way one could download hundreads of messages very efficiently.

Currently, POP3 servers don't have this feature. :-(

yes, yes i do!

[Anonymous Coward]

i only knew of one BBS in the local area that ran it but i thought it was realy neat. thanks for reawaking some memories - i had forgotten that i had forgotten about Excalibur (and a couple of others, think there was one called Worldgroup or maybe that was the servers name?.. memory too fuzzy)

Re:yes, yes i do!

[alsta]

I know there was one called Compuserve. =)

WWIV, and age of responders so far.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sort of surprised that not too many have been into BBSes back when WWIV was a force to be reckoned with. Or any of the Amiga or Commodore 64 BBSes. Or, for that matter, any of the UNIX or Apple ][ ones.

Is it just a matter of age?

I came from the tradition of getting the legitimate source code for WWIV, modifying it to a very useful state, and doing so for everybody in my area (Windsor, Ontario). A list of modifications that people kept to themselves (like I did) would be beneficial to see how people wrote and interacted--more so than the stock crap that came out on WWIVnet and in public.

/X

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget all that peecee shit, the real dreams were with /X (AmiXpress)...

Be sure to mention BBS politics...

[MwtrV]

I'm sure a few people out there can remember the politics surrounding the BBS "scene" -- that is to say, a certain segment of the community that did everything possible to be considered "elite". Some will say speak for your own experience; that's fine, but it doesn't dismiss the phenomenon that couldn't possibly have been local to my area only...

So much of it being a competition likely didn't help the matter -- who had the most warez, who could get the most artwork, who could do the best set up, who could hold the best networks, who had the best users, etc etc. There was so much hate in some of these people, too. Not just out of competition, either. The fact warboards even existed only goes to verify this. As I got older, I realized the silliness of it all, as I'm sure other people did too. To say some people took it too seriously would be an understatement.

I always take the conference of BBS nostalgia with a grain of salt. It was fun, but there were just so many unpleasant folks out there they ruined the experience for everyone. They know who they are, and they didn't contribute shit other than efforts overshadowed by ugly attitudes.

Re:Be sure to mention BBS politics...

[NiftyNews]

I always take the conference of BBS nostalgia with a grain of salt. It was fun, but there were just so many unpleasant folks out there they ruined the experience for everyone. They know who they are, and they didn't contribute shit other than efforts overshadowed by ugly attitudes

Ouch. Try substituting "BBS Nostalgia" with "Every Hobby In The Entire Freaking World." It's more accurate yet equally bitter.

Re:Be sure to mention BBS politics...

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember it well. All the groups competing. Razor was one of the big ones. I remember being a 'courier' ,then later running my own BBS and CoSysOping others.
The politics were in all the groups, even the ANSI groups (ICE, ACID, some smaller ones like the ones I started, KronicK and Organized Kaos Tribe). VGA loaders, ANSI art that scrolled by for days.. ahh those were the days.

Re:Be sure to mention BBS politics...

[tim_maroney]

There was so much hate in some of these people, too.

Very true. I think the documentary is bound to give short shrift to this unpleasant fact, though. Listen to this utopianism from the pitch: "an entire generation started to grow up online. They knew then what so many are learning now: the thrill of communication with others like themselves, around the country and the world.... They made friendships to last a lifetime. And they changed everything." Yikes. Talk about rose-colored glasses. What about the fact that the BBS world was often a snake pit of casual bans, flame wars, and rigid groupthink?

there were just so many unpleasant folks out there they ruined the experience for everyone. They know who they are, and they didn't contribute shit other than efforts overshadowed by ugly attitudes.

The only thing I disagree with is that "they know who they are." I think the most unpleasant people in the BBS scene were people who thought very highly of themselves and their contributions, and who really believed they were improving things for everyone by carrying out personal vendettas, banning everyone they disagreed with, and leading the charge to label anyone who didn't agree with local consensus as a troll. As usual, the real black hats were the crusaders, and they were convinced they were on the side of the angels.

Tim

Re:Be sure to mention BBS politics...

[Jason Scott]

Apparently you're unaware of the purpose of a "pitch".

The idea behind a pitch is to explain, in hopefully under a minute or two, why a project should get your attention, money, or time. It is intentionally focused on the positive, the sizzle, and above all the universal themes attached to your project. It is intended to grab your interest and make you do whatever it is you do, for the filmmaker/songwriter/artist.

At the bottom of the pitch, it invites you to take a more involved read into what I'm doing, and of course the bulk of my research is located on the website as well. I think it's interesting to note that further down this thread, I'm accused of being too negative about the history of the BBS! (That is, focusing too much on the busts in the timeline.) I address that issue as well.

I guarantee that I will cover both the positive and negative aspects of BBSes. Otherwise it's just a smear job, either way I bias it.

Write me if you want to be interviewed.

Re:Be sure to mention BBS politics...

[Rasta Prefect]

I'm sure a few people out there can remember the politics surrounding the BBS "scene" -- that is to say, a certain segment of the community that did everything possible to be considered "elite". Some will say speak for your own experience; that's fine, but it doesn't dismiss the phenomenon that couldn't possibly have been local to my area only...
So much of it being a competition likely didn't help the matter -- who had the most warez, who could get the most artwork, who could do the best set up, who could hold the best networks, who had the best users, etc etc. There was so much hate in some of these people, too. Not just out of competition, either.

Hey, it's like IRC without DDOS attacks! Really, these people exist everywhere. The Internet is full of them. You get used to them, ignore them and move on. Yeah, I remember people who were like that. Either we ignored them or if they got too hard to ignore the Sysops booted them. If they were the Sysop, I quit calling back. It all worked out.

Man, I miss BBS's...

[oldmildog]

I ran a few BBS's in Tampa from around 85 to 92... here's what I remember from my experiences. The first board was GBBS running on an Apple ][e with 2 floppy drives and a 300 baud modem. After a few years, I migrated to an IBM PC XT with 640k RAM (all the RAM anyone will ever need) and a 30meg hard drive. Upgraded to a screaming 2400 baud. Ran software including WWIV (overall, my favorite -- came with source code!), Genesis, Searchlight, and QuickBBS. HATED PCBoard... retarded interface. The king of all door games was Tradewars 2002... some of the other better ones were Arena, Operation:Overkill, and Pyroto Mountain.

Oh yeah, FidoNet was Usenet, Zmodem was FTP, ANSI graphics was Flash, and spam was practically nonexistant.

Good times...

Re:Man, I miss BBS's...

[Stavr0]

Pyroto Mountain has reincarnated as a web-board.

Re:Man, I miss BBS's...

[Stavr0]

whoops. Make that http://www.pyroto.com

InterBBS games

[slyrp]

Or using a memory editing tool, and being the sysop of a BBS, just to increase the amount of Jets / Fights in the Forest you will get next turn :)

Terminate!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yes, I've got Terminate. Registered (yes, I
payed...at some board in North Carolina), and
upgraded to version 5.

When I bought my PC, I bought Procomm Plus for
Windows (this was 16-bit WfW 3.11 at the time)
with it. Just to see, I downloaded Terminate,
tried it out and found it so much faster and
more intuitive, I deleted PCPW, and never
messed with it again. (I was going to download
Telix, but the FILE_ID.DIZ seemed more compelling)

Ever read the Fidonet TERMINATE echo? Remember
the Bo Bendtsen / George Collins drama?
(I even tried his "fake" terminate...and while
it was buggy, it wasnt terrible...it sort of had
a Turbo-pascal style windowing system)

I miss those days!

[cmilkosky]

Lets see - I went through a number of BBS software packages before the Internet became popular:

• WWIV
• RBBS
• Renegade - this was great
• Maximus/2 - also great

OS/2 ended up being the platform I stuck with because of its decent multitasking ability. It was neat being able to watch users in a little window while I was working on something else in another. That was such a big deal back then! =)

Doors - here are my favorites (the ones I can remember!):

• LORD - Legend of the Red Dragon
• LOD - Land of Destruction
• GWARS - Global Wars - Risk-like game - real fun
• Tradewars
• Chess
• Foodfight

Favorite terminal emulators:

• Telix - was my DOS favorite for a LONG time
• Terminate - this was, hands down, the absolute best.
• Procomm was OK not the greatest - I mention it only because I remember it

Hosting a BBS was such a gratifying experience for some reason. It actually was rewarding for me to give a free service to the public.

ANSI art - that was fun... Wish I could remember the name of my favorite ANSI art package.... Something with a "T" I think... Can't remember.

Well, thanks to all for bringing back those good memories!

Chris

Re:I miss those days!

[cmilkosky]

Oh yeah - another favorite door - Operation Overkill!

Re:I miss those days!

[mpatmcg]

TheDraw was the ANSI art package wasn't it?

Re:I miss those days!

[cmilkosky]

Another thing - how could I forget - the EchoNet I think it was called. Kinda like newsgroups "echoed" from BBS to BBS - I believe FidoNet was the same thing. I had my board sync up at certain times during the day.

Damn I miss those days.

Re:I miss those days!

[cmilkosky]

TheDraw was the ANSI art package wasn't it?

Ah yes! That was it!

Thanks!

Re:I miss those days!

[Cuthalion]

Operation Overkill 2, the only one I played, didn't work so well once you got into modems with big buffers and compression / error correction. The combat system required too much responsiveness. Alas.

Re:I miss those days!

[AnalogBoy]

TheDraw! and, of course, AcidDraw.

RIPEdit [i think] for the 1 / 100000000 that used RIPTerm..

Re:I miss those days!

[triple_c]

Hosting a BBS was such a gratifying experience for some reason. It actually was rewarding for me to give a free service to the public.
ANSI art - that was fun... Wish I could remember the name of my favorite ANSI art package.... Something with a "T" I think... Can't remember.

You probably are thinking of TheDraw... however all us doodleboys used ACiDdraw. TheDraw has a linux clone known as DuhDraw.

Re:I miss those days!

[Anonymous Coward]

AcidDraw is a nice ANSIart program that's still around to this day. Just a bit hard to find... heh :)

Works well, though...

If it's really a BBS documentary...

[Tsar]

...doesn't that mean only one person can watch it at a time? Hopefully, he'll put it on FidoNet so more people can see it.

You know, we all tend to look back fondly on those days, but even through the haze of nostalgia, I remember that little timer in the command prompt, counting down the minutes until I got kicked off. I surely don't miss that!

Re:If it's really a BBS documentary...

[RiotNrrd]

>...doesn't that mean only one person can watch it at a time? Hopefully, he'll put it on FidoNet(TM) so more people can see it.

Not if he's using a GalactiComm board...

"Oh bother", said Pooh as he shelled out an extra 5 quid for Teddy-Style.

I'm sorry

[ReidMaynard]

I was around in BBS days and it sucked (compared to now).

I can't believe I was impressed with 256 color GIF porn....

Remember Acid? Ice?

[v4sudeva]

That whole art scene back in the day was well beyond my skills; I was more into learning the details of the phone system, etc. But to me, art was like magic, and it pretty much still is.

Anyway, I was lucky enough a few years ago to meet one of the old-schoolers from that scene. He has some printouts of ASCII and ANSI art that are just amazing.

Today, we've got a little website together. It's fun, and keeps me reminded quite often of the good things about the old days.

Am I old or what?

[SkinnyChick]

Am I the only one whose first BBS was on CPM or what? :)

Re:Am I old or what?

[ch-chuck]

Am I the only one whose first BBS was on CPM or what? :)

Maybe in this group but surely not the only ;) I remember, in 1985, after moving to Newport News VA and looking for the local bbs scene there was one called OX Gate that was STILL running on CP/M, and I think claimed to have gone online in 1979.

Re:Am I old or what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran several BBS' under CP/M on Epson QX-10's and later on QX-16's -- including "Pulsar" in the LA area.. Do you remember the "Bye" or "mbye" programs that were required to pickup the phone when it rang? There's a concept!

I even for a while ran the Epson technical support BBS in Torrance -- and even got paid! Later I switched over to using a PC and ran WWIV -- care of Wayne Bell -- He went to my church at the time.. Lot's of good memories.. I remember when Wayne Bell was one of the first systems that had "pseudo" network mail, where you sent mail to 1@1 (Wayne Bell), and it would travel over the various modems between different cities, etc.. Very slick -- pre Internet...

Synchronet

[daitengu]

You know, Synchronet BBS is still around, and has been completely adapted for the internet... It will work with both dialup and telnet, but you must use an older version of the software to allow dialup access, otherwise 3.0 is strictly telnet only. there is a Windows version and a Linux version availible, visit the website http://www.synchro.net for more info.

Graphical BBS's

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember Darkstar? What a joke, Shotgun worked well enough and it is now free, albeit kinda huge.
Things change, but if you want to dial places, there are still a few out there for special interest groups. You gotta look real hard...

No BBS history could be complete without MTABBS

[SacredNaCl]

Which debutes in around 82-83, running on a system called the Rolla Link (in Exile) on a TRS-80 Model III. There is still an MTABBS up and running on a TRS-80 Model IV (started in 1983) called The Junk Drawer (314)434-4034. Probably the oldest continually running BBS in the 314 (St Louis) are. Amazingly enough, cept for replacing the power supply, the unit is entirely origonal. Back then they built 'em to last. :)

Re:No BBS history could be complete without MTABBS

[King_TJ]

Wow - imagine finding another "local" on here. Heh... Not sure what your "handle" was on there, but yeah, it's funny. I dialed up Junk Drawer just a couple weeks ago from work, just to test a modem in a laptop. (I couldn't get an Internet PPP connection to work in Windows NT, and wanted to make sure the modem was functional. I used Hyperterminal and dialed up Junk Drawer, and it worked!) I couldn't remember my password to actually log in -- but I know they're real good about keeping old user accounts active for years, in case you call back sometime.

Re:No BBS history could be complete without MTABBS

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh wow, I remember the Junk Drawer! Sysop (was his name Merlin?) was always willing to chat, was developing his own BBS software last I heard and worked for Boeing.

Great finding some locals here on /. that were BBSing back then!

They should cover cracking BBS's too

[itx]

Hopefully they'll touch on the security of some of those systems too, they were a ball to hack. I remember Renegade in particular had a huge hole in it, where you could go into the d/l area, and pass it ..\..\Rengade\*.DAT and d/l the system's DAT files, then look through them to get the system password. With that, you could install a copy of Renegade on your system, put in those DAT files, use the system pw to login locally, and then get the passwords of every user on the system, including the sysop. And then log back into the BBS as sysop and have some fun.... ;) Man those were good days. Oh, and as far as add-on software, they have to touch on Doorway, an ANSI emulator for DOS command prompt sessions. I used that to administer my board when I was away. I ran the Sanitarium up here in Michigan's 810, and had the most activity around in 95-96

Re:They should cover cracking BBS's too

[Ariven]

You could only do that "hack" if the sysop misconfigured his security settings from the default.. or gave access to some twit who shouldn't have it..

Re:They should cover cracking BBS's too

[Jonny Ringo]

Yeah, I remember that hack being quite popular for a bit. It seemed a little short lived to me (maybe I just found out a bout it later than everyone else). The sysops seemed to wise up pretty quick and plug the whole.

What would be a fun comparison though is how long it took, and how the info was sent on security updates to bbs software packages compared to os and web server security updates.

Re:They should cover cracking BBS's too

[The AtomicPunk]

Wow, 10 years later and the bullshit continues.

There was never a hole in Renegade.

There were a lot of stupid people that ran trojans that would allow people to download the Renegade.dat file.

However, there was no hole in Renegade.

I think I should know.

Re:They should cover cracking BBS's too

[Anonymous Coward]

Let us finally see the source code, so we can review it, then!

*grin*

Re:Remember Acid? Ice?

[motardo]

ACiD is still around i believe, http://www.ACiD.org is their site.

-motardo

One of the strangest things...

[Tony Shepps]

In the Philly area, what is now Voicenet was originally a files-n-pr0n BBS back in the day. The gent who ran it was a serious hobbyist. His system grew to something like 50 lines. Nowadays, with T1s leading into Ascend boxen, managed by a single Radius server, 50 lines is not unthinkable. But hobbyists back then knew nothing of Unix. So 50 lines meant that he had 50 386s! And no rack mounting... these were on cheap bent-metal racking with scores of wall warts for the modems! I think it was all in his garage or something.

I heard that the guy was astounded out of his gourd to see one of the first SLIP-oriented ISPs set up correctly with those same 50 lines run from two Sun pizza boxes.

(My own BBS lives on in the form of a web community. The Cellar, est. 1990. The IotD in my sig is just a part of it.)

Re:One of the strangest things...

[EisPick]

But hobbyists back then knew nothing of Unix. So 50 lines meant that he had 50 386s!

It depends on the software he was using. By about 1990 or so, there were several BBS apps that used Desqview to run multiple instances of the BBS on one box, and others that supported DigiBoards with 16 COM ports. TBBS, which was written in assembler to be amazingly frugal with system resources, supported "intelligent" DigiBoards and could accomodate up to 64 lines on one Intel box. I know because we had a 48 lines hooked up to a 386SX TBBS host -- which we later upgraded to a 64-line 486.

Re:One of the strangest things...

[dasunt]

I'll verify that. Somewhere around here are old ISA cards with 4 com ports, probably over a half-dozen or so.

Came from a BBS, btw. :)

Re:One of the strangest things...

[Rasta Prefect]

Or, in the case of one I Co-Sysoped, VBBS under OS/2 Warp.....

Renegade & BRE

[jh9]

I ran a bbs for the sole purpose of playing Barren Realms Elite. What a fun game. LORD was cool too, but BRE was really fun. I remember coming home and the first thing I did was log into BRE to see how the battle was going.

Re:Renegade & BRE

[Anonymous Coward]

hehe... I was waiting for someone to mention BRE! I remember coming home from school and loggin in to see if we had accumulated enough money to send the nuke to the rival board... those cross-BBS fights were awesome!

I ran Proboard and RemoteAccess... and for a couple days a copied version of WildCat (serial number 00-0000), I loved RemoteAccess though.

Global Wars

[StormCrow]

For a internet playable game similar to Global Wars, check out World at War.

Re:Global Wars

[nbvb]

Or check out Global Wars (it still lives!) at www.johndaileysoftware.com

Citadel

[Torinaga-Sama]

I am very impressed that Jason has so much specific information on the many flavors of xHenge and Citadel.

Being a citadel user for for about 10 years (and I am a relative newcomer) I appreciate his treatment of a bbs system that puts social interaction ahead of files and games.

cheers!

Usurper!

[Anonymous Coward]

The only adventure-style game I ever got into was Usurper (classic version), it was neat on a well-traveled bbs, forming teams, clobbering the others. Usurper is still one of the more popular doors (among the BBS's that remain)
...I recall seeing a telnet BBS sysop a few months ago warning "Usurper freaks" not to make multiple accounts. (I believe it was Hard Drive Cafe BBS -- telnet://hdcbbs.net)

Other big door games I sample once or twice: Exitilus, Godfather of Crime, Barren Realms Elite (BRE), VGA Planets, Trade Wars, some "BBS Wars" PPE for PCBoard, Falcon's eye.

Evolution of BBS's

[HeyBob!]

A great way to see the history and evolution of BBS's (and the internet) is by checking out the Boardwatch magazines, online, from the current issue thru 1995. The mag goes back before then, and they don't show any of the ads, so you'd have to check at a good library for older issues. If they do an interview, Jack Rickard, founder of Boardwatch, would be a must.

BinkleyTerm deserves a mention!

[Alioth]

Software like Binkley also deserves a mention. Ever log onto a FidoNet BBS? The first thing you were likely to see was the BinkleyTerm version information.

BinkleyTerm (and similar) was the bit that shunted FidoNet Netmail and Echomail messages from BBS to BBS. My memory of it is a little hazy now (well, it was 10 years ago!) but I remember it was wrapped in a vile batch file that looked at the exit code to decide what to do next (launch the BBS or get Echomail etc.)

My BBS was never popular, but it was always fun, and being part of FidoNet made it a lot more interesting. 2:252/204, you'll be sadly missed :-)

(It was a 386/16 with a whopping 2.5MB RAM and DesqView as the multitasker).

OSDEBATE...Team OS/2....Bob Germer

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone here read or remember the Fidonet echo
OSDEBATE (I believe it got so big/active at one point they made a OSDEBATE2 spillover group).

What a lovely, vicious echo that was - my favorite character there being the crazed OS/2 zealot Bob Germer, spouting profanities, accusing everyone under the sun of being a Microsoft employee planted in the group, and threatening to email printouts of echo traffic to the DOJ, to expose these FUD planters.

Team OS/2 spread the word to most of the Fidonet, Ilink, RIME, Intelec and other networks. They had a point, OS/2 was a wonderful operating system, and tried their
damndest to let everyone know about it -
but you have to wonder if their zealotry drove
away as many people as it brought. :) Sounds
like the Linux users of the past few years.

Davy Jones's Locker

[Isldeur]

I was sifting through some of the enteries on textfiles and smiling now and then with the memories. But nothing got me to smile as much as this about Davy Jones's Locker in Millbury MA.

I remember a few friends and I got on it a few times (the toll call was rather large and the parents very watchful of it... :). It was so easy to get an account and he basically had _everything_ you would want. And things you might want but would even take *days* downloading on a 9600 (the fastest then, though I had 2400).

Gosh, all these things I'd forgotten about! What memories.

Re:LORD and boards

[DrZimp]

Lord's still around.. http://lord.lordlegacy.org .. Being ported to Win32 w/ door32, OS/2, and Linux. (some people might ask "why os2?" its easy for me to do win32 and os2 versions. change compile target, recompile, poof. done.) A telnet server and web version are both planned as well.

Seth Able, the original author, got burned out on bbs coding.. Sold all of his software (Lord, Lord2, Teos, and TLord) to Metropolis (http://www.gameport.com).. They had the games for a good 2 years before allowing me to work on them.. This next June will make 3 years that Ive been working on them.

Want to see what the games like nowadays? telnet://bbs.lordlegacy.org .. Make sure to use a good telnet client, such as Mtelnet..

BBS's, while not as popular as they once were, are still going pretty strong. With telnet helping out, theyre making a good come back. Check out Synchronet, EleBBS, or Mystic for good telnet softwares.

Maybe looking for bbs chat? Grab an IRC client and go to irc.lordlegacy.org or irc.thebbs.org in #bbs

Looking for a list of boards? TheDirectory has a telnet list and a dialup list.

Looking for the bbs files? TheBBS's Archives is huge.

Looking for some good links? Sysops Corner has them

Philly and 215/610 represent!

[Cesaro]

Hey any philly 215 old BBS'ers out there respond and we can reminisce....

Man I miss these days....
I miss Asgard, Diabolical Laughter, Armageddon (HPAVC!), Boot Hill, River Styx, ....

I miss that $800 phone bill I had because I didn't quite grasp the concept that something in my own area code could be long distance. Hmmmm.

Does anyone have a good telnet version of Renegade that I could run? I'd love that to no end.

Re:Philly and 215/610 represent!

[Rude Turnip]

I used to frequent Joe's Garage in the 215 area code. But that was in Morrisville and a local call for me in NJ.

God, I think my entire teenage social life can be summarized by the letters B, B & S.

RA in Texas...

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran RA down in Central Texas area about 10 years ago... One of the few peices of shareware I've ever paid to register ...

Re:LORD and boards

[$0 31337]

Damnit... Synchronet being freeware is, of course, very nice but it still sucks that I paid 99$ for the original MSDOS version :P

Yeah, it's nostalgiac... but a bit disheartening.

[weslocke]

I just ran through the timeline, and with the exception of a few bits here and there it all seems to be:

"XXXXXXXXX arrested by the FBI for copyright violations"

"XXXXXXXXX BBS shut down due to obscenity violations"

"XXXXXXXXX apprehended by the FBI on charges of child pornography"

"XXXXXXXXX began serving his(her) xx month sentence for xxxxxx"

I ran a large (well, for Chattanooga anyway) Remoteaccess board starting with .04, all the way to 2.51. There was a sense of community that you just don't have now, regardless whether it was people popping messages back and forth with BlueWave or hopping on to play LoRD and BRE.

I _really_ hope they try to focus more on that than on the negatives that seem to choke up the timeline given.

(and as an aside, what about FrontDoor and Bink as mail-tossers? No mention there. Not to mention the whole door phenomena, which has been mentioned already. Or how many of you guys remember AreaFix for File Echos? You know... if I knew a way to connect RA to the net... ;^)

Ripterm

[mblumber]

Anyone other than me remember how great it was when people started supporting RipScript? That was truely the "flash" in the BBS world, being about to get good graphics to download quickly.

Re:Ripterm

[Rude Turnip]

IIRC, RipTerm worked by you first downloading the BBS's package of Rip graphics into your system. So, essentially, all of the RipTerm graphics were cached in your computer and the BBS made reference to them.

What about EXEC-PC ???

[subsolar2]

Exec-PC was once the largest BBS around with a hundred+ nodes and GIGS of storage when such 50-80MB drives were common. It's still in operation last I checked accessible via telnet at bbs.execpc.com.

Of course I could be biased since it's in my area. GO 414s!! (well 262 now).

- subsolar

Re:What about EXEC-PC ???

[rtrifts]

Indeed, looking at the large BBS's that survived the transition and those that died is a grand look at how businesses change. The story of how BBS's transformed into ISP's is a central part of the story.

Exec-PC was, indeed, a large BBS. It was not the largest though - that honour went to Canada Remote Systems (CRS Online) in Toronto.

CRS ran PCBoard software on over 230 nodes. In 1993/94, that was the biggest board around - anywhere in the world.

But CRS could not survive the transition to ISP. It fumbled horribly.

In a nutshell - many of CRS' customers were FIdoNet enthusiasts. When dial-up ISP's started, there was no easy client interface avilable to permit CRS customers to keep Fidonet access. CRS fumbled the ball by trying to go to a custom (and buggy) client for dial up access to their ISP which allowed for Fido.

It was a collosal failure and a horrible client.
CRS died a fiery death in late 1995. They tried to keep to the old ways - and paid the price.

An interesting sidenote is that in Toronto at the same time, a tiny competing BBS, Computerlink Online emerged as a power house which killed CRS and became one of the greatest success stories of the BBS era.

Computerlink originally started up as a "support" board for its owners, who operated a sleazy software rental company, located in a run down strip mall in the west end of Toronto.

As you might imagine, the whole concept of software rental was simply a scam for legalized software piracy. Members of Computerlink paid for a mebership and then, for about $9 more per rental, they got a copy of the original software to take home overnight. You then copied those floppies as fast as you could.

Members of the software rental club also got access to Computerlink's "support" BBS system. The BBS was basically an attempt to create something to justify the cost of "membership" in the software rental club. It was little more than a transparent attempt to provide some legitimacy for the "membership cost" to local law enforcement authorities.

In 1994/95, as part of the phased in scheduling of NAFTA, the Canadian government amended the Copyright Act and outlawed software rental.

The core business of Computerlink was out of business at the stroke of a pen. Not all was lost though, as Computerlink's BBS had grown successfully and had become a decent little chat board with close to 30 lines. In expanding it from its original 4 lines, Computerlink gained valuable skills at managing the addition of phone lines to an existing system. Computerlink was moderately successful, but CRS Online was much too large and established to compete against as a full fledged monthly membership online service.

Forced to change its business with the outlawing of the software rental business, and unable to compete head to head against CRS Online, Computerlink decided to expand by setting up another dial up access system (sharing their existing phone lines) to run one of the first public access ISP dial-ups in Canada.

There were others out there, and many had a head start, but Computerlink had gained valuable skills on the BBS side from adding phone lines to its system while still managing to to keep it all running.

Were they successful? :-)

They grew like topsy. Computerlink grew and grew and its dial up division became "Internet Direct" -Canada's largest "independent ISP". At its height (before @Home), Internet Direct was Bell Canada's single largest customer in Canada. Bigger even than the Federal Government.

But - the story gets better!

As part of a parallel service it provided to BBS users, Computerlnk ALSO developed an HTML based web site for making free downloaded shareware available to its IP users - just like on the Computerlink BBS.

The web site? Well, you guys might have heard of the site. It had a real stupid name. They called it TUCOWS.

The original owners of Computerlink took their 4 line BBS from 1992, and by the time John Nemanic and his partners cashed out in 1999, they sold Internet Direct and Tucows.com for well over Five Hundred ("500") Million Dollars.

Not bad at all. :-)

The guys who invented BBSs!

[netringer]

I've the privilege of knowing Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, the two who INVENTED the BBS (and coined the term) right here in Chicago. Ward is an on-site technical support rep that is working in my office a bit now. We had lunch a few days ago.

When it was mentioned here on /. that Google had posted the USENET archives I checked for Ward's name. I told him that comes up with 700 messages, mostly mentioning his MODEM protocol as "the Ward Christensen protocol." Yeah, he invented file transfers by modem, too. Google returns over 54,000 web page matches for Ward's name. Ward laughs about how many hits you can get when his name is mis-spelled.

In 1978, Chicago had a severe blizzard and Ward and Randy wanted to share programs. Ward wrote the MODEM protocol to send the files back and forth.

During that snowstorm in January 1978, they invented CBBS to emulate the cork bulletin board at the meetings of the Chicago Computer Hobbyists Exchange (CACHE) user group that computer hobbyists used to post messages about wanted computer parts and such. They made use of a pair of direct connect 300 baud modems donated by Dennis Hayes. Randy built the S100 system and Ward wrote the program which they called CBBS. There was no operating system in those days, so the program talked directly to the hardware. It took them a month to have it done by the next CACHE meeting.

Ward is a pioneer that we all owe:
- He invented the world's first BBS program, CBBS.
- He wrote the world's first modem file transfer program, (X)MODEM.
-one the pioneers of FREE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE. The company he works for would not let him sell programs he wrote so he gave them away. If you had an early CP/M system like I did, you knew that there were dozens and dozens of free useful utilities available on BBSs that were written by one W. Christensen.

BTW, they copyrighted the term "CBBS," not "BBS." Oh, well.

I'm sure the documentary team will be looking up Ward. I'll let him know about this and maybe he'll post.

P.S. Randy's Illinois license plate is CBBS. Ward's is XMODEM.

Trivia question: What does the C stand for? It's not what you think.

Re:The guys who invented BBSs!

[The AtomicPunk]

Uhh.. Ward invented the XMODEM protocol, not the MODEM protocol.

Re:The guys who invented BBSs!

[netringer]

Uhh.. Ward invented the XMODEM protocol, not the MODEM protocol. Wrongo, Beavis!

Ward called the protocol he wrote MODEM. The client program that you ran was called MODEM.COM (MODEM.ASM was the source in assembler). The PROGRAM that you ran eXternally on the HOST BBS to do a MODEM protocol file transfer was called XMODEM (XMODEM.COM from XMODEM.ASM). Both names came to be used for the protocol, but Ward originally called it MODEM. His license plate is XMODEM because that's what everyone knew. He'll accept both names.

Was there. Knew that.

Re:The guys who invented BBSs!

[Yakman]

Trivia question: What does the C stand for? It's not what you think.

Based on what you said above, is it Cork? :) (I would think the 'obvious' answer is Computer)

Re:The guys who invented BBSs!

[WardCBBS]

Got to correct a few things in Netringer's post:

Re: "blizzard / sharing programs" Xmodem was independent of the BBS project and came at the end of summer '77. CBBS was invented because of the "snowed in, lets do something" issue.

Re: "They made use of a pair of direct connect 300 baud modems donated by Dennis Hayes." Randy never told me that! I used my Livermore acoustic coupler all the time. When I went online with a "test system" I think by then it was a "PMMI" modem - one that squeezed up to 710 baud out of the Bell 103 300 baud protocol.

Re: "There was no operating system in those days, so the program talked directly to the hardware". No, there was CP/M thank God. CBBS was a CP/M program.

Re: "It took them a month to have it done by the next CACHE meeting.". No, Randy said "forget having the BBS as a club project, it will get stuck in committee. Just the 2 of us do it. I'll do the hardware you do the software". I had the software done in 2 weeks, but no one believed it so we called it a month. (testing DID begin 2 weeks after conception).

I am VERY VERY happy to report that Jason doing the BBS history seems to be very accurate in everything he posted. In the past I've heard things like "Bill Blue invented the BBS" - his Apple BBS in fact honored us by programming his Apple BBS after my command set so they would have a similar look-and-feel).

The bit about Mike asking what the "C" stood for in CBBS, most people thought "Christensen" or "Chicago" not what it really was - "Computerized". That's so OBVIOUS they'd say. No, not when there was no such thing as a computerized bulletin board system - at THAT time it WAS unique, haha.

------
Do I have any regrets? Yes, (1) not having a single entrepreneurial gene in my body and thus passing up the chance to make a career out of my "fame" and experience in Xmodem & BBSs; (2) using a simple checksum for Xmodem not a better one or a CRC;

P.S. just have to say it - CBBS got "hacked" one day. A file on the drive was created saying "George Tirebiter was here". I was SO dumbfounded, since I wrote ALL the code and knew it was uncrackable. Turned out someone visiting Randy Suess's had physical access to the drive and put it there - the only possible answer. Later, I discovered a programming "loophole" allowing breaking CBBS passwords. I "incremented a byte register" to count the # of missed-chars while typing the password. So if you missed 256 of them (you might have to try a few times since some would coincidentally hit) you would roll back to 0 and be in. I had to use this hack when Randy would jokingly (?) Lock me out now and then.

Thanks VERY Much to Randy for pushing the project independent of the club, and pushing for the SW to be written, and doing such a great job of the hardware.

Re:The guys who invented BBSs!

[netringer]

Trivia question: What does the C stand for? It's not what you think.

Based on what you said above, is it Cork? :) (I would think the 'obvious' answer is Computer)

I thought it was "Community" but Ward says above that it really is "Computerized."

What if I don't wanna remember?

[Leven Valera]

Wow. These are memories of bbs's I don't need.

:watching a naked picture of a fat girl download one painful line at a time, and not knowing she was fat until ten minutes later

:my Legend of the Red Dragon character got laid before I did

:Jolt Cola in cans

:$17,465 in long distance charges - three years to pay!

I'm sure there's more, but I'm not sharing.

Re:Remember Acid? Ice?

[King_TJ]

Yep! There was also a lady named Violet, who was famous for doing really nice ANSI artwork screens for BBS's. When I had my BBS, I received a message from her one day, saying she decided to make several screens for my bulletin board. All of her artwork was signed with a VV in the bottom corner, as I recall.

Re:Yeah, it's nostalgiac... but a bit disheartenin

[Nelson]

I agree. There is a lot of history and interesting events other than the crimes and busts. PC relay and FIDO are interesting in and of themselves. Much of the social interactions is also fascinating.

There are people I've lost touch with that I only ever knew through the BBSes. At times I wonder where they are.

History remembers the criminals

[pjrc]

I just read through most of the timeline, and it struck me a truely sad that history will primarily remember the criminals and their prosecution. The vast majority of the entries are news articles about various busts by the FBI.

I called a lot of BBS's from '86 to '88, and it was great fun. There was a lot more good than bad, and I met a lot of great people (some even in person at some get-togethers we organized).

It makes me sad to see that the lingering public memory will primarily be of small-time criminals getting busted for phreaking (cheating the phone system), trading calling card numbers, breaking into remote systems and later pirating software. The days of 'old were so much more to so many people. I hope the video manages to capture some of that.

Re:History remembers the criminals

[Jason Scott]

This is specifically what I am trying to avoid by doing the documentary.

The timeline is currently heavy on busts and negative events because they were the easiest to find in the media searches I've been doing. That's not where I'm going to leave it.

Through the hundreds (!!) of interviews I've got lined up, I can guarantee a much fuller picture will arrive of the experience of BBSes. If I wanted to bring another "Computer Undergr0und" documentary in the world, I'd hardly have had to bother with the work I've been doing contacting everyone from Ward Christensen to the current BBS sysops on the Internet.

I would, however, appreciate if people could mail me days and events they think should be covered. And don't just say "There was this thing that happened once, I can't remember when..." because that's what I'm already working with; I've got hundreds of events in my mind but it's difficult to nail them down.

Re:Yeah, it's nostalgiac... but a bit disheartenin

[saxon612]

Or remember the famous last "words" at the end of a post that would kill everyones connection when they read it.

+++
NO CARRIER

Apple II BBS software missing:

[VValdo]

HBBS -- The first graphical BBS software I can think of, circa ~1984, HBBS (HiRes BBS) never fully worked on my Franklin Ace 1000, but I knew people who had it working.

Tele-Cat II - Docs here Basically an Apple II BBS for the Novation Apple Cat modem/miracle. I think this one was actually written by Novation, but i can't remember.

ABBS - BBS system, docs at this excellent site

ProTalk -- A total rewrite of L&L Productions' GBBS by Parik Rao, the only thing ProTalk had in common with GBBS was it used the same MACOS language. ProTalk was pretty popular by like 1988 or so.

Ascii Express -- Anyone writing a history of BBSing on the Apple II MUST include this file-xfer software which was basically the system upon which the Apple II BBS community were built. In the early days of the 1980s, AE *WAS* BBSing, and AE was usually integrated into later BBSes, which would "drop you" into AE for file uh, exchanging.

Cat-Fur ][ -- Not BBS software per say, but this file transfer software was very much used w/the Novation Apple Cat file-sharing set and was integrated into many BBses.

There was also some kind of famous EAMON-like role playing BBS system too for the Apple II but I can't remember what it was called.

Hope this is helpful. Maybe someone else can fill in the blanks.

Re:Apple II BBS software missing:

[Anonymous Coward]

Some additions to the list:

NetWorks ][ - the first major BBS package for the Apple ][ series that I can recall. Supported the old Hayes Micromodem ][ at 300 bps. As I recall, it supported a main message board as well as electronic mail (and they were distinct concepts).

GBBS - This was a prototype BBS that starting running around 1982. It ran at a high school in Colorado and was up during non-school hours.

GBBS ][ - This was the rewrite of GBBS that turned into a commercial product and was the basis for many Apple ][ BBS systems in 1983-1985. It was written in Applesoft BASIC and used a small assembly language driver to handle modem I/O. The BASIC code was written with the intention of being modified by individual Sysops who wanted to customize the look of their BBS. It supported email, multiple message boards and external modems up to 1200 bps.

GBBS "Pro" - This was the successor to GBBS ][ and was developed as a commercial product and released in late 1985 by ProTech Software. It used a special "language" called ACOS that was similar to BASIC, but did not use line numbers and included special commands to handle BBS tasks (such as efficient message board handling, modem control, etc). Rights to this product were sold to a company called L&L in 1987 and a number of derivitive products were later developed.

As to the Eamon system, there was a BBS called The Eamon BBS run by the author of the GBBS products. It allowed users to login and play one of the Eamon adventures remotely (Eamon was a text based adventure game authoring system with a number of different adventures written by indiviuals). I believe The Eamon BBS was running in 1985.

Re:Apple II BBS software missing:

[Anonymous Coward]

NoChange BBS was around before HBBS, and it included 30+ games..

Re:Apple II BBS software missing:

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the Proving Grounds? I remember that as a very popular role playing BBS run on Apple ]['s. If I recall correctly, it only supported 300 baud modems :(

I guess it wasn't really "role playing". More like "kill the other guy before the other guy kills you". Lots of fun.

You're kidding, right?

[zrk]

I got to learn BASIC on 110-baud terminals with yellow rolls of paper. If I was lucky, I could get one of the ones with the papertape reader.

I think they were called Acoustic Couplers.

Re:Yeah, it's nostalgiac... but a bit disheartenin

[Jason Scott]

The reason the timeline is currently so bust-heavy is because those events tend to have specific days attached to them, and could therefore be entered.

It's rather difficult to put an entry in the timeline like:

September 12, 1987: A warm sense of community floated throughout the Chattanooga BBS scene.

As I cover elsewhere, there's a very strong attempt on my part to get the people who were behind BBSes in for interviews. You'll get the sense of community from them.

Incomplete page?

[allenw]

How funny. We were just talking about WWIV, the first WWIVcon hosted by the Southern IL and St. Louis, MO sysops in 92 or so, and the events that led up to me switching to DLG Pro (and later on moderating the INTERNET echo on Fidonet for a year or two).

The documentary page seems to be incomplete though. In some sections it specifically says "author contacted" and in others it does not. For the sections where the "author contacted" is mising, does this mean that Jason Scott can't get a hold of them?

For some of these programs, I'm sure some of us know someone who knows how to get a hold of whoever or we can provide more background information ourself. (ie, I still have -lots- of stuff about WWIV and DLG laying around on my hard drive... somewhere. *smile* I know that I paid $50 to get the source back in 89 or so, and that it later went up to $75. v1 was written in BASIC [and was quite scary]. v3 was written in [Turbo] Pascal. v4 was written in [Turbo] C... etc..)

While I realize that the top of the page says:

If you see a lot of empty space, that probably means I haven't given that OS or Software my full attention. In some cases, I am finding lists of BBS Software online, shoving the names, and getting back to it all "later". Either way, feel free to send me information if you have it nearby.

I'd hate to flood the guy with info that he already has....

Re:Yeah, it's nostalgiac... but a bit disheartenin

[weslocke]

Actually on that day there was a spirited debate going on over which was the better movie... Princess Bride or Full Metal Jacket. (And if not, there should've been) ;^)

As long as the documentary doesn't end up as a 'Long before there were web sites, or even FTP sites, there were other methods for pirates and pornographers to distribute their materials...' piece, I'm all for it. And please, please, please... try not to dwell too deeply on those aspects. From the outside it looked enough that those were all there was to the BBSes, when those of us involved know how small of a part they actually played.

The real question

[Joe U]

Is how long it would take to download the finished documentary at 300 baud.

-
ARB BBS, excuse me while I laugh.
C-Net 64, Crashes as much as Windows 3.1

BBS Documentary - Missing Influential Software

[rtrifts]

Man, my nostalgia for this is *very* strong.

One remarkable software release that was not mentioned was Seth Hamilton's "RoboBoard".

Robo was notable as the BBS precursor to HTML and Mosaic. In fact, it took HTML several years to rerach the level of graphical functionality that Robo had built in.

Quite simply, RoboBoard was the graphical model for Netscape-nee-NCSA Mosaic.

That said, as Seth told me in 1998, "on the day Netscape was released, our orders for Robo came to a dead stop. My business was instantly over."

Seth went on in the biz and still develops for the online community. Last time I checked, he made Web Monitoring software which permits a Webmaster to monitor hits and visitors loading pages in realtime, measuring load speed and so forth.

It struck me that RoboBoard would be a good piece of software to close off your documntary, as a transition/ seque-way to Netscape and the end of the BBS era.

LoRD2? Cool?

[dave-fu]

Oh, come on. I run it on my BBS and people play that sack of doo-doo even less than they play poker.
LoRD was fun and simple, TW2002 0wns, Usurper's keen, OO][ rocked the casbah... but LoRD2? Jinkies.

Hey everyone from 313!

[Gondola]

I knew several people that ran Commodore 64-based "C-Net" BBss.

Rome.
Inverness.
Camelot.
Castle Royale. (oy, the Zone charges on that one!)

And then there was the MajorBBS.

Amusers.
Somewhere Online aka SOLARIS (before Sun came out with the name Solaris for their OS!)

There are a lot of memories tied into BBSs, from when I was 12 up to the end of high school. The internet came along and quashed it all.

Of course, the internet is pretty damn fun.

If you were on any of the above-mentioned BBSs in Southeastern Michigan, drop me a line.

unix_guy at hotmail.com

BBSs are STILL ALIVE

[Anonymous Coward]

Contrary to the maker of this film...BBSs are still alive and kicking. Yes, there still are some dialups but most of us have move to telnet. There are still many BBS packages being developed (actively). LORD is still being written as are a few other door games. There are many people that would like to think that they're dead or they don't count because they're telnet...But they're still BBSs, they look and act the same as they did before, you just get to them from the internet. But our buddy filmmaker here, who also runs textfiles.com refuses to recognize this very fact. He just wants everyone to believe that the BBS scene is compeletely dead, they're not they're just evolving. It's annoying when people write BBSs off because one person deems them dead just to sell a film.

Re:BBSs are STILL ALIVE

[Jason Scott]

Apparently you haven't read the site or the text of this story. From what I submitted:

"...The list is not complete, but I've so far gotten a great list of interviewees who helped make the Dial-Up BBS what it is in history (and today, I rush to add)...."

That is, BBSes are very much alive. The documentary is primarily about the Dial-Up BBS, which has declined in the US and Canada but is experiencing a strong "aftershock" in other parts of the world. You can't argue that the BBS is as strong a presence in terms of pure dial-up as it was in, say, 1994, but I am not dancing on any graves prematurely or dismissing the efforts of today to bring the best parts of the "BBS Mentality" to the Internet and the world.

It's especially annoying when an anonymous coward insults your reasons for shooting a documentary and doesn't check the facts. For shame!

Re:BlueWave, FidoNet vs. current discussion system

[AnalogBoy]

My old /. sig read "Am i the only one who wishes he could download /. in qwk format?"..

Two main reasons:
BlueWave was many things, but not White on Green on White...

Random taglines. So you could have different witless humor at the bottom of every post!

Telix SALT based BBS?

[Splork]

The DOS comm program "Telix" had a bytecode interpreted C-like language called "SALT" in which someone wrote a complete BBS program. I don't remember its name, though I ran it for a year. anyone else know?

503 area code represent!

[Anonymous Coward]

We used to have great fun. bbs get togethers... skippin school to play MajorMud and get the next lvl...

most of the time i played on MajorBBS boards.. but many of older boards were other programs.

Earthquake City BBS is still alive and well

[Reziac]

... in Granada Hills, Calif., and one of the largest (if not THE largest) repositories of Netware 3.x material in existence. And our DOS collexion rivals Simtel. Give us a call -- 818-368-3337 (Wildcat 4.20 running on Netware 3.20; access to everything but internet email is free; email subscription $10/year). Or check out http://eqcitybbs.tripod.com -- home of the Computer Links From Hell reference pages. [/shameless plug from the co-sysop-at-large] :)

Yeah, there's nowhere near the volume of callers as in BBSing's heyday, but for some things you just can't replace a BBS.

For those concerned about messaging security in this era of prying gov't eyes -- mail that goes into a BBS's local conference never touches the net -- thus never goes near Carnivore and its ilk. And once deleted and the message base purged, it's gone forever. With a secure system like Wildcat for DOS, the only persons who can read a given message are the sender, the recipient, and the sysop.

Ah, Wildcat 3... good times

[ebmedia]

Anyone else decide it was time to quit when RIPscrip started getting big? I ran a 1-2 node BBS in my garage when I was 11, and it had the best damn ANSI graphics in southern california, as far as I was concerned :) I wasn't gonna learn to use RIP, nor did I like it at all. Kinda like how I feel about HTML to Flash.

Darkstar BBS

[screenbert]

I sent this message in, I was wondering if anyone else used Darkstar and had any comments... (aside from bashing it's author. Many people feel they were ripped off since they for 2.0 and it never came out of beta). Aside from that I was wondering if anyone ran dual BBS's like I did. Darkstar and RA?

Hello,

I found the BBS documentary project off of slashdot.org. It looked really extensive. In 92 I started to get into BBS's. It just so happened, the author of Darkstar BBS lived 2 blocks from my house. I used to go over there all the time. I was known as Joey Fowler back then. Jerry Thomas Hunter was the author. He had a product that was HTMl before there was HTML. Behind the scenes though there was a much different story from what boardwalk magazine showed, and the tradeshows they attended. Ken McDowell worked with Jerry. There were 2 sides to the story but after the 1st version came out they parted ways, with the whole product remaining with Jerry. He would tell people "It'll be ready anyday now". He was programming in VP, and he was good but spent too much time supporting it and not enough writing code. Version 2 beta came out, but was never finished. I moved away from the area and I heard rumors of rip-offs etc, but I still believe Darkstar could have been a solid product if things had been run right. Below are the few links with actual information I could find on the internet. If you're interested in finding out more let me know.

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=joey+fowler&hl =e n&rnum=1&selm=0df_9412231714%40ima.infomail.com
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=joey+fowler+bb s& hl=en&rnum=4&selm=b5b_9412102331%40sherwd.fidonet. org

... Old farts never die, they just stink to death!

Beyond 2000 - Valparaiso, IN 219-462-8806

[Jimithing DMB]

Hello! Great to see this being done. I am the former sysop of Beyond 2000. I notice that on the bbslist it is listed also as "Jake's Place" and that the years are only from 1994-1995.

The listing for Jake's Place is because for a while I let my cosysop (Jake Schroeder) run it as he pleased. The board was not Jake's Place for all that long, only very briefly. The listing as 1994-1995 is probably because that was when I was part of Fidonet. The BBS actually operated from around 1991 or so until about 1995 (partway into 1996 possibly). At that time I got an internet connection from a local ISP, Crown Net, and pretty much tied up the phoneline being connected to the net.

Also sometime towards the end of its life I had my WD 200 MB hard-drive crash and thus lost everything. I think I made a few feeble attempts to put it back up (and I think that may be when I had Jake run it for a while, though I can't quite remember exact details on that whole thing).

While I was probably not the youngest sysop in history I was born in 1980 and ran the BBS from 6th grade up until about 9th or 10th. My cosysop was also the same age.

If you want my input for the documentary please feel free to send email to dfe@tgwbd.org

Re:BlueWave, FidoNet vs. current discussion system

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer the BlueWave packet format over the QWK format. It has more options!

Also, who remembers the old "doors" technology for extending the BBS software?

What about Doorway, which was similar to PC Anywhere?

I like the The Bat! e-mail client which can be found at http://www.ritlabs.com/the_bat/ . It is an Internet POP3/IMAP e-mail client, but the FidoNet influences show a lot - many good things from FidoNet were adopted in this e-mail client.

It also doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, but has A LOT of useful options. I'm in no way affiliated with them other than being a (registered) user.

:)

Re:Yeah, it's nostalgiac... but a bit disheartenin

[Reziac]

And I've noticed that most of the people posting to this article seem to be from what were fringe areas of BBSing. Hardly any mention of how it was THE mainstream messaging method for so many years. I guess no one else remembers how at one time BBS conferences, and networks like Fido, U'NInet, ILink, Byte Brothers, etc. were the equivalent of usenet today. (Complete with high traffic, spam, twitlists, and flamewars.)

Oh, and I still use a BBS and BlueWave every day for my regular email (rather, seasonally HeatWave or ColdWave, as I've taught it to call itself courtesy of a hex editor :)

Typical Slashdot groupthink.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

As usual, the Slashdot groupthink refers to BBS's as a "thing of the past." Listen folks, BBS's are not dead. Dialup is dead, yes. BBS's have moved to the Internet. Those that didn't evolve have died off. Those that did, are thriving. Click to log on. Telnet, SSH, web, your choice. Client software, the whole works. Some BBS programs are even evolving into nice-looking groupware systems.

You can bet your bitbucket that I'm going to drive this point straight home when I'm interviewed for the BBS documentary. BBS's are not dead.

Re:Typical Slashdot groupthink.

[DerekLyons]

As usual, the Slashdot groupthink refers to BBS's as a "thing of the past." Listen folks, BBS's are not dead. Dialup is dead, yes. BBS's have moved to the Internet. Those that didn't evolve have died off. Those that did, are thriving. Click to log on.

The system you link to is just another website, altho with an interesting interface paradigm and overall theme. It's not a BBS in the classical sense.

One interesting point about evolution... At least two local BBS's evolved into ISP's.

Legend of the Red Dragon, BBS Links - repost

[DrZimp]

Lord's still around.. http://lord.lordlegacy.org .. Being ported to Win32 w/ door32, OS/2, and Linux. (some people might ask "why os2?" its easy for me to do win32 and os2 versions. change compile target, recompile, poof. done.) A telnet server and web version are both planned as well.

Seth Able, the original author, got burned out on bbs coding.. Sold all of his software (Lord, Lord2, Teos, and TLord) to Metropolis.. They had the games for a good 2 years before allowing me to work on them.. This next June will make 3 years that Ive been working on them.

Want to see what the games like nowadays? telnet://bbs.lordlegacy.org .. Make sure to use a good telnet client, such as Mtelnet..

BBS's, while not as popular as they once were, are still going pretty strong. With telnet helping out, theyre making a good come back. Check out Synchronet, EleBBS, or Mystic for good telnet softwares.

Maybe looking for bbs chat? Grab an IRC client and go to irc.lordlegacy.org or irc.thebbs.org in #bbs

Looking for a list of boards? TheDirectory has a telnet list and a dialup list.

Looking for the bbs files? TheBBS's Archives is huge.

Looking for some good links? Sysops Corner has them

Ah, the good old days.

[joshuaos]

I ran a 24 line BBS in south Florida for a while (didn't start it, but ran it a while) called Dragon World. I originally found that board through Eric Thav's South Florida BBS List, though who knows where that is today. There were some other good boards on it, like Fantastic Planet. We ran MajorBBS, owned by Galacticom. It was my entire social life for years, and I'll never forget the way a wall of external USR modems look, blinking all night log.

sigh, Joshua

Monksboa?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember TMMABBS? In the mid to late 80s, this Washington, DC area board was one of the first serving the local Macintosh community ("MA" = "Macintosh Apple"). It attracted many luminaries, but the central figure was Tel ("TM" = "Terry Monks"), who wrote the crazy Apple II software that ran the whole thing. I still remember the rejoicing when some kind soul contributed a gigantic 20MB hard drive for the thing.

Focke's List

[cswiii]

Anyone from DC ought remember, and any BS historian ought know about Focke's List, a monthly publication that tracked the DC/VA/MD BBSes. It was quite an exhaustive database.

I can't find any hard links to it anymore -- hence the google reference -- though I'm sure some ancient editions can be found on some dusty FTP server somewhere. This Washington Post article is an interesting time capsule, however, as it references the decline of BBSes, via Focke's, as early as 1997.

Re:Focke's List

[cswiii]

Heh -- I take that back... the google link points to this URL, which just might contain an old copy...

Re:Yeah, it's nostalgiac... but a bit disheartenin

[DerekLyons]

I _really_ hope they try to focus more on that than on the negatives that seem to choke up the timeline given.

It's going to be hard because, other than software releases, most of the 'positives' were purely local in effect. Is it important that the 1994 Floppy Disk Throwing Party [1] had * 100 * people attending? (It was to us, then and there..) How globally important is it that Bill W. of the Wings BBS had thirty people help him recover his systems after his house fire? (It was to us, then and there..)

[1] An annual BBQ circa 1989-1995 for the Kitsap Peninsula BBS crowd.

Mistaken Assumption

[DerekLyons]

And I've noticed that most of the people posting to this article seem to be from what were fringe areas of BBSing.

I guess I'm curious as to what you mean by that. Many people used BBS's for many different uses and reasons, there was no 'standard' usage pattern. Some were door wizards, others chatted, others only used the local conferences...

Hardly any mention of how it was THE mainstream messaging method for so many years. I guess no one else remembers how at one time BBS conferences, and networks like Fido, U'NInet, ILink, Byte Brothers, etc. were the equivalent of usenet today.

Usenet equivalent? Mainstream? Hardly. The BBS community was *tiny*, and mainly geeks, certainly nowhere the penetration that Usenet has today. At least in this area it was fairly late in the day when most BBS carried anything beyond their own conferences. That was the great strength of BBS's, that they were local, and many interacted in meatspace as well as online.

If anything is being missed in this discussion it's the role the BBS community played in the growth of the internet by providing a pool of technichally inclined users ready to explore 'new' methods of interaction.

Re:Mistaken Assumption

[Reziac]

Fringe areas -- exactly the sort of BBSs you're talking about. I used to track about 50 BBSs in the north Los Angeles area (my reviewed BBS list may still be floating around in old filebases). Network messaging was the CORE activity for most of the really viable BBSs, followed by filebase activity, with door games and such being an attraction but nowhere near the ongoing draw that messaging was.

The BBS software mentioned also is evidence: most serious BBSs used Wildcat or PCBoard (of course those both cost serious money), and that's where the majority of the users were, too -- probably because the interfaces were more competent and easier to learn. Conversely interfaces like WWIV actively discourage messsaging because it's so awkward (linear message spooling, fer ghu's sake, and no mail door), and messaging on Renegade/Telegard without a mail door is likewise more of a PITA than it's worth. Renegade was popular among hobbyists mainly because it was free.

And the messaging community was only "tiny" (compared to modern Usenet) because far fewer people even owned computers in those days. But nearly everyone who did had at least one BBS subscription. (I used to track users across BBSs, too. BBSs normally had a userlist available.)

Local BBS community was there, yeah, but it mainly served as the springboard for network communities to grow from. That's where the heart really was. Once those networks began losing critical mass to Usenet, THAT is when BBSing began to die. Which really didn't happen until Win95 made dial-up networking and easy ISP connectivity ubiquitous.

BBSs without major messaging networks tended to attract mainly kids and file leeches who would hang around for a few months, then move on -- which does nothing for building a community of stable users.

In my observation (admittedly I don't track it as closely as I used to) BBSs that survive via telnetable access are still messaging-oriented, with filebase activity still coming in second.

Re:Mistaken Assumption

[DerekLyons]

Fringe areas -- exactly the sort of BBSs you're talking about.

That's a badly mistaken assumption... I didn't talk about types of BBS's, I talked about how people used BBS's, a very different issue.

I used to track about 50 BBSs in the north Los Angeles area

Well, there's another badly mistaken assumption.. Los Angeles is not the world.

Network messaging was the CORE activity for most of the really viable BBSs, followed by filebase activity, with door games and such being an attraction but nowhere near the ongoing draw that messaging was.

I guess that depends on your definition of viable. Your messages indicate that you only believe that network messaging mattered. My experience over the years 1982-1996, in widely seperated areas, indicates that is not true.

Re:Mistaken Assumption

[Syberghost]

Usenet equivalent? Mainstream? Hardly. The BBS community was *tiny*, and mainly geeks, certainly nowhere the penetration that Usenet has today.

Only if you very narrowly define "BBS".

In any sensible definition, Compuserve and AOL are BBSes, and AOL's got 30-million-plus users.

Re:Mistaken Assumption

[Reziac]

As it happens, my old QModem phonebook has BBSs in several other states as well as Los Angeles. (Imagine calling out of state on a 2400 baud modem.. I must be insane :) And I've had telnet accounts on several (and not just in the U.S.) since that's become a major access method.

You seem to think that BBSs in Podunk, Nebraska were somehow different from BBSs in Los Angeles, and it just wasn't so. I tracked every BBS in my calling radius, not just the messaging BBSs, or the file BBSs, or the chat BBSs. Long-term viability and messaging went hand in hand, period, because that's what attracted people who called in every day, year after year after year. File-oriented BBSs that didn't have much messaging would have spasms of activity, but once everyone had leeched what they wanted, they moved on. Chat BBSs were kinda like IRC on specialty channels -- some core users and a lot of short-term drifers who don't "stick".

Re:Mistaken Assumption

[DerekLyons]

You seem to think that BBSs in Podunk, Nebraska were somehow different from BBSs in Los Angeles

Well, given that my experience in three different states across nearly eighteen years is very different from yours... Los Angles is not the world, how hard a concept is that to understand?

I tracked every BBS in my calling radius,

'Calling radius' is a term with no definition. Your original claim was based on "50 BBS's" in the Los Angelese area.. Now you attempt to use an undefined term to expand that claim.

Long-term viability and messaging went hand in hand, period, because that's what attracted people who called in every day, year after year after year

Of course, if you chose to ignore Door BBS's, and BBS's that served a close knit community.. And many other kinds of BBS's and BBS based services other than national level echoes and conferences. I don't know what you mean by 'viable', but you need to define it in other terms than just the use of one of the many services that a BBS provide(d). That's called 'circular logic'.

Re:Mistaken Assumption

[Reziac]

Calling radius: about 20 miles in all directions.

And there were every which type of BBS in that area.

*shrug*

Our dialup BBS is still alive. Most aren't. Draw your own conclusions.

Re:Mistaken Assumption

[DerekLyons]

Our dialup BBS is still alive. Most aren't. Draw your own conclusions.

Funny, the survivors here (3-4 last I checked) are all door game boards.

ddial

[Syre]

How about ddials? Those were pretty cool... multi-user chat systems that interconnected with each other to form networks of chatters... I dunno if it counts as a BBS, but I think it should really. You could leave messages for people.

Here's the page of info: http://www.ddial.com/highlight.html

Also... in the timeline, why all those milestones with RemoteAccess BBS? I don't think that was that used.

What about PCBoard which was probably the most popular for a while.

Or Searchlight, or the Dorsai Embassy (http://www.dorsai.org/), or Panix (http://www.panix.com/)... for a year of research, I think you're missing lots of really basic stuff!

Re:Remember Acid? Ice?

[Anonymous Coward]

We used to have quite a large art scene going. I'm kinda dissappointed because it looks like this documentary is going to look over it. I think the art scene bbs's were enough to make up an entire movie.

zambihnee

Re:Legend of the Red Dragon, BBS Links - repost

[!Xabbu]

Another BBS that runs LoRD online is Clockwork Orange BBS. FidoNet is still around as well as many other nets. Why not try a bbs again! Don't forget TRADEWARS!! We have that too.. some new games will be banged within the week!

telnet://clockworkorangebbs.org
http://www.clockworkorangebbs.org

Old Stuff.

[downundarob]

I still recall the first BBS software I ran, on my Atari ST, it was a single floppy system, fully fidonet capable using Pandora for the BBS and TheBox as fidomailer.

Ive just dug through my old file collection, and from a Fidonews article circa 1996 I found an old software list, but the lameness filters are blocking me posting it.

Xmodem vs Modem - where it all started...

[WardCBBS]

Interesting commentary about Xmodem.

No point arguing what I called the protocol - I am not sure I even did call it anything.

The quick history:

In '74, I attended a class, one session only, called "Large Scale Integration". The teacher held up a microprocessor - an 8008. I asked if it could be used to create a general-purpose computer, because I wanted a home computer. He said an 8008 could be used, and I asked what I needed to know to make my own, and he said "TTL Logic" which I wrote down because I never heard of it.

In the rest of '74 I taught myself TTL 7400 series digital logic, and started designing my own circuits. I became convinced the 8008 was "feeble" and started designing my own scratch-built 7400-based microprogrammed computer, working only on the most trivial of "subsystems", (haha) like a start and stop button that would if you pushed start, start a 4-phase clock (fetch, decode, execute, increment instruction counter), but if you held stop and pushed start, it would only run 1 4-step cycle. I learned about "synchronous" logic - my asynchronous logic would blip in little phase 1's after phase 2, etc, because of propagation delays, etc. But too much detail.

Anyway, when the Altair was announced in Jan '75 Popular Electronics (curses! I loaned my issue to some guy used to work for a TV station in Chicago and lived on the S. side but never got it back and can't remember who it was)... I decided the 8080 was more powerful and abandoned my home-brew project.

Instead I designed and built (1) a selectric typewriter interface for the Altair and (2) a floppy drive interface - using "Dynastor" flying head 256K floppies.

At first I adopted Processor Technology's paper-tape based assembler/editor to Tarbell's Cassette system, and later to my kludgy disk system - I called it "KOS" - Kludge Operating System". It could load programs by name, but pretty much everything else was rather manual. This was before IBM became the standard with their 8" floppies.

When CP/M came out, I bought a copy, and "beeped" it with a 300 baud modem, to an audio cassette on a friend who had a "Digital Systems" IBM-compatible floppy. I took that cassette home and with a speaker set on my acoustic coupler, beeped it into my machine, only to find CP/M itself destroyed, but "movCPM" OK, which I understood had a copy of CP/M in it assembled to 0. I disassembled CP/M, into assembler, later optimized it a bit (getting rid of jump tables) and reassembled it in the high memory of my machine (what, 20K then?).

SO why Xmodem? Well, because of having designed my own disk controller, I was incompatible with what was now the standard - IBM 8". So I used the 'beep to cassette' idea I'd used to move CP/M to my incompatible system - 128 byte (1 CP/M sector) blocks, numbered, with a checksum.

I based the protocol on an ascii reference card I had - i.e. "ACK", "NAK", etc seemed logical to use.

I released MODEM.ASM into the public domain by putting it on the CP/M user's group 6th distribution disk, in I think about August of '77.

It was totally manual - to be used by 2 people each "attending" their systems - i.e. one would type "modem s[end] " the other would type "modem r[eceive] ". At some point I added a quiet switch like "modem sq ", to allow sending to a "remote system" -

Keith Petersen, now of Simtel.Net, modified modem.asm to turn the quiet switch on by default, and re-named it "Xmodem.asm". That being a much more recognizable-as-unique name than my dumb "modem.asm", the name "xmodem" stuck, and people began calling it the xmodem protocol, or the "christensen protocol" (which I never liked).

There were others very instrumental in this - my bad memory fails to bring the names back - I can picture him - Jaffe... First name escapes me. He did the "remote CP/M" where he wrote a "bye.com" that relocated itself to high memory and allowed people to call into your CP/M system. Also important was ... John .... worked for IBM at the time - he added the CRC vs my rather weak checksum, to xmodmem.

Then of course Chuck Forsberg, wrote a unix version of xmodem and added batch send/receive (I numbered my blocks starting at 1, he used a block 0 to send minimally the filename, or more info (size, date, etc) if it was available. He extended it to 1K blocks - my original being in the 300 baud modem days where 128 byte blocks was "almost perfect" as one communications engineer said (luck!). If it was shorter, packet overhead would slow it down, if longer, higher chance of corruption would slow it down with resends.

Chuck called his program "rbsb" (Receive Batch, Send Batch) and I suggested since his 1K block batch protocol was better than Xmodem, he call it "Ymodem", and he liked that and did so and of course followed it up with the spectacular Zmodem.

Xmodem (modem.asm, originally) was of necessity to share programs with "the world", and the BBS was 100% independent of it. Its history is a bit much to type in here ;-)

Ward Christensen

Re:Yeah, it's nostalgiac... but a bit disheartenin

[TinWeasle]

OMG... I was the CAD Moderator on U'NInet for a few years. I connected to Chip Shapiro's board, "Absolut(e)ly Temporary", in Las Vegas (702). This was 1990-93 or so. Chip also hosted my first SLIP connection to the internet. He ran PCBoard (Clarke?)on DOS, then OS/2. We were in the OS/2 User Group together.

My preferred packages were Telix and Silly Little Mail Reader (for offline qwk mail). I was trottin hot stuff, in those days, working from my CAD plotting service bureau on Telebit Trailblazer Plus modems (19.2 to other TB+'s!!), three lines each with a cubix box connected to my novell server. I fondly remember my big "workstation", a new 486 with 16 MB RAM and a 540MB HD. SVGA ruled!

(slightly OT->) I knew the guy that wrote Improc, a graphics tool of the day, who logged on to that board as well.... It had a "jiggler" feature to shake pixels in a marked area around. Lots of laughs with the dirty gifs of the day!

Deep in the heart of E-lec-tronic Siberia...

[Anonymous Coward]

BBS' ruled, at least in 1988 - 1992. Unfortunately, the main FIDONET hub was run on school equipment by a great guy who was a school employee. Since the BBS could carry a K-12 education forum, he could run it, and the phone charges were picked up by Joe Taxpayer. Since the nearest FIDONET hub was 45 miles away, it cost a bit to run - but everybody into computers would connect to it or hang their BBS off of it. It grew to carry quite a bit of traffic - and political rants and raves by us locals. Did I mention that "Deep in the heart of E-lec-tronic Siberia" needs to be said with a cowboy twang? This is a pretty conservative part of the USA - and we used the politics forum for some great free speech.

Problem was, the head school guy was Chairman of the local Democratic Party Central Committee. Also, a few of the local VIP's were lurkers on this forum (editor of the local newspaper, county officials or their wives, etc. - even the FBI had an agent assigned to monitor). So you might imagine the situation: the many, vocal conservatives were complaining about the government - and it annoyed the heck out of the (very liberal, leaders-who-get-their-way) people lurking. What could they do? It was free speech in the grandest of american traditions.

So Paula Jones files a lawsuit against Bill Clinton, and someone takes the full text of the lawsuit and publishes it to this politcal forum. (Need to know what, exactly, was in it, so as to know what we would be talking (or arguing) about.) Well that was the last straw - "their" beloved Bill Clinton getting slammed by all us conservatives - and with access to the real documents not filtered by the news media.

"erect penis" - those words were in the lawsuit. And now, those words were on a school run BBS that also carried a K-12 education forum.

Children might see that.

That was all the excuse "they" needed. "They" had the modems turned off for a week, and when it came back on: no political forum, no FIDONET to internet mail gateway, no access at all. If you were a student, your school teacher could get in, but all us Joe Publicans were just shit out of luck.

So BBS' were great, until censorship. Thank you, friends of Bill Clinton. Frankly, this part of the country is still missing its 'electronic community voice'. A couple years later, the internet reached this deep, so we can't really call ourselves 'E-lec-tronic Siberia' any more. But Usenet just can't get as local as we had with our BBS'. You could post a rant on one day, and get feedback (good or bad) the next at the local user's group meeting. That will never happen with today's internet. Censorship won.

Re:Remember Acid? Ice?

[v4sudeva]

Well, speak up then! The guy doing the documentary is nothing if not open to comments and information. If you were to email him and let him know what a thriving portion of the BBS subculture the art scene was, I'd be profoundly surprised if he didn't incorporate it.

In fact, this is such a good idea I've just had that I'm going to make sure he finds out. The cool thing about the art scene is that it's a visual medium, so it'll be perfect for the film. We might see some good shit popping up onscreen!

YES THAT'S IT!!

[VValdo]

Thank you! I couldn't remember the name of it, but the Proving Grounds is absolutely the one I was thinking of .

W

pr0n!

[zoftie]

who needs porn? this is the hot stuff!!!
can't wait to see it!
p.

Re:Xmodem vs Modem - MOD THOSE UP!!!

[netringer]

Hey, moderators! MOD UP THE PARENT posts from Ward! (Informative and Interesting) Fer Chrissakes, you just had a visit from the guy who invented the topic (I called him) and you're gonna leave his two very informative posts on the history of the first BBS at 1? Thanks for the information, Ward!

Re:Remember Acid? Ice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow... I guess that ascii and ansi oldschooler would be me. Anyway, If you want to check out some pieces I drew up,

fake accounts

[juju2112]

When I was first getting into BBS's, I logged onto a local board and wanted to create a fake account. So, to make sure all the user information sounded real, I picked a name completely at random out of the phone book and entered in that persons' name, address, and phone number into the database.

Turns out, the name I picked at random out of the phone book just so happened to be the name of a sysop of another local BBS! The sysop of the BBS I was on was watching me log in and was friends with the guy. So, while I was looking around I was granted sysop-level access for no-apparent reason. Then, the local sysop broke into chat and started talking to me, saying, "Hey, Bryan, what's going on? How's you been?", etc., etc.

Anyway, I guess this post is waay to late to actually be read, but i'll still never get over that amazing coincidence. I mean.. I literally just opened the phone book and picked out a name at random.