Slashdot Mirror
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."
..because TAG-clones ruled 313 ... :)
google is pretty damn useful sometimes..
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
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.
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
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!!
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
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
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.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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
karma capped
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.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
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.. ;)
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
I know there was one called Compuserve. =)
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
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.
mwtr / THIS SIG HAS BEEN PRAYED OVER AND MAY BE USED AS A POINT OF CONTACT (ACTS 19:12)
Oh yeah, FidoNet was Usenet, Zmodem was FTP, ANSI graphics was Flash, and spam was practically nonexistant.
Good times...
They have the Internet on computers now?
- 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
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
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.)
Or check out Global Wars (it still lives!) at www.johndaileysoftware.com
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.
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).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
:). 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).
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...
Gosh, all these things I'd forgotten about! What memories.
I just ran through the timeline, and with the exception of a few bits here and there it all seems to be:
.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.
;^)
"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
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...
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
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.
/. 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.
When it was mentioned here on
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.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
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...)
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
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.
Woot w00t w007.
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.
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.
There are people I've lost touch with that I only ever knew through the BBSes. At times I wonder where they are.
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.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
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.
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
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.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
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!
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.
.Robert
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?
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.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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 :)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
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.
.. Make sure to use a good telnet client, such as Mtelnet..
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
- Jimbob
Thank you! I couldn't remember the name of it, but the Proving Grounds is absolutely the one I was thinking of .
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.