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Remembering the BBS
Anonymous Coward writes "Nice reminiscence about BBS's, back in the day and all. Author describes them as "Where a teenage loser could lose himself", which for me would have been pretty accurate. I still miss being able to find cool ASCII graphics, text-based RPG's, and the Anarchist's Cookbook all in one place."
Check out www.ice.org
Try http://archives.thebbs.org/index.html
rOD.
Rod Begbie done this, and he's not
http://lord.nuklear.org/ yes LORD 4 life indeed... this web page usually has at least 100 strong people playing daily.... great site if you still love the game
Check out textfiles.com for dumps of a lot of old BBS stuff. I stumbled across it while looking for documentation on the XMODEM (yes, xmodem) protocol.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
The problem is that ansis nowadays exist as gif and png's. Sending lots of people to all try to download 200k files off some smaller-bandwidth server is suicide.
But with that in mind, www.ice.org has all of the iCE Packs online, and even some pre-pack ansis (since iCE began in 1990 but groups didn't start releasing packs until around 08/1992). You can search for art there, but only among the iCE work. ACiD still has a website, but that seems to be down now. But their artpacks site is still online, with lots of old packs (not viewable on the web, so you'll need an ansi viewer) at here.
There is a more comprehensive web-viewable ansi archive of almost every major pack ever released, but it appears to be down right now. Check www.idledreams.net sometime in the future to see if it's come back online I guess, that's probably what you want.
Slothy
(disclaimer: I help run iCE)
Actually, there's a version out for Linux now called DuhDraw:
http://www.wwco.com/~wls/opensource/duhdraw.php
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
I'm with you, except for...
300 baud connections even a 14-year-old could outtype
300 baud (in those days) was about 30 chars/second. Unless you're pressing keys at random, there's no way any human can keep up with that. It only seemed slow because of the latency of echoing your characters back to you. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
my bad..
:~)
the correct URL is http://tradewars.darklegacies.com/
it will give you the information needed to connect.. it is telnet based game.. still get the ansi animations.. almost brings a tear to ones eye
CiA
iCE
sorry for replying to my own post. I found the TW 2002 & Gold site
http://www.eisonline.com/products/default.htm
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
www.acheron.org - I used to hang out in #ansi and I can't remember who started this but it's been around for quite sometime now.
You can download free software here that includes lots of old BBS ATASCII movies.
It will even play them back any any baud rate you like, even 300 baud =)
Download ATS from www.atarimax.com.
Unfortunatly its windows software but its freeware.
Version 3 is still actively played via email, over the internet. Version 4 is in Beta right now.
go to www.vgaplanets.com, and start playing!
http://www.bbsdocumentary.com: The BBS Documentary, currently in production.
http://bbslist.textfiles.com: My list of BBSes, ever growing, and needing your help (and lists).
- Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM
You miss Text RPGs? How can you miss them, there are still thousands of MUDs out there, which are pretty close to old text RPGs and very multiplayer...
Such as Moral Decay
Come play Moral Decay!
Well, if you're pretty good with linux, you could try dosemu under linux and run any old dos based BBS software under there. I searched around and found this post on the tux.org. Some further searching took me to the Linux BBS FAQ. Enjoy!
If this hasn't already been mentioned... Textfiles is a huge repository of (mostly) old BBS textfiles. Also web.textfiles.com has newer ones.
"I have fallen off the wagon, for I am a slave to tea."
I ran my BBS for over 10 years, in one form or another. During its "low point", I was stuck with only 1 phone line and a system shoved in a bedroom closet because the apartment I was living in would only allow a maximum of 2 phone lines - and we needed a voice line.
Despite all that, I put up with a *lot* to keep it running, but never looked at it as some sort of "business model" for making a monetary profit.
I also wouldn't say it was "just for fun", because believe me - staying up all those late nights validating users, correcting spelling mistakes and incomplete file upload descriptions and keeping everything updated wasn't exactly a picnic.
There was a sort of profit to it, but it was more intangible. For me, it was the thrill of going to the local computer store and having techs come running out of the back room to meet me when they heard I was the sysop. It was the opportunity to meet some of the most interesting and intelligent people I've ever run across (some of whom are still good friends of mine today). It was the personal satisfaction of knowing I was doing something that enriched so many other people's lives in some small way.
Near the end, yes, I did gladly accept donations and even did optional "subscriptions" that bought the user some extra online time and download credits -- but I never so much as broke even on it. I never expected to. Most hobbies are like that. If there's a mistake people were/are making with Internet sites today - it's being too obsessed with making it into a business. Do it because you enjoy and love it, and because the mere presence of it satisfies you in some personal way. If you do this, the money may well follow.... but people can tell if your heart is in a given web site or not.
So are there any public BBS's left?
See http://www.mono.org
Telnet to electron.mono.org to log in.
You can get the ACiD and iCE art packs from
ACiD
iCE