The "Find Your Old BBS Buddies" Database

sloop writes "Everyone wonders what happened to the old geeks we used to see on the local bulletin boards. With "cool" aliases like Lord Nikon and Zer0 C00l they often can't be found in a phone book. Enter BBSmates, a database of most every published BBS. You can associate yourself with BBS's you were on and find other users." Or you can go on to found a website with one of 'em.

Comments

E-mail addresses

[Anders]

I would settle for a database mapping old, non-working e-mail addresses into current ones.

Re:E-mail addresses

[toxcspdrmn]

Sorry, that link should have been ReturnPath - please excuse my incompetence - just had a wisdom tooth removed and I'm not entirely with it.

I tracked them down using...

[GC]

Google.

In the dark distant past, prior to IRC, WWW (We had Gopher though!!) - I frequented talkers such as Cheeseplants house, usually accessed by telnet on a high port, like a MUD.

I was intrigued whether there was any record of the talkers on the net and here is some of what I came up with:

Talker History
Cheeseplant's House
Crazylands.org

I noticed that crazylands acutally ran a talker so I connected to see who would be online. Pity though, only 2 people were there. The strangest thing was that Grim, who I remember from Cheeseplant's house in 1991 was actually still online!!! what a spod! (we chatted for a while, then I got idle). I found another, although the name goes away, which had a few more people online, but none of the ones from before.

I look back as this being the golden age of the Internet, back in the days before AOL, while so much has changed, it's actually interesting to see that the smaller communities still exist down there in the talker underground.

Few BBSs I remember in OH

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Computrek (used to be able to Telnet to Computrek.org)

Starfleet Academy

Rusty and Edies (the place to go for porn in OH)

BBSing was fun. The wildest thing was when we'd all get into TC (MajorBBS was the greatest) and then we'd chat about of all things, the weather. Tc was better then IRC cause it had actions. You could drop a nuke on someone or send someone flowers.....it was pretty neat! Then there were my legendary BBS parties where I would get snockered and then get online and try and find folks to get snockered with, or to go to Waffle House or Tee Jayes and have breakfast and get sober. Fun fun! MajorBBS dropped the ball when they went to that weird GUI thing. They did not make it a requirement to get in, but after being text based so long, it just seemed, well, weird.

Tired of Slashdot "BBS==past" attitude

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Arrgh. I am sick and tired of the Slashdot editors pushing this idea that the BBS is a thing of the past. The BBS community is alive and well on the Internet. It's single-line dialup systems that are dead.

BBS's still provide the greatest sense of a cohesive online community out there. Better than "blog" type nonsense, and certainly better than what the likes of MSN and AOL have to offer.

I've run UNCENSORED! BBS for 14 years and I'm not about to stop now. And the 200+ users aren't going to stop logging in, either. Modern BBS's offer access via telnet/ssh or web, your choice. And the Internet-connectedness of it all has made it possible for BBS communities to attain geographic diversity, something which was not possible when you had to deal with long distance modem calls.

Please, people, let's get the perspective straight. The BBS is alive and well, so stop pushing this "bygone era" myth.