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Best BBS Memories?
TerryAtWork asks: "What are Slashdot readers' best BBS memories? The BBS ruled before the common man got on the Internet and a lot of older Slashdot reader's first on-line experiences were with them."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Creating and sharing ANSI graphics made with TheDraw. Also that "Mad Max" feeling you get from playing Operation Overkill...
High phone bills.
You see, we pay even for our local calls here, which did put rather a downer on the whole BBS thing.
I remember being envious of the US with the free local calls thing.
"Back in the day" in the UK it was not uncommon to get phone bills of around $300 a month for BBS usage at wonderful 2400 baud.
Then of course we got the "high speed" 9600 model modems. Ahh nostalgia.
My parents gave me and my brother our first computer - an Atari 520ST fm computer with an Emerson 2400 baud modem. This was on advice from a coworker of my dad's who ran an Atari-based BBS.
From day one we were dialing up BBS's. I have since spent countless thousands (tens?) of hours downloading text files, images, programs, whatever. Posting on the boards, chatting with the SysOp if he (never a she) was around. Playing games like Tradewars 2002.
Sometime in late 1996 I got my first email account and internet access from a local ISP, Europa. Until then, though, the only online world I knew was that of the BBS.
BBS's were great but I'd never go back. The ol' internet is far more accessible and wide-reaching. BBS's just can't compete.
BTW: don't dis the Atari. We could go from a cold boot to being dialed up to the local BBS (Puddle City) in less than 60 seconds.
Exocet Industries - Taking over the world, one computer at a
My dad's password was a little too easy to guess.
"Derp de derp."
In Uruguay, and most of South America, BBS ruled for as late as 1996-97, when internet access finally made it's way to the public.
:). (and no, it was not a dating service, it was a geeky BBS that suddenly got crawled with not-so-geeky types, my wife included, which gave us nerds the chance to meet and relate to people with real world experiences!).
I remember expensive phone bills (which my dad covered at the time of course, it's a good thing DSL finally found our little country by the time of my financial independance), and a terrible sense of envy for the folks with 9600 and 14400 connections (i had a 2400 modem).
On a more positive note though, i got a 24 hour reminder of the whole 'BBS era' thing, since i met my wife in one of those networks
Finding out they existed.
My
Limekiller
Sorting out a UUCP newsfeed (back when internet access meant having a dialup shell..), mostly so I could get the alt.binaries groups and have the best pr0n collection in the region.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Does anyone remember Thor ? It was an offline message reader/controller for Amiga and worked with AmiBBS. Somewhat similar to a mail client today, where you could download messages, filelists, etc, read them offline, reply, and upload them on the next connect. It rocked.
Great cybersex, and of course I nailed a few (cute, by the way) girls on a local BBS. BBS's ruled. It was exciting just getting my computer connected to other people, sure, but the sex owned.
nuff said.
the pun is mightier than the sword
Long before mp3s the demo enthusiasts would be downloading from their favorite BBS MODs, S3Ms, ULTs, XMs and others at a fraction of the filesize of a typical mp3 (100K/file vs 5MB). We were then using some form of advanced sound card (Gravis) or player (Cubic) to play it all. And it was all free, and mostly kicked ass.
RIP Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate
Fish do not make good desert travel companions.
The Red Dragon Inn, a BBS I ran off of my Franklin Ace 1000. Written in AppleSoft BASIC. At first I had to run it only at night, but I was finally able to talk my mother into getting me my own phone line. Amber monitors, 5 1/4" floppies, and cracked versions of Ultima IV. Ah, t'were a simpler time. A 9600baud AppleCat modem was the state-of-the-art. I even remember the first GBBS I ever logged into. Can't remember the name, but I remember 'drawing' line graphics in posts.
To be young and phreakin' again...
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
Uh, dude... Violet wasn't real...
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
And those trusting people that wrote BBS software. There was a message board where you could post private msgs to others, and the 'from' field was an editable string. (Hmm, come to think of it nothing much has changed in the past 20 years, has it?) Anyway, I msgd 3 tradewars enemies to move all their ships to a certain sector and signed each msg with one of the others' names. At 11:55 pm I logged in and moved my entire fleet to said sector, comprehensively thrashing the lot of them in one hit. Hey, it was easier than looking for them all over the map ;-)
Since then, I've more-or-less behaved myself. Promise.
Cheers
Simon
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Predicting which character was next going to drip out of my 300 baud modem...
For the first time, having access to really whacked out text documents, like the one about how Reagan's SDI ("Star Wars") program was not about defending against nuclear strikes but really about defending against alien invasion...
Playing a serial MUD. There were multiple players, which was cool (even cooler because I knew most of them), but since the BBS had only one phone line, only one person could play at once. (I imagine this was typical in those days, but it seems interesting to me now...)
Had to be over Telnet, into ExecPC (doesn't seem to REALLY exist anymore). This was two years ago. My town never had any BBSes, and got dialup in 1997, so it was all dialup until I discovered telnet.
I'm recalling a BBS from around 1981 or so, called "Ski's Lodge". It was run on an Apple ][ with a Novation 1200 baud modem. The sysop was called either Ski Patrol or Speeka Troll, I don't quite recall perfectly.
The ski resort motif was complete enough that whenever the BBS program encounted a software error, it would say "AVALANCH" and dump you off line.
Across town there was Worm-O-Net. This was run on a Commodore 64 with a very common and very bad Commodore 64 BBS program (something even worse than C-Net). They did NOT have Auto Answer. Run by the Worm family, you connected to it by dialing the number with the modem. On the other end, little Tina Worm would answer the phone, see if she heard a screech, and then turn on the BBS software.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I remember Trade Wars. Some BBS owner ran it on an ST. They version they had included a treasure planet called "The Wanderer". The object of the game became to shoot scout ships throughout the universe until they hit the Wanderer. The couple of dozen ships lost was more than made up for by the 800 or so always found by taking possession of The Wanderer's riches.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I remember all of those things... I made a few good splash screens when I ran a BBS with three lines... was really popular too.. When I went to other BBS's it was sooo much fun to play with ZModem making it download files... That was awesome.
Warez back then just rocked too, when programs that were over 100 megs was unheard of, and nearly every BBS in my area had them.
Just me
I met my future wife for the first time in a chat room on the Compass Rose BBS. That was April 26, 1992 out in California. Nothing can top that memory. I even have the chat log saved from that day.
I was a 13yr old snot nosed kid and had gotten myself into a flamewar on a local BBS using several obsenities during the course of the thread. Well the sysop didn't fancy that kind of language polluting his board so he took it upon himself to call the house leaving a nasty message on the answering machine, which my mother picked up ... very embarrassing. Right there and then I learned never to use my real demographics when on-line.
"...and a lot of older Slashdot reader's first on-line experiences were with them."
So at age 25, I'm supposed to be all ancient now? Wow. Anyway, I have very fond memories of the BBSes I used to dial with my 2400 bps modem. Unfortunately no local ones were available and I had to dial long-distance. My favourite BBS, particularly at first, was that owned by a great geek C64/Amiga magazine called Datormagazin (legendary in Scandinavia in the late eightees and early to mid ninetees). It had debates better than those typically found on usenet, and there were excellent programming related discussion groups, and lots of freeware or public domain software to download (often with source code, long before the terms "open source" or "free software" were coined).
Sorry.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
When I was 15 years old I got my first modem. And my cousin was sysop for two local (I'm from Munich) BBS's, one was a chat-BBS called StadtNet.
It literally changed my life, since for the first time I met people with whom I could talk about computers (noone in my suburb was into programming, and by the age of 15 I already knew four or five programming languages). But the most important part was that since we were all from Munich or from suburbs of Munich we did a lot together, like having brunch every Sunday or meeting at different restaurant every Tuesday, going to the cinema together, having parties, etc.
I met a lot of people that heavily influenced me because they really impressed me (like a guy who was a real old-school gentleman... it really did me good to have known such a guy, helped later on with flirting to have learned from him ;-)
I was 1:114/244. Message networks are one thing I really miss in the "modern" network. Usenet just isn't the same thing, and neither are web forums.
Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
Jason Scott has been working on it for quite a while, see this.
The latest Slashdot meme.
After moving 1500 miles from where I grew up, and not knowning any of the locals, meeting fellow geeks at a local BBS party has to rank up there pretty high for me.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
My best memory was "Uncle Lem's Cabin" ran by a buddy of mine.
A bunch of us played an RPG game on one of his BBS forums. That was a trip. Basically the GM would give us the setup overnight and we would have all day to write up our actions. Some of us coordinated our plans by telephone. Then the GM would read our messages and respond accordingly. During the thick of it, we were doing two rounds a day.
BBS's and GEnie (which was like Compuserve or early AOL) got me through the half-dozen years between having a mainframe account in college and the Internet.
My father is a blogger.
Well, I could write a novel on my BBS memories, but I'll condense it.
Most of my boarding occured in Texas, most notably on After Hours BBS, Adrenalyze (later just called Adren), and Adam's Garden.
Through these boards, I made the best friends of my teens, some of which I still talk to now (and others, I've lost contact with for eons, and then seemed to re-meet 8 years later on some random MUD). I also recall having two short-lived boards of my own, one running Renegade, the other running MajorBBS (which later came to be called WorldGroup -- about the same time they put a windows GUI to it).
The most special, however, after getting over the "Oooh I'm special cuz I'm a SYSOP like everybody else", was playing MajorMUD, and then Adren started hosting something similar to MajorMUD, a place called Realms of Thoth, that later became a telnet MUD.
I've been addicted to text-based RPG's ever since then. (amaranth.wehostmuds.com port 4080.. we're not hack-n-slash, we require brains!)
I used to think Peter Shipley was cool. Then I aged past 16.
did _you_ ever get the last blade?
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
In preview, that said mud > bbs (the subject line)
Does anyone remember C-Net, a rather common and rather annoying BBS program for the Commodore 64?
I'm sure there were still some C-Net BBS's running when someone decided to use the name as an Internet news/download site. When I first heard of www.cnet.com, I wondered "Why bring a bad BBS into the Internet era?"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
was designing and running David's Amazing BBS, which existed in its best form from 1987-1991. As the "big fish in a small pond", I made a lot of friends and even got a couple of good relationships out of it.
:-(.
I wrote my own software that ran on a Microport Unix system. I had an assistant named REM, and he kept on telling me SCO was better, but I could never afford it. Considering current developments, I thought that was worth noting.
My system was always crashing because I was running it on flaky hardware. Unfortunately, revenues from my rates ($7.50/month, $35/6months, $60/year) were enough to pay the phone bill and maybe give me a few bucks in spending money, but not nearly enough to replace the hardware.
I wrote the software myself, including a very nice WELL-like public board system. The boards would be intelligent one day and horrible flamewars the next. I never figured out how to balance free speech versus flames, a problem that I think was solved pretty well on Slashdot. Perhaps if I'd had the time to think things through instead of having a real job, I could have figured it out. But of course there were no revenues.
I had a fancy dating questionnaire system, which I still think was the best in the industry. It let you answer questions multiple choice and by writing essays, whichever you liked better. Unfortunately, with only five phone lines plus one "secret" one outside of the rotary, there weren't enough lines for a real chat board, and I didn't have the bucks to expand.
When the hardware finally died, so did the system. A few years later I became a minor-league ISP but things were never the same. The BBS world was a lot more fun.
I got spoiled by the local nature of the BBS, where everyone knew your name, and you could put together parties at local restaurants and the like. It was so much nicer then than the current, more anonymous and harder to crack, community. Even after 1,500-odd posts on Slashdot, I don't feel I really know anyone; it's just too big.
But on the BBS, I knew everyone.
My love life never recovered from dropping out of the BBS world
D
Dad to me: How the heck could you spend $400 in long distance last month?!
Me to dad: Don't worry, I got about $1000 worth of free software.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Had to be the day I signed for the package containing my USRobotics HST Dual Standard modem.
The 9600/14.4 modem retailed for almost $1500 in the late Eighties, and there was a sysop's discount of 50%. It took me months to save up that $795 plus shipping. I had them ship it to my office so I wouldn't miss being there to receive it. Fortunately my immediate boss (who also operated a BBS) had an appreciation of the finer things in life, and we spent half the afternoon looking at it, reading its large and content-filled manuals, and going over what I would need to do to to get it to function with my Fido/Opus BBS setup.
I well remember stopping by Baynesville Electronics to pick up my 16550/AFN UART, and as well the new driver chips. These were quickly installed, and I set to work after supper configuring the system and the modem. It had a wonderfully rich and complex set of registers and commands; you could get it do do just about anything you wanted. Friends passed around prized init strings the way church ladies pass around prized recipes, and I received several "Heard you got your modem. How's it going?" phone calls that evening. I had it up and running by midnight. Most fun was to watch the mail transfers running along at warp speed. The final touch: Adding that prized "HST" to the BBS's tag line. Noblesse oblige, and I became a mail point with the next Nodelist update.
I mostly remember two things:
First, I enjoyed and greatly miss the sense of community among most of the BBS sysops of that net--Net-261. Knowledge was shared freely, help was forthcoming, and the group was an extended family. I formed friendships that are still valued almost twenty years later. We often got together personally, and our families got to know one another as well.
Second, there's never been a piece of hardware as much fun to work on as a modem that's intended to drive a BBS.
Anne
The Keeping Room: Opus 1:261/1055 HST
Gone these many years, but never forgotten
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
Hey, BBSes are still around, though they are only kept around for nostalgia nowadays...
there are a lot of telnet boards such as east1999.acid.org and blackthursday.net
There are stil plenty of groups thta draw ascii and ansi too...
check them out at ansi.idledreams.net thuglife.org and scene.downmix.com
Downmix - The Artscene News Source!
Door Games: Tradewars, Global War
...and FWIW, Zamfir's Magic Castle.
Downloads: MODs, Shareware Demos (DukeNuken, Stunts, Wolf3d, Doom)
Dwango - for you Doom players out there, it was local for us Houston,TX-folk.
My computer when i started BBSing was a 286, 40Mb HD, EGA monitor, 2400baud modem. This was all given to me by a now good friend of mine. Thanks Stevie G!
Right after Wolf and Doom, i realized i needed one of those fast 386/DX machines, so again Steve hooked me up. got a 386/DX-66, 4Mb, 125Mb HD, VGA, and a 14.4baud... i was ready to rock.
My favorite BBSs were Mont Belvieu BBS and The Ice Castle.
Back in the day (I was quite young, about 7 or 8), me and my 386/33 2400baud would dialup to my uncle's BBS. There were a million fun things to do there. Chat, Food Fight (a really fun game), Shareware downloads, and a whole bunch more.
Unfortunately, the day I upgraded to 14.4k was the day he shut down.
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
Favorite memories? Upgrading from 2400. I paid $300 for a used Intel SatisFAXtion 14.4 internal modem. Whoa. The screens of text are drawing faster than I can read them. Cool.
Chatting on local message boards and then discovering Fidonet. Back then I hung out in the Fidonet SF Echo. One day someone in the echo mentioned that he had been looking for a particular book that was OOP and couldn't find it at any of the local used bookstores. Somebody elsewhere in the country said "Hey, I saw that book the other day at a local used bookstore. I could pick it up for you, just reimburse me." You could just see the collective light go on over everyone's head and suddenly the Fidonet Used Book Squad (FUBS) was born. I had a spreadsheet keeping track of who I owed books or payment to and who owed me books or payment. We even had a t-shirt printed up.
Yeah, we were a bunch of nerds.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
My BBS started as a 2400 baud, 52MB, 4MB RAM i386 with Desqview & Maximus ended as a 28.8k baud, 8MB RAM, 1.2GB i486 with OS/2 (still Maximus! It was one of the best systems out there, fully configurable, written in C, in later versions it had its own programming language, which was just brilliant).
The other system started as 4x2400+8x14.4k modems, 3 boxes with Novell 3 and Maximus and ended as 9x33.6k modems + 2 terminal servers and TCP/IP ability (to allow telnet connections), all running on a single OS/2 box (with Maximus of course).
I had some of my happies memories with my Net friends and probably most of my worst memories as well.
A lot of BBS software never survived Y2K. By that time most of the amateurs had moved over to Internet. A number of software just stopped functioning, some survived... Just... But the community didn't survive Internet. I always hoped our local community would just switch to the net and I tried by best but what's left of them are just a closed, paranoid group and I don't want to have anything to do with them.
i loved being elite and trading the warez.... yo warez puppies!
My favorite BBS experience was a *nix based BBS in Norfolk, VA called "The Genuine Aloha Ukelele" (major trivia points to anyone who can name the source). It was networked (UUCP) with a few other similar hobbyist systems, the only one I recall being "Milo's Meadow". After being a good user for a while, I got shell access. I had no idea what that was. But I learned.
Also, I ran one of the very few Apple II based Fidonet nodes, "Radio Free Earth". I got to be a moderator for the Apple and Writing echoes (e.g. newsgroups). That was an excellent learning experience as far as learning to get people to get along with each other in a medium where flaming was so easy. Although I'd been on usenet before, it wasn't until we got our software to be usenet message format complaint that I started interacting with it much. Just as in many things, working hard to get this capability made me appreciate it more.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A-hem. I resent that. And go clean your room, it's a mess.
The BEST thing about BBS's, at least in the early days, was that it wasn't something that just ANYBODY could figure out how to do... it sure kept the riff-raff out. We had an actually COMMUNITY of users who, for the most part, knew each other personally and weren't above getting together regularly for all-night drunks. We had our share of devil-worshippers and wife swappers (and of course, devil-worshipping-wife-swappers) but get a few beers into 'em and they could be a lot of fun. There were also warez-kiddeez with their grocery sacks full of debo'd C64 crap on 5-1/4" floppies... but I think the average IQ among 'em still hovered near the genius range, much unlike their equivalent today... God bless their pointy little heads.
1:3612/112
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
...was an old b/w tv and a Vic-20 with a 300bps modem bungie corded to an old Radio Flyer. We'd pull that out from my room to the one phone in the house. We'd have to dial the number by hand, wait for the carrier, unplug the handset, and plug the wire into the modem.
There were at least 10 people active on that (single-line) BBS running on an Apple ][+. My brother and I would be up until the wee hours of the morning watching text scroll slower than we could read it on that 22 character wide display...
Once, we even had the FBI show up unexpectedly at our door. Mom was pissed. What great memories!
Wake up.
Thank God Zmodem came along...
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I'll never forget it. I was at my cousin's house, and he had a C64 and a 300 baud modem. Right before my eyes, he dialed up some pirate BBS, downloaded a cracked copy of Out Run, and we started playing.
That was the "first one's free!" experience that set me on the long road to internet addiction. And that was also the day I began to dislike the woefully un-modemed Tandy 1000 my parents had gotten me.
~Philly
Circa 1990, while in college at Lawrence University I ran RyBBS, written by Greg Ryan, from my dorm room (in Plantz Hall, the jock dorm) at night, from 7pm to 7am. The hardware was a Tandy IBM 8088 and a 2400 baud modem. Memories:
Oh, and if all this BBS talk has stirred up the sysop in you and you want to put up a BBS, go for it! You can get BBS software here and instructions on how to connect your 64 or 128 to the Internet here.
Remember, if the present ain't working for you, do what I do. Live in the past!
Making the first connection to a BBS through an 14k4 modem
Making my first account on an Amiga warez BBS
Getting the first upload to a warez BBS
Getting the first 3:1 download ratio
Getting the first unlimited download ratio
Becoming a warez trader between several boards
Getting a US Robotics 21k6 modem
Being asked for several warez groups as a courier
Getting my v.Fast (28k8) modem
Getting high phone bills
Opening my own BBS (ATMOSPHERE)/Being a sysop
Having a rather successfull single-node BBS
Going to some really *GREAT* parties with where the entire Dutch Amiga scene was at
Tweaking my A2000 to whatever Mhz
Having a ventilator blowing into an open A2000 casing during a hot summer to prevent overheating
Having a friend over to backup the uploads every friday evening between 18:00-19:00 on DAT tape
Running into some trouble with police
Connecting my BBS for the first time through telnet on the internet
having really long chats with my users (even without the use of Hydra protocol)
Ever since september 1996 I miss my BBS. The last few months I've been trying to use WinUAE and Diavolo backup to retrieve a backup DAT tape dated 1996 to get to my old BBS... Still no progress but keeping hope that one day I can get to my old AmiExpress (/X) backup for nostalgic reasons.
I more or less think that the tape will be f*cked though...
I remember the first time that a local BBS gave me access to an "adult" posting area.
:
I automatically had to make a mockery of it to the effect of
cemetary + shovel = instant orgy
I was banned pretty quickly. Heh.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I used to run "Skynet BBS" in the Boston area, a 2-node 28.8k Wildcat system (originally 1-node 2400bps Renegade system).
Some of the best stuff I can remember from the day were door games - namely LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon) and BRE (Barren Realms Elite). BRE was incredible in that leagues were created by teams of BBS systems sharing user data during off-hours. LORD was just a great text based RPG.
Another thing that was cool was Renegade itself. Although it was freeware, it was better than its commercial competition in many ways. I've always longed for some of its powers to be transplanted to the web.
Then, of course there were the beautiful ANSI graphics you knew were always hand-crafted. And the fact the entire system was made possible by other local hackers. Message boards were far better than today - there were no trolls, there was no flamebait, and spam was still a food best avoided.
Those were the days..... gone forever, I'm afraid.
This was most of my life. I loved the ten thousand times we fooled the same people by creating fake "crossdressers" on the board. It got 'em every time.
activestudios web design
Me to wife: How the heck could you spend $400 on clothes?
Wife to me: Don't worry, I got about $1000 worth.
It was the best. We even upgraded to First Class sometime in the late 80's I think; no more zterm. I used to dowload every piece of new software I could. /Randoms
That's a great way to put it, and boy could the internet use some de-riff-raffing. I remember the first time I heard a modem connect tone on a radio advertisement. My jaw dropped, and my train of thought went something like this:
"Wtf? Do they expect their listeners to know what that sound means?"
"Hmm, maybe this is getting big enough that they do."
"Oh well. There goes the neighborhood."
BBS parties were great! All my friends' parents thought I was the "good kid", so they wouldn't get to go to parties unless I was going too. Oh man...
Upgrading from 2400 to 14400 was like trading in the Schwinn for a Ferrari. I waited 'til the proprietary 19.2's came out, so the prices on the 14.4's dropped into my range.
Zmodem was my god, and Bluewave came in a close second. HSLink came on the scene too late to be useful, but chatting with the sysop while uploading a file earned me better-than-average access on at least one board that I can remember.
RIPscrip' was for weenies that couldn't handle a text interface. I still feel that way about Flash.
and a program I typed in from a magazine article! That was in 1988. I formed strong friendships with several people I met on one particular BBS, and was engaged to two different men from there.
I ran the Underworld back in the 80's - 309 area code. Had a single private line installed in my dorm room just for the BBS (had to petition the university to get it). Ran on an Apple ][ clone that I built, with an Apple Cat modem (1200 baud full duplex), then upgraded to a USR 2400 baud modem later. 10MB (yes MB) hard drive as big as a shoebox, running UBBS software...
Fantastic experience. Rewrote everything around a D&D motif, reprogrammed the autodialers on campus to include my BBS, and posted flyers all over the place with scans from the Fiend Folio (scanned in with a Thunderscanner on my Mac128)...
Met some fantastic people over the BBS, some of whom I am still friends with (18 years later). Plus it was a great way to get laid by Comp Sci cuties - come on up and check out the hardware...
Ahhhh, those were the days... Life was never the same after the Internet took over....but that's good too...
Downloading SLS Linux at 2400 baud (With thanks to a kindly sysop who agreed to waive the u/d ratio for the 30 floppies worth). It had kernel 0.96 or so. Certainly a huge step up from Windows 3.1 and DOS.
The elation of getting MNP 5 and not having to backspace over line noise any more (but there was still the sysop's cat walking on the keyboard).
Trying to guess how many days it would take for a message to propigate through fidonet.
Playing 24 games of chess one move per night per game through the chess door.
Phil Katz vs. Seaware, with Seware being banned from BBSs everywhere because of the ugly and stupid lawsuit over the .arc extension. The ban was just as well, PKzip was much better than arc anyway.
Using ANSI codes to create color animated messages or change the from field on the message.
My favorite BBS memory has to be doing modifications to WWIV. It's the way I learned C and it was a lot of fun.
:) I have many friends still to this day that I gained from BBSes. So it's really had quite an impact upon my life, amazing.
WWIV was the most popular BBS system in my area, and of course it had it's WWIVnet that had message boards networked across the country.
On WWIVnet people would post mods to the source code for WWIV (which was available if you registered for $50). I got $50 from my Mom so I could get the source code (being around 14 at the time). I started downloading the mods from the local BBSes and the message boards and modifying the code. After a while I started trying to make my own modifications and when successful sent them out to boards (a couple of popular ones being a conferencing system and a vertical chat modification).
Anyway, it's amazing to think about how much I sucked at programming back then, but it was a great start.
Oh, and the people were great too.
(Apparently there's a WWIV 5.0 beta now, years and years later. Occasionaly I check up what's going on, and this seems fairly new (last 6 months?). It's amazing it's taken this long though - I was able to port WWIV to ncurses on Linux in a weekend.)
In jr high/hs, a number of friends got me hooked on the local Apple BBS scene. It wasn't until college that I started getting into running a few of my own. I got to know all of the local sysops, and we felt like the kings among our peers (those peers being the types with which your common RPGamer wouldn't condescend to socialize).
A favorite memory was hosting a local convention where we got the guy who wrote Qmodem to show up and give a talk about the future of BBSing. At that time, he spoke of interlinked BBSes using a packet switching network as a way of synching the disparate message stores.
A while after that, I hooked up a couple of my endeavors to the ISCA Fido node, and started in on global messaging. At that time, I participated in (as many did) in a flame war with Joel Rosenberg over the term "Cyberpunk" in sf.fandom (Joel's a fantasy/sf writer of some note).
Of course, as soon as I discovered free MUDing, nothing was ever the same for me, and I never looked back.
I was more 3l33t at that very moment than everyone else on the planet.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Synchronet is still a very popular piece of BBS software that's used by a great number of BBS's worldwide even today. It's still being actively developed, and is 100% open source, running on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and a handful of others (including Win32.) Its features are beginning to rival even those of WorldGroup, with all its built-in services. It can even run old-school DOS doors under Linux by using DOSEMU. When you compare this to other BBS packages out there (such as Falken BBS, which has all but stopped development since changing owners,) it's nice to see BBS software that's still being actively developed with daily CVS commits.
You can check out a list of BBS's running Synchronet (many of them with friendly, active sysops) at http://www.synchro.net/sbbslist.html, or a bigger list of BBS's (all checked to be active on at least a monthly basis) at http://www.dmine.com/telnet/. You can, of course, find out more of Synchronet at http://www.synchro.net.
In related news, Fidonet is still alive and well, and when you compare it against today's spam-infested usenet, Fidonet is actually quite the attractive alternative. BBS's may be outdated and more a novelty these days than anything, but it's still the only thing out there that has that nice, close-knit 'family-like' atmosphere.
Anyone use Mad Hatter's Worm-hole add-on? There were ALL kinds of bugs associated with it.
I remember running bigbang.exe and giving it 30-45 mins to create an universe.
I really miss Tradewars. It was an incredible game.
*sniff*. we hardly knew ye.
Tradewars was my FAVORITE GAME. Also the forums, aka "brick walls". I remember my external 2400 baud modem, and how fast it all seemed at the time.... and my fondest memory? A heated argument with several other sysops about this new-fangled invention, _the mouse_. No way, we insisted, would these things EVER be used over a modem!
**** You never REALLY learn to swear until you own a computer. ****
Getting totally backstabbed by my Tradewars 2002 corp. partner after finally getting a Class M planet with a citadel, huge treasury, planetary defense system, and cherried-out ISS ranks high on my list. Even better, after I logged in and found myself sitting in an escape pod in the middle of nowhere, the sysop chatted me just to say he watched the whole thing happen live. Fuckers. That and entering those wonderful "no-exit" sector clusters.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
I remember not long after I got my first PC (a PS/2 Model 30 with an 8086 CPU and kick-ass MCGA graphics) being handed a list of phone numbers to local and semi local BBSs.
Logged onto a few, mostly WWIV systems, and finally found a couple that were to my tastes, like Online's Place and the Alchemist's Lab. I remember mainly how even though there were a lot of massive flamewars between fifteen year old boys, how for the most part the entire community was accepting and friendly - we'd even have real parties. And by "real" parties, I mean wake-up-in-the-bathtub, dude-where's-my-pants, I'll-never-drink-again masterpieces.
One memory of those parties was being able to log on to the BBS from the console, always had a feeling of "power" when I was logged on locally - God knows why, it's not like I had anymore privileges there than over the phone line.
But I guess I remember the sense of community and the parties more than anything else, I mean, when't the last time you went to a Slashdot party?
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
I spent almost 10 years running a BBS in the Philadelphia area. Ran WWIV, and eventually modded the heck out of it. Initially the newsgroups were a big part and a big draw. I only had one door game, Trade Wars. I had many great and informative discussions with intelligent people. Unfortunately, I was soon innundated with kids wanting nothing but games and porn. I checked ages for adult access (you had to mail me a filled out application and disclaimer, and send a photocopied drivers license) but that didn't stop those snot nosed little brats from trying every trick in the book to get access. Once I started logging caller ID numbers, and calling a few parents, that stopped pretty quickly. What I liked most about BBS's at least in the early days, was that most people were quite nice, quick intelligent, and very willing to help out with problems and questions. Any time I posted a question, I would get several helpful responses, and of course I always tried to post answers to questions that others posted. Unfortunatwely, since PC's have proliferated so much, and Windows and AOL have dumbed down the Internet so much, most people on line are imbeciles now.
Liberalism...the next best thing to thinking.
Met my wife via one back in 1992 -- AfterHours BBS (512 area code, R.I.P. Tombob). I think at its heyday the sysop had 24 lines (running MajorBBS). We'd get together once a week for some face-to-face chat and take over the the Incredible Flying Pizza Society for a few hours. Sure, I played around with other BBS', but nothing compared to chat.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Anyway.. One of my fondest memories was this poser (703/202/301) user called "Batman" who liked to post about how 3133T he was. I was a level-255 cosysop on the BBS at the time, running WWIV 4.xx.
I changed his colors to black-on-black for all 8 text colors.
I created a message base that everyone BUT him had access to.
I then posted the logfiles of him calling up, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
Another user created an ANSI showing me ("Satan") hitting Batman with my pitchfork, generally making fun of the whole situation. I still have the ANSI. Good times.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I was calling boards in '85 from my TRS-80 III on a 300 baud acoustic modem. In fact, my favorite board was running on a TRS-80 I with 4 floppy drives and a real honest to goodness Bell 103A modem, with a relay hacked in to answer the phone. Custom BBS software the op wrote in BASIC. I was known as The Trashman (not many people actually LIKED TRaSh-80s), other callers I remember were Dr. Death and Knight Lockinvar.
C-Net has been mentioned here, and doors. Anyone ever use The Proving Grounds ? It was also popular, and ran on Apple ]['s -- a BBS that was also a multi-user D&D type game.
TBBS was a great BBS system that started out on TRS-80's, but was eventually ported to PCs. TBBS let you create your customize the entire board. Essentially, it made as many layers of menus as you wanted, could put discussion areas and file area anywhere. People would make mini-worlds or locations in the BBS. One here in NY called itself the Grand Central BBS and modeled itself after Grand Central Terminal. All in text, of course.
Eventually, as people switched to PCs, we had PC Board, and Fido Net. Fido was clunky though, and eventually Opus became more popular. For many of us, Echo Mail was our introductions to discussions with people across the country.
We vaguely heard it was something like "Usenet", but had no idea what the hell that was. The Internet was something you broke in to by dialing University computers. I may even have my war-dialer around someplace. Operation Sundevil scared most of us out of doing things like that though.
If you have any interest in BBSes at all, the SYSOP of one of the local boards I used to call has put up many of the text files we used to trade on a web site called, appropriately enough, www.textfiles.com
I bought an 8088 from a friend of mine in late '92 with a 1200 baud modem on it. All it was good for was calling boards, since it only had a 200M hard drive. This was the first computer I had besides my old Apple ][+ that was pretty useless. After becomming obsessed with the boards for abour 3 weeks, I talked my mom into getting me my own phone line for my birthday and I put up my own board, The TARDIS. I went by the Doctor. Once I realised I wasn't as big of a Dr. Who fan as I thought I was, I changed the BBS name to Peaceful Death (named after a Dead Horse song) and I later started using the alias DeadAir. The BBS was hacked a while later during a BBS hacker war and I put it back up under the name Fear and Loathing.
Loved it. The board was very popular until late '97 when the internet started pulling people away from the scene. I pulled the plug January 1 2000 after going almost 6 months with no calls except for network updates. I really miss it sometimes.
Vincent
---- The one good thing about music: When it hits you, you feel no pain.
Nuff said.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
That reach doesn't replace the BBS.
The best thing I remember about BBSes was being able to get out and meet people, there was even the odd adult BBS (one without porn... and open enough that couples would hang around on.), people would be able to get together for dinner, picnics, all sorts of stuff.
The Internet killed those BBSes, so now for the mostpart, I can't meet the people I chat with or game with. That social scene died.
I rather hope that wireless networking can do something to replace it. Free high speed connectivity to your neighbours could make for some cool little communities. And by that I don't mean high-speed internet connectivity, just local stuff... like the camera some guy set up two houses over, or the communal MP3 collection, or the chat room. That'd be cool.
I've been toying with the idea of setting up one of these, a modern BBS-type thing. E.g. any connect attempt through port 80 is redirected to the BBS. Kind of a wireless community bulletin board. The "web" site could then hold all the info as to what the site is about, how to get into chats, online games, etc.
The one thing i miss most about my BBS days are the sense of a Local Community. It was always great to have everyone from the BBS's get together once a month to meet face to face, it really personalized the whole experience, and you got to know people beyond just what you knew about them online. Some of my best friends to this day are friends from my area that I met on a local BBS and we stay in touch to this very day. (One i just saw this week for the first time since the BBS days disappeared) Email and IM have been instrumental for me in keeping those BBS friendships alive over the years as people have moved and gone to school, etc.
:) I also loved FidoNet because i could for example read the STTNG echo and get all of the upcoming episode lists for Star Trek and impress my friends :)
Even with Fidonet, our local net 2613 was like it's own small community, with everyone from my area contributing to it, plus our local net had the bandwidth advantage of being able to download from the fidonet backbone via the internet from a local university.
Maybe this one could make it into a slashdot poll....
What was your favorite BBS software, either from a user or sysop perspective? I personally frequented many PCBoard and Telegard BBS's, as well as being sysop of a PCBoard BBS, but there are others that i can't remember the names of the software of...
I started out with a 300 baud modem on my C-64. I had forgotten how much I loved ZModem until other people pointed it out here. There were precious few BBSs in local dialing area around Knoxville, IA. My brother and I would save up money and call late at night or on the weekend to the great BBSs in the big cities to download shareware. I remember back then a lot of BBSs weren't open all day, they'd just start after some guy (or his parents) went to bed :) There was one game that was a lot of fun for me back then where you'd create a fighter and enter the arena to win money and buy better equipment. I never got into Tradewars much, it was a little hard for me to get the hang of... I even created my own simple BBS in Basic, but nobody came...
it was all about Rusty 'n Eddy's and all the pr0n GIF's
=8-)
My favorite "doors" were called "Land Of Devastation" and "Excalibur".
http://www.landofdev.com/
I've been trying to find the guy that wrote Excalibur and see if he or someone has updated it, but I haven't had any luck.
Being a Mac user (my mom was a teacher, "apples for educators" was a brilliant strategy) I was quite involved in the "Mac v. PC" war on the "Graffiti Wall." (my fave board didn't have a real forum)
I also was assistant-sysop of the BBS that ran out of the local HS electronics-lab. It seems our HS had a direct line to Seattle that you could use with no long-distance charges. The sysop would call into the BBS from home, drop to DOS, and call out on the line to Seattle. He was a big Amiga freak and there weren't any Amiga BBSs locally.
My favorite BBS at the time had a hookup to a national X-Files forum going right when the show started. After a while we decided it would be a good idea to think of a term for X-Files fans like Trekkies for Star Trek fans. I eventually thought of x-philes and it was liked by all. A little while later I was reading an X-Files magazine and saw fans of the show called X-Philes for the first time. I have no way of knowing if I was the first to use it but I haven't been able to find any other references from an earlier date (although if someone finds one, I'd like to see it).
Another favorite memory was my friend and I just about taking over the entire universe in the Tradewars game on the local BBS. I loved that game.
- Modem upgrades - 300 to 1200 to 2400 to 14.4k to 28.8k.. every time it was an amazing increase, watching those file transfers and ANSI graphics rush in at amazing speeds.
- WWIV - Most of the boards I called ran this. I bought a copy so I could write mods to the source code.
- TradeWars - I played as many TW2002 games as I could find. I made a few friends who I'd form a corporation with whenever possible. The other door games were fun as well.
- Warez - The warez scene was fun. I even cracked a few games and distributed software a bit, but was never a hardcore warez dude or anything. I was pretty paranoid, though, and find it amazing that these days we can do it out in the open without getting into much trouble.
- ANSI's - Like the parent poster mentioned, ANSI graphics were cool as shit. I made quite a few, and eventually got good enough that some of the local boards used my ANSI's for their login screens.
- Locality - Though I didn't go to that many BBS greets, there was that local community feel to it that was great. I got to know people really well, and I still keep in touch with some of them to this day.
I always wanted to run my own board, but being a teenager at the time, my parents didn't allow me to get a second phone line. One of my friends got one running, though, and I got to be cosysop, and that was pretty fun.
I still remember an old BBS I ran in the LA area. I won a free PCjr with a 256k RAM sidecar, I had two 1200 baud Hayes Smartmodems sitting around idle, and two phone lines, so I set up a multiuser Wildcat BBS. The app and message database had to fit on one floppy drive, so it didn't have much room. But I was able to get it to connect to the Wildcat message forwarding network and successfully handled an extremely tiny amount of packet traffic. The system went active every night at something like 4AM, dialed up the nearest node, and exchanged messages to forward across the net. I think my Wildcat system had the smallest msg storage allocation around, it worked, sorta, but the network pretty much routed around me.
Anyway, I ran one of the first BBSes in my area, the first BBS hosted by a university department with a specialized focus. I abandoned it when I left school, but it eventually evolved into one of the top 10 educational sites on the net. I'd say more about who they are but I don't like to reveal my identity on Slashdot. At least I can privately enjoy what I built, even if the new operators refuse to acknowledge me in any way.
And of course, who could forget spending hours buried in the text files of the Temple of the Screaming Electron.
Yeah... Pimp Wars, Monty Python scripts and being given admin priveleges I so did not merit on a buddy's BBS he ran out of his basement.
Those halcyon days of being a geek in incubation...
Seasons of Wither...@ 300 baud.
WOW...now those were the days...when computers cost $3400 and you really, in retrospect...couldnt do a damn thing with them. My, are we spoiled now.
Anyone remember Seasons of Wither?
It's not what you know; It's what you can find out.
Having the Sysop of our local Major BBS using Sprint's PC Pursuit to link up with another BBS across the country, using one of his 32 channels to link in another 16-channel BBS. It was a major bummer when Sprint cancelled that discount service for BBS's.
Flash Attack was one of the more interesting of the ANSI-Graphics games that ran over the Major BBS system. I'd love to see a modern update running over TCP/IP.
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
In my day, we didn't have 24-bit color JPEGs or 19 inch LCD screens... no, we had to download text files full of periods and asterisks that if you printed it out, on your 7-pin dot matrix printer that sounded like a tank about to invade Honduras, and you held the printout 7 feet away in a dark room and squinted, it almost looked like a playboy bunny who was hardly even naked to begin with. And we liked it!