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Commodore BBSes Return using the Internet.
oldbitcollector writes "Several Commodore 64 enthusiasts have developed a method for putting Commodore BBS sytems on the Internet. Users can "dial" using a standard 64 connected to the Internet or by using a "CG Term" for the PC. Details can be found here."
How can this be very useful? The C64 has about 32K of useable RAM and about an 800K floppy... am I missing something, have they come up with larger mass storage systems for the C64 or something?
(This isn't intended as a troll or flamebait... it's a genuine question....)
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Wow, this brings back memories. I ran a BBS for years, Bladerunner BBS. It started out running on an Osborne Executive (2400 BPS! 2 double-sided quad density drives!) and then was upgraded to an Atari ST (20 MB SCSI HD, 19,200 BPS Telebit Trailblazer!). The amusing thing was that the CPU in the Trailblazer was much faster than the ST itself.
One thing I really miss from those days is the sense of community, and the games. I ran a number of games on my BBS, and it was always a lot of fun watching people interact. Unlike modern online games, anyone could write a test-oriented BBS game if they knew a little BASIC, so there were all sorts of cool games. I remember in particular a drag racing game where you could race, earn money, buy upgrades, and compete against other drivers (i.e. other players on the same BBS). The integration of the game into real-time was fascinating -- most BBS games let you make a limited number of moves a day, so people would play a single session of a game for _weeks_. And there were tons of cool timing tricks, like dialing into the BBS at 11:30 so that you'd have the last move before midnight and then the first game after midnight, which could give you a nice advantage (and leave you vulnerable as everyone else moves after you).
Hey, thanks for the excuse for the flashback. Fun days!
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Commodore BBSs were such fun for cracker sysops. Since they stored user passwords in the clear for any sysop to read, once you had sysop access on two different popular BBSs, you could tell who used the same password on all their accounts everywhere.
Once upon a time, there was even a BBS owner/sysop I knew who didn't bother to use more than one password.
Need I say more?
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Heres something that might give you a c64 flash back.
:) :)
;)
GOOGOOACKACKBADBAD
Punter
Xmodem-1K and Ymodem-1K
300 Baud modems you pluged your sound into.
Sixpack (s2g), Arj, Lha
4 pixel wide 80 column display on a 40 column terminal
4 color ansi (And of course Petascii)
Burping Number 5.
Dual Sid, playing Skate or Die, Sids rule
Speedload Cartridges, (My fav the Snapshot)
GEOS and Quantumlink
Peek and Poke
Compiled Basic
Atari 2600 joysticks
Am I missing anything else? Other than almost every BBS being written in compiled basic, some where written in C. The Amiga where BBS's compiled in C was the rave. Moving on UP. I remember before I got my Amiga, I upgraded to a C128 so I could do real 80 column ANSI, for almost a year during school, I had at least a real ANSI term, DesTerm I recall, even had real zmodem.
Rusty and Eddies!
Ok, I should stop now before I go on about moving to PC playing Tradewars on WWIV BBS's and Galaciticom (Before they turned into ISP software.)
The BBS scene has turned into the IRC scene, now it seems to be the IM scene. Blogs are there too, but I was blogging before it was blogs, so Im blogged out. (Or is Slashdot a BLOG?)
"Know your roots!"
AT&F&C1&D2
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
I cut my BBSing teeth on boards pulled from that very BBS listing in TC. Used to wait excitedly for the "Big BBS List" to come out every now and then. :)
It used a single sided 3.5" floppy exactly like the double sided ones we have for PCs now.
Was I the ONLY kid on the block who had one of those drives?
Back in the old days I bragged about having a combined storage of 1.5 megabytes online! lol. Man, now I have 2 terabytes on 2 networked PCs...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
It's been done. 2002. Just not up now, unless it is running at another address somewhere.
But I haven't heard of any earlier Apple IIs being accessible via Telnet, and not any `GBBS "Pro"' systems.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Having writen BBS programs for the Vic20. C64 and C128 (Actually same program evolved as I switched systems.. Also ported to Dos and would have gone to Linux but the BBS died on Dos as the phone company ripped out the wires to my phone line and offered to charge me to fix there own mistake.
Intrestingly enough I wasn't supprised to discovere I had no callers. I was only supprised as to WHY)
If the trick is handled all on the PC side (and I expect it is) then it dosen't matter.
If they are doing it the way I think
(Commodore userport to RS232 to null modem to PC sereal (rs232) then PC forwards to telnet etc...) this should also work on the Vic20.
For that matter it should also work for CP/M, Apple II, TSR-80. Pritty much any old BBS.
Dos BBSes can be done on the same Linux or Windows box that provides the Internet access making it much easier.
I don't actually exist.
Is not a new thing.
Jay | http://oldos.org
I remember my C=64 with fondness. I should, I paid $495 or so...
There was a guy I found who was building 1 meg of RAM expansion slots, I thought I was on top of the world. And when i got my 3.5" 1.44 Mb floppy drive I almost peed my pants.
I forget the program, but I set up my C=64 to be a BBS for the real estate office I worked in. You could NOT tell you weren't on a PC (286/386) of the period.
I wrote my first book on that machine, printed it out on a Star printer, and published it.
And there WERE a few BBSs around with more than one phone line, not to mention a national BBS I think called Q-Link(?). I took courses on that big BBS up in Virginia(?) with a dozen other peolple on line. And who could forget "Windy City BBS"?
I connected a 286 to the internet, and also a Mac LC II. Both of these could only access text pages, such as provided by the National Weather Service. If you went to a site such as yahoo.com, you essentially got turned away, as your postage-stamp sized processor was detected, as well as your tiny motherboard. Really. The NWS didn't care, so you got your text. Found out that you needed some power on your end to get snappy downloads, and if you didn't have it, then you wound up with something like 26 bytes per second, if that. Both of those boxes hard drives had to be prepared on later-model machines so they could get on the internet. Installing the software was nearly impossible on them. Used MS-DOS/Arachne 1.70 on the 286, and Mac OS 7.5.3 on the Mac LC II.
Commodore was unbelievably stupid, and made some things harder for programmers. For example, the C-64 and C-128 computers both had a software-emulated UART chip, instead of a real one (to save money, as I understand it, about $5), limiting the baud rate to how fast the computer could process code in what was called a "non-maskable interrupt". The C-64 allowed a max of 1200 baud. The C-128, because it could run at double the clock speed of the C-64 ("Fast Mode", or about 2Mhz), could in theory run at 2400 baud, but you had to write your own version of the UART emulator using well-optimized machine language. Faster connection speeds were out of the question.
As the author of a few C-64 programs (e.g., "Prototerm"), I can't tell you how many times I wanted to drive to West Chester, and strangle someone. Nowadays, of course, I periodically get the urge to strangle a person or two in Redmond. Fortunately, it's too long a drive.
Nothing every changes, just the names and faces.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
I've been waiting for Commodore BBSes to return to the net for a long time.
The thing I liked the most about Commodore BBSes was the color and graphics. Every BBS had little custom color schemes and graphical flourishes here and there. And, of course, the phreakers' boards had the most flamboyant designs. With the popularity of ASCII art today, you can just imagine what Commodore users could accomplish with PETSCII, and what Atari users could accomplish with ATASCII now that you mention it.
Color64 and C-net boards had a charm that was hard to match.
Yeah..
First BBS I logged into was a DYM BBS.. I was too young to log in and I lied.
It didn't work out.
Then I logged into the Forth BBS in SanFransisco. Your command prompt was actually in forth.
The way forth works is you can add commands so the BBS fuctions were just new commands. I think they locked off the programming features (makes sense but I never tried to edit the BBS so I don't know).
I remeber the ongoing story of Murphy Law of folly forth. I just folowed the story as it progressed. "Folow the yellow diod"...
(Being an impressionable kid I actually refered to going to the bathroom as "dumping my buffers" for a while. As in "I gotta go dump my buffers" while dancing the "gotta go to da bathroom" dance)
Later I had access to some RCP/M and RBBS bbses. The downloads section was just dropping you to a secured prompt.. (think restricted Unix shell where you can't do much) run xmodem filename.ext and then download the files you wanted.
I always thought of Commodore BBSes as limited but secure. Oh boy I had everyone and there brother trying to prove that wasn't the case. Nobody ever hacked into my BBS but I knew it had nothing to do with Commodore.
It was that I wrote the program and every time someone TRIED to hack in I changed the code.
(Staying one step ahead is the ONLY way).
There were three reasons people tried to hack my BBS.
1. I once called it uncrashable. I never did that again once it went into a crash recrash loop.
2. I was sereous about the no cuss words policy (that went away when I hit 18. Mommy might not approve)
3. I ran my BBS on a Commodore 128.
Actually worse than that MY software tried to addapt to the user and often failed.
So I had people hacking my BBS who thought I had an Apple II, a TRS 80, a PC and any number of platforms people didn't like.
I also had one guy yell at me becouse his 300 baud modem connected to my 1200 baud as a 300 baud.
(Some 300 baud modems let you go faster but the other side has to have the same kind of modem and support the hack. I didn't)
And then there was the guy who accused me of stealing his BBS look.
(His was a brand new BBS and I know my BBS changed it's apperence at least twice while he was online just to accomidate his poking and proding)
But that was the worst of it.
However when I want to remember the good old days I log into my Linux box and go into the command line.
Then I smile.
Then I type the old forth BBS commands and they don't work.
I don't actually exist.
Our school uses an old mainframe and a 9600 baud modem to handle the registration of ~20000 students.
...my very first introduction to local Commodore BBS's was shortly after I purchased a Datalink 2400 internal modem for my Apple IIGS.
One of my dad's coworker friends ran a board called "The Ivory Tower", and passed the info along to me. Let me tell ya, up until that time, I had no idea how my life was going to change. I miss the small community feel of old BBS's like "The Ivory Tower".
I remember also the frustration of hearing those blasted 'busy' signals when trying to call up a popular board. As I made my way around the various BBS's of Knoxville, TN, I came across "The Volunteer BBS" -- it was one of my favorite hang-outs -- it was a PC based BBS, but they had great online games like Millway's Casino and Tradewars 2002. With the Internet being so global, it's getting harder to find such cozy little places to hang out anymore.
Bring back Millway's Casino!
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
...is a 2 meg Flash animation that mimics letters slowly appearing on a green screen at 300 baud.
W E L C O M E
T O
T H E
C O M M O D O R E
P I R A T E 'S D E N
1> Warez 2>Chat 3>BBS System
>?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
My parents got an Apple ][+ with a 300 baud modem when I was in third grade, back in 1982. I remember the "Cracked" screens with the phone numbers for the BBSs of the pirates who had cracked the games I was playing (Drol, Snack Attack, Taipan, Escape to Atlantis). I also found local 'boards' where I would read what everyone who had logged on before me had posted in the various 'rooms' that I was interested in and I would reply appropriately. I can't remember downloading any warez, though early pr0n was available on CompuServe and my friend John and I racked up an inexcusably large bill after 'downloading' all night. My best friend Jason and I convinced our parents to buy us Mac 512s in 1985, when we were in 7th grade. Jason's parents moved during junior high and he got a second phone line installed and started running a BBS on a Mac Plus he'd picked up for the purpose.
I remember me and the other geeks who logged on (and who spent time redialing when somebody else was tying up the single phone line) pushing the BBS software Jason was running to the limit; the big hit was being able to fuck with the text display and simulate "animation" by forcing the page of text you were reading to refresh by issuing different backslashes in the text posts. Dumb shit that would take over your text display until it played itself out, but which was amusing nervertheless.
It's an awesome idea to transmorgify the internet to a C64 BBS, but just imagine a website that tracks either realtime (i.e.. http://npds-tracker.continuity.cx:3680) or better yet just lists possible BBSs and lets people with the old school hardware break it out and dial up to phone numbers that might or might not be busy. There's nothing quite like the end user experience of old BBS software whatever the OS it ran on; I propose the excitement is better created by setting up real BBSs on original hardware as a better alternative to trying to connect old, old boxes to the internet. I for one would consider the thankless process of getting an additional phone line to set up a dial-up BBS on my trusty Mac Plus (formerly a Mac 512 before my roommate pour a beer through it when I cut him off on Tetris) with a HD20 and a 33.6 modem should the demand be there (and methinks it probably isn't).
Wouldn't it best be experienced as it was originally experienced?
End of Line
Several folks have mentioned that they miss that 'sense of community' that BBSs brought - well it's not like you can't get that sort of community anymore. There are still plenty of BBSs out there that _do_ have an active community of users. OSUNY ssh://osuny.co.uk is one of them. BBSs are still your friend. :)