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VCF 7.0: BBS Bonanza in Bay Area

Posted by timothy on from the just-time-to-walk dept.

RaD Man [ACiD] writes "Vintage Computer Festival 7.0 will be taking place November 6-7th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California! In addition to the tours of antiquities and computer history galore, VCF 7.0 will be hosting a unique Retro Video Game Programming Challenge and presenting a number of interesting seminar speakers, such as the inventor of FidoNet, Tom Jennings. The VCF founder will also be appearing on G4TechTV's "The Screen Savers" this Tuesday, October 19th, to demonstrate some of his favorite artifacts."

4 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. BBS Documentary world premiere by radd0 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Tying into the underlying BBS theme this year, VCF will be hosting the first and only public screening of the long anticipated BBS Documentary which is due out on DVD late this year.

  2. Re:Sweet! Bring it on back =) by LardBrattish · · Score: 4, Informative

    One other interesting fact about original MUD from the 1980s involving a VERY well known character:-

    One player of the Essex MUD was Alan Cox, also known as Anarchy. He wrote (with a bit of help) AberMUD, named after the University of Aberystwyth, Wales, which he attended at the time. It was originally implemented on a Honeywell mainframe running GCOS but was soon ported to UNIX. Its poor design and implementation (all game information was stored in a shared file, which meant that several processes were constantly accessing the disc) did not endear it to many system administrators. Nevertheless, it was the first MUD to gain widespread popularity. After the source code reached the United States, several people made enhancements and additions, notably Rich $alz. It now seems to have found a home at St. Olaf University, where a few dedicated hackers are keeping it alive despite its general grunginess.

    I believe he's still programming somewhere & has improved greatly... ;)

    --
    What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
  3. wohooo! by sinner0423 · · Score: 4, Informative

    In case you guys don't understand the significance of RaD Man posting this story, he leads the ACiD artwork group. ACiD was the biggest, and best, ansi art group back in the day. They had distro's all over the world at one point, and if you had original ACiD art on your board, you were leet.

    I miss the BBS days. There was something appealing to me about playing B.R.E, L.O.R.D, Barneysplat, posting FIDOnet messages, and trying to figure out ways to scam the upload/download credit system. Bulletin boards definately helped inspire some of the basic fundamental utilities we have on the internet today - message boards, games, file transfers, we had it all.

    It really was some of the best times i've ever had with a computer, period. I'm only 24 and this is literally part of my childhood. I urge any old sysops, or anyone who is curious to check out the BBS Documentary website for more nostalgia & information.

    708/312 repruhzent.

  4. BBS's are alive and well out there by arjovenzia · · Score: 5, Informative
    I recently have had a look around some of the BBS's that are present on the 'net (via telnet), particularly those running Synchronet software http://www.synchro.net/sbbslist.html. Being to young for BBS's (and the town i live in would have never had a local system), I have never experienced them, but lookin around a few, I love them. Yay for retrogeeks!

    i wish there was something like that remotely close to where I am, old computer systems are so cool. i think its a shame that there isn't something that we can do with all that old equipment