Slashdot Mirror
Re-Discovering The 'Lost Civilization' of Dial-Up BBS's (ieee.org)
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes:
Two new articles take a look at "social media's dial-up ancestor" from back in the 20th century. First a new article in IEEE Spectrum remembers a time when tens of thousands of dial-up bulletin board systems kept modems busy all around the world playing chintzy "door" games, downloading textfiles and ANSI art, and reading messages left on FidoNet's "echo" forums. "To understand how the Internet became a medium for social life, you have to widen your view beyond networking technology and peer into the makeshift laboratories of microcomputer hobbyists of the 1970s and 1980s...amateurs tinkering in their free time to build systems for computer-mediated collaboration and communication." And the former sysop at "The Cave" has also written a new article about visiting the few surviving BBSes, some still in operation since 1983, many now accessible via telnet, and some still even delivering messages over FidoNet's phone-to-phone network.
Anyone else have fond memories of visiting (or running) a BBS?
Anyone else have fond memories of visiting (or running) a BBS?
Every so often I find a BBS still in operation over telnet, and log in to play Usurper. For those who didn't play it, Usurper was a D&D-style RPG that had a little more in it to do than the better known Legend Of the Red Dragon (LORD). A while back the source code for Usurper was released under GNU by the original author.
This also reminded me of an even more complicated game called Exitilus. According to at least one group, the code for this is lost to history, as it the original author of the game.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I had a BBS, but it was down most of the time because I wanted to play simcity and my XT couldn't multitask yet. Who remembers the big BBS platforms? Opus comes to mind.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I suspect it'd be hard to get RIPTerm 1.54 or anything fully compatble running over telnet (that I know of, anyhow). This is a pity - near the end of the BBS era, a lot of them used it (depending on the software - I ran a Searchlight BBS, which had good support).
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I had a friend who used to run a BBS back in the mid/late-80's that specialized in doc files for game manuals, back when Commodore 64 and other computer games adopted a primitive form of DRM by asking you questions from the game user manual. You would pirate the game from a friend, then go download a manual for it from the BBS.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I was really drawn to BBS's in the late 80's and early 90's due to a wide variety of unique text based games. They were like interactive books. Yes most were like Zork in the way they operated and even for the time it was a bit of cheesy fun. The neatest part about it was the remote communication between your home PC and another. Knowing that your PC could talk to another PC across a phone line was a whole new world prior to AOL's existence. When AOL came out that's when BBS's started to disappear as the internet grew. BBS's are to the internet what telegraphs were to telephones. We wouldn't be here without them but they are completely inefficient and obsolete compared to modern technology. This is like asking the question do you miss telegraphs, what are you most fondest experiences with telegraphs? The day they became obsolete is my favorite experience naturally. Why reminisce about obsolete technology? Does anyone want to reminisce about the days of AOL chat rooms? Move on, that was 30 years ago, it wasn't cool then and it's definitely not cool now but we should all respect where we are now because of it. Fond memories of frustrating technology though, no.
People seem to like having someone else in control. BBSs had operators that ultimately controlled access and content. Usenet didn't and was replaced by web boards and Facebook groups. The king is dead, long live the king.
DOSBOX. You have to manually configure it, but the serial support in it (and only it, dosemu, etc all don't currently have similiar support!) has a virtual modem builtin that can use 'atd' to connect to a remote telnet port that provides access to a BBS. The only thing I have found that DOESN'T work with it is ROBOBBS. The terminal app side works fine, but the BBS software never properly initiates a connection after the RING signal shows up.
Besides all of the clearnet telnet bbses still running, there are at least a few up on both Tor and I2P providing services and door games for people who are interested.
In fact with a low latency VOIP connection you can even emulate a dialup connection today. 19.2-28.8k maximum connection same as attempting to connect over POTS on AT&T's network today.
Back in the 80s I was in high school in Montreal. I was socially very awkward and shy and flat out dysfunctional. The local dial-up scene was a way to socialize with a bunch of people. I only ever met a few of them IRL.
My favorite BBS was SASSy. It was a one-user-at-a-time wall-of-text board with no logins. It was GREAT. I wish I could find the entire text archives but the sysop, Tim Campbell, was a very strange dude and never released them, because he felt it was worth thousands and thousands of dollars.
On the other hand you had the whole "warez" scene for the C64, got a lot of software that way and met a few people also. Often I would come back home with boxes full of floppies and hundreds of terrible games to play through!
At some later time multi-line BBS were a thing, and I met a woman at the time due to this BBS. (Linq) She was a mental ward head case and combined with my own terrible issues she set me on a path of virginity and loneliness.
Lushh, I still hate you. Every day.
Mostly random stuff.
For a taste try SDF.org. you won't need a modem or Kermit. Anybody have a Gandalf box?
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
Only having a 300 baund modem, with no auto answer made running a BBS a bit on the difficult side, but I managed.
When I got my own phone line put in, I had them put the demarc point inside my 2nd floor bedroom.
At the time, I had a Tandy Coco 3 running OS-9. I ran the phone lines through the cassette drive control port on the computer, then from their out to the modem.
my software would "pick up" the phone by toggling the cassette relay, listen for keystrokes, and if it got them, proceed with the BBS software I built. No keystrokes, would hang up, wait 5 seconds, and try again. All night long. "Click". pause. "Click"...
Good times.
Lots of good memories meeting lots of interesting people. More interesting than Facebook; typically more civilized than Reddit, Slashdot, 4Chan, or pretty much anything else of today.
I ran a BBS in Atlanta in the mid-80's. Was very fun. Until joining Eskimo North (still online!) had not used a multi-user BBS. That was one of the draws of the BBS scene; single-user by nature, most of the time, and replies were far slower in coming..... 8/N1, The Greene Machine, Tandy Trader, Cornucopia, among many others. I still have a print of a 1987 dial-in list from Atlanta, and I was involved in many of them.
BBSing got me into uucp and running my own C-News leaf node attached to Eskimo North. Fun days. Usenet was the next step, really, beyond the dial-up BBS. Especially in terms of loss of civility; alt.flame, alt.barney.must.die.die.die, etc. Discussion of new group creation, some of the interesting things in alt.folklore.computers, and good times in comp.sys.tandy.
2:251/56.10
Hairnett BBS, was all I used it for!
Being an old fart, I used them a lot in the day, beginning with a 300 baud acoustic coupler before getting a 1200 modem.
But the last time I used one, was during the Compuserve days, I was member of Borland's TeamB and patches and beta versions had to be downloaded from an old BBS named Xanadu, which did cost me a lot, since I had to dial internationally from Europe.
A few years later, during one of the TeamB meetings at the Borland campus, I visited the server room, where they showed me the old BBS Xanadu in the rack, still running there for years after the last use, because nobody knew it still existed and hence nobody ever gave an order to dismantle it.
... we surfed on boards!
I wrote my own terminal emulator in assembly on a CP/M system. Worked really well, except I couldn't get the darn X-Modem protocol right. Had to settle for Kermit.
Later I ran a 4-line Maximus BBS, wrote a DOS TSR software to redirect sysadmin yells over Netware IPX. Oh the days..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
I learned the ropes being a Point, then became a Node (2:292/853) and was briefly even the Region 29 Coordinator (2:29/0). That was before I was conscripted into the army.
And the dismay of downloading an 11-part ZIP/ARJ only to find out one part is corrupted.
I used BBS's in the early 90s roughly like I do facebook now. Chatting/arguing w/ folks about religion and politics. Except, I also played door games (SRE/BRE and the Risk clone) and occasionally downloaded files (Wing Commander was 6 MB and took like 6 hours to download over 2400 baud).
I remember staying up way too late in college because the BBS I was dialed into was two timezones away and I wanted to be on at midnight their time so I could get my new set of turns on my various games. LORD, Falcon's Eye, Trade Wars, Usurper... So many good memories and fun times. I've been tempted to try some of these modern BBS's but I haven't found a good one that's a mix of active, but also casual. Then again people who are still playing these games after all these years are mostly bound to be pretty hardcore about it. My problem is that now that I have a wife and a job, I can't commit the same amount of time.
The site appears down!
One nice thing about Door games back then was that everyone got the same amount of turns each day, and when those were spent you were done. This made the games a bit more fair as 'Pay to Win' hadn't been invented yet. There was no 'Buy extra turns for only $x' or 'Upgrade to an elite account for more turns per day'. About the only way to get an unfair advantage was schmooze the Sysop into giving you more, but that rarely worked. :)
PopNet is where I took my alias from, in the late 80s. I actually had a CompuServe account but dang, that was useless for the most part. PopNet is where I spent much of my time. PopNet used your first name initials and last name to coin up a user name. I used Mouse UseR because I wanted to buy a Mac in those times (I was still under Apple //e) and because Muser was already taken, system added an initial and ended up with MouseR. Capitalisation on the trailing R, I dont remember if it was just for visual design or an accident. At the time my english wasn't good enough to know that "mouser" was a mouse-chasing cat.
Anyhow, my zircon.net dialo-up provider user name ended up being mouser@* and my PopNet account was MouseR.
PopNet was hooked up on FidoNet and usually synced in the night There was a great community and great games too. Fond memories.
I still remember searching through BBS indexes in Atlanta (largest local calling area in the US.... SO MANY BBS) to find that one adult BBS that wasn't completely busy all the time. Signing up an account with my friends and scrounging any crappy nudes we already had to help get us a decent ratio so we could spend the next 30 minutes at 2400 baud (per image) downloading some of our first girl on girl porn. Oh, the joy we experienced when the image was finally fully loaded and the fight over the only floppy disk we had to copy to so that one lucky friend got to take it home to their computer also.
Good times...... good times.
Anyone remember the HellHole based in Palo Alto?
It was run by the son of one of my customers, as I recall he had five phone lines for it and "dad" payed for it all.
That "kid" must be in his fifty's now, yikes!
I used MAX's BBS, and running this software on the Amiga was a completely different experience compared to the laughable IBM PCs; with confortable graphical user interfaces and fully pre-emptive multitasking, we could sit around working with DPaint or Final Writer or whatever, while users were calling in on the BBS. Pretty amazing for those days.
I think I finally pulled the plug when I went a month with no calls.
Even though it's been 22 years since I first registered my copy of Hermes II, I still remember my login and password for the Olympus BBS where one was able to download updates.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
After years of running around and running a pirate board decided to code a 'scene' VGA magazine and they still have it captured on https://defacto2.net/organisation/advanced-pirate-technology
Wrote it in Turbo C++ in high school. VGA demos were stand alone and we just linked it all together using bat2com, it was amateur, but again I was in high school when I coded it all and put it together.
I was one of the first guys "in the C64 scene" to get a 2400baud modem, but quickly found that the RS232 i/o code in the C64 was inefficient and was causing errors, it couldn't handle 2400 bits per second. So I modified one of the most popular C64 terminal programs with my own assembly code that was fast enough to handle the new speed.
Also worked on code for a few "elite" BBSs for C64 importing/cracking groups. I still have the print-out of the C64 BASIC code that ran one of these sites, tattered and faded. I'm still writing code today and looking back, the line lumbers make me shudder.
Shout out to TychoB who ran TCE - good times with multi-line C64 BBS fun!
My first modem was 2400 baud. The hand-me-down computers I had before that didn't have modems and I couldn't afford to buy one sooner.
I dialed into a bunch of BBSs with that 2400 baud modem but honestly didn't get the appeal.
When I discovered Usenet via college Sun servers it was a totally different story, but BBSs just never clicked for me. Maybe the ones in my area weren't any good. I couldn't afford long distance and although I wasn't aware of phreaking I wouldn't have considered BBSs access a good enough reason if I had known how.
Some friends had better computers than I did but I don't recall them having much interest in BBSs either.
I ran my own bbs back in the 80s/90s running my own software. I do t remember if anyone in here remembers this website asking for contact from old bbs operators but for nostalgia, http://textfiles.com/ (including its list of bbs that existed through the years)
Zoltrix 14.4kbps with BananaCom, downloading all those sweet .mod files after midnight, chatting around with friends in telecomference rooms...
I couldn't afford the hardware that would've been required to run a BBS the way I wanted to back in the day, but I have a lot of fond memories of calling them. My friend and I started out calling the local BBSes after CompuServe got too expensive. We were calling a few Apple II based boards several times a day, and 2 or 3 D-Dial chat boards. Eventually we stumbled upon the Color 64 BBS scene, and actually met some of our fellow users IRL.
That was a fun time, I was lucky to have an Apple ][+, a modem, and my own phone line at home during the early 80s, sometimes up half the night chatting, downloading games and software, using free long distance for remote BBSes, etc.
I think it was more personal in a way, because we had users group meetings and got to meet - today who knows if the other person is for real or not.
I started w/the C= 64 like so many others, 300 baud modem. Got a 1200 at some point.
But my claim to fame (in my own head) would be running what I believe might've been the first multiline BBS on a personal computer, an Amiga 2000 with four Supra 2400zi modems (as soon as they were available) with BB/OS software which was designed for multiline.
At the time PCs and Macs didn't generally have multiple serial ports, and the systems that offered multitasking aside from the Amiga were the NeXT and OS/2, Macs didn't, PCs didn't, I'm unsure of the Atari STs could have multiple serial ports then, but didn't know any BBSes run on those regardless.
The fun part was getting the phone company to cope with a personal residence having four more phone lines, I had to go through the commercial division and they created rates for me, it was all new to them too, heh.
I loved BBSs, used them from 300 baud on up in Winnipeg. They were great for the local scene, but it was the advent of store-and-forward networking that really blew me away. Mail and newsgroups to and from my home system, through a guy working at an ISP (hi Greg!), and off to the world.
By batching up messages together and sending them in a periodic squirt, you didn't need to tie up the phone line for long. Sending email meant storing it in the spool, and it would go out soon enough when the connection next occurred. Now that I live on a coastal island where DSL doesn't reach everywhere, I wonder if this tech is still useful. Ditto for when things go down (tree on the wires, this time of year), would love to see a robust, distributed alternative. Maybe a mesh net?
I know. Talk about excessive contrast!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I started employment life in 1989 as a 19yo tech support helpdesk for a modem company in Australia - and slyly a backup sysop of a BBS.
At night I would see these sysop feeds saying "I just got a new beta firmware for my modems that makes it do...." and guaranteed I would get 10-20 calls the next day from bbs operators saying "...,and it doesn't do..." trying to get the beta...... They didn't need it, just had to be the latest. Beam me up scotty.
Even had some sysop troll me because we refused.... and I watched as he posted a flame, naming me.. then tried to call me the next day asking for help... I still remember the persons name..
Ah the 90's
For those of us whose formative years were spent on BBSs, the different modem sounds while connecting is quite nostalgic. I'm sure that everyone from that era can easily differentiate the sounds between a 300, 1200, 2400, and 9600 baud modems connecting.
http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/
And a partial list of dial-up BBSs (the one I used to run 33 years ago, "Buried Treasure" is in there)
http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/boardsims.txt
&TotSE reporting in.
Huff raid, molotov everything, etc.
When I was like 13 my grandmother hired me to setup her phone and computer systems at the non-proffit she ran; me and my friends scraped together a computer and hooked up a half dozen modems to it we had harvested from old systems, I hid it in an office in the back that was used mostly for storage of toilet paper, dot matrix printer labels, crates of floppies, etc.. plugged it into the phone system.. the phones would shutdown outside business hours and forward to my modem bank.. me and a dozen friends from the area who were into computers used it as our personal BBS to play MajorMUD and LORD after the popular local BBS went offline.. only accessible on weekends and after school til 6am
all pirated software; could not afford to actually buy anything.. but it was fun being the admin of a BBS.. scripting mud's is what got me into programming.. we had our realm up for for nearly a decade and we invited people to join in via word of mouth.. eventually I moved the system to one running in my basement and put it online via telnet.. Working part time as a teen and over half my paycheck went to pay for my 128k ISDN connection to support it.
...just to chat with you.
;)
;)
I remember that, 2 o clock in the night, ping...ping...ping...
Sysop coming online...
And then the chat was initiated. Spent so many hours chatting with people calling MY bbs. I used a BBS system for the Amiga, I had an Amiga 2000 with a seriously big harddisk for the 90s. I remember how hard it was to write a mounting script for it (yes, we couldn't just plug shit in, we had to write mounting scripts for literally everything). 200 whopping megabytes of sheer fun when everyone else had 20mb hdd or less. I found it for a measly 5 dollars at a thrift store and no one had an idea what it was, oh boy where me and my computer geeks at school surprised when we discovered the insane size of that SCSI based puppy. And what other purpose would it serve than to run a nice BBS service?
I even wrote an adventure that people could play. I used the programmable BBS system (which where sort of an BBS coding language to customize your very own BBS from scratch) so I could literally make this adventure just like a game, people were playing it like mad, paying a HUGE telephone bill just to keep playing. Yes kiddies...downloading and uploading stuff where expensive back then, it could cost a long-distance caller in the 100s of dollars just for a few hours back then, but WE DID IT for the LOVE. (well, some blueboxed their way to a cheaper phone bill...erhm..not me of course)
Ah those where the days.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Well, we cannot get proper non-voip telephone lines here without a "business" plan, but I have been running one of my two BBSes non-stop since 1998.
The first one was from 1995 up to 1997, then I switched to my own bbs software, which I started coding in C under Linux (kernel 1.0, 1.2, around that time).
The one I coded myself it's still online, and I also run another one that uses Mystic BBS, and I run a couple Fidonet-style networks.
bbs.buanzo.org
darkgame.buanzo.org
weird thing, i can remember hardly any number, but i still remember a number of my first bbs :) bbs was the place where demo coders and demo community gathered, shared demos, electronic magazines, code and mainly tutorials - some of them were very good. plenty of people wanted to do the stuff the Future Crew, Triton and other legends did.
but it was not only bbs back then, we had lot of ftps (ftp.funet.fi), archie and also irc.
i also recall downloading some of the first distros of Hurd back then (~1993), for a week.. it was some 25 megs and it felt like my son's birth.
I still remember the clicking sound the maxtor external hard drive made when there was an incoming call. Yes, that was one sick drive.
I had several blind dates and business opportunities as a result of BBS stuff. Yes it was slow but it was the fastest way to communicate with someone not in the room, city, state, or country. People take internet for granted. This was pre-internet.
JJ
This website is a treasure trove of text files from the BBS era. Enjoy....
http://www.textfiles.com/
The big bbs platforms I remember setting up were RBBS, Wildcat, PCBoard GAP, WWIV, MajorBBS, TBBS, Searchlight.
Here is a more complete list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BBS_software
Thinking back what I liked most about the boards is long distance fees, download ratios and practical lack of global reach or memory.
Today everything is too connected too many eyeballs involved to ruin it too many people spend too much time on systems run by "be as evil as you can possibly get away with" lunatic sysops. (e.g. Facebook) With no incentive to do anything but wrack up hits for advertisers. Other sysops used to account for a small but healthy margin of overall user base now they are well below the noise floor.
I loved the shenanigans. Tricking people into typing +++ or redirecting command interpreter to their modems com port, uploading infinitely compressed zip files. Staying up late so that you could take your turn in door games and login again right after midnight maintenance ran so you could finish your assault on your enemies planetary defenses.
The offline news readers QWIK? Were fast and useful.. now we have crappy online forums filled dominated by ads and malware.
A metric shit-ton of sysops became ISPs back when the shell account and personal web space was a standard feature of Internet access.
While the nostalgia was fun I don't miss it. What I miss is the diversity of systems and ratio of people/operators who cared about running shit and contributing. I miss ordinary people creating personal home pages and Google and Facebook not owning the entire fucking planet. I never minded commercial operations.. but drinking too much water can kill you... Ultimately I don't think it is healthy to have it take over to the extent it has and lead to aggregation of systems and power to the extent it currently has.
With all of the technology and capabilities PCs and networks have today vs BBS era.... it is depressing to see the value proposition to the average user be so low.
The first BBS's I logged onto were at 300 baud, and were Commodore 64 based, generally running C-Net. Wonderful stuff. Later went on to regularly use BBS's running many different packages on many different platforms. The most common was WWIV, but Telegard, WildCAT, Opus, (I think often referred to mistakenly as "FidoNET" which I think is an inter-BBS message transport system, but I could be wrong.), PCBoard (often called PCBoring), Renegade, Synchronet were all widely used. I ran the only PowerBBS system I knew of in the area. It was a native Windows application. (and not a very good one!) ;)
I ran across this list: http://bbslist.textfiles.com/ Perusing around the area code I lived in back then brings back tons of memories. So many sysops that I knew, including several that are no longer among the living, a few friends, even a few lovers. It's good to see some of their names haven't been forgotten! There's a few there that might be best off forgotten, too! ;)
Time to share this article to a few of them!
At the Freeware Hall of Fame web site, formerly a BBS, we have available for free download two versions of PCBoard, one of the most successful and popular BBS platforms. http://www.freewarehof.org/olh... is where to find that and "Door" programs useful on a BBS. We also have a lot to say about life in the BBS days and hints for running a good board. The FHOF BBS was named one of the country's top 25 boards by Boardwatch magazine. More can be read here: http://www.freewarehof.org/hom... . Caveat: PCBoard is a DOS platform, though it can be made to run in Windows, (Not by me.)
Same here. IIRC, I started with local BBSes when I was a teen(ager) with internal 2400 dial-up modems (ZOOM and Hayes). It got so addicting that I got in trouble with long distance calls (didn't know same area codes can be toll calls based on the phone service), prank calls for being a r0d3nt/n00b, etc. :/
Don't forget that rad(ical) old BBS Documentary -- Watch it for free on The Archive. Even old /. has a few old stories about this documentary:
Good memories. I'd like to see an updated version!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The old BBSs were too frustrating for me, and too limited. Usenet of the 80s may not have been all that civil, but its sheer breadth was kind of exhilarating. People from other countries, new boards popping up. Even the flames were sometimes witty or at least over the top! That's what I feel nostalgic for. I confess I've never used Facebook, or Twitter, or them other things, so I can't say whether they're better or not. I do think Slashdot's moderation system is a somewhat useful noise filter, but Slashdot has changed since the days when my 5 digit ID was a 'high' number, and not for the better. Nevertheless, I'm still here.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
I dearly miss the BBS experience, both as a user and sysop.
A guy in Biloxi, MS got me into the sysop side of things, he ran QuickBBS, I ended up with RemoteAccess Pro with FrontDoor handling the mail. Two nodes, one on a built-from-spare-parts 386, one on a Packard Bell 486 that had been demoted from desktop use. One 28.8 line, one 14.4. The 14.4 handled ZMH.
The menus always evolved, first garish, then I toned it all back down to something simple, elegant and quick. I did admire ACiD and their crazy ansi stuff.
Was a member of FidoNet, carried quite a bit of echos and moved a fair bit of netmail, and was an avid reader of Mindless Chatter and Drivel, and of course the echos dedicated to RA and FD.
Had TW2000, Yankees and Rednecks, LORD and some others I can't even remember, this was 20 years ago!
I did had a fairly sizable file collection, and a real neat piece of gear to serve up a lot of files on CDs: A NEC SCSI 5-CD-ROM changer. It was a trip to be in the room, hear the whirr-click-clack-shhk-shhk of the changer loading a given disk, then seeking to where the file was. "There goes another one!"
It was all strictly hobby, no fee, no membership. Send me a check if you want, or buy me a beer at a BBS pizza night.
Ah.. those were the days. Then in 1998 I unplugged it, and never put it up again.
I long ago lost the diskettes for RemoteAccess Pro, but I still have the Front Door disks, in the envelope they shipped in, with the original invoice still intact.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
I ran an RBBS-PC BBS out of Faslane, Scotland while home ported there. I was a missile tech in the US Navy in the latter half of the 70's and early 80's, and a lot of us (and other electronics-oriented ratings) started building computers from mail order kits. Those of us that had shore duty and lived off base set up BBSs mainly for ourselves. Not only did we share software but parts and hardware modification plans. In the end, almost everyone had an Apple II, TRS-80 or a Commodore of some sort. There was, or course, the occasional nut with a TI 99 or Sinclair or something. I stayed with my home-brewed S-100 bus system until I finally broke down and bought an IBM-PC. It cost three times what I paid for my (fairly new) car.
I remember thinking at the time how we had our own world even though it spanned the planet. Even most other computer hobbyists were unaware of it. I was closer to a lot of BBS guys that I never met in person than I was to most of my actual shipmates. So when my kids complain about their kids spending to much time on social media, I have a laugh. (Then I make sure their Facebook friends aren't predators. Let's be real; the world's changed.)
Ward Christensen and Dennis Hayes should have been a Nobel Prize or something for firing the shots that revolutionized human interaction in the last third of the 20th century.
Phone hacking phreaking which come from Australia for us. Zmodem with error correction on BBS = bulletin boards. Hours to download a MS-DOS, although Dr DOS protected mode was better. Then come the mobile phone which looked like a large square brick your computer would look for a number when it found it you had free telephone calls. What you would get on a typical BBS would be game codes, phreaking software which work on high-pitched tones. Text downloads on how to steal electricity without being caught. And company network telephone numbers with passwords. Games from the Oliver Twins, especially for the Amiga, "treasure Island dizzy" and if money was scarce a Amstrad, computer. The Atari ST was my favourite. And they would swap codes for Datel Electronics Action Replay cartridge which come with a floppy disk.
Oh dear, I understand this story and I would spend almost every waking hour on BBS boards all over the world. What a waste of childhood.
I would say that the hobby of BBSing and running my own BBS was one of the few things that really defined my childhood/teen years.
I became fascinated with the early home computers in the 1980's, growing up. I think the first one I ever really got a chance to use was a Commodore VIC-20, which one of my best friends' dad bought. His parents were divorced so he was only at his dad's place every other weekend, but I spent much of that time on those weekends hanging out with him. He had a 300 baud "VICmodem" with it, which I recall was pretty much the only thing we did with that computer. (I don't think he bought any other software for it at that time.) We got on CompuServe because that's all we knew about, and had a blast playing one of those dungeon exploring games that drew the walls of the rooms with asterisks down the screen. That lasted until his first bill came - and then no more VICModem for us! (I forget the exact price, but CompServe used to bill by the hour after you used an initial free hour they always included in their sign-up kits, and it got expensive fast.)
I also knew a couple of other kids with parents who bought some of the early 8-bit home computers. One of them owned an Apple //e and another had a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 3. My friends and I played a few games on those (slowly loaded from cassette tapes), but those didn't have modems and were so expensive, their parents didn't let us spend that much time using them.
I really got into the BBS world a few years later (I guess it was around 1985-86), when I got a Tandy Color Computer 2 (upgraded from a Timex Sinclair 1000 I'd been playing with and learning BASIC programming on). I was able to buy a Radio Shack "Model 1B" for it, which let me manually dial up numbers and flip a switch to "Originate" mode to generate the 300 baud response tone. Then you just hung up the phone receiver and it was connected. I got ahold of several BBS numbers from the manager at the Radio Shack store I bought the modem from, and kept collecting more and more BBS's from there. I had a 3 ring binder I kept all my passwords and numbers written in, and I think I reached as many as 97 BBS's I had accounts on in the St. Louis, Missouri area.
I wound up meeting several other people around my age with Tandy Color Computers, via the BBS scene, and met them in person at a local computer users' group they held at one of our library branches. They went on to be among my best friends through college and even to this day in a couple cases.
At some point, I knew I wanted to run my own BBS -- but I had to scrape together the money (I think about $180 at the time) for a modem with "auto answer" capabilities first. When I finally made that happen, I worked with one of my friends who knew how to write assembly code. He developed a device driver program so anything I wrote in BASIC to draw on my local screen went out to the remote screen, and any INPUT statements allowed the remote end to key in responses. (Well, he got the core of the code from a computer magazine, but modified it significantly to make it more usable.) Using that, I wrote my own BBS software I called the "Dial-a-Color" system. I even sold a couple of copies of it to my friends who owned Color Computers and they set up BBS's with it too.
To make this long story a little bit shorter -- my BBS was very successful and when I eventually moved to an IBM PC compatible like the rest of the world was doing, I started using the pre-packaged software available for the Intel platform. I ran Telegard for a long time, and Renegade after discovering it was a "better" Telegard. I also experimented with PC Board because it was so customizable with all the add-in modules around. I finally did a long stint with Wildcat BBS, after a buddy of mine gave me a user license from a friend who bought the whole package but decided to quit using it. At that point, my BBS had grown to 4 phone lines and a 128K ISDN circuit with incoming telnet capabilities and selected Usenet newsfeeds carried on it. I
1992-1995. Made a decent chunk of change actually. It was a lot of fun and inspired me to build a business.
"It's not stealing if you don't get caught!"
Ran it using VBA software. great times
Using VBBS software great times.
I got into the BBS scene around 1985, and I loved it. The height of it for me was around 1994, when I was one of the sysops on a friend's Amiga system running C/Net. Eight lines, a gig of file storage (huge at the time), FidoNet, and I wrote a little shim to allow the Amiga to talk to an ancient PC/XT running Remote Access so we could offer PC doors on the system. Toward the end we started offering Internet mail access through a SLIP gateway at a local college. I miss the BBS days a lot, and it's hard to get kids that have grown up with the Internet to understand how cool it was at the time.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I downloaded my first Internet porn from a BBS.
I started with CompuServe and various local BBS's. 1200 baud!
In 1992, I was also a casual member of a Mac User Group and somehow volunteered to run a new BBS for them, based on the FirstClass software from SoftArc. (GUI interface) We named it Electric Sheep, after the Philip K Dick novel. Started with 2 phone lines and 14k modems, running on an old SE. It grew to the point where we had 10 lines (USR Couriers rock) and a UUCP gateway! Everybody got an email address, and we used it for so many things, like publishing a monthly (paper) magazine, sharing with OneNet forums, coordinating computer camps twice a year, etc.
I ran that thing for 19 years before that Interwebs thingy stole too many members to justify its continued existence.
I was always proud of the fact that it paid for itself - we charged $1.50 month for access and it was restricted to members of the MUG. (We were a large MUG back then, with about 1200 members and about 500 of them paid for access)
Good times.
It was about 1982 or 1983 - a good friend convinced me to get a modem. There was one BBS in the area at the time called NYBBLINK. Well a month or two after I got the modem NYBBLINK was disconnected.
So I cajoled my friend into writing a BBS platform on the TRS-80 Model III - thus was born Syslink. Syslink in turn spawned PowerNet and PowerCore which morphed into Intelecom Data Systems (IDS) owned by another friend.
It was running Fido, and was part of Fidonet, 163/5, before there were zone numbers! I named it after one of my favourite songs, Solsbury Hill by Peter Gabriel. Our hub for Ottawa was run by a guy named, I kid you not, Al Hacker! He had to pull out his wallet and show us his driver's license at the first Sysop gathering we had! l I started carrying "Echos", which were sort of like Newsgroups on Usenet, and I remember when the nodelist of Fidonet BBSs broke 1,000!
I also met some truly wonderful people, and a few cranks...but it was a formative experience, and later lead to a career doing Unix and Linux.
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
2:253/417.5
Those good old memory.
We started with a Michtron BBS on an Atari ST, which was limited to two lines. Switched to an Atari PC with four lines. It was so successful we needed more lines.
My partner noticed a tiny add in Byte about the Breaktrough card (an 8 line multi serial card created by Tim Stryker / Galacticom) which came with a BBS to show its potential. We bought one and instantly became one of the most popular BBS's in The Netherlands. Best thing of The Major BBS was it was an open platform: the source code was included. As a programmer I should be able to extend its features. After a halve a year I was able to connect a cd-rom player (the first was a Phillips top loader) to this multi-user BBS. No other system in the world had that. Soon I got request from around the world to buy my Major CD. It was the start of my very successful company. We've expanded Major CD to handle up to 8 cd-changers (a total of 32 cd's online) and created several other add-ons for The Major BBS, that was later renamed to Worldgroup.
The BBS world had its own magazine, called Board Watch. They organized global conferences BBSCON. Great for doing business, but even greater to meet other Sysops and developers. It was amazing fun.
I remember one of the European versions of BBSCON where Tim Stryker asked us if he could join one of our famous programmer sessions. We invited him for a midnight session in Rotterdam with a lot of weed and pizza.
In that period I had the best time of my life.
I still use the same email address: sysop@.......
I don't get why almost all the BBS servers ask for my real name. I almost always have to terminate the connection because I get asked for my real name. It's as if I was asked for an ID when entering a pub, seems like nonsense to me.
Legends of Yesteryear BBS is still up and running in Huntsville, AL via both WWW and telnet. Just can't play the door games on the web side. Member of multiple echo-nets including Fido. Several door games available, including Usurper and multiple Tradewars games.
So, yes, rumors that BBS' are dead is highly exaggerated. There are still a good number of us keeping the genre alive.
www: loybbs.net
telnet: loybbs.net:23322
New users have full access.
Back in the early 1990 I started a BBS running Wildcat BBS on one node in a small town in Québec/Canada. It quickly became bigger. I quit my day job as a financial/cost analyst and I had to add many other nodes and my house was soon overrun by network cables and computer hardware...
In 1993 I added internet email using UUCP and newsgroups unsing PlanetConnect satellite service and migrated to a full PPP connection provider in 1995. I was able to get broadband connection from my Telco and began connecting high speed Internet client in 1997. I sold that company in 2001 to a bigger ISP but it was the best experience of my whole life. Just remembering and writing these details brings me goosebumps! Things were moving quickly on the hardware and software front. I was using Livingston Portmaster 2 and Portmaster 3 hardware (I kept them as a souvenir). A PM3's cost was 25,000$ and an equivalent Cisco unit was 50,000$+! I can proudly say that I developed my first Web App in 1994, it was a online payment system for my ISP business.
After 2001 I kept going as an IT consulted/Developer and still doing it today. Several years ago I bought a maple and I take time off during maple season to make maple syrup and server traditional sugar shack meal to my clients. Those are the last 25 years of my life... Many more to come I hope.
JF.
I ran CVBBS for three years (83-85) using TBBS. Apple 2+, two floppies, and a Novation AppleCat 2 300 baud modem (I added the 1200 baud daughtercard to it late in it's existence.) I even asked for (and got!) One of the Cider 20mb external hard drives (high school graduation gift) that made it feel "real"...
Good times.
I can't remember the exact years my board ran but definitely mid-80's -- 90's. My handle here on Slash is an extension of my operator handle from +30 years ago. LoL. It is an interesting perspective to have with modern social media and the Internet. I remember that transition from modem based BBS to Internet based. There was a similar transition in the hacking community from modem scripting and shenanigans to TCP/IP based goofballery.
I ran a Searchlite 4.5 BBS in Panama back in 1995 called "REQUIEM BBS!!!" Had about 8 games on it and email back to the states. I spliced in a phone line running from the hall phone to my barracks room so after 10 pm I'd hear people complain about the phone being broken by all the squeeling. In the morning i'd unplug the phone line from the pc and wind it up and tuck it up into the ceiling tile.
running a bbs required some dedication, i ran a 2 node bbs and that cost me a lot of money. as a high school student, all the money i could earn went into it.
you wouldn't and couldn't do it, unless you were really dedicated. it was worth it though, i loved the interaction with users. when i first got a demo from the internet, i was not impressed - because i couldn't interact with the user...
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
If you want a virtual modem at this time your options are dosbox's virtual modem mode and as someone else mentioned the serial port redirector daemons (none of the latter seem to have support for the fake atd commands for connecting to a remote host, in my experience. They are just virtual null modem cables across the internet once setup.)
For running ACTUAL modems over voip there is nothing special, you just need minimal jitter/latecy and almost/no packet loss. If you have that then literally all you need is a pair of FXS adapters to plug the two real modems in, and an asterisk box in-between providing pbx services and logins for the two devices. Once you have that set up you have the client system dial the host system, and as long as the BBS program picks up on the ring signal and attempts to connect, it all works perfectly (Roboboard tends to be finicky about this. It is impossible to get it to connect over dosbos's virtual serial port, and has a tendency for graphical mode to fail to start for at least some roboboard versions.)
As to the 'modem to plaintext to modem over IP' concept: There is actually a standard for MoIP, but either no implementations made it to market, or they were all commercial and niche usage. The F(ax)oIP implementation usually used with HydraFAX actually has partial support for modem standards in its backend library, but nobody has bothered to do the work necessary to implement full data modem handshaking and communication in it to demodulate in software, transmit between servers, and remodulate on the remote side before outputting to the modem. The possibilty is there if someone does the work and each endpoint has a LAN asterisk box to encode/decode(the fxs adapters usually run proprietary ARM+DSP chips which are not publicly documented and run proprietary VOIP software despite being linux based embedded systems), but so far nobody knowledgable enough to put in the work has.
As an aside: If someone gets a sacrificial Vonage HT802 VOIP box and uses jtag to pull the image off and RE the default admin password/provide a modified reimage, there are a cheap 5-10 dollar way to have FXS ports for exactly this usage (Their predecessor, the Basic Talk HT702 was broken a few years back, but so far nobody has attempted the same for the replacement. The 702s are excellent if jailbroken before having network acecss. If they get provisioned before you attempt to hack them however they get a serial based password installed on them which makes it difficult to reflash them with unbranded firmware without opening them up and reflashing over jtag.)
I started on what was known back in the 80's as 6485-BBS (later renamed to Ivory BBS), written by Ivory Joe (a piano player out of Corpus Christie. Later I moved to the Commodore 128 running C-Base 128 (written by Dan Drury). Those were the days...
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!
The same guy (Jason Scott) has hundreds of the old shareware (and other) CDs up for download on archive.org as well. Lots of good stuff there.
I used to use Genie back in the day. I thought I was Matthew Broderick in WarGames ... a real computer bad-ass.
I ran a BBS for 9 years and it was great. Eventually, the internet overtook such programming fun for me and I switched to programming a MUD for 18 years.
Door games I wish were actually still around:
SI Droids
Tradewars.
Quizzors Mountain
Power Struggle
Those games may have been text based, but they did consume a lot of time and brain power.
Also, the additional fun part of that time was:
Which was better transmission method? Better BBS software? Best way to use your 1200baud modem? Zmodem, Qmodem? How to get long distance the cheapest PCLink.. etc
The invention of viruses, anti-viruses, ZIP vs ARC, etc. A lot of innovation from small groups.
!Member Berries galore here!
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
I wrote my own BBS software in Quick Basic. It was pretty full featured, supported Fidonet and fossil. I also wrote a pretty bitchen door game called Spider Gates, which was a top-down (ANSI) graphical RPG with a built-in game editor, where users could create their own worlds with a visual editor, and a simple scripting language that allowed you to create NPCs, dialogues, shops, temples, taverns, etc. People got pretty creative with it. One guy made a HP Lovecraft themed world, another made one on the surface of the moon. It was linked to a more D&D type of world, by getting shot out of a giant cannon. LOL I wish I could find my old files, it would be fun to put it up via telnet.