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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
Same here. Ever play GTW? That was fun.
But honestly, I don't miss the whole BBS thing except as an exercise in nostalgia. I had a 300 baud modem on an Atari 800 and you could literally watch the characters coming across the phone line slow enough to read. You could also turn the baud rate down to anything you wanted, and sometimes it was fun to turn it down to 10 or 20 baud so we could laugh at the data stream between bong hits.
256 colors, 8-bit music, 720K disks, 2 count em' 2 joystick ports, holy shit.
Then we got 1200 baud modems and damn if we weren't livin' in the future.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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.
It's weird I'm reading this today.
I've been thinking about my Atari 128 ? (I think, it was the later model grey one with 128k memory)
Anyway, I decided I was going to dig out of my parents house this afternoon while picking them up for a family gathering. And then I log on here to see someone talking about it!
then off to find a power supply for the disk drive, it disappeared. I wonder if the disk s are any good anymore?
And of course figure out a way to hook it up to a TV...
I have a complete system Atari 800 system with loads of software and one of the "Happy Drives" (used for duping copy-protected software). Everything is there, power supplies, tons of carts, manuals, plus all the cables and joysticks and stuff. It's all packed into some well-sealed boxes. I don't know if the disks are any good anymore though since it's all been packed away for about 35+ years or so. Maybe a collector would want it.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Even had a tool I had made that was like a hole punch but the punch was square and it had a frame to automatically position it correctly on the disk. I wonder where that is now?
Yep, that was it...I had one of these (although you could use a hole-punch or scissors too). Mine was, I think, called a "Nibbler" or "Notcher" and they were about $5 at the software stores. Mine is no doubt packed in the box with the rest of my system.
Lol, "software stores", truly a blast from the past.
Yes kids, they actually had software stores that were filled with racks and racks of 5.25" disks in plastic sleeves. There were racks for games, utilities, business apps, "artists tools", and misc stuff. A lot of it was Shareware. Remember Shareware?
A lot of stores would let you rent disks for a couple of bucks a week, but you had to promise that you wouldn't copy them (lol). Of course we copied them, that was the ONLY reason you'd ever rent a disk. :)
A Happy Drive and a copy of Diskey, woo hoo! It would even replicate disks with "fuzzy sectors" by duplicating the sectors that were supposed to be fuzzy. I copied a shitload of stuff in my time, and patched lots more to knock out the copy protection.
Back then we considered copy protection to be a bug, and you know what you do when you find a bug...you go in and root it out. :)
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...