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?

Comments

I still telnet for usurper

[damn_registrars]

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.

Re:I still telnet for usurper

[sproketboy]

Cool. Here's a video of the gameplay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:I still telnet for usurper

[Lord Kano]

I thought I was the only one. I fell in love with Usurper about 22 years ago. I used to play it religiously.

When BBSs went away, I downloaded the door and played it on my local system.

I tried a telnet BBS or two but I couldn't re-capture the magic but every few years, I try it again.

LK

Re:I still telnet for usurper

[Pikoro]

TW2002

Re:I still telnet for usurper

[damn_registrars]

There simply aren't many people connecting to BBS any more. Back in the day I used to dial up (first on a 2400 baud modem) to local numbers in my area, I kinda felt like Matthew Broderick in War Games. Much more recently I used to use telnet to play on x-bit, but that closed. I've found a game of Usurper on convolution.us, but there are generally only about 4 players on there total (and almost never more than one online at any given time). It's cool that synchronet is free and makes it easy to run a board, but if you can't get people to come check out your board then it doesn't much matter.

Some installs I've seen of newer versions are odd, too. Only a helmet for armor (amongst other odd things)? At least the steroids, drugs, alcohol, and poisons are all still there, though...

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

BBS

[fluffernutter]

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.

Re:BBS

[reboot246]

In the mid-to-late 90s I WAS the parent.

But I was the one on the computer all the time. Finally had to get a second phone line. Wound up with three phone lines before it was all over.

Re:BBS

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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.

Re:BBS

[Minupla]

I ran a bluedoor BBS on my C-64 until I moved on and ran a OMMM enabled Opus fidonet node, and was network coordinator for my town.

It was a great way to prepare for being a sysadmin. "Did the mail go out last night, because your system didn't make the pickup" "Damn! OMMM crashed. Let me get on that"

Re:BBS

[crashumbc]

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...

Re:BBS

[Fnord666]

Yep. You got a 5.25" 360K floppy and punched an extra notch in the disk cover so you could flip it over and use the other side. 360 +360 = 720.

I remember calling them "flippies". Apparently both sides of the disk were coated with media. 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?

Re:BBS

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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.

Re:BBS

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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. :)

Long before The Pirate Bay

[elrous0]

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.

You would be WRONG!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Oh so many good memories

[50000BTU_barbecue]

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.

The Greene Machine, 8/N/1, Eskimo North, RIME,....

[lowen]

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.

Xanadu

[nospam007]

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.

Door Games

[Tempest_2084]

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. :)

Montreal's PopNet

[MouseR]

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.

C64 BBS Scene

[leptons]

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!

Ditto. Don't forget that old BBS Documentary too.

[antdude]

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:

• A Documentary About Bulletin Board Systems
• The BBS Documentary: A One Year Report
• 7 hour BBS Documentary Nearly Ready
• BBS Documentary Now Shipping
• Hundreds of Hours of BBS Documentary Interviews

Good memories. I'd like to see an updated version!