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Die-Hard Sysops Are Resurrecting BBS's From The 1980s (arstechnica.com)
Ars Technica reports on vintage computing hobbyists "resurrecting digital communities that were once thought lost to time...some still running on original 8-bit hardware." Sometimes using modern technology like Raspberry Pi and TCPser (which emulates a Hayes modem for Telnet connections), they're reviving decades-old dial-up bulletin board systems (or BBSes) as portals "to places that have been long forgotten." An anonymous reader writes:
One runs the original software on a decades-old Commodore 128DCR. Another routes telnet connections across a real telephone circuit that connects to a Hayes modem. And after 23 years, the Dura-Europos BBS is back in business, using an Apple IIe running its original GBBS Pro software -- augmented with a modern CFFA3000 compact flash drive, and a Raspberry Pi running TCPser. [It's at dura-bbs.net, using port 6359.] Ars Technica blames "the meteoric rise of the World Wide Web and the demise of protocols that came before it" for the death of BBSes. "Owners of older 8-bit machines had little reason to maintain their hardware as their userbase migrated to the open pastures of the Web, and the number of bulletin board systems plummeted accordingly...
"Despite the threat of extinction, however, it turns out that some sysops never quite gave up on the BBS," and for many modern-day users, "it's simply a matter of 'dialing' the BBS using a domain name and port number instead of a phone number in their preferred terminal software." There they'll find primitive BBS games like STARTREK, Chess, and Blackjack, but also "old conversation threads dating back decades were available verbatim... It's like a buried digital time capsule."
One user says visiting a web site today "has a very public feel to it, whereas a BBS feels very much like being invited into someone's living room." The article also remembers "the dulcet tones of a 1200 baud connection (or 2400, if you were very lucky)," adding that "to see what was accomplished with so little was simply humbling."
"Despite the threat of extinction, however, it turns out that some sysops never quite gave up on the BBS," and for many modern-day users, "it's simply a matter of 'dialing' the BBS using a domain name and port number instead of a phone number in their preferred terminal software." There they'll find primitive BBS games like STARTREK, Chess, and Blackjack, but also "old conversation threads dating back decades were available verbatim... It's like a buried digital time capsule."
One user says visiting a web site today "has a very public feel to it, whereas a BBS feels very much like being invited into someone's living room." The article also remembers "the dulcet tones of a 1200 baud connection (or 2400, if you were very lucky)," adding that "to see what was accomplished with so little was simply humbling."
migrated to the open pastures of the Web
Not to fear: the internet is being closed back up against as fast as people can sign up for Facebook, use closed/proprietary IM systems, and DRM everything in sight.
...We remember them with fond memories.
I remember when I spent so much of my savings as a kid to purchase that expensive 1200/2400/4800/9600 multimodem. Not to mention when I got two phonelines into my bedroom. My parents thought I was completely nuts, they complained about the "iiiiiii...ryryryryryryr....shhhhh" sounds at night, and I remember waking up to that music thinking, oh boy - someone is logging onto my computer.
Sometimes they just called the BBS system just to chat with Sysop. ...Paging sysop....
Sysop Coming Online...
Ah, the memories.
Just for the same reason I have my Commodore 64 next to me, I don't actually use it, and when I do - it's frightfully slow, but fun to do raster-interrupts and simple code challenges on anyway.
We only do this because we are still remember the good times, they have very little to any good use today, but it's really just for the nostalgia.
GOOD TIMES!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
With a 1581? Or for real old-school power, a SFD-1001.
Mostly random stuff.
I remember when 1200 baud was unobtainium expensive and many dial up services didn't even have 1200 modems at all. 300 was decent, but you had to put up with 110 once in a blue moon if the modem pool got full.
For the longest time I had an AppleCat that would only do some weird half-duplex 1200 baud that was unusable with normal 1200 baud. Somebody figured out a simple handshake system and made it possible to send whole floppies at 1200 baud.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460402/]BBS: The Documentary[/URL
is a pretty good look back. It would also be intensely boring to anyone who wasn't there.
I ran a WildCat! BBS on an old IBM AT computer with a 2400 baud modem during 1994-95 school year when I was at the university. TradeWars and Legends of The Red Dragon (LOTRD) were my favorite DOOR games. I was planning to build my BBS empire until something called the Internet came along. I was a dot com bust before there was dot coms to go bust.
Back in the day I would dial into Chrysalis BBS in Dallas, TX. At one point the BBS had 96 lines into it so it had chat rooms and multi-player games. I started out on a 2400 baud modem, stepped up to a 14.4 modem and when I got the 56K modem, I was on top of the world.
They had one MUD that I would play, every night at 3am the in game goodies would reset. There was one area that you could buy gold, silver and copper. The supply was very very limited so you had to be in the area when the game reset cause it was gone with in mins. I remember setting my alarm for 2:55 one morning, I got up got the goods, sold them and went back to bed. This MUD had active devs that would add new areas which kept it fun. May I wish I could remember the name of it. At one point the SysOp tried to bring the BBS back online through a web portal about 10 years ago, but it really went anywhere.
Telnet links still work AFAIK so why not post them?
running Fidonet. The good old days where the rules were simple:
Don't be excessively annoying.
Don't be easily annoyed.
Fuck AOL, for how "far" we've come.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Mine was:
AT &D1 &D2 \N0
Surprised I still remember it.
geeky stuff I'm proud to have been a part of: linux.com / themes.org / sourceforge.net / sicnus.com
I wrote this circa 2012, on the relevance and missing community aspect of BBSes these days..
---
Over the past months I have thought a lot about how social networking websites such as Myspace and Facebook (and the newer Google+) always seem to have their “golden age” of popularity – and then steadily decline.
I’ve thought about when I switched from Myspace to Facebook. There just seemed to be a specific point where it would have been more productive to invest my time in my (newly created) Facebook profile – and a majority of my flock of friends and family I had connected with had migrated as well.
And then I’ve thought about my transition from Friendster to Myspace. Friendster was one of the very first generalized social networking websites. It was great in its own regard, though it was primitive compared to what Facebook and Google+ are today. At its core, though, it was a beautiful creation and a great idea to bring casual conversation to a worldwide audience.
Going back further, I reminisce about the rise of the Internet and the subsequent decline of dial-up Bulletin Board Systems. Anyone who knows me personally from the mid-90’s and earlier knows how nostalgiac I am about BBSes even today. There has always been something about them that Internet-based social networking websites today can’t seem to hold a candle to – something I could never put my finger on.
Just the other night I was reading a paper called “The Temporary Autonomous Zone”, which describes communities of past and present – all different types from 18th century pirate utopias to the (then) modern computerized communities of Bulletin Board Systems. It described the social aspects of these communities and their decentralized (some would say anarchy-based) nature. Though most of them hold no place in history books, their ideals were always the cornerstone of their purpose. Many of them were actually meant to be temporary; the lifespan of the community was inherent to its validity.
Myspace, Facebook and Google+ all have the same idea – connecting and socializing with people you know in real life. What seems to be the common decline with these sites in general is quite simply that once your userbase reaches a certain threshold, the communal foundation itself starts to wobble and eventually comes tumbling down on top of itself. More specifically, once your “friends” list becomes more than you can handle, you start to question the validity and value of the people you have connected with as well as the community as a whole.
For me, it started with a “friend sweep” – going through my list and removing the friends who I didn’t find completely necessary to communicate with. My first sweep list consisted people I knew in school and past jobs, but never really conversed with anyway. Then came the ones who I did genuinely care about, but just couldn’t stand to see one more post about their political stance/life story/band/business happenings. After many months and multiple sweeps, however, the stale smell of wasted time still hung in the air for me. This resulted in me leaving the site for a time, declaring my independence and recaptured freedom and liberty. (Dramatic, aren’t I?) Of course, I have come back and left a few times, repeating the same shenanigans. The desire to communicate with those I care about draws me back. The feeling of distance, the feeling that people are screaming through a bullhorn at a ginormous crowd (i.e. their friends list) makes me leave because I feel like I have no real connection with them.
With all of this back and forth came a realization to me that old-school dialup Bulletin Board Systems rarely encountered these kinds of issues. For the most part, BBSes always seemed to hold a small, passionate community that kept themselves on target with what they were trying to accomplish (which was the same goal as modern social networks – informal human to human
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
we used modern technology as well as we used that old technology. Nowadays we have images, videos, sound etc. all to the good. But why does starting a browser alone use 25% CPU usage and using 3/4 of my memory. Maybe someone will start to make BBS systems with modern equipment that can compete with "the Web".
I only shut mine down about 4 years ago after a hardware failure, there were still plenty then.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I would like my Commodores back now, please. Which one of you has them?
and I'm still poor.
That's no-one else's fault, and it's no-one else's problem.
Fuck all of you motherfuckers
And with that attitude, you'll stay poor and die poor.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
It was like that with IRC, forums, Hotline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., KDX.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Congrats on posting what is probably the first and only "Read the rest of this comment..." message on /. that was actually worth reading.
I remember Hotline Communications
As someone who was there 25 years ago, I can tell you, it was no golden age. There were already trolls complaining about the 1990s version of "SJWs" and hollering that there were too many posts that weren't "tech" enough.
Imagine today's Slashdot, but in lower resolution, and having to wait while a GNAA comment loaded on the screen.
On the plus side, there was plenty of ASCII porn.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Because coders are lazy. Your average desktop today is orders of magnitude faster than 20 years ago. Programs never load any faster and pages never render any faster either.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
WWIV + LORD + Tradewars. That was middle school in a nutshell, on a 14.4 bbs with a phone cord strung out from my room to the living room to sneak on at 1 AM...
I can't have what I had due to the Internet more so IRC.
I ran 3001 BBS (go figure), a 6 line chat board.
Cnet software on an Amiga 3000, a 6 port serial printer card, 6 2400 baud modems and a Robotics HST (1400 baud) which I allowed any one who wanted to log in for free, a donation gave more time forever (time was a commodity).
I ran it for close to 4 years 24/7, and it was the most popular BBS this area ever saw. Post I was going to the park and a few would show up, card games every weekend, it was a very nice time. People of all ages just wanted something to do, and I managed a few girl friends.
I could and did take my entire chat area and join up with any Cnet software in the world, this at 10 Cents a minutes for each phone line.
It cost a bundle but my hobby, and I'd go back to those days in a heart beat but it's over.
Does anyone else recall struggling with the door.sys file on your BBS? One door game generally worked fine, but woe to you when you tried to configure multiple door games on your BBS, particularly with more than one user at a time!
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Most of the 8/16-bit BBS's popping back up are using things like Lantronix UDS or iPocket232 serialethernet adapters that emulate a modem. You actually telnet to them. For extra authenticity you can use something like Syncterm to get real ANSI, PETSCII or ATASCII support.
Many of these BBS's simply run on emulators but the die-hards use real hardware. I connect to a couple to play old-ass online door games. Normally I use SyncTerm but I have a tricked out 800XL (576K RAM, Happy 1050 floppy, IDE interface and Atari 850 RS232/Parallel interface w/ iPocket232) that I connect with occasionally.
Another option with Atari 8-bit machines is using something like APE or SIO2OSX and using your PC to emulate devices.... the adapter can be built for $5 using an FTDI FT232RL USBTTL serial breakout board. This is convenient for transferring or running real disk images/files as well as printer emulation and modem emulation. Makes running "backups" of all those old games you could never find or afford very easy. The Atari 8-bit machines are the easiest to pull this off on.
This is nothing new. It's just most people under 30 couldn't give a shit less.
"Hard Sysops Are Resurrecting BBS's From The 1980s"
No they're not. A few cranks are emulating legacy point-to-point systems because it's an insanely hipster thing to do, but no one is resurrecting BBS'.
Next on slashdot, ""Die-Hard Cowboys Are Resurrecting Buggy-whips From The 1880s"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I just have to chime in here and say that I'm finding almost every post on this story interesting and entertaining in a way that I haven't experienced on /. in a long, long time. More of this please!
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
isn't the nostalgia angle. I like that it could morph into a viable, minimalist alternative to the corporately-owned, advertising-funded, privacy-annihilating crapcake that the Internet has become. It would be pretty tough for anyone to monetize BBSes in any significant way when they're running on low-bandwidth connections and have relatively small membership numbers. BBSes and modems would restore some fun and some adventure to the act of going online. There's one big difference, right there in those two words: 'going online' as a conscious decision, rather than 'being online' as a normalized state of existence.
Plus, wouldn't it be kind of 'modern steampunk' to have a modem app on a phone or tablet so you could 'dial in' to a BBS? Oh, wait - I guess that would require the Internetz again. Oh well...
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
It was dull unless you were awake when it actually found something.... then you practically shit your pants.
A BBS style public messaging system, coupled with PGP/GPG public key sharing, could be an interesting thing.
People just logging in see nothing but cypher text if they dont have the right keys. Meaning the conversation is private, even from the sysop. If they manage their keys properly, and have valid chains of trust, it would be a good holdout against the loss of privacy in the modern world.
Throw in a fully encrypted transport (like SSH), and there you go. Only other remaining thing would be decentralization of the service, but that would require much more thought.
I had star trek running on my test pc in the workshop.
Field engineers came in just to play trek.
It used to be an old game on IBM mainframes.
Go well
I like it! This is a great idea. The only real problem is that for kids these days to realize the usefulness of a given technology, you have to assign a flashy, buzzwordy brand name to it. Something easy to say and cute but slightly self-deprecating, that hearkens just tangentially to the features it provides, with a slight, almost subliminal flavor of the signs of the times... something like a cross between "Dropbox," "Trump," and "Napster." Any ideas? :-D
I wrote the k56 Flex modem CCL for the Apple Internet Connection Kit..... Used to run a Hermes BBS, then Nova Link.... But before that Wildcat.
It's deep in my DNA. But aside from an occasional wistful nostalgia... I've no desire to return to those days.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
There have LONG been internet ports into and out of BBS.
The first board I ever dialed into ran TBBS and had integrated FTP and Lynx browsing and some other things. I got my first @ email there too.
By the time 1995 came around, I was running my own Maximus board with nodes on Fidonet and a couple others. Had two phone lines, did co-sysop duties on two other Maximus boards, and generally had a lot of fun tinkering with Max, Binkleyterm, Squish, and my favorite mail editor of all time, tim-ed. Ah I miss that.
And of course I had door games like LORD and the usual Bluewave mail door.
By 2000, I was out of it but other guys had ported their boards onto the net. Anybody with a telnet client could just connect as if it was via dialup.
So putting BBSs on the net was done a long time ago. All the major board software brands could do it. Still can for all I know.
Sig for hire.
You and your fancy auto-dial modems... I'll be up all night to flip the switch on my 300 baud volksmodem!
Appetently reddit is a terrible place, hmm I most have found the nice part of it then. r/postgresql r/ipv6 and r/irc does not seem to be populated whit the people you descripe, orm maybe I just have not spotted them to any great extent, anyway imho they are not a significant problem, your milage may wary
Then don't. Go to 4chan instead.
Yes, it is. But this is no different. powertripping neckbeard douchenozzles will blossom anywhere they get a chance, like dandelions.
The funny part is that they BELIEVE that they are special, but in actually they are the shitty weeds that anyone with a milligram of socialization would rip out by the roots and leave on the sidewalk to die.
LOL!
Ya, I had exactly that thought. I have a full backup of the day I took C.A.T.I.E. offline. I did a google and it may as well have never existed.
I had a sad, and what does the left and right pointy brave mean that a post just ignores it ? (shift , and .)
dammit "brace" not brave.
Don't slashdot drunk my fellow kids. Not even the red underlines can save you!
Anyone remember the Pirates of Puget Sound? dsPPS, gsPPS, etc. Somewhere there's an old Sider hard drive that still contains all that code ...
Quite possibly creating an artificial limit to your network will help it thrive – be it restricted to family members, friends from school, specific workplaces you get the idea. The key is to harness the power of the quality of your community and not the quantity.
Probably. Though one thing that set BBSes apart is that they often amounted to singular communities of people, like you describe. Not multiple (though overlapping) networks belonging to individual people each with their own circle of friends, like modern social networks. Nor communities of interest, like many FB groups, web boards, or Usenet groups.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
After some Googling, the AppleCat was doing Bell 202 signalling to make 1200 baud and it could do it with anything else capable of it, but it was a one-directional standard and required some kind of timing to make tx/rx work, so basically you needed to be running software aware of this on both ends to make it work.
I don't remember Bell 202 supported by any other product, they usually were Bell 212 if they supported 1200 baud.
The other thing that made the AppleCat kind of attractive at the time was that it was kind of binary programmable, and I think could be made to make its own touchtones and listen to the line. I remember a fast dialer that I used on busy BBS numbers -- you could dial and redial about as fast as the central office could complete the circuit. I think it was also effective as a war dialing system, able to map out vast phone number spaces pretty quickly.
IIRC, all of these were big advantages over Hayes modems that used AT command sets and had limits on how fast you could dial or detect a non-modem far end.
It's interesting that Bell 202 is a pure one-way standard. Outside North America we got CCIT V.23 which was 1200 Baud in one direction and 75 Baud in the other direction, so you usually had to decide in advance which direction you wanted to be fast, depending on which way you were copying files. Generally it would default to fast download (and slow upload) from the point of view of the party initiating the call.
Which were the ham radio equivalent of a BBS. Rather than dial in, you used a radio and a modem to link up via radio. It was pretty cool, sending messages back and forth across the country to people. It usually took a day or two, depending upon how many hops it took -- a lot like FidoNet.
And it suddenly came to me – It’s the community, stupid!
This is something I have realized for quite some time now. I would really like to run a local-focused web forum. The effort of actively pruning people outside the area trying to gain a foothold is probably less than the technical effort to run an actual dial-up BBS these days, so I won't even begin to consider running a "real BBS". And not being limited to a single physical channel by dial-up will be so much better anyhow.
One of these days. Right now I'm in the middle of a lot of IRL crap that's keeping me from doing much of anything productive, but it should be over soon enough.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
From the perspective of someone who wrote BBSes during the 1980's (Stonehenge, &c) what I find interesting is that the social problems associated with message systems are still largely the same (twits, trolls, spammers, and those who shout lies louder than those who speak truth). Every now and then I read about someone in the modern era who has a "new idea" (e.g. "selective invisibility" for obnoxious trolls) which was invented thirty years ago (and probably before that) by multiple folks working independently.
I remember the biggest struggle was making sure that networked messages didn't just circulate forever. Given the limited memory and mass storage and slow processing speeds I ended up with a primitive-but-effective combination of hop counts, expiration dates, and a use window. None of that is of much practical use today but the struggle to make it more or less work was an important experience for a then-larval coder. Actually, a lot of the interesting problems of that time were making relatively cheap and primitive hardware do something useful in a reasonable amount of time.
Don't post as AC and it'll be that much harder to get modded -1.
I remember dropping like $200 of my hard earned money (when I was like 13-14 yrs old) on a brand new external 14.4K modem to get on some of my favorite BBS's. That was about the same time, that RAM cost about $100/MB or so. Things were crazy expensive then.
We had a 1200 baud and a 300 baud smartmodem. The aluminum case was snazzy.
I think the general modem pool for the timeshare system used in CompSci 3104 might have been 1200 baud capable in 1986 at the University I attended. I know for a fact in high school it wasn't -- there were a handful of 1200 baud lines restricted to admin logins, and an admin I knew used to gripe a lot about wasted money on a Hayes 1200 modem that seldom could get the 1200 baud lines.
FWIW, I think the AppleCat had a Bell 212 "normal" 1200 baud option, but it was nearly twice the price of the non-212 version. And the usual problem was almost nothing was 1200 baud capable, especially BBSes.
The prices sure seemed to come down fast, though. Within about 5 years, it seemed like 14.4k was pretty cheap.
two different BBS software on a C-64: HAL9000 and CNET v10 in SoCal from 1983-1986. It started at 300 baud and ended at 1200. It was called The Pirates Galley and later, The Probability Broach. CNET v10 software had lots of basic parts to it, so was highly customizable. For example, the email section was fashioned after the wild west and visiting the old post office. File transfer section was science fiction themed. We only had a few thousand user accounts, but for a single line BBS, that's pretty good. I can still remember the phone number, 805-647-8093. No, don't try it, it's been offline for over 30 years.
I still have the basic portion of the CNET printed out on some dot-matrix printer around here somewhere..good times.
... bring back vinyl and by BBS!!!
BBS software from the 80s/90s never had security in mind.
When I was in Highschool, I got a broken VDT from them with a built-in 300bps accoustic-coupler modem. Had to connect an external monitor to the thing; basically a VDT with no monitor and an accoustic coupler for a standard Bell-style office phone handset. Had shift-register video memory, which occasionally would drop random bits, corrupting characters on the screen. No lowercase characters, was basically a 'glass TTY'. RTL logic chips in it. Actually managed to repair it.
Going there to download some sick axelfoley.mod
www.mono.org (home page for a telnet / ssh bbs) has been running since the late 80s and is still going, several evolutions of hardware later (original hosts were whitechapel workstations, then sparc stations, these days BSD on a virtual host).
Account signup is free and a significant amount of the original content is still available...
-Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience-
Oblig. rfc2549
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Ah Tradwars, good times! I also had a handy 2400 baud modem, I recall racing home from school to get my turns in for the day. It basically prompted the 2nd phone line after Mom would pick up the phone and no carrier me, causing much yelling... Kinda surprised a MM internet version re-boot was never developed, seems like one of the more fantastically popular games in hindsight.
Really? This is like breaking out the tricycle and baby blocks. Technology that really was from the 1970s, improved a bit in the 1980s and was way out of date in the 1990s.
Not a bad punishment if you do something bad, like rob a bank or something. Your sentence is you have to run this BBS for a year. (defendant) NOOOOOO, anything but that!
I have a couple old android phones around running stuff like ipcam and whatnot-- so they are a bit underutilized. I think I'll take a shot at putting dosbox on one and giving it a shot. Whould be a good way to utilize an old phone.
The PTT Bulletin Board System ( telnet://ptt.cc ) in Taiwan has more than 1.5 million registered users, with over 150,000 users online during peak hours. The BBS has over 20,000 boards covering a multitude of topics, and more than 20000 articles and 500000 comments are posted every day. It even has its own chrome extension telnet client. https://chrome.google.com/webs...
Yes on my old Empire machine at empire.openmpe.com
Enter:
HELLO PLAYER.TREK
or
HELLO PLAYER.SUPRTRK
or
HELLO PLAYER.SUPRTREK
(Haven't tested them in while. Let me know if they crash.)
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
My first BBSs were single line and used my own software written in Basic and then Turbo Pascal. I loved to be original and people enjoyed my software, even when it wasn't as reliable as it should have been. Back in the day, if your software crashed, your BBS would be down until you got home ...
I eventually bought someone's failed BBS project through The Recycler, yesteryear's equivalent of Craigslist. It had a six-line serial adapter and Microport Unix. I never liked Microport but it did work, after a fashion, and my six lines were quickly humming. Unfortunately, as we say in the Internet world, the revenue model was never what it should have been, although I remember being thrilled when my first subscriber check – $60 for an entire year! – came in, from one of my favorite users. I wanted to be a general purpose home for eccentrics, with both dating and discussion parts equally balanced. I have never had a more successful social life before or since. We would have roughly monthly meetings at various local venues, and a pretty substantial number of people would turn out. It was relatively easy making a geographically based community, because most people lived nearby thanks to free local calls and pricey "local long distance" ones.
There were a couple of bad apples, who trolled like crazy, but it was definitely a fun environment, and my six lines were always busy. I had the first three lines for the paying users, two for non-payers and one for administration. I set up a "holding tank" for new users and those who had been troublesome, which was a forerunner of today's ultra-complex moderation systems. It didn't work all that great since I have never been a big censorship supporter.
I still remember the one user who loved Werner Erhard's The Forum and kept posting about it, even though people were totally sick of the topic from minute one. I eventually set up the typo corrector (which changed "teh" to "the" and other similar conveniences) to change Forum to Murof. Made him mad as a hatter, but all in good fun.
Even though the system vanished due to a failing disk drive in the 1990s I still have fond memories of it. And I still have friends who are former users. Wish I'd kept a copy of the software. It did some pretty cool things. For instance, the dating questionnaire let you answer questions in your own words if one of the prepared answers didn't work for you.
What I really find sad about today's environment is that we are no longer open to much unique, different or eccentric. I tried creating a social network of my own, but I wasn't able to get anyone excited about it. It was unique, and different, and just not what people wanted. The world wanted the uniformity and impersonality of Facebook, not the informality and homey atmosphere I wanted to provide. The big city, not the small town.
Nowadays I'm a photographer instead of a programmer, with almost 2000 friends on Facebook. So you can teach an old dog new tricks. And honestly, I'm glad my photographs never crash.