Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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".
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.