Are BBS-Like Communities Dead?

Fr05t asks: "Since the day the Internet became popular and the good old BBS's faded into the back ground, I myself have had a hard time finding the same kind of active community. Sure there's Slashdot, BugTraq, and IRC, but for whatever reason it seems people remain private and keep to themselves without a who's online option, and a message feature. I do see other Slashdot members posting often, but there are allot more people that read the articles and have opinions that remain in the background. I guess my question is if anyone has found the same kind of thing as the old BBS's?" (More)

I remember back in the 80's when I spent most of my waking hours after school in front of the monitor hooping from one BBS to another. I figure most of the BBSes have evolved in some way, shape or form and made the jump to the Internet. A few of them have evolved into Web Boards, which just don't have that same feel.

When I speak of "that BBS feel", I mean having the ability to go through different sections of the system, actually browsing the messages left by others in a free-forum (as opposed to moderated forums like Slashdot), actively seeing who was on the system at the time (the afore mentioned "who" command), the ubiquitous file transfer areas (which, for the most part have been surplanted by your mega-FTP sites like WcArchive and Freshmeat and others of their ilk). And door games....anyone remember door-games? (I'm still waiting for an online version of TradeWars for the Internet...)

Of course, my free time online has dropped dramatically due to my day-job and Slashdot, so I don't have the time to search for such online communities anymore. If anyone cares to make recommendations to any IBBS systems that may still exist, please feel free.

Comments

Firs^H^H^H^Her, yeah I have

[scrytch]

I've found that MUSHes and MOOs provide much of that community feel. Try LambdaMOO on for size, telnet://lambda.moo.mud.org:8888
(you'll want a client program though, using straight telnet sucks)

Re:Firs^H^H^H^Her, yeah I have

[Jonas �berg]

I too spend some time on MUSHes. Surprisingly, when I fired up TinyFugue a month or so ago after having been away for almost one year, I still saw the same people connected (more or less) as was there when I left. Unfortunately, there are not a great deal of new players/community members to MUDs.

Re:Firs^H^H^H^Her, yeah I have

[wynlyndd]

I think part of the "trouble" is that people have many more options for engaging strangers in cooperative/competitive play. Most new computer games have multiplayer capabilities and pretty graphics to boot. Games such as EQ, UO, and Asheron's call I think take many people away from MUDs.

Re:Firs^H^H^H^Her, yeah I have

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes most BBSes Have gone to a telnet system, thereby more easily accessible to the internet.Unfortunately most people don't know or don't care about these.Several good ones I Know of offhand are Infinite Darkness (infidark.dynip.com) Distorted Utopia (distorted.darktech.org) Fluph (fluph.darktech.org) Asylum68 (a68.darktech.org) The War Room BBS (twr.darktech.org) Actually a great place to go to is www.darktech.org.They offer a service that allows sysops to use a regular address instead of an ip to telnet to their board.They have a list of hundreds of bbses available to telnet to.And yes most of them have tradewars! :)

Re:Firs^H^H^H^Her, yeah I have

[toni]

I agree, I found from MUD's what I lost in the BBS world. Try telnet delphine.org sometime or goto www.delphine.org...

Re:Firs^H^H^H^Her, yeah I have

[Eidolon]

Even LambdaMOO suffers from too many users, resulting in many people attempting to be completely outrageous or inane in order to be noticed. The old-timers who don't want anything to do with such nonsense keep to themselves for the most part, and have developed their own culture in the opposite direction; radically exclusive of the flaming masses, yet totally boring and staid.

There are other such places around which are more rewarding.

BBS' are dead as Bill Clinton's honour

[Anonymous Coward]

They've been dead a long time now. I ran a huge one (for the size of this city) with 32 lines and a satellite feed. When we hooked up the Internet connection it was all over in six months - calls went from 1200 a day to 100 a day in what seemed like no time, now gets about 15 calls a day (and is much smaller) because there are a few people who use it that can't afford a full blown Internet account. We haven't updated the software or hardware in five years (GO Worldgroup!) and will shut it down for the last time on December 23. Sometimes it doesn't even make 15 calls.

Communities Exist

[Jonas �berg]

The communities still exist in various forms. They have just moved on from the dial-up form to some other form of communication. There are a lot of BBSes out on the Internet which you can connect to using telnet. There's also an increasing amount of gatheringplaces on the web for people to meet and interact with each other. I don't really prefer the web type interaction, but it certainly seems to attract a lot of the youths today.
But contrary to the BBS world, people don't seem to "advertise" their communities like they used to do earlier. Instead, they kind of keep to themselves and it turns into a very closely connected society.
Also, communities are formed inside of larger groups of people. IRC, AIM, Zephyr, etc are probably good examples of this. When you think of it; this is really the way the world works IRL too. You seldom see advertisements for groups of people (unless they have a specific interest). Instead, you tend to meet new people through friends and family. In IRC, you probably meet friends of your friends and start talking and perhaps that person you speak to will then be your friend too, just like in real life.

Re:Communities Exist

[Paolo]

FirstClass and Hotline are two communities which are still very active. The problem is, these are fading as well, as commercialism (banner ads) and paranoia (somewhat expected) have taken over. They're still great hangouts for early teens, but eventually people "grow up" (that is to say, get a life) and move on.


I think high-volume websites with good stories and features (like Slashdot) are and will continue to be the best BBS-like experiences one can find.


On a somewhat seperate note, the L0pht runs a bbs (telnet to bbs.l0pht.com). If you think about it, today's web portals are much like graphical BBSes--you log in, get your mail, your chat, news, forums, etc. all in one place. BBSes haven't died, they're just hiding in unlikely places.

Re:Communities Exist

[WedgeAntilles]

I suppose it's a little harder to find real communities out there on the internet these days than it once was with bbs's and such like. But they do exist, and I certainly have been lucky enough to find some good ones. I was never around for the BBS's way back when, but I did get into the internet relatively early ('94) and I have been able to find communities of various kinds without too great an effort. For example, newsgroups can be great places for people to hang out and talk about their interests. I've made some good acquantances there, but I think it is the extremely rare usenet experience that yields a close-nit community of friends and colleagues. Online forums (such as /. and others like it) can also potentially be places for those honest-to-goodness communities to sprout and grow, however, again, it is equally rare for such things to occur. I myself have been fortunate to recently become part of a very close community of people. I have made good acquantances as well as close friends. We've been through our share of difficulty (perhaps more), but it seems to have made us even more of a community. We're not really sure where the spark that transformed us from a group of people discussing stuff, to a true community, but we are glad it happened. If you'd like to check us out, we're at http://dualboot.net/forums. We talk about computers and tech and stuff, or whatever.

Try this:

[Anonymous Coward]

telnet aubbs.cx

BBS's dead?

[PovRayMan]

I never really got into BBS's before. It seems that the old 1200bps modem dial up BBS's live on in CGI scripted message posting web sites. I'm sure its not the same, but with the aging technology, I guess the community could live on.

-PovRayMan

Ufie

[QuMa]

Ufie still have a BBS, and they run tradewars. They even have prizes at the moment. Sadly, no free t-shirts ;-).

have a look at http://bbs.ufies.org/ and telnet://bbs.ufies.org

Re:Ufie

[Null_Operator]

The Ufie bbs is great, i mean, LORD! they even have LORDII. and some strange food game.

I use one all the time

[Ford Prefect]

.. but to avoid an influx of Slashdotters, I'm not revealing its name or location.

Suffice to say, it's been running at my university for years. It was, until recently, running on a small Sun box, but after the original code (it was running a somewhat evolved form of UNaXcess) proved to be far too buggy and difficult to maintain, a rewrite was started. Which failed. Then another rewrite. And so on.

Late summer of this year, the final, all-improved version was rolled out. Which has proved to be very slow, buggy, and somewhat unstable, but still shows a lot of promise. It's improving all the time - and now it runs on Linux instead of SunOS.

The 'community' on is pretty small, but many people know each other in real life, since membership consists mostly (entirely?) of current and former students. There are deep, philosophical debates (Pie-vs-Baguette), musings on the meaning of life ('PUB NOW!' system announcements), and general intellectual advancement (Pointless, Moan, LAM, Holy-Wars, and the ever-popular Abuse).

I know of several other similar internet-based BBS-type things; they usually keep a fairly low profile in order to avoid invasion by clueless AOLers or similar.

Re:I use one all the time

[madprof]

I use two BBS systems, one of them run by a guy called Ford Prefect so I'm wondering... :-)
It's been going since 1986 (a bit before my time) and I am not revealing the name of it either.
However, the other is Monochrome which is the largest BBS in the UK, probably. Thousands of users, plenty to do and if clueless people want to turn up they're welcome. There is no snobbishness on there.
It's a real community and the facility ot message other users of the BBS and see how is on makes you feel that you're inside the system.
Closest thing I've seen to a real Internet community, and a shining example of how BBSes can still work today.

Re:I use one all the time

[Anonymous Coward]

heh. ford is right, you just have to know where to look. i am also a member of the community he mentioned -- and i i find it far more useful and fun to read than the net in general. the key is keeping the number of users down to a manageable level, say 2k total users, of which 100-300 actively post. this particular community has been around for at least 13 years, (an eternity by net standards!) keeping it secret, much like a secret society or hidden paradise helps out a lot. new users are mostly recruited by word of mouth though at one time its existance was advertised widely over the campus.

Re:I use one all the time

[Draggie]

Me too. In fact I run one - at the above URL. We migrated from the old DOS-based RemoteAccess to the Web when it became obvious that there was a mass migration happening, and it was a case of 'adapt or die'. We didn't want to die.

Having been established for 9 years as a dial-up BBS, we already had a good user base - I'd hate to try starting one from scratch - so it was a case of running the Web version and the Dialup side-by side for a good six months before finally committing to the change, but eventually there were enough users logging in to the Web-based BBS to do it.

The next challenge was finding suitable software. BBSers don't generally relate well to the 'usenet' style of most Internet-based forum software, so we went through a few variations before biting the bullet and writing our own. It's still not finished, but hey, it works!

Anyway, enough rant. Suffice it to say that we're still around, although there may not be many of us. I'd throw a couple of other related URLs in too, but while the aforementioned threat of an 'influx of slashdotters' is fine to risk on my own behalf, it's not a thing I would willingly expose others to.

DL

the 386sx. and the 16 color monitor..and the MODEM

[ndfa]

I can completely understand what you are going through. Back when i did not have a computer, I would have to go to a friends house to use his 386 to get on the local BBS. AT that time there was no such thing as an ISP at home (pakistan).
BBS was the only way your computer could connect with others to get files, games and get to share ideas with other computer ppl.
Even when ISP's came about, BBS was the best way to "stay in touch". And of course the fact that an ISP cost an arm and a leg was also a problem.

I think one of the reasons that people dont want that exp. is that there are soo many choices that you just do whatyou want. There are still places where ppl. share ideas (Slashdot, irc etc)
and play games on web pages and all that. Just that they are all different! It would be cool to have a completely INTERCONNECTED set of webpages that allow you to chat, run a "who" command or just post stuff (who cares what) on some b-board!!!

well if there is such a place... point me to the right direction!!!

Fan clubs

[AmirS]

I know a few people who have joined a community through web based 'fan club' sites, mostly for bands. They primarily use message boards and chat rooms to hang out; what's strange is that these people have only started using the 'net recently, thay have never even heard of IRC or BBSs! I guess this is what the current generation of newbies do, and it works quite well.

telnet bbss

[_martini_]

there is a telnet bbs out there that I used to spend some time on, but I don't any more. bbs.ufies.org

complete with door games. :)

User Friendly BBS!

[_blueboy]

From UserFriendly.org:

Harkening back to the halcyon days of dial-up Bulletin Boards, the UFie BBS can be reached at http://bbs.ufies.org and telnet://bbs.ufies.org. Tradewars and Lord and other famous BBS door games are available, as are message boards, Fidonet feeds, and more! Thanks go to Moe, the generous chap who set the whole thing up and paid for the license!

Re:User Friendly BBS!

[ben.b]

Woohoo! I haven't played LORD in years - the only time I ever considered getting into Pascal was to write extensions for that game. I think me and that bar maid have some catching up to do ;)

Re:User Friendly BBS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody care to share the proper $TERMINAL settings to get ANSI to display correctly in Linux? (or, how about a RIPscrip client?)

Re:User Friendly BBS!

[Anonymous Coward]

try :
more /etc/termcap

and
export $TERM=ansi-bbs
or
export $TERM=ansi
or
export $TERM=vt100

i hope this helps.. :o)

With you all the way!

[MikeBabcock]

I feel like we've lost that sense of community as well. The environment is huge ... so its easy to get lost. I see the wave of the future as having been the ICQs and AOL IMs which allow people to track each other without forums. I miss the permanent record of forums though ... and the membership that came with being a part of a certain system. I think a good use of some of the PHP and MySQL tools we have would be to build a generic BBS system for HTML ...

... a very similar system could grow, run by a backend (but small) database (like Slashdot, etc.) but with the BBS feel to it ... and no anonymous access for non-members :-).

Just my $0.02 worth ...

PS. I ran a BBS in Ontario, Canada for several years on a 2400 baud modem up to the first 19.2k modems then 28.8k. We were part of international Fido-type nets ... it was fun :).

Re:With you all the way!

[Kiwi]

I see the wave of the future as having been the ICQs and AOL IMs which allow people to track each other without forums.

I find it ironic that both of these interfaces are considered new, since they are essentially reinventions of the UNIX 'write' and 'talk' commands.

- Sam (who remembers doing all-night USENET sessions on a UNIX box and having one of my buddies on the same system 'write' me.)

Don't forget IRC ... urgh, and AOL

[taniwha]

There are some tight IRC communities out there that describe what you are missing.

And I'd guess that AOL also provides that sort of community too.

The Well still exists last time I checked.

But I suspect that the local city BBS has probably been replaced by more global communities on the net.

Newsgroups and mailing lists

[qts]

I find that newsgroups and mailing lists perform just the same job. With newsgroups, you just have to filter out the spam.

Many mailing lists definitely have a sense of community. In this regard OneList is to be commended.

One trick I use with newsgroups is to maintain a picklist, and look for posts from those posters - PMINews helpfully allows me to give the message title a different colour.

Pity there isn't a Win32 version.

qts@nildram.co.uk

Re:Newsgroups and mailing lists

[savaget]

I find the NOISE ratio too high in most newsgroups. I just hate having to be bothered with setting up filters for this and filters for that, not to mention all the email spam you get if your dare make your email address public on a newsgroup.

OTOH I agree with your views on mailing lists. I find mailings list much more informative most of the time, even the ones that have little to no moderation.

how about Hotline?

[sh4de]

Hotline Server/Client provides quite BBS like features over a proprietary protocol. It includes chat, news, file serving, and private messages for example.

The server tracker feature is neat, but makes it clear that most Hotline servers are dedicated to trading VCD/MP3/warez. Some communities do have Hotline servers for the intended (IMHO) purpose: to have a place for people to gather together and have the appropriate amount of fun. :)

Some Hotline servers act as "metaservers" for collecting people together to play games online, if the game lacks a "lobby" or other convenient method to find fellow players.

Re:how about Hotline?

[Geekboy(Wizard)]

currently, i am on a mp3 server (of which i am one of the main admins) and we are having a great chat. i mainly get on just to chat with the people there. it's a private server, so people had to get in by word of mouth, or back like 2-3 years ago when it was a public server. we get some pretty crazy chats going, and if they get to henious, we just get a private chat going with those we want to talk to.

the bbs community (not that i would know, never joined a bbs, just went straight to the internet) is alive and well.....it's just well hidden from the mass public.

Alive and Well in Ciberspace ( I hate that word )

[Forge]

Not only are BBS communities alive an well but they have grown stronger over the years. What has changed is the technology. In the old days it was only practical to be on BBSs in your home town ( Onles you phreaked ). Now BBSs have moved online for the most part.

Guess what Slashdot is ? Massive online debates, games ( 1st post *IS* an online game ). Flames, threats and a lot of fun. This is Rob's BBS and the day it becomes something else 90% of the regulars will depart.

BTW : The traditional BBSs are still around. For those in Jamaica ( or willing to pay perverse international call rates ) you can check out Chrysalis at 876-977-7334 and Synapse at 876-977-6681 .

What about boards elsware?

Usenet and IRC

[SEWilco]

I think the BBS activities moved to Usenet first, and some have now split off to IRC. They're even more effective time sinks than BBSes were.

At least now there's Deja.com so the Usenet stuff can be searched.

Re:Usenet and IRC

[Yuck_Fu]

Well.. IRC has mostly replaced local BBS's here (Norway). But it just isn't the same. There's so much more "junk" on an IRC-channel than in BBS-conferences or chat.

BBS's are out there...

[legoboy]

BBS's are still out there, but you need to know where to look. Hint: A fair number have telnet access.

I won't post the address to any here, since I don't have any particular wish to crash the two that I frequent. However, I will reccommend the program Zap-O-Com (ZOC) which is available at http://www.emtec.com/zoc/index.html. They have a downloadable shareware version. (Because after all - BBS's are what made shareware work not so many years ago.)

ZOC is a very configurable, ANSI enabled telnet/dialup client. The only hitch is that it is only available for Windows and OS/2.

As for doors on the existing BBS's, Trade Wars 2002, Barren Realms Elite, and Falcon's Eye are still ubiquitous. Trade Wars seems to have the most devoted crowd, and there are many lists of active games available. This is one I found after a quick search. Others exist that are updated nearly daily with information such as the nuber of players, planets, corporations, etc. http://www.tradewars.org is a Trade Wars news site. Not sure how good it is.

Anyway, I encourage any people out there who haven't had experience with BBS's to try them out. The community still exists, the only real downside is that it is a lot more trouble to meet someone face to face (should you want to) than it was when everyone was in the same city/town. (Damn you, Mosaic, damn you)

------

BBS communities are still out there- on port 23

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a number of thriving telnet based online communities still out there. ISCA, whip.isca.uiowa.edu, is probably the most well known of these, but there are others. I'm partial to one named Heinous, telnet heinous.net, login bbs. ISCA and Heinous respectivly had 97 and 25 users on this morning at 11:00am CST.

the center of BBS' ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Well.. I've run a bbs since I got my shiny new Atari 800 and 300 baud modem.. had a 810 (90K) disk drive.. wheee.. I miss that thing.. anyway, if you folks ARE interested in a place where sysops abound, try irc: irc.sysopsnet.org (or is sysopnet.org?) and visit http://www.pcmicro.com/sysopscorner (Plus pcmicro itself has TONS of bbs stuff for download..) I think it'd be pretty cool to see a huge upsurge of bbs' ;) but then again.. I'm like all old and ancient and stuff..

Re:the center of BBS' ;)

[knghtbrd]

(I must be crazy--I'm posting to slashdot again)

I expect we will start seeing a rise in BBSes again because it's becoming possible to set them up again. Most people today have access to fast enough connections that allowing a few users to log on to a BBS over the internet is no longer impractical. The BBSes can probably never be quite what they were (what use is ZModem today? Message bases are probably going to be stored in NNTP format, etc) but there are too many people who miss them for them not to start reappearing.

Dead

[gutterface]

I was involved pretty heavily in the BBS scene in the 80's and early 90's. It was one of the reasons I came so late to the internet. The scene is completely dead as far as I'm concerned.

So far I haven't come across anything having the same feel. I suspect there are two reasons. The main one is that BBSes had a strong local base, with the same cast of people. Everyone knew your name, you probably met many of the people behind the aliases (remember GTs (get togethers)?). The turnover was way lower than the equivalents we have today.

The fact that the Internet has allowed information to be specialized is another reason. Communities are highly focused on particular niches. Slashdot serves the open-source digerati types. There are communities based around the X-Files, etc. These communities tend to be too large compared to BBSes, and have people that may be too similar to each other.

Finally, I haven't found a decent interface for communities. Mailing lists are way to primitive, and web bulletin boards too klunky. The BBS Interface is still superior to anything I've seen thusfar.

Peace.

Pendulum?

[Fufie]

Hi,

I remember my BBS-days eight or ten years ago, and BBSes were invaluable back then to get in touch with likeminded people, and meet other avid computer users in the local area. At times we had pizza-nights when everyone got together in Real Life and got a shock when we saw how the people you'd been talking to for months actually looked like. It was nice, and it was important as community-building.

The Internet is a much bigger place and isn't as intimate as the old BBSes were. A lot of the people from the old BBS days and newer people seems to miss a more intimate environment. The Net is a pretty big place and people tend to feel all alone. My guess is that such environments will show up again, and they do at times in IRC-channels, MUDs, mailing-lists and news-groups.

My guess is that the Net will eventually be more divided into separate communities where people "belong" and we already see the start of it with the Linux/Free Software-community which have a number of services that cater for them and them alone. We have our freshmeat, our LinuxToday, /., shops, credit cards with penguins, etc. In a way one replaces the old country-borders with communities based on interest. My guess is that we will see this even more frequently with other "interests" and groups where new communities that easily can get more intimate show up. We're just starting out on our way to change society...

Re:Pendulum?

[connor_macleod]

The wicked thing is, that while you replace these borders and create new ones based on interest, peoples interests are always a range of things, so the borders will overlap and blur ...

EWWW POKEMON!!! (and other ramblings)

[Keefesis]

Henious.net is a Pokemon BBS!!! Can we please keep Japan's latest attempt to brainwash American Children off slashdot?? If you consider that slanderous, it wasn't intended to be, just my opinion on those little thingamabobbers. I don't see what their good points are, we had trading cards, btu those were superheroes and villians, not cuddly little animals.
Anyway, back to BBS. I know in my neighborhood anyway, there were a few active BBSes until about 3 years ago. Who wants to log onto a sheltered place with 20 people when you can log onto the internet just as eaisly and reach millions. I believe it is the growth of the internet that has been the death of the BBS. There's my take on it all.

Re:EWWW POKEMON!!! (and other ramblings)

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you totally missed the point. All the better, say I.

Re:EWWW POKEMON!!! (and other ramblings)

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, Japan has had soooo many cultural attacks by Hollywood it's not even funny. Just imagine that there was a Poke'mon-like phonemonon in the USA six or eight times a year. Japan has absorbed much more than they will ever hit back with. And frankly, Poke'mon isn't that bad, not as bad as the Spice Girls, or Power Rangers, or Masters of the Univers, or any of the other 30-minute toy commercials that come on after schoool.

Re:EWWW POKEMON!!! (and other ramblings)

[Spatch]

Henious.net is a Pokemon BBS!!! Can we please keep Japan's latest attempt to brainwash American Children off slashdot??

Wow. You gathered all that from just gazing at the BBS' login screen, did you? Didn't even check the messages. The next time I have a book that needs to be judged, I'm sending you the cover and you can tell me all about it, OK? Thanks!

Heinous (that's h-e-i-n-o-u-s, by the way) has a motto: Fewer cretins. By your refusal to even log in and peruse the BBS' content, you've helped keep the place true to its motto. Again, thank you.

Ones I used to frequent...

[jwaters]

Net BBS' aren't entirely dead, although they don't enjoy the popularity they once used to.

Some still active ones...
Prism BBS
ISCA BBS

BBSs, etc.

[Requiem]

As far as I can tell, they died quite a while ago. For me, the end came when my favourite BBS shut down in February of 1997. The Sysop took it down because it was a pain having to continually maintain it, and I think it was also because he wanted to free the time up for other things. That was sort of the end of an era for me; up until that point, I had used a 2400bps modem on an 8086 with a lovely monochrome CGA monitor (there's still no burn in!), so you could accurately guess that BBSs are something of a nostalgic memory for me.

But yes, I definitely miss the sense of community. I still talk with some people I knew from my BBS days on ICQ and very rarely on IRC...it's sort of hard to believe that I've known one of my friends for three and a half years now, and we've never once met in real life, despite the fact that we live in the same city, and on the same side of the city.

Still BBSing after all these years

[homerj79]

Strangly enough, even with all the Internet has to offer, I still find myself calling a local BBS here in Utah by the name of Lower Lights. The beautiful thing about LL is that it still has a community to it. We gather at local coffee shop on the weekends, throw picnics at various parks during the summer, and have a good time online with each other. With the popularity of the Internet growing, members of LL have dies down quite a bit. Just to give an example, LL used to have 64 dialup lines and 32 telnet lines. The roles have now switched to where there are 32 dialup lines and 64 telnet connections. Most of us "old skoolers" prefer less users, it makes it a more personal experience. Much how it used to be back in the day. You can get online and have a wonderful conversation in chat with anyone online, or you can go post your most current poem or something similar in the forum. Even after all these years, its still a great place to get away from it all.

Damn I miss trade wars...

[mrbiggs]

Door games were the best...
Gimmie The Pit, Risk, or any number of those old cool games. God they were more addictive than crack and better than booze. Online games suck in comparison sure HTML makes things prettier than ANSI graphics but a deapth just isn't there.

Gunna hack me out some decent "Door-like" online games sometime...

Re:Damn I miss trade wars...

[!k]

Trade wars was bad for the GPA. Really bad. Only slightly better than beer. Cheap bear. Like Hamm's. shitty canned beer taste, in a shitty can. I miss TW too.

Slashdot TradeWars [was Re:BBS's are out there...]

[gutterface]

TradeWars... haven't played that in years. Any Slashdot teams out there, or interested in forming one?

Mail me...

Nostalgia is universal -- a connection

[Jackster]

I was never able to see why lots of older people mourned for the old days, when "the little man" ran junky gas stations, but this post has given me a parallel. I read the sentence,

"ubiquitous file transfer areas (which, for the most part have been surplanted by your mega-FTP sites like WcArchive and Freshmeat and others of their ilk)."

and mentally replaced it with,

"small gas stations where they would fill your gas, check your oil, and wash your windshield have been replaced by mega-gas stations like [pick your station name]."

I'm not trying to mock anyone; after all, *I* was a sysop, once upon a time. I just think that the connection is interesting, that's all.

check out etunnels too...

[poutineboy]

Another one to check out like this if you're a winblows user is etunnels , it's group centered where you create a group and only people you invite to that group can join.

Once you're in a group you can instant message, email and trade files. The cool thing is that you can share a folder out from your PC directly to your group mates and it appears as part of their filesystem. It works pretty well, I play MP3's directly from my buddies computer without a problem. It's a little unpolished at the moment but worth checking out if you're in to this sorta thing. They say they're doing a Linux version soon.

It does seem to have some of that old BBS sense of community, but then again my BBS days way back in the late eighties when were spent on invite only boards trading files back and forward. Er, the files were shareware only of course!

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

There are people online there!

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes they're dead.

somthing similar...

[juzam]

there is still hotline, which is very similar to a bbs. yet recently, hotline has gone down the drain after more and more windoze users came. now its all a flood of porn, warez, banners, and scams.
y

Re:somthing similar...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would disagree with the comment that it "went down the drain". I feel that this is a statement that hotliners have been using since day one, as a way to way to lagitimize their disgust(without being disagreeable). All I can say is that I run a clean server and enjoy the ever increasing user base. It gives me more interesting problems to solve and more interesting people to meet. Now only to get my files back up :P But it's not a big deal with the people who I am around... You create the society around you there, and there are some really cool ones - some private, and some public.

Re:somthing similar...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree with juzam that hotline has been going down the drain, but I don't think it has much to do with the influx of wintel users. I think that Hotline Software Inc. itself is largely responsible. Every release since version 1.2.3 has been a bloated poorly reverse engineered copy of the original which the company 'stole' from it's creator Adam Hinkley. You can get more info on that situation here.
But I think the hotline community actually has a chance to recover despite Hotline Software's corporate stupidity. A lot of the servers out there are still using the versionn 1.2.3 server and encourageing users to use the 1.2.3 client, or a third party clone(which include a couple of OSS projects, and are available for just about any platform). I'd encourage everyone to go to VivaHX! download a client and check out the hotline community.

Re:somthing similar...

[Anonymous Coward]

And then there was Boffo. How we miss it so... -r-

Many Dialup BBS's where I live...

[Anonymous Coward]

My town (Portland, OR) has lots of BBS's listed in the back of a local free computer magazine...dozens of them. So from sheer numbers, I would have to say that the BBS is not dead.

Lurkers unite... or something

[h2odragon]

I can beat the guy with the 386. I remember fondly the days wasted with my 286 and a 1200 bps modem, racking up some impressive phone bills. Anybody else remember the first public-access Usenet node? Joliet One, or something like that, an AT&T 3b2 IIRC; it was before the Great Renaming. It always seemed to me that the lurkers and leeches made up the majority of the BBS population even back then.

The 'net as we now know it is geared less for interactive communication than the BBSen were, and the proportion of "quiet folk" has increased. That's a natural consequence of lowering the entry hurdles: once you'd managed to find a good BBS back then, you were more likely to say something just to prove to yourself that you'd done it.

I recall a SysOp buddy of mine pulling the plug on his active and growing board because the "real user ratio" had fallen too low for him. He said he wanted people to communicate, and never realized that the readers, the audience, the lurkers, were at least as important to comunication as those who wrote.

Re:Lurkers unite... or something

[TrevorB]

I can win this hands down.

Commodore 64 with 300 baud VicModem, surfing the BBS scene in Nanaimo, BC, Canada.

I eventually got my hands on a Commodore 128 with 1200 baud modem and an 80 column monocrome monitor. Gotta love the C128, it had 2 monitor ports out the back, one for the 40 column monitor, one for the 80 column monitor... Ah yes, BBS was glorious in those days.

Now, 80% of the people in a local community are on the net socializing with the world instead of a local BBS. If it was the only option available to most, we'd all be back there... Reading News on FIDOnet... :)

Why do I feel like such an old fogie at 25? :)

Re:Lurkers unite... or something

[err head]

ah
the lovely vicmodem
unplugging the handset to plug it into the modem
my first upgrade was to a 300 baud Direct Connect modem that allowed me to autodial(pulse of course, by raising and lowering DTR quickly)
I think the international flavor of the internet is detrimental to the kind of community you can get when everyone's in the same calling area

Re:Lurkers unite... or something

[Bartmoss]

We started with a C64 on a 300 baud connection. by the time I could afford my own line, computer and modem, the world had already reached 14.4k. The net came soon after, and within two years, the bbs scene was entirely dead.

Re:Lurkers unite... or something

[Our Man In Redmond]

Not to start a round of the Grandpa Game, but . . .

My first BBS experiences were with a TRS-80 and a 300 baud acoustic modem (the one you would fit your telephone headset in). Back in those days (1980) you could comfortably fit every known BBS in the world on both sides of an 8.5x11 inch sheet of paper in Courier 12 type. I once dialed into a board in England from Colorado just to prove I could do it (stayed all of about a minute ).

Now of course I can connect to demon.co.uk and not pay any more than I do to pull in /. It's like most things in life -- we remember the good old days with nostalgia for the communities and the adventure, but we forget the slow speeds and astronomical phone bills.
--

Re:Lurkers unite... or something

[mistered]

I remember those days, with my C64 and 1200 baud modem. I even had an 80 column terminal prog for the 64 - I think it was called novaterm or something like that. I think the 64 had something like 320 pixels across a "high-res" screen so Novaterm drew its own 3-pixel wide characters.

Ahh...

Re:Lurkers unite... or something

[stang]

I can win this hands down.

Commodore 64 with 300 baud VicModem, surfing the BBS scene in Nanaimo, BC, Canada

Pah. Newby.

In 1979, I was introduced to the BBS scene by a friend who showed me how to use the 110 baud accoustic coupler attached to the (Anderson-Jacobsen?) teletype in the high school computing "room". Man, that thing was loud. We also had some kind of HP box that took punch cards (only for the kids in the computer class), and a TRS-80 Model III -- 16K RAM, *high-speed* cassette drive (is that an oxymoron?).

When I got a 300 baud modem for my home computer a few years later (having tired of the discount 110 I'd purchased), I can remember thinking "Who needs more than 300 baud? I can't read any faster than that!"

I went ahead and spent the $150 for a 1200 baud modem, which let the stuff page to the screen, where I'd catch up with it. I also became a little less annoyed with the ANSI screen graphics.

BBSing was one of my favorite things to do with the computer, so I went a bit ahead of the curve and spent $225 to get the Supra 2400 bps, even before all of the BBSes supported it. I still dropped the connection rate down to 1200, or even 300, when dialing up Compu$erve, 'cause I just couldn't afford the higher prices that went with the faster connection.

I had much less time for BBS surfing when I got out of the service and went to college, so I kept the 2400 well into the 9600 era, picking up a Hayes 9600 clone when the 14.4 standards war was being waged. Sometime around here (1990-ish) I got my school internet connection (at the time, only available to CompSci majors and faculty/staff), so the 9600 is probably the last modem I BBSed with.

14.4, 28.8 -> 33.6, now at 56K. I get a pretty reliable 48K connection. My house is in a new neighborhood, and close to the telco COR. The 56K box I have -- a SupraExpress 56e Sp -- is a cheap, plastic thing with a 25-pin serial cable permanently attached to the back of the unit. It's a far cry from the heavy metal Supra 2400 that I've still got in the closet somewhere.

The 56K will be the last modem I own -- I'll switch to a different technology sooner or later. Certainly, my online experiences now, in one way, are very different from the 80's. OTOH, it all just seems like more of the same to me: like I've got an unlimited Compu$erve account, like FidoNet has 40,000 discussions going on, like the files area has *unlimited* PD files availble (with NO download ratios!), like all of my online wishes came true.

Re:Lurkers unite... or something

[Eidolon]

I *ran* a BBS on such a system back then, coded from scratch in a mess of BASIC and machine code. The whole thing, including messages, had to reside in memory (a whopping 16K).

There was something incredibly satisfying about the whole experience which I've never managed to find again. Perhaps running a MUD or something would be as good, but it would be prohibitively expensive.

Wired Community

[wynlyndd]

I live in a wired community with Ethernet to each apartment (http://www.waldenweb.com). By having mailing lists, we kinda have a community. Each of the mailing lists in divided into certain topics (graphics, linux, etc and the catch-all, misc). All of the main mailing lists are mirrored to an NNTP server keeping a historical record. This allows comments to be sent out to all and feedback generated. As for the ability to see "who is on" at any particualr moment, we all use ICQ.

CIX conferencing in the UK

[cixen]

OK, disclaimer, I work for the place. But CIX (Compulink Information eXchange) in the UK evolved out of a BBS and still has a strong conferencing community.

CIX added an internet service too later on after some CIX users formed Demon Internet, but many people still connect direct with an offline reader rather than over IP. And others will use a different ISP for internet but still have a CIX account just for the conferencing.

Even though the company are trying to aim more at the business internet market there's still a good community feel on the conferencing system and there is even a barbecue once a year where members can meet face-to-face.

However, it is a pay-for service, so you can't really get a feel for the community without stumping up the cash. And there's no web front-end yet.

Check out the web pages at www.cix.co.uk - however I don't think there's much about conferencing on there.


Sean
sean@cix.co.uk

Re:CIX conferencing in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

One word: BBQ...

Obloid

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been working on a web BBS for about 3 years now, and it's pretty much as close to the feel of a Renegade BBS as I can make it... a few glitches here and there, but for the most part, it's pretty functional and has a lot of regular users. The Obloid Sphere is its name, the same my Renegade BBS 6 years ago was named. I think the BBS scene was in fact very localized, and one usually found themselves in select groups. When the internet boomed, these groups didn't necessarily die off, but they faultered, and people from one said group did not usually encounter people from other groups. Years went by, and eventually people pretty much stopped caring. Those that were *seriously* into message based BBSes went to usenet; those who were seriously into online games had new online game communities to easily join.

BBSes dying... dying... dead.

[DonWallace]

Nobody here has yet mentioned the lifecycle of Compuserve and its forums. I used to frequent a VERY active forum on CI$ named CONSULT, for computer consultants, in the early 90's. But the recent lifecycle of those forums matches the description at the top of this thread. They began a serious decline when Compuserve users began to notice that ISP accounts were a much better deal than CIS for being on-line.

By mid '97 the message traffic on CIS:CONSULT was in serious decline; I heard that recently, CONSULT was merged into several other techie fora and is a ghost of its former self.

Yes, BBSs are a dying breed, even thought there are orders of magnitude more people online today than there were 7 or 8 years ago. You'd think the exact opposite would have happened.

Today, as an adjuct to, or in place of proprietary online service forums such as GEnie or CIS, you have freeware web based BBSes that anyone with a Perl CGI based web host (that is, just about anyone on an ISP) can set up... but, maybe because the cost of entry as a BBS is so low, the BBS action is splintered and fragmented across perhaps thousands of individually operated niche BBSs.

Also, limiting size of web BBS forums: just FINDING the right BBS on the web can be a chore. With Compuserve it was easy... you wanted to discuss flowers and gardening, here's the one or two or three fora you should use... etc.

Maybe what's needed is a comprehensive cross reference of all web BBSs. There ARE thousands... including the ones that are buried underneath local newspaper sites, or under corporate domains.

My favorite web BBS is the Computer Contractor's BBS (plug: http://www.realrates.com/bbs). Maybe it can be a representative of the best that a BBS can be on the internet. The thing that the Realrates BBS lacks, probably due to its focus, is the participation of a truly broad cross section of professionals, such as business owners, managers, and profesional writers and speakers - CONSULT had this.

InnerSpace - The Internet Community

[Lord Kinbote]

I've started an old style BBS type system for the web in the last month or so that has many of the features that were thought to be lost. It has a game called Assassin where users can work to take out the founder of a multi-billion dollar company that's monopolistic practices have threatened to rule the world. The game works much like the old fashion doors we all miss, but is made 100% for the web, not requiring any kind of java telnet interface like most other systems still existing out there.

On InnerSpace there is private email, a message forum for the users to post on, real-time chat, a who's online list (okay, so it doesn't work too well, but the who's online list still works pseudo-well), and online games, just like the old BBSes used to have.

Take a look at www.innerspace.org if you're interested.

Lord Kinbote

Cnet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow that brings back memories!

BBSs, MUDs, and Freenets, Oh My!

[grahamkg]

Here's a link to the latest telnet bbs list:

http://www.thedirectory.org/telnet

It lists around 600 or so, and is updated every month. For muds, see

http://www.mudconnect.com/

Freenets, which do seem to be dying, are listed here:

http://www.lights.com/freenet/

What's really funny is that people are posting about BBSs and trying to keep others away from them. Hmmm...

Graham

Re:BBSs, MUDs, and Freenets, Oh My!

[Coram]

MUDs are an interesting phenomenon. I believe a lot of the reason behind the popularity of muds, and to some extent talkers, is the way in which communication takes place.

MUDs to the greater extent take off where BBSs ended. Typically, users of BBS systems were geographically located in the same area. I met several people from different BBSes over a period of a couple of years. MUDs simulate this 'closeness' through a 'virtual physical world' (yay, a paradox!) where the inhabitant is drawn into the online 'reality' to interact in any number of ways with the environment and other inhabitants. If you allow yourself to bridge the imagination gap then to be part of this type of online community can be quite rewarding.

I've made a lot of friends on Fractal Edge over the last three years and travelled to the US (i'm from australia) earlier this year and met a dozen of them.

Others are here from that net of Fidonet..

[farrellj]

Hi!

1:163/xxx.xx Was a lot of fun way back when...I rmember when we started it, and applied for our own net number. Until then, we were a bunch of nodes off of 148, Toronto's net number.

Data/SFnet was one of the first 500 BBSs in Fidonet, which at it's peak had tens of thousands of BBSs world wide connected. What can I say, I am an early adoptor of tech....

ttyl
Farrell

Re:Others are here from that net of Fidonet..

[MikeBabcock]

I was a member of several normal nets (including SFnet) but also DEADNET, BOMNET and BGRNET ... "hacker" networks which were, at the time, what we now would call boring ;-) ... we discussed real 'hacks' ... how to get a coffee for $0.05 from a $0.75 machine (see l0pht.com), problems with FTP protocols, programming in C vs. Pascal ... :-)

The Biggest Difference

[Dr. Evil]

The biggest difference between BBSes and the Internet is that when you dialed up a BBS, it was in your local calling range. Everyone else online was in your local calling range. Yes, you could hold conversations with people on the other side of the continent, but those were slow and generally infrequent. For the mostpart, everyone was within a reasonable distance of eachother.

On BBSes, there were meet and greets, you could buy a beer for the guy who's planet you crushed in Tradewars, or chat (physically) with those women you were flirting with. Just try that on the Internet.

Re:The Biggest Difference

[celtic heretic]

Exactly. It's a feeling of community that's missing in IRC, newsgroups or mailing lists. The latter all distance people from one another because they are distanced.

Why, back when... sorry. ;) In 1990 I dialed into a dozen BBSes running on Amigas, x86es and some Apples. The people on them went to universities and schools I knew of. I knew the streets they lived on and if someone said "Tony's donairs are great!" my mouth watered because I knew what Tony's donairs tasted like. If some obscure shop (or pub) was carrying Jolt (or Guiness) again we told each other and we'd probably run into each other there over the next couple of days. And then there were the bashes. Admittedly I didn't attend many but I could and occassionally I did. If we wanted to have a good time we could all head down to Barrington Street and hit the Pizza Hut (if there were young'uns) or any of the numerous bars or pubs. The closest thing to it today is the LUG mailing list and that is so focused it's hard for me to become interested in the people. The friendliest, most community oriented forums on the net today have people spread out all over the world. At the ends of the earth as I am a trip to New York to meet some of the great people I know is a monumental undertaking I can't afford but a dozen in that area get together regularly. Same for T.O. or Boston or any of the other big cities. In the local area that doesn't exist anymore and it's a real shame.

If what I said is nonsense,
I'm making a point with it.
If what I said makes perfect sense,
you obviously missed the point.

Re:The Biggest Difference

[Stonehand]

Right-oh. I regularly meandered through a few local BBSes, partly for the bboard chats (and most of the other patrons tended to be peers -- namely, local high school folk that I knew *before* BBSing), and partly for the doors (in particular, "Hack & Slash" and the SRE/BRE duo).

It *really* helps when you've known the folks offline *first*, and when the number of "regulars" is quite low. This promotes discussion since y'all have a good idea of the context; the in-jokes; and so forth. In addition, there's a strong degree of mutual trust.

Telnet into a bbs, and nowadays you may have absolutely no idea who you're dealing with; one can misrepresent himself at will. You don't know whether they'll be around the next day, either. That's *very* different.

M-Net and Grex

[howardjp]

M-Net and Grex are two BBS I have used for years. They are both based out of Ann Arbor, MI and have a local feel. However, both do cater to thousands of telnet (and hence, world-wide) users. If anyone is interested in more information they can be found at http://www.arbornet.org and http://www.cyberspace.org, respectively. They can also be reached at telnet://newuser@m-net.arbornet.org:23 and telnet://newuser@grex.cyberspace.org:23 .

For a little information you will not find on the website, M-Net is a little bit harder and rougher on newusers. Basically, they hate them. But if you hang on for a little bit they eventually begin to tolerate you. However, when an argument springs up it is rougher and more abusive than anywhere else on the Internet. As for Grex, they are much kinder to newusers and in general more tolerant. If anyone tries either I am "jp2" on both. Have fun.

Re:M-Net and Grex

[el.lelande]

*snort*

Re:M-Net and Grex

[howardjp]

Eat a bag of shitdicks. ;)

Moderators, buzz off, it is a private joke.

Re:M-Net and Grex

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll "out" that private joke: It is a good example of the comments you're likely to get if you venture to M-Net.

Re:M-Net and Grex

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why I use Grex. :) I ventured into M-Nut once and didn't see any reason to come back. Grex also has a better web interface than M-Nut.

BBSs Glory...

[Pollux]

I was an avid BBSer four years ago. Heck, back when I first got a computer and learned about BBSs, I would get up at 4AM in the morning, turn on the computer, hope the churning of my 5 1/4" floppy drive and the modem dial-up noise wouldn't wake my mom, and go online.

Five years ago, our city had about 30 BBSs (and countless other "kiddie" ones that were run by 13 and 14 year olds at night when their mommies let them have the phone). About three and a half years ago, when the internet just started to kick in (when Netscape released v2.02), we were down to about 8 BBSs. Two years ago, our last three BBSs (two of the three at that point had been up for 8+ years) merged into one.

That last BBS, WestPole, is now down to four active local users and four active telnet users. The only way it's survived was by opening the BBS to Telnetters. Our sysop (alas, another term that's nearly died with the times), living about 1500 miles away from where the BBS box is, manages it remotely through Linux (another way it's survived...he only resets it once a year for maintinence).

BBSs as we know them from the past (1200/2400 baud modem & a dial up connection) are dead. I've been telnetting around, and have not found a single BBS that only has dial-up connections. But there are still a good number of telnet BBSs that have survived. You can find a hefty listing of them here.

Although I'm saddened by the fact that the "locality" of BBSs has died, they still have been able to maintain their sense of community, although you now need an internet connection to use them...kinda ironic that the internet, which destroyed BBSing, is the thing which still allows BBSing to survive.

Monochrome.org - Keep the BBS culture going

[szyzyg]

Go on get on there - it just needs telnet, no fancy web browser and there's a complete self contained community there.

Don't complain about it - get on these things and keep them alive.

Re:Monochrome.org - Keep the BBS culture going

[xiox]

Oh yes. Mono's great.

http://www.mono.org/

Alive and well in Milwaukee!

[raker]

Check out ods.ods.net

The file library is empty now since it has changed ownership about 6 or 7 months ago but the place is great. There are weekly "round tables" and "foodies" and the people are cool. Just like any system there are dead days and days where you can hardly keep up with conversations due to the screen scrolling by so fast. There are extensive "actions" in teleconference. There are tons of games such as crosswordz, tele arena gold, major mud, kyrandia, trade wars 2002. LORD, etc...

People on the system vary from complete geeks, to wanna-be geeks, to people that are just on because their girlfriend/boyfriend is online. Very real.

So to answer the question. It is alive and well in my eyes. Not as big as it used to be but the people online become tight-knit and it is very easy to become a part of it. You are accepted because you log on. You don't have to fit some physical description, or like a certain band. you just have to be a person and you can be considered a friend.

ANSI graphics are so much fun anyways. :)

Nostalgia

[julez]

Even though I'm only 21, I miss the hours I spent wasting away on a BBS...irc and mailing lists jsut don't cut it some how. The local "gang" that I hung out with moved to the internet, and we still all hang in the same irc channel, even though all we do is idle :) In our early 20s we remember the days of ol' when you could cheap post and not get flamed. Playing LORD and BRE, atmy gawd! 2400 baud connections! For the people that I hung out with, we've all still stayed connected on the internet, so that kind of community is still there:)

However, I think that part of the allure and what made the communities closer is that BBSes were very much underground and VERY much a geek only thing (at least in my city). In the past 5 years the number of computers per household and the number of people with modems (or other connections) has jumped exponantially.

BBSes were 31337:) And so are us old schoolers:)

try Carracho (why i don't like hotline)

[mcc]

i really can't stand Hotline, and i suggest you at least try Carracho if you like Hotline.
Hotline's _idea_ is great. If implemented correctly it could be a wonderful graphical approximation of the BBS community feel-- or at least a nice reimplemntation of what "finger", "talk", "mail", "write", ftp and all those other UNIX utilities provide if you can actually still find a box that multiple people are going to be connected to at once.
But hotline _isn't_ implemented correctly. It's marred by so many interface quirks the interface gets in the way of whatever you're trying to do. Carracho, on the other hand, is hotline done right; everything Hotline falls short in, Carracho does beautifully.

And the thing is that for some reason, it really feels to me like carracho has much more of a community feel to it. maybe because it's so much smaller, maybe it's because of the interface. But it just doesn't feel as much like you're wandering by random faceless faces-in-the-crowd..

Of course i'm not saying Hotline is useless. I've found some really nice places (community-wise) there; i just think carracho deserves more attention as an alternative.
Note that carracho is still kinda beta-ish and crashes from time to time. Also, and maybe more importantly, it's currently macintosh-only as far as i know. But then again, for a long time the only windows hotline software was third-party, and the only current linux clients/servers are implemented by third parties..

http://www.carracho.com/
http://www.hotlinesw.com/
http://www.freshmeat.net/search.php3?query=hotli ne

OS/2 BBS Community...

[tsikora]

I think only the OS/2 community still actively uses BBS's, the largest being Peter Norlofs OS/2 Shareware BBS. He's been on the Internet for quite a few years too. Most users as seen when you log on are on the Internet however. You can still dial-up, telnet via tcpip, or browse his web pages. If your an OS/2 fan believe me this single site has pretty much everything ever made for OS/2
I too run a BBS, The Power-Users BBS. It also was a Maximus BBS but unfortunately I did away with the dial-up section. It is strictly http/ftp now.
Unlike Norlofs my site has always supported Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris too as well as OS/2. My site is the main XFree86 ports repository for the XFree86/OS2 community. We are now enjoying Gnome, Gimp, Qt and a host of other Linux ports thanks mostly to Holger Veit and his port of XFree86 and a very dedicated but small group of supporters. Mailists have also replaced the BBS in part becoming a place where small parties congregrate.
The XFree86 and EMX mailists are an example. I think what comes around goes around so I would not be surprised if BBS's have a resurgance. I have had a lot of requests recently for good Linux BBS ports. There are some excellent BBS software packages for Linux that gives you all those nice DOS BBS features via the Internet. Who knows...

Who's online+messaging = ICQ?

[TrevorB]

It seems like all the best ideas from the BBS days have been ported over to the Internet at large... Take ICQ. I know not everyone uses it out there, but for those who do, it's very addictive. Forget logging on to a community and seeing who's there, just turn on your computer, and have instant presence of your friends online (cable modems rock!).

I know this isn't exactly community, but IRC takes up more of this role today.

Are there any other BBS functionality that haven't been ported to the net? I'd love to see more Tradewars like games out there... :)

Whoa, my bbs has activity!

[Cybersonic]

Its nice to actually see activity on my amiga 4000 for once :) Puts my T1 to good use :)

Ths coolest thing is the fact it can handle 10 callers at once with 10 megs of ram and 100 megs of hard drive space (OS AND BBS software)

CNet Amiga kicks ass :)
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell

Also web access

[Anonymous Coward]

I found that there is a neat java telnet thing you can use too. http://www.aubbs.cx/

An old bbs'er speaks

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, maybe not so old... but I pretty much was in on the last few years of the bbs's popularity. Now, there are still a few boards around (just dialup boards) that I frequent, but of those boards, few of them get much activity at all. The ones that actually get the most activity are restricted-access boards that seem to be the last holdout of people like myself: those who don't want bbs's to die, and want a private place without a lot of confusion and chaos and unwelcome visitors.

Kind of ironic that the only way to make a bbs survive is to keep out new users as much as possible. The boards that try looking for new users never seem to get any.

I'm also co-sysop on a local board known as "window of illusion bbs" (see www.windowofillusion.com). It's an Amiga running CNet 5.x. Yes, that's blatant advertising, I know. Forgive me. But we are rather short on users and activity.

But getting back to the topic, I have to admit, there is no place I've found on the 'net that has quite the same feel of "community" that you had on bbs's. Even the telnet bbs's out there don't cut it (I've yet to see a single telnet bbs that runs decent software - that may be part of the problem. Citadel is a wonderful program, but the telnet interface needs help, seriously). And it's almost impossible to have meetings and "gatherings" on 'net-based bbs's, since everyone is likely to be quite a distance away from each other.

I had been working on a few projects to program a new unix-based bbs system that had the same basic look and feel as CNet/Amiga (my personal favorite bbs software), but I finally gave up: no support. Why bother creating it if no one is interested or even knows what a bbs is anymore?

Ah well.. you can thank AOL for this...

Re:An old bbs'er speaks

[Anonymous Coward]

As a BBS sysop myself, I do have to agree. I've been running a BBS for about 6 years now and just a few months ago shut down the last dialin line I had in favour of eight telnet nodes. The BBS (Stromghold Enterprises/X) is now strictly a telnet/web-based BBS and it actually does relatively decently considering it's focused entirely on linux/programming/os2/bbsing and other technical subjects. It's running BBBS which is an excellent BBS package, and running under Linux. For those interested, you can telnet to shx.tzo.net or do a web login at http://shx.tzo.net/shx/. Yes, BBS's have declined quite a lot in the last few years, but there are a few of us old-timers that are still running it.. more for ourselves than the users, I think, but the users still come which makes it even more worth it. Personally, I just enjoy reading FidoNet mail and Sysop's TechNet echomail instead of usenet... much more personal, I find. The internet definately needs a better community "feel" to it... it's a cold void compared to "home" (which is my BBS). Aw well... I'm sure that one day the whole BBS thing will phase out and we'll be stuck with web-based forums like Slashdot, which is cool, but will take some getting used to I suppose... =)

Before being a Internet Junkie I was a BBS junkie

[savaget]

I sure miss the BBS community. I used to log in several times daily, for my *.qwk packet fix to read on my offline mail reader. I used mail reader such as 1st Reader, SLIMER, KWQ Mail/2.

Now my substitutes for the above are technical mailing lists subscriptions and Slashdot of course. I have tried IRC and newsgroups, but they seem just too high of a noise ratio in them IMHO.

The one aspect I don't miss about BBSs is the overly moderated environment and the lack of confidentiality with email. SYSOPs just had way too much power/control. (I hope my former SYSOP is not a Slashdot reader;^))

The sense of community is very different

[silver]

I remember a BBS I used to frequent in NZ called the Realms of Insanity. There was a definite community that developed around that BBS, made up mostly of univerity students from the local uni.

We used to have parties fairly regularly where you could meet 'in the meat' people you had met on the BBS and try and guess which person fitted which alias on the BBS.

That sort of community that developed around small local BBSes is largely nonexistent in todays web forums. Sure, they are much larger and have a far more diverse user base then the BBSes of old but unless you are lucky enough to live in the US and have a fair amount of money to travel to meeet people then most of them are just web pages with interestingly variable content.

I must say that I miss the BBSes I used to frequent. Almost all of the BBSes I used to know died with the explosion of net usage in this country in the early to mid 90s.

The problem with the net as more and more people get access is that places like usenet and irc are drowning in a sea of mindless crap, spam and ads for sex sites that it is becoming almost impossible to filter to the point of readability any more. That was another point in favour of BBSes, as relatively closed systems they didn't suffer the deluge of crap that accompanies large easily accessable public forums like the net.

Bad Moderation on this topic

[Anonymous Coward]

This topic has been about as badly moderated as any I've seen on Slashdot. The question was, where can I get a BBS-like experience, now that I'm using the web most of the time and there are few if any BBSes I can dial into. Several of the replies actually offered suggestions, e.g., MOOs, MUDs, IRC. But these are scored lower than the "Yes, BBS is dead!" and "No, I have a BBS in my town!" posts, which are of dubious relevance.

Not to mention the completely gratuitous shot at Bill Clinton in the title of the highest-scoring post....

DC Area telnettable bbs

[cswiii]

Via email, I recently ran into an old bloke I knew from my MajorBBS days... he's now got a bbs on a Linux box, running FalkenBBS; You can telnet in here.

Falken isn't the best bbs software out there, but it's multiline, teleconferenced, and runs on Linux.

There are a handful of us on there, it's not a huge population. However, if you ever bbs'ed in the DC/NoVA area, you might recognise us ;).

Infinite Connections --> Too Big Communities

[Christopher B. Brown]

In the BBS days, you were limited to connecting to BBSes in the local community, as LD charges to go further made anything more extensive impractical.

The Internet immediately "scales" to handling ludicrously large numbers of interconnected users. If you've got the name of:

• A person's email address
• A Usenet newsgroup
• A web site

You have random access to that location, and little reason to have any concern about whether this be in the same city, state, country, or even continent.

Last night, I got an email message from someone in New Zealand complaining that some of my web pages were mislinked/missing. This was because I was, at that very moment, in the process of installing updates, after having just nuked the existing copies. Apparently there's not a time to do maintenance that's not "prime time" somewhere.

In the old days, Star Trek fans would have to get together in person, which limited connections to occasional "conventions" and local community meetings. With Usenet, this provides the ability for everyone to post on the same newsgroup, and with tens of thousands of fans, this results in daunting quantities of traffic.

That heads us now towards the problem... BBSes limited community sizes to the size and diversity of the people in the local community. Usenet and the Web expand this to allow literally hundreds of thousands of participants in each of a multitude of fora. Unfortunately, you can't usefully have hundreds of thousands of participants in any kind of forum. A Slashdot thread with a mere 200 messages is effectively unreadable.

The result is that only those that are, in some manner, "Extreme," wind up being prime participants. A Star Trek newsgroup will have a small set of experts (such as one might be "expert" on such) that participate usefully, and those that are less expert will either:

• Be intimidated out of participating as they feel inadequate to really contribute, or
• Not care that they're inadequate, and bluster through to produce whatever they wish, which leads down the road to Inane Flame Wars.

That doesn't have to be Star Trek; it can apply equally well to any other topic with many "somewhat interested parties."

This is almost exactly the same idea as how single people have a hard time connecting personally/socially in large cities even though there may be vast quantities of other singles. The vast quantity of other people is off-putting.

And the same is true of apartment hunting. Some years ago, I moved to Toronto, and started apartment hunting by acquiring copies of the local newspaper. The thousands of apartment listings were less useful than having mere dozens, as the sizable lists had too much "chaff" to plough through. I wound up using word-of-mouth, via a friend-of-a-friend, to locate a place.

Having a virtually infinite number of links is thus as bad as having no links, if you have no good way of choosing from the infinite quantities.

Re:Infinite Connections --> Too Big Communities

[jimfl]

The size of a community definately has an impact on how well it clicks. Too, I think, the ease of use and the transient nature of to-days electronic messaging tools (News, Email, Web: NEW) create a completely different dynamic from the On-line disucssion (OLD) tools of the mid-80s.

300 baud was the perfect speed, because you could read an entire 'room' without having to page through it. You could pause if you needed, but generally didn't need to. When most of the BBSs I called on a regular basis upgraded to 1200 baud, I would generally still call at 300. The pace fostered thoughtful replies, and clever, often deep banter. I still have close ties to people with whom I developed online relationships. I wish that I could recover some of the content which was generated.

At one point, a bunch of folks who met through BBSing, rented a house together. The house had 4 telephone lines, and you had to call one of the BBSs and scream "Voice call" or "Bomb Threat" through the carrier negotiation tones to talk to anyone voice. Great callerID! There were some people who would call each of the BBSs in the house in turn, probably not realizing they were all in the same room.

While to tools in use were slow, the times and relationships were dynamic. Regular parties sprouted around the online musings. Seattle formed a Telecommunications Users Group (TUG) which met regularly. There were feuds between various BBSs, etc.

Far too much of the email I get today consists of just a single URL. The odd thing is that I've experiemented with various forms of web-based BBS and online forum, and none seems to click. Slashdot has some interesting ideas for managing huge communities, but spending lots of time moderating can take away one's will to participate more meaningfully.

Weblogging bas become a sort of community, with popular webloggers banding together and sharing content, and doing things offline together. And I have seen some topic-specific forums work very well (scripting.com and WikiWikiWeb (http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors) as two examples.), but weblogs are often topic focused (I run one such weblog, Bubble Chamber, http://jimfl.yi.org:88) or web focused, and don't have room for discussion. The BBSs had lots of various, evolving topics, which you could participate in, lurk, or ignore, and there was a great diversity of interest.

So, like ecosystems, you have to have the right mix of species, not too big, (with a path down the middle. Yes, a PATH, a PATH, Nik!), and where people can read what has come before and decide to join in the middle (email can't do this), sometimes months after the conversation has gone dormant.

Re:Infinite Connections --> Too Big Communities

[Michael Doherty]

As you say, there is a scaling problem. Chhristopher Alexander, in "the Timeless Way of Building", postulates that the ideal community is no more than 7,000 people.

I'v also heard of a theroy that the human brain has evolved to deal with about 150 people.

The questions remains as to whether we can retain this human scale in the face of ever expanding technology.

Re:Infinite Connections --> Too Big Communities

[jimfl]

Now there's an interesting idea. Anyone interested in developing "A Pattern Language for Online Communities?" A list of little self-contained wisdoms which make online communities work.

Perhaps one already exists?

Re:Infinite Connections --> Too Big Communities

[roomfull of blues]

I agree with you. Because of the lack of BBSs around anymore, I have thought about hosting my own internet site BBS-style, but I just never got to it.

And community size is an issue. Slashdot for example is a great discussion forum, but I have never stopped to remember anyones' name. Occasionally I click on someone's user info page or their web page if they have one, but actually forming relashionships is just too impractical in a cummunity of hundreds of thousands of people.

I would like to see a slashdot with a limited but open user group, a wider range of discussion topics, no moderation system, and keep all threads open, no matter how old they are.

Wasn't all the hype about the internet "breaking down barriers" supposed to be a good thing? I prefer just saying that the internet screwed up a lot of things that were going fine and abolished old traditions that kept many communities alive. The internet isn't all that it is cracked up to be.

Re:Infinite Connections --> Too Big Communities

[markalot]

This thread is a good example of too much information. I don't have time to read all fo these posts, but slashdot does a pretty good job of letting me filter out most of the garbage. My ISP hosts a news server and offers a couple of local newsgroups. Many good conversations take place in there because it is limited to maybe 20 people tops.

As far as flames wars go, this is user error. If everyone would learn not to reply to a post that insults the the flamers would fade away. IMHO

mark

Re:Infinite Connections --> Too Big Communities

[Anonymous Coward]

This BBS has been net connected for 5+ years, but still (I think) has a dialup. Its free, and run out of the University Computer Club in Perth, Australia (http://www.ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au/):

telnet flame.ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au 4242

It's called 'flame' (with a lower case f). It is a MUD BBS, with message boards, rooms, etc, and gateways of message boards to some selected newsgroups IIRC.

Re:Infinite Connections --> Too Big Communities

[Syberghost]

And in fact, because of that, a couple dozen of the folks who used to contribute to a certain BBS network's forum for Star Trek fans now communicate just with each other via a mailing list.

It's small and cozy, like the forum once was before the Internet came along, and we like it just fine.

I think mailing lists fill a big part of the old BBS niche.

The rest of that niche gets nicely filled by a web page that archives the email, and allows links to be created to any files that would have been uploaded in the old days.


The Internet didn't kill BBSing, it just killed BBS technology. That's not really a loss; we can build our communities now based on mutual interest, not just geography.

You can still do everything you used to do, you just aren't restricted to doing it one way.


The only thing that doesn't translate directly to a combination of the web and email is door games, and let's face it, they mostly sucked.

If you really, really just gotta have your Time Of Chaos fix, or whatever lame door game you played, there's always telnet. Some of the old BBSes even operate this way. They are out there.

You can find out more from the (currently sparse) links at:

http://www.fidonet.net

Re:yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! Ha! you monkey spanking, pathetic little bone smoker!

Internet - BBS's for the masses

[mcdade]

BBS's are dead, they were the early-adaptor clubs of the late 70's and 80's. They were the breaking ground for those who were fascinated by technology and not afraid to venture forth. It's an era that will live in some people's minds as vivid as the hippy 60's, the disco 70's or the glamrock 80's. Everyone who actively participated has fond memories of the boards they frequiented, and glimpsing memory of all the numbers you would wardial looking for still running boards to leach warez off.

The Internet changed that, it brought digital communication to the masses, easy to understand, relativly idiot proof package. This is evident by the populatarity of AOL, the emergance of 'flash traffic' and advertisment of websites. Most of us who were there for the BBS years are still around doing the more interesting projects in this realm, we communicate on /., read ARS technica, and don't beleive the hype about some latest virus. We are the one building the network bigger, faster, and more robust.

I just wonder how long it will be till we start refering to the 'web years' or the 'slashdot effect' with the same kind of fondness.

-b

I REALLY miss BBSs :P

[Cybersonic]

I for one really miss BBSing in general.. My personal BBS is still up at:

http://aubbs.cx

Ive had this thing up since the late eighties, started out on a commodore 64 with a 1200 baud modem, then eventually moved to a c128, amiga 500, amiga 2000, amiga 4000.... :)

At one point i had over 15 lines on it... Arctic Underground BBS was a free system.. I kept it up on user donation and McDonalds paychecks ;) The best part was the user picnics! I had picnics for the users around once a month, and usually had over 50 users attend, usually with their whole family... Thats what i really miss, is the community...

Now all we really have is AOL. Thats why i want to write a really cool Web based BBS... I miss that sence of family back when people actually could easily get to know one another online! :) ahh the memories.....

At least this gives me a use for my T1 other than putting up South Florida Geek Storm Cams :)


Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell

Small or large..

[Anonymous Coward]

Try these, explanation at the bottom: The Mud Connector or check out A Dark Portal If you're looking for a BBS-like environment, they are out there in the form of MUDs and MUSHes and MUCKs - online playing environments where players can talk to each other, post notes, and even fight, in some cases. MUCKs and MUSHes tend to be more oriented on Roleplay, whereas MUDs are usually oriented on Hack'n'slash - run around sowing destruction. Mud Connector has listings of thousands of games. If you are looking for something in particular, like a game based on a book or series like The Crow or some such, go there. A Dark Portal is a small mud where everyone is very friendly. If you're new to muds, this is the place to go.

BBS's are not dead they just evolved

[Insane One]

BBS's have evolved into telnet available systems.
The thing that killed bbs's wasn't the internet, it was the sysop's that gave up. There were and still are software to convert your bbs to the internet they just didn't do it. I don't blame most of the sysop's because they were our age (20's) 10 to 15 years ago and now they have families with other responsibilites. Here is a link to a site that maintains a bbs list that has been active since '84 (i think). BBS's will never die...there will always be interest in it IMHO. Check out my friends bbs at www.dsbbs.net . Here is the link to list.
www.usbbs.org

Forms of telecommunication

[extrasolar]

I have never used BBS. Mostly because I never had a modem until we were well into the internet era. But I am interested. I am also interested in other forms of telecommunication if anyone knows of any.

Okay, I know this is childish. But if there were any protocals or something that forms an internet *underground* or something similar. It sounds like BBS may be what I am talking about but I think there might be something else out there.

I think the internet is overpopulated. Now that it is all the buzz and hype on the news and such... I want to escape.

Oh well, I'll cower my foolishness now.

Re:286? I wish...

[citmanual]

286!!! You were a rich bastard!

I remember using my cousins C64 with a 300 baud external. I was over there everyday to try to find 'elite' areas for games and such.

When I finally got a machine, it was a Leading Edge 8088 (circa 1986-7) and two years later I bought a 1200 baud internal modem. another year later I got a 2400 baud. My first 14.4 was purchased for that same 8088 for the sole purpose of BBS'ing. I bought a 14.4 because only 1 of the 5 BBS's I frequented had a 28.8. Those were the days........

Fido: "I'm not dead yet! In fact, I feeling..."

[farrellj]

When I first installed RedHat 5.x, and checked out the Dosemu setup that came default with it, I noticed a piece of software I had not seen in years, a FOSSIL driver. It stands for Fido Opus SeaDOG Serial Interface Layer. Basically a generallized connection that all of these products, and those compatible with them can share. So I knew there was some interest in running DOS based BBS software out there...but things are progressing very fast. It seems that Fidonet Technology is being rapidly integrated with TCP/IP to enable the full use of Fidotech via the Internet. Programs like "DBINK" serve as a front-door forthis, and many programs out there handle the tossing and scanning of mail from message bases. In some ways, this software is more mature and employ better technology solutions than News does, for example. Before the decline of Fidonet, it was moving more mail/news type traffice than than usenet was then, and maybe even today, if you cut out the binaries newsgroups.

Right now, I am working on the rebuilding of a popular network that used Fidotech, PODSnet, on the internet. You can email me if you would like to know more about the recreation of PODSnet.

ttyl
Farrell

BBSes still around

[kwalker]

Being a former SysOp and long-time BBS user myself, I watched about the same thing happen. Back in 1993, I used a DOS-based program called Telemate to connect to about forty BBS's in the city, about ten of them on a daily basis. By 1996, most of them were gone. By 1998, all but a handful of die-hard BBSes are gone, and those are generally elated to have a new user.

I used to think it was hopeless and that the community that had helped me realize what computers could do and how they could connect people--the community that had introduced me to Linux--was completely gone. I still had my BBS, but one call per week was hardly enough to justify staying off the Internet for me. And while I loved forums like Slashdot and Freshmeat, none of them gave me the tight-knit sense of community that I had with the old school BBS's.

There was a tiny glimmer of hope, however. Many BBSes had managed to get themselves setup as telnet sites. I found one large and very active one in the Netherlands (Fluxpod Information Exchange) that reminded me of what they used to be like, and the wave of nostalgia washed over me and has not completely abated since. I began to search for other online BBSes (telnet but in the old-style). I found quite a few; The Hard Drive Cafe, Eagle's Dare and quite a few others. I also found that some BBS software is not entirely dead. A lot of the BBSes I used to use were based on WWIV and in fact, they still exist and are developing 4.30 to have telnet capabilities.

I also got in touch with a guy who was developing a Linux version of WWIV. WWIV/X was born and is steadily progressing toward a stable, full-featured release. I wish that I could report that WWIV/X will be Open Source, but since WWIV is not, and WWIV/X uses WWIV for the vast majority of its code, it will most likely be under the same license as WWIV (Shareware 60-day trial). However, I am working on other BBS-related projects that will be under Open Source licenses, but none of them are far-enough along to make any kind of real announcement. If you want more information, e-mail me.

On good telnet ansi programs - mtelnet & TheDraw

[Anonymous Coward]

Try using mtelnet for the standard look and feel of a dos-based character ansi set. very nostalgic. Supports full ansi and zmodem which is blazingly fast over telnet despite the fact it says youre transferring at 28.8 heh. http://home.earthlink.net/~cthind/mt32.exe http://home.earthlink.net/~cthind/thedraw.rar for the last release i know of TheDraw used for creating ansi stuff. -CiXeL

BBSing

[British]

I miss BBSing. It's practically forgotten these days. Oh the adventures. I started out in 1989 with a TI-994/A and stopped just around, say 1997 when most of them died off.


The great thing about BBSes is that there was actual LOCAL activity. With the 'net, it's still far too spread out. IRC will not duplicate it. There's a commentary somewhere on one of my web pages about the BBSing days in the 612 area code.

Re:BBSing

[yelvington]

Well, I never did find much commentary about BBSing in the 612 area code, but I have to point out that there is more local activity today on the Star Tribune's "Talk" service than ever existed in the combined user bases of all the 612-area BBSes in the days of the Computer User list.

I ran one of those old-style BBSes (The Lake), and later I built the Star Tribune's Web site (I was the editor). I made certain that startribune.com had a community focus and the Web-based discussion tools to do it right.

Re:BBSing

[osu-neko]

Well, I never did find much commentary about BBSing in the 612 area code, but I have to point out that there is more local activity today on the Star Tribune's "Talk" service than ever existed in the combined user bases of all the 612-area BBSes in the days of the Computer User list.

Unfortunately, that's the problem. I ran a local (612) BBS from 1985 into the early 90's (started as Irongate, went down for a time, came back as Artificial Reality). I noticed a real decline in the quality of BBSing as the quantity of people engaged in the activity increased. It was great in the early to mid 80's, but as the 80's drew to a close, I became increasingly disgusted with the influx of "ruggies" and the like. Being a sysop went from a fun hobby to a frustrating chore. Logging into other BBS's, I could usually tell instantly if a BBS was any good or not by checking the userlist. If it had between 50-200 people in it, it had a chance. Any more than a couple hundred people and it was almost certainly a pointless waste of time to try to wade through the message boards. There would be a lot of posts but generally less actual interesting content than on BBS's with around 100 users.

A forum with the combined user base of all the Twin Cities BBS's combined sounds like a complete waste of time. The Internet didn't kill BBSing, the BBS scene became a parody of its former self half a decade before Internet access became common. Cheap, plentiful modems killed BBSing as I knew and loved it.

--

The difficulty with large communities

[alhaz]

It's interesting that the preference towards "free" discussion was brought up, as opposed to moderated forums like slashdot.

All you have to do is read /. comments at -1 to see what it would be like without moderation. Did you really want to see all that? Yes, sometimes, it's good to see what's down there, to keep an eye on the moderation, or moderate. (Remember, it's always better to use that point to moderate up an interesting AC than it is to use it to moderate down a boorish but otherwise harmless +1 user)

The problem with really large communities tho, isn't so much the signal to noise ratio as it is the way a large community can distance a person from the whole.

BBSs gave us, as users, the same sense of belonging that a small town gives someone. It's not that you feel a member because you're like everyone around you, it's that you feel you can relate to those around you.

This doesn't mean that it's impossible for a large city to have functioning communities, it means that it's harder, in the relatively metaphor-poor arena of the internet, to develop a functioning sub-community that's small enough to create the same sense of belonging.

Lots of people post comments on slashdot. Even more read them. Nearly everybody recognizes Bruce Perens, even if you don't know who he is outside of slashdot. I'm sure one or two of you recognize me, but it's not the same. It's the division between the luminaries and the public that makes the distinction uncomfortable, but it's unavoidable in a large forum, and it's nobodies fault.

It's not that it makes anyone feel jealous, it's the sense of disconnection.

If this was a BBS, I'd be throwing these words before a bunch of people I kinda feel that i sorta know, that i sorta relate to. That would allow me to adjust the way i phrase things so that my ideas are accessable to a particular group of people that i'm trying to communicate with.

Here, well, I don't have any sense of the identity of my reader. It's a lonely feeling, when you look at it that way.

But in another way, it's somehow empowering to know that possibly thousands of anonymous geeks will paruse my feeble ramblings, and maybe even approve of what i had to say.

Re:The difficulty with large communities

[the hanged man]

This is exactly the problem. Its like the difference (for me, anyhow) between college and high school. I went to a high school that wasn't particularly small (2000-2500 students), but there was a fairly good sense of community within the little microcosm there. Now I go to Georgia Tech, with 10s of thousands of students, and there really is no sense of community at all. I have a few pals from high school and some I know from various other things, but other than that, I haven't met but a couple of people. Its big and unfriendly and businesslike. And that is the problem with the Internet... no feeling of community, everything is super-huge. I don't know anyone on slashdot or any newsgroups I read. I'll never have that feeling... but on BBSs, I felt like I knew some of those people.

An interesting question: what is to be done about this? I mean, we can all complain. Some (like myself) can start up little telnet BBSs in an attempt to return to the 'glory days' or whatever (I'm really not old enough to talk like this), but really, none of that is a step foward. How can we regain the sense of community that we had in the BBS days?

the hanged man
http://thehangedman.digitaldriveway.com
Sysop, Solace BBS - telnet://solace.digitaldriveway.com

Re:The difficulty with large communities

[bob9134]

Now I go to Georgia Tech, with 10s of thousands of students, and there really is no sense of community at all. I have a few pals from high school and some I know from various other things, but other than that, I haven't met but a couple of people. Its big and unfriendly and businesslike.

I go to Texas A&M, with ~40k students. Somehow they've managed to keep some sense of community. Largely by means of shared experience - everyone does 2 days of new student orientation. 3 days of hazing at "Fish Camp" is almost mandatory. Everyone funnels through the same huge classes their first year - although engineering tends to separate from business. Traditions that people participate in - yell practice, silver taps, muster, and yes - bonfire.

I think the shared experience is what gives the sense of community - If the other readers of slashdot were all ags I'd have an idea of them. Of course, members of the corps of cadets are usually jerks, residents of Walton hall tend to be rowdy, etc - but you have an idea of the mix.

Calling bulleting boards (and yes, running my own) you had shared experience from living in the same city. Everyone had been to Zilker park, you all knew about the construction on Congress Avenue, and you could meaningfully share tips about the best pizza places - because your readers could all go there without using an airline.

Online we give tips about what motherboards to buy, which video cards are crap, and whether anyone else has had a problem with linux kernel 2.2.10 showing signs of a memory leak (anyone?). I don't know if it's possible to create a strong sense of community in a forum open to literally the entire world, but I do know that if I can't get an account under either of my two handles, it's probably got too many people (hello misanthrope and lux! you beat me to it.).

Not ALL Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

In Alaska where I'm from there were about 200 back in the day. They all died except one, which is still active. There are regular, weekly gt's and the like, and active posting. It's a FirstClass board: connect over the net to fcak.telepresence.net Tell them Myopic sent you.

Re: BBS' are dead

[calvrak]

I've watched the demise BBS scene in the SF Bay Area over the last few years and its been very sad. I do take some resposibility for this; once I had an internet connection my BBS calling went way down. However, there still is a BBS up in Contra Costa -- Henry's Hallucinations. 925-825-5864, 925-691-1486, and 925-827-5958.

We still have socials; in fact, we had one last night. So even if the BBS scene is dead, at least the Real Life scene is very much alive.

Progress marches on

[SurfsUp]

for whatever reason it seems people remain private and keep to themselves without a who's online option, and a message feature

The new buzzword is "internet presence" - this is the facility provided by ICQ's 'contact list' for example, and soon to be provided by open messaging systems like jabber. You know the idea - whenever you come online your "internet presence" client contacts a server and forwards the information about your change of state to all your contacts that are also online. This is the right way to do things - once the technology is generally available in a non-proprietary form (and a non-amateurish form - jeez ICQ is weak) it will spread like wildfire. You'll see online communities popping up like they never have before.

Of course, once you know someone is online you can do all kinds of things - send messages, chat, send files, news, forums, other things that haven't been thought of yet. Widespread use of internet presence will essentially cause the internet to be reinvented yet one more time.

I guess what I'm saying is: don't feel too bad about the demise of the good 'ol BBS - progress marches on, and what's coming next will beat the heck out of BBS in every way.

Maybe you're not looking in the right places

[yelvington]

Of course BBS-like communities still exist; they're just on the Web now. If they're badly implemented on the Web and you're moping for the past, then the likelihood is that you're suffering from selective memory.

Most of the BBSes in the 1980s were twirly-cursor ruggie havens not worth the time it took to dial the number. It shouldn't be surprising that most of the Web-based "communities" suck. It's the rare gems that stand out in your memory.

Take a look at some of these:

Talk to Tom with restaurant critic Tom Fitzmorris in New Orleans. Food is a big deal in New Orleans. InsideNewOrleans.com has assembled a very active, very local, very focused community around eating.

Backfence with James Lileks, a newspaper columnist with the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. His column is spun out of contributions from his message boards. He's built his own tight community within the newspaper's "Talk" service, which has something on the order of 30,000 registered users.

Cyberspace Cafe & Pub, a meandering discussion that began in 1994 or so on the proprietary Interchange network and migrated to the Web in 1995. Don't be fooled by the message count (around 5800); this has "rolled over" half a dozen times.

Cafe Utne, operated by the Utne Reader, sort of a Reader's Digest of "alternative" publications. If you're wondering where all the '60s liberals went, this is it.

Table Talk,, the message boards of the Web-based Salon magazine.

Re:Maybe you're not looking in the right places

[yelvington]

Dang, I hate it when I hit "submit" intending to press "preview."

Continuing my rant: Software counts. Software implements the organizational metaphor. The medium is the message, and all that. Most of the Web-based discussion software is horrid.

Take Slashdot, for example. It's a moderated annotation system, not a discussion system. Does anybody really come back and read after they've posted? Maybe a couple of diehards, but fundamentally this is a rant-and-run environment. It works very well for its intended purpose, but it's not a discussion system.

The trouble is that most of the packages that pretend to be discussion systems have no more thought applied to sustaining discussion than Slashdot. Sustained discussion requires a primarily linear flow. Most Web boards are built with too much threading, too many decorations, and not enough productive features (such as keeping track of which messages I've already read).

Communities

[Lao-Tzu]

While it seems that many BBSes are dead and the sense of community throughout the internet has changed substantially, there is one area of the internet that seems to have hidden from major changes. MOOing. LambdaMOO (telnet://lambda.moo.mud.org:8888/) still supports thousands of users a day, though the 'community' there is .. often questionable. Smaller MOOs, such as MOO Canada (http://www.moo.ca/) seem to have a stronger sense of community, and tend not to gain more users than they loose in a period of time.

Online Communities - Axis Mutatis?

[Darchmare]

I used to sysop an old message board a few years back, before the world moved to the 'net and AOL en masse (I had a shell account which I used as a source of current software, but that's a bit different). Why did people leave? I don't know - my guess is the lack of 32k color graphics, blinking text, and realtime naked pictures of beautiful women had something to do with it. You simply have to look harder to find the value in a BBS.

However, the web has most definately not replaced the best 'features' of the traditional 16 color ANSI based board, even though it pretty much killed them outright. The problems of the web are numerous:

1. It's not stateless, meaning that once a page loads, it's not terribly dynamic until you resubmit a form or click on a link.

2. The audience is multinational, which is great in its own right, but BBSes were fun because you'd often get to meet other BBSers (they lived in town). We even had 'pizzas' and 'coffees' where we'd all get together.

3. For some reason, the signal to noise ratio was usually better. Even on sites where the sysop wasn't a censor-nazi.

4. BBSes were usually more immersive, meaning that you felt you were actually 'somewhere', versus just another web site. You also focused on the site for longer periods of time, whereas web users are far more fickle.

5. BBSing and advertising didn't go so well together, so you didn't have banners. People ran sites usually because they wanted to, not for profits alone.

6. Open standards - 16 color ANSI was pretty universal, and no matter what terminal you used, you would usually see the same thing. You can blame Netscape and Microsoft for the lack of universal standards on today's web.

I'd love to see someone come up with a web based system that captures the feel of the local boards. It's not easy, though - I've tried it myself with Axis Mutatis:

http://www.axismutatis.net

...which has gained a loyal following, but still doesn't replace the good old BBSing community I used to be part of. It's not easy, and I haven't seen it done perfectly yet.

[note: If you go there and have problems, bookmark the site and come back later. I've had some DNS problems so you may or may not be able to get on - you may even end up at a different site]


- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)

Tradewars 2002

[j1mmy]

BEST MULTIPLAYER COMPUTER GAME OF ALL TIME

those were the good old days...

Help me start the Slashdot BBS!!!!!

[Mo B. Dick]

Ok Heres the deal, you can send me donations, heres what we'll do, Ill buy a Wildcat DOS BBS, ill get about 5 9600 baud modems, get 5 lines, we'll be in like flint, but we cant call it the slashdot BBS we need a more bitchin name like "The Pirates Cove" Anyone interested?

Re:best community

[myconid]

Ignorant attempt at a translation:

If [you] want a kewl [c]ommunity, use IRC instead!!! IRC is so[oo] m[u]ch better than lame ass web board[s].
[You] get t[he] benef[i]ts of [elite] warez [too]. (hehehehehehe). All [for] free!!! :-) :-)
If [you] want [to] join [our elite club, than come to] EFNET #1337 [one-three-three-seven] [to]day. [You] need pass an initiation test, say .. hacking a lame website.

So they just want you to do a (html)(title)hi(/title)(body)yo mom(/body)(/html) ? lol.... Llamas..
Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff

IRC and its accompanying sites

[BRTB]

I used to use a few local (Orlando) BBSes when they were still operational... now that everyone I know has an Internet account we all tend to just use our IRC network (iChat.org) and its Memo Service, etc. for our online communications. And we have a Quake server setup with Team Fortress on it for hours of shoot-your-best-friend-with-the-sniper-rifle fun - seems to replace those BBS doors pretty well ;) File transfer? That's what the DCC function on IRC is for... and a few of us use an FTP box for those times we can't all be online at the same time.
And since it's all real-time and we try to keep a friendly atmosphere we have kept the community sense together, even though we're spread throughout the world - try that with a BBS.

Try irc.iChat.org:6667 or www.iChat.org for anyone that's interested in seeing what we do to replace our old friendly BBS systems.

Re:IRC and its accompanying sites

[Anonymous Coward]

Spam :P

But yes, I too love IRC, and iChat.Org is not bad at all, IMHO. I love the new services there more than dalnet's (seems to be a blend of dalnet's and undernet's)

Re:IRC and its accompanying sites

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw this post, and I thought I would give it a try. My first IRC experience was great. The helpful people there pointed me in the right direction, helped me with theirs services and helped register my channel. irc.ichat.org is a great place to chat. IRC.ICHAT.ORG

Re:IRC and its accompanying sites

[MonteCarlo]

Wow Talk about a cool little network with rockin services. This network coded a services that uses all the possible services nicks to interact as one X Q ChanServ NickServ Neo Morpheus iChat and so on all react so if your used to X then use and register with X if you like iChat U register the channel with iChat and you can change services nicks without unregistereing the channel, on top of that there isnt a channel password, services like these are what really makes a network and I give them WOW on a score of 1 to 10 I give them 1000 because this little network has potential. IRC.ICHAT.ORG check it out.

Telnet just isnt the same

[joshua_doesnt_know]

A few years ago I used to frequent the BBS just before they started to dissapear for good. The large BBS turned into ISPs years ago, some of the small ones just shut down or the sysop moved somewhere else.
But anyway, these telnet BBS may have some of the same door games but the things that made the BBS so fun are missing. The major appeal was that everyone who would be calling would usually be from your area unless they are calling long distance. You might never know the people in person but they lived in your area so it had a community feel. A friend might turn you onto his BBS, and there was just something neet about knowing your sysop personally. File bases were uncluttered and message bases might be local or in a net from around the country. All of this without commercialism, and usually it was free. You just can't bring back the same feeling of the old BBS.

_joshua_

Changing expectations in the Internet era

[Argy]

BBSes in years past had several attractive features, such as file download sections, gaming, and chatting/e-mailing with other locals. All of these have been impacted by the Internet.

For downloading files, the Internet offers more variety than any BBSes ever did, and with web hosting that can cost less per month than a single phone line, it costs less to reach a wider audience by providing files for download over the Internet.

Modern gaming, if you like the latest in multiuser entertainment, bears too little resemblance to the "door" games in the heyday of BBSes to really compare the two.

For discussion forums, the rise of the Internet has driven people to expect more specialized communities. A few years ago, when CompuServe was essentially a huge national BBS, it offered the same advantage: there wouldn't be enough compression algorithm enthusiasts in a city to support a local BBS, but aggregated between all CompuServe users, they had a decent discussion forum for this. On the Internet, with a huge user base, Usenet and the proliferation of web-based chat boards have resulted in discussion groups defined much more by interests than geography. People did dial BBSes long-distance, but the bulk of the regular callers were generally local, except for narrowly specialized boards, or the handful of shareware and image/porn BBSes that got especially huge (100+ lines).

If you have a nostaligic longing for an active ASCII-based online community, dial Ann Arbor's Grex, +1 (734) 761-3000, N81, 14.4kbps...they have about ten phone lines. Although if you're reading this, you'll probably have an easier time telnetting to cyberspace.org...create a free shell account (they run SunOS), and you'll get the same feel through telnet as through a comm program. They've survived the transition to the Internet by promoting community interaction rather than file downloads and gaming. The Internet has introduced users from around the world, although there's still a core of Ann Arbor locals who keep things going.

It's right Here. No wait, There. Over THERE.

[eagl]

I think the web itself has replaced the BBS concept, neatly filling in and replacing all the features most old BBS systems had.

Instead of logging into a BBS and seeing who's online, I dial my isp and ICQ wakes up showing me if any of my friends are online. Instead of checking my favorite discussion forums, I go through my browser favorites hitting 5-6 pages and web BBS'. I also get to check stock quotes, something I never could on the BBS' I used to frequent.

Email is checked while web pages are downloading since I only have a 56k modem, and I also pass along pointers to interesting web sites via email. A quick check on my gaming email list and one last sweep of ICQ, and I'm off the online gaming arenas. Instead of playing poker in the chat room, I fly a virtual P-51 Mustang or B-17, and do my chatting while shooting at other people online. Unlike many MUD's and other early online games however, the games I play are against real people not AI routines, so it's all about interacting with real people. Some get chat windows, some get virtual bullets...

Anyhow, my point is that for me, I've found that sense of community with the web at large replacing and expanding on the old BBS features. The BBS sysadmin is replaced by thousands of users, webmasters, content providers, and application programmers all working with a common set of protocols. I agree, AOL is probably one of the very few places that provide most of the typical BBS features in one place, but for a user willing to experiment and "get out there" and search a bit (like browsing BBS file areas eh?), all the tools necessary for the community are easily available. I don't think I'd go back if I could.

Online Communities

[DaveHowe]

Most of the online communities I know of revolve around Usenet groups these days, rather that BBS (but then, I didn't know many BBS systems here in .uk due to the high phone charges)
Groups like Alt.Fan.Pratchett and Alt.Fan.Eddings tend to have regular "Meets" and their own IRC channels, but the meets and channels are there to support the Usenetters, not the other way around...
--

BBS's faded away

[fdawg]

I remember the good old days on my 8088 where id fire up the modem, pick up the receiver, dial a number, then click on the modem to handshake. BBS's were the unspoken cult that most of us compujunkies would resign ourselves to once the day was done. I haven't found a community such as that in a long time. I remember posting on FIDO-Net or wardialing to find the newest BBS because at the time, BBS's were popping up about as fast as websites are today. I miss those old days and I did cry when the last BBS in my area called it quits. But it just goes to show you that someday, you eventually do have to roam around outside and talk to REAL people, rather than be mesmorized by a bunch of glowing pixels and be dazzled by the sounds of a 300 baud modem handshaking. People are equipped to handle real life situations. BBS's are dead and the internet is more than just a living thing. I think its more of a virus now. People should try to become sociable in real life rather than create that alter ego that only exists on the backbone of some website. I do miss the BBS's, and I do admit that I am a net aholic, but all things in moderation. Live for the sake of living. Don't live in front of a computer.

Tradewars

[Indomitus]

Damn, I loved Tradewars back in the day. I'm with Cliff on wanting an online version. The only problem would be my college grades going down in relation to how powerful I became in the game, just like my high school grades did. :)

Long Dead

[dotd]

I started a BBS on a 8086 with a 2400 baud modem, centuries ago in net time, a mere 6 years ago in real time. Back in the prime time of BBS' here in Phoenix, AZ, there were over 600 of them(!), now, there are less than 30 listed in the local free computer mag (may be even less as the last issue I picked up is a couple months old).

Almost as soon as I got a net account, I discovered MUDs, and started my own soon after. However, it's 15 mins of fame are over, it's still up but I rarely work on it anymore... once you know how the universe works, it no longer holds it's charm (which is why our universe rocks, unlike muds, you can always find something new).

BBS' are dead...

Networked Conferences and Downloaded Mail

[pgrote]

What a topic! I do miss BBS. I was a sysop, remember PCBoard, and what I miss most is the interconnected mail networks. I ran a BBS just so I could get the conferences I wanted. I was a member of PCRelay (RIME), InLink, InterLink, Fido and many more specialized networks. I miss two things about this: 1) I miss the ability to download mail that is threaded with everyone having an identity. 2) I miss moderated conferences. You can say UseNet is similiar, but it is nothing like the old conferences.

Remember QMail? Remember the QWK format? I miss it. Any newsreader today can't hold a candle to the tight integration and features of QMail. I wonder what happened to Sparky?

Some say moderation is censorship, but I don't. Someone was in charge of making sure the boards talked only about their topics. I knew I could send a message out in say, the Boyan conference, and get a message back in a couple of hours from someone. No spam. No xrated garbage. I loved it. Now, if someone tries to keep a board on topic they can't.

I also miss the local flavor of a BBS. You pretty much knew everyone on the board and developed true online relationships past email.

Don't even start me on the cool doors available like tradewars, etc.

NOT dead.

[Signal 11]

No. I ran a BBS (Eye of the Storm) in western wisconsin right before the internet hit paydirt. Fun little thing, I put alot of time into that. It didn't die from negligence or disuse, but rather from parental problems. But that's beside the point. BBSing itself is dead, but not the idea. I'm shocked and appalled by the impersonal nature of the web - many corporations are running "one-way" websites - no feedback allowed. Behind all the glamor and glitz there are real people back there, and I'd like to talk to them. But webservers weren't designed for two-way communication: they were designed for "I post,you view." It works as designed - just not the way I envisioned the "information age" to come about.

So I got to talking with some of my friends about this, and they too miss that "community" feeling that BBSing had. I think it's alot like why people don't vote - they don't think it'll make a difference. Statistically, it doesn't. But when you have 10 of your friends at a private party, isn't it alot more fun than a hundred people who you "kinda" know at a party? I'll tell you what's more fun - the 10 person party. The reason is that what you say makes a difference, and everybody can listen to everybody else.

I don't believe the web is going to give many people that community feeling they're looking for.. atleast not the conventional way of using it. But I am doing research and such on developing a kind of "online" bbs - not the cheezy kind, but a real bbs that is modern, uses the technology, and stretches the limits. It's a daunting task. Slashdot is one way of doing it, but even that is still largely "I post, you view". I don't have any answers, but I do know there's a need - I want to fill that need, if only for myself.

--

Not me...

[Ford Prefect]

I'm only a clueless spod - I've never got even close to running any kind of BBS. I imagine Ford Prefect is a pretty common pseudonym. After all, there are quite a few Slashdot users with very similar usernames; I've got the original. :)

My first online experience was when my dad found a 2400bps modem at work (this was when 28800 modems were the fastest available, so it wasn't that long ago). I connected it to my Atari ST, dialled in to 42BBS (one of the biggest Atari BBSs in the UK, sadly no longer operational) and became hooked immediately. I saved up for a 14.4kb/s modem (it's still my only modem), and enjoyed the benefits of real internet email through 42BBS's email gateway.

About a year after that, I got an internet subscription. I've missed the idea of an 'online community' - parts of Usenet looked promising, but the signal-to-noise ratio was invariably too high. Then, when I went to university, I discovered the so-called 'conferencing system' there (it's often been described as 'communications drivel'). I don't run the BBS, but I help to admin the university Computer Society computers on which it runs.

Memories...

[Lee Cremeans]

I remember when I got my start online, in late 1992 (yes, I was a bit late to the party, but I did already know about the Internet, so I was at least a little prepared for the future). First board I used was one in Alexandria, VA, and originally, I hit the BBSes to look for files (especially since Prodigy, which I used for a few months in 1993, didn't have *any* file areas). Later on, I moved on to message boards (I miss RIME and Fido), and for a while I was getting Internet mail at home through one of the Fido boards I called.

All this started disappearing in 1995-1996; the board I was getting email through closed down in December 1995, and still others closed throughout 1996. There used to be a list of local BBSes for my area (prince william co., VA), but I have no idea where it went; I just found Mike Focke's list (updated 2/1999), and there were about 72 active BBses left in the entire DC metro area at the time.

It's good to see that some boards (like the ufies board) still exist, though.

-lee

the internet killed them

[dextro]

all good things come to an end, is that what they say? it seems the internet has killed real online communities for the most part. i cant help but think it is because mortals and media thought it would. they never saw the internet as a real community a place where a relationship or friendship can develope and prosper. now every site i go to, even sites about specific interest i think i hold to be pretty uniquely(?) mine, are overrun by thousands of users. this post probably wont be read by 5% of the slashdot community. get my point. remember when the internet was fast on your modem? that wasnt because you cable modem is so great, it was because johny joe blow next door wasnt online 24/7 reading about weather and trying to get porn without his wife finding out. the solution? population control... jk, is there any solution for the overpopulation of the internet? children are starving everyday because the dont get enough bandwidth. please help...

Nostalgia - How things once were

[WHiTe VaMPiRe]

I was not going to post, but what the hell. Time to waste some time that I do not have!

I first started on BBSes with my good ol' trusty 2400. I remember spending 10 minutes to download a 50k DOOM wad, those were the later years that I had it. Hayes, of course.

I called all the local boards in 614 and actively participated in the community. I stuck to a lot of the 'underground' scene and participated in the more tight-knit boards. Boards such as Computeen were not good for much more than their active LORD, which I was kicking ass in.

I participated in a local FreeNET, my first introduction to the Internet. I mainly used it for Usenet and I used the e-mail account that they had available. I generally avoided using the Internet; I was not very big on it. I preferred the more tight-knit BBS scene where everybody knew everybody.

Gamma Force BBS -- the first real incarnation of Gamma Force, and the first board that I ran. I had co-sysoped a couple boards before but this was the first one that I truly ran. I had a whole lot of fun too. Many a late night I spent working with the board, talking to a user or two.

It originally ran on VBBS (Virtual BBS) and I eventually switched to Iniquity. Iniquity is a pretty nice board, and development is still going on. On another note, Iniquity is also what brought me to having my nick with lowercase vowels. It was a 'feature' in the software and I thought it looked neat. I decided to stick with it to recognize my 'roots.; This was before all the '133t crap.'

After I had gF BBS up for awhile, I managed to get a 14.4. That was back when they were first available and still pretty expensive. I remember when I first dialed up a board and the ANSI loaded so quickly. I nearly cheesed my pants. No more laggy ANSI on the 2400! Stuff was pretty cool then. In my eyes, it was the peak of the scene.

I had gF BBS up for nearly 2 years. I had approximately 400 users. I forget how many calls a day. I was still only one node. I think I managed to hit 28.8 before I took the board down. That was when I first started to spend more time with the Internet.

Every now and then, I would waste a few hours fraggin' away in DOOM. Nothing taught you how to wupp some ass more than getting yourself gibbed, repeatedly. I would go into this more, but it is off topic.

I still spent most of my time with the BBS scene but I had started to explore the Internet. That was back when IRC was still in its infancy. Nobody cared too much about the Web. Mosiac, ew. No frames, no tables, no font face tags. Lynx anyone?

I also had begun to experiment with Linux during that time period. Slackware 2.0, baby. Kernel 1.0.28 (I think, something like that). But that is another story.

Most people had started to shut down their boards. A lot of the greats were shutting down; the scene was starting to die. I kept the board around for a bit longer, as long as possible. Then I started to have computer problems, HD failures and what not. It just began to be so much trouble to keep the board up it was not worth it. I solemnly decided to end the legacy, as short as it may have been, of Gamma Force BBS. It was a helluva ride.

Where is Gamma Force now? I have it archived on my hard drive somewhere. Maybe one day I will get a wild hair and decide to put it back up as a telnet board, for nostalgia reasons. We shall see what the future holds.

Gamma Force's main project is currently Gamma Force IRC Network. It has been running for about 4 years now. Still small, not very successful. We have been around longer than some of the big networks, but hey. It started out private and we may make it private again unless we decide to get it going again. Twenty users just do not cut it anymore.

There is also Project Gamma, a sister project of gF.

We have other things planned; we have had other projects. We will always remember Gamma Force BBS. Those were some great times. Unfortunately, they are a thing of the past. We now have the Internet, and things have changed a lot. A whole lot.

That was definitely a trip down nostalgia lane.

(Disclaimer: Most of this stuff is from memory, some cloudy. All apologies for any inaccuracies, it is all from memory.)

References:

Gamma Force

Project Gamma

Iniquity

pG editorial - Times Are Changing - More on the whole 'BBS' thing and the lowercase vowels.

Project Gamma, Introduction - Read this if you want more information about the above.


Regards,

WHiTe VaMPiRe\Rem

The Internet is full: go home

[jra]

Yeah... that's part of it. It became too easy _not_ to be limited by geography, and on top of that, as one other post implied, _too many_ people could be connected at once.

But then, I have no hope of practically being able to track the threads my postings to /. generate, either; the tools are not built for that.

Give me Usenet, anyold day...


Cheers,

muds/mucs/mush/Universities

[maraist]

I remember the old days of BBS's. We'd have monthly get-togethers that included pizza. We were all a big group of friends; the younger crowd talking about games, the older crowd talking about hardware all in the same room. Sure enough, the feel of community is removed when you're 10 thousand miles away from everyone.

When I went to a University, I actually found a nice replacement for BBS's in the campus central UNIX machines. I'd log in and track who else was on. I could be productive, while chatting with 3 or 4 other people. There were bulliten boards, download sites. Before the web was popular, we'd play with our .plan and .profile's. We had a sence of our own little space that we could decorate and other friends come come and visit.

Around that time muds/mush's/mucs were popular. There were tales of people failing out of college playing muds 18 / 7. Those muds allowed chatting in a pseudo IRC fashion, but just as on the UNIX machines, we had our own little piece of the virtual world that we could decorate and share with others.

The combination of these provided ample substitute for me in the mid 90's. BBS's were still popular ( and I activately sought them out ), but as FTP sites fullfilled my download cravings, I had removed the last of the BBS advantages.

Role playing, chatting ( with local people ), files, information, home decoration...

Now AOL's Instant Messenger, ICQ, and Yahoo pager are my primary chat resources ( localized apps are much faster and virsitile than an IP packet per character ). My Web page is all the person information I need to keep. The web itself handles all my files. And I've been too busy to seek out those MUD's of old.

Actually, another good thing about the BBS's was that you couldn't be a junky. You only had 2 hours a day, and all your games were turn based, which limited so many actions per day. There is no reason why tradewars can't be loaded onto a telnet compatible server and still use the turn based mentality. I would hope that it's already been done.

Just my 2 bits of nostalgia.

Those old BBS days ...

[jfaughnan]

>I remember fondly the days wasted with my 286 >and a 1200 bps modem, racking up some impressive >phone bills. Not bad, but I'll trump that one. I used my 8086 and a pre-Internet packet switching network (tymnet or telenet) to visit BBSs around the nation. For a modest monthly fee one could access these corporate networks after hours, and avoid long distance charges. There were tens of thousands of BBSs nationwide. The setup process was rather baroque, but it worked. The net was around by then, but not for use by non-academics.

The downfall of the BBS.

[sinnergy]

You make a very good point. It seems as though the closest thing that I've ever used that comes close to a BBS-like community is MUD (or one of it's variants). Peronsally, I used to be heavily involved in batmud (telnet batmud.bat.org). It's still a thriving community (with the required obnoxious personalities) and I hope to be able to have the time to play and/or socialize there again.

I admit that it's not the same as the traditional BBS. There are a few out there, and many that support some of my old favorites (door games (BRE, SRE, etc.). I sometimes yearn for the "old days" of my 14.4 and ANSI telecomm program, but then I realize, too, the benefits that the net has today.

As it is, Cleveland, Ohio, lost a landmark in online communities this fall when the Cleveland Freenet (owned and operated by my alma mater, Case Western Reserve University) was shutdown. The shutdown invoked scathing critcism and many flames directed toward both the President of the University (who was only in office for a few months) and the VP of IS (who was summarily fired a couple of months later). Still, even though the Freenet model was a trailblazing way of connecting people and allowing the "common folk" to explore this wonderous new thing called the Internet back in the early 90s, by even 1996 the system became so deprecated that it was becoming nothing more than an embarrassment and a money pit for the University. The "communities" that once thrived (including a very active local IRC, one that I still miss to this day and one which I can proudly say I found my current girlfriend of 3 years and potential wife on) were no longer active, except for a few strong holdouts by a stalwart few. In the place of the active lurkers and posters alike came the kiddy-porn mongers, the leechers and flamers. Granted, they were always there, but the ratio increased to a degree where it was no longer any "fun" to use it.

I feel like and old fogey when I reflect how things were in the late 80s and early 90s. People that didn't use BBSes will never truly understand the quaint charm they held and the sense of community they brought about. However, I can say for certain we'll be saying these same things about the Internet in 10 years. We'll be telling our children about how we used to have to type in "slashdot.org" this and "http://" that. I presume that the guts of the net will become so transparent we'll experience another great abstraction of the methodolgy in which we obtain and contribute information.

I've rambled enough. I need to mud...

Re:The downfall of the BBS.

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one miss the days of knowing all the local sysops, and sluaghtering players on LORD all night, breakfast the first Saturday of each month with all the other members. The inter is a thriving city in cyberspace.... someday people will remember the BBS as a first cabins in a brave new world. And I for am proud to have played my part. To all the BBS that have faded inton the mist of time... I will miss you my freinds.

Re:The downfall of the BBS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Regarding the posts/articles pertaining to BBSs and those "Good Ole Days"....

I've run a BBS since 1991 up here in Bangor, Maine. At its peak, I had 4 phone lines, a Satellite downlink (Planet Connect) for Fidonet Files as well as the early days of Newsgroups. It was a great deal of fun to run a BBS because they were in short supply in this area. With 4 lines, and a population of 45k or so, I was among the largest in the area and easily logged up to 100 calls a day. On top of that, we had a huge file library and charged a nominal $1 a month subscription fee, which did a great job getting rid of the trouble users. Yes, many great BBSs were free but I couldnt afford to have 9 computers, a satellite fee and 4 phone lines going just on my good looks ;-)

Let me point out several things about those "old days"....
* Getting New Users was very difficult. Whats a COM Port? Whats an IRQ? Recall these were the DOS days. How do I download? What do I do with a ZIP file? Windows 95 made life a lot easier, unfortuneatly, by 1995, the Internet Wave crashed down on the BBS world.
* Remeber when Boardwatch actually dealt with BBSs? Since the Internet came, all traces of BBSs in the media have all but disappeared. 'Sysop News' was a great little magaine that kept track of the latest and greatest in the BBS world, but it seems to have faded away.
* As a Sysop, I sure do not miss the problem users complaining that there is a problem with your modem, since they can not acheive a solid connect (now, nevermind the fact you've taken 50,000 calls that year and this guy is 1 of 3 having trouble). Oh, and lets all thank those engineers for PnP modems/WinModems!
Now...let me go into a little detail why so many BBSs all but died out:
* The Internet (obviously)
* Most were hobby systems, free or for profit. Those that were for profit, tried to make the change into becoming an ISP. And some suceeded. But most BBS packages did not offer Telnet/FTP or web access. Those that did had large system requirements and the software itself was pricey. Then, add in Internet connectivity. Clearly, too much for so many. Case in point: Wildcat! came out with Wildcat! 5/WIN Server. Ideally it wants NT though works on 95/98. And any one that has priced out NT Server knows its pricey, and likes large system requirements. And...remember this is 1995. RAM was expensive, as was NT and everything else.
So where are they now?
Several are still around. Mine is (www.checksix.net) but far less traffic than I used to have. But, they are poised to grab a market that wants more than to just download files and chat on IRC. But...there are the Old Dogs that insist any BBS that has a web interface isnt a *real* BBS. (Yes, narrow mindedness is still abundant!). On my system, folks can telnet in and see those good ole ANSI graphics or visit with their web browser. And, the systems web side has been optimized to be even more user friendly than the best ANSI menus ever could be. What BBSs have gained by being on the Internet is the ability to get callers/users that were just a few years ago, way outside their local calling area. Now you can have users from anywhere there is a PC and an Internet connect.
Although this may be a weee long winded...us BBSs are still out here. Although we got trampled by the Internet initially, the BBS Software makers that are still around have worked hard to make their systems compatible with todays web browsers. Examples of this is Wildcat! 5 (now know as WIN Server). Check out their site at www.winserver.com as their package seems to be the best, as well as Wildcat's reputation as a solid BBS system.
Feel free to visit my system or email me if anyone has any questions about BBSs that are still out here, or are interested in starting one.

Paul J. Bussiere
CheckSix.Net / Check Six! BBS
Bangor, ME
http://www.checksix.net
email webmaster@checksix.net

(Sorry to post as annonymous..I waited 2 hours for my password to be generated! Damn Slash...doesnt take any time on my BBS system. Perhaps you are due for an upgrade? )

BBSes

[drwiii]

The BBS I most frequented became an ISP in mid-1996. Today, I own part of the business, and our old BBS friends are still very active on the Internet. We eventually decommisioned the BBS host (everybody saw it as a legacy system).

One question I have though, is whether everyone thinks BBSes making the jump to the Internet is evolutionary, embrace-and-extend, or a complete paradigm shift on their part.

TradeWars

[Darth Maul]

Oh, man, does that take me back. I actually
hosted a BBS for a while, and had the whole
TradeWars game up and running on a WWIV BBS
system. Now *those* were the good ol' days.
There has to be a 'net version of that game
around somewhere... Anyone know?

I remember when we used to "mod" the WWIV
BBS server and think we were the stuff...

David's Amazing BBS ...

[daviddennis]

existed as a much-loved creation between 1987, when I bought an already ageing 286 with 4MB RAM and Microport Unix and 1991, when the hard drive finally gave up the ghost.

The best thing about it is that we had user meetings, everyone could get together, and I met enough women through it to make my life interesting. Now, the most interesting women I encounter are not just in other cities, try other countries!

On the other hand, I was always trying to figure out a good balance between free speech and censorship. I believe in free speech; many of my users hated the consequences, because one or two disruptive people can really do bad things to the system. I have to say that Slashdot has a better compromise between the two ideals than anything I've seen, and if I were running a large-scale message board system, I'd take many of the ideas to heart.

I always liked fooling around with the technology of online matchmaking - it's always been something I've been passionate about, considering that people are increasingly paranoid and disassociated from their communities. I think that's a lot of what caused BBSes to decline in such dramatic terms when the Internet came to town.

But still, come visit my latest matchmaking experiment if you feel in the mood - it's at http://207.151.18.18/ and it uses a lot of the same ideas I first hatched when I had my BBS years ago. Incidentally, if you tried this when I last announced it, I've had a bit of a technical goof and you'll have to go through a quick procedure to re-find your account.

Hope you'll visit!

D

----

Re:Pirate's Cove?

[Darchmare]

Nope, forget that. "Pirate's Cove" has been done before. In fact, we had a board of that name in the 509 area code.

It was a lame WWIV board, too.

- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)

BBS's are alive and well

[Anonymous Coward]

True, they're not as numerous as they once were, but there are still a lot of telnet-accessible BBS's out there. I run one myself, though I don't advertise its presence since the volume of potential users on the global Internet far outstrips the relatively limited number of callers one might get from local dialups. There are a growing variety of telnet BBS packages out there -- just search on Slashdot. (I use Citadel/UX myself, and BBBS looks like a good package, too.)

The web will never replace the kind of communities one can have with a BBS. Aside from being incredibly ill-suited to anything genuinely interactive, it's too easy to flit from site to site. With a BBS, you actually have to establish an account, login, interact, and then logoff. This creates clearly defined boundaries for the experience -- and thus the sense of place websites typically lack -- and it also insures that users invest some time and effort in what they do, and I think it shows in the quality of the conversations, especially when compared with what you see in most web forums. It especially cuts down on the volume of trolls and annoying anonymous cowards.

The web does some things well, but it is and probably always will be a unidirectional broadcast mechanism, something like TV with ten million channels. It's not an interface well suited to community building. BBS's are. They're still out there, and with the advent of cheap high speed links like cable modem, their numbers are slowly building again. Thank God.

A good example of a BBS-moved-to-the-'net

[mrbill]

silverchat, a local multi-line (up to 100 users) chat system, reminds me a lot of the old BBS days. Check out silverchat's web page, telnet to silverchat.com, or "ssh -p 2323 silverchat.com". Great system, mostly local Austin people. Be warned, however - we're not friendly to outsiders. 8-)

Link vs. Net

[jeremyphillips]

Does anybody remember the old WWIV BBS software and it's network?

I used to go to a bunch of the WWIV (At least that's what I remember it being called, since I called it World War Four). But there were two competing networks for email. There was the "Net" where you could email anyone else on another Net system for free (some places charged a few pennies). Then a bunch of peope got fed up with some politics or something and started the "Link". Yeah, it took a couple of days for the email to travel cross country, but there wasn't another option back then. I lived in Virginia, and when one vacation in California, I was able to email back and forth with my friends in VA. Took about a day or two for messages to travel, but it was awesome at the time. No lonf distance, just a local call to BBS. Am I just crazy, or does anybody else remember this?

Synchronet BBS software coming back?

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the day, probably best BBS software was Synchronet. It did just about everything and did it better than anyone. Unfortunately the Web sort of killed the BBS software industry and Digital Man, the guy behind Digital Dynamics the company that made the software went on to do other nifty things - like put out CDs with his punk/pop band Weedpuller. DM re-released the software for free with source several years ago. The new rumor is that he's built a completely new, and still completely free, multiuser telnet server version of Synchronet. If this is true then real BBSes will live again for sure, this time on the net.

BBS's - Is it over?

[PRawk]

I'd say personally that the closest you'll get is a Mu* server, although they're usually geared towards gaming. I'm working on setting up a Mu* (proabably under TinyMux) that will be much more like a BBS, complete with ANSI screens, FREE-FORUM message posting, and file transfer links. Keep an eye out. If you can't wait for that, just do a google search ( http://www.google.com ) for Mud, MUSH, MUX, and surf away. I personally check out MushWarehouse and GODLIKE.com ( I don't remember the URL for Mushwarehouse, but godlike is at http://www.godlike.com ) Happy Hunting!

Web sites VS BBses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are BBSes dead? Nope, are they as popular? eh...probably not. Personally however, I long for the days of BBSes, due to the fact that the internet is full of the very idiots people talked of, in other posts. I can remember when AOL let loose it's hord onto the USENet. One forum I was on was clean, had a close nitch of people, and followed the rules. Within 6 months, the thing was LOADED with spam, mis-directed posts, and binaries. I left a year after that.

I ran a BBS for 2 years, around 87 or so, had 5 lines and a lot of fun. It had all the usual stuff, including a good set of people who debated, complained, faught and mainly had fun. We'd meet in the local pizza shop, and get lots of weird looks by the other people but it was fun.

It ceased being fun, when people started clamering for internet access. Back when ISDN was a joke, T-!s (or even fractial T-1s) was an overpriced joke.

Today, 10 years or so later, I see the internet as as a bunch of sewer mouthed kids, porn, and questionable people, with very weird ideas, and desires. True, 99% of the slashdot community are good folks, but I've met a few of these "others" and so have a lot of my friends. Including the people who I work for, in their homes, with their computers. Older folks (like 40+) who are just getting their first computers.

BBSes had one great advantage, that 99% of the web chat/BB don't have. That is monitored. A BBS could easly get rid of a pedophile, or someone raising a flame. Can't do that as easly on most web sites. Most folks today I talk to, say they're kind of scared of letting their kids on web chat areas, cause of this problem. There's many problems I see with web services, aside from the above. What about Web sites that are collecting data without your knowledge? True, a sysop could do the same, but he's not motivated by greed like these companies are. If you also got a problem, how many times have you recieved an answer from a big web service? I'm not picking on all web sites, but there is a growing problem I see, of web sites coming up that are too big, too sleezy, or plain don't give a byte about their customers...

There's a large, and growing community out there, of parents, 40+, and elderly people and even yes, kids, who are as intelligent as we are (cough :) but either don't have the thick a skin as we vets do, or plain just don't want to fool with the bull puncky of jerks. (I can relate to that...must be getting old :) I can see a need for a community that's monitored, and somewhat 'protected' - Think of a small town. Would you want someone like a pedophile in it if you know of them? That's kind of what BBS communities, are like. Everyone knew everyone, and everyone was friends.

Although my BBS isn't up yet, I've got a web page that is associated with it, and starting to be developed. http://members.tripod.com/~novus-cs

(Be sure to turn off javascript before visiting..mine doesn't have Java, or JS on it anyway.)

Are BBSes dead? No...but can they enjoy a resurgance? VERY possibly, and I personallity hope they do.

(But linux is the only way to go ;)

Re:Web sites VS BBses.

[WHiTe VaMPiRe]

Perhaps you want a 'safe' community but that would be best left to a BBS, or some other small 'community' outlet.

As far as the Internet, a large network of computers providing information, censorship would be in utterly poor taste. To say the very least.

Regards,

WHiTe VaMPiRe\Rem

They need to be small

[redhog]

There are, from what I know, a lots of BBSes out there, connected to the Internet in some way or another (Telnet is the most common, I think, but specialized clients do exist). But theeir existenses are held secret, since if they grow, they will be destroyd (The citizens of a large city are much more alien to each other than those of a small town).
An example is a client-server BBS-like system that was developed at my University - LysKOM. This system is up and running at many sites, and at our we are a few thousend users, divided up in disjunct "meetings". In most meetings there are just a few hundreds of members.
I don't think that those types of systems will ever die, but they are not intended for a broader public, and will hide, just as they hide before when computers wheren't common Joe toys... They won't die since they are needed. People need to form small societies.
They'l just never be connected to things like /..

Re: BBS's dead

[Mr. CBBS]

Well, as the co-inventor of the original BBS,
CBBS, I can say that the BBS concept is still alive and well, just moved from dialup to Internet based ones. I shut down the original about 8 years ago when the Internet became standard. The spirit is still alive everywhere, including at the home of the original. It was nice getting rid of the 12 fone lines and modems and instead having a conferencing system available via SDSL. My partner, Ward Christensen, has basicaly got out of the on-line community thing, but CBBS still lives on the conferencing system I still run and its small core of regulars.

The BBS's of the Internet: Social MU*'s.

[swdunlop]

As far as tight social groups go, I would suggest visiting your local Social MUD/MUCK/MUSH/MUVE/MOO/what-have-you. A good one to start off with would be Timescape MUCK, which is a light-roleplay, heavily social little muck that I pretty much live on. It's a lot like the old BBS days, except you really don't have file transfer. As for door games, the combat MUDs and heavy-roleplay MUSHes, like Shadowrun MUSH, Armageddon and the now defunct Hemlock MUSH seem to have taken over that role, as well as Asheron's Call, Ultima Online and the rest of the MMORPG pay-to-play services.

MUCKs, especially, have a very close-together feel to them, fostered by an open building policy. People can easily build new areas and add new code to the MUCK, allowing them to create homes, roleplaying areas and even games. The MUD community is in a bit of a transition right now, as the coders are moving on to fourth-gen servers, like ColdMUD and LambdaMOO, so we could certainly use an infusion of new blood.

Btw, you'll probably want to download a MUD client for connection.. I would suggest TkMOO-lite, since most everyone here has access to Tcl/Tk and probably has the urge to script and tweak things.

I beat you: VIC-20 w/ VicModem...

[Joseph Vigneau]

Ah yes, 300 baud, and we didn't have no stinkin' Hayes command set! I had to load the terminal program from tape (about 2 minutes), dial the (rotary) phone, wait for the tone, disconnect the headset, and plug it into the modem... But make sure the switch was in the 'originate' setting first!

23*22 charaters... You C-64 folks with 40 chars per line were spoiled... You even had more than 5K of RAM in that box.. Geez...

I remember using a teletypewriter in junior high. With acoustic coupler, no less.

-joev, old fogie at 23..

Re:best community

[Anonymous Coward]

>So they just want you to do a (html)(title)hi
>(/title)(body)yo mom(/body)(/html) ? lol....
>Llamas..

no, i think its just somebody having a laugh.

ANSI Art

[fishlet]

The thing I miss most about BBS's are the ANSI art galleries... some of them ANSI artists were really tallented. I remember my first BBS I was a member had a choice of color/b&w when I first logged in. It was good for those who still had measly 300 baud modems. Then there were the BBS games where you had so many turns a day. There was this space war game (forgot what it was called) that I was addicted to for months. Ahhh memories :-)

BBS != DEAD

[CAIMLAS]

Even though I was only in the BBS scene for a very short period of time near it's end, I was fairly involved.

My philosophy is make due with what you have. I've basically made my own BBS-like utopia. My current digital socialization is mostly over ICQ, AIM, and IRC (clients for linux) and through "wall"ing on various shell accounts. Most of these ppl are aquantances from IRL, and we frequently get together to have "GeekFests", gatherings where the Dew, music, and techno-rantings flow freely. Various junkfood, geek movies, and timeshare on the fastest available system is also frequent. The people that aren't local are generally geeks in arms that one of us met online, at a convention, or other event.

While online, we chat, transfer files, trade links and news articles, and even play the occasional game. Netris somes to mind, as does Quake, StarCraft, and others. It's a fairly well refined community, built around people that generally do the same things.

So, the BBS environment is not dead. It's merely changed shape through the innovation of protocols and the expansion of data transfer capabilities. It may be harder to find a place with a similar environment because there are so many new environments to choose from. So many different non-comp societies have popped up, it's hard to find the now-minority geek communes.

-------
CAIMLAS

BBSing isn't as fun anymore (and some BBSes)

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to run a large (read 5 line) local BBS, but ended up taking it down about a year ago. With the low cost of computers and the boom of the internet, the people who use them now, well, suck. There had never been such flaming, anti-social behaviour and complaining before the internet. I dunno, it's pretty sad. I still use several BBS', though. baronsys.com and tinys.oix.com which have local dialups and dump.com which doesn't anymore.

How to run TRADE WARS in linux.. or, the best BBS.

[xtal]

Come on guys! Let's be innovative, here. All the tools are right under your noses in your favorite linux distributions!

Linux is fully multiuser - three's your accounts. Linux has great support for dialin access, there's your modems. It also has killer networking support, as well - there's your telnet.

Want all those DOS online games? Set up a shell and run DOSEMU. Use DOSEMU to load the game. We're running Trade Wars 2002 and Operation Overkill II right now via telnet - ANSI even works in console mode. This works extremely well.

Who's online? Check out the finger command. Need chat? Fire up a local IRC server and you're off to the races!

People like quake? Set up your quake server on that good 'ol linux box.

Online message groups and discussion? That's what TRN is for, my friends. It doesn't take much to get local newsgroups set up and running..

File transfers? ftp! Need a web frontend? Apache is free...

I used to sysop a BBS, and I loved it. This is the next best if not better thing!

Kudos.. and don't fear the console :)

BBS are alive and well

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a number of great ones. Endless Forest survived the trip from dial-in to internet and still holds it's annual party in Omaha. In other forms, my wife is completely addicted to the Straight Dope message forums, which have a feel that really resembles the old BBS forums, complete with the occasional idiots, trolls, brilliant posts, and bad haiku. As a side note, the original post mentioned seeing who else was online. The vast majority of the best BBS I remember were single line systems. The only time two people online was when they were the user and the sysop. But that was long ago and it was far away and I was so much wiser than I am today. - bonsai -

find BSSs through FidoNet nodelist

[Tim Fraser]

Hi!

I got a list of BBSs in my area code by grepping the FidoNet nodelist. The nodelist lists BBSs worldwide, so this strategy should work for people outside my local area, too. You can get a copy of the nodelist by by web-searching for "nodelist" and "fidonet".

I was thinking of getting involved with FidoNet, but the feudal nature of their net-wide behavior policy turned me off. You can find info on FidoNet and their policies at www.fidonet.org.

- Tim

I evolved

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to run a free dialup BBS (in Venezuela), with doors and stuff. I remember I had so many callers that I had to reduce the daily time to 20 minutes per user. Then I evolved, my BBS still exists, and its not in the internet, its a dial-up BBS. You connect to the PPP server, and you have FTP areas, WWW (here I have my own domain ;) users have E-mail (now intead of QWK I use pop3) and the users have a quota for making their homepages, they can link to each other pages, etc. This is still a community. The problem is that I still have much to learn about CGIs, javascript and stuff, before I used to program in pascal my BBS. Email me to alanml@cantv.net if you want to share something with me.

There are pretty decent versions of BRE and SRE

[jandrese]

I'm sure you still remember Barren Realms Elite and Solar Realms Elite? Well, the guy who made those branched out into web based games a while back that still mostly capture the feel of the BBS games despite being HTMl based.

Check out Echelon Games for both of them. Be careful, just like BRE and SRE they are very addictive.

Re:There are pretty decent versions of BRE and SRE

[Amit J. Patel]

Correction: The guy who made Barren Realms Elite went on to do Falcon's Eye, Earth:2025, and Echelon Entertainment. The guy who made Solar Realms Elite became addicted to Slashdot and will get back into writing games when he finds more spare time. :-)

- Amit

Re:There are pretty decent versions of BRE and SRE

[Amit J. Patel]

Actually, what *really* tore me away from BBSes was LambdaMOO. It's still alive at telnet://lambda.moo.mud.org:8888/ and I'm still there as Mat (also Amit). I toyed with the idea of making a "door" game inside of MOO but I didn't have the time. :-(

- Amit

Re:There are pretty decent versions of BRE and SRE

[Toth]

A few years ago, I moved with my family to Halifax, Nova Scotia. I got a computer and modem at home for my youngest son who was not at all pleased about the move. Halifax, at that time had a very high bbs per household density and he quickly found a few home bbs's several of which were running BRE. Both my sons and myself played on the same BBS running inter-bbs registered league. My son later operated a bbs from our home which ran BRE Tradewars and several other games.

In Echelon's Utopia web game, A "Kingdom" is made up of 25 players. Each kingdom has an elected Regent. The kingdom regent has the power to moderate the kingdom's private discussion forum. The regent gets a small bonus in food production and income. He can also declare war, peace, etc.

In the BBS game of BRE, each BBS could have 25 players. The Sysop had the power to moderate the discussion forums. His bonus was that he didn't get busy signals when he wanted to manage his lands.

I think these games help build character, much in the same way as hockey or baseball.

In both the web and the bbs game by these authors, diplomacy becomes an important skill. I have seen swaggering, "Destroy all before us" types turned into wise leaders with good diplomatic skills.

The public discussion area outside the Utopia game has a similar flavour to the BBS discussion boards in days of old.

Some of the things that BBS's provided us are still alive.

Re:There are pretty decent versions of BRE and SRE

[munson]

If you actually want to find out where the
doorgames that the Patel brothers used to wrote are consider visiting the new programmer's site at
http://www.johndaileysoftware.com and they are Y2K compliant :)

MOO.ca

[Garak]

Check out MOO Canada, eh!. They offer free email, homepages, custom portals, etc... all programed in MOO.
We even have a Lord clone and a few other fun text based games(fishing, paintball, blackjack, roulet, etc...)
The moo is mainly targeted at youth and has strict policys(please read them).
telnet://moo.ca:7777

Resort, Forrest, Foothills ...

[Azul]

There are still some persons that spend lot of time in telnet-based talkers, kinda like MUDs. We have seen them slowly die in the last years. As I write this, I am currently logged into Resort (see their web site) and `There are ninety five people on the program' (when years ago you'd tipically see more than 200). They have their own community. You get to know the people that goes there frequently. I suppose that is, as many on this thread have said, the main difference between those communities and the ones like Slashdot. They have a total of 7719 accounts (accounts expire if you don't log in six months) when years ago the number was over 14000.

I invite you to check out Resort by telnet'ing to resort.org, port 2323. I am Azul there.

Alejo

Limited Sized Communities

[Christopher B. Brown]

Buckminster Fuller, in his book Critical Path, describes a town design where they were essentially going to put a dome over a city. The result would be that houses would not need roofs, and people would be able to essentially see across the whole town.

The size was going to be limited, not only because creating a really big dome would be prohibitive, but also because it could only work as the creation of a fairly small community.

It almost happened, but the degree of design compromise that was getting forced in by political "hacks" made it all fall through.

Computer technology is somewhat frightening in terms of just how many levels of scaling it involves.

bbs' may be dead but the spirit lives on

[betamax_]

This is a very interesting conversation because it deals with how communication networks actually effect our social environments. With bbs' you had to search around for a good one, which was usually physically located close to you. All this meant that you would almost immediately find like minded people in an intelligent forum. Maybe this was also because not everyone had a computer then. It was mostly geeks who were on bbs', but now everyone is on the internet. You are flooded with information. With usenet, mailing lists, and websites you can find millions of communities about a subject; but it is very hard to find a good one where the people are interested in quality conversation and you can form real relationships. It also has to do a lot with the people involved. Most of the people on the bbs' back in the eighties were teenagers and now they've grown up and moved ont o other things. They've been replaced with a different generation of teenagers. It is usally around this age that people adapt best to technology. I'm 14 and me and I have a lot of friends who I communicate solely with through email and chat (mostly java- irc isn't "cutting edge"). So if we as a wired society are moving away from sociality, then it is sure to be back when the next generation comes of hacking age.

telnet://toonland.novamarines.org

[Cebert]

Give us a visit.

And to those of you who feel BBSing is dead, you can just wallow in your idle IRC client, and enjoy your endless monkey porn. ;)

That Community Feeling

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to run a BBS and it was the center of my life and my community of friends. Of course we all lived in the same city and got together all the time. Frankly, I'm glad the old BBS scene is dead. I'm just as happy with the new BBS scene. I mean, really, dialup BBSs sucked. I could only afford one line, so there was only one user at a time. When I moved 300 miles away for two years, I couldn't afford to call my own BBS, although I made arrangements to keep it running. I had to have a friend e-mail me new posts and then posts things for me. The only reason I ever shut it down was because I was using a special cracked pirated commercial version of the software and when my hard drive crashed I couldn't find it again. My life was pretty depressing after the BBS went down. You just can't organize events and have free-roaming discussions in the same way with a phone and e-mail. So I ran a MOO for a while and that was great because we could all be on at the same time and chat. The message posting interface was terrible, though. I had to pay for space to run it on and eventually interest waned and I shut it down. Now I run a web-based forum using WWWThreads, some really sucky forum software. But posting is easy and I don't have to worry about long distance charges and no busy signals. I think it's way better than the old BBS days. True, no files or door games, but we were never into that. We mainly post. And it's all the same people. We mostly live in the same city, but those that have moved away can still participate easily. We have parties and go see movies together. My sense of community was dwindling to nothingness until I started the old BBS back up again with the new power of the web behind me. The software is pretty bad to maintain, but I'm working on writing a replacement. The best thing I've found so far as Citadel/UX, available on Freshmeat. It has a web interface, telnet interface, POP3, and clients for Linux, BSD, and Windows. Personally, I think that if you feel you lack an online community for your area, then you should start one. Or, if you're in Austin, TX, you can e-mail me and I'll tell you about some around here. cybermage@mail.utexas.edu

Re: BBS' are dead

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the best BBSs that is still very active IMO is grex cyberspace. Telnet cyberspace.org There are a lot of old time Unix hackers on this BBS including original TMRC members. This board has very active discssion boards similar to the WELL in its prime, in fact the picospan conf software is written by a Grex member Marcus Watts, so check it out.

Obstacles towards Web Communities

[stendahl]

I think there are a few problems with web communities.

One, that's already been mentioned, in the sheer number of people that can access any web page or USENET group. Related to that, is the lack, IMO, of any usable web-based discussion forum. No webboard I've used is able to put a thousand messages in readable for. One that could would be a big help.

A second problem is the horrible interaction that the internet provides. Real life encounters are incredibly more rich; imprinting them in our memories. No one remembers the poster of a message they read, they would remember the name of someone they had a talk on the street with. There needs to be some way to communicate with people over the web that provides more than just text.

Third there's the question of the basis of an online community. Real life communities tend to be based on shared experience, or close physical proximity, both of which encourage common interaction. On the internet, you'll probably never hear from most people again, and therefore don't feel as close to any of them.

Then, I would ask if Internet-based communities are even desirable. Shouldn't we just meet people in real life and use the Internet for keeping in touch with them, or for other uses altogether?

About the closest thing..

[Anonymous Coward]

The closest thing that I've discovered over the years is a place called The Resort. It's known as a talker. Has a lot of the legacy functionality of BBS's, plus a ton of modern functionality as well. It even "feels right", it's completely in real-time, has username/password support, ability to customize your own virtual enviornment and plenty (as in tens of thousands of users) of people to meet and chat with, not too mention a multitude of other interesting features like their online games. It's probably the largest non-distributed chat enviornment. If you want to check it out it can be found via telnet at resort.org 2323, or www.resort.org.

Re:About the closest thing..

[WHiTe VaMPiRe]

Talkers are poorly coded resource hogs. Many a talker has brought an excellent system to its knees, or at least crippled it. Not to mention a poor alternative to IRC.

Regards,

WHiTe VaMPiRe\Rem

Re:About the closest thing..

[Anonymous Coward]

4-5 years ago I would have agreed with you. Because at that time, they were exactly that, poorly coded resource hogs. However that was then, nowadays most talker codebases (such as ew-too and it's varients) have been completely rewritten in C++ by professionals, and individuals with years of programming experience. They have come quite a long way since their origins nearly a decade ago with Cheeseplant's house. They run extrememly efficiently, are very stable, and have a very minimal RAM/CPU footprint. As far as IRC is concerned, I wouldn't say either is "better" than the other, because they are each used for distinctly different purposes. Despite the fact that talkers are FAR more advanced and functional than IRC is in most reguards (username/passwords, channels, mail, news, rooms, full configurability, much much more), talkers do not have a file transfer protocol nor a distributed architecture.
It may have been previouslly pointed out, but The Resort is a good example of one of the "modern" talkers of today. Just like anything else, everything has it's purpose.

Alive and well.

[Fict]

BBS's are alive and well, as long as you know where to look. Check out english.gh0st.net. There's quite a lively and intelligent group of people who correspond there.

------------------

IRC communities - in a different way

[Patola]

This one I have to say for Brazil. We have a different culture for IRC here. From the beginning IRC in Brazil created the tradition of IRC meetings, something we call IRContros ("IRCounters").

This is not the same concepts as other countries. IRcontros are like going to a date, party or very informal meeting. Some IRC channels make daily or weekly IRContros.

As long as I know, this is something unique to Brazil. I've even contacted people who are doing their master thesis on it and they say the same thing. In other countries, the "IRC meetings" are very different from ours. They don't get even close to the unifying feeling of an IRContro.

This provides an awesome community feeling and bursts your social life. It is wonderful to see the internet uniting people instead of isolating. No place for "socially-impaired nerds" here.

As a former "socially-impaired nerd", I can say IRC pretty much cured me from my isolation and even brought me a lot of girlfriends.

Patola

The Internet obsoletes BBSes

[Tom Christiansen]

Here's my premise: the isolated BBS world cannot survive in the face of point-to-point IP. You'd think I would be in the right age group to play with BBSes. But I didn't (well, except to write one for pay once). How come? Because I was always on the Internet, so it seemed silly to BBS. Now that everyone is on the Internet, the same effect has occurred on a broader scale. No one bothers.

Not counting strange experiences of the PDP-11 and RSTS/E kind in the late 70s, by the time I hit the net in the early 80s, my peer group had already passed the BBS scene by light years. You see, we had the Internet. We had Usenet and Internet mailing lists, so we already had plenty of non-real-time discussion forums. For file exchange, we'd just compress, uuencode, shar, them and mail them to each other. For file archive repositories, we just used ftp. And for real-time, well, it started with talk, then moved on to ytalk, and some folks eventually got stuck in IRC, muds, and the like. I'd talk to friends around the country in real time, leave messages for them over night, all the things we do today. There was no cause for a BBS.

What I'm saying is that the reason you don't have garage-style BBSes much anymore is that the Internet renders them redundant. And I point out that for the community that was already on the Internet back in the 80s, we saw no reason to bother with the small and localized world. Now, not everyone was a major arpanet hub with its own imp, so the Internet came later to users than to us Unix programmers who were lucky enough to be on the real Internet back before it got invaded. But even after the invasion, one could always find one's own clique somewhere.

Look at what happened to "mass-market" BBS style access providers, like Prodigy and Compuserve. Once the real internet hit the masses, nobody wanted a closed world. You see, given a large and open world, you can create closed pockets. But you can't go the other way around. If you start out cut-off and closed, there you say.

Re:The Internet obsoletes BBSes

[Belgand]

YOu're entirely correct. You never needed BBSes b/c that's what you had on the early internet. While the rest of us were doing the same sort of things through BBSes you had those opprotunities through the internet. While it may not have been local (and in my opinion, that does take some of the joy away) it was a small, tightly-knit community. You can still find your cliques b/c you never had to deal with switching mediums as the rest of us did. BBSes were rather different and I have, as of yet, not run into any of my good friends back from the day on the Internet.

The "mass-market" BBS style providers died not b/c they were a closed world, but b/c they were a large closed world. They had their system, a large system but with the intimacy of a BBS, with the mass invasions of the internet they died b/c large systems were better and easier to find elsewhere, not b/c large, open systems are necessarily better.

BBSes: Past and Present

[WHiTe VaMPiRe]

As a result of this discussion/Slashdot post I have written an editorial for my Web site. I thought that it may be of interest to the Slashdot community, or at least the people participating in this discussion.

You can read the editorial at: http://projectgamma.com/news/editorials/bbses.shtm l

Regards,

WHiTe VaMPiRe\Rem

BBSes are alive and well.

[Shag]

By the late 1980's, the Citadel BBS program originally written around 1980 for CP/M by Jeff Prothero (aka Cynbe Ru Taaren) had been ported to the DOS PC, Mac, Atari ST, Amiga, C-64, C-128, and (courtesy of Ignatius T. Foobar) UNIX. Citadel/UX ran on QuartzBBS at quartz.rutgers.edu from 1989-1994, and still runs at bbs.fdu.edu, bbs.k2nesoft.com, and bbs.quartz.org (Quartz II). A derivative, DOC (Dave's Own Citadel) is used for the ISCA BBS at bbs.isca.uiowa.edu. If you used a Citadel on any other platform way back when, you should feel right at home.

The Viewdata community

[Joel Rowbottom]

Here in the UK I used to fondly use Viewdata bulletin boards such as Cyclone, The Cellar, CCl4, Optix, Chipboard and the suchlike. Based upon the Teletext character set (think Prestel) and populated for the most part by BBC Micro users, the community was great and to a certain extent was killed off when ANSI boards came round. Indeed, the infamous Steve Gold/Robert Schifreen "Prince Phillip" hack was carried out on a Viewdata system in 1984 - as detailed in Hugo Cornwall's Hackers Handbook (now out of print) and Approaching Zero: Data Crime And The Computer Underworld (still in print, published by Faber&Faber).

Now, as James Lawson puts it on the CCl4 web site, the ANSI board is all but dead. Most boards have been surpassed by the Internet and indeed FTP sites and websites as you rightly state; Fido feeds have been surpassed by Usenet; message areas by maillists. It's back to information provision and suchlike.

There has been, for some years now, a Viewdata Revival going on, which puts forward many of the arguments. Unfortunately the website is a bit stale but it does give you a sort-of hail back to the days of CARBBS, XFS+ and EBBS board hosts running on 32k BBC Micros with (if you were lucky) 20Mb Winchester hard disks - none of this 24Gb filespace and 18 CDs online rubbish.

There are several Viewdata bulletin boards now online on the Internet, run from Acorn Archimedes machines using Gareth Babb's excellent VHost software. Mine is called Haven and you can get to it without even a Viewdata emulator, by using the online Java-based client. Alternatively there are bits of software you can use to access them.

Of course, there are still ANSI boards available via telnet - the UserFriendly one immediately springs to mind. But you still won't get back the sort of thing which you had with Viewdata.

Hope this enlightens at least some ;)

Joel.

Wiki Wiki

[tauzell]

An interesting BBS type of forum that is popping up are Wiki sites.

Wiki sites are really just editable web pages. Somebody starts a page on some topic and then others add to it. You can go in and change what you said a week ago or add something new.

They can be quite nice as the 'editing' feature allows authors to refine what they said eariler.

Re:Internet - Web is to BBS as TV is to books

[Angst Badger]

I hope not. I can't imagine that the net could be dumbed down any more than it already has without becoming TV.

My BBS experience.

[Crixus]

I must say that in my 16 years of owning a modem and being online in one form or another, that I do miss the old mid 1980's BBS scene in which I used to participate. It seemed to be a close-knit community that actually engaged in real conversations. We seemed to know one another, or get to know one another on the BBS.

By 1985 I enjoyed it enough to actually start my own BBS, running CP/M on a Kaypro I, running software called CITADEL (thanks CrT for your great freeware BBS software).

My BBS was single user (naturally) and ran at 300/1200 baud on my Hayes Smartmodem 1200 (which cost me over $350 back then, and that I still have).

After a year or two I went to what we locally called a "Hamfest" (before they were computer fests) and bought an XT clone and started running the MSDOS version of Citadel (thanks Hue Jr. for your freeware Citadel for MSDOS which extended CrT's original code) which had more features and networked. That was fun. I eventually hooked up a US Robotics 9600 HST to that system which I bought through the USR "Sysop Deal" (and that I also still have) for $500!

By the early 1990's more and more kids were getting modems for Xmas and my BBS and the whole local scene slowly began to lose it's charm. This was probably due to the sheer numbers of new users that we for the most part never got to know. This was probably more OUR fault as the old users since we probably thought of them as new meat and didn't make them feel as welcomed as we should have. But I must say that they did SEEM like little punk kids! :-)

I think I ended up taking my BBS offline in 1992 or thereabouts. (I still have that XT with the BBS on it sitting next to me exactly as it was the day I took it down. The XT is powered on and seems to be Y2K ready!)

I do miss the old BBS scene and do find the web less charming than my BBSing days, and in some ways less enjoyable. So for the most part I think the BBS community scene is dead vis-a-vis the BBS. But I think that spirit can be resurrected in LUG's and other user groups.

Having said that, I will say that I do enjoy the web for its power and what is allows me to do, and I wouldn't trade it for anything, despite its lack of charm. :-)

Right now I am considering putting up a Multi-User Citadel system running Linux and making it Telnet-able. There is a GREAT version of Citadel for UNIX which compiles nicely under Linux (Thanks Ignatious T. Foobar for your GPL UNIX version of Citadel). All I need is a better net connection.

Who says you can't go back home? :-)

While you probably can not, it will be an interesting experiment since most of the old users are kicking around the internet and will be able to telnet into the system.

As a postscript, if anyone would like to see my Kaypro I with Hayes 3/12 sitting on top as it would have looked many years ago, I submitted the photo to the Obsolete Computer Museum, and perhaps one day Tom will actually put it online! :-)

My telnet chat servers are not too big at all.

[invenustus]

For two and a half years now, I've been a regular (under the name MacHiNe) at Subway Chat. It runs a system called NUTS which runs on almost any Unix, as far as I know. It's based in Victoria, Canada, and most of its users are from the British Columbia area, but that hasn't stopped me, a Philadelphian, from meeting people from my area there, and people in England. Populating the community is difficult for a startup talker, but it CAN be done, and when it is done, you have a nicer place than one that's built around one common interest (e.g. Star Trek) because you don't have to deal with constant flamewars.

Re:Pirate's Cove?

[Mo B. Dick]

Actually Pirates Cove was an old warez/hacking BBS if you look at some old hacking text files you always see an ad for it!

some went private

[hawk]

It hasn't necessarily disappeared, but perhaps just changed form.

Several years ago, our football newsgroup was overrun with yahoos from another team, and we formed an open mailing list. This too quickly became obnoxious, and a handful of us sececeded and formed a private list--invitation only. It runs off topic as often as on-topic, which is how we like it. It has the flavor of the old small BBS's.

THen again, the multi-line BBS's were on the rise about the same time I moved and stopped using them (1990), so my take may be a little different.

At times, I toy with a hybrid of these ideas on the internet--a general site, with open access to the lower levels, with users being invited up as they show signs of intelligence/conscious thought.

someday, in my spare time . . .

Re:some went private

[S_hane]

That would actually be a fairly decent way of running things.

Intelligent thought seems to be limited to a fairly small subset of the total number of people who post on a particular topic.

For instance, in any one SlashDot thread, out of 200-odd posts, there might be 20 that are REALLY worth reading (if you're lucky), and anothe 20-30 that are worth reading.

A layered system, where people could post in certain "circles" by invitation only, but anybody could read any of the circles (or perhaps even restrict reading of the highest levels by the lowest levels...) might help to keep the 40-50 intelligent posters talking with each other, and restrict the 10-20 odd flame-idiots to the lowest of lows.

However, some potential problems:

* (This one is particularly near-and-dear to me, coming from Australia) - often I see an intelligent post that hasn't been moderated up because it was posted too late in the day. Over here, we only get to post stuff well after discussions have ended over there in Yankeeland. I think the reason for this is that slashdot is organised on a day-by-day basis. After discussions are more than a day or two old, they die.

* Different people have different concepts of "intelligent discourse". For instance; some people quite like sardonicor sarcastic humour; others think of this as flaming. Some think that (say) a post discussing the horrors of certain OSs highlights some interesting points, while others treat the post as a personal attack.

* Somebody needs to do the rating; they need to do it _VERY_ well, or (as we have seen on SlashDot DESPITE the magnificent service that it offers to the online community) they will get flamed. You can't have automatic ratings based on volumes of postings. You can't have a small subset of people rating often. It needs to be community-based. Perhaps a vote - "Does the 'seventh heaven' want member X to join?"), with more than 50% of the members of the 'seventh heaven' having to say yes. This way the prejudices of each circle are maintained - the majority of the people within that circle would then be happy.

Well, that's all I can think of right now.

-Shane Stephens

new technology

[MillMan]

Others have said they have been dead for a while now and I'd have to agree. The web simply offers more as far as connectivity.

BBS's have a kind of "community" feel for several reasons. They are relatively small, the users are generally local, and especially, they are devoid of commercial content.

Has there been a good model for that "community" feel on the web (or BBS feeling as he calls it)? There has to be a few, but not any that I know of. Most "local" type webpages (for that community feel) are either highly commercialized (sidewalk.com type stuff) or run by local government types (*.us domains) which maybe have community news, but no forums, and are generally bland. The commercial aspect really prevents anything interesting, everything revolves around materialism.

I think slashdot is good, but you can't get that local community feeling here because this is the web of course, it reaches around the world. I'd rather have it this way however, for obvious reasons. There is no need to isolate yourself, and no need to romanticize the past. The web is a Good Thing, even when it's often used otherwise.

old skool

[Anonymous Coward]

catfur proterm special emulation pcp/telenet altos chat via tymnet manually switching the modem from answer to originate mci codes acos/macos, gbbs, ddbbs, metal dalton disk disintegrator

Local BBSs vs a world-wide web

[Charlie Kinbote]

My first encounter with a BBS was done on an original 5-slot IBM PC with a 300bps modem. I posted messages and I DL'd software. It was great fun. But these boards were all 'local.'

That was then; this is now.

At least twice a day I check into a web BBS that focuses on my interests; the regular participants are literally world-wide. For real-time chat I have a choice of IRC channels of interest to me. Again, I encounter people from all over the world.

After my retirement, thanks to cheap air fares I began to travel to places just to meet people whom I'd encountered on the 'net; I even endured the 17-hour non-stop flight from Los Angeles to Sydney. In all these places my hosts provided me with wonderful experiences a tourist would miss.

All this and Slashdot too!

You can have the good old days.

The BBS's may be gone but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The communities are still around. I met most of my current freinds some years ago through a local BBS and even though hardly anybody ever call it anymore we still all hang out and have "Socials" (for those of you not farmiliar a social is just a get together of bbs users so people get a chance to put a face to the handles) and all together we have a very tight "family" that always remembers everybodies birthdays and we always get together for the holidays and such. All this sprouted from a small WWIV bbs with a handful of lines and lots of creative East SF Bay souls. If anybody out there lives in the SF Bay Area drop me a line through email at dfn_doe@pacbell.net and I'll give you the low down on the next social. And add you to the announcment mailing list if you're interested.

TI-994/A

[Elvii]

Wow... thought nobody else remembered those anymore... that was the first computer I used, complete with tape recorder and later, big silver box that had the 5 1/4 floppy drive, thermal printer ability, etc. Now I do feel old, and still under 25. :)

To be slightly on-topic here, I never used a bbs untill we got a 286, and added a modem to it.. but remember a good BBS Called Dark Side of the Moon that had users, good files, doors, etc... everything that I've seen mentioned in this thread. Those were the days. :)

bash: ispell: command not found

Gee, that's nice.. But it's NOT the same.

[Skwirl]

I'm glad to hear that some of you still have online communities to hang out on. I'm sure at least one of the larger BBSes have moved to telnet in many areas. But, it's not the same. Why? At least in Portland, OR, all the big BBSes that did move to the net survived that long for one reason: Major MUD or other forms of online gaming. Intelligent conversation died in most places many years ago. If you're lucky enough to still have an intelligent community to turn to, I envy you.
Why should I go play TradeWars on the UFie BBS? It won't be the same, because the fun part of TW was dominating boards where nobody was smart enough to get a commision on the first day after big bang, and then blowing them out of the water once they did. =)
And sure, I get my fix for intelligent forums on Slashdot, but what all those fun religious debates between friends that never turned into flamewars? Or the bi-yearly pizza/frisbee/bowling meets? No, I'm sorry, but you can't do that with internet communities.
And remember all those online women you met? Err, oh yeah, that never happened... But at least if it did, you wouldn't have to fly halfway across the country to have an awkward first meeting, you could just go to the local mall.
I'm even nostalgic for the obnoxious newbies who would come in flaming their mouths off and you could tell them "Press ALT-H for Sysop access."
And most annoying and depressing of all, when I'm on AOL Instant Messanger and I go "AFK" or "BRB" or "ROFL", people don't know WTF I'm talking about.
Ah well, it's not like I have the time anymore to spend 12 hours online everyday photoning people who try to get to the Stardock.

Hotline? Carracho?

[Noer]

What about Hotline? Besides being the seamy realm of warez and pr0n, there are many private or quasi-private true BBS sites... Mac Gaming Ledge has a great Hotline site, for example. And though Hotline is starting to suck hardcore with the newer releases, there are alternatives like Carracho. www.hotlinesw.com www.carracho.com

nice going dumb ass

[Anonymous Coward]

You just killed all the bandwith and that site is going to be full from now untill 2005. Now its always gona be full with those 31337 waReZ d00dz/Slashdotters with their cablemodems as they try to archive the whole site. I really wish some people would think be for they post...

off-topic, read anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

--

There are things better left unknown

Telefinder BBS

[Anonymous Coward]

I still run a Telefinder BBS server (by Spider Island Software) on a Mac for clients wishing to dial in directly. We have a couple of regular users who choose it over the internet alternatives. Maybe because it's very easy and very reliable. As a concession to modern times, I have made the the same server available over TCP/IP (207.0.205.71:1474) but nobody has ever used that feature.

150 people in a social group.

[hypatia]

I've also heard of a theory that the human brain has evolved to deal with about 150 people.

Yeah. Apparently that was deduced from the size of the neo-cortex in the brain.

And the number is only that large because we use language to nurture and manipulate social relationships. Other primates use grooming. I think I read an estimate that we'd need to spend 40% of our time cleaning each other to maintain a social group that large.

Here's a preprint of the relevant paper - Co-evolution of neocortex size, group size and language in humans.

Quoth the page:

Dunbar, R. I. M. (1993). Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (4): 681-735.
The final published draft of the target article, commentaries and Author's Response are currently available only in paper.

BBS's

[Jami]

I still run one, have since 1985, but it's going down soon. I haven't touched it myself in over a year. It's running Major BBS on a dos machine, you can telnet to it at y2k9.org (used to be partyline.com until I sold the domain name). Lot's of old files to download, play LORD and Tradewars....

An example of the Next Generation

[kovacsp]

I believe there is a website that has a lot of the features you just described. Check out http://www.knowpost.com and you'll see a thriving community that has a "Who's online", an internal messaging system, and an "almost" freeform discussion mechanism. It's quite cool really. One of the best communities on the Internet as far as I'm concerned.

The internet killed the BBS star?

[whocares]

One of the things that was charming about most BBSes is that they were little niches, little cliques of likeminded people. Idiots got their accounts killed, and the sysop was god, period. Often they were tied to a geographical area (especially for those of us who couldn't afford long distance bills and didn't have the technical prowess to avoid them =]) and physical meets were not only possible but frequent.

I think as much of BBS culture came from it being isolated as internet culture comes from it being distributed. Culture and community is bred when the same people interact with each other daily - something that in the vast open spaces of the internet just doesn't happen. Too many newsgroups, WAY too many web-boards.

Some of the most bbs-like communities you'll see are on special interest mailing lists (I've belonged to car mailing lists that really reminded me of those days, and the pregnancy list I'm on reminds me of it as well, but hey, you can guess which group of people is more technically savvy. =]).

I think most people who were once part of BBS culture miss it a lot, and I know a lot of people who have tried to re-create it, but it requires an investment of time on not only the part of the sysop but of the users - and who has time to do that when you have to read slashdot, freshmeat, userfriendly, suck, salon, cnnnews, and bugtraq? Most people I knew had a handful of bbs'es they were active on, and spent a LOT of time on them.

It seemed like most BBSes died when the old core of people who gave them character moved on to the internet, abandoning their BBS roots. Some BBSes became ISPs for a short time, some became web pages, some just stuck around until the sysop got bored.

People go somewhere else for everything they got on BBSes - interaction, files, games... but it was everything in one place that made it unique, and I kind of doubt there will ever be a true resurgance of that.

Would you want to go back?

[Ion-Flux]

...to the way it used to be?
I'm 15, and spend most of my time discussing physics/philosophy on irc. I consider that my community, and i love it. But now and then I come accross one of those telnet bbs like systems, or I read about them in *.txt. They seem so much more complex than what we now have, like the ruins of a long dead civilization. And i ask myself: "self, did you miss all the fun?".
What i'd like to know is if those of you who've lived thru the development of all this prefer or dislike the 'modern' community relative to the BBS community?

Re:Would you want to go back?

[VValdo]

As a sysop circa 1985, I can say I do miss some of it, but then again, what was a young 14 year old like me doing on bbs's in 1985 when I shoulda been out meeting people in real life?

I dunno, the "GT" parties were fun. It was fun to customize GBBS in MACOS (anyone remember ProTalk? How about an online text-video game called Turbo Run?)

Ah well...overall the Internet is better. It's BBSing plus a lot more

W
-------------------

Re:Would you want to go back?

[Fourthstring]

I certainly miss them, though I would not go back since I no longer have the time to devote to such an intense thing. Well... You might be interested in BLaH tfiles (txt files) here. A lot of it was looking for places that hopefully were not too far away, for interesting files and/or discussions.

Re:Would you want to go back?

[Jeff Archambeault]

Ah, GBBS...thanks for shaking the memory of MACOS loose. :)

Spent many an hour working on my Apple ][gs (a whopping 1.8MB of drivespace!), but then came FIDONet and a 286 running Binkley/QBBS, then D'Bridge and SuperBBS. Those were the days. The things one could do with a 2400 baod modem and 128k of RAM :)

Re:Would you want to go back?

[deepgeek]

I feel like I missed out on that whole time period. I wish I had an Altair. I mean, I look at the computer I'm sitting at. I can see the processor right now, and the ram, and the video card. I'm somewhat versed in the _theory_ of it all, but I have really no conception of any of it. As much as I hate it, I am a mindless drone that has learned how to use a tool, but has not learned the tool itself. I want to understand whats happening.

To many layers of abstraction. We're too far removed from the basis of the Art. Maybe corporations are glad it's so easy. Maybe people all over the world that are sharing information effortlessly are happy. But I'm not. I'm merely a wriggling little user.

I just feel like I missed something. I wish I could find it.

Re:Would you want to go back?

[Felinoid]

Theres a lot of advantages of the Internet over BBSes thats a given however as much as has been gained a lot was lost.
The Sysop never had specal hardware/software requirements. If you could call one BBS you could call them all. You were never forced to use defective software or expensive hardware.
Some BBSes let you access the operating system directly such as RCPM systems and a Forth BBS.
Everything was basicly free. Excluding the LD phone rates. But if you called only local BBSes you didn't have to worry about that.
Issolated BBS communitys ment the goofballs had there own BBSes and you never had to deal with them at all where as with the BBS we all have to make an effort to get along and there will allways be a few who try to mess things up for everyone else.
But what I really miss is more of a byproduct of the times not directly a BBS thing. A few people would call for censorship of BBSes akin to the CDA and other efforts. The calls to censor BBSes fell on deff ears as only BBS users knew what a BBS was. If your ignorent enough to believe the rantings then you wouldn't know what a BBS was and thusly not understand the rantings in the first place.
Picture this:
Lunitic: We have to ban thies evil pronographic gif files on BBSes
Senitor: Shure I'll support a tax on expensive gifts..

Well it is Slashdot...

[CrAlt]

If you want your post to get moderated up just put in the topic: "Microsoft=Evil" or "Linux r00lz" or "Linus is God, ph33r!". Its not that hard to figger out. :)

FirstClass BBSes like PlanetMUG exist

[KFury]

While they have evolved from the Hermes and Fido BBSes of old, there are still a bunch out there and some have successfully migrated their paradigm to the internet.

My favorite examples are FirstClass systems. They have real forum areas, real chat, the ability to 'yell' at other people who are online right now, their own internal email systems, file upload and downloads, and they work seamlessly with dialups and TCP connections at the same time.

check out PlanetMUG, the evolutionary step of the Berkeley Mac User's Group, as an example. You can take a look at a slideshow tour at http://www.bmug.org/planet. Please don't spam about commercialism. I'm just citing it as a societal example, not hawking on /. .

They're out there, but they don't have the viral growth potential of usenet or mailing lists, which is why, for better or worse, they've largely fallen to the wayside.

Kevin Fox
www.fury.com

Re:the 386sx. and the 16 color monitor..and the MO

[Anonymous Coward]

A 386? As recently as about 5 years ago, there was one popular local BBS here running on an 8088. I think they upgraded the modem to 14400. The modem was worth more than the computer, and the computer was probably slowing the modem down...

I still have my BBS.

[CrAlt]

It was more like the local ghetto of BBS's. It was a Laser Turbo (turbo ment it was 10Mhz and not 4.77, ph33r!) XT. It had dual ST-225 MFM HD's (20Megs each) and a good old Hays External 2400BPS smartmodem. It ran on JetBBS and if there was a shareware/free door game out their i had it on the system. I would go away for one weekend only to come back and find the HD's full with warez or something like that.

The game in my calling area wasnt LORD, it was the multiBBS games called Planets (I think thats what it was called) and Falcon's Eye. At 12:00am or so they would all dial some server and download all the moves. So you ended up having BBS vs BBS. There was always a rush to see who could get connected 1st at 12:10am so you could get the 1st moves.

Re:free, multiplayer, bbs-style strategy game...

[Sun Tzu]

Well, not quite tradewars, but completely rewritten for the Internet. Check out starshiptraders.com either using a web browser, or, for you original BBSer's, telnet straight in to port 23.

The SST design is derived from Czarwars, one of several tradewars-genre BBS door programs from the '80s. SST has been online in various forms for three years and is still in beta testing. It's pretty solid but remains in testing due to endless feature creep. ;)

We are currently running 10 games in an on-going ladder-style tournament. The games all reset on Thanksgiving (Thursday) and each has room for a few hundred more players. There are usually about 500 active players (well, active ships -- it's hard to tell how many actual people log in). The web mode serves about a half million pages a week and accounts for 75% of the traffic -- with the remainder of the activity being through telnet.

BBS-Feeling Web Site

[KlomDark]

I agree that you don't get the same feeling with the average "web community" type site that you used to get back in the good old BBS days.

I've been trying to find a happy medium for a web page and a BBS. I looked at the HTML interface for Citadel/UX, and it's just terrible. I figured there has got to be a way to move the feel to a web browser. A way to take the group interaction of the forum posting, but also the personal feel of being able to see who else is there with you and be able to send personal messages to other people who are there.

It's way early in the coding, but it does work. It combines a forum interface somewhat similar to the one here on Slashdot, but also adds the ability to show Who's On, and send messages between logged in users. Dunno if it'll stand up to the /. effect, but hopefully it will. You are welcome to try it out at: http://24.3.245.223/MessageBase/

[My hard drive just shuddered in fear! :) ]

TradeWars!? DEAD?!

[Alpha42]

Nobody told US that!
Okay, seriously though... boards are still around, tradewars is still around (and getting developed still!)... we're all just a little harder to find these days tucked away under all the fluff on the net. :)

BBSes, reinvented...

[Robotech_Master]

BBSes, I feel, were a strong example of the human need to build a community with like-minded people.

I'm one of those people who you might say spans two worlds; I got into college in Fall, 1991, here in Springfield, Missouri. One of the first things I did was figure out how to make the university's modem pool dial out and voila...a new universe of BBSes presented itself to my wondering gaze. Likewise, there was a student-run campus BBS on the ISN (Information Systems Network, a primitive networking system something like a cross between a phone system and Ethernet) with 8 connections (later expanded to 16) which featured chat and message boards, but no doors. It was called COEPIS, for the College of Education & Psychology which was where it was located, and nobody could quite figure out how to pronounce the name. I still have a T-shirt from it.

I made a lot of friends on COEPIS, a couple of whom I still know now--they're employed by the university, I'm still studying at it, the eternal student. But COEPIS wasn't long for the world; it only lasted a couple of years, more on that in a bit...

I got accounts on a dozen different BBSes, soon whittled down to one or two as my interest dwindled. I dabbled a bit in FidoNet, too. I made friends via COEPIS, and a few acquaintances through the local BBSes; I even schlepped down to the weekly BBS get-together at a local pizza joint a couple of times. This was sort of a community within a community...all the geeks could get together and talk about computers and things. We weren't completely likeminded, but we were closer than a lot of the other people in the town.

BBS doors were kind of fun for a while, but didn't really hold my interest too much, because I discovered...the Internet. I came into the computer lab one day, noticed some of my COEPIS friends doing something that looked interesting, and said, "Hey, how do I get into that?" "I'll set you up." Thus came my first encounter with the Internet: MUCKing via RexxTalk on a VM/CMS box. In those days, Internet was not a gratis-for-all-students deal; it was a "get a faculty sponsor so you can get an account" sort of thing.

Gradually, as time marched on, the Internet became much more accessible, students got an honest-to-god Unix box to play on and Ethernet replaced ISN...and COEPIS died. The Internet killed it.

The Internet made it possible to find people who were >90% interest matches, rather than the 60-70% that were the closest local BBSes came, just because there was suddenly a much greater pool of people to search through. There were whole newsgroups (mailing lists, chat forums, eventually webpages, etc.) devoted to niche interests, be they anime, Star Trek, belly-button lint collections, or almost anything you could think of. Once it became available to The Great Unwashed Masses, how could something with a strictly local focus possibly compete?

We have the same functions available to us via the Internet as we did on local BBSes. E-mail, USENET and mailing lists for discussion groups, IRC/MU*/ICQ/webchat for chat forums, and so forth. The only difference is that there are many more participants now, and we're not guaranteed to find the same people in one area that we know in another. Our community is that much greater in scope.

Of course, we do sacrifice the community closeness inherent in the BBSes...but do we really miss it enough to want to use it? I don't know...I haven't checked in with the local BBSes in a couple of years; I'm not sure how many people still do use them. I suppose that for the old-timers, and the people who still have a lot of fast friends in the area, there's still some appeal...but for this new, younger generation, I expect that the rapid explosion of the 'net more or less speaks for itself.

Some of those door games, revisted...

[gothic]

In case anyone cares to play a 'net-wide version of Tradewars. You can find it here:

http://www.shareplay.com/spacemerchant/


It's still pretty devel last time I played, but very stable.
I might also tell you about Utopia, which can be found here:

http://games.eesite.com/utopia/


Kind of a LORD/Usurper/TW2000 feel game..Fantasy, of course. You might like them, you might not. Personally, I don't because I liked TW(2000) being only a 100 people or so max. But...Enjoy. On a side note, Space Merchant is *really* nice on a fast-fast connection...Enjoy

BBS's arn''t dead yet.......

[Anonymous Coward]

In replay to an amail posted by Cliff about BBS's, I had to write to say that not all BBS's are dead. True though they are a dying breed. Even the old IRC style chat rooms are falling prey to the new Voice chat rooms. But if you look hard, there are a few good BBS sites still operating. For example, Flux BBS on Termisoc.org has been going for a long time now, and is reguarly updated. It has its loyal users, and is easy and quick to use. It has all the standard BBS options as well as few new ones.

Although the new rooms look very fancy, you still can't beat the good old BBS. And to be honest, i find them easier to use, with more features than any other style of chat / conference room.

- Jock - http://flux.termisoc.org

Seperation of Real life, and... Not

[eksos]

Well, reading all these posts, I've kinda thought a bit about things.. If you used to BBS, then chances are you want that feel back, the localness of the community, so on.. If your just new the internet, chances are that you love that you can talk to everybody all over the world, in one way or another. I agree that it's really cool having a local BBS, where you can dial in, and only people in your area hang out there, but the internet is about communication over long distances, with lots of people. I think of it this way: Telnet BBS's, online chat rooms, MUD/MOO/etc., usenet, it's all just a close, specialized virtual community. When you're there, it's like you live there - the same place where all kinds of people with broadly (maybe very close to-) the same interests as you live. It's just like a different life kinda. That's on one side, then the opposite side is RL -- Hopefully you know something about this. Then, in between is the dial up BBS. It gives you the togetherness of RL, but also combines in the ability to find people with more-or-less the same interests as you, and also give you the communication and sharing features of most internet communities. It's kinda a ratio of how much you like talking with people with your same interests, and how much you need to know people in RL... if nobody needed to know RL people, we'd all be connected to VR helmets, mounted in large buildings where all our waste and food was managed by machines.. But people tend to need a RL connection with people, it's just a matter of your RL:interest ratio. Eventually the internet will mold itself into exactly the right ratio, just like nature, it'll go back and forth, slowly getting closer each time, then we'll have it. Prepare for BBSs to come back ;)

Maxx

They just aren't called BBS's...

[78spb89]

And further more, since everyone uses them now, and most of the people on the net have no clue about BBS's, and very little intrest in technology, or discussing it, they've basicly turned into talkers. Not that anyone would read this (I'm way behind in my reading/posting today) but I have been wanting for quite a while to set up a "talker" if you will, for the discussion of coding, hardware, and other geek related subjects. My only question is, who would be intrested in such a thing? Is anyone willing to rally around such an idea?
if (OS==Linux && segfault) {edit_source()} continue;
if (OS==Windows && illegal_operation) {
fdisk();
return Linux;

Hotline, hx :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved BBS's myself, but found a similar community in Hotline. There is hxd(www.krazynet.com/hx/) which is a free client for unix, and there are several graphical clients in progress(one of which I'm currently working on). Although there's no doors, it's pretty close with news, chat, and files. You just have to make sure not to get lost in the pr0n and w4r3z sites. The rest are full of pretty cool people, like me :) pd.cyberdream.net:55500. That's where I hang my hat, because it reminds me of BBS's

Pirates Cove=Gay bar

[CrAlt]

There is a gay bar named The Pirates Cove in my city...dont think ill log on to a BBS named after it

sure

[CrAlt]

I would try it...even tho im not 100% sure what a talker is :)

What Makes a Community a Community

[goliard]

Several things are necessary for a group of people to feel "Community". One such thing is a high density of interpersonal relationships.

It's not enough to know (of) a group of people through some public forum. A sense of community only arises when a large number of people each have a one-on-one relationship of some kind with each of a large number of other people (in the same group).

If you don't have those private relationships, you may become emotionally invested in the *idea* of the group, without having any sense of belonging. I find /. to be a lovely example of this: I think Slashdot's really great, but I don't have any particular feelings of community because I don't know (almost) anyone here personally.

Another way of putting this is that if you represent a community as a graph, where the people are the nodes and the edges are the interpersonal connections, a community will be densely connected.

It is my deep suspicion that you can't have that sense of community without a population in which at least half of the people know at least half of the people.

The larger the population the harder it is to keep up that level of personal interconnectivity. So, yes, size is a limiting factor.

But another issue is that a system which allows you to talk privately one-on-one as readily as address the group is more likely to grow community than a system which does not.

----------------------------------------------

telnet talkers

[Anonymous Coward]

MUDs, MOOs and the likes seem to have the old atmosphere. Especially telnet talkers whose clients tend to be more tech-oriented. try Fear the Penguin at esgeroth.org 9000 pretty good place

Hotline

[Anonymous Coward]

Hotline is about as close as you can get in the mainstream. It's ususally used for illegal software and MP3 distribution and porn, but often enough you can find a server that has people, discussions, and files that you are interested in.

Thoughts from the suburbs

[Pike]

I too was a frequent BBS user. I lived way out in the [conceptual] country, where 28k gravel roads were all that existed. Lots of creative ANSI scenery...only a few neighbors, but we knew each other; if more than one of us bumped into each other online we might actually start up a short chat session just for the sheer novelty of it.

Then I moved down south to the suburbs. (I come from Minnesota, and south == city here.) The sheer amount of people here is desensitizing. And those nice 256k DSL freeways! I haven't used my old '91 Ford modem in a long time. Out in the country people generally can get along with their own kind; you had some things in common. But out here, you really can't identify with anyone. The sheer amount of people desensitizes you. You may have a brief flash of personality every now and then, but in an hour you've forgotten them and they likewise have forgotten you existed.

Commercialism! wheew! Out in the country, you could get together and maybe play a game of LORD. Maybe page through the file sections or look at some familiar stats which fluctuated rythmically as the seasons. Down here, it's INFORMATION and SELLING! Electronic brochures! You want a research paper on the valuation of Brazilian currency together with peer review, legal implications and spiffy graphics? You got it! But try to find a small, local place to hang out. There are a lot of nice big skyscrapers here, but no small resturants like Judy's back home where the electricians would sit for coffee every morning at 8:00.

One final thing: no scenery. I suppose you could call the city skyline scenery, but nothing like the natural scenery of prime ANSI wilderness. I don't know about the other forty thousand people in this stadiun, but the white prompt on a simple black background is very familiar and comforting, even when you have a thousand people on the MUD all jabbering at once.

I'd almost forgotten all this stuff. But, progress, you know. Someday, when all forty thousand of us have gone our seperate ways, we'll see something that reminds us of good ol' SlashDot...

JD

BBS

[Anonymous Coward]

man, trade wars was a great game... i think i spent over 75% of 5th and 6th grade playing it....

My BBS

[Kukester]

Well, I am currently working on a lightweight
Linux BBS software, which will support little
more than doors. All the other old BBS functionality
is available on the 'Net, but muds just dont have
the warm feeling I get from lord

http://lord.doa.org (Offline until 12/1/99)

BBS's and my thoughts

[strlen]

I started becoming a geek in 1995-1996, the end of the B.B.S. era. My first taste of the Internet, was using the Windows 3.1 hyper terminal to dial up a local B.B.S. where I downloaded demo versions of games and read newsgroups. Then I left to Russia, where the telecomunications network is to degraded for B.B.S.'s and Internet alike. When I came back there was no trace of the good old B.B.S. The directories only mentioned porn B.B.S.'s.

I found IRC, to be a reminiscent of B.B.S. community, especially on the Open Projects (LinPeople) network and the Gimp IRC network. I also found a nice B.B.S. you people should check out -- telnet://fix.no. They are Norway based yet all have knowledge of English and have members from Mexico to Japan. They also give access to e-mail, newsgroups, fidonet, their own conferences and a file database. Chat is available for all you IRC junkies ;-)

I believe the decline of the B.B.S's is caused by the faster, slicker Internet services, with the respectable looking web pages and "serious context". B.B.S's are being portraied as heavens of skin head activity and warez, unlike the Internet, which is shown to be a commercial and serious network. Sad. But don't dispair B.B.Sers! There's still many B.B.S.-like communities on the Internet.

Folks, it's simply nostalgia

[destinati]

In the early 90s, I was into the BBS scene. I remember logging onto the local boards at an amazing 2400 bps. This was an incredible speed boost from the 1200 bps modem that I had earlier. I can remember spending over an hour to download Wolfenstein 3D. I thought life was great. I can remember the day I first used ZModem instead of Kermit and XModem (remember those protocols! eek!).. I can remember the days when PKZip 1.0 was the common compression algorithm. I can remember the big event when 2.0 and then 2.04g was released, many things were recompressed to take advantage of the new compression.

Also, don't we all remember logging into one BBS that had the door game called "Studs? That was a funny game. There was also "Trade Wars" and "Global Wars". The ANSI graphics were king.

The day I received a 14,400 modem, I was in heaven! It was the first time in my life I surpassed 1000 cps! ZModem flew the bits to my computer.Life was good.

But folks, the simple truth is that this is all nostalgia. We all probably remember it better than it actually was. For the typical /,'er.. this was probably their adolescenthood too. It was for me... But the fact of the matter is that most people remember the good parts about it and tend to forget the bad parts.. (like the horrid download speed!).

I think all slashdotters that grew up with the BBS era should take a deep sigh, then get over it.. It's our past.. take time, sit back in your chair.. download on your 56K or T1, T3...line and say to yourself... the modems of the earlier day were terribly slow, you were limited to a very limited realm of the same old people, the file selections weren't that good, and finally the Internet brought us the idea of living in a big city.. it's scary at first, but incredibly exciting.


Now.. get out of the retrospection, welcome to your adolescent future (minus the ideal girlfriend, of course)

QWK+Slashdot?

[toolz]

Real messaging on most BBSs I frequented really took off with QWK. I miss this badly even today, because nothing beats the convenience of a compressed message packet with all recent messages in it. The web might be fancy, but web-based BBSs are *bleh*!

Wonder if Rob would consider adding one more link to each news item on the front page - download QWK of message thread?

toolz

sysop of CiX, Bangalore, India - Dec 1 1989 to Mar 20, 1999.

not dead

[Anonymous Coward]

I still run a BBS (which will remain nameless to avoid the trademark fake accounts of the typical brainless internet lamers) which is still active, although the attention has moved from the filebase to the online games and chatting. I've also provided internet email for years and recently IRC, both free, to the local community. BBS' are a community thing, not a global thing.

The is no room for lusers on BBS' and thankfully they've all moved to the Internet or otherwise moved their mindless drivel elsewhere(alt.sex.fetish.os2). Only the real fans remain.

There 16,000+ nodes left in the Fidonet nodelist is half that of 5 years ago, and dozens more die every week (note that there are a lot of non-Fidonet boards around). We're dying slowly, but we're not dead yet.

Oh yeah?

[DragonHawk]

I can win this hands down.

Commodore 64 with 300 baud VicModem, surfing the BBS scene in Nanaimo, BC, Canada.

Oh yeah? Well, in my day, all we had were tin cans and string! You had to attach the can directly to the CPU with tinfoil! We were lucky to get two characters per second, and were happy if we just got one!

You youngsters these days, why, you have no idea how good you got it. We used to have a 4K disk the size of this *room*, and you didn't hear us complaining! Oh no, we knew to be grateful for what we had! Why, we didn't even have keyboards at first! We had to *chip* the characters into the screen! With our teeth!

And ya know what else.... why.... um.... what was I saying?

Re:Oh yeah?

[mihalis]

Pah! You were lucky...

In my day we had no physical reality at all. I had to imagine an entire world of sentient beings, invent methods of communication betweent them and then invent all the communications that they sent. Once they got going properly they still didn't want to be my friend.

Re:yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

fp, you say?

FILE *fpi = fopen( "grits", "r" );
FILE *fpo = fopen( "pants", "w" );
GRIT g = fgetgrits( fpi );
while( !feogrits( fpi ) )
{
fputgrits( g, fpo );
g = fgetgrits( fpi );
}
fclose( fpo );
fclose( fpi );

FIX

[mong]

A *really* good BBS still exists, it's run by a group of Norwegians, and even has (fairly) regular visits from the author of BBBS, we have people from Freehive there, and people from GPhoto.org.

We also have MUDS there as well.

Check out the (dated)FIX pages for more info.

Sorry, I guess this was a blatant plug :)

Mong.

* Paul Madley ...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *

Re:FIX

[Anonymous Coward]

The weird thing about this BBS is that it seems to grow. More [active] users are always being added and things are always changing. In fact, the whole BBS system is being re-written from scratch (or nearly-scratch, as I understand it) Quite an international place. I'm Stateside and have had the opportunity to meet many of the 'native' FIXers in person, interesting people.

Remembrance of Things Past

[Trepidity]

Here's something remotely related...

/.ers are lamers!

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people involved in BBSs knew what they were doing - they were true techies - you pretty much had to be in the first days on MODEMs.

These days, any lamer can and does post to things like slashdot. Hence, most of the comments are from lamers. Those who were involved in BBSs tend to read the slashdot headlines since many are interesting but avoid the comments for fear of being tarnished as a slashdot poster.

Tradewars Online

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a online community doing its best to keep BBSs alive. There are a number of telnetable BBSs available. For you Tradewars fiends, it is compatible with most of the web bbs software out there. Check out: http://www2.southwind.net/~jonhall/tw2002/twtelnet .html It has links to a few TradeWars 2002 sites.

And yet Lower Lights is dying too

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been calling LL for about 5 years (or just telnetting in nowadays)

I remember when you had to redial over and over for an hour just to get on. But now, people just telnet in.. see that nobody is on.. and log off. I only call to talk to 2 or 3 certain people anymore, and ICQ easily replaces the need for that.

LL used to have a gigantically growing user base, because it seemed so interesting to new users. (even though most newer users were annoying HS kids) But now I don't see how any new user would be interested in getting an account when they can just hop on IRC or AOL chat or whatever.

BBSs will be dead. Soon. But the communities won't die completely, because a lot of people -- like myself -- have made some good friends for life on them.

Re:And yet Lower Lights is dying too

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow.. lower lights is still around?? I remember when they first went up around 1991(?), 1992.. I was pretty impessed back then with their 10+ lines, etc etc.. ( I was only 12 ) oh, well.. it only goes to show how quick things change...

Re:And yet Lower Lights is dying too

[homerj79]

Sure. LL users have dwindled over the years, but its still a good place to go and chat with people locally. Which is probably why LL is still around even after all these years. And sure, you can chat with people on IRC and AOL, but most of the time their not local. You cant chat about the recent storm, or I-15 with someone in, say, Florida. LL will still be a place for people to go and chat with people locally, which will (hopefully) keep it around for a long, long time.

show some heart man!

[Rotten168]

Well I don't think that the poster was complaining about missing the technology of the old BBS's. I think he/she's complaining about the 'grassroots' feel of them. The internet has rendered much of our society obsolete (sometimes it seems even face to face communication). But in the process we have lost something and I think that's what the poster is talking about. It's all about the 'vibes' of a scene. I hope that makes sense.

Nyx.Net

[blacklambda]

Nyx, The Spirit Of THe Night is a still thriving internet connected BBS/Telnet system.. Although I still year for the days of Wildcat and such stuff the UNIX Shell that they give you (after validation) and the community that is there is still wonderful.. Nyx makes one of it's primary goals to distribute free computers and terminal progs to low income people in the Denver area to allow them email access. We even have a RL picininc every so often. I agree with the sentiment of many other people on here... I remember firing up my XT and Hayes Smartmodem 1200 and putzing around on local BBS's until they eventually turned into ISP's or just shut down... The sense of community i have on the Internet although different is still ther with /. ICQ and IRC

Memories

[Inhibit]

Wow, that brings back the memories. Playing Stock Trader or the game with the fantasy kingdoms (don't remember which at the moment) really rocked as a way to waste a few hours. The thing I'll remember most about BBS's, though, was the feeling of community you got with them. People on the board I used to Co-Sysop were extremly diverse, and would have never communicated except for the message board. Sort of like a breakfast club thing. You just can't get the local familiarity on the net. Everyone hasn't gone to the local high-schools, worked for a local company, or hung at the same clubs. It's just too vast.

Re:Before being a Internet Junkie I was a BBS junk

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of QWKs, I've always wanted to start an online "museum" of QWKs from the golden age of BBSing.

I have a few QWKs that date back to late 1988, 1989 and the 1990s, but like a fool, I didn't save many of them. With everyone writing books about the history of the Internet, I fear that the history of BBSing is going to be lost before it gets written (if ever).

There are interesting stories to tell, that's for sure!

sparky@NOsparkwareSPAM.com

Citadel BBS's Still Alive and Kicking!

[EWillieL]

Anybody remember Citadel? It's still actively maintained! Check out the Uncensored! BBS. They have a Citadel room-based system, with a Web interface, a Telnet interface, and clients for a number of platforms. Way cool!

Re:Citadel BBS's Still Alive and Kicking!

[yelvington]

See also:

citadel.org

isca bbs, U of Iowa

ANSi Art Boards...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ohh, how the memories come flooding back. I used to log onto Whodini's Magik, a local [614] art bbs back in the late early to mid 90s. Remember the group ACiD? Ohh, and what were some of the others... Man, were those good times. We were like regular old teenagers, had different social classes and "gangs", for loss of a more correct term. How you had to pass a test to log onto each board and the cooler the board, the harder the more groups you had to know and the better the software got (Oblivion/2, Celerity, and so on). Most of us, at least here, were artist/hackers/phreakers/crackers/etc. We would have our 2600 meetings and attend the free classes at that AT&T complex thing (now Lucent). But times change, we grow older. It lives on in my history book. Now I rarly chat online, in fact this is my first post to /. yet I've been reading it for almost a year now. hmph. Wierd how it all works. Life that is.

hxd !

[rullskidor]

Since you can't use carracho on UNIX or even that old winDOS thing some of you might have heard of;) it's quite useless.

Linux users have at least 3 different ways to access hotline servers:

hxd www.krazynet.com/hx which is a server, tracker server and client under the GPL

HSX,GHX,HST are the same things but shareware and freeware(and therefore sux)

There is also some pearl hack but I have no idea if it works.

None of these are perfect, and the all lack features and can be quite outdated from officiall holtine. But whats more intressting, is that BBSes are alive, even if you could get all your software from some huge ftp server or chat on IRC. Hotline although lacking in every area got at least 1000+ servers and regular users.


If someone created a free implementation much like hotline and firstclass I'm sure it would be very popular...

Talkers

[blob]

What about talkers? (e.g telnet://spod.org:2010) They provide "communities", and I myself use the 'who' command on them to see who is online.

OS/2 users can still experience a bbs with Vmodem

[joeler]

OS/2 users that are using SIO, can still access a few old-time bbs systems via telenet. Using the vmodem (virtual modem) feature allows you to start up and run your favorite dos or windows (3.1) terminal program such as Qmodem, Telix, or any other termnal program, including those with RIP graphics. The virtual modem would ring and answer, just like a modem on a telco line, but would work via the internet. The lag would prevent you from playing some faster ansi games, but mostly everything else worked the same. You could download the messages in .qwk format etc read and post etc... It really was like using the telco lines,almost no difference!!!

I can only remember one OS/2 bbs that is still on line using vmodem - you can also reach it with "telnet juge.com " . Bob Juge doesn't have on line games but does have the FIDO message system and there you can find other BBS systems that are using both telnet and telco lines. He was/is using the old faithful "Maximus" bbs system, so well known with FIDO and Binkley users.

Using Vmodem was/is very close to using the modem over telco lines, as a BBS operator, all you needed to do was add another com port in your config.sys with the SIO driver. Your OS/2, or dos BBS program (and mailer such as Binkley) and all that worked over the telco lines would now work via the internet as well. Vmodem made it really easy for any bbs running on OS/2 to open a port to the internet. However, to truly enjoy using these systems you need to run your favorite terminal program on a virtual modem with all the RIP graphics, off line readers etc.

Unfortunately, OS/2 isn't very popular these days, so the number of people still using Vmodem for their bbs system and/or terminal programs are smaller than back in 1994 when Vmodem was more popular. However, as posted earlier, there are still a few on line.

good luck...and have fun

PS: I am not affilated in any way with IBM (OS/2), Bob Juge or the bbs located at juge.com, or Ray Gwynn ( creator of vmodem), Scott Dudley ( Maximus BBS) or the multible writers of Binkley Term.

Heinous BBS and of course ISCA

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't scroll, but thought I'd mention, ISCA seems to be one of the larger bbs communities on the internet, loathesome as it is.

Other such BBS sites, like Heinous BBS
http://www.heinous.net/~bbs/
have sprung up as well.

CompuServe ate The Source

[Anonymous Coward]

I graduated from law in 1989 and moved out of Halifax. I'd been on BIX (The BYTE Information Exchange) and the Reader's Digest - owned The Source for about two years with my AT&T 6300 PC and US Robotics 9600 baud Courier HST modem, back when real men used DEBUG as a word processor...


There was a real community feel to the SFSIG (SF Special Interest Group), with about forty regular posters from around the world. Unfortunately, Reader's Digest had no idea what to do with The Source, and although my SFSIG friends got live postings of my wedding - done by someone else on the SIG who showed up as my hands were usually busy, The Source got bought out by CompuServe, which I'd tried briefly but found infantile (ie the usual SF post on CompuServe was about whether Picard was more buff than Kirk), and I wound up getting off-line altogether for years (raising two boys from her first marriage didn't exactly leave a lot of free time, either).

The net and the web (not the same thing) were something I experienced in 1980 (TCP/IP) and 1994 respectively, but I didn't get an ISP until 1999 and I still post as Anonymous Coward. Life's too short to respond to email. If it's too easy to write, idiots will take up all your time that could more valuably be taken up with the real world. But I do miss The Source's SFSIG community. Slashdot is about as close as I come to that now, and due to the nature of my work I prefer to lurk.




MicroSoft: It's not just a bad idea, it's against the law!

Slashdot as a bbs

[rafa]

As many people have said before, slashdot has a lot of the feel of a bbs. It's just a very, very big bbs. It has a lot of the functions of bbs'. There's slashnet (the irc servers). So - what would slahsdot need to become a complete bbs-like environment? Well, a way to see who else is online. Perhaps jabber? Games. Slashwars? Slashmail? Well, that could be the jabber messages i suppose.

-----

What a funny question

[kris]

What a funny question to ask a thing like this
on Slashdot, of all places.
© Copyright 1999 Kristian Köhntopp

BBS Community Advantages / ISCA plug

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been bbs'ing since I purchased my first PC two years ago. I don't know if what I've found is like the bbs experience of old, but I know I'm onto something good. I've found Iowa State (university) Computing Association's ISCAbbs.

I feel relatively large telnetable bbs's (hundreds of simultaneous users) possess several advantageous characteristics:

* Sense of community - I believe bbs userbases are more stable/consistent than website userbases - I feel that you're more likely to return to a telnetable community than a website or chatroom. I note that I generally use the same bbs's I've always used.
* Tremendously diverse user populations provide each other with mutual assistance - user's various areas of specialization can replace hours of research. The amount of trust you place in a user's competence/judgement can add credibility to an opinion or advice.
* Policy development & implementation, code creation/maintenance and administrative tasks are learning opportunities.
* No advertising banners, popups, profit considerations. Bbs'ing is not free, payment is time spent helping others; moderating forums; policy, maintainance, development and housekeeping issues.
* Ideally hidden agendas sometimes associated with profit motives are non-existent.
* Connection speed & hardware requirements provide an enjoyable experience without the latest & greatest.
* Large userbase usually keeps misinformation relatively infrequent(users provide checks & balances).
* The opportunity to help someone online is the opportunity to give something back, to pass something on, especially to the IT community. In giving we strengthen our own understanding and take pleasure in giving. Our ideas are then critiqued, corrected, clarified and so forth by others.

OTOH, smaller bbs's might claim an advantage in that they offer more closely-knit communities.

ISCA's userbase has dwindled from a peak of around 50000 to 15000. Telnetable bbs's tend to apppeal/reach a small audience, and though newer applications have probably reduced that audience, the die-hards will stick around - and the opportunity to interact with the die-hards is why I keep coming back.

ISCA's contributors continue to maintain and develop client terminal programs for most operating systems (with desirable functions such as autoreply, who's online, other useful features), and ISCA should soon move to new code rich in features. They donate bandwidth and storage as well.

I've found many resources (like slashdot) via the BBS.

A good deal of my computing abilities and employability result from two years spent devouring forums, chatting with users and exploring the resources they'd mention.

ISCA is telnetable. IIRC, account creation may take a day or so, but there's a guest login too. telnet://whip.isca.uiowa.edu { 128.255.85.69 }

I bbs, therefore I am (?) DH.

Re:BBS Community Advantages / ISCA plug

[Anonymous Coward]

uiowa.edu is the University of Iowa. which is nitpicking, but way down the road from Iowa State University.

BBS-lists

[Anonymous Coward]

About 5 years ago, I used to do some game-testing for the scandinavian computer magazine "Tekno".

In this magazine there was a "bbs-list" over two pages in the middle of the magazine, with numbers to the different bbs's, number of telephone lines, descriptions of what to find in each bbs, etc.

Is there any such lists for bbs's online today? If not, it would be great if someone(hint hint) took the responsability of making and maintaining one. :)
With a huge list of bbs's with ratings and descriptions, there would not be som much pressure on each bbs, since there would be much more to choose between. At the same time, the people would re-explore the joy and fun of BBSing, and maybe start a whole new golden age for BBSing(Hey, I can dream, can't I?). :)

-SNw-

Fruhead.Com: Web-Based BBS

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a long-time BBSer back in "the days", and was sad when most of the local boards started vanishing. The Internet is great, but there weren't many true communities on it -- the sheer size eliminated any hope for a consistent, local user base for any forum.

When I set out to design Fruhead.Com, a web community for fans of the band Moxy Fruvous, I didn't design anything with the old BBS days in mind. That didn't keep that sleeping part of me to wake up and take over. What I ended up with was something that felt to me a lot like the old BBS days, complete with a "Scribble Wall", a "Who's On", a private message system, a message board, a Java IRC interface, and specialized areas for specific interests. The response to it has been nothing short of amazing to me.. there are many who spend a significant portion of their day on the site.

I think that the reason that most web-based communities fail is their lack of focus. Groups either are too large or too small, and there's no unity of interests. Local BBSes used to at least share the common tie of location, but trying to do the same on the Internet seems to always lead to anarchy. BBSes need to adapt to survive, and I've found the success to Fruhead.Com lies in its focus -- all users share a common bond, and the site focuses on that.

Josh Woodward
joshw@fruhead.com

I know such a community!

[Krilomir]

I read through some of the answer and saw, that many of them pointed to different muds and web-based BBS games.

I've been playing Utopia for more than a year now, and I have at least 200 utopia people on my ICQ contact list, 30 bookmarks with pages about utopia and an okay reputation. The game itself is similar to Earth, and remember playing something like that back in the later 80 on a BBS.

The online game can be found here, and has more than 40K players at the moment. We have an official forum (plus 10 non-official with many posts every day), we have Active ICQ lists with hundreds of members (doesn't work with licq I'm afraid), we have quite a few big alliances (complete with ministers and leaders).

In other words, we have an community. Many things seems strange for outsiders. Ever heard of an landgrab for example? I meet new people every through this game, and our common interest for this game makes it easy to find something to talk about - a bit too easy perhaps.

That said, there are periods where I have to stay away a bit from this game... It's time consuming if you're into many alliances and such. But overall, I think it's great.

Did I mention that the author (Mehul Patel) made the first BBS game where many BBSs was linked into one game? He tells a bit about in in this Interview.

BBS to WWW conversion experience

[Sebastian Knight]

We had a lovely little BBS called Crunchland going in the Washington, DC area. Once it became blindingly obvious that everything was moving to the web, we started looking around for ways to move the BBS onto the web. Now, it runs at www.crunchland.com on UBBS, which has been pretty good to us.

A few thoughts on what is good, bad, new, missing, or otherwise different after the big switch:

• Messaging is pretty similar, ultimately. We just added private messages, but people aren't using them too much, because you can always just e-mail on the web. Now the messages have embedded HTML tricks instead of stupid ANSI tricks, of course.
• No formal "who's on" feature. We have a page listing everybody's ICQ number, and have used that at times to get a similar effect.
• We miss the BBS games. LORD and Popwords especially. We've tried writing a few little web-based diversions, but they aren't the same. Sooner or later, one of use will find or code something cool to take it's place.
• Individual web pages stored at the BBS. This is new and cool, and really adds to the flavor of the place. Probably the best new feature. Those who have their own sites elsewhere can at least link from the Users page.
• The geography thing is interesting. Those of us in the DC area still get together (Bowling Night coming up, LAN parties pretty regularly, a boatload of happy hours etc.), which preserves the local community feeling. But we have some regular posters who live elsewhere. It's also been easier for users to keep in touch after they move out of town.
• We'd pretty much let the file area die down anyway (in the old days, Crunchland was a big source of unprotects), and certainly don't feel any need for it now with the whole web doing that job. If we want to direct everybody's attention to a cool download, we'll just link to it somewhere else.

So, basically, a successful transition, and we've got as many users as ever.

Old BBS

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm.. me thinks I gota a copy of every BBS software I ran still.... Maximo Renegade Telegard to name the lowly of the few good ones Ha memomries , ghosts of many a season past access levels and ansi graphics hell even those badly drawn out ansi-scrabble torneys with other BBS's all over the globe. Days of 64k memory and a whopping 4mb ram to run an entire communications central hooked to 128 modems and a flame pit of posts and requests surging in on me from all sides as I fight the temptation to run a cd-server in the background and use my Amiga 500 as a secondary backup cause I could. Hell I think this even taps my memories of pong and gunfighter on the Tristar game counsle and my first experince with Ham to Commodore communications Help dear lord I long for days of real transport speeds and not the imagniary 56k which only travels one way not two but I digress

"Conferencing" software

[argentus]

Actually, there are online 'conferences' in which messages can be posted, and many require distinctly that one not be anonymous. A package called Caucus, by Caucus Systems (formerly Screenporch Software) allows for conversation of all sorts to happen online, as well as basic file transfer. Altavista also had a similar package called "Forum", though I haven't used it in years, and don't know if they still make it (seeing that they've changed hands twice recently). I'm a member of one site that uses Caucus, and it is quite a thriving online community. (I won't divulge the URL here, though, as I'd get hung by my toenails and beaten with a keyboard if it was slashdotted because of my carelessness.)

I hate to say it, but eBay is creating its own sort of community, too, with much interaction on the site and via e-mail. Granted, the basis for the communication is in RL, but it's still all handled online except for the payment and product delivery.

IBBS

[Zulu]

If you're still looking for the good old BBS feel, it's gone. However, a lot of people did venture into telnet boards, I personaly run an internal telnet board at our school, and they might be the closest thing you have left. Too bad life for the real computer geek isn't more like for the hollywood computer geek, a 'joint' of types would be nice eh ;)

The Lower Lights BBS

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wrote in to invite Slashdotters to take a look at The Lower Lights BBS. It has been around since 1991, with a peak of 96 lines, 48 dialup, 48 telnet. It is running TBBS (The Bread Board System) and serves mostly the Salt Lake City, Utah crowd. Ages ranging from about 13 to 50, and with about 1500 users, it has some good variety. Come check it out, it isn't going anywhere anytime soon. =)

TRADEWARS

[psylence]

Sorry, just had to say that TradeWars was by far the best door game EVER...

Maybe LORD, and I think that Hacking game was fun, if not worthless :)

Ohh, how I miss those days.

There's a couple of ways to meet these

[hawk]

> might help to keep the 40-50 intelligent
>posters talking with each other,

exactly
>and restrict the 10-20 odd flame-idiots to the
>lowest of lows.

As in, "no access." I don't see any reason for a private operation with this intent to provide access to the troublemakers. In the one-line BBS period, this was done by simply revoking accounts.

>Over here, we only get to post stuff well after
>discussions have ended over there in Yankeeland.
>I think the reason for this is that slashdot is
>organised on a day-by-day basis. After
>discussions are more than a day or two old, they
>die.

I think it's more the story-by-story orientation than the day-by-day. With usenet, topics can last for days, months, or years (are the heinlein flamewars still running in whatever net.scifi was renamed? And talk.origins seems to be still running the same arguments (with the same people?) as used to be in net.religion.

>* Different people have different concepts of
>"intelligent discourse".

no problem. They'll choose different forums. Part of the problem that led to the second mailing list was that those who came afterwards wanted somethign entirely different than we did (ok, that was the major part. They also complained about anything non-football, and got vicious about the 8-10 line signatures of one of the core members). I thought that better than 90% of the boards in San Diego at the time were infantile (or less!), so I stuckwith 2 or 3 that I liked.

>* Somebody needs to do the rating; they need to
>do it _VERY_ well,

I think this is the easy part, actually. At bbs size, it can even be a single person. On our private list, nominations require affirmative votes by two-thirds of the members, with any member able to veto. This is practical for the twenty or so of us, it wouldn't be practical at 50 or 100 (but we don't want to get that big. The list is already larger than originally conceived, and new members are usually close relatives or close friends, though occasionally we invite someone with intelligence & wit from the first group [yeah, a couple of us are still active there]).

Remember when...

[Vignettian]

One of the main purposes for BBSs were to distribute manufacturers' updates / drivers / patches.. Oy the phone bills. A one hour call to San Mateo to get updated video drivers, a forty-five minute call to Sierra's Wildcat BBS to get the patch for Aces of the Pacific, maybe an hour getting tips from infocom's bbs on how to beat Zork II.

On that same note.. anyone remember printing out those looong lists of 1-800 BBSs (on every BBS that I found it, it was always named 800BBS.TXT) and spending all night trying to find a BBS that had guest access via an 800 number?

The closest thing that I've found to those BBS days are local area computer groups. They're all local (usually), so there is a good chance that you'll be able to meet them face to face at least once. These kind of meetings might be a little too topical for you (CTLUG = Central Texas Linux Users Group), but after meeting some of these people, you can usually find other things to talk about.

NO they not dead just hiding

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do you think the MP3's and warez have gone :) I know of MANY very active BB's... With the RIAA and Software folks cracking down on the net, the shadow factor is sliding back off to BB's, If you look closely on certain pages phone#'s are given to the Black Market BB's :)

CommunityWare

[Erbo]

Forgive me the odd bit of self-promotion...

For the past couple of years (at least), I've been working on a Web-based online community system that is very BBS-like in some respects. It's called CommunityWare (or, in its latest incarnation, CommunityWare/XML) and it features conferencing, online presence, instant messaging, chat, Web hosting, email, and so forth. It allows people to create their own "communities" online, so I guess it'd be more of a "meta-BBS" system than a BBS proper. You can get into it here.

One of the best-known communities hosted on CommunityWare is the Electric Minds community, which is full of interesting and fun people. You can get to it through its own URL, which is referenced in my .sig.

Eric
--
"Free your code...and the rest will follow."

BBSs are alive

[Anonymous Coward]

...at least in Austria: Reachable via telnet: karanet.uni-klu.ac.at anglistik.uibk.ac.at fhtupc154.tu-graz.ac.at

BBS have change form

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the net is one giant BBS one way or the other. Of course most of the BBSer prefer the net most of the time but there are still some BBS out there. Recently I found the BBS community in Japan suddenly grow because BBS found their way into many companies. Some of them are public but most of them are private and for employees only. The advantage of BBS is that it exists for a closed group of people instead of everyone else on the net.

BBSes and what became of them (in PA anyhow).

[Fubar_2000]

I remember the good ole days of BBSing...you know, when 14400 modems were king, and the warez boards were cool. I used to run a BBS back in the day. Usership was pretty good... most of them did the online game thing. I didn't have a huge file section, but I tried to keep things different. There was one BBS in the area that tapped into the net... offering access and such, but the price they charged was insane. The major downfall of BBSing in my area came when the ISPs invaded... I miss the message networks thing...

well...

[Anonymous Coward]

what about icq? it tells you when your ppl are online, and has a spiffy messaging thingie.. but im generally stupid, so icq probably sucks.

Hear, hear (and defects of the /. model

[Tau Zero]

You're damn straight about the productive features. It's impossible to maintain an on-going discussion on Slashdot because you cannot distinguish between material that's new to you and that which you've seen once (twice, N times) before. Aside from watching your own user page to see who's responded to you, you cannot track new material only; the overwhelming task of sifting through the existing stuff to check for new posts directed to others means that almost nobody does it. Discussions go for a couple of days at most, then die from the "horizon effect" (new users never see them on the list) and their own overwhelming mass.

This may be just fine for Slashdot, which explicitly says it is News for nerds and not a discussion forum. But as a model for a cyber community, it leaves much to be desired.
--
Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,

My First BBS

[Anonymous Coward]

My first BBS went online in December of 1986. It ran on a Commodore 64, a 300 baud modem, and a floppy drive. I used C-Net 10.0. I'm encouraged to see the rise of web based message boards. A few of them seem to have a BBS-like community quality. I'm hoping they'll evolve. Regards, The Friendly Fascist, Host The Basement Internet Show http://freespeech.org/basement/

in the UK

[strowger]

In the UK, as well as the ANSI ("scrolling") BBSs, there was the Viewdata system. BT ran a national Viewdata BBS system called Micronet, with local rate access for most people. Micronet had a subscription charge; many local BBSs also existed, and didn't charge (or charged less). A few of them survive - see CCl4.

www.lugnet.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Check it!

BBSs

[Anonymous Coward]

The BBSs died totally about last year. I shut mine down in August of 1998 for lack of callers. With the Internet being so vast, there probably won't be anything quite as "homey" as the BBSs. I miss them too, there are still a few Telnet boards floating around, but the lack of knowledge for most people keeps their numbers pretty thin. It was kinda fun going to a LORD party (legend of the red dragon) and meeting the users and other Sysops that you frequently chatted with...Messages were fun, ANSI graphics were always an attraction on a board too. Maybe one day they might make a return if there's a faster connection via regular dial up telephone lines.

BBS adapting to the internet, Solace BBS

[the hanged man]

Well, I guess BBSs have adapted a little bit to the internet. Using certain programs like netmodem you can run BBSs over telnet connections, as long as you have and ANSI compatable telnet client. I have a bbs running myself, that I started up recently:

Solace BBS - telnet://solace.digitaldriveway.com

Give it a try.

Later,
the hanged man
http://thehangedman.digitaldriveway.com
Sysop, Solace BBS - telnet://solace.digitaldriveway.com

BBSes in Israel

[Eesh]

BBSes were brought to Israel in the late '80s, and now it's pretty safe to say that the BBS scene is almost completely dead.

I'm a sysop since 1995, and when I opened my BBS, which was running 10PM to 7AM each night on my 386dx with a 2400 modem, I'd get a few calls each night, not counting those bothering my family during daytime. :-)

Nowadays, what's left of my BBSes and most of the others is mail. We have Fidonet technology based mail nets in Israel called C_Net and UltiNet (The latter has a homepage and online mail reading, http://www.mikud.org - Requires Hebrew on your browser [Because it's in Hebrew, duh..]), which are relatively active and have about 50-70 writers together. In the "good old days", we had over a hundred writers, and hundreds of readers...

As for the BBSes themselves, most BBSes that aren't mailer-only (Like mine is) run RemoteAccess or PCBoard, and get about 5 users a day, at best.

As for BBSes worldwide, off the top of my head, I can think of http://www.pcmicro.com and http://www.juge.com where you will probably find links to other BBSes too.


Liron.

C64 bbs

[Stu Charlton]

I still remember connecting to Commodore 64 bbs' back in the mid 1980's. And there were *so* many BBS programs out there, many custom-modded by Sysops.. anyone remember C*Base, C-Net and ImageBBS? There were a few others. WWIV, All american BBS, etc.

The funniest were all of the pirate C64 BBS sites in the 80's.. there were HUNDREDS of them! Garden of Eden, anyone? :)

Quantum Link (QLink, aka. AOL now), was also pretty cool. Some of the technology was pretty amazing for its time.. Lucasfilm's habitat (Club Caribe), or Rabbitjack's Casino..

BBS'S ARE ALIVE AND WELL!

[IGnatius T Foobar]

I've been hearing "BBS's are dead" for the past four or five years, and it's just not true. I've run one myself for nearly twelve years now. It's called UNCENSORED! BBS, and it runs on the Citadel software. You can telnet in, you can dial in, or you can use a browser-based front end.

It's a shame that dialup-only BBS's have, for the most part, faded away. Getting a BBS onto the Internet can really be a problem, but as DSL and Cable lower those obstacles, I think there will be more BBS's surfacing.

Please visit my BBS and see what you think. Those of us already in the community really enjoy it.

BBS Communities

[grx0]

I'm pretty dissapointed myself, I miss the days when you could get online go through some message bases of topics that may or may not be off the wall, btw, gotta love that wicked ANSi gfx, but here locally we only have 2 or 3 boards left. More so I'm dissapointed in the fact that even though the web offers chat, message boards and what not, it severly lacks the same kind of control as the old bbs softwares such as impulse or renegade, or even wildcat/major bbs, from a sysops point of view, I'd love to see software with a robust administration package, a wonderful messaging system, such as ultraboard, a great news system, such as slashdot's, a decent multi user chat system, all integrated together, with logins, a who's online, etc etc, even those nifty old door games, but somehow, I've yet to find in the infinite vaults of software that are on the net anything that remotely reflects this that doesn't require some screwy client specifically for that software, I've been toying with the idea of starting a project like this, so, if anyone has any ideas or suggestions, you're welcome to email me at dlimited@NOSPAM.hushmail.com (remove the NOSPAM. for you short bus kids)... and if no one gives me any ideas, I'm just gonna have to whip out a copy of telegard to satisfy my bbs cravings hehe...

Re:BBS Communities

[termigan]

Why do you insist on not having a client for formatting? Anybody who was serious about BBSes had a terminal program that they had to download. (Or wrote for fun!) When there was a new one out, you tried it to see if it was any better...

The concept of a mud (Multi User {dimension|dungeon|delusion}) is probably reaonably close, but it's also been eclipsed in popularity by the internet chat sites. You should start with a mud like moo and morph it into a community. Heck, make a new client that does html formatting. (should be able to steal the engine from mozzila 5.0) Who said that you couldn't type in a html formatted window?

Whatever you do, don't depend on M$ telnet. It's so bad. Sure, it mostly works, but that's the worst.

scared?

[Anonymous Coward]

i agree that BBS's are dead. And this is because people aren't as out-going as they used to be. I mean people are frightened of getting flamed or rejected, i believe this because i've been a long time observer of internet communities, buit much to my regret i've only recently started to jump in and voice my own opinions, and i think this should definetly be encouraged more because it's what built the original BBs's and it's what can keep whats left of them going.

I do miss the good old days..

[demwiz]

As the former beloved sysop of Demented Domain, I feel most assuredly your pain of the loss of the BBS communities. I fought it as long as I could, but when I got down to about 4 calls a day, I figured it was time to give up. I was a devoted fan of the renegade system which ran quite well under DesqView . As for finding a substitute these days for what has been lost, the best thing I've found is ICQ/EGN/AIM, slashdot, betanews, and archmage. Nothing like the old days I'm afraid, although if there was ever enough interest I would love to be a sysop once more.

Re:Slashdot TradeWars *MegaCorp*

[yzorderex]

TradeWars... haven't played that in years. Any Slashdot teams out there, or interested in forming one?
Could be good. Place to discuss this matter is prolly right here.
TW Mailing list
Yz

They will never die -- Just change.

[detritus.]

I got into BBS'es when I was 12. That was my real introduction to chats, games and being able to so much more without the isolation of the personal computer. Thanks to the internet, the traditional dial-up BBS'es are dying away. However, I have found many boards to now support telnet connections. The cost of dialup lines are simply too expensive and non-economcal. Thanks to the internet, one can use one dialup line and use the bandwidth to support at least 3 simultaneous internet users without lag. That's quite an advantage over dishing out $15 a month for a line from your residence, and having to abide to the telco restrictions of the amount of lines, etc... Also, many boards running the very expensive (and very powerful) MajorBBS aka Worldgroup is still found to be used by many Internet Providers to handle their userbase who simply started as a small BBS. Worldgroup and Wildcat! BBS both have continued development of their software to offer web integration. Alot of people are still fans of muds. I think what has kept Worldgroup still popular is MajorMUD - a highly addictive and mostly scripted multi-user mud that has been a highlight of boards since I started. It isn't a door, but a proprietary module for Worldgroup. Even Seth Robinson, the creator of the classic Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD) released LORD II about 2 years ago. At least someone still has the heart for the boards. It's kind of sad that everyone is moving towards point and click. I'm still a fan of the text-based stuff, whether it be the console of Linux or the menu navigation of a BBS. BBS'es will always live on. This whole new generation is growing up on the Internet, and as the old board fans migrate to the internet, they are becoming more scarce. I surely hope many more years of good boards.
- Detritus

BBS's By ZIPCODE/AreaCode

[fosh]

How about a web site that creates virtual communities delimited by geographical boundries. The most obvious and easiest way to do this now would to be using Zip Codes and Area codes. Once this has been set up, giving people that old school terminal interface is trivial. Further, people would be MUCH more likely to divulge info to poeple only in thier neck of the woods. Finally, For every region, there could be a question that anyone who lived in the area would know the answer to, but no one else would.... -Alex the Fishman

BBS communities: Chinet

[Anonymous Coward]

There's at least one BBS community still alive and vibrant, if smaller than it once was: the very first one! Chinet is the lineal descendant of "CBBS", the very first BBS ever to go online more than 20 years ago. I've been a regular since the late 1980s myself, from back when it was about the only source of a dialup newsfeed in Chicago. Of course practically nobody actually dials in anymore. Not even sure if Randy Seuss still has a modem line in service. But the conferencing system remains the heart of the thing and does lead to real-live contact. I spent last night at Chinet HQ at a LAN gaming party. You can telnet to chinet.com and log into the shell bbs, or go to http://www.chinet.com and log into the web version of the same conferencing system. Randy's talking about switching to a different conferencing software but whatever, it will always be clearly labeled on the website.

[cue flashback] remember the kid of the 80s email?

[zerocool^]

Ah, those were the days.

Myself, I am only 18, was born in [gasp] the 80s and still get choked up when i read one of those cheezy "children of the 80's emails... and I remember a few things... [cue flashback]

I remember when the popular memphis BBS "the mongoose's shadow" (later "shadowscape") was about the only one in town with >1 node, so you could talk to ppl online, which was the coolest thing since sliced bread.

update: i recently heard a rumor that said BBS was run by 901.org, the local "hacker" community... hmmm...

I remember BBS's that were optimized to be seen on my Apple IIgs, with a 2400 modem. I'm sure some of the old fogies reading this will say "In my day, 2400 was lightining!" but remember, hell, when the 2400 was the thing, i was about 11!

I remember "modem speed wars", when the BBS would log the transfer rate and you would try to compete for the fastest transfer rate at a speed, say 14,400, and you could mess with different ADTD &blahblahblah codes or try X,Y,Z modem protocols to try to get fastest rate.

I remember LORD!!!! I'm sorry, but that was like the definitave door for me. Legends of the red dragon. I was playing that before Dragon Warrior hit for the NES. Yep. Remember you could take the chick (read: prostitute) in the bar "upstairs" if you charmed her for days in a row? Yeah, that was fun.

Anyway, just the musings of some punk lamer kid that has been in the scene since jr high.

~zero
From the "brings-back-memories-of-a-time-long-gone" dept

Spitfire BBS

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember back in the early 90's a buddy of mine ran a BBS in the Cincinnati, Ohio area, called Symposium. It was one of the more popular boards in the area, even though he only had 1 line. He ran good old Spitfire 3.X, with all the FidoNet and FidoNet Internet Gateway (something like that), with tons of board games. Barren Realms Elite, Food Fight, Legend of the Red Dragon, etc. Most were networked to other games in the area. After seeing all that, I decided I should run a BBS, on my brand new (at the time) 486 66. It was a monster machine in its day, which was actually pretty overkill considering I was running DOS 5 (or 6). In any case, my board was pretty small compared to his. I dont remember what modem I had at the time, I think it was a 14.4, until I upgraded to a Zoom 28.8 V.Fast modem (ugh, V.FAST, pre V.34 standard). My user base was only like 300, getting around 20 calls a day. But it was still fun. Spitfire. That was some neat BBS software. I remember that RipScript became popular shortly before the popularization of the Internet. But it was far to little, to late. Anyone remember ANSi art? Oh yea, Legend of the Red Dragon exists now on the Internet somewhere. Just do a search somewhere for it. Any cincinnati people remember Symposium, or Utopia? If so, drop me a line, nickh@one.net . Enough rambling for now. Time for sleep. Later all.

Another great abstraction?

[blackwizard]

I am wondering if all this "great abstraction" is really good for society. Every day, more and more is abstracted away from our daily routine.

Even today, we are largely abstracted from pretty much everything that is important. And I'm talking about things that are truly important -- life or death kind of importance, not meeting "crucial" deadlines to get the latest (buggy) version of Windows out. I am referring to basic survival needs. How many of you grow or kill your own food? Yeah, it's nice that we have the technology to grow and distribute all this food to millions of people -- but if something should ever happen to that method of distribution, then we could be pretty screwed.

Okay, so most of us probably don't have the knowledge or resources to grow our own food. What about shelter? Who here knows how to make clothes? I am willing to bet that most of us live in houses or apartments that we wouldn't have the slightest clue how to build ourselves, should we ever need to. Granted, we're smart people, I'm sure we could figure something out, but the point is -- we're already heavily abstracted from basic needs such as food and shelter already.

The list only grows from there. Transportation? Well, (mostly) everyone can walk... but, nope, transportation has been abstracted into an elaborate system where if you don't have an automobile of some kind, you simply can't get to where you want to go, when you want to go there. Commercial zones are heavily separated from Residential zones, making it difficult and expensive for most people to live close enough to their place of work to walk there, should they want to. (If anyone has ever been to San Jose, you know what I mean; I tried to get gas there one time, I had to drive through countless miles of suburbs before I even found a gas station. Not exactly a great model of efficiency, any way you look at it.)

So, here's my point -- what happens when one of the layers in the "great abstration" breaks? It has happened before, and it's likely that it will happen again. (A good example would be the Great Depression; it happened because of short-sightedness on our parts, and also a layer of abstraction we like to call the "economy".) The whole Y2K scare? It happened (and still is happening) because of short-sightedness on our parts, combined with many, many layers of abstraction. If something fails on one of the lower levels of abstraction, it has the potential to create a tidal wave that wipes out the rest of the entire system. The more layers of abstraction, the more potential failure points. (This is why the linux kernel is so blindingly fast, and stable)

Personally, I would prefer to eliminate the overhead of unnessecary layers of abstraction. The superficiality of society today irritates me to no end. All us geeks need to unite to make this world a better, more peaceful, more efficient place. The less abstraction involved, the better off we will all be in the long run.

Free Trade Wars Server

[Anonymous Coward]

About the comment I saw regarding an online version of Trade Wars... I run a server dedicated to the game of Trade Wars with 5-7 games running at any one time. I run a specialized software package that eliminates even having a BBS. Server is FREE, so if anyone would like to try it out, the telnet address is twgs.tradewars.org.
Thanks.

EleqTrizi'T
Sysop of The Home Sector Game Server
telnet://twgs.tradewars.org
http://www.jps.net/eleqtriq

I got a BBS for ya!

[bcflood]

My buddy runs one in Indianapolis called "Taciturn Seclusion". It is free and offers the usual "trade wars" amd other door games, as well as chat, "Major Mud" and other exciting games. The addy is: tac.oaktree.net The website is http:\\www.taciturn.net and the Sysop's email is: sleep.walker@tac.oaktree.net

BBSes still exist

[Anonymous Coward]

BBS systems STILL exist, though many have migrated to the Internet using Telnet. Check out the Telnet BBS Guide at The BBS Corner: http://www.thedirectory.org/telnet BBS systems still live and still thrive! Dave

Moderation and meeting people online

[Fandango]

I agree with your comments about the nature of BBS's vs. the Internet. A few additional thoughts: First, one interesting effect of BBS's was that the Sysop had the ability to moderate posts, as well as kicking the really obnoxious users off of the system completely. You might cry censorship, but if any Sysop was really that heavy-handed, you were free to choose any number of other local BBS's to chat on.

Another stabilizing effect were the frequent user meets that many BBS's would have. Forcing people to connect in real life broke down some of the anonymity and freedom from accountability that often gets people in trouble in their online communications. I was too young to take advantage of it in the heydey of BBS's, but I went to a few user meets for my roommate's BBS last year and they were pretty cool, despite the fact that the BBS itself, while still around, has long since ceased to be a focal point of activity for the community that it spawned.

Finally, I'd like to put in a plug for one local community that made a successful transition from the BBS world to the Internet, and is actually a great place for single geeks to meet MOTAS (Members Of The Appropriate Sex). I'm convinced that their site would never have been as cool had it started as a Web site instead of a BBS. Check out Matchmaker.com. They have local nodes for major metropolitan areas, and a very generous free 30 day trial. What sets them apart from the usual free personals services is the extensive and well balanced questionnaire (including several essay questions) that you're encouraged to fill out. By immediately eliminating prospects who aren't literate enough to write something meaningful, you can eliminate all but the most intelligent, interesting people (and as we all know, geeks crave intelligence in a mate).

From the women I've talked to on MM, it seems like there's a real lack of intelligent, friendly, single guys to talk to. If you're a lonely male without a mate, act now! Most guys seem to be either way too forward and sexually oriented in their pick-up emails, and/or just try *way* too hard. Be friendly, open, and honest, and try to meet a friend first, and a girlfriend second. Women are not as interested in photos as men, but if you have one, it can't hurt. If you don't meet at least one interesting person before your free trial runs out, well at least it didn't cost you anything!

Yet another example that MM is hip: in the Smoking category, in addition to the expected "Don't smoke", "Smoke occasionally", "Smoke like a chimney", and "Trying to quit" responses, they have entries for "I get high occasionally", "I get high daily", and "I never come down". What other site notices the reality that pot is the fourth most popular social drug (behind alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine) and allows users to query on recreational drug use (there's a separate question for alcohol) in such an unobtrusive and practical manner?

One more note about MM which reflects the sad times we live in: there's an essay question which asks "What do you look for in a BBS?" Almost all of the responses I've seen (including many from otherwise intelligent women that I've met) have said something like "What's a BBS?" Truly sad.

Dronefone

[bjb]

I used to run a small 30/callsPerDay BBS in the 201 area code (northern new jersey) called Dronefone. Originally on an Apple ][ with 2 floppy drives and a 300 baud modem. Ahh, those were the days. You would come home, kick up your feet, and read the messages posted by your users and relax. When I eventually got 2400 baud, I was one of the first boards in the area to have it. It was too cool.

Strange, but when I refer to the modem days I refer to the speeds as 'baud'. Now you see modems rated in 'bps', but you can spot an 'old timer on the modem' if they refer to the speed (accidentally) as baud rate. The technical difference is that baud is the number of times per second (or something like that) that the signal does a wave. Bps (bits per second) is the number of bits per second that the signal can transmit. Up until 2400 baud, bps and baud were synonymous since the modem sent one 'bit per wave'. With 9600, they were using 2400 baud, but were able to stick 4 bits into each wave. Interesting...

Enough of my rambling... Any of my old community out there? Any of you still remember my BBS? ;-)

--

Re:[cue flashback] remember the kid of the 80s ema

[scrytch]

Yeah, I knew I was Officially Old when I commented to some kid asking about languages and said that perl looks like line noise. He asked me what line noise looks like.

Matchmaker

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, I met my wife on our local Matchmaker back in 1994, back when you used to have to autoredial to snag one of the 32 available dial-in lines. Now they have none, but you can still telnet into most of them, or use their web front end, which is also quite good.

Re:[cue flashback] remember the kid of the 80s ema

[toni]

What's line noise? )"#U)#")#%MERF)#"R"#)"#)R"#))#)R#+++ATH0 NO CARRIER

Chinet is still running

[Grand Poobah of PRAM]

I was amused to see this item. The original BBS, up and running since 1978 (on one machine or another), is still going strong. The sysop hosted a gibathon last Saturday. Check it out at www.chinet.com.

Re:We are not dead!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been actively developing my bbs system for quite some time now, it runs on linux, and has over 20 dos doors currently functioning, in a week or so I plan to upgrade the bbs server past the 486 it was developed on (it forced me to keep the code clean and light ;-), get the cable modem, and perhaps if there is enough of a demand to bring back my TWGS... telnet://intergate.dyndns.org

Web Based BBS system

[Anonymous Coward]

I've actually been working on writing a Web-Based BBS system.. I will throw a sample BBS online soon.. I've also been working on porting some popular door games for the new system. If anyone would like a copy of the system or has any questions, e-mail me at david.irving@maine.edu

my 2 cents.. (online illusions bbs representin')

[Xelar]

Man.. those were the days.. I started "modeming" (hah, havent used that term in awhile) when i was 8 (1989).. i remember fighting for a 2400 bps connection with other users of a local chat system.. if you were at 2400, you thought you were blazing.. then i remember getting my 14.4 and thinking man! this 100k file only takes 10 minutes! (or whatever it was..) Eventually, i like everyone else it seemed, started running a bulletin board.. we grew from 1 line to 2, to 4 , to 8, and so on up to 32 nodes.. that was pretty damn big for our area (melbourne, fl).. we had full internet access, and all that.. but it still wasnt the same.. after awhile we decided to move on with our lives and leave it behind. I wanted to try to purchase our domain name back (lusions.com), but its owned by some strange internet "pay to surf" company.. strange, didnt think the "word" lusions was a hot commondity.. o-well, it was fun while it lasted, and im sure something will come alone to bring back that feeling (or whatever it was) that bbs's carried. I still have my autographed copy of the Lord - Tournament poster (seth able was the shit) shout outs to any of our users in the strange possibility that someone reads this alex.