51–60 of 215 posts
Fellow obscure BBS software author here. Mine was Apocalypse / ApX (a hack of Havok, which was a hack of something else, which was a hack of Emulex/2, which I think was a hack of Forum?), around '92. I, too, remember recruiting ACiD guys to help out with the menu art. Ah, memories.
Pfft, iCE > ACiD any day of the week!
Fellow obscure BBS software author here. Mine was Apocalypse / ApX (a hack of Havok, which was a hack of something else, which was a hack of Emulex/2, which I think was a hack of Forum?), around '92. I, too, remember recruiting ACiD guys to help out with the menu art. Ah, memories.
Weren't the vision/vision2/visionX based on forum hacks as well ? And celerity ? All written in turbo pascal, right ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This was usually run by someone with money because their modems were making long-distance calls (including overseas) on a regular basis. It's amazing to me is how many people volunteered their time, hardware, and money to keep these systems running for free.
It is, but there was also a certain amount of vanity to it. If you had the cash, you were the dude . You could watch as an entire region's (or even entire countries') mail flowed through your system. You probably walked down into your office and watched your busy Fido server (or servers) and a sweet stack of USR Courier external modems blinking away (you never wasted time on cheap gear) and when you participated in g…
I remember when, as a kid, if you answered the phone and it was a long distance call for mom or dad, we would run to get them yelling "Long distance! Long distance!"
Every second was precious.
In the east bay (primarily - Contra Costa County, but there was an offshoot (maybe two) down towards Dublin/San Ramon), there was a multi-line chat BBS known as Popnet. The main office was in Walnut Creek, socials were a regular thing, online chat and games were an important part of socializing. It was custom written software by the father/son team. If I recall rightly, they even had an online version of Diplomacy (t…
Anyone play TradeWars 2002? That's what I was doing in '93 on my BBS.
Yes! I've tried over the years to create a TW2002 clone, but I always stall out at the economic system. I've also tried to recreate Barren Realms Elite / Solar Realms Elite, but Amit lost the source code to that, too. Reverse engineering BBS games is hard! Maybe Legend of the Red Dragon would be easier... [Edit: I'm aware that there are TW2002 games out there right now, but those tend to be web-based, and I wanna do…
The late 80s/early 90s BBS scene was an amazing time for me. I was in high school and I've never been as interested in computers and communications as I was then. I never ventured into the "dark" side like OP--I was too scared of my parents--so I ran a legit FidoNET BBS using the RemoteAccess BBS software and the Frontdoor mailer (and later, Maximus and BinkleyTerm). The most amazing thing about it all was that it wa…
Oh the Nostalgia! My soul hurts. I was just a kid (teenager) so I didn't have the funds to run a BBS myself. But I remember the 60 minute limits, the long lists of local BBSes, the ANSI graphics, Maximus, RemoteAccess and others (I had played with a few in the hopes of starting a BBS, but that era was starting to end when I graduated in the early 2000s), Door games, RIP graphics (the very early days of vector art on…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This was usually run by someone with money because their modems were making long-distance calls (including overseas) on a regular basis. It's amazing to me is how many people volunteered their time, hardware, and money to keep these systems running for free.
It is, but there was also a certain amount of vanity to it. If you had the cash, you were the dude . You could watch as an entire region's (or even entire countries') mail flowed through your system. You probably walked down into your office and watched your busy Fido server (or servers) and a sweet stack of USR Courier external modems blinking away (you never wasted time on cheap gear) and when you participated in g…
I made friends with a fellow in Texas that claimed he had won a counter suit against AT&T for false phreaking charges and settled out of court for some number of years of free long distance. Because of this he would call my board and push me the mail from our other nodes every day and save me the money.
Now that I'm older the story sounds implausible and I think the dude might have just been lonely.
It was a lot of fun getting messages from boards in South Africa and other places every day. A very prominent HNer ran a BBS that was also a member of the network though I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate being outed! Such fun times.
I used a mailer front end called Intermail, and I remember at age 15 it was unimaginably complicated to set up.