A look at my BBS Software from '93 • Hacker News Board

Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93

#71

Post by deepakhj » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 5:56 AM UTC

hoodwink wrote: post #10

Anyone play TradeWars 2002? That's what I was doing in '93 on my BBS.

One of my all time favorite games. I miss those days so much.

Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93

#72

Post by alexkavon » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 6:00 AM UTC

Oh man, I remember running my old acmlmboard back in the day. Great times.

Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93

#73

Post by hertzdog » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 6:09 AM UTC

Thank you for your post and thanks for all the comments... it takes me years back. Maybe a dumb question: why we all miss those days? I don't think it is only related to being young. I am convinced it is something related to a "less noise/new tools" and probably I agree about "the more constraints more creativity". Is there anybody who can better articulate or have a different vision?

Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93

#74

Post by deepakhj » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 6:14 AM UTC

This brings back a lot of memories. I started in the bbs scene when my friend gifted a 1200 baud modem in 1992. I began trading warez on a 8088 xt 1mb ram 40mb machine. From the local scene in Los Angeles (818). I modified WWIV and ran my own bbs until my hard drive crashed and I eventually lost the source. I also got into war dialing pbx's so that I could call famous bbses in New York and Canada. I loved the style of bbs software like celerity and visionx and the art of acid and ice.

I eventually made it to the it scene where I had access to and ran the top ftp sites in the world.

I miss those days immensely.

Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93

#75

Post by Kenji » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 6:20 AM UTC

hertzdog wrote: post #73

Thank you for your post and thanks for all the comments... it takes me years back. Maybe a dumb question: why we all miss those days? I don't think it is only related to being young. I am convinced it is something related to a "less noise/new tools" and probably I agree about "the more constraints more creativity". Is there anybody who can better articulate or have a different vision?

The internet got popular. What that means: Government snooping, DMCA, lots of non-nerds and idiots on the internet, websites that lock content down regionally, bloated garbage websites.

There was lots of untapped potential back then which made things exciting. Also, the communities were smaller, like families.

Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93

#76

Post by AvocadoSushi » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 6:25 AM UTC

Here in Taiwan BBS is still popular, PTT [0] has ~120k avg. concurrent users every day.

For those interested, their codebase is available on GitHub [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System

[1] https://github.com/ptt/pttbbs

Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93

#77

Post by LVB » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 6:29 AM UTC

hoodwink wrote: post #10

Anyone play TradeWars 2002? That's what I was doing in '93 on my BBS.

Oh yeah. I recall writing Telix scripts to traverse the galaxy and then calculate the shortest path from a->b based on the portals it discovered. I also recall quite the scandal when a sysop peeked into the admin console and gave an advantage to someone.

Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93

#78

Post by lucaspiller » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 6:32 AM UTC

Kenji wrote: post #75

hertzdog wrote: post #73

Thank you for your post and thanks for all the comments... it takes me years back. Maybe a dumb question: why we all miss those days? I don't think it is only related to being young. I am convinced it is something related to a "less noise/new tools" and probably I agree about "the more constraints more creativity". Is there anybody who can better articulate or have a different vision?

The internet got popular. What that means: Government snooping, DMCA, lots of non-nerds and idiots on the internet, websites that lock content down regionally, bloated garbage websites. There was lots of untapped potential back then which made things exciting. Also, the communities were smaller, like families.

I wasn't part of the scene (too young), but from comments here it sounds like there was a certain romanticism about writing/building and running your own BBS. It's not quite the same as spending 5 minutes to spin up a new Digital Ocean instance and running a Docker image.

Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93

#79

Post by b0blee » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 6:33 AM UTC

Thanks! BBSing got me my first programming job in 1985. I ran several boards, including one for the company, before the web came along 10 years later. I really enjoyed your screen shots.

Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93

#80

Post by ianmcgowan » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 6:46 AM UTC

jmspring wrote: post #43

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…

I moved to SF in the late 80's and was amazed by the BBS scene. After a few massive phone bills to Berkeley and Walnut Creek, I realized that even though their area code was 415, it was an intra-LATA call, not quite local, not long distance. Very expensive if you spend hours hogging a phone line though.

I eventually stumbled on wetware.com, which was a shared unix box hosted (I think) near SF State somewhere. The joys of UUCP mail and Usenet! I made some really good friends both on and off-line there, but sadly all of them eventually drifted away from the Bay Area, as most transplants do.

This thread is bringing up a lot of nostalgia...