So many memories sparking up from this thread. I ran The Dark Tower from my bedroom in the late nineties on my Tandy 1000 286 from Radio Shack. Everything I do professionally I started off on there.
A look at my BBS Software from '93
81–90 of 215 posts
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#82I wrote a lot of BBS software starting from 1986. This was in Toronto mainly on the C64 (28k RAM… plus some available via switching out ROM using assembler), so Spence BBS was an inspiration, but with a friend we wrote software called M1 which had creative features like user contributed ongoing stories and a way to display files or run simple scripts from any command, like a shell. Eventually around 1990 it was exten…
" ... around 1993 as it became https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internex_Online" I remember "io.org" as the shortest domain name I knew in 1993 and adopted it as my default password for anonymous ftp logins. In fact to this day if I login as anonymous on an ftp server, muscle memory dictates I type in "k@io.org" as my password.
Recently I discovered the domain: m.me
It's the shortest useful domain name I know.
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#83The 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…
> Doing Fido over TCP/IP just doesn't feel the same. It's way too easy. Do you remember ZMH? Zone Mail Hour? If you had a public BBS, you had to disallow logins during ZMH, so that your phone line was reserved for netmail and echomail delivery. I was just a lowly point, so I didn't have to bother with that crap. 2:201/274.9 representin', yo. The funniest part about the star-shaped network was that it was more of a fe…
I ran 2:250/165 back in the day. RemoteAccess 2 and FrontDoor NC. And running Desqview so I could have the BBS running as well as mess with my pc ;)
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#84wardialing, redboxing, beige boxing for 900's, breaking into pbxes, east coast bbs scene. good times for sure.
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Even the talk of "long distance phone calls" makes me nostalgic. 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.
This is why we need to colonize space. Bring back those low-bandwidth long distance communications.
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#86The 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…
> Doing Fido over TCP/IP just doesn't feel the same. It's way too easy. Do you remember ZMH? Zone Mail Hour? If you had a public BBS, you had to disallow logins during ZMH, so that your phone line was reserved for netmail and echomail delivery. I was just a lowly point, so I didn't have to bother with that crap. 2:201/274.9 representin', yo. The funniest part about the star-shaped network was that it was more of a fe…
Finishing my original thought in the comment, since I got sidetracked by the nostalgia:
The reason for ZMH was that a node making a connection to another node required the use of a physical phone line where one node would dial the other, which would stop anyone else from connecting to those two nodes. So if you had a lowly user logged on to your BBS, noone else could log on to it, and you couldn't send or receive Fidonet mail.
Contrast that with TCP/IP where it's possible to have millions of active connections to other nodes on a single node without breaking a sweat, and it's just a ridiculous comparison.
Another hilarious quirk of the times was that almost noone was running a multitasking OS (Amiga users: shut up!), which meant that once someone had called your Frontdoor system and delivered mail, it would exit, and start your mailer (Fmail!), which would uncompress the received file, put all the messages in your local message db (We're talking flatfiles of course, SQL was nowhere in sight), and prepare packages for all your downstream nodes, and after that it would start up Frontdoor again, at which point you could finally receive calls again.
So not only were the systems unable to handle more than one connection at a time, there was also no background processing, so while your computer was busy unpacking an enormous serveral-hundred-kilobytes zip file of mail, it couldn't accept any calls.
Oh, oh! And there was no Unicode, not UTF8, so there was a years-long technical debate/flamewar/ridiculous shoutfest about which character set to standardize on, where the main contenders were CP437 vs. ISO-8859-1.
Looking back, it's amazing it worked at all, but it did, and that was fucking magic.
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#87The 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…
Thank you for the happy nostalgic reminiscence of my youth. I also remember the computer mags that had several pages devoted to BBS phone number listings (just before the program listings you could type in)
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#88This is awesome, thanks for sharing. For yet more nostalgia, I recommend you check out the /r/bbs Reddit, or for EVEN MORE nostalgia, take a look at ENiGMA BBS - it's BBS software developed in Node and can be spun up on any Linux box - https://github.com/NuSkooler/enigma-bbs/.
Thanks again, enjoyed this thread!
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#89I loved my BBS. I remember when I came home with a modem and my parents asking me what was that. That thing was the device that skyrocketed the phone bill up to a thousand dollars. I remember my parents screaming like crazy.
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#90Anyone 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.
There was also custom TW2002 Telix-based software that had an overlay with macros you could use. Made things so fast.