Very cool. Thanks for the nostalgia. Played a ton of TW2002 and LORD on Virtual Arcade BBS back in Cleveland, OH in the early 90s. Ah, back in the days when I had the Internet AND local BBS access and the BBS was far more compelling...
A look at my BBS Software from '93
91–100 of 215 posts
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#92I remember back in 2002, I joined my first BBS.
It was a smallish (~30 people) anime & manga community and the twist was, that the whole board was written by one of the founders in PHP.
I remember him hating on the other BBS because in his eyes they weren't "pure" anymore and in his eyes, they had nothing to do with BBS at all. What can I say... the community broke down because he insisted on his strange BBS and people went to communities who embraced the "social web" with profiles, timelines, blogs etc.
But this was in a time when people said, these new "blogs" were like "guestbooks you write in yourself", which is true and in view of the omnipresent guestbooks on every website, where people wrote that they visited the website, a blog sounded hilarious. Now the concept of a guestbook sounds hilarious and blogs are a backbone of the web...
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#93I fondly remember that "Kall Back Soon" ASCII art. I think I used it on my BBS too. I ran a single line PCBoard BBS in the mid to late 90's. PCBoard had its own plugins called PPEs. A lot of them were distributed as shareware. After finding a decompiler I had a lot of fun reading source code, making personal keygens, and finding security issues.
Likewise, I think it was used by a few different pieces of software. Mystic BBS still has it as its default logoff art today...
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#94My BBS was called CENTURY XXI. At first, it was just an Apple IIe with a SiderII harddrive (just 20MB!). 24hs. GBBS was the software usted to manage it, it was great. Based on Argentina, it was an awesome learning experience. Check this link for more BBS in Argentina: https://goo.gl/7EXTMx
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think that the achievement of some home-made appliance that was actually hard to get money-wise (and probably build) is one aspect of what makes those memories fond.
But I have another explanation, which, I think, explains much of it. Being a part of the BBS network meant one had overcome a bit of a hurdle and reached a small community that actually cared about the system and the sense of the community itself. Those BBS islands had their own rules, implicitly or explicitly spelled out, they were full with lots of creativity (cf. the ASCII/RIP art), and while the occasional troll or rude idiot can be found anywhere, posting something to a BBS usually meant you got some response back. It was a smaller circle (at least, it felt that way). You could actually make friends through the BBS network. Today, when I try to post something on HN, I cannot even find it immediately after posting, let alone hope that other people find my submission. :)
The SDF.org bboard feels much in the same way.
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ;)
What do these numbers mean ? My Google-Fu is failing
I was just a little bit too young to get access to BBS in my youth.
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ham radio. 300 baud packet over HF (thousands of miles) is still a thing, as are newer data modes such as PSK31 and the JT family. I'm actively working on 1200 baud projects over VHF FM now. Back in the day BBS was very much in. These days the same tech is more often used for telemetry, tracking etc (APRS). Now you can do it all in software, ref https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf and friends.
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ;)
What do these numbers mean ? My Google-Fu is failing I was just a little bit too young to get access to BBS in my youth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet
I was 2:201/274.9. My upstream node that I connected to was 2:201/274. He connected to his upstream hub, 2:201/200, who in turn connected to his upstream net coordinator, 2:201/0, whose upstream was the regional coordinator, 2:20/0, and finally up to the zone coordinator, who I think was 2:0/0 or something.
A zone was a continent, 2 was Europe. Regions were countries in Europe, 20 was Sweden. Each region could have any number of networks, Sweden had like 5, and network 1 was the Stockholm area. Each network had hubs and nodes, and the guy who ran the node I talked to was simply the 74th node of the 2nd hub. Finally, since I didn't have a public BBS, I was a private point, the 9th on my node.
So putting it all together, a Fidonet address is zone:regionnetwork/hubnode.point.
Why weren't there separator characters between the region and the networks, or the hub and the nodes? Who knows, it worked. :-)
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why we need to colonize space. Bring back those low-bandwidth long distance communications.
Ham radio. 300 baud packet over HF (thousands of miles) is still a thing, as are newer data modes such as PSK31 and the JT family. I'm actively working on 1200 baud projects over VHF FM now. Back in the day BBS was very much in. These days the same tech is more often used for telemetry, tracking etc (APRS). Now you can do it all in software, ref https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf and friends.
Ham radio doesn't allow for encrypted connections AFAIK, which makes it a lot less interesting to me.
Re: A look at my BBS Software from '93
#100All of you nostalgics in this thread need to get together and write a book. I loved Exploding the Phone, and I'd love a volume that covered the BBS era.