BBS: The Documentary (2005) • Hacker News Board

Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)

#31

Post by gmiller123456 » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 11:15 PM UTC

leptons wrote: post #19

themew wrote: post #6

The day I was able to upgrade my 'shoebox' 110 baud modem to a 300 baud modem was the day I thought "I'll never need this kind of speed, but it's nice to have." Thanks for posting about this documentary. I ran a BBS from 1983-1986 on a Commodore 64, a 1200 baud modem and 5 1541 floppy drives. An amazing time for this technology.

Which BBS? I was on a lot of C64 BBSs. I actually built my own 300 baud modem for my C64 from electronic components I got at Radio Shack. I was kind of a nerdy kid.

Cool. Did you ever do a write up on how to do it, or know of one. I'm just curiuos, I assumed it was pretty involved.

Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)

#32

Post by bsagdiyev » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 11:16 PM UTC

sdenike wrote: post #30

slowhadoken wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Usurper and Legend of the Red Dragon are still running somewhere. They’re basically just old DOS games running on someone’s computer you dialed into.

I remember years ago someone made a PHP version of Legend of the Red Dragon, I think it was Legend of the Green Dragon if not mistaken. I wish I still had my original registration code that was mailed to me and signed by Seth Robinson.

Is this it? https://github.com/stephenKise/Legend-of-the-Green-Dragon

Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)

#33

Post by brianstorms » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 11:33 PM UTC

I still have the DVDs in shrink-wrap. Have never watched. The documentary has a glaring omission, not covering COCONET from Coconut Computing.

Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)

#34

Post by epcoa » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 11:46 PM UTC

brianstorms wrote: post #33

I still have the DVDs in shrink-wrap. Have never watched. The documentary has a glaring omission, not covering COCONET from Coconut Computing.

I was gonna say take it up with Jason. Looks like that has been done http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3415

Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)

#35

Post by quilombodigital » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 11:48 PM UTC

Yep. Good old days… I also had a bbs with a friend in Brazil, we would make very expensive international calls twice a month to other bbs to download the news. Ah… and of course there was a group called applemaniacos that would send apple II disks every month by mail, with a very funny zine.

Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)

#36

Post by shon » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 11:50 PM UTC

Just a reminder that you can relive the good ole days and run your own BBS with doors FidoNET and all sorts of legit oldskool features all in a modern system running in Node

EnigmaBBS:

https://nuskooler.github.io/enigma-bbs/

Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)

#37

Post by nullc » Sun, Dec 24, 2023, 12:00 AM UTC

I am so glad my teenage hijinx did not survive the transition to internet and I feel deeply sorry for children today. Sooo much cringe.

The inherent locality of BBSes was pretty nice however, sure there were some long distance users but most people on most boards were local. I recently rediscovered this photo where 16 year old me recreated the on-login BBS quote wall by asking BBS friends that came over to sign my wall: https://nt4tn.net/photos/wall.jpg

It's been a few years since I've talked to anyone I knew from the BBSes (moving to the other side of the country no doubt contributed, some of them have died, etc) but they hung on longer than anyone else I knew as a teenager.

Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)

#38

Post by nullc » Sun, Dec 24, 2023, 12:05 AM UTC

fintler wrote: post #11

divbzero wrote: post #8

Are there places where BBS is still in active use?

If you’re near the Bay Area, CA, there’s a few N0ARY BBSes accessible via packet radio. For example, there’s one on Mt. Umunhum in the Santa Cruz mountain range.

The Umunhum packet bbs has great range. I can work it from northern Marin maybe 90 miles away. But sadly, whenever I've logged in it seems kinda dead except for national network traffic. Maybe there is local stuff I missed in the flood of non-local stuff.

Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)

#39

Post by nullc » Sun, Dec 24, 2023, 12:08 AM UTC

divbzero wrote: post #8

Are there places where BBS is still in active use?

A few years back I realized I had a non-used landline due to DSL and I thought it would be fun to try to log into every BBS remaining in the country. I picked up a nice external courier modem from weird stuff for a couple dollars and started dialing.

I was thwarted by two factors, one is that the vast majority of the numbers I could find were now answered by humans who I felt bad for bothering. The other was the apparently even a lot of landlines (including my own) have VoIP steps in their transport that modem traffic doesn't work well across.

Re: BBS: The Documentary (2005)

#40

Post by tjohns » Sun, Dec 24, 2023, 12:11 AM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #5

https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary in case you're looking for a version which isn't 27GB.

There's also a torrent there, in case you feel guilty about their hosting bill for direct-downloading 27GB.