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An old photo of a large BBS (2022)

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Re: An old photo of a large BBS (2022)

#31

Post by icedchai »

jacquesm wrote: post #23

The OS that was running on these is irrelevant, the important part is the BBS software. And these usually ran quite a few lines per box, sometimes they would use external racks of modems, but I'm not seeing that here so maybe these were using internal modem cards, so maybe 6 per box, but if they were using external modems it could easily be 12 or more, with the PC cards hosting multiple serial ports, 4, 6 or even 8 p…

The OS was relevant if your BBS software was limited to a single simultaneous user, like many of the early DOS BBSes. The late 80's "PCBoard" BBSes I'm familiar with needed one PC per user, plus a file server with Netware.

Re: An old photo of a large BBS (2022)

#32

Post by rconti »

jacquesm wrote: post #23

The OS that was running on these is irrelevant, the important part is the BBS software. And these usually ran quite a few lines per box, sometimes they would use external racks of modems, but I'm not seeing that here so maybe these were using internal modem cards, so maybe 6 per box, but if they were using external modems it could easily be 12 or more, with the PC cards hosting multiple serial ports, 4, 6 or even 8 p…

Yeah, this jumped out at me too. It's a wild misunderstanding of how BBSes worked.

That said, I have no idea how a multi-node BBS would work, in terms of keeping state synchronized.

Re: An old photo of a large BBS (2022)

#33

Post by bluedino »

Would love a technical explanation of how all that stuff worked by someone who did that kind of stuff in those days. In the old days I personally never saw anything bigger than a four line BBS. But I remember reading about that one in shareware README.TXT files

Wouldn't mind hearing war stories from the cdrom.com guys as well.

Re: An old photo of a large BBS (2022)

#35

Post by dublin »

If they were really badass, they had a rack of Telebit modems. (Telebit made 68020 based modems that did 56+ Kbps long before a 56K standard, and literally had more compute power than most of the computers they were connected to.)

Re: An old photo of a large BBS (2022)

#36

Post by jacquesm »

icedchai wrote: post #31
jacquesm wrote: post #23

The OS that was running on these is irrelevant, the important part is the BBS software. And these usually ran quite a few lines per box, sometimes they would use external racks of modems, but I'm not seeing that here so maybe these were using internal modem cards, so maybe 6 per box, but if they were using external modems it could easily be 12 or more, with the PC cards hosting multiple serial ports, 4, 6 or even 8 p…

The OS was relevant if your BBS software was limited to a single simultaneous user, like many of the early DOS BBSes. The late 80's "PCBoard" BBSes I'm familiar with needed one PC per user, plus a file server with Netware.

Ok, but that's just the vehicle, it is the BBS software that does the works. And even in the 80's there were ways to run multiple instances of 'single user' BBSs on one box, for instance (dare I say it...) OS/2 and TV.

Re: An old photo of a large BBS (2022)

#37

Post by [deleted] »

ryandrake wrote: post #20

I remember thinking that I would reach absolute peak-coolkid if I could start and run a BBS. I even installed WWIV and DesqView to fuel the fantasy and prepare. But my parents didn't understand technology and couldn't grasp why I wanted to hook up (and pay for) a second phone line for the house. So, unfortunately I would remain a mere luser until I went off to University where the Internet was just getting popular an…

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