61–70 of 196 posts
Also thinking it's a lot environmental easier to host a BBS than a Discord server.
Higher resolution photo https://web.archive.org/web/20230531042903im_/https://static...
In this picture it seems that all machines have a 3.5" floppy disk inserted. Maybe they had no hard drive and only booted from floppy and then ran software over the network?
I am surprised by the assumption that each box could only handle one modem. I seem to remember that some DOS BBS packages could handle multiple modems/users concurrently and only needed multitasking operating systems for “door” programs. Am I misremembering?
Higher resolution photo https://web.archive.org/web/20230531042903im_/https://static...
maybe i'm a bot.
anyway i used to call into BBSs back in the early 90s and the thing I'm remembering is that they survived mostly on donations, and now that I am seeing the infrastructure that supported those systems and recalling the price of hardware back then I'm starting to second guess everything I thought I knew.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren’t the modems the black boxes sitting on top of each PC in the picture?
yes, most of them look like USRobotics Courier modems. Note that not all the machines have one, and some have two. Assuming that the parent commenter is right and that they are using internal line cards, I wonder if the external modems were being added to support higher speeds. However, the fact that we can see at least 2 (but I think four) 66 blocks means they had 50 to 100 phone lines for the machines visible, whic…
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.
That's quite the assumption.
There were a lot of different BBS hosting programs. They wildly varied in what they supported and how they were implemented. Further even within a given piece of software the ways you could configure them and the consequences also varied. Even if a given software supported concurrent users on a single PC for various reasons a BBS might choose not to host that way.
I am surprised by the assumption that each box could only handle one modem. I seem to remember that some DOS BBS packages could handle multiple modems/users concurrently and only needed multitasking operating systems for “door” programs. Am I misremembering?
Edit: Ugh... I'm gonna have to go back to floppy images to find it. There's a "MUBBS" for Mac from 1992 showing up in search engine results but that's not the one I'm thinking of. It was more like 1989 or 1990.
Higher resolution photo https://web.archive.org/web/20230531042903im_/https://static...
Oh that's a breaker box (or a box of wiring of some sort), not a mirror!
The blur does interesting things.