171–180 of 215 posts
Most of my BBS talk/nostalgia is embarrassing but by far my most embarrassing anecdote was that I set up a BBS exclusively to chat with my high school girlfriend late into the night. This is only noteworthy because, in 2017, this would be entirely normal behavior for a 14 year-old. But the amount of effort and expense it took to get the equipment, extra line, BBS and then _teaching my girlfriend how to use a modem_ p…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh the Nostalgia! My soul hurts. I was just a kid (teenager) so I didn't have the funds to run a BBS myself. But I remember the 60 minute limits, the long lists of local BBSes, the ANSI graphics, Maximus, RemoteAccess and others (I had played with a few in the hopes of starting a BBS, but that era was starting to end when I graduated in the early 2000s), Door games, RIP graphics (the very early days of vector art on…
Yes, I had so many DOOR games, and Solar Realms Elite (SRE) and Baron Realms Elite (BRE) were the only ones that I enjoyed playing myself. I liked how they were turn based (each user got X turns per day) and one player played at a time, but you were playing in a multi-player world against other people who would take their turns for the day. I always thought it'd be interesting to do something similar in modern day, w…
Of course, these days you'd probably be able to just buy an extra day for 500 gold coins...
Anyone play TradeWars 2002? That's what I was doing in '93 on my BBS.
Dude, I still play TW2002! SWATH is the best modern helper I know about: http://swath.net/ My meagre collection of SWATH scripts: https://github.com/irtnog/swath-scripts/tree/master/src The ICE9 game server: http://www.oregonsouth.com/ice9/ I don't know if ICE9 still does this, but they used to have a bunch of interesting customizations, like where sectors 1-2000 were a lightly regulated federation space were connect…
I was in middle school...so this would have been mid 90's.
I was connected to the Internet using a freenet that was provided by SEFLIN (South East Florida Library Information Network)...text based. People who had real internet ran applications, and using ICQ to chat (since you can scan the in network chat for teams chattering!) I was using plain ol text based Internet...and Pine was my email program. I still use nano very often as my editor of choice :)
One time my local BBS moved to Miami...but the area code was still 305. It was considered long distance, even though the area code was the same. I racked up quite a telephone bill.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I loved collecting BBS Software at the time to look at what other people were doing. Pretty much everything was either a Forum (Pascal) or WWIV (C) hack.
There was also "real" BBS software like wildcat and MajorBBS ... I also remember some very, very active and high quality boards that ran citadel ... citadel was sort of the HN of the BBS world ... no ANSI, no fluff, just quick command keys and all high quality discussion.
This meant it could offer an active chat room, and it had a MUD game that everyone loved, called TeleArena.
For me, TeleArena was fun because I'd write scripts that would automate playing the game for me when I wasn't there.
Here in Taiwan BBS is still popular, PTT [0] has ~120k avg. concurrent users every day. For those interested, their codebase is available on GitHub [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System [1] https://github.com/ptt/pttbbs
Fascinating! I would have thought most people didn't have land lines in Taiwan. Are they dialing in using mobile phones?
BBS with Internet today serves as a high-performance forum, loading boards/articles takes a single RTT. Storage is still file-based and relies on filesystem and kernel caching.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes we did. It's amazing what teenagers were accomplishing at the time. Full product release life cycles, done after school and homework. A few memories: 1) I had a 2400 baud modem, and then upgraded to an external 14.4K US Robotics Courier. They were $1000 at the time but USR offered it at $500 in return for advertising their brand. Someone on my BBS paid that fee in exchange for higher access. 2) I'd trade snippets…
Okay, gather round chillen', the old guys are swapping stories. Right after Caller ID was introduced, I thought it would be a great idea to use it to log somebody into my BBS directly. So I wrote up the software that would extract it, dip the db, and log the user in if found, otherwise, it'd go to normal login (in case of calling from another DID). I was a STAR Then a user figured out how to spoof caller id and as I…
I don't have a memory of caller id being around when I ran my BBS, or maybe I just didn't have it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ham radio doesn't allow for encrypted connections AFAIK, which makes it a lot less interesting to me.
Why wouldn't it allow encryption? Can't anything that sends and receives packets be able to be encrypted?
Computers were a lot more fun in those days.
Right. Something about hardware and OS staying stable long enough so that people could focus on creating new interesting software -- instead of just trying to keep up with ever changing APIs and constantly searching StackOverflow for ready made solutions. Sometimes severe constraints drive the really beautiful solutions.
Just gonna drop this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PJcABbtvtA