171–180 of 196 posts
From my days... this is what an old photo of a "proper" BBS looked like https://beeline.org/beeline/?view=a29ed68f4f4d53 (note the wire wrapped custom modem controller) - the description is "Original Apple IIe with 11 modems and two 4-port homemade serial cards" And to keep better time, https://beeline.org/beeline/?view=c0a8000daa11ca It was later upgraded to a 486 https://beeline.org/beeline/?view=188870d0bbc894
Those were the days. I still believe nothing replaces the camraderie of the small, local BBSs. The large ones were good too, but these tended to resemble the modern Internet forums a bit more. I miss BBSs and that's why I featured them in the story of my sci-fi game! If you are interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
Nothing quite replaces the drama level and drama complexity of the small, local BBSs. Especially when the denizens met in the big room with the blue ceiling.
From the follow-up article: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/01/27/scale/ "If you are sticking with the 2022 equivalent of MS-DOS and machines that do exactly one thing at a time, then yeah, you are going to have a whole fleet of systems all sitting there busy-waiting on something stupid." "Don't recreate the basement full of PCs when the problem can actually be solved with a single box sitting in a cabinet somewher…
How did they keep the room cool? that equipment must not be shown... Maybe fans to move the hot air ....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even for a standard PC, you could buy a 16 port serial card and hook it up to 16 modems, either discreet devices or the dedicated ISP kit which might support dozens of incoming calls (possibly on a single bearer) via various means. Telebit netblazers and then ascend maxs were common in those days.
The question is if you could actually handle that many lines concurrently, with available software and the hardware resources of a single PC. Rachel's article as well as other comments here indicate that you could not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even for a standard PC, you could buy a 16 port serial card and hook it up to 16 modems, either discreet devices or the dedicated ISP kit which might support dozens of incoming calls (possibly on a single bearer) via various means. Telebit netblazers and then ascend maxs were common in those days.
The question is if you could actually handle that many lines concurrently, with available software and the hardware resources of a single PC. Rachel's article as well as other comments here indicate that you could not.
Those were the days. I still believe nothing replaces the camraderie of the small, local BBSs. The large ones were good too, but these tended to resemble the modern Internet forums a bit more. I miss BBSs and that's why I featured them in the story of my sci-fi game! If you are interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
> ...nothing replaces the camraderie of the small, local BBSs. Nothing quite replaces the drama level and drama complexity of the small, local BBSs. Especially when the denizens met in the big room with the blue ceiling.
https://www.wired.com/2001/12/sexchart-degrees-of-separation
From the follow-up article: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/01/27/scale/ "If you are sticking with the 2022 equivalent of MS-DOS and machines that do exactly one thing at a time, then yeah, you are going to have a whole fleet of systems all sitting there busy-waiting on something stupid." "Don't recreate the basement full of PCs when the problem can actually be solved with a single box sitting in a cabinet somewher…
The BBS software itself would have likely ran on the PCs, one instance per simultaneous user, and because it's a single-tasking OS, that means one simultaneous user per PC. They aren't just bridging packets to a single central multi-user server that serves everyone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even for a standard PC, you could buy a 16 port serial card and hook it up to 16 modems, either discreet devices or the dedicated ISP kit which might support dozens of incoming calls (possibly on a single bearer) via various means. Telebit netblazers and then ascend maxs were common in those days.
The question is if you could actually handle that many lines concurrently, with available software and the hardware resources of a single PC. Rachel's article as well as other comments here indicate that you could not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Glorious. This must be what is like when old people long for the hot car they lusted for in their youth.
> Glorious. This must be what is like when old people long for the hot car they lusted for in their youth. Absolutely. The blog post goes to great lengths about why it's stupid to run a cluster, and I run a NAS in my house that has more horsepower than anything from the 90s, but there's a part of me that's still a teenager who wants to run a monster multi-node BBS
I've got a nas and a relatively powerful mini-pc for most of my home lab server stuff... but all the same, juggling about 6 BBS related projects I'm hoping I can bring all together later in the year.