201–210 of 215 posts
I ran my own BBS from '92 through the early 2000's, starting on an Amiga. I wrote it myself in C (Lattice C, later SAS/C compiler.) It had email and Usenet newsgroups (through a UUCP feed to a local dialup ISP...)
Fun times. I eventually moved to Linux and FreeBSD...
I've been trying to find a "door" game I played that was themed around a nuclear wasteland. There was an ansi-graphical map with tiles you moved between. IIRC you potentially would run into various wild/mutant animals or other players that you could battle. I don't remember much else about it but I remember enjoying it profusely and have been unsuccessful in finding even the name of it now. Also played a ton of Trade…
I've been trying to find a "door" game I played that was themed around a nuclear wasteland. There was an ansi-graphical map with tiles you moved between. Land of Devastation? ANSI first, then an EGA and I think VGA client later? If it's that, I loved that one. A multi-user Wasteland rip.
From video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7iQIXs6gpc
I remember there was a "replicator" item that that was rumored to exist, but somehow only the admins could ever 'find' them. Always was suspicious about that.
Re: losing BBS/source from the 90's -- I was fortunate enough to regularly back things up to QIC tape, and lo and behold, 22 years later a hacked up box restored the BBS perfectly and it ran in DosBox on my laptop. I was pleasantly surprised that it all worked immediately. Hardest part was finding parts for a floppy tape and installing the right Windows version. Seeing the ANSI art made it all worth it... https://twi…
I still have some 3.5" floppy disks with my BBS and the door's I wrote for it. My parents still use a USB floppy drive (and have several) because they have a sewing machine that uses it. Perhaps I'll give this a try.
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Pfft, iCE > ACiD any day of the week!
Thumbs up ACiD! iCE! ASCII art, we had to be joking :-) I remember those multipages drawings... And, what was the tool ? TheDraw I guess ?
You'd actually have to add delays by moving the cursor to allow enough time to read the captions/speech bubbles. It was pretty funny because it would be much slower on a 300 baud modem vs. a 2400 baud, so you had to be careful how you tuned your delays.
Does anyone remember the terminal software "Terminate - the final terminal"? Does anyone know what happened to the original author, Bo Bendtsen? I'd love to send a registration check, since I never registered it as a youngster! There's a Bo Bendtsen from Denmark on twitter but alas it's not him (I asked!).
It was pretty good, but the joke was that it contained everything and a toaster.
One thing that always fascinated me is that although BBSs connected people, they were necessarily constrained by distance given the difficult (and price) of long-distance calls. That reflected on the shape of the community around it. There were some things that would be common between them but overall different area codes had very different scenes. This is somewhat diluted today, since you can connect with whatever c…
BBS software was very regionalized. Being from a different part of Brazil Remote Access reigned supreme, while PC Board is something I saw once that one day when I dared dial long distance to some BBS in a different state. The same goes for all the other software. In some areas LORD was _the_ BBS game, in others it was unknown. In my region BlueWave was the standard offline mail reader, in others only QWK or even wei…
That's how I started programming professionally. One of my friends hired me as a programmer, saying "Anyone who can write a BBS for a Vic can program!" Thirty-three years later, that same friend wants me to work with him at Google.
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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.
Someone local to me had launched a pay-for-membership based MajorBBS that had something like 16 phone lines in. MajorBBS was the only thing I had seen that could support so many users at once. This was around the time I had stopped running my own BBS, before college. 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…
I had this weird software I licensed which let people play Doom against each other, over the phone line, simulating a local IPX network ... MPGS (Multiplayer game server) by a company called APCi.
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> Doing Fido over TCP/IP just doesn't feel the same. It's way too easy. Do you remember ZMH? Zone Mail Hour? If you had a public BBS, you had to disallow logins during ZMH, so that your phone line was reserved for netmail and echomail delivery. I was just a lowly point, so I didn't have to bother with that crap. 2:201/274.9 representin', yo. The funniest part about the star-shaped network was that it was more of a fe…
I loved how relaying got around long distance charges. Bowmanville would call Oshawa which was a local call. Oshawa would call Pickering which was a local call. Pickering would call Scarborough again a local call. Scarborough would call Toronto and Toronto would call Mississauga. All the message relays would just use local calls, but if you left any of the stop out you would need a long distance call. So all our loca…