17 ms·

A look at my BBS Software from '93

392 points by mmccaff 9y ago

Safety1stClyde 9y ago
Too bad you lost the source code.
- mmccaff 9y ago
  I know. It was on a computer that burned down in a fire. So, it's very much gone. Both that and the message archives from the bbs itself would have been a treasure trove of nostalgia.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    I'm sure the vast bulk of the message archives from BBSs are long gone. Many were local and vanished when the systems shut down. And I'm not sure how many archives there are from FidoNet, PC-Relay and the like.
  - sixothree 9y ago
    I have the last few months of logs and messages from my bbs but have lost all of the menus.
    - a1studmuffin 9y ago
      I'm in the opposite situation, I have all the ANSI art I created but none of the Remote Access database + config files. CRC error. Oh 3.5" floppy disks, how you made storage exciting.
  - chubot 9y ago
    What was your BBS handle? I was in the 609 area code and these ANSIs look familiar :) I might have been on your BBS or one using your software. Although it was most likely a long distance call to 908 so I don't think I called it that often. edit: Oh I guess it was Midnight Sun? I don't remember if we ever interacted, but the ANSIs look familiar!
    - mmccaff 9y ago
      Yes, it was Midnight Sun and my BBS was called The Night Light. You were long distance in 609, so we might not have ever met. My only memory of the 609 area code was of a good Pascal developer named Ffejtable? (question mark included in the handle.) What was your handle?
gus_massa 9y ago
Nice post, but it's not a "Show HN". From https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html > What to Submit > Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread. > Blog posts, sign-up pages, and fundraisers can't be tried out, so they can't be Show HNs.
- mmccaff 9y ago
  Ok, yes, I suppose I was a bit liberal with those rules. It's something that I made but it is now impossible to play with because dialup BBSs have gone extinct. By converting the ANSI images to PNGs, I tried to show what it would have been like to play with in its time. I removed 'Show HN' from title.
  - j45 9y ago
    Most BBS users had to use their imagination when navigating text based interfaces, ANSI interface design and all - I had no problem traversing the experience. The WWIV BBS world reminded me of another Telegard based BBS software I used a lot - Renegade BBS. You may not be able to get Dementia back up, but maybe some of the ANSI artwork could come back to life, RG was pretty configurable in it's time. https://renegadebbs.info/ https://renegadebbs.info/
    - voltagex_ 9y ago
      Interesting - wonder what they did to piss off Bluecoat (Content Blocked (content_filter_denied), Content Category: "Malicious Sources/Malnets")
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cyberferret 9y ago
Nice! Way better than most BBS's that I used to frequent back in the 80's and 90's. Great to see an OS/2 based one too - I remember switching to OS/2 for a small time "play" BBS that I set up in the early 90s... I was astounded at the ease of running multiple modem lines on OS/2 as compared to DOS or CP/M...
- dade_ 9y ago
  There was fantastic support from fellow sysops for OS/2 2 and Warp. OS/2 was bulletproof, and the multitasking was key for multiline and allow maintenance work while live.
hoodwink 9y ago
Anyone play TradeWars 2002? That's what I was doing in '93 on my BBS.
- Jemaclus 9y ago
  Yes! I've tried over the years to create a TW2002 clone, but I always stall out at the economic system. I've also tried to recreate Barren Realms Elite / Solar Realms Elite, but Amit lost the source code to that, too. Reverse engineering BBS games is hard! Maybe Legend of the Red Dragon would be easier... [Edit: I'm aware that there are TW2002 games out there right now, but those tend to be web-based, and I wanna do a legit BBS-style game. Telnet, probably.]
  - exogeny 9y ago
    LORD is available here: lord.nuklear.org
  - ddunkin 9y ago
    You can find the Majorbbs Entertainment Edition out there. Has TW, SoC, trivia, etc. Supports telnet.
  - ryanobjc 9y ago
    Ditto actually. I mean, ultimately that's what Eve Online is, a massive TW2002 "clone". Only everything made better. I think the problem with an economic system is you need enough people to do it properly, or you have to figure out some kind of 'fake' where it can be dynamic enough for the concept of cross-space trading work, but also not be entirely unrealistic. I did learn a lot about event-driven programming, state machines, and the telnet protocol however.
  - hoodwink 9y ago
    What are the TW games out there right now? I was not aware! I've dreamt for years about licensing TW to make a mobile version consistent with the gameplay of the BBS days. Before scripts. I don't know if you fall in love with the first games you play as a kid, but 25 years later, I still yearn for a 6 month TW bang with a corp of 4 friends.
hoodoof 9y ago
How old were you when you wrote this? Looks like a big system - was this your first major project? I seem to recall OS/2 and a C compiler cost money back? How did you get to be using those, through work or did you buy them? Why did you choose OS/2 - did you consider any other alternatives?
- chubot 9y ago
  OS/2 and C compilers were readily available for downloaded on BBses. I'm pretty sure I downloaded Turbo C onto like 20 floppy disks over ZModem or something. Not only did it take forever to download, but installing it was a huge pain, with all the disk swapping. I guess the hard disk didn't have enough space for both the raw disks and the install? I don't remember exactly. I never ran OS/2 but a friend did, and I'm pretty sure he downloaded it rather than paying for it. A primary form of social currency on BBSes is who had access to commercial software, i.e. the "zero-day warez".
  - apaprocki 9y ago
    Yeah Borland Turbo C in DOS was the way to go. My first board ran on multi-tasking DOS in DESQview before moving over to OS/2 -> Windows over the years.
    - 20after4 9y ago
      Heh same here. DESQview worked remarkably well, actually.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > I guess the hard disk didn't have enough space for both the raw disks and the install? Floppy-disk-based installers were often hardcoded to use the A: drive so even if there was space for the install and the floppy installer on the HDD, you'd need to copy the installer to the floppies to use it, unless you had some workaround.
    - Narishma 9y ago
eric_arrr 9y ago
Fellow obscure BBS software author here. Mine was Apocalypse / ApX (a hack of Havok, which was a hack of something else, which was a hack of Emulex/2, which I think was a hack of Forum?), around '92. I, too, remember recruiting ACiD guys to help out with the menu art. Ah, memories.
- rsync 9y ago
  Weren't the vision/vision2/visionX based on forum hacks as well ? And celerity ? All written in turbo pascal, right ?
  - apaprocki 9y ago
    Oblivion* also, Renegade was Pascal. This is a lot on the topic: http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/FORUM/ http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/FORUM/
  - sk5t 9y ago
    AFAIK the canonical spelling of the progenitor software was FoReM. I never dabbled in VisionX but Celerity was definitely a FoReM derivative.
  - mmccaff 9y ago
    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.
    - rsync 9y ago
      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.
      - mmccaff 9y ago
        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 scripts that would automate playing the game for me when I wasn't there.
davidy123 9y ago
I wrote a lot of BBS software starting from 1986. This was in Toronto mainly on the C64 (28k RAM… plus some available via switching out ROM using assembler), so Spence BBS was an inspiration, but with a friend we wrote software called M1 which had creative features like user contributed ongoing stories and a way to display files or run simple scripts from any command, like a shell. Eventually around 1990 it was extended to support federated message exchange, but by then UNIX systems were entering consciousness so we switched to multi-line, uucp capable Waffle software on DOS, then Xenix, BSD/OS and finally Linux around 1993 as it became https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internex_Online https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internex_Online
- rsync 9y ago
  " ... around 1993 as it became https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internex_Online" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internex_Online" I remember "io.org" as the shortest domain name I knew in 1993 and adopted it as my default password for anonymous ftp logins. In fact to this day if I login as anonymous on an ftp server, muscle memory dictates I type in "k@io.org" as my password.
  - Jaruzel 9y ago
    Recently I discovered the domain: m.me It's the shortest useful domain name I know.
  - ethomson 9y ago
    That's funny - I have always simply typed `ethomson@` as my password for anonymous FTP, without ever specifying the hostname portion. The then-popular wu-ftpd had an option to enforce that there was a `@` in the password for anonymous access, but it didn't verify anything after that. I read somewhere that therefore a reasonable shorthand was to drop the hostname portion of your address since the FTP server knew your source hostname anyway. So this is similarly etched into _my_ muscle memory, but looking back I have no idea where I read this or if it was actually common at all or if I was the only one.
Arizhel 9y ago
Computers were a lot more fun in those days.
- nimrody 9y ago
  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.
  - Arizhel 9y ago
    Don't forget documentation. Sure, you couldn't look stuff up on StackOverflow, but there was actual, real, paper documentation you could read, and it was usually well-written and really useful. Try finding that these days, even in digital form. (Personally, I'll vote for the Qt documentation, but that's about all I've seen that's really that great.)
- jug 9y ago
  People may say it's just nostalgia but I think what I loved most was the competition and variety. It was like living in a golden age of home computing. You had the Amiga, Atari, ZX Spectrum, C64, all these sorts of incompatible home computing systems. And I think being incompatible was kind of a benefit for home computing culture. Because this spawned multiple magazines and communities that could survive because they could target various systems, rather than more consolidated cultures that have happened since the IBM PC days, where you end up with just a few big web sites no one can compete with. I miss that diversity, and also hacker spirit compared to today when building systems is often much like using big pre-built Lego blocks. We need to give a new Internet traction just to relive this, haha... Use the opportunity to fix DNS and decentralize it while at it. :p Then get Haiku OS or something going...
apaprocki 9y ago
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://twitter.com/apaprocki/status/550432891201941504 https://twitter.com/apaprocki/status/550432891201941504
- rhizome 9y ago
  Frankly I'm most impressed that you had a QIC drive available.
  - apaprocki 9y ago
    The current owners of Colorado Backup software IP made it freeware a number of years back as well. (Thanks!) Without that you'd also have to find ancient software to pull it off the tape.
- josteink 9y ago
  > Hardest part was finding parts for a floppy tape and installing the right Windows version Surely you mean floppy drive?
  - tbyehl 9y ago
    QIC-40 and QIC-80 drives connected to the floppy disk controller.
- mmccaff 9y ago
  Amazing that you got it back up and running! I would love to see some of the old messages on the public message boards of my BBS from those days. I had a tape drive as well,and I did back things up at the time, but even those backups are gone.
- vt240 9y ago
  Smartest decision I ever made was backing up all my old childhood 68k and PPC Macintosh systems to QIC using a friends SCSI drive. Later I bought a ClubMac (haha remember them) drive for nothing on eBay. A couple years ago I was able to restore some old old systems from the attic, nostalgia city ! I think I had some Mac specific BBS software in there somewhere, TeleFinder and FirstClass I remember. There was another GUI based one, I think NovaTerm. I sure wish I would have imaged some of the Apple IIgs software though before all the floppies went bad.
RyanRies 9y ago
It's beautiful.
exogeny 9y ago
I spent an absurd amount of time modding my Renegade board, drawing ANSI, listening to the latest mods out of the demoscene and failing miserably at learning Assembly circa 1993-1996. And then IRC came along.. 412/724 scene, north of Pittsburgh. Lots of good friends met on the boards, some still friends today.
driverdan 9y ago
I fondly remember that "Kall Back Soon" ASCII art. I think I used it on my BBS too. I ran a single line PCBoard BBS in the mid to late 90's. PCBoard had its own plugins called PPEs. A lot of them were distributed as shareware. After finding a decompiler I had a lot of fun reading source code, making personal keygens, and finding security issues.
- davestephens 9y ago
  Likewise, I think it was used by a few different pieces of software. Mystic BBS still has it as its default logoff art today...
grumblestumble 9y ago
omfg! i was on many Dementia BBS' in SoCal back in the day. First board I sysop'ed was a WWiV 3.21 - I was very proud that I modded the Pascal source to support more than 9 discussion boards at the time.
- mmccaff 9y ago
  That is amazing to hear! Dementia's beta tester was in Modesto and he distributed the demo version (limited to 5 users) around CA.
chrissnell 9y ago
The late 80s/early 90s BBS scene was an amazing time for me. I was in high school and I've never been as interested in computers and communications as I was then. I never ventured into the "dark" side like OP--I was too scared of my parents--so I ran a legit FidoNET BBS using the RemoteAccess BBS software and the Frontdoor mailer (and later, Maximus and BinkleyTerm). The most amazing thing about it all was that it was the public internet before there was a public internet. E-mails sent over FidoNET had an amazing weight to them that's hard to describe. It took a ton of effort just to get your BBS to participate in the network and once you did, data moved so slowly that you became very observant of each step of the process of communicating. First, you wrote the email in your mail editor (I loved GoldED). Then, another program bundled it up with other emails into some kind of binary packaging and passed it along to the mailer. The mailer took this bundle of mail and dialed out on the modem to the local FidoNET hub. If you lived in a rural location, this meant that you had to make a long-distance call to deliver the mail. My local hub was in Seguin, TX (~30 miles away) and it felt like a very big deal when my computer dialed him up to do a delivery. From there, the hub delivered it to a "star", which was a regional hub that dealt in larger volumes of mail. This was usually run by someone with money because their modems were making long-distance calls (including overseas) on a regular basis. From the star, your mail was shipped across long distances and then the process repeated in reverse until the recipient's system picked up the mail from their local hub. Then, when they replied, the whole thing happened again in reverse. It regularly took days to get a reply from across the world but it was so fun! Every single mail that you received in your inbox felt as important as someone writing a letter by hand and sending it via the postal service. I cherished getting emails, even if they were stupid. I still dream about reviving a modern FidoNET (yes, I know it still exists) for the HN crowd. I write a lot of Go and I even read some of the FidoNET technical standards with the thought of a Go implementation of the protocols but never got anywhere in it. It's an enormous amount of work and I haven't had a real phone line in over a decade. Doing Fido over TCP/IP just doesn't feel the same. It's way too easy.
- matt_wulfeck 9y ago
  >This was usually run by someone with money because their modems were making long-distance calls (including overseas) on a regular basis. It's amazing to me is how many people volunteered their time, hardware, and money to keep these systems running for free.
jmspring 9y ago
In the east bay (primarily - Contra Costa County, but there was an offshoot (maybe two) down towards Dublin/San Ramon), there was a multi-line chat BBS known as Popnet. The main office was in Walnut Creek, socials were a regular thing, online chat and games were an important part of socializing. It was custom written software by the father/son team. If I recall rightly, they even had an online version of Diplomacy (the board game). I still have friends from that era. It's interesting to see Dementia was based off of WWIV. The WWIV BBS software was well written and easy to update/customize/modify. TML, Innerdot, and others were amongst those that ran it in the 80s to early 90s. Interestingly enough, I actually feel like the BBS days did more to foster social interaction than "social networks" now. They were (unless warez sites) hyper local. In the east bay, we had regular pick up tackle football games (going from several a year in the early days on 1/x year in the 2000s) that ran for around (maybe more than) 20 years. Many of those involved are still friends.
- oaktowner 9y ago
  Reminds me a bit of The Well in Berkeley.
- ianmcgowan 9y ago
  I moved to SF in the late 80's and was amazed by the BBS scene. After a few massive phone bills to Berkeley and Walnut Creek, I realized that even though their area code was 415, it was an intra-LATA call, not quite local, not long distance. Very expensive if you spend hours hogging a phone line though. I eventually stumbled on wetware.com, which was a shared unix box hosted (I think) near SF State somewhere. The joys of UUCP mail and Usenet! I made some really good friends both on and off-line there, but sadly all of them eventually drifted away from the Bay Area, as most transplants do. This thread is bringing up a lot of nostalgia...
agentultra 9y ago
I wish I had been able to preserve those door games I wrote...
booleanbetrayal 9y ago
I miss the ANSI art scene. I remember 800# access that would live and die on the daily. That and phone bills.
neuro 9y ago
You just took me back to the 80s. Stale chips and cracks screens(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlVmPU6dh1M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlVmPU6dh1M) from downloading games till 4 AM in the morning on a 1200 baud modem with friends. What an outstanding looking BBS! Thanks.
sjs382 9y ago
If you love BBS art, be sure to check out https://artpacks.org https://artpacks.org
fiorix 9y ago
Just gonna drop this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PJcABbtvtA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PJcABbtvtA
- henrikschroder 9y ago
  "Have you ever paid a toll booth without slowing down?", and then he slides his credit card through a thing in his car!!! :-D :-D I mean, they got the prediction right, but their implementation is so so wrong!
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  One of the comments on that video: "Will you lose your privacy and civil liberties? You will, and the company that will bring it to you, AT&T."
- codazoda 9y ago
  You'll recall that the first iPhone was exclusive to AT&T so it feels a little like they came through on this promise. Apple might deserve a little of the credit, I suppose.
- mmccaff 9y ago
  Good commercial. Kind of chilling how visionary those ideas were at the time and that they did happen, though not exclusively brought to us by AT&T.
niix 9y ago
This looks awesome. I was a little later to the game, spent most of my childhood time on AOL 2.5-4.0, writing "progz" in Visual Basic.
- nickpoulos 9y ago
  ahhh dude that was my scene too! private room theselectfew a bunch of others...jeez...some of my stuff is still up on lenshell.com. Cmon know you remember that site, it exists still. my handle was filter back then and a few others haha
  - niix 9y ago
    Haha yeah I was looking at lenshell not too long ago, amazing that it's still there.
aethant 9y ago
This was a great post. I remember playing LORD and writing doors in turbo pascal back in high school. Thanks for posting!
X86BSD 9y ago
Maybe I missed it in the comments but was I the only one to run Wildcat! software for their board? I loved Wildcat!
- MR4D 9y ago
  I ran it too! Was so much fun right before the time the internet connectivity expanded past universities. I ran the BBS because otherwise I had to dial into Chicago (long distance - ha, what a concept!). For me it was much cheaper to just run a multiline BBS, and then read news on my own computer that sat in the basement!
- drittich 9y ago
  I ran it too! A co-worker and I who were sys admins at a Canadian provincial ministry ran it on behalf of the ministry, because no one knew enough to tell us not to :) Also, what about RoboComm? That thing was incredible to me back then.
- reiger 9y ago
  I ran it too - could never afford MajorBBS or the successors and it was easy to scale from 1-24 nodes. I even ran the weird BBS/ISP hybrid WINS Server but wasn't good enough to be considered a real ISP.
jonahhorowitz 9y ago
I ran a BBS back in the 90s called The Game BBS, it was hosted out of my bedroom in Colorado. I'd love to find an old backup, but I doubt I have one.
th0ma5 9y ago
I wrote a thing in Turbo Pascal that would convert Prodoor (Proboard) mailbox files to RBBS mailboxes. Or the other way around, I can't remember, but not both directions I don't think. Anyway, I uploaded it to several boards back then I think someone who was a retired Navy officer used it on their own board. I also think the Prodoor people may have used several of the ideas possibly, but in all the archives of BBS software, I haven't been able to find it. Oh well! Turbo Pascal was so much fun, and reading the RBBS source was a great education at the time when long distance phone calls were expensive.
alexkavon 9y ago
Oh man, I remember running my old acmlmboard back in the day. Great times.
hertzdog 9y ago
Thank you for your post and thanks for all the comments... it takes me years back. Maybe a dumb question: why we all miss those days? I don't think it is only related to being young. I am convinced it is something related to a "less noise/new tools" and probably I agree about "the more constraints more creativity". Is there anybody who can better articulate or have a different vision?
- Kenji 9y ago
  The internet got popular. What that means: Government snooping, DMCA, lots of non-nerds and idiots on the internet, websites that lock content down regionally, bloated garbage websites. There was lots of untapped potential back then which made things exciting. Also, the communities were smaller, like families.
  - lucaspiller 9y ago
    I wasn't part of the scene (too young), but from comments here it sounds like there was a certain romanticism about writing/building and running your own BBS. It's not quite the same as spending 5 minutes to spin up a new Digital Ocean instance and running a Docker image.
    - eveith 9y ago
      I think that the achievement of some home-made appliance that was actually hard to get money-wise (and probably build) is one aspect of what makes those memories fond. But I have another explanation, which, I think, explains much of it. Being a part of the BBS network meant one had overcome a bit of a hurdle and reached a small community that actually cared about the system and the sense of the community itself. Those BBS islands had their own rules, implicitly or explicitly spelled out, they were full with lots of creativity (cf. the ASCII/RIP art), and while the occasional troll or rude idiot can be found anywhere, posting something to a BBS usually meant you got some response back. It was a smaller circle (at least, it felt that way). You could actually make friends through the BBS network. Today, when I try to post something on HN, I cannot even find it immediately after posting, let alone hope that other people find my submission. :) The SDF.org bboard feels much in the same way.
deepakhj 9y ago
This brings back a lot of memories. I started in the bbs scene when my friend gifted a 1200 baud modem in 1992. I began trading warez on a 8088 xt 1mb ram 40mb machine. From the local scene in Los Angeles (818). I modified WWIV and ran my own bbs until my hard drive crashed and I eventually lost the source. I also got into war dialing pbx's so that I could call famous bbses in New York and Canada. I loved the style of bbs software like celerity and visionx and the art of acid and ice. I eventually made it to the it scene where I had access to and ran the top ftp sites in the world. I miss those days immensely.
lsc36 9y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System [1] https://github.com/ptt/pttbbs https://github.com/ptt/pttbbs
- jamesjyu 9y ago
  Fascinating! I would have thought most people didn't have land lines in Taiwan. Are they dialing in using mobile phones?
  - lsc36 9y ago
    AFAIK most Taiwanese BBSes established in the 90's already run on Telnet over TCP/IP. PTT has SSH support, smartphone clients are available as well. 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.
b0blee 9y ago
Thanks! BBSing got me my first programming job in 1985. I ran several boards, including one for the company, before the web came along 10 years later. I really enjoyed your screen shots.
revicon 9y ago
So many memories sparking up from this thread. I ran The Dark Tower from my bedroom in the late nineties on my Tandy 1000 286 from Radio Shack. Everything I do professionally I started off on there.
eternalvision 9y ago
wardialing, redboxing, beige boxing for 900's, breaking into pbxes, east coast bbs scene. good times for sure.
davestephens 9y ago
This is awesome, thanks for sharing. For yet more nostalgia, I recommend you check out the /r/bbs Reddit, or for EVEN MORE nostalgia, take a look at ENiGMA BBS - it's BBS software developed in Node and can be spun up on any Linux box - https://github.com/NuSkooler/enigma-bbs/ https://github.com/NuSkooler/enigma-bbs/. Thanks again, enjoyed this thread!
- mmccaff 9y ago
  Thanks for those recommendations, I didn't know about r/bbs and Enigma looks like an interesting project. I just starred it on Github and will definitely check it out!
meerita 9y ago
I loved my BBS. I remember when I came home with a modem and my parents asking me what was that. That thing was the device that skyrocketed the phone bill up to a thousand dollars. I remember my parents screaming like crazy.
icelancer 9y ago
Very cool. Thanks for the nostalgia. Played a ton of TW2002 and LORD on Virtual Arcade BBS back in Cleveland, OH in the early 90s. Ah, back in the days when I had the Internet AND local BBS access and the BBS was far more compelling...
k__ 9y ago
I remember back in 2002, I joined my first BBS. It was a smallish (~30 people) anime & manga community and the twist was, that the whole board was written by one of the founders in PHP. I remember him hating on the other BBS because in his eyes they weren't "pure" anymore and in his eyes, they had nothing to do with BBS at all. What can I say... the community broke down because he insisted on his strange BBS and people went to communities who embraced the "social web" with profiles, timelines, blogs etc. But this was in a time when people said, these new "blogs" were like "guestbooks you write in yourself", which is true and in view of the omnipresent guestbooks on every website, where people wrote that they visited the website, a blog sounded hilarious. Now the concept of a guestbook sounds hilarious and blogs are a backbone of the web...
pibefision 9y ago
My BBS was called CENTURY XXI. At first, it was just an Apple IIe with a SiderII harddrive (just 20MB!). 24hs. GBBS was the software usted to manage it, it was great. Based on Argentina, it was an awesome learning experience. Check this link for more BBS in Argentina: https://goo.gl/7EXTMx https://goo.gl/7EXTMx
endgame 9y ago
All of you nostalgics in this thread need to get together and write a book. I loved Exploding the Phone, and I'd love a volume that covered the BBS era.
cJ0th 9y ago
This system looks like a real life text adventure game :)
bananaboy 9y ago
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!).
- henrikschroder 9y ago
  Oh horror and nostalgia, yes! It was pretty good, but the joke was that it contained everything and a toaster.
wccrawford 9y ago
WWIV BBS and "doors" (games, basically) were my intro into system administration and further experience programming back then. I had so much fun setting that up. My parents even let me have 2 telephone lines so that I could have 2 users (plus someone in the house) on at the same time. I had exactly 1 multiplayer "door", but that was fine. My favorite door was Legend of the Red Dragon (LoRD) and I remember playing it a lot back then. My users (all half-dozen of them) did, too. It was a small town, and I was surprised to get that many people. So much nostalgia, and I can definitely link it to my career today.
- wyldfire 9y ago
  I was surprised that there was no mention of door games. That was easily half the fun, IMO.
- bluefox 9y ago
  You can still play (a clone of) it online... http://www.lotgd.net/ http://www.lotgd.net/
bungie4 9y ago
Old sysops get shit done! I ran BBS's from the late 80's through the 90's. All the local sysops are still friends and we still wax nostalgic over the old days. To a person, we all are still in IT and hold senior positions. When I remember those days and compare them to today, by and large, nothing is 'easy' anymore. It's what happens when you get to far away from the metal.
- mmccaff 9y ago
  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 of source code with other BBS authors. We'd exchange the code to implement one feature for another. 3) There were a few beta testers, distributors, and artists. It's what started my interest in building and releasing software, for sure.
  - bungie4 9y ago
    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 sat there, and watched the user log in as ME. LOL! Took me all of 5s to rip that out :D My first modem was a 300 baud that we tweaked up to 450 baud. When I shut down my BBS years later, I was running 3 lines on TBBS and I had no files or doors. It was strictly a message board with no networking (been there, done that). I specifically limited it to the top 150 participating users. Doesn't sound like much, but all 3 lines were busy constantly. Around 150 users seems to the magic number. More than that and ppl who lose track of whose who and stop participating. You have to go for big userbases to recover. At least that has been my experience.
    - 9y ago
jv0010 9y ago
omg this is amazing. even the ascii art brings back memories.
phaed 9y ago
Dem feels.
hackermailman 9y ago
Blue Board (Commodore64) software was the best I found for the late 80s/ early 90s, it was cheap, incredibly easy to run and customize, consistently updated, and it came with a built in terminal so when no one was on your board you could call other ones or easily script a file transfer/mail sync with a remote board. I remember a lot of STS chat boards too, In 1989, a DDial-like clone, Synergy Teleconferencing System AKA STS was released for IBM PCs and until 1997 I regularly would connect at 300bps to talk with local hackers at 3:00am on these "big" 16 line STS boards until easier access to IRC killed them off.
myth_drannon 9y ago
You can get software for BBS and some shareware CDs from BBSs at http://cd.textfiles.com/directory.html http://cd.textfiles.com/directory.html
myth_drannon 9y ago
anyone recommends active telnet BBSs?
- myth_drannon 9y ago
  I think I found a good list - http://telnetbbsguide.com/ http://telnetbbsguide.com/
wyldfire 9y ago
Apparently WWIV is provided with an open source license and builds on modern OSs [1]. You can run it as a telnet server! [1] https://github.com/wwivbbs/wwiv https://github.com/wwivbbs/wwiv
jotjotzzz 9y ago
Omg BBS. Did anyone remember Boardwatch mag? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwatch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwatch There were many BBS's posted there, and that's how I discovered them.
whatever_dude 9y ago
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 community you want. It creates a different sort of bubble. Anyway, that constraint was also somehow reflected on the choice of tools, maybe in this case especially in the software used by the BBS itself. The US had plenty of different BBS software being used. I know Wildcat was popular in Europe. In my native Brazil it was dominated by PCBoard (major) and Remote Access (minor), and the underground scene was heavily invested in the "cool" Oblivion. I actually thought PCBoard was a major player until I realized very few boards in the USA used it.
- rottyguy 9y ago
  also, it was constrained by a queue. Usually 1 phone line therefore only one person could be on at a time (cooperative multitasking if you will). busy signals (when was the last time you got a busy signal anywhere?) and auto-redials. good times!
- zorked 9y ago
  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 weirder formats were the standard.
  - bananaboy 9y ago
    In Melbourne, Australia, Remote Access and ProBoard were fairly popular amongst regular BBSes. At the time I always had the impression that PC Board was more popular amongst the warez BBSes.
- Muuuchem 9y ago
wiz21c 9y ago
As a wannabe-hacker, I had the super pleasant surprise, once trying to login into a BBS (for which I had no password, of course) that the line was interrupted in the middle of the screen and the sysop started typing "what are you tryin' to do"... It was just like in a movie. This was my first day on the "scene". BBS was located in Belgium, don't remember the name... I wonder if one could do that with, say, ssh (and without IRC :-)) After that, the problem was paying for long distance calls to more "3l33t" BBS's (usually in Sweden). But we had our ways :-)
1001101 9y ago
Not sure if anyone saw this: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/a-1986-bulletin-board-system-has-brought-the-old-web-back-to-life-in-2017/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/a-198... Basically RPi + tcpser == Internet BBS. I ran a PCExpress BBS - AMI Express for PC -- (USR Dual) for a while, and feel very lucky to have been a part of that era. Have been thinking about doing something on tcpser. Still part of that a bit, as we still make modems at the current gig. Get nostalgic every time when I hear them training up.
JohnLeTigre 9y ago
I miss those days I miss live-chatting with the sysop if he was around I miss gaining access levels and discover new files/areas I miss re-loging at 12:01am to have double turns for my attack in BRE I miss the discovery involved, how you would need to come up with interesting/new content to maintain you UL/DL ratio I miss the epic mail convos we had in my BBS community I miss GT's
EvanAnderson 9y ago
Being involved in the late 80's / early 90's BBS "scene" was formative for me. I wrote and "sold" some unimaginative "Door" programs (even going to far as to register my copyright on one of them). I wracked-up a lot of long-distance bills! I always wanted to run a board, but never got my act together enough to do it. Since the audience here is very diverse I'll selfishly throw out a couple nostalgia requests: A friend's board ran a door game called "Cyberspace" that was a TinyMUD-esque "single user dungeon" game. At one point we had 10 - 12 people actively building rooms, adding mobile NPCs, etc. It was loads of fun even though only one person at a time was interacting with the software. I've looked periodically over the last 20 years to see if I can find the people who wrote it on the 'net, but I've had very little luck. (It was Turbo Pascal-based, and originally written for WWIV, but we "adapted" it to work on Searchlight and later Renegade.) I'd love see if anybody from the old 203 board "Bit Truth" or the classic 602 "Unphamiliar Territory" is on here. Any takers?
- frandroid 9y ago
  You mean that guy? https://www.facebook.com/patrick.hunlock https://www.facebook.com/patrick.hunlock
  - EvanAnderson 9y ago
    No kidding. I guess it has been awhile since I tried to look them up. Thanks!
cgrusden 9y ago
I love this. Reminds me of my MajorMUD days, thanks for sharing
synrst 9y ago
Ansi art, still 31337 af.
nkozyra 9y ago
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_ put me squarely in the superdork category.
- macarthy12 9y ago
  and having a girlfriend excludes you completely
  - nkozyra 9y ago
    Everyone needs love [1] http://www.digitalia.be/images/2013/nerd-couple.jpg http://www.digitalia.be/images/2013/nerd-couple.jpg
- chrissnell 9y ago
  It was really fun way to communicate as a nerdy high schooler. One of my best friends was varsity football player, a jock who was a closeted nerd. We would both go home to our own houses at lunch time and dial up the local BBS and chat with each other about (what else?) BBSes. My parents were very anti-computer at the time because I spent so much time on it and they would never let me spend any of the money I earned at my busboy job on computer parts so I had to be sneaky about it. I eventually pilfered the $150 to get a Zoom 14.4Kbps modem and me and my buddy took his car to CompUSA and bought modems on the sly. I had to pull mine out of the packaging and ditch the box and sneak it home in my backpack so my folks wouldn't see, then be sure to mute the modem speaker so they wouldn't notice the changed negotiation tones. It seems so ridiculous now: computers became my meal ticket in a very big way and I'm eternally grateful that I had the balls to secretly buy that modem.
sathackr 9y ago
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 wars.
- glorytoad 9y ago
  Sounds like Operation Overkill ][. Here is a writeup about it that includes the little 3x3 tile map for movement: http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2015/04/game-187-operation-overkill-1990.html http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2015/04/game-187-operation-ov...
- mancerayder 9y ago
  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.
  - sathackr 9y ago
    that looks alot like it but it doesn't quite seem to fit -- I swear the map seemed bigger. From video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7iQIXs6gpc 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.
dreva 9y ago
I have many fond memories of the BBS scene... 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...
tdumitrescu 9y ago
Awesome memories! Modifying WWIV for local BBSes was how I got started with C when I was a young teen (after years of Pascal and Basic). For example putting in a user-vs-user combat system that could lock out a defeated foe for the day. Great for getting a board's users to keep out trolls collectively!
mrlyc 9y ago
In 1984, I wrote a BBS for the Commodore Vic-20 with up to 64 "rooms" (message areas), email and an online game. Users could create a room and make it public or private. The board was very popular with users spending an average time of 70 minutes on it. 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.
dbrian82 9y ago
hi,i'm Brian, i had my friend help me hack my ex's email, facebook, whatsapp,and his phone cause i suspected he was cheating. all he asked for was a his phone number. he's email is (hotcyberlord425@gmail.com)..IF u need help tell him Brian referred you to him and he'll help. Am sure his going to help you do it, good luck

392 points by mmccaff 9y ago

Safety1stClyde 9y ago

Too bad you lost the source code.

mmccaff 9y ago
I know. It was on a computer that burned down in a fire. So, it's very much gone. Both that and the message archives from the bbs itself would have been a treasure trove of nostalgia.
- ghaff 9y ago
  I'm sure the vast bulk of the message archives from BBSs are long gone. Many were local and vanished when the systems shut down. And I'm not sure how many archives there are from FidoNet, PC-Relay and the like.
- sixothree 9y ago
  I have the last few months of logs and messages from my bbs but have lost all of the menus.
  - a1studmuffin 9y ago
    I'm in the opposite situation, I have all the ANSI art I created but none of the Remote Access database + config files. CRC error. Oh 3.5" floppy disks, how you made storage exciting.
- chubot 9y ago
  What was your BBS handle? I was in the 609 area code and these ANSIs look familiar :) I might have been on your BBS or one using your software. Although it was most likely a long distance call to 908 so I don't think I called it that often. edit: Oh I guess it was Midnight Sun? I don't remember if we ever interacted, but the ANSIs look familiar!
  - mmccaff 9y ago
    Yes, it was Midnight Sun and my BBS was called The Night Light. You were long distance in 609, so we might not have ever met. My only memory of the 609 area code was of a good Pascal developer named Ffejtable? (question mark included in the handle.) What was your handle?

gus_massa 9y ago

Nice post, but it's not a "Show HN". From https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html > What to Submit > Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread. > Blog posts, sign-up pages, and fundraisers can't be tried out, so they can't be Show HNs.

mmccaff 9y ago
Ok, yes, I suppose I was a bit liberal with those rules. It's something that I made but it is now impossible to play with because dialup BBSs have gone extinct. By converting the ANSI images to PNGs, I tried to show what it would have been like to play with in its time. I removed 'Show HN' from title.
- j45 9y ago
  Most BBS users had to use their imagination when navigating text based interfaces, ANSI interface design and all - I had no problem traversing the experience. The WWIV BBS world reminded me of another Telegard based BBS software I used a lot - Renegade BBS. You may not be able to get Dementia back up, but maybe some of the ANSI artwork could come back to life, RG was pretty configurable in it's time. https://renegadebbs.info/ https://renegadebbs.info/
  - voltagex_ 9y ago
    Interesting - wonder what they did to piss off Bluecoat (Content Blocked (content_filter_denied), Content Category: "Malicious Sources/Malnets")

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

cyberferret 9y ago

Nice! Way better than most BBS's that I used to frequent back in the 80's and 90's. Great to see an OS/2 based one too - I remember switching to OS/2 for a small time "play" BBS that I set up in the early 90s... I was astounded at the ease of running multiple modem lines on OS/2 as compared to DOS or CP/M...

dade_ 9y ago
There was fantastic support from fellow sysops for OS/2 2 and Warp. OS/2 was bulletproof, and the multitasking was key for multiline and allow maintenance work while live.

hoodwink 9y ago

Anyone play TradeWars 2002? That's what I was doing in '93 on my BBS.

Jemaclus 9y ago
Yes! I've tried over the years to create a TW2002 clone, but I always stall out at the economic system. I've also tried to recreate Barren Realms Elite / Solar Realms Elite, but Amit lost the source code to that, too. Reverse engineering BBS games is hard! Maybe Legend of the Red Dragon would be easier... [Edit: I'm aware that there are TW2002 games out there right now, but those tend to be web-based, and I wanna do a legit BBS-style game. Telnet, probably.]
- exogeny 9y ago
  LORD is available here: lord.nuklear.org
- ddunkin 9y ago
  You can find the Majorbbs Entertainment Edition out there. Has TW, SoC, trivia, etc. Supports telnet.
- ryanobjc 9y ago
  Ditto actually. I mean, ultimately that's what Eve Online is, a massive TW2002 "clone". Only everything made better. I think the problem with an economic system is you need enough people to do it properly, or you have to figure out some kind of 'fake' where it can be dynamic enough for the concept of cross-space trading work, but also not be entirely unrealistic. I did learn a lot about event-driven programming, state machines, and the telnet protocol however.
- hoodwink 9y ago
  What are the TW games out there right now? I was not aware! I've dreamt for years about licensing TW to make a mobile version consistent with the gameplay of the BBS days. Before scripts. I don't know if you fall in love with the first games you play as a kid, but 25 years later, I still yearn for a 6 month TW bang with a corp of 4 friends.

hoodoof 9y ago

How old were you when you wrote this? Looks like a big system - was this your first major project? I seem to recall OS/2 and a C compiler cost money back? How did you get to be using those, through work or did you buy them? Why did you choose OS/2 - did you consider any other alternatives?

chubot 9y ago
OS/2 and C compilers were readily available for downloaded on BBses. I'm pretty sure I downloaded Turbo C onto like 20 floppy disks over ZModem or something. Not only did it take forever to download, but installing it was a huge pain, with all the disk swapping. I guess the hard disk didn't have enough space for both the raw disks and the install? I don't remember exactly. I never ran OS/2 but a friend did, and I'm pretty sure he downloaded it rather than paying for it. A primary form of social currency on BBSes is who had access to commercial software, i.e. the "zero-day warez".
- apaprocki 9y ago
  Yeah Borland Turbo C in DOS was the way to go. My first board ran on multi-tasking DOS in DESQview before moving over to OS/2 -> Windows over the years.
  - 20after4 9y ago
    Heh same here. DESQview worked remarkably well, actually.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > I guess the hard disk didn't have enough space for both the raw disks and the install? Floppy-disk-based installers were often hardcoded to use the A: drive so even if there was space for the install and the floppy installer on the HDD, you'd need to copy the installer to the floppies to use it, unless you had some workaround.
  - Narishma 9y ago

eric_arrr 9y ago

Fellow obscure BBS software author here. Mine was Apocalypse / ApX (a hack of Havok, which was a hack of something else, which was a hack of Emulex/2, which I think was a hack of Forum?), around '92. I, too, remember recruiting ACiD guys to help out with the menu art. Ah, memories.

rsync 9y ago
Weren't the vision/vision2/visionX based on forum hacks as well ? And celerity ? All written in turbo pascal, right ?
- apaprocki 9y ago
  Oblivion* also, Renegade was Pascal. This is a lot on the topic: http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/FORUM/ http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/FORUM/
- sk5t 9y ago
  AFAIK the canonical spelling of the progenitor software was FoReM. I never dabbled in VisionX but Celerity was definitely a FoReM derivative.
- mmccaff 9y ago
  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.
  - rsync 9y ago
    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.
    - mmccaff 9y ago
      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 scripts that would automate playing the game for me when I wasn't there.

davidy123 9y ago

I wrote a lot of BBS software starting from 1986. This was in Toronto mainly on the C64 (28k RAM… plus some available via switching out ROM using assembler), so Spence BBS was an inspiration, but with a friend we wrote software called M1 which had creative features like user contributed ongoing stories and a way to display files or run simple scripts from any command, like a shell. Eventually around 1990 it was extended to support federated message exchange, but by then UNIX systems were entering consciousness so we switched to multi-line, uucp capable Waffle software on DOS, then Xenix, BSD/OS and finally Linux around 1993 as it became https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internex_Online https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internex_Online

rsync 9y ago
" ... around 1993 as it became https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internex_Online" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internex_Online" I remember "io.org" as the shortest domain name I knew in 1993 and adopted it as my default password for anonymous ftp logins. In fact to this day if I login as anonymous on an ftp server, muscle memory dictates I type in "k@io.org" as my password.
- Jaruzel 9y ago
  Recently I discovered the domain: m.me It's the shortest useful domain name I know.
- ethomson 9y ago
  That's funny - I have always simply typed `ethomson@` as my password for anonymous FTP, without ever specifying the hostname portion. The then-popular wu-ftpd had an option to enforce that there was a `@` in the password for anonymous access, but it didn't verify anything after that. I read somewhere that therefore a reasonable shorthand was to drop the hostname portion of your address since the FTP server knew your source hostname anyway. So this is similarly etched into _my_ muscle memory, but looking back I have no idea where I read this or if it was actually common at all or if I was the only one.

Arizhel 9y ago

Computers were a lot more fun in those days.

nimrody 9y ago
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.
- Arizhel 9y ago
  Don't forget documentation. Sure, you couldn't look stuff up on StackOverflow, but there was actual, real, paper documentation you could read, and it was usually well-written and really useful. Try finding that these days, even in digital form. (Personally, I'll vote for the Qt documentation, but that's about all I've seen that's really that great.)
jug 9y ago
People may say it's just nostalgia but I think what I loved most was the competition and variety. It was like living in a golden age of home computing. You had the Amiga, Atari, ZX Spectrum, C64, all these sorts of incompatible home computing systems. And I think being incompatible was kind of a benefit for home computing culture. Because this spawned multiple magazines and communities that could survive because they could target various systems, rather than more consolidated cultures that have happened since the IBM PC days, where you end up with just a few big web sites no one can compete with. I miss that diversity, and also hacker spirit compared to today when building systems is often much like using big pre-built Lego blocks. We need to give a new Internet traction just to relive this, haha... Use the opportunity to fix DNS and decentralize it while at it. :p Then get Haiku OS or something going...

apaprocki 9y ago

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://twitter.com/apaprocki/status/550432891201941504 https://twitter.com/apaprocki/status/550432891201941504

rhizome 9y ago
Frankly I'm most impressed that you had a QIC drive available.
- apaprocki 9y ago
  The current owners of Colorado Backup software IP made it freeware a number of years back as well. (Thanks!) Without that you'd also have to find ancient software to pull it off the tape.
josteink 9y ago
> Hardest part was finding parts for a floppy tape and installing the right Windows version Surely you mean floppy drive?
- tbyehl 9y ago
  QIC-40 and QIC-80 drives connected to the floppy disk controller.
mmccaff 9y ago
Amazing that you got it back up and running! I would love to see some of the old messages on the public message boards of my BBS from those days. I had a tape drive as well,and I did back things up at the time, but even those backups are gone.
vt240 9y ago
Smartest decision I ever made was backing up all my old childhood 68k and PPC Macintosh systems to QIC using a friends SCSI drive. Later I bought a ClubMac (haha remember them) drive for nothing on eBay. A couple years ago I was able to restore some old old systems from the attic, nostalgia city ! I think I had some Mac specific BBS software in there somewhere, TeleFinder and FirstClass I remember. There was another GUI based one, I think NovaTerm. I sure wish I would have imaged some of the Apple IIgs software though before all the floppies went bad.

RyanRies 9y ago

It's beautiful.

exogeny 9y ago

I spent an absurd amount of time modding my Renegade board, drawing ANSI, listening to the latest mods out of the demoscene and failing miserably at learning Assembly circa 1993-1996. And then IRC came along.. 412/724 scene, north of Pittsburgh. Lots of good friends met on the boards, some still friends today.

driverdan 9y ago

I fondly remember that "Kall Back Soon" ASCII art. I think I used it on my BBS too. I ran a single line PCBoard BBS in the mid to late 90's. PCBoard had its own plugins called PPEs. A lot of them were distributed as shareware. After finding a decompiler I had a lot of fun reading source code, making personal keygens, and finding security issues.

davestephens 9y ago
Likewise, I think it was used by a few different pieces of software. Mystic BBS still has it as its default logoff art today...

grumblestumble 9y ago

omfg! i was on many Dementia BBS' in SoCal back in the day. First board I sysop'ed was a WWiV 3.21 - I was very proud that I modded the Pascal source to support more than 9 discussion boards at the time.

mmccaff 9y ago
That is amazing to hear! Dementia's beta tester was in Modesto and he distributed the demo version (limited to 5 users) around CA.

chrissnell 9y ago

The late 80s/early 90s BBS scene was an amazing time for me. I was in high school and I've never been as interested in computers and communications as I was then. I never ventured into the "dark" side like OP--I was too scared of my parents--so I ran a legit FidoNET BBS using the RemoteAccess BBS software and the Frontdoor mailer (and later, Maximus and BinkleyTerm). The most amazing thing about it all was that it was the public internet before there was a public internet. E-mails sent over FidoNET had an amazing weight to them that's hard to describe. It took a ton of effort just to get your BBS to participate in the network and once you did, data moved so slowly that you became very observant of each step of the process of communicating. First, you wrote the email in your mail editor (I loved GoldED). Then, another program bundled it up with other emails into some kind of binary packaging and passed it along to the mailer. The mailer took this bundle of mail and dialed out on the modem to the local FidoNET hub. If you lived in a rural location, this meant that you had to make a long-distance call to deliver the mail. My local hub was in Seguin, TX (~30 miles away) and it felt like a very big deal when my computer dialed him up to do a delivery. From there, the hub delivered it to a "star", which was a regional hub that dealt in larger volumes of mail. This was usually run by someone with money because their modems were making long-distance calls (including overseas) on a regular basis. From the star, your mail was shipped across long distances and then the process repeated in reverse until the recipient's system picked up the mail from their local hub. Then, when they replied, the whole thing happened again in reverse. It regularly took days to get a reply from across the world but it was so fun! Every single mail that you received in your inbox felt as important as someone writing a letter by hand and sending it via the postal service. I cherished getting emails, even if they were stupid. I still dream about reviving a modern FidoNET (yes, I know it still exists) for the HN crowd. I write a lot of Go and I even read some of the FidoNET technical standards with the thought of a Go implementation of the protocols but never got anywhere in it. It's an enormous amount of work and I haven't had a real phone line in over a decade. Doing Fido over TCP/IP just doesn't feel the same. It's way too easy.

matt_wulfeck 9y ago
>This was usually run by someone with money because their modems were making long-distance calls (including overseas) on a regular basis. It's amazing to me is how many people volunteered their time, hardware, and money to keep these systems running for free.

jmspring 9y ago

In the east bay (primarily - Contra Costa County, but there was an offshoot (maybe two) down towards Dublin/San Ramon), there was a multi-line chat BBS known as Popnet. The main office was in Walnut Creek, socials were a regular thing, online chat and games were an important part of socializing. It was custom written software by the father/son team. If I recall rightly, they even had an online version of Diplomacy (the board game). I still have friends from that era. It's interesting to see Dementia was based off of WWIV. The WWIV BBS software was well written and easy to update/customize/modify. TML, Innerdot, and others were amongst those that ran it in the 80s to early 90s. Interestingly enough, I actually feel like the BBS days did more to foster social interaction than "social networks" now. They were (unless warez sites) hyper local. In the east bay, we had regular pick up tackle football games (going from several a year in the early days on 1/x year in the 2000s) that ran for around (maybe more than) 20 years. Many of those involved are still friends.

oaktowner 9y ago
Reminds me a bit of The Well in Berkeley.
ianmcgowan 9y ago
I moved to SF in the late 80's and was amazed by the BBS scene. After a few massive phone bills to Berkeley and Walnut Creek, I realized that even though their area code was 415, it was an intra-LATA call, not quite local, not long distance. Very expensive if you spend hours hogging a phone line though. I eventually stumbled on wetware.com, which was a shared unix box hosted (I think) near SF State somewhere. The joys of UUCP mail and Usenet! I made some really good friends both on and off-line there, but sadly all of them eventually drifted away from the Bay Area, as most transplants do. This thread is bringing up a lot of nostalgia...

agentultra 9y ago

I wish I had been able to preserve those door games I wrote...

booleanbetrayal 9y ago

I miss the ANSI art scene. I remember 800# access that would live and die on the daily. That and phone bills.

neuro 9y ago

You just took me back to the 80s. Stale chips and cracks screens(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlVmPU6dh1M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlVmPU6dh1M) from downloading games till 4 AM in the morning on a 1200 baud modem with friends. What an outstanding looking BBS! Thanks.

sjs382 9y ago

If you love BBS art, be sure to check out https://artpacks.org https://artpacks.org

fiorix 9y ago

Just gonna drop this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PJcABbtvtA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PJcABbtvtA

henrikschroder 9y ago
"Have you ever paid a toll booth without slowing down?", and then he slides his credit card through a thing in his car!!! :-D :-D I mean, they got the prediction right, but their implementation is so so wrong!
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
One of the comments on that video: "Will you lose your privacy and civil liberties? You will, and the company that will bring it to you, AT&T."
codazoda 9y ago
You'll recall that the first iPhone was exclusive to AT&T so it feels a little like they came through on this promise. Apple might deserve a little of the credit, I suppose.
mmccaff 9y ago
Good commercial. Kind of chilling how visionary those ideas were at the time and that they did happen, though not exclusively brought to us by AT&T.

niix 9y ago

This looks awesome. I was a little later to the game, spent most of my childhood time on AOL 2.5-4.0, writing "progz" in Visual Basic.

nickpoulos 9y ago
ahhh dude that was my scene too! private room theselectfew a bunch of others...jeez...some of my stuff is still up on lenshell.com. Cmon know you remember that site, it exists still. my handle was filter back then and a few others haha
- niix 9y ago
  Haha yeah I was looking at lenshell not too long ago, amazing that it's still there.

aethant 9y ago

This was a great post. I remember playing LORD and writing doors in turbo pascal back in high school. Thanks for posting!

X86BSD 9y ago

Maybe I missed it in the comments but was I the only one to run Wildcat! software for their board? I loved Wildcat!

MR4D 9y ago
I ran it too! Was so much fun right before the time the internet connectivity expanded past universities. I ran the BBS because otherwise I had to dial into Chicago (long distance - ha, what a concept!). For me it was much cheaper to just run a multiline BBS, and then read news on my own computer that sat in the basement!
drittich 9y ago
I ran it too! A co-worker and I who were sys admins at a Canadian provincial ministry ran it on behalf of the ministry, because no one knew enough to tell us not to :) Also, what about RoboComm? That thing was incredible to me back then.
reiger 9y ago
I ran it too - could never afford MajorBBS or the successors and it was easy to scale from 1-24 nodes. I even ran the weird BBS/ISP hybrid WINS Server but wasn't good enough to be considered a real ISP.

jonahhorowitz 9y ago

I ran a BBS back in the 90s called The Game BBS, it was hosted out of my bedroom in Colorado. I'd love to find an old backup, but I doubt I have one.

th0ma5 9y ago

I wrote a thing in Turbo Pascal that would convert Prodoor (Proboard) mailbox files to RBBS mailboxes. Or the other way around, I can't remember, but not both directions I don't think. Anyway, I uploaded it to several boards back then I think someone who was a retired Navy officer used it on their own board. I also think the Prodoor people may have used several of the ideas possibly, but in all the archives of BBS software, I haven't been able to find it. Oh well! Turbo Pascal was so much fun, and reading the RBBS source was a great education at the time when long distance phone calls were expensive.

alexkavon 9y ago

Oh man, I remember running my old acmlmboard back in the day. Great times.

hertzdog 9y ago

Thank you for your post and thanks for all the comments... it takes me years back. Maybe a dumb question: why we all miss those days? I don't think it is only related to being young. I am convinced it is something related to a "less noise/new tools" and probably I agree about "the more constraints more creativity". Is there anybody who can better articulate or have a different vision?

Kenji 9y ago
The internet got popular. What that means: Government snooping, DMCA, lots of non-nerds and idiots on the internet, websites that lock content down regionally, bloated garbage websites. There was lots of untapped potential back then which made things exciting. Also, the communities were smaller, like families.
- lucaspiller 9y ago
  I wasn't part of the scene (too young), but from comments here it sounds like there was a certain romanticism about writing/building and running your own BBS. It's not quite the same as spending 5 minutes to spin up a new Digital Ocean instance and running a Docker image.
  - eveith 9y ago
    I think that the achievement of some home-made appliance that was actually hard to get money-wise (and probably build) is one aspect of what makes those memories fond. But I have another explanation, which, I think, explains much of it. Being a part of the BBS network meant one had overcome a bit of a hurdle and reached a small community that actually cared about the system and the sense of the community itself. Those BBS islands had their own rules, implicitly or explicitly spelled out, they were full with lots of creativity (cf. the ASCII/RIP art), and while the occasional troll or rude idiot can be found anywhere, posting something to a BBS usually meant you got some response back. It was a smaller circle (at least, it felt that way). You could actually make friends through the BBS network. Today, when I try to post something on HN, I cannot even find it immediately after posting, let alone hope that other people find my submission. :) The SDF.org bboard feels much in the same way.

deepakhj 9y ago

This brings back a lot of memories. I started in the bbs scene when my friend gifted a 1200 baud modem in 1992. I began trading warez on a 8088 xt 1mb ram 40mb machine. From the local scene in Los Angeles (818). I modified WWIV and ran my own bbs until my hard drive crashed and I eventually lost the source. I also got into war dialing pbx's so that I could call famous bbses in New York and Canada. I loved the style of bbs software like celerity and visionx and the art of acid and ice. I eventually made it to the it scene where I had access to and ran the top ftp sites in the world. I miss those days immensely.

lsc36 9y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System [1] https://github.com/ptt/pttbbs https://github.com/ptt/pttbbs

jamesjyu 9y ago
Fascinating! I would have thought most people didn't have land lines in Taiwan. Are they dialing in using mobile phones?
- lsc36 9y ago
  AFAIK most Taiwanese BBSes established in the 90's already run on Telnet over TCP/IP. PTT has SSH support, smartphone clients are available as well. 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.

b0blee 9y ago

Thanks! BBSing got me my first programming job in 1985. I ran several boards, including one for the company, before the web came along 10 years later. I really enjoyed your screen shots.

revicon 9y ago

So many memories sparking up from this thread. I ran The Dark Tower from my bedroom in the late nineties on my Tandy 1000 286 from Radio Shack. Everything I do professionally I started off on there.

eternalvision 9y ago

wardialing, redboxing, beige boxing for 900's, breaking into pbxes, east coast bbs scene. good times for sure.

davestephens 9y ago

This is awesome, thanks for sharing. For yet more nostalgia, I recommend you check out the /r/bbs Reddit, or for EVEN MORE nostalgia, take a look at ENiGMA BBS - it's BBS software developed in Node and can be spun up on any Linux box - https://github.com/NuSkooler/enigma-bbs/ https://github.com/NuSkooler/enigma-bbs/. Thanks again, enjoyed this thread!

mmccaff 9y ago
Thanks for those recommendations, I didn't know about r/bbs and Enigma looks like an interesting project. I just starred it on Github and will definitely check it out!

meerita 9y ago

I loved my BBS. I remember when I came home with a modem and my parents asking me what was that. That thing was the device that skyrocketed the phone bill up to a thousand dollars. I remember my parents screaming like crazy.

icelancer 9y ago

Very cool. Thanks for the nostalgia. Played a ton of TW2002 and LORD on Virtual Arcade BBS back in Cleveland, OH in the early 90s. Ah, back in the days when I had the Internet AND local BBS access and the BBS was far more compelling...

k__ 9y ago

I remember back in 2002, I joined my first BBS. It was a smallish (~30 people) anime & manga community and the twist was, that the whole board was written by one of the founders in PHP. I remember him hating on the other BBS because in his eyes they weren't "pure" anymore and in his eyes, they had nothing to do with BBS at all. What can I say... the community broke down because he insisted on his strange BBS and people went to communities who embraced the "social web" with profiles, timelines, blogs etc. But this was in a time when people said, these new "blogs" were like "guestbooks you write in yourself", which is true and in view of the omnipresent guestbooks on every website, where people wrote that they visited the website, a blog sounded hilarious. Now the concept of a guestbook sounds hilarious and blogs are a backbone of the web...

pibefision 9y ago

My BBS was called CENTURY XXI. At first, it was just an Apple IIe with a SiderII harddrive (just 20MB!). 24hs. GBBS was the software usted to manage it, it was great. Based on Argentina, it was an awesome learning experience. Check this link for more BBS in Argentina: https://goo.gl/7EXTMx https://goo.gl/7EXTMx

endgame 9y ago

All of you nostalgics in this thread need to get together and write a book. I loved Exploding the Phone, and I'd love a volume that covered the BBS era.

cJ0th 9y ago

This system looks like a real life text adventure game :)

bananaboy 9y ago

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!).

henrikschroder 9y ago
Oh horror and nostalgia, yes! It was pretty good, but the joke was that it contained everything and a toaster.

wccrawford 9y ago

WWIV BBS and "doors" (games, basically) were my intro into system administration and further experience programming back then. I had so much fun setting that up. My parents even let me have 2 telephone lines so that I could have 2 users (plus someone in the house) on at the same time. I had exactly 1 multiplayer "door", but that was fine. My favorite door was Legend of the Red Dragon (LoRD) and I remember playing it a lot back then. My users (all half-dozen of them) did, too. It was a small town, and I was surprised to get that many people. So much nostalgia, and I can definitely link it to my career today.

wyldfire 9y ago
I was surprised that there was no mention of door games. That was easily half the fun, IMO.
bluefox 9y ago
You can still play (a clone of) it online... http://www.lotgd.net/ http://www.lotgd.net/

bungie4 9y ago

Old sysops get shit done! I ran BBS's from the late 80's through the 90's. All the local sysops are still friends and we still wax nostalgic over the old days. To a person, we all are still in IT and hold senior positions. When I remember those days and compare them to today, by and large, nothing is 'easy' anymore. It's what happens when you get to far away from the metal.

mmccaff 9y ago
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 of source code with other BBS authors. We'd exchange the code to implement one feature for another. 3) There were a few beta testers, distributors, and artists. It's what started my interest in building and releasing software, for sure.
- bungie4 9y ago
  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 sat there, and watched the user log in as ME. LOL! Took me all of 5s to rip that out :D My first modem was a 300 baud that we tweaked up to 450 baud. When I shut down my BBS years later, I was running 3 lines on TBBS and I had no files or doors. It was strictly a message board with no networking (been there, done that). I specifically limited it to the top 150 participating users. Doesn't sound like much, but all 3 lines were busy constantly. Around 150 users seems to the magic number. More than that and ppl who lose track of whose who and stop participating. You have to go for big userbases to recover. At least that has been my experience.
  - 9y ago

jv0010 9y ago

omg this is amazing. even the ascii art brings back memories.

phaed 9y ago

Dem feels.

hackermailman 9y ago

Blue Board (Commodore64) software was the best I found for the late 80s/ early 90s, it was cheap, incredibly easy to run and customize, consistently updated, and it came with a built in terminal so when no one was on your board you could call other ones or easily script a file transfer/mail sync with a remote board. I remember a lot of STS chat boards too, In 1989, a DDial-like clone, Synergy Teleconferencing System AKA STS was released for IBM PCs and until 1997 I regularly would connect at 300bps to talk with local hackers at 3:00am on these "big" 16 line STS boards until easier access to IRC killed them off.

myth_drannon 9y ago

You can get software for BBS and some shareware CDs from BBSs at http://cd.textfiles.com/directory.html http://cd.textfiles.com/directory.html

myth_drannon 9y ago

anyone recommends active telnet BBSs?

myth_drannon 9y ago
I think I found a good list - http://telnetbbsguide.com/ http://telnetbbsguide.com/

wyldfire 9y ago

Apparently WWIV is provided with an open source license and builds on modern OSs [1]. You can run it as a telnet server! [1] https://github.com/wwivbbs/wwiv https://github.com/wwivbbs/wwiv

jotjotzzz 9y ago

Omg BBS. Did anyone remember Boardwatch mag? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwatch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwatch There were many BBS's posted there, and that's how I discovered them.

whatever_dude 9y ago

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 community you want. It creates a different sort of bubble. Anyway, that constraint was also somehow reflected on the choice of tools, maybe in this case especially in the software used by the BBS itself. The US had plenty of different BBS software being used. I know Wildcat was popular in Europe. In my native Brazil it was dominated by PCBoard (major) and Remote Access (minor), and the underground scene was heavily invested in the "cool" Oblivion. I actually thought PCBoard was a major player until I realized very few boards in the USA used it.

rottyguy 9y ago
also, it was constrained by a queue. Usually 1 phone line therefore only one person could be on at a time (cooperative multitasking if you will). busy signals (when was the last time you got a busy signal anywhere?) and auto-redials. good times!
zorked 9y ago
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 weirder formats were the standard.
- bananaboy 9y ago
  In Melbourne, Australia, Remote Access and ProBoard were fairly popular amongst regular BBSes. At the time I always had the impression that PC Board was more popular amongst the warez BBSes.
Muuuchem 9y ago

wiz21c 9y ago

As a wannabe-hacker, I had the super pleasant surprise, once trying to login into a BBS (for which I had no password, of course) that the line was interrupted in the middle of the screen and the sysop started typing "what are you tryin' to do"... It was just like in a movie. This was my first day on the "scene". BBS was located in Belgium, don't remember the name... I wonder if one could do that with, say, ssh (and without IRC :-)) After that, the problem was paying for long distance calls to more "3l33t" BBS's (usually in Sweden). But we had our ways :-)

1001101 9y ago

Not sure if anyone saw this: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/a-1986-bulletin-board-system-has-brought-the-old-web-back-to-life-in-2017/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/a-198... Basically RPi + tcpser == Internet BBS. I ran a PCExpress BBS - AMI Express for PC -- (USR Dual) for a while, and feel very lucky to have been a part of that era. Have been thinking about doing something on tcpser. Still part of that a bit, as we still make modems at the current gig. Get nostalgic every time when I hear them training up.

JohnLeTigre 9y ago

I miss those days I miss live-chatting with the sysop if he was around I miss gaining access levels and discover new files/areas I miss re-loging at 12:01am to have double turns for my attack in BRE I miss the discovery involved, how you would need to come up with interesting/new content to maintain you UL/DL ratio I miss the epic mail convos we had in my BBS community I miss GT's

EvanAnderson 9y ago

Being involved in the late 80's / early 90's BBS "scene" was formative for me. I wrote and "sold" some unimaginative "Door" programs (even going to far as to register my copyright on one of them). I wracked-up a lot of long-distance bills! I always wanted to run a board, but never got my act together enough to do it. Since the audience here is very diverse I'll selfishly throw out a couple nostalgia requests: A friend's board ran a door game called "Cyberspace" that was a TinyMUD-esque "single user dungeon" game. At one point we had 10 - 12 people actively building rooms, adding mobile NPCs, etc. It was loads of fun even though only one person at a time was interacting with the software. I've looked periodically over the last 20 years to see if I can find the people who wrote it on the 'net, but I've had very little luck. (It was Turbo Pascal-based, and originally written for WWIV, but we "adapted" it to work on Searchlight and later Renegade.) I'd love see if anybody from the old 203 board "Bit Truth" or the classic 602 "Unphamiliar Territory" is on here. Any takers?

frandroid 9y ago
You mean that guy? https://www.facebook.com/patrick.hunlock https://www.facebook.com/patrick.hunlock
- EvanAnderson 9y ago
  No kidding. I guess it has been awhile since I tried to look them up. Thanks!

cgrusden 9y ago

I love this. Reminds me of my MajorMUD days, thanks for sharing

synrst 9y ago

Ansi art, still 31337 af.

nkozyra 9y ago

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_ put me squarely in the superdork category.

macarthy12 9y ago
and having a girlfriend excludes you completely
- nkozyra 9y ago
  Everyone needs love [1] http://www.digitalia.be/images/2013/nerd-couple.jpg http://www.digitalia.be/images/2013/nerd-couple.jpg
chrissnell 9y ago
It was really fun way to communicate as a nerdy high schooler. One of my best friends was varsity football player, a jock who was a closeted nerd. We would both go home to our own houses at lunch time and dial up the local BBS and chat with each other about (what else?) BBSes. My parents were very anti-computer at the time because I spent so much time on it and they would never let me spend any of the money I earned at my busboy job on computer parts so I had to be sneaky about it. I eventually pilfered the $150 to get a Zoom 14.4Kbps modem and me and my buddy took his car to CompUSA and bought modems on the sly. I had to pull mine out of the packaging and ditch the box and sneak it home in my backpack so my folks wouldn't see, then be sure to mute the modem speaker so they wouldn't notice the changed negotiation tones. It seems so ridiculous now: computers became my meal ticket in a very big way and I'm eternally grateful that I had the balls to secretly buy that modem.

sathackr 9y ago

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 wars.

glorytoad 9y ago
Sounds like Operation Overkill ][. Here is a writeup about it that includes the little 3x3 tile map for movement: http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2015/04/game-187-operation-overkill-1990.html http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2015/04/game-187-operation-ov...
mancerayder 9y ago
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.
- sathackr 9y ago
  that looks alot like it but it doesn't quite seem to fit -- I swear the map seemed bigger. From video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7iQIXs6gpc 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.

dreva 9y ago

I have many fond memories of the BBS scene... 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...

tdumitrescu 9y ago

Awesome memories! Modifying WWIV for local BBSes was how I got started with C when I was a young teen (after years of Pascal and Basic). For example putting in a user-vs-user combat system that could lock out a defeated foe for the day. Great for getting a board's users to keep out trolls collectively!

mrlyc 9y ago

In 1984, I wrote a BBS for the Commodore Vic-20 with up to 64 "rooms" (message areas), email and an online game. Users could create a room and make it public or private. The board was very popular with users spending an average time of 70 minutes on it. 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.

dbrian82 9y ago

hi,i'm Brian, i had my friend help me hack my ex's email, facebook, whatsapp,and his phone cause i suspected he was cheating. all he asked for was a his phone number. he's email is (hotcyberlord425@gmail.com)..IF u need help tell him Brian referred you to him and he'll help. Am sure his going to help you do it, good luck