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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 th

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 10y 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.
- chrissnell 10y ago
  It is, but there was also a certain amount of vanity to it. If you had the cash, you were the dude. You could watch as an entire region's (or even entire countries') mail flowed through your system. You probably walked down into your office and watched your busy Fido server (or servers) and a sweet stack of USR Courier external modems blinking away (you never wasted time on cheap gear) and when you participated in group mailing lists, you probably signed your e-mails with a sig that said something like "Bob Smith, Southern Star, 1:10/2", your address being a coveted and sweet, low-digit number. You were respected for your technical mastery of the system and in the very political world of Fido, few would challenge you. I dreamed of running a big Fido hub. Sadly, Fido vanished before I reached the income level where I could have a bank of phone lines making long-distance calls all day and not worry about it. Just running a single phone line was an expensive challenge for me as a young kid. It took a lot of bussing tables at a hamburger joint.
  - oaktowner 10y ago
    Even the talk of "long distance phone calls" makes me nostalgic. I remember when, as a kid, if you answered the phone and it was a long distance call for mom or dad, we would run to get them yelling "Long distance! Long distance!" Every second was precious.
    - adrianN 10y ago
      This is why we need to colonize space. Bring back those low-bandwidth long distance communications.
      - tomfanning 10y ago
        Ham radio. 300 baud packet over HF (thousands of miles) is still a thing, as are newer data modes such as PSK31 and the JT family. I'm actively working on 1200 baud projects over VHF FM now. Back in the day BBS was very much in. These days the same tech is more often used for telemetry, tracking etc (APRS). Now you can do it all in software, ref https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf and friends.
djsumdog 10y ago
Oh the Nostalgia! My soul hurts. I was just a kid (teenager) so I didn't have the funds to run a BBS myself. But I remember the 60 minute limits, the long lists of local BBSes, the ANSI graphics, Maximus, RemoteAccess and others (I had played with a few in the hopes of starting a BBS, but that era was starting to end when I graduated in the early 2000s), Door games, RIP graphics (the very early days of vector art on VGA screens). There were door games like Baron Realms Elite where BBS sysops would get together and play BBS against BBS (of course many people had player accounts of multiple BBSes but it was all part of the fun and the years of protection added a decent balance to the game). Games from that era were so much better than this Free-To-Play with micro-transactions crap. I understand it earns mobile game companies a ton of money (from a tiny % of the population that spends $200 to $5000 on a single game), but the shareware model of first 10 levels free, next 30 levels for $x made for much better games. Plus it gave people something to exchange from board to board; the whole upload/download ratios (which kids from the torrent era should really learn about--because it existed then and for legal shareware on the majority of BBSs). I remember once getting an amazing side scrolling shooter from Japan. It may have not been shareware, but it was impossible to tell. It had no readme and I couldn't read anything on the screen. :-P It was super fun though, and I remember thinking of all the hops it must have taken (those people who make long distance BBS calls, or maybe just someone who brought disks over on a holiday) to get to a BBS in my small town. I also remember Doom coming out, and all the Sysops talking about how amazing a game it was. I think it was 3 disks though; took either three days (60 minutes time limits) or hopping to three different BBSes to get all the disks. Then it said I needed a 386 or higher (I had a 286). I took it to a friends house who had a 486. His mom was a super Christian. She watched us play a few levels and that didn't really end well.
- Imagenuity 10y ago
  Glad to hear someone still remembers RIPscrip graphics. I was a co-founder of TeleGrafix Communications, who made the RIPterm and RIPaint software for viewing and creating those graphics.
  - ethomson 10y ago
    What a blast from the past. I remember TeleGrafix fondly; if I'm being honest, I didn't really use RIPterm all that terribly often; I've always felt more at home in text. But I did run a BBS (1:233/24) and I enjoyed hacking on it more, I think, than actually running it. So I spent a lot of time trying to shoehorn RIPscrip into Maximus, more for the novelty than for any actual demand on the part of my callers. After googling, I just realized that Maximus 3.0 eventually included RIPscrip support built-in, but I had lost interest in my BBS and moved on to hacking on Unix systems by then. But I remember RIPscrip being a nice format. Thanks for providing me with many an afternoon spent tinkering with it.
henrikschroder 10y ago
> 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 feudal society than a democracy. And of course it devolved into political fights among the lowly nodes and points who thought the stupid RCs and NCs had way too much power over the network and wanted it to become more democratic, but since the coordinators (Did you call them stars in zone 1?) footed the bill for the long-distance message deliveries, it was usually their way or the highway. Funnily enough, Sweden abolished the concept of long-distance calls sometime in the 90s, which drastically undercut the power of the controllers. :-)
- jamiewildehk 10y ago
  I ran 2:250/165 back in the day. RemoteAccess 2 and FrontDoor NC. And running Desqview so I could have the BBS running as well as mess with my pc ;)
  - brusch64 10y ago
    What do these numbers mean ? My Google-Fu is failing I was just a little bit too young to get access to BBS in my youth.
    - henrikschroder 10y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet I was 2:201/274.9. My upstream node that I connected to was 2:201/274. He connected to his upstream hub, 2:201/200, who in turn connected to his upstream net coordinator, 2:201/0, whose upstream was the regional coordinator, 2:20/0, and finally up to the zone coordinator, who I think was 2:0/0 or something. A zone was a continent, 2 was Europe. Regions were countries in Europe, 20 was Sweden. Each region could have any number of networks, Sweden had like 5, and network 1 was the Stockholm area. Each network had hubs and nodes, and the guy who ran the node I talked to was simply the 74th node of the 2nd hub. Finally, since I didn't have a public BBS, I was a private point, the 9th on my node. So putting it all together, a Fidonet address is zone:regionnetwork/hubnode.point. Why weren't there separator characters between the region and the networks, or the hub and the nodes? Who knows, it worked. :-)
Angostura 10y ago
Thank you for the happy nostalgic reminiscence of my youth. I also remember the computer mags that had several pages devoted to BBS phone number listings (just before the program listings you could type in)
- chrissnell 10y ago
  Do you remember Computer Shopper? I remember when it was an inch thick. I would ride my bike to the grocery store and buy it and spend days reading though every ad, marveling at the 2 GB SCSI hard drives (like 4" thick!!!) and wishing I had the $4000 or whatever to buy one for my BBS.
spektom 10y ago
There's a Website that helps you find FidoNet address in case you've forgotten it, it helped me find mine: http://nodehist.fidonet.org.ua/?address=2%3A400%2F466 http://nodehist.fidonet.org.ua/?address=2%3A400%2F466
- Coreburn 10y ago
  Oh man thank you for this link.
WalterBright 10y ago
> it was the public internet before there was a public internet The internet was invented several times. Many people assume that it wouldn't have happened without ARPAnet, but that doesn't line up with history. I remember the olden days :-) and anyone with two or more computers tried to hook them together by inventing a network. It's like when the steam engine was invented (to pump water out of mines), one of the first things people tried was putting wheels on it. It's just obvious.
mmccaff 10y ago
Ah, FidoNET. Two things about Mastodon are what got me thinking about BBSs. 1) Administrators running their own instance that they can customize and have local conversations on, and 2) FidoNET, where instances relay messages to each other across a network. I had worked on a similar network at the time which used Frontdoor in front of the BBS to call other boards and relay the messages (and receive calls from boards), but was never a part of the FidoNET network myself. Haha - also "I was too scared of my parents" .. me too. There was not as much darkness as the skull images suggest, but trying to look 3l33t was /<-rad and all. RemoteAccess ("RA") was a nice software, I used that myself for a short time. I remember that I had a strict limit of $13 a month that I was allowed to spend on long distance phone calls. I paid the bill myself, but my mother could not understand wasting more than $13 (I think it was originally $10, and I negotiated up to $13) a month on calling BBSs. I kept a hand-written log of how many minutes I spent in each area code and the price to call that area code so that I would not go over.
ckeck 10y ago
Reading the comment thinking...I wonder if I know this guy...check username...yup :) How goes it?

matt_wulfeck 10y 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.

chrissnell 10y ago
It is, but there was also a certain amount of vanity to it. If you had the cash, you were the dude. You could watch as an entire region's (or even entire countries') mail flowed through your system. You probably walked down into your office and watched your busy Fido server (or servers) and a sweet stack of USR Courier external modems blinking away (you never wasted time on cheap gear) and when you participated in group mailing lists, you probably signed your e-mails with a sig that said something like "Bob Smith, Southern Star, 1:10/2", your address being a coveted and sweet, low-digit number. You were respected for your technical mastery of the system and in the very political world of Fido, few would challenge you. I dreamed of running a big Fido hub. Sadly, Fido vanished before I reached the income level where I could have a bank of phone lines making long-distance calls all day and not worry about it. Just running a single phone line was an expensive challenge for me as a young kid. It took a lot of bussing tables at a hamburger joint.
- oaktowner 10y ago
  Even the talk of "long distance phone calls" makes me nostalgic. I remember when, as a kid, if you answered the phone and it was a long distance call for mom or dad, we would run to get them yelling "Long distance! Long distance!" Every second was precious.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    This is why we need to colonize space. Bring back those low-bandwidth long distance communications.
    - tomfanning 10y ago
      Ham radio. 300 baud packet over HF (thousands of miles) is still a thing, as are newer data modes such as PSK31 and the JT family. I'm actively working on 1200 baud projects over VHF FM now. Back in the day BBS was very much in. These days the same tech is more often used for telemetry, tracking etc (APRS). Now you can do it all in software, ref https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf and friends.

djsumdog 10y ago

Oh the Nostalgia! My soul hurts. I was just a kid (teenager) so I didn't have the funds to run a BBS myself. But I remember the 60 minute limits, the long lists of local BBSes, the ANSI graphics, Maximus, RemoteAccess and others (I had played with a few in the hopes of starting a BBS, but that era was starting to end when I graduated in the early 2000s), Door games, RIP graphics (the very early days of vector art on VGA screens). There were door games like Baron Realms Elite where BBS sysops would get together and play BBS against BBS (of course many people had player accounts of multiple BBSes but it was all part of the fun and the years of protection added a decent balance to the game). Games from that era were so much better than this Free-To-Play with micro-transactions crap. I understand it earns mobile game companies a ton of money (from a tiny % of the population that spends $200 to $5000 on a single game), but the shareware model of first 10 levels free, next 30 levels for $x made for much better games. Plus it gave people something to exchange from board to board; the whole upload/download ratios (which kids from the torrent era should really learn about--because it existed then and for legal shareware on the majority of BBSs). I remember once getting an amazing side scrolling shooter from Japan. It may have not been shareware, but it was impossible to tell. It had no readme and I couldn't read anything on the screen. :-P It was super fun though, and I remember thinking of all the hops it must have taken (those people who make long distance BBS calls, or maybe just someone who brought disks over on a holiday) to get to a BBS in my small town. I also remember Doom coming out, and all the Sysops talking about how amazing a game it was. I think it was 3 disks though; took either three days (60 minutes time limits) or hopping to three different BBSes to get all the disks. Then it said I needed a 386 or higher (I had a 286). I took it to a friends house who had a 486. His mom was a super Christian. She watched us play a few levels and that didn't really end well.

Imagenuity 10y ago
Glad to hear someone still remembers RIPscrip graphics. I was a co-founder of TeleGrafix Communications, who made the RIPterm and RIPaint software for viewing and creating those graphics.
- ethomson 10y ago
  What a blast from the past. I remember TeleGrafix fondly; if I'm being honest, I didn't really use RIPterm all that terribly often; I've always felt more at home in text. But I did run a BBS (1:233/24) and I enjoyed hacking on it more, I think, than actually running it. So I spent a lot of time trying to shoehorn RIPscrip into Maximus, more for the novelty than for any actual demand on the part of my callers. After googling, I just realized that Maximus 3.0 eventually included RIPscrip support built-in, but I had lost interest in my BBS and moved on to hacking on Unix systems by then. But I remember RIPscrip being a nice format. Thanks for providing me with many an afternoon spent tinkering with it.

henrikschroder 10y ago

> 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 feudal society than a democracy. And of course it devolved into political fights among the lowly nodes and points who thought the stupid RCs and NCs had way too much power over the network and wanted it to become more democratic, but since the coordinators (Did you call them stars in zone 1?) footed the bill for the long-distance message deliveries, it was usually their way or the highway. Funnily enough, Sweden abolished the concept of long-distance calls sometime in the 90s, which drastically undercut the power of the controllers. :-)

jamiewildehk 10y ago
I ran 2:250/165 back in the day. RemoteAccess 2 and FrontDoor NC. And running Desqview so I could have the BBS running as well as mess with my pc ;)
- brusch64 10y ago
  What do these numbers mean ? My Google-Fu is failing I was just a little bit too young to get access to BBS in my youth.
  - henrikschroder 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet I was 2:201/274.9. My upstream node that I connected to was 2:201/274. He connected to his upstream hub, 2:201/200, who in turn connected to his upstream net coordinator, 2:201/0, whose upstream was the regional coordinator, 2:20/0, and finally up to the zone coordinator, who I think was 2:0/0 or something. A zone was a continent, 2 was Europe. Regions were countries in Europe, 20 was Sweden. Each region could have any number of networks, Sweden had like 5, and network 1 was the Stockholm area. Each network had hubs and nodes, and the guy who ran the node I talked to was simply the 74th node of the 2nd hub. Finally, since I didn't have a public BBS, I was a private point, the 9th on my node. So putting it all together, a Fidonet address is zone:regionnetwork/hubnode.point. Why weren't there separator characters between the region and the networks, or the hub and the nodes? Who knows, it worked. :-)

Angostura 10y ago

Thank you for the happy nostalgic reminiscence of my youth. I also remember the computer mags that had several pages devoted to BBS phone number listings (just before the program listings you could type in)

chrissnell 10y ago
Do you remember Computer Shopper? I remember when it was an inch thick. I would ride my bike to the grocery store and buy it and spend days reading though every ad, marveling at the 2 GB SCSI hard drives (like 4" thick!!!) and wishing I had the $4000 or whatever to buy one for my BBS.

spektom 10y ago

There's a Website that helps you find FidoNet address in case you've forgotten it, it helped me find mine: http://nodehist.fidonet.org.ua/?address=2%3A400%2F466 http://nodehist.fidonet.org.ua/?address=2%3A400%2F466

Coreburn 10y ago
Oh man thank you for this link.

WalterBright 10y ago

> it was the public internet before there was a public internet The internet was invented several times. Many people assume that it wouldn't have happened without ARPAnet, but that doesn't line up with history. I remember the olden days :-) and anyone with two or more computers tried to hook them together by inventing a network. It's like when the steam engine was invented (to pump water out of mines), one of the first things people tried was putting wheels on it. It's just obvious.

mmccaff 10y ago

Ah, FidoNET. Two things about Mastodon are what got me thinking about BBSs. 1) Administrators running their own instance that they can customize and have local conversations on, and 2) FidoNET, where instances relay messages to each other across a network. I had worked on a similar network at the time which used Frontdoor in front of the BBS to call other boards and relay the messages (and receive calls from boards), but was never a part of the FidoNET network myself. Haha - also "I was too scared of my parents" .. me too. There was not as much darkness as the skull images suggest, but trying to look 3l33t was /<-rad and all. RemoteAccess ("RA") was a nice software, I used that myself for a short time. I remember that I had a strict limit of $13 a month that I was allowed to spend on long distance phone calls. I paid the bill myself, but my mother could not understand wasting more than $13 (I think it was originally $10, and I negotiated up to $13) a month on calling BBSs. I kept a hand-written log of how many minutes I spent in each area code and the price to call that area code so that I would not go over.

ckeck 10y ago

Reading the comment thinking...I wonder if I know this guy...check username...yup :) How goes it?