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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

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.
- mmccaff 9y ago
  Great story! I don't have a memory of caller id being around when I ran my BBS, or maybe I just didn't have it.

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.

mmccaff 9y ago
Great story! I don't have a memory of caller id being around when I ran my BBS, or maybe I just didn't have it.