4 ms·

What was the name of your BBS? What was your handle? I know of you as the security guy from Enteract, but didn't know you were in the BBS scene!

by nope96 5y ago

tptacek 5y ago
I keep pretty quiet about this out of embarrassment (there's stuff from me from when I was like 14 still hiding on the Internet --- I think there's a tfile somewhere where I breathlessly explain how to use `ls`) but if you email me, happy to share. I was an H/P/A/V board scene person. If you knew NBFC or Whammy Bar, you knew my Chicago social scene; if you knew UPT, my actual interests. My silly Chicago BBS was kitted out to look like a Gandalf X.25 router.
- icedchai 5y ago
  Same here. I also ran a local H/P/A/V board (mostly H/P, really) back in the early 90's. I wrote several text files, and collected/distributed 1000's more of them. Fun times.
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  I've got much the same thing re: the "old days". My friends and I wrote a mess of (bad, but for the most part intentionally bad) text files that have mostly disappeared. UPT! No kidding. That's a blast from the past. Sadly, I only remember a few particular people from that time. I got to meet just a few of them IRL. I was slightly too young to go to the various 'cons, etc, before the Internet came storming-in and killed the BBS scene.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    I left home right after high school (not in a bad way!) and wound up going to basically every hacker conference for the next couple years, and a side effect of that is that a lot of those people are still personal friends today. There are good stories about where a lot of those people --- especially the UPT people --- ended up, but a lot of them are skittish about having those connections made and I never know which of them are or aren't sensitive. We all thought we were pretty cool, but of course, there was an even sub-er subculture that was doing the UPT thing but on BBSs set up on X.25 networks; that's how you get to, for instance, the 8lgm people.
    - EvanAnderson 5y ago
      I can understand being skittish about it. We had to have crossed paths back then (though probably not IRL-- I went to a couple of the early DefCon's but that was it). I've mostly lost touch with everybody from "the scene", sadly. There was a conversation on HN a couple of years ago where somebody posted a particular old X.25 NUA (ending in "..0177") that brought back a flood of memories. There was quite a thrill in "exploring" back then (wardialing, scanning the X.25 networks, messing with voicemail systems, etc). I never did get into that SCO Unix box that purported to be in a local Taco Bell... >smile<
- kingcharles 5y ago
  All my childhood embarrassment was on Usenet. Then Google grabbed up all those old Usenet archives and there I was...
- bremensaki 5y ago
  I lost all parental credibility the day my kid learned that I used to use "Black Rose" as a BBS alias back in the 90s.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  >I think there's a tfile somewhere where I breathlessly explain how to use `ls` You should post a link! Every once in a while when I'm using a common unix command, I find myself randomly re-encountering the frame of mind that I was in, the world outlook I had, and the sense of amazement I experienced when I first learned it as a kid. A sudden and explicable feeling awe at the breathtaking pervasive power of "cat" or "ls" or "echo" and how they fit together, and the very idea of a shell with commands and files and directories that you could name, look at, change, and move around. Remembering the excitement of discovering and fitting a new important puzzle piece into the growing model of what I was learning.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    For me, it was like, I know how to write a DOS batch file, and here's Unix, you can do some of the same things. I was smarter as an 18 year old than I am now, though! That's a thing my IRC friends from the time constantly talk about today; the people we were when we were shouting each other out in 1990s Phrack issues seem a lot sharper than we are now. We used to hang out and build "protected mode program loaders" for fun. You know, operating systems.
    - eashman 5y ago
      I was in the BBS scene in Baltimore in the mid-to-late 80s and totally relate. I think about some of the things I used to pull off on an Apple //e and then a 286 PC along with school and a job and wonder how I had time to do it. Youthful energy? Or maybe the limitations of the tech made us work cleverly and thus made us prouder of the result.

What was the name of your BBS? What was your handle? I know of you as the security guy from Enteract, but didn't know you were in the BBS scene!

by nope96 5y ago

What was the name of your BBS? What was your handle? I know of you as the security guy from Enteract, but didn't know you were in the BBS scene!

tptacek 5y ago

I keep pretty quiet about this out of embarrassment (there's stuff from me from when I was like 14 still hiding on the Internet --- I think there's a tfile somewhere where I breathlessly explain how to use `ls`) but if you email me, happy to share. I was an H/P/A/V board scene person. If you knew NBFC or Whammy Bar, you knew my Chicago social scene; if you knew UPT, my actual interests. My silly Chicago BBS was kitted out to look like a Gandalf X.25 router.

icedchai 5y ago
Same here. I also ran a local H/P/A/V board (mostly H/P, really) back in the early 90's. I wrote several text files, and collected/distributed 1000's more of them. Fun times.
EvanAnderson 5y ago
I've got much the same thing re: the "old days". My friends and I wrote a mess of (bad, but for the most part intentionally bad) text files that have mostly disappeared. UPT! No kidding. That's a blast from the past. Sadly, I only remember a few particular people from that time. I got to meet just a few of them IRL. I was slightly too young to go to the various 'cons, etc, before the Internet came storming-in and killed the BBS scene.
- tptacek 5y ago
  I left home right after high school (not in a bad way!) and wound up going to basically every hacker conference for the next couple years, and a side effect of that is that a lot of those people are still personal friends today. There are good stories about where a lot of those people --- especially the UPT people --- ended up, but a lot of them are skittish about having those connections made and I never know which of them are or aren't sensitive. We all thought we were pretty cool, but of course, there was an even sub-er subculture that was doing the UPT thing but on BBSs set up on X.25 networks; that's how you get to, for instance, the 8lgm people.
  - EvanAnderson 5y ago
    I can understand being skittish about it. We had to have crossed paths back then (though probably not IRL-- I went to a couple of the early DefCon's but that was it). I've mostly lost touch with everybody from "the scene", sadly. There was a conversation on HN a couple of years ago where somebody posted a particular old X.25 NUA (ending in "..0177") that brought back a flood of memories. There was quite a thrill in "exploring" back then (wardialing, scanning the X.25 networks, messing with voicemail systems, etc). I never did get into that SCO Unix box that purported to be in a local Taco Bell... >smile<
kingcharles 5y ago
All my childhood embarrassment was on Usenet. Then Google grabbed up all those old Usenet archives and there I was...
bremensaki 5y ago
I lost all parental credibility the day my kid learned that I used to use "Black Rose" as a BBS alias back in the 90s.
DonHopkins 5y ago
>I think there's a tfile somewhere where I breathlessly explain how to use `ls` You should post a link! Every once in a while when I'm using a common unix command, I find myself randomly re-encountering the frame of mind that I was in, the world outlook I had, and the sense of amazement I experienced when I first learned it as a kid. A sudden and explicable feeling awe at the breathtaking pervasive power of "cat" or "ls" or "echo" and how they fit together, and the very idea of a shell with commands and files and directories that you could name, look at, change, and move around. Remembering the excitement of discovering and fitting a new important puzzle piece into the growing model of what I was learning.
- tptacek 5y ago
  For me, it was like, I know how to write a DOS batch file, and here's Unix, you can do some of the same things. I was smarter as an 18 year old than I am now, though! That's a thing my IRC friends from the time constantly talk about today; the people we were when we were shouting each other out in 1990s Phrack issues seem a lot sharper than we are now. We used to hang out and build "protected mode program loaders" for fun. You know, operating systems.
  - eashman 5y ago
    I was in the BBS scene in Baltimore in the mid-to-late 80s and totally relate. I think about some of the things I used to pull off on an Apple //e and then a 286 PC along with school and a job and wonder how I had time to do it. Youthful energy? Or maybe the limitations of the tech made us work cleverly and thus made us prouder of the result.