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I ran a BBS and Fidonet node (2:5077/7) from 1994 till 2001, I was 17 when I started. At that time I worked as an operator at local "computer centre" (вычислите
by ruslan 2y ago
I ran a BBS and Fidonet node (2:5077/7) from 1994 till 2001, I was 17 when I started. At that time I worked as an operator at local "computer centre" (вычислительный центр) and used their resources, namely multilined (8 lines) phone line, 8 US Robotics Courier modems and dedicated 386 PC. It ran OS/2, Binkley/2 mailer and Maximus/2 BBS. Also this box served as local file server (IBM LAN Server) and performed some remote file sharing for "work" purposes, to justify the need for BBS. :)
There were other BBSs in the area, but mine appeared to be the largest. I recall, there were 2000+ users which was quite a lot for the area. Some of them are still my good friends.
By running BBS, I learned telecom technology, TCP/IP and networking. I became sysadmin and worked for local ISPs, then as network architect and system/network software developer.
- jlundberg 2y agoThanks for sharing! OS/2 was awesome for sure. Did you run all those 8 nodes on a single 386?
- ruslan 2y agoYes, it was one node serving 8 lines (modems) connected by 8 port "Hydra" ISA board with 16850 FIFO UARTs. Binkley/2 could automatically distinguish between unattended mailer call or user call and spawned Maximus if user was there. My BBS was quite heavly loaded, all eight lines were busy quite often. One of the coolest thing about OS/2 2.x is that it was truely multitasking (pre-emtive multitasking), which allowed me to do some work on this same box in PM while it was serving users in background. :-)