4 ms·
I'm fairly certain you are correct. I remember the MajorBBS could handle multiple lines on its own. I knew a couple of local DOS BBSes that ran multiple lines
by icedchai 8mo ago
I'm fairly certain you are correct. I remember the MajorBBS could handle multiple lines on its own.
I knew a couple of local DOS BBSes that ran multiple lines with PCBoard under DESQview.
- ghewgill 8mo agoMajorBBS could handle multiple lines on its own, but you had to handle ALL of the lines with one box. That meant a serial port interface like DigiBoard which provided some number (8 or 16 or more) of serial ports that you would connect to modems.
- icedchai 8mo agoI remember DigiBoard from my early ISP days. We attempted to turn a mid 90's-era Linux system (Slackware) into a terminal server. The Linux drivers for DigiBoard weren't quite up to it so we wound up going with Telebit Netblazers, I think.
- kstrauser 8mo agoI think we used RocketPorts for a while until switching to Livingston Portmaster 3s, which you plugged a T-1 into.
- icedchai 8mo agoPortmasters were very popular. Later on the ISP I worked with moved on to Ascend boxes which had digital modems (T1 / PRI lines.) PRI was a huge step. The "individual modem" days were a mess. Each modem had a serial cable, phone line, and power brick. I remember doing some maintenance in one of the POPs. There were at least 100 modems, stacked on a cheap plastic shelving unit. The shelving unit was sagging from the weight and heat of all the modems. This early POP was haphazardly built, so no cable management. I remember a river of phone cables coming out of the wall. The power bricks were also crazy. We had power strips 2 or 3 levels deep, making it a hazard to even get behind the rack without tripping on something.
- kstrauser 8mo agoThey'd already switched to PRIs before I started so I missed out on that "fun", but I can personally vouch to the younguns here that every word you just wrote was completely plausible and likely.
- jacquesm 8mo agoPortmasters were a godsend. They turned piles of gear into clean boxes at a fraction of the heat and mess.
- jamroom 8mo agoYep - I ran a 16 line Major BBS back in the mid 90's in Seattle - used what was called a "Bocaboard" - had 16 serial ports on it - plugged in 16 external USR 28.8 modems. It all ran off of one PC.
- EvanAnderson 8mo agoFor sure. I knew people who ran multi-line BBS's on DOS PCs under DESQview, just like that (running Searchlight BBS, in my case). I know of a four line that was just using multiple external modems and non-standard IRQ's for COM3 and COM4 (since, by default, COM1/3 and COM2/4 share an IRQ).
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]