I started waaay back in the late 80’s. First BBS went up here in Jackson in 1986 (MacHaven, yeah, it was a Mac BBS).
I got online seriously in 1989, because that’s when a friend gave me his old c64 with a 300 baud modem. Now that was cool: 64K, 1541 5.25 inch floppy (Oh yeah, loved the load times on that thing. I could go make a ham sandwich and a glass of tea and be back in time for it to be loaded…) and that awesome 300 baud modem.
Of course, that same friend gave me my first taste of the internet, back in 1991. We searched sites in finland for Commodore Software. I left thinking “Damn, that’s cool.”
Someday I want to adapt the WWIV functionality to the web and release WWWWWIV.
It’s entirely possible that you’re thinking of Operation Overkill II. Ah, memories. And Trade Wars 2002, Legend of the Red Dragon, Barons, Solar Realms Elite, all the classics.
But they all pale in comparison to WoA - World of Adventures. The best (read: crappiest) door game ever.
I used to be so proud that I could read at 2400 baud…
We never even had a modem until around '92, but we still got into the local BBS’s before the internet started becoming popular. I remember whipping people at Risk simply because I logged in everyday and got extra armies (well, that plus I’m a fairly decent player).
In fact, I think there are still some BBS’s in my parts; I know I’ve seen my brother playing games on them within the past year. The poor sap hasn’t discovered this place, I guess…
Oh boy, you guys are all latecomers to the BBS game. I remember using a Teletype ASR-33 with a 110baud modem to contact BBSs in the mid 1970s. It was a great improvement when I got a 300 baud acoustic coupler to attach to my homebuilt Sol Terminal Computer in about 1976. I recall running up a huge long distance phone bill playing Adventure on a far away system.
I started one of the first microcomputer BBSs in the world, by my figures it was about #10, I ran it on an Apple II (not even an Apple II+) for the local university hospital. We used it to distribute experimental software we’d written for medical applications.
But of all my favorite BBSs I ran, I’d have to pick a Wildcat system I ran. It was based on a PCjr system with one 360k floppy disk for storage, 64k RAM, and two modems. And it actually worked! I have never seen anyone do more with less hardware.
Ok, let me ask this: did any of you ever do any serious hacking or phreaking? The boards I frequented (mainly C64 oriented ones) had tons of info on how to do it, but frankly, I was always too much of a chicken shit to try any of it. I was afraid I’d get my parents tossed in jail - I was into BBSs while in junior high school mind you.
There was, however, one incident that I remember with a mixture of guilt and pride. There was one board that had an especially annoying sysop that I determined was in need of an attitude adjustment. The guy was running a HAL BBS, and I found on Compuserve that the guy who did the BBS programming had rather idiotically included a backdoor that gave you sysop privileges. So I trashed the board in a way befitting my maturity as a twelve year old - no, I wont elaborate.
Somehow, the guy found out that I was the guilty party and called my dad! Of course, my dad had no idea what the guy was yelling about - he had no clue what I was doing in my bedroom with my 'umble C64, and after listening to the guy babble a few minutes told him to go screw himself! HA HA HA!
I think I was one of those! Dad bought our first computer, a Commodore 64, during my last semester of high school. A few months later, he added a 300 baud modem. I had heard about BBSs from guys who took computer lab, so I went looking for some. The first BBS I ever called was The Bowling Alley, and I found it listed in the New Orleans yellow pages, of all places! The Bowling Alley was an RBBS which had a Commodore section, and was one of several which posted a list of all the area BBSs. One of my favorites was Half Moon Lake, IIRC a 6485-based BBS with four 1581 drives and several music files. I was active on the many of the C64 boards, and some IBM boards, in the New Orleans area from '86-'88. I did abandon one C64 BBS when I realized the sysops were trolls.
In '88, I left the New Orleans area for the DC area. I didn’t really connect with any DC BBSs until I bought my first MSDOS computer in '92, an 8088-based Tandy 1000 series. The absolute best DC BBS was Your Place, RBBS-based with four lines and a huge amount of files. Execpt for some C64 strip poker, Your Place BBS was my introduction to the world of downloadable PC porn.
Yes, you could always expect to see during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, a major influx of very young miscreants. “Oh boy, oh boy,” they chortled with glee. “Now I can connect to the outside world!” So you’d see all these inane postings by them on the BBSs. And you’d roll your eyes and sigh and… Hm, come to think of it, this hasn’t changed much, has it?
Don’t remember the year, but I had it goin’ on with my Commodore VIC-20 and the almighty 300 baud VicModem. And those multi-line BBS’s where you could chat with other users, those were stylin’.
I was also on a couple of early internet BBS’s, namely the Mars Hotel and Hotel California. Anyone else ever hit them? They ran PirateBBS software, which was written by a grad student at Mississippi State when he bet someone he could write a BBS app in a weekend. Guess he won that bet, and if you do a search I think you can still download the software.
While we’re kind of on the subject, here’s an immortal quote from yours truly: “The web won’t last, it’ll be a passing fad. It just takes too damn long to download all the pictures. People would rather have text.” Right on, as usual.
Yep. Dallas/Fort Worth BBS, back in the early 80’s. 300 baud manual dial modem, TI 99/4 (not the 4a with upper and lower case, but the original, with the equation calculator), It had 16k of ram, and later, I got a single sided/single density 35 track floppy. and sometimes a dumb terminal or a model 100 trs-80. I remeber I had little double pole knife switch that I threw to print things out…it redirected the serial data to my serial daisy wheel printer. Always had some garbage at the top of the page when I threw the switch.
Most of the BBS’s that I hung out on were written by thier owners. We used to make fun of people who used someone elses software.
I remeber there was a white power bbs, the aryan liberty network, or some such nonsense. Me and my friends crashed that thing every time he put it up. We figured out when he when to work, and crashed it shortly after. It would stay down all day.
The BBS’s I hung out at most were Roverdig, and The /closet.
The /closet was run by two people who were the first couple ever married online(IIRC), and they met on compuserve CB simulator. The board was run a TRS-80 model 1, with 3 floppy drives.(before ordinary folk could afford those new fangled hard drives).
There were a couple of other boards, but I forget thier names
Thanks for reminding me of some great times! Oh wow.
I first got on-line with a Tandy Model 1000 with a 300 baud modem in the late '80’s. Most of the boards were running WWIV by Wayne Bell. Farpoint Station, The State Penn, BFE II, etc. There was one being run by a guy on his Amiga but was a bit of a long distance call for me so I did not go there much.
Which leads me to an observation - it was a lot easier to do a get-together back then. Since most people called boards in the local area to avoid LD charges, you could meet face to face much easier. We use to routinely get together and play volleyball, etc. Met some people through the BBSes that will be life-long friends.
A few of the on-line games were mentioned. Anyone remember “Foodfight”? I can remember staying up a minute past midnight in order to call in to be the first to get my turn for the day. Tradewars was another good one. A few of them also ran with ANSI graphics. The State Penn had “Risk” on-line that was a blast. Also played a couple of chess games on-line. Those would take months!
Thanks for the walk down memory lane. I am going to go bask in the good memories for a bit.
I remember BBSes. Fortunately, I lived in a home with two phone lines, so I could indulge to my heart’s content.
I remember the great troves of shareware, and how you had to upload a certain amount to be able to withdraw. One time, I uploaded a de-arc utility to earn some more download credits. Sadly, I had archived the de-arc program – the policy was that uploads had to be archived to save space, and I followed that policy without realizing that no one would be able to use it without a de-arc program, in which case they wouldn’t download it in the first place.
I wasn’t big back then but I frequented those BBS under the handle Doctor DM. My friend Josh ran one called the Tower of High Sorcery for a while.
I used to be hooked on those games, Food Fight, Dominion, and the rest. I even posted a few times when I didn’t have to to play games. Its been so long now. I can’t even remember the names of the places I called so often. Still it was a fine time while it lasted.
I was on the msstate, auggie and citadel BBS’. I first connected my freshman year of college, which would have been 1991. Don’t remember my username though. The auggie boards still exist, and I have an account, but I almost never use it.
The “talk” system with the split screen was a fantastic thing at the time-I kept in touch with a couple of friends from high school that way. Of course, I lost track later on.
If you’re hankerin’ for some old-school ASCII action, check out http://www.textfiles.com… It’s a site dedicated to preserving all the great online writing of the golden era of BBSes. Highly recommended…
I got my first modem in 1991, a 2400 bps model. Cost me around $160 at the time. And I became quite the BBS addict. I remember how jazzed I was when I figured out how to turn on the hardware compression, and my download rates jumped from 230 to 270 cps! Go speed racer, go!! Well, it was exciting at the time, when downloading a 200K GIF could take half an hour; that shaved whole minutes off the download time.
I remember getting a QuantumLink demo disk a long time before that for my C64. They showed a chat sample. One line I remember that one of the chatters said to another: “Thanks for the help buying my new modem. I love 1200 baud!!” hehehe. It all seems so quaint now…
In fact, I went online before you (July 1985).