I remember back in 1995/6 I found Bulleting Board systems! IT was the best thing since Windows 3.1. I liked it so much, after only 3 months, I broke down and got a 2nd line, and started running a 24/7 BBS of my own.
Yeah, I was a SysOp, and I loved it. I ran Renegade 3.0 and had no problems.
What I remember (and miss) are the Role Playing games. I would spend over an hour every day, on each BBS i dialed.
My favorite RPG was called L.O.R.D. (Legend of the Red Dragon) I believe it was only like $20 to register, yet I never did. It was a cool game in-and-of itself, yet it had plugins too. the character would (G)oto the forest and there would be a list of a whole bunch of RPG games that 3rd partys made. This was ever-so cool!
What were some of the games you remember playing online before the internet?
Granted, it was for a proprietary BBS system me and my friend cooked up, so the games could only be played on our board, but it was rather clever for the time. I’d name names, but odds are good you’ve never heard of any of 'em.
I miss the regular Tuesday night movies with other board members. $2.00 for a movie and then the ritual schlepp over to Denny’s to consume the unconsumable.
Good times.
I also (kind of) miss the hierarchical access schema that many of the boards had, whereby there would be additional subboards and other hidden features visible only to the annointed.
I miss being able to geekily exploit ASCII add super cool special effects to your messages! Ring the bell! ^G^G^G^G … ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HActually, that was pretty lame, wasn’t it?
What I miss the most is the localness of BBS’s. Nearly everyone who called a board lived in the local dialing area. Those Denny’s get-togethers were a lot of fun.
Also, all the things that went with the primitive technology and limited bandwidth that are now unnecessary. Ascii art, offline readers and packet U/D loads, subscribing to Fidonet, Hayes commands, Commodore/IBM translation, limited caller access (unless the sysop went big time and installed extra lines or even a PBX, in which case they usually became a “payboard”). It was fun in a sort of hand-cranked Model-T way.
I remember running Searchlight and Renegade BBSes way back when, having to fiddle with FOSSIL drivers and such, making super-secret “friend” menus, and dealing with whacked out stalker types that always wanted to “see” what a BBS looked like from the other side.
I even called long distance to try and get an update to Sphinx BBS because there were no other boards like it in the area, and I wanted to be unique… spinning ANSI cursors were just so keen!
I miss SysOps randomly breaking in for chat, upload / download ratios, the first CD-based BBS archives… cool ANSI screens, even the first stabs at Windows based graphical BBSes…
I guess I miss everything about the BBS days. Sad to think that all that fancy stuff that made me do whoa back then is so … mundane today…
Those CD archives I was in awe of… 640 megabytes– now just a sliver of my HD space. The BBSes with cool menus? Nothing more than fancy MUDs now.
Damn right, 'cept for us Commodure users it was a science lab at the University of New Orleans. Until some jerks (not associated with us) had to go and steal some university computers.
I discovered BBS’s on March 17, 1985. Three days later on one of the BBS’s I met the man who was to be my husband. We’ve been married 18 years. Love over two Commodore 64’s!
The best man, the minister, the hostess for the rehersal dinner and reception were all people that I had met through the BBS. So were several of the guests.
I wonder if any of those guys are Dopers. Anyone here from The Wilderness or Motherboard? Rocky Top? Wildman? Lurking Grue? Echolalia? The Lorax? “Assassian” aka Ian? Dreamer? The Punisher? Doc? Ed? Zenster? So many more…
I miss playing Usurper, ansi-loading screens, and porn pics that took ten minutes to download each. These kids today dont realize how good they’ve got it when it comes to getting their pr0n
Slow porn was a good thing at 16. I had some program that worked with one of BBS operating systems, that would run automatically at night, I could get about 9 whole pics a night while I slept. I was king of the neighborhood. 2400 baud, 12Mhz of lightning fast processor speed, gigantic 40 meg HD.
I really do miss Global Wars, stupid ANSI game.
Ahh the good OLD days.
Good points Skeezix, I stand corrected. I guess with my pop-up blocking browser (Mozilla) and good Bayesian spam filter those things don’t bother me too much, but still more than when they didn’t exist.
I miss a lot of things already mentioned also. Gatherings, knowing almost everyone that posted, LORD, etc. My brother sysoped a wwiv board and it was fun to help with suggestions on that, too. The game I liked the best I have forgotten the name of, it was very similar to LORD in playing style, but involved outerspace and interplanetary travel. I had gotten in on the first day, so had a pretty good head start compared to the other users, something that never happened with LORD.
I remember the sysop pressing both shift keys to pull me into chat during e-mail, and deciding to add some of his/her own input to the mail. heh I’m not sure how much of it has to do with being younger and just recalling that fondly, but I think a lot of it had to do with how close all of us were.
