I think that one was called TradeWars 2010 or something like that.
Dude, i joined the BBS. What is your BBS name? Mine is the same as here. I’m playing LORD on #12 and on #13. I’m also playing Exitilus!
C U there!
-RMX
cichlidiot, Could you perhaps be talking about “Galaxy 5” ? 
It was pretty new about the time my BBS went down. (okay, so I took it down, cuz i had 2 calls a week, from the same 2 people)
PS: the font name i’m using is called system.
Oh, the memories. How well I recall bringing up my dial list, then kicking back as my computer dialed each number in turn, watching television until I heard connect tones as the first BBS answered for the day. Checking the forums, maybe chatting with the sysop, maybe playing Tradewars, then repeating the whole thing until they had all been called.
And they had such great names…Demon Roach Underground…Club Baby Seal…Virtual Hell…Neurochic’s Biker Slut Haven…
The Internet did indeed create impatience. Back then, all we had was WWIVnet and the like, where post packets were sent from board to board by phone in the wee hours of the morning. It took at least two days to get replies to your post from another board. How childlike and innocent we were back then…
Ahh, the old C-64 w/ the 300 baud modem… I had forgotten that you could actually sit and watch the characters pop up, one by one.
Good times, good times… what shan’t come again. For me, the Golden Age of local BBSs ended when I heard the cheesy siren song of QLink…
What I miss about BBS’s Back In The Day I’m failing to recapture on the telnetted ones.
There are too many people there for the ‘little community’ aspect and on the telnet BBS’s I’ve been on, the LoRD games just don’t have the role-play aspect that I loved so much on the old ones. (The LoRD marriage I and a friend had on one board was extremely involved.)
For those of you missing the olden times, here’s a site devoted to the old BBSs:
I miss the get-togethers and the naivete: We were much more forthcoming with each other back then, before the Net became such a scary place.
Ah SysOp chats. I loved to bother my SysOps and request chats, it was just so neat and Sci-Fi!
I’ll never forget that one Sysop who let me have access to the XXX section of the board, just because I asked. Normally it required a 5 dollar donation and a copy of your drivers license. Being 13, this was a big deal.
I must have leached dozens of GIFS at 2400 baud before the board closed down later that month.
Ah, I remember dreaming of one day owning a 2400 modem…
Ah yeah… I’d almost forgot about the first e-p0rn. I remember once downloading a whole 1 meg worth and thinking. “Good Lord, that’s alot of p0rn. This will take forever.”
Hell, I still read at 300baud.
As for chatting with the sysop, I recall what dreadful and slow typists most were.
Hey, I found the very first BBS I visited! The Bowling Alley
They have the wrong years though, Roy had it open at least as early as '87. Guess I should register there and suggest they fix that.
Yeah, the site owner is pretty good about that stuff. After you register, you can list any and all BBSs you were on and then check up on them intermittently to see if any other ex-members drop by. You can also verify information for them.
You want to know what I miss?
I miss the ‘song’ my modem sang as it dialed up.
It was so Star Trek to me.
I miss the characters. No, not the ASCII character set… the people!
It seemed like the local nature of the BBS community made for much more, ahem, colorful personalities. Or maybe it was because of the naivete that dantheman mentioned, that allowed the ubergeeks and, ahem, colorful personalities not stifle their, ahem, colorful behavior, either online or off.
In the local calling area, there were many BBSes, and the same people dialed in to all of them. Most had a one-hour limit, because they only had one or two lines, and so supply expanded to meet demand, more or less, and you could spend the entire afternoon or evening calling all of the local BBSes and engaging the same people on all of them in post-and-reply correspondence.
There was the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome-afflicted teenage boy born to rich parents who bought him every expensive toy he wanted… which he would tire of in six weeks and then sell at a deep discount on the BBSes for cash. In his mind, he was part wolf, and he was always making lupine metaphors and allusions, to the point of being a pest. And he was slow… and annoying… and persistent… and did I mention slow and annoying?
Then there was the uber-geeky guy who lived behind the bike shop and who, socially, was very uncomfortably clingy and needy.
And there was a guy with a degenerate disease of the vestibular system who couldn’t drive or ridea bike or do anything athletic, he could barely even walk sometimes, but who had an ascerbic wit and a hair-trigger flamethrower.
And the teenage girls who were nerdy, too, but who also enjoyed fueling the not-always-subliminal sexual tension because, well, they were girls in the middle of a mostly male strictly nerdy social group.
And there was the sysop who had his board setup to sound a chime anytime a new member registered, and he would go check their stats… if it was a female, he would interrupt their session with chat mode and hit on them. He met his current wife this way.
And then there was another sysop who wrote all the code for his BBS on an Amiga. He was another alpha-geek, and could settle for no other position but alpha male of the geeks. Any technical discussion became a contest. And put him together with one of the other narcissistic types and you had to bail the one-upsmanship with a bedpan…
And those are just the ones who I remember individually… there were tons more who’ve just blended into the background, not forgotten over 20 years, but just kinda smeared out into a blur. But they were real, and if you BBSed in the 818 area code in the early nineties, you just may recognize yourself, or someone you know.
There were no time limits for any of ours; I got in a lot of trouble on more than one occasion for calling so often each day. You think I’m on here a lot? You should have seen me then!
Of course, 99% of the people on the boards back then were middle-aged, ugly males (engineers, programmers, etc.); it was a Big Deal when an actual, living female would show up at one of our get-togethers.
Anyone remember FIDO net? it was kewlers! Actually chatting with boards outside your area code. It was a coo.
And like Dr_Xadium, i liked the secret screens. I made one for my board too! It had the super secret friends menu. What was the main focus of that menu? uhm, warez and pr0n, what else? ;;
Oh yeah, …BBSes, the original vessel that birthed the smilies! Go Colon-dash-closeParenthesis, Go!
Zebra I LOVED my modem song! I could tell how well the handshake was going with the tones and noise! m=5 baby, m=5! (hayes code… who can figure/remember what it means?)
Found my true love on a local BBS called The Annex. Playing “TeleArena” - he was an Acolyte and I was a Druid.
Found the joy of being online (not to mention “hotchat”!) on a funny little BBS called Baudtown back around 88 or so.
Those were the days!
Grife, you’re old. ^__~
By the time I got into BBS’s (93 or thereabouts) it was mostly teens (such as myself) and 20-odds, and on several of the boards I was on, the ratio of males to females was either even or skewed towards the female.
I married the sysop! That’s gotta score five stars on some kind of scale. She was running Warlock’s Castle in the 612 area code, and I met her at my first GT. She’d been divorced for six months, and we hit it off big time. We’re still together 12+ years.
Oh, and Warlock’s is still running for the handful of locals looking for Tradewars and LORD.
IBMs and Apples were ok, but for true uber-geekdom there was nothing like the Commodore 64. Ah, playing with the synthesizer by POKEing bit values to the correct memory address! I had the king of Commie terminal programs, Desterm, with it’s IBM/Commodore translation and it’s 80-column screen emulation!