Back in the day, when the earth was still cooling, and before the internet was what it is now, I used to connect to local bulletin boards with my old trusty14.4K modem.
You could download files, games, search the nest using ‘Gopher’ and other Unix tools.
Does anyone still run them?
What was the name of the various software used to run the boards back then?
The wikipedia page on bulletin board systems has some info. It includes a section detailing the common hardware and software platforms used back in the BBS days. There are some links at the bottom of the article, but when I followed one to a list of BBSs still in service I found that most if not all of them were “online” BBS systems. Those that used to be dial up only often migrated to the point where they had dial up and internet access, and most of those have switched over to internet only access (or they’ve just gone away).
Link to the wikipedia page:
I had a commodore 64 and a 300 baud modem back in the day. I can type faster than 300 baud.
You had a modem? Why when I was a lad, my dad used to make me walk over to the teacher’s college in the next town. I’d run up to the math building, stick my head in the lab and holler “One!” They’d holler back “Zero!” and I’d walk back home to tell my dad. Then I had to do the same the same thing over again for the next bit. I was almost out of high school before we finished the handshake.
The most luxurious jump for me, was from 300 to 1200. That’s because it would actually appear faster than my natural reading speed. Anything beyond 1200 was nice, of course, but it never was the same blissful experience as that first 1200.
While I was still using an acoustic 300 baud modem, my dad brought home this interesting modem called a Racal Vadic. This modem had the feature of being able to run at 1200, only when it talked to other Vadics, otherwise it reverted to 300.
I asked the sysop of the best bbs in town at that time if he had any thoughts and he told me he happened to have a single Vadic among his 12 modems. He came up with the idea that he would put that one last in the “trunk hunt” sequence, so I could try its direct line and see if it was available. Whenever I wanted to get online I would try that one first, and then try the main number. Once in a rare while I got the special treat of being able to connect at 1200!
I can’t imagine how much time was spent by folks redialing the local BBS number until a line opened up.
Oh nostalgia. I’m a youngin (25), but I remember BBSs (my best friend had a geeky older brother). I started off with a hand-me-down 300 baud modem, when I upgraded to 2400 it was amazing. To be fair, most of the other BBSers had 14.4s, but since I was getting old used modems for free I couldn’t complain.
I met some really good friends that way, and got really addicted to text-based games like MajorMUDD. Wow, now I feel like a member of the uber-dork club again, even though I let my membership lapse quite some time ago.
Lots! I remember the days when it was a luxury for a BBS to have two modems.
I had a Procomm script that would hunt through numbers of various boards so I had a decent chance of at least connecting to something that I was a member on.
And then there was CompuServe, and dialing in at 2400 baud to snag email and then go back at 300 to browse or search as the charged more for 2400 baud service.
Seriously though, my first modem was a 300 baud acoustic modem. You couldn’t even use it today because there are very few phones that would fit into the cradle.
Ah, I miss majormud. I met many friends through that (and even one Ex). In fact and old friend contacted me through myspace awhile back telling me his dark secret: he started scripting MajorMUD once again.
I started with a 300 baud modem too. This would be way back in the mid 1980s. I got serious about BBSing in 1985 with a 1200/75 modem, then I got a 2400 bps one. Cool cats had the Courier HST, a modem with a proprietary 9600 bps protocol. In the early 90s I got given two very nice 14400 modems to evaluate.
Does anyone else remember Telix and Telemate? Procomm?
Ah, the days of 300 baud modems and $200 phone bills. Nostalgic maybe but things sure are better now.
As far as the question, try this site for a blast from the past: http://www.dmine.com/telnet/ It is an A through Z list of BBS systems, most accessible by your Telnet client built into Windows, some still have phone numbers listed though. I’ll leave it to others to call the numbers and listen for the screech to see if the modem(s) are still up.
Nostalgia? We had a 300 baud acoustic modem that my dad made out of wood. Daisychat on PRESTEL, how much trolling we did, how much time we wasted…
How grounded we got when my parents got a phone bill for £200 (no free local calls in the UK then, you see) - and this was in the early 1980s when £200 would have bought a reasonable second-hand car…
I remember scanning BBS directories for “local” boards I could call without incurring long-distance charges. I was lucky because I lived in western NY at the time and the University of Buffalo had an active BBS community.
I had no BBSes in my local calling area, and the way C&P/Bell Atlantic rates were back then it was actually cheaper for me to call out of state than in-state outside my local area.
My first computer was a Commodore 64, and Commodore used an entirely different coding scheme for text than standard ANSI. So when I first got into BBS’ing I hung out strictly in the Commodore-based BBS’s. Then I finally got a Commodore term program that offered Commodore/standard ANSI translation. It also had a “pseudo-80 col” text mode that allowed you to squeeze 80 columns of text into the 64’s 40 column monitor.
Heh, I probably have floppies stuck away in a drawer somewhere with .txt files that have a LF/CR at the end of every 80 characters.
We had a Tandy 1400 Laptop with a 1200 baud modem in 1986. There were 5 BBS systems in my home town that we could call. Three of them ran Citadel 86, one ran Wildcat and yet another one ran something else I don’t remember the name of. I also was able to dial into the University’s VAX/VMS mainframe and do my programming from home instead of the computer lab. I connected with a program called MS Kermit which was a VT-100 terminal emulator.
Now that was some real computing back then. We had to wait half an hour just to download a single 320 x 200 .gif image file. Programs were downloaded using the ZModem protocol because YModem didn’t have error checking and was prone to corrupt your download.
Funny this thread popped up. I was a VBBS SysOp back in the early 90s. New Orleans had hundreds of dialup bbs’s. I still have a few friends that I see on a regular basis that I met through some of the local bbs’s. There were local gatherings on a regular basis at different restaurants and one of the local SysOps had a big house with a bar and pool and used to host parties a few times a year.
A few weeks ago, I started digging around and found RetroBBSGames (telnet to telnet://bbs.retrobbsgames.net) and started playing TradeWars again.
I seriously doubt that anyone has a dialup bbs anymore. I haven’t even had a modem in my computer since high-speed internet came ot my area about 8 years ago.