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Commodore BBSes Return using the Internet. 261

Posted by Hemos from the using-the-intarweb dept.
oldbitcollector writes "Several Commodore 64 enthusiasts have developed a method for putting Commodore BBS sytems on the Internet. Users can "dial" using a standard 64 connected to the Internet or by using a "CG Term" for the PC. Details can be found here."
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Commodore BBSes Return using the Internet. More

Commodore BBSes Return using the Internet.

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  • What? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Black Jack Hyde ( 2374 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @09:34PM (#8775598)
    No VIC-20 support? Darn, and I've even got a tape drive.

    • Doing same on Vic20 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Felinoid ( 16872 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @10:16PM (#8775894) Homepage Journal
      Having writen BBS programs for the Vic20. C64 and C128 (Actually same program evolved as I switched systems.. Also ported to Dos and would have gone to Linux but the BBS died on Dos as the phone company ripped out the wires to my phone line and offered to charge me to fix there own mistake.
      Intrestingly enough I wasn't supprised to discovere I had no callers. I was only supprised as to WHY)

      If the trick is handled all on the PC side (and I expect it is) then it dosen't matter.

      If they are doing it the way I think
      (Commodore userport to RS232 to null modem to PC sereal (rs232) then PC forwards to telnet etc...) this should also work on the Vic20.

      For that matter it should also work for CP/M, Apple II, TSR-80. Pritty much any old BBS.

      Dos BBSes can be done on the same Linux or Windows box that provides the Internet access making it much easier.
      • One of the linked articles (PETscii.com) had a listing of TelBBSes, running on various platforms (mostly C64/128s, but there was an Atari, and some Apple II and Commodore-based BBSes emulated on Windows, Linux, and (!) Amiga.
    • I've got a PET 2001. Way to leave me and my legions in the dust.
    • I've got the Assembler cartridge! But I can't remember the entry point to run it. Back to read data, poke data looping. :(

  • Oh boy! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 05, 2004 @09:35PM (#8775605)
    Just what the world needs-- more underpowered computers connected to the internet so that we can all DoS *ahem* I mean Slashdot them.

    Hip hip Horray!

    • Re:Oh boy! (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      In your News Night TV 6 advantage at 11 - today someone wrote the first C-64 worm. This worm finds all internet enabled C-64's and turns them into undead zombies, capable of unleashing a DDOS attack of about 19200 baud combined.

      System admins, for some reason, are not paying much attention to this latest threat.....

    • Re:Oh boy! (Score:4, Funny)

      by el-spectre ( 668104 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @09:50PM (#8775727) Journal
      Shit... you could DoS 'em with a fancy toaster... wouldn't take much.
    • Just what the world needs-- more underpowered computers connected to the internet so that we can all DoS *ahem* I mean Slashdot them.

      Yeah, it's sure good to know that things haven't changed as far as underpowered computers connecting on the Internet...makes me want to hook my fishbowl to it :>

  • Weird (Score:5, Funny)

    by ziggy_zero ( 462010 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @09:35PM (#8775608)
    What's with that period? It makes the headline seem so...threatening, ominous.

    • Re:Weird (Score:4, Funny)

      by el-spectre ( 668104 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @09:40PM (#8775645) Journal
      Hmm... I've seen a lot of grammar Nazis around... never a grammar paranoid :)

      .

    • Re:Weird (Score:3, Interesting)

      by _Sharp'r_ ( 649297 )

      Commodore BBSs were such fun for cracker sysops. Since they stored user passwords in the clear for any sysop to read, once you had sysop access on two different popular BBSs, you could tell who used the same password on all their accounts everywhere.

      Once upon a time, there was even a BBS owner/sysop I knew who didn't bother to use more than one password.

      Need I say more?

      • Re:Weird (Score:4, Insightful)

        by zakezuke ( 229119 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @10:56PM (#8776174)
        Once upon a time, there was even a BBS owner/sysop I knew who didn't bother to use more than one password.

        True, but what could you gain access to with other people's passwords at the time? Another commodore BBS? Getting a chance to cheat in an online game? Posting as this person, "I am a foofoo head because I use the same password everywhere!" Once upon a time, passwords were pretty damn worthless.

  • setting low expecations (Score:5, Funny)

    by frovingslosh ( 582462 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @09:35PM (#8775612)
    One has to wonder about an implimentation for "fringe" computers when the website (http://www.petscii.com/) supports IE but only gives a blank page if opened in Netscape.
    • For some reason he fails to use any HTML, HEAD, or BODY tags in his pages. I suspect ignorance, not malice. As usual.
      • IIRC, head and body tags aren't absolutely neccesary. They're simply there for your convenience.
        • No, they have always been required. However, since MSIE 4.0 and up, IE has allowed extremely poor HTML grammar. This leads to a lot of bad web pages and "web developers" that can only code for the latest MS browser.
    • I didn't know Microsoft ported IE to the Commodore 64.

  • modems (Score:5, Funny)

    by dan2550 ( 663103 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @09:36PM (#8775619) Homepage
    HAH! my 28.8 modem days finally pay off! now I actually can do something that people with broadband can't do. there is nothing like a carrier signal to lift the sprits.

    • Re:modems (Score:5, Funny)

      by spellraiser ( 764337 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @09:42PM (#8775671) Journal

      Sorry to burst your little bubble, but us broadbanders can also connect to these BBS'es using CGTerm [paradroid.net], as mentioned in the article.

      Guess you'll have to make do with A-HA and Duran Duran albums for that exclusive sense nostalgia ... oh wait, I have those too :P

      • Sorry to burst your little bubble, but us broadbanders can also connect to these BBS'es using CGTerm, as mentioned in the article.

        Hey, but the guy some slack. He's still trying to download the article on his 56k modem...

  • Very nice, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Travoltus ( 110240 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @09:37PM (#8775624) Journal
    How can this be very useful? The C64 has about 32K of useable RAM and about an 800K floppy... am I missing something, have they come up with larger mass storage systems for the C64 or something?

    (This isn't intended as a troll or flamebait... it's a genuine question....)

    • Re:Very nice, but... (Score:4, Funny)

      by SomeoneGotMyNick ( 200685 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @09:45PM (#8775697) Journal
      Well, I suppose the safest stuff to trade without recourse for the moment is C64 Warez

      When you log on, check out the Uploads/New!!0-3Decades/ folder for all the latest stuff :)
    • I assume it is useful for people with C64s to communicate with one another and to up/download software.

    • Re:Very nice, but... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Phexro ( 9814 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @09:50PM (#8775722)
      Actually, IIRC the 1541 was single-sided, single-density, around 160kb of storage.

      But yes, there are various different expansions available, including hard drives and more memory. There were various 3rd-party options, and now someone has developed a way to hook up an IDE drive to a C64 [volny.cz]. It also can be used to access CF cards.

      I believe that apps had to support the memory upgrade peripherals. I seem to recall them being fairly popular with GEOS users.
      • It used a single sided 3.5" floppy exactly like the double sided ones we have for PCs now.

        Was I the ONLY kid on the block who had one of those drives?

        Back in the old days I bragged about having a combined storage of 1.5 megabytes online! lol. Man, now I have 2 terabytes on 2 networked PCs...
      • Back in the day for storage on the C64, major C64 BBS's ran SFD 1001 drives a 1 meg floppy drive. SFD stands for Super Floppy Drive. Before HD adapters came along, chain's of floppy drives where common on most BBS's. And really on the C64, 4 megs of diskspace was alot.
        • Damn straight.

          I still have a couple of SFDs in my basement. 4,133 blocks free each, a hair over a meg. My 8050, bless it's soul, blew up in the early nineties. (8050 - two side-by-side single-sided SFDs in a 4040 chassis).

          I also have a couple of 4040 chassis lying around intact (except for repairs -- they work), and one which was stuffed full of single-speed Sony CD-ROMs many many moons ago.

          For the parent, The 1541 had 664 blocks free, or about 170K of usable storage. Unless you chose to use track 18 (th

      • Re:Very nice, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by zoeblade ( 600058 )

        Actually, IIRC the 1541 was single-sided

        But if you got some scissors and cut little rectangle shaped holes in the appropriate place, you could make the disks themselves double sided. You'd still have to turn them over though, yeah.

    • 800k?! You must be thinking Amiga.

      The 1541 held a massive 170kB (per side; disk had to be flipped manually) and transfered data at a blazing 400 bytes per second.

    • Re:Very nice, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by diodeus ( 96408 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @09:53PM (#8775750) Journal
      A buddy and I wrote an ran a BBS program for the Commodore 64 (the Spence XP BBS).It ran, successfully, on a single 160K floopy drive. It even have a full-screen editor. I was selling it commercially while I was still in highschool.

      We even had to renumber the BASIC line numbers, because they were stores as strings. Many calls to "GOSUB 55000" took up way too much so we did silly things like change that to "GOSUB 3", then line 3 said "goto 55000" Woo hoo! we recovered 200 bytes!

      As the BASIC program grew we ran out of memory and started re-writing bits of it in 6502 assembler. We had bits of machine code stuck in unusual places like the cassette drive buffer, ram under the basic ROM, unused ram between the basic ROM and the OS rom, on the screen RAM, you name it.

      You'd load up the program, then swap the floopy, putting in your "download section" disk. Hey, good programs where 32K back then :)

      Later some company made a proprietary SCSI controller and a 10MB external hard drive. I had two of them for a while. Yup, a C64 with 20MB downwload section.

      I also ran the BBS list for Toronto Computes!, and had a monthly column on BBSing that I wrote between 1985-1995. I was a big supporter of the BBS scene back them.

      - James.

      • You deserve a "Thanks!" (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I cut my BBSing teeth on boards pulled from that very BBS listing in TC. Used to wait excitedly for the "Big BBS List" to come out every now and then. :)

      • Re:Very nice, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by gklinger ( 571901 )
        Hey James. It's Golan (think back, way way back). Your post took me on a journey down memory (no pun intended) lane. I have much stronger memories of the first Spence BBS program which was equally thrifty with memory. I remember trying to customize it for a friend and constantly banging my head on the desk because you guys had used every available byte of RAM (and then some). The fact that your program was easy to set up and could operate quite nicely with a single 1541 drive made it possible for anyone to
    • How can this be very useful? The C64 has about 32K of useable RAM

      Actually, it's a very secure system to go on the internet with, for one thing: even the smallest Windows virus won't fit in 32K.
    • Actually, a 170k floppy. :-)
    • How can this be very useful? The C64 has about 32K of useable RAM

      It's actually 64 K of RAM about 51 k of it usable. Most Commodore BBSs swap in and out the various sub-programs as needed.

      and about an 800K floppy

      Most BBS sysops have a hard drive or large RAM drive such as the CMD Hard Drive or RAMLink [cmdrkey.com] I started with floppies (which the 5.25" drives were 170 k and the more expensive 3.5" were 800k) but you can only run a text based board (and not a networked one) on such limited capacity.

      ... am I miss

    • ....have they come up with larger mass storage systems for the C64 or something?

      Ummm... I know for a fact you could get mass storage for the C64. They were sold in computer stores in the form of a 10 or 20meg peripheral which was nothing more then a scsi host adapter, and often times an MFM/RLL to SCSI controler. The cooler ones could support 2 MFM drives...I know I bought my 15meg Seagate st-419 in about 1988 for about $300.

      I can speak only from the atari standpoint as far as 8bits with mass storage.
    • The C64 has about 32K of useable RAM
      If you're willing to code in 6502 ASM, virtually all of the C64's 64K is usable (*). I once wrote a 6502 assembler that used the RAM 'under' the Kernel image to store its data.

      (*) Some, of course (like the memory used to hold what's displayed on the screen) has fixed use, but most can be used generally.

    • How can this be very useful? The C64 has about 32K of useable RAM and about an 800K floppy... am I missing something, have they come up with larger mass storage systems for the C64 or something?

      Even 'back in the day' there was mass storage for Commodore 64s. My father taught computer studies at a local high school, and part of his job was managing a network of--if memory serves--sixty or so Commodore 64s.

      The Commodore 9060 and 9090 offered 6.4 and 9.6 MB [commodore.ca] of storage, respectively. Manual here [commodore.ca], for anyo

  • are they "secure" like the old bbs' were?

    everyone knows that a bbs attracts conspiratist theorists like flies to fido spread over 5km of freeway
  • ....first posting?

    Actually it'd be interesting if some of the old databases of messages could be restored.... as BBSs carried local events and interesting conversation.... you know before we knew first hand what trolls and flamers were or would become...
    • I take it you never heard of Textfiles.com [textfiles.com].
    • Actually it'd be interesting if some of the old databases of messages could be restored.

      Hey, you know that is a good idea. As a kid calling BBSs, I really think that the opportunity to communicate with older folks helped me a lot from a maturity/learning/thinking/etc standpoint. It is sad that today it seems like the Internet only causes trouble for younger kids- the sexual predators and stuff. BBSs were a much tighter community, at least in the small town where I grew up. Even if you didn't know the

  • Wow, this brings back memories (Score:5, Interesting)

    by laird ( 2705 ) <lairdp@@@gmail...com> on Monday April 05, 2004 @09:39PM (#8775635) Journal
    Wow, this brings back memories. I ran a BBS for years, Bladerunner BBS. It started out running on an Osborne Executive (2400 BPS! 2 double-sided quad density drives!) and then was upgraded to an Atari ST (20 MB SCSI HD, 19,200 BPS Telebit Trailblazer!). The amusing thing was that the CPU in the Trailblazer was much faster than the ST itself.

    One thing I really miss from those days is the sense of community, and the games. I ran a number of games on my BBS, and it was always a lot of fun watching people interact. Unlike modern online games, anyone could write a test-oriented BBS game if they knew a little BASIC, so there were all sorts of cool games. I remember in particular a drag racing game where you could race, earn money, buy upgrades, and compete against other drivers (i.e. other players on the same BBS). The integration of the game into real-time was fascinating -- most BBS games let you make a limited number of moves a day, so people would play a single session of a game for _weeks_. And there were tons of cool timing tricks, like dialing into the BBS at 11:30 so that you'd have the last move before midnight and then the first game after midnight, which could give you a nice advantage (and leave you vulnerable as everyone else moves after you).

    Hey, thanks for the excuse for the flashback. Fun days!
    • Ooh, I forgot to mention that the ST ran STadel, an awesome room-based BBS system. Every 'room' had a topic, and could have files, messages, etc. Much, much cooler than the typical command-line BBS's.

      Citadel's had this amazing networking scheme where BBS's could route messages between them so that (like Fido) you could send email (slowly) cross-country with only a series of local phone calls (i.e. free). But it was about a billion times easier to set up, as you simple created a shared room and configured w
      • I, too, loved Citadels. Something about the no nonesense approach, just text messages will all those lovely, lovely ROOMS to explore. You can, of course, still find them around today. Whether they have the same feel/flavor is an entirely different subject, of course. Check out the Uncensored! BBS at uncensored.citadel.org [citadel.org]. It is running Citadel/UX on a Linux system so you can still feel proud to check it out, even if you're too young to have experienced BBSing the first time around.
    • The amusing thing was that the CPU in the Trailblazer was much faster than the ST itself

      Hardly amusing. The technique of offloading CPU load onto specialized, more powerful (in their own way) specialized coprocessors is older than the ST. Hell, even the blitter could be said to be faster than the 68K in the ST.

      Have you ever wondered what part of your PC does floating-point calculations the fastest? and which one does DSP the fastest? (hint: it's not the main CPU).
    • Since so many sysops around (havnt used that term in years)

      Check out these links.

      http://archives.thebbs.org [thebbs.org]
      and
      http://bbslist.textfiles.com [textfiles.com]

      Don't forget to google for Similar pages, if you migrated to PC after the Apple/C64 classic modem BBS'ing, you can find all the Ansi Door games of the past. BTW, you can run door games under linux with dosemu and Linux BBS software for those broadband Tradewar junkies.

    • Ahh the memorys (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Felinoid ( 16872 )
      Yeah..
      First BBS I logged into was a DYM BBS.. I was too young to log in and I lied.
      It didn't work out.

      Then I logged into the Forth BBS in SanFransisco. Your command prompt was actually in forth.
      The way forth works is you can add commands so the BBS fuctions were just new commands. I think they locked off the programming features (makes sense but I never tried to edit the BBS so I don't know).
      I remeber the ongoing story of Murphy Law of folly forth. I just folowed the story as it progressed. "Folow the yell

  • SWEET JESUS. (Score:5, Funny)

    by aardvarko ( 185108 ) <webmaster AT aardvarko DOT com> on Monday April 05, 2004 @09:39PM (#8775636) Homepage
    And just in case there was any lingering doubt that Slashdot editors might not derive some sort of malignant glee from watching servers go down, now we are posting links to COMMODORE 64s! C'mon, let's be more forthcoming - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, Harnessing the Power of Geeks to Set Protozoan Servers on Fire. BOO-YAH!
  • ...as sys 49152

    who knew?

  • Feels Different (Score:5, Funny)

    by Punchinello ( 303093 ) * on Monday April 05, 2004 @09:43PM (#8775677)
    A Commodore 64 BBS is not the same over a high speed connection. I long for the days of my 300 baud modem when I could read the text in real time as it came across my TV screen. It was all down hill after the 1200 baud modems came out.
  • Well, they do you know ;)

    --
    Mad Penguin [madpenguin.org]
  • Soon to come: an internet morse code [easyconnect.fr] interface for the internet C64 BBS systems, for those of us who really think those 40 columns by 25 lines and 16 colors are a disgraceful novelty item, not worthy of true purists!!

  • another day at the k mart (Score:4, Funny)

    by Perianwyr Stormcrow ( 157913 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @09:54PM (#8775751) Homepage
    10 PRINT "FUCK"
    20 PRINT "YOU"
    30 GOTO 10
    END
    • When I was in high school, just before the national anthem I used to go up to the Qnx machines and enter a quick program to sleep 5 minutes and then start beeping (I forget if I used some kind of playsound API or just printed control chars).

      I was the teacher's pet but he never caught me and he was always REALLY pissed when it went off.

      Sad, aren't I? :)

      • Re:another day at the k mart (Score:5, Funny)

        by zcat_NZ ( 267672 ) <zcat@wired.net.nz> on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @12:01AM (#8776540) Homepage
        Back when I was at high-school, we had a 'network'; 16 weird-ass brand computers, connected by 1200 baud RS232 to a Z-80-based 10m 'fileserver'

        There was also a network printer; it even beeped if you sent it a ^G.

        So one afternoon, we carefully crafted up a file full of ^G's and pagefeeds (^L), queue'd the file about a hundred times while the printer was turned off, and went to our next class. Since the network didn't have any kind of 'queue management', nobody had any idea what the problem was and after chewing through about half a box of paper, the printer got sent back to the shop for servicing.

        Good times..
  • It's really kinda sad.

    I'm all for nostalgia in some minor way but when do you let it rest? I wonder how many guys are out there praising this move who, the day after they got their x86, were trashing the C=64?

    I still own a working Amiga but even I've come to the point that I'm asking myself; what for? It was great in the day but the day's over. Stop playing Trade Wars and play some MOH so I have another newb I can kick in the nuts...

  • BBSmates.com (Score:5, Informative)

    by W1K-Galoot ( 745033 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @09:58PM (#8775785)
    Guess it's time for mysemi-annual plug of BBSmates.com [bbsmates.com]. You old-schoolers can look up your old hang-outs, hook up with your old BBS buddies, and see for yourselves that everybody but you aged poorly. :-D

    (And there're a lot of old BBSes available through telnet, though I dunno about C64-based ones.)

  • Whoa flashbacks. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @10:00PM (#8775792) Journal
    Heres something that might give you a c64 flash back.

    GOOGOOACKACKBADBAD
    Punter :)
    Xmodem-1K and Ymodem-1K
    300 Baud modems you pluged your sound into.
    Sixpack (s2g), Arj, Lha
    4 pixel wide 80 column display on a 40 column terminal
    4 color ansi (And of course Petascii)
    Burping Number 5.
    Dual Sid, playing Skate or Die, Sids rule :)
    Speedload Cartridges, (My fav the Snapshot)
    GEOS and Quantumlink
    Peek and Poke
    Compiled Basic
    Atari 2600 joysticks

    Am I missing anything else? Other than almost every BBS being written in compiled basic, some where written in C. The Amiga where BBS's compiled in C was the rave. Moving on UP. I remember before I got my Amiga, I upgraded to a C128 so I could do real 80 column ANSI, for almost a year during school, I had at least a real ANSI term, DesTerm I recall, even had real zmodem.

    Rusty and Eddies! ;)

    Ok, I should stop now before I go on about moving to PC playing Tradewars on WWIV BBS's and Galaciticom (Before they turned into ISP software.)

    The BBS scene has turned into the IRC scene, now it seems to be the IM scene. Blogs are there too, but I was blogging before it was blogs, so Im blogged out. (Or is Slashdot a BLOG?)

    "Know your roots!"

  • Maybe it's just me... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rampant mac ( 561036 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @10:00PM (#8775795)
    I miss the days when Wildcat, iNiQUiTY, Kermit, backbone, "drop carrier" and "line noise" all meant something.

    AT&F&C1&D2

  • It's a [insert old computer here] on a terminal server... one user at a time, just like the good ol' days.

    Remember when the PCers were running multiple copies of their software under Desqview, for a multiline system on one machine? I wonder if you could accomplish the same thing with multiple instances of [insert old computer here] running on your favorite modern OS? Probably lots of file locking (or lack thereof) problems to overcome, though.

    I ran a board for years--taught me a lot, especially about mode

  • Commodore Like BBS on BSD (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 05, 2004 @10:03PM (#8775820)
    We've been running a Commodore like BBS program on a BSD box for a number of years. It's called The Shack and you can get to it by just a CLICK! [velvet.ath.cx]

    It's been a fun project and we hope to continue it's development whenever spare time is available.

  • Does this mean I can play Hack & Slash again? At least this time around I don't have to worry about whether the ultra-fast 14400 line is available...

    -Jem
  • DO YOU SEE A BLOOD RED SWORD?

    • Re:But... (Score:2, Funny)

      by diodeus ( 96408 )
      YOU SEE A RED DOOR TO THE NORTH
      (I called my character A RED DOOR TO THE NORTH)

      > Open red door

      I DO NOT SEE A RED DOOR HERE.
      A RED DOOR TO THE NORTH STRIKES YOU, INFLICTING 30 DAMAGE.

      (I also liked to call my character "1l1l1lll11")
  • I used to run an Apple ][ BBS, I wonder if I could do the same - and if I'd actually get any traffic. Any takers?

  • Ah, memories... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jxliv7 ( 512531 )
    .

    I remember my C=64 with fondness. I should, I paid $495 or so...

    There was a guy I found who was building 1 meg of RAM expansion slots, I thought I was on top of the world. And when i got my 3.5" 1.44 Mb floppy drive I almost peed my pants.

    I forget the program, but I set up my C=64 to be a BBS for the real estate office I worked in. You could NOT tell you weren't on a PC (286/386) of the period.

    I wrote my first book on that machine, printed it out on a Star printer, and published it.

    And there WERE a few BBS

  • History Lesson (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Prototerm ( 762512 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @10:51PM (#8776140)
    Nothing in this world is new, stupidity in particular.

    Commodore was unbelievably stupid, and made some things harder for programmers. For example, the C-64 and C-128 computers both had a software-emulated UART chip, instead of a real one (to save money, as I understand it, about $5), limiting the baud rate to how fast the computer could process code in what was called a "non-maskable interrupt". The C-64 allowed a max of 1200 baud. The C-128, because it could run at double the clock speed of the C-64 ("Fast Mode", or about 2Mhz), could in theory run at 2400 baud, but you had to write your own version of the UART emulator using well-optimized machine language. Faster connection speeds were out of the question.

    As the author of a few C-64 programs (e.g., "Prototerm"), I can't tell you how many times I wanted to drive to West Chester, and strangle someone. Nowadays, of course, I periodically get the urge to strangle a person or two in Redmond. Fortunately, it's too long a drive.

    Nothing every changes, just the names and faces.

  • slashdotted? (Score:3, Funny)

    by ocie ( 6659 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @10:51PM (#8776141) Homepage
    READY
    LOAD "HTTP://WWW./PETSCII.COM/",8,1

    HTTP 404 SITE NOT FOUND
    READY

    so anyway, I just had to add this little bit to get aroung the lameness filter. So, how's that Internet thing doing?

  • To be realistic (Score:3, Informative)

    by EmbeddedJanitor ( 597831 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @10:54PM (#8776166)
    ...they better be limiting the throughput to 300baud. Good old days when you could read "in real time" ie. you could read as fast as the data came through the modem - no need for this scroll bar bullshit.

  • Why Commodore BBSes ruled. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pentomino ( 129125 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @10:56PM (#8776173) Homepage Journal
    I've been waiting for Commodore BBSes to return to the net for a long time.

    The thing I liked the most about Commodore BBSes was the color and graphics. Every BBS had little custom color schemes and graphical flourishes here and there. And, of course, the phreakers' boards had the most flamboyant designs. With the popularity of ASCII art today, you can just imagine what Commodore users could accomplish with PETSCII, and what Atari users could accomplish with ATASCII now that you mention it.

    Color64 and C-net boards had a charm that was hard to match.
    • ATASCII was some crazy shit! With that character set you could make some really intricate curved borders, although not in as many colors.

      A lot of the color stuff lives on in the IRC Undernet though. The first time I saw Undernet I just started laughing. It certainly gets your attention!

  • Waxing nostalgic about Commodore BBS's... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BobWeiner ( 83404 ) on Monday April 05, 2004 @11:48PM (#8776477) Homepage Journal
    ...my very first introduction to local Commodore BBS's was shortly after I purchased a Datalink 2400 internal modem for my Apple IIGS.

    One of my dad's coworker friends ran a board called "The Ivory Tower", and passed the info along to me. Let me tell ya, up until that time, I had no idea how my life was going to change. I miss the small community feel of old BBS's like "The Ivory Tower".

    I remember also the frustration of hearing those blasted 'busy' signals when trying to call up a popular board. As I made my way around the various BBS's of Knoxville, TN, I came across "The Volunteer BBS" -- it was one of my favorite hang-outs -- it was a PC based BBS, but they had great online games like Millway's Casino and Tradewars 2002. With the Internet being so global, it's getting harder to find such cozy little places to hang out anymore.

    Bring back Millway's Casino!

  • ...is a 2 meg Flash animation that mimics letters slowly appearing on a green screen at 300 baud.

    W E L C O M E
    T O
    T H E
    C O M M O D O R E
    P I R A T E 'S D E N

    1> Warez 2>Chat 3>BBS System

    >?

  • My parents got an Apple ][+ with a 300 baud modem when I was in third grade, back in 1982. I remember the "Cracked" screens with the phone numbers for the BBSs of the pirates who had cracked the games I was playing (Drol, Snack Attack, Taipan, Escape to Atlantis). I also found local 'boards' where I would read what everyone who had logged on before me had posted in the various 'rooms' that I was interested in and I would reply appropriately. I can't remember downloading any warez, though early pr0n was a
  • ... and I should know, for I run a modern day BBS (see .sig below). Have a look at this BBS software suite [synchro.net] and you will see that the world does indeed have a great open source BBS suite that runs on both Windows and *nix. Telnet has done away with dialing in, and also does away with long distance charges. If you look at this page [synchro.net], you will see that there are quite a few Synchronet systems in existence with new systems coming online and connecting into DOVE-Net almost weekly. (DOVE-Net is the QWK message
  • I can't believe it. Someone actually recorded the fact that these things existed. Ok, I believe that. What got me was that one of my very first contributions to the net is there: Fantasy Roleplaying BBS (FRPBBS). I wrote that for the C64 and it was my first real "thing" if you know what I mean.

    It lead more-or-less on a straight road to writing GemStone I, ][ and III, and thus the company I now run. But to see someone record that FRPBBS existed, brings a tear to my eye. :)

    Yeah... we all have slashdot

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