Remembering the BBS 491
Anonymous Coward writes "Nice reminiscence about BBS's, back in the day and all. Author describes them as "Where a teenage loser could lose himself", which for me would have been pretty accurate. I still miss being able to find cool ASCII graphics, text-based RPG's, and the Anarchist's Cookbook all in one place."
Avatar graphics (Score:1, Interesting)
I wasn't around for the early BBS days, but I saw them at their peak prior to the internet/web taking off and stealing most callers away. Sometimes, I miss my BBS, and think about setting it up again... and then reality hits me. You can't go back again.
ANSI archive sites? (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks in advance.
Flashbacks (Score:5, Interesting)
WWIV ... still up and running ... (Score:3, Interesting)
The latest software, v4.30, combined with fossil drivers for Windows (new in v4.30), and with a virtual com port software (COM/IP) ... creates an online BBS, that can be accessed like a website ...
Please note that I currently don't have a board up ... since I don't have 24/7 access ... yet.
ah fare thee well (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Me too (Score:2, Interesting)
Computer Shopper (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember getting the "Computer Shopper" every month, flipping to the back, and hoping to find a new BBS that was a local call away from my back woods town. Never happened. *sniff*
Thirty minutes of long distance calls a month was all I could afford at the time. I missed out on most of that grande era.
Ahhh .. the good ole days (Score:2, Interesting)
Learned to suck up to the SysOps of the "elite" WaReZ BoardZ by creating animated ANSI logos for their sites and for the ZIP comments. -=2i6=- RulEz!
I used to frequent the BBS of the dude, Jim something or other (Barry?) who wrote the Searchlight BBS software. His BBS was called Flip Flop. I chatted with him once or twice online.
BBS were also my first real introduction to porn.
Ahhh, the memories. Managed to suck up to one SysOp well enough to be come his Adult Section SysOp at the ripe old, adult age of 14. People would upload the files, and I would have the really tough job of reviewing the new uploads; if the files were good enough, I approved them and gave the uploader ample credit so he could download new files from the adult and warez sections. Tough job, but someone had to do it.
With a 2400 modem I now understand why my mom was pissed about me tying up the phone line all night long, every night
I used to have to bum rides home from high school sometimes, and I could usually count on one of my teammates to give me a ride back home - I just had to pass him a floppy of the previous days' porn uploads
I was just remembering today about how JPEG and GIF were just becoming popular, and my 386 SX-25 took like 10 seconds to display the damn picture files.
Finding those people... (Score:4, Interesting)
Once a month (first Saturday of the month) we would have a physical meeting (called "The Meat") at a local mall.
I remember being envied for my 2400 baud modem hooked up to my Apple
This was about 1991-1993 or so.
I have not talked with any of those people since. Is there any website devoted to reuniting (as it was) any people from these boards?
I did a simple search a few months ago, and foud a few dead message boards dedicated to boards that were mainly out in the Bay Area, but nothing more than that.
Memories (Score:2, Interesting)
My machine was a PCjr with 128KB, single floppy drive, and a Hayes 1200. It's amazing how nice the carrier signal sounded. The Hayes 1200 was a beautiful piece of machinery - brushed aluminum, with the black bezel and red lights. Solidly built, to have the old Western Electric desk telephone sitting on top of it. Once you were connected to a BBS, what machine you had didn't matter - C64s, Apples, Commodores, etc - they all joined the party.
Remember PC Board? FidoNet? Doors? File download areas that were meticulously organized? Downloading ratios? Sysops with "god" power? Sysops that you could actually talk to using a "Page Sysop" function of the software? ANSI graphics?
In 1984 a friend and I (John N.) decided to write our own BBS software. The first verion was horrible, but then again so was the language. (Interpreted BASIC.) The second and third versions were so much better - compiled ZBASIC with embedded assembly code. The software ran for two years on another friends computer. (Nick S.) The phone number was 997-1189. I'll never get that out of my head.
Using BBSs and trying to write one taught me a lot, not just about computers either. It was a great experience - much more personal that the Internet is today.
What really caused the demise of the bbs (Score:2, Interesting)
In my opinion, what really caused the demise of the BBS wasn't the internet like most people seem to think -- it was purely the introduction of people who didn't care anything about how or why things worked. This may be fine, and yes, things should "just work" without having to know the ins and outs of things (see The Invisible Computer, ISBN 0262140659 [barnesandnoble.com]), but that's not the point of my rambling.
I began noticing a HUGE shift in the local BBS audience when the first multi-line chat boards started appearing. They became immensely popular. With 10 telephone lines going in to them on average, people logged in simply to chat (like IRC) with other people.
Member statistics quickly changed from "geeky male" to "average teenagers" that knew little about the technology other than they needed one to connect chat in the middle of the night. Heck, I remember making fun of people who didn't know what "ATDT" meant.
It was depressing in some respects. If you didn't have 20 telephone lines and a chat room, your system was doomed for failure. Soon, the "chat crowd" spread to other bulletin boards and the die-hard regular callers, now annoyed, soon gave up trying to post messages or play games. I can remember all of the local bulletin boards that once were popular completely drying up.
And so it ended in a much much shorter time than it had began. With the emergence and popularity of more online services and finally the Internet, it was only a matter of time until my BBS was the only one left in the 407 area code (and remains so to this day as far as I can tell).
Thankfully, once the internet hype died down, there has been a small resurgance in the appeal of running a bulletin board system. People all across the globe are either starting new systems or resurrecting their old ones -- and I think it is a welcomed change. As has been often said, the feeling of localness and personability is must stronger than that of the informal and anonymous internet.
I personally have waited and stuck it out. My BBS has been running for years with all but an occassional caller. It's been not much more than my FidoNET feed for a few years now (which, by the way, I now receive spam through somehow).
My secret wish is that a new internet protocol will be developed by someone that is somewhere between telnet and http. But until that day, or the next evolution of the internet comes along, my BBS will be up as a telnet system.
Makes me feel old (Score:1, Interesting)
I was sysop once, had my own BBS running on two nodes, man it was great! (the fun i had with the users together with my co-ops)
I was running that thing on a AMD486/40 with 16Mb ram and 1Gig HD space and two 28.8 USR modems running desqview in dos 6 with PCBoard. (this was at the end, i started with a 386 with 120Mb HD space 14.4 modem, no kidding!). But having a BBS with 1Gb storage space was like BBS heaven, people could upload whatever they wanted it would never get full. anyway my board was specialised in the demo/art-scene.
the demo scene was so alive back then, but what was even more great was the ANSI-scene! ACiD vs iCE vs Apathy vs Fuel vs
viewing these ansi-drawings in acidview, switching from ansi to vga mode and drawing ansis yourself in aciddraw/thedraw.
I too was an ansi artist (fuel member) and won several prices in several demo parties here in europe.
Articles like this makes me want to grab my CD's i burned when i took my board offline and wade through those megs of ansi packs again...
(oh yeah and no spam in my mail either, those were days)