
A look at my BBS Software from '93 - mmccaff
https://mmccaff.github.io/2017/04/18/my-bbs-software-from-1993/
======
chrissnell
The late 80s/early 90s BBS scene was an amazing time for me. I was in high
school and I've never been as interested in computers and communications as I
was then. I never ventured into the "dark" side like OP--I was too scared of
my parents--so I ran a legit FidoNET BBS using the RemoteAccess BBS software
and the Frontdoor mailer (and later, Maximus and BinkleyTerm).

The most amazing thing about it all was that it was the public internet before
there was a _public_ internet. E-mails sent over FidoNET had an amazing weight
to them that's hard to describe. It took a ton of effort just to get your BBS
to participate in the network and once you did, data moved so slowly that you
became very observant of each step of the process of communicating. First, you
wrote the email in your mail editor (I loved GoldED). Then, another program
bundled it up with other emails into some kind of binary packaging and passed
it along to the mailer. The mailer took this bundle of mail and dialed out on
the modem to the local FidoNET hub. If you lived in a rural location, this
meant that you had to make a long-distance call to deliver the mail. My local
hub was in Seguin, TX (~30 miles away) and it felt like a very big deal when
my computer dialed him up to do a delivery. From there, the hub delivered it
to a "star", which was a regional hub that dealt in larger volumes of mail.
This was usually run by someone with money because their modems were making
long-distance calls (including overseas) on a regular basis. From the star,
your mail was shipped across long distances and then the process repeated in
reverse until the recipient's system picked up the mail from their local hub.
Then, when they replied, the whole thing happened again in reverse. It
regularly took days to get a reply from across the world but it was so fun!
Every single mail that you received in your inbox felt as important as someone
writing a letter by hand and sending it via the postal service. I cherished
getting emails, even if they were stupid.

I still dream about reviving a modern FidoNET (yes, I know it still exists)
for the HN crowd. I write a lot of Go and I even read some of the FidoNET
technical standards with the thought of a Go implementation of the protocols
but never got anywhere in it. It's an enormous amount of work and I haven't
had a real phone line in over a decade. Doing Fido over TCP/IP just doesn't
feel the same. It's way too easy.

~~~
henrikschroder
> Doing Fido over TCP/IP just doesn't feel the same. It's way too easy.

Do you remember ZMH? Zone Mail Hour? If you had a public BBS, you had to
disallow logins during ZMH, so that your phone line was reserved for netmail
and echomail delivery.

I was just a lowly point, so I didn't have to bother with that crap.
2:201/274.9 representin', yo.

The funniest part about the star-shaped network was that it was more of a
feudal society than a democracy. And of course it devolved into political
fights among the lowly nodes and points who thought the stupid RCs and NCs had
way too much power over the network and wanted it to become more democratic,
but since the coordinators (Did you call them stars in zone 1?) footed the
bill for the long-distance message deliveries, it was usually their way or the
highway.

Funnily enough, Sweden abolished the concept of long-distance calls sometime
in the 90s, which drastically undercut the power of the controllers. :-)

~~~
henrikschroder
Finishing my original thought in the comment, since I got sidetracked by the
nostalgia:

The reason for ZMH was that a node making a connection to another node
required the use of a physical phone line where one node would dial the other,
which would stop anyone else from connecting to those two nodes. So if you had
a lowly user logged on to your BBS, noone else could log on to it, and you
couldn't send or receive Fidonet mail.

Contrast that with TCP/IP where it's possible to have millions of active
connections to other nodes on a single node without breaking a sweat, and it's
just a ridiculous comparison.

Another hilarious quirk of the times was that almost noone was running a
multitasking OS (Amiga users: shut up!), which meant that once someone had
called your Frontdoor system and delivered mail, it would _exit_ , and start
your mailer (Fmail!), which would uncompress the received file, put all the
messages in your local message db (We're talking flatfiles of course, SQL was
nowhere in sight), and prepare packages for all your downstream nodes, and
after that it would start up Frontdoor again, at which point you could finally
receive calls again.

So not only were the systems unable to handle more than one connection at a
time, there was also no background processing, so while your computer was busy
unpacking an enormous serveral-hundred-kilobytes zip file of mail, it couldn't
accept any calls.

Oh, oh! And there was no Unicode, not UTF8, so there was a years-long
technical debate/flamewar/ridiculous shoutfest about which character set to
standardize on, where the main contenders were CP437 vs. ISO-8859-1.

Looking back, it's amazing it worked at all, but it did, and that was fucking
magic.

~~~
rasjani
Effin client, can't edit nor reply: s/qemu/desqview/

------
apaprocki
Re: losing BBS/source from the 90's -- I was fortunate enough to regularly
back things up to QIC tape, and lo and behold, 22 years later a hacked up box
restored the BBS perfectly and it ran in DosBox on my laptop. I was pleasantly
surprised that it all worked immediately. Hardest part was finding parts for a
floppy tape and installing the right Windows version. Seeing the ANSI art made
it all worth it...

[https://twitter.com/apaprocki/status/550432891201941504](https://twitter.com/apaprocki/status/550432891201941504)

~~~
codazoda
I still have some 3.5" floppy disks with my BBS and the door's I wrote for it.
My parents still use a USB floppy drive (and have several) because they have a
sewing machine that uses it. Perhaps I'll give this a try.

~~~
jharger
I had some old 3.5" floppies I tried to read recently. Unfortunately it seems
that they didn't survive the long dark in my parents' closet, and were
unreadable, at least by consumer hardware... maybe a data recovery service
could extract the data.

------
EvanAnderson
Being involved in the late 80's / early 90's BBS "scene" was formative for me.
I wrote and "sold" some unimaginative "Door" programs (even going to far as to
register my copyright on one of them). I wracked-up a lot of long-distance
bills! I always wanted to run a board, but never got my act together enough to
do it.

Since the audience here is very diverse I'll selfishly throw out a couple
nostalgia requests:

A friend's board ran a door game called "Cyberspace" that was a TinyMUD-esque
"single user dungeon" game. At one point we had 10 - 12 people actively
building rooms, adding mobile NPCs, etc. It was loads of fun even though only
one person at a time was interacting with the software. I've looked
periodically over the last 20 years to see if I can find the people who wrote
it on the 'net, but I've had very little luck. (It was Turbo Pascal-based, and
originally written for WWIV, but we "adapted" it to work on Searchlight and
later Renegade.)

I'd love see if anybody from the old 203 board "Bit Truth" or the classic 602
"Unphamiliar Territory" is on here. Any takers?

~~~
frandroid
You mean that guy?
[https://www.facebook.com/patrick.hunlock](https://www.facebook.com/patrick.hunlock)

~~~
EvanAnderson
No kidding. I guess it has been awhile since I tried to look them up. Thanks!

------
lsc36
Here in Taiwan BBS is still popular, PTT [0] has ~120k avg. concurrent users
every day.

For those interested, their codebase is available on GitHub [1].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System)

[1] [https://github.com/ptt/pttbbs](https://github.com/ptt/pttbbs)

~~~
jamesjyu
Fascinating! I would have thought most people didn't have land lines in
Taiwan. Are they dialing in using mobile phones?

~~~
lsc36
AFAIK most Taiwanese BBSes established in the 90's already run on Telnet over
TCP/IP. PTT has SSH support, smartphone clients are available as well.

BBS with Internet today serves as a high-performance forum, loading
boards/articles takes a single RTT. Storage is still file-based and relies on
filesystem and kernel caching.

------
davidy123
I wrote a lot of BBS software starting from 1986. This was in Toronto mainly
on the C64 (28k RAM… plus some available via switching out ROM using
assembler), so Spence BBS was an inspiration, but with a friend we wrote
software called M1 which had creative features like user contributed ongoing
stories and a way to display files or run simple scripts from any command,
like a shell.

Eventually around 1990 it was extended to support federated message exchange,
but by then UNIX systems were entering consciousness so we switched to multi-
line, uucp capable Waffle software on DOS, then Xenix, BSD/OS and finally
Linux around 1993 as it became
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internex_Online](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internex_Online)

~~~
rsync
" ... around 1993 as it became
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internex_Online"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internex_Online")

I remember "io.org" as the shortest domain name I knew in 1993 and adopted it
as my default password for anonymous ftp logins.

In fact _to this day_ if I login as anonymous on an ftp server, muscle memory
dictates I type in "k@io.org" as my password.

~~~
ethomson
That's funny - I have always simply typed `ethomson@` as my password for
anonymous FTP, without ever specifying the hostname portion. The then-popular
wu-ftpd had an option to enforce that there was a `@` in the password for
anonymous access, but it didn't verify anything after that.

I read somewhere that therefore a reasonable shorthand was to drop the
hostname portion of your address since the FTP server knew your source
hostname anyway. So this is similarly etched into _my_ muscle memory, but
looking back I have no idea where I read this or if it was actually common at
all or if I was the only one.

------
whatever_dude
One thing that always fascinated me is that although BBSs connected people,
they were necessarily constrained by distance given the difficult (and price)
of long-distance calls. That reflected on the shape of the community around
it. There were some things that would be common between them but overall
different area codes had very different scenes. This is somewhat diluted
today, since you can connect with whatever community you want. It creates a
different sort of bubble.

Anyway, that constraint was also somehow reflected on the choice of tools,
maybe in this case especially in the software used by the BBS itself. The US
had plenty of different BBS software being used. I know Wildcat was popular in
Europe. In my native Brazil it was dominated by PCBoard (major) and Remote
Access (minor), and the underground scene was heavily invested in the "cool"
Oblivion. I actually thought PCBoard was a major player until I realized very
few boards in the USA used it.

~~~
zorked
BBS software was very regionalized. Being from a different part of Brazil
Remote Access reigned supreme, while PC Board is something I saw once that one
day when I dared dial long distance to some BBS in a different state.

The same goes for all the other software. In some areas LORD was _the_ BBS
game, in others it was unknown. In my region BlueWave was the standard offline
mail reader, in others only QWK or even weirder formats were the standard.

~~~
bananaboy
In Melbourne, Australia, Remote Access and ProBoard were fairly popular
amongst regular BBSes. At the time I always had the impression that PC Board
was more popular amongst the warez BBSes.

------
nkozyra
Most of my BBS talk/nostalgia is embarrassing but by far my most embarrassing
anecdote was that I set up a BBS exclusively to chat with my high school
girlfriend late into the night.

This is only noteworthy because, in 2017, this would be entirely normal
behavior for a 14 year-old. But the amount of effort and expense it took to
get the equipment, extra line, BBS and then _teaching my girlfriend how to use
a modem_ put me squarely in the superdork category.

~~~
macarthy12
and having a girlfriend excludes you completely

~~~
nkozyra
Everyone needs love

[1] [http://www.digitalia.be/images/2013/nerd-
couple.jpg](http://www.digitalia.be/images/2013/nerd-couple.jpg)

------
eric_arrr
Fellow obscure BBS software author here.

Mine was Apocalypse / ApX (a hack of Havok, which was a hack of something
else, which was a hack of Emulex/2, which I think was a hack of Forum?),
around '92.

I, too, remember recruiting ACiD guys to help out with the menu art.

Ah, memories.

~~~
rsync
Weren't the vision/vision2/visionX based on forum hacks as well ? And celerity
?

All written in turbo pascal, right ?

~~~
mmccaff
I loved collecting BBS Software at the time to look at what other people were
doing.

Pretty much everything was either a Forum (Pascal) or WWIV (C) hack.

~~~
rsync
There was also "real" BBS software like wildcat and MajorBBS ...

I also remember some very, very active and high quality boards that ran
citadel ... citadel was sort of the HN of the BBS world ... no ANSI, no fluff,
just quick command keys and all high quality discussion.

~~~
mmccaff
Someone local to me had launched a pay-for-membership based MajorBBS that had
something like 16 phone lines in. MajorBBS was the only thing I had seen that
could support so many users at once. This was around the time I had stopped
running my own BBS, before college.

This meant it could offer an active chat room, and it had a MUD game that
everyone loved, called TeleArena.

For me, TeleArena was fun because I'd write scripts that would automate
playing the game for me when I wasn't there.

~~~
rsync
I ran a 10-line worldgroup (majorbbs) in Boulder, circa 1996.

I had this weird software I licensed which let people play Doom against each
other, over the phone line, simulating a local IPX network ... MPGS
(Multiplayer game server) by a company called APCi.

------
wccrawford
WWIV BBS and "doors" (games, basically) were my intro into system
administration and further experience programming back then. I had so much fun
setting that up. My parents even let me have 2 telephone lines so that I could
have 2 users (plus someone in the house) on at the same time. I had exactly 1
multiplayer "door", but that was fine.

My favorite door was Legend of the Red Dragon (LoRD) and I remember playing it
a _lot_ back then. My users (all half-dozen of them) did, too. It was a small
town, and I was surprised to get that many people.

So much nostalgia, and I can definitely link it to my career today.

~~~
bluefox
You can still play (a clone of) it online...
[http://www.lotgd.net/](http://www.lotgd.net/)

------
JohnLeTigre
I miss those days

I miss live-chatting with the sysop if he was around

I miss gaining access levels and discover new files/areas

I miss re-loging at 12:01am to have double turns for my attack in BRE

I miss the discovery involved, how you would need to come up with
interesting/new content to maintain you UL/DL ratio

I miss the epic mail convos we had in my BBS community

I miss GT's

------
bananaboy
Does anyone remember the terminal software "Terminate - the final terminal"?
Does anyone know what happened to the original author, Bo Bendtsen? I'd love
to send a registration check, since I never registered it as a youngster!
There's a Bo Bendtsen from Denmark on twitter but alas it's not him (I
asked!).

~~~
henrikschroder
Oh horror and nostalgia, yes!

It was pretty good, but the joke was that it contained everything and a
toaster.

------
jmspring
In the east bay (primarily - Contra Costa County, but there was an offshoot
(maybe two) down towards Dublin/San Ramon), there was a multi-line chat BBS
known as Popnet. The main office was in Walnut Creek, socials were a regular
thing, online chat and games were an important part of socializing. It was
custom written software by the father/son team. If I recall rightly, they even
had an online version of Diplomacy (the board game). I still have friends from
that era.

It's interesting to see Dementia was based off of WWIV. The WWIV BBS software
was well written and easy to update/customize/modify. TML, Innerdot, and
others were amongst those that ran it in the 80s to early 90s.

Interestingly enough, I actually feel like the BBS days did more to foster
social interaction than "social networks" now. They were (unless warez sites)
hyper local. In the east bay, we had regular pick up tackle football games
(going from several a year in the early days on 1/x year in the 2000s) that
ran for around (maybe more than) 20 years. Many of those involved are still
friends.

~~~
ianmcgowan
I moved to SF in the late 80's and was amazed by the BBS scene. After a few
massive phone bills to Berkeley and Walnut Creek, I realized that even though
their area code was 415, it was an intra-LATA call, not quite local, not long
distance. Very expensive if you spend hours hogging a phone line though.

I eventually stumbled on wetware.com, which was a shared unix box hosted (I
think) near SF State somewhere. The joys of UUCP mail and Usenet! I made some
really good friends both on and off-line there, but sadly all of them
eventually drifted away from the Bay Area, as most transplants do.

This thread is bringing up a lot of nostalgia...

------
hoodwink
Anyone play TradeWars 2002? That's what I was doing in '93 on my BBS.

~~~
Jemaclus
Yes! I've tried over the years to create a TW2002 clone, but I always stall
out at the economic system. I've also tried to recreate Barren Realms Elite /
Solar Realms Elite, but Amit lost the source code to that, too. Reverse
engineering BBS games is hard!

Maybe Legend of the Red Dragon would be easier...

[Edit: I'm aware that there are TW2002 games out there right now, but those
tend to be web-based, and I wanna do a legit BBS-style game. Telnet,
probably.]

~~~
amitp
I agree, reverse engineering some of this stuff is hard. I had been studying
economics & systems design and put lots of interacting feedback loops into SRE
so it's sometimes hard to tease out the individual effects. I've put some
notes up here for anyone who wants to clone it [http://www-cs-
students.stanford.edu/~amitp/Articles/SRE-Desi...](http://www-cs-
students.stanford.edu/~amitp/Articles/SRE-Design.html)

For a quick “where are they now”:

\- Barren Realms Elite --> Mehul (my brother) moved from BBS games to web
games, with Earth 2025 and then Utopia, and then a web portal Swirve.com, and
then he got out of the games business and ran a coffee shop, Dominican Joe in
downtown Austin (but it was just sold) \- Legend of the Red Dragon --> Seth
Robinson (who I finally met this year) moved on to PC games, then mobile
games, and now runs a successful MMO called Growtopia (but it was just sold)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Technologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Technologies)
\- Solar Realms Elite --> I got out of the BBS door world and went to grad
school, interested in teaching. I now write interactive tutorials at
redblobgames.com, starting with game development but I want to expand into
math and computer science. SRE's wikipedia page got wiped by the deletionists
[http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/922](http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/922)
but was preserved by [http://breakintochat.com/](http://breakintochat.com/)

~~~
Jemaclus
Yep yep, I've studied your notes before. Great resource. :) You're a rock
star. Nice "Where are they Now" notes, too! Very cool!

------
wiz21c
As a wannabe-hacker, I had the super pleasant surprise, once trying to login
into a BBS (for which I had no password, of course) that the line was
interrupted in the middle of the screen and the sysop started typing "what are
you tryin' to do"... It was just like in a movie. This was my first day on the
"scene". BBS was located in Belgium, don't remember the name... I wonder if
one could do that with, say, ssh (and without IRC :-))

After that, the problem was paying for long distance calls to more "3l33t"
BBS's (usually in Sweden). But we had our ways :-)

------
exogeny
I spent an absurd amount of time modding my Renegade board, drawing ANSI,
listening to the latest mods out of the demoscene and failing miserably at
learning Assembly circa 1993-1996. And then IRC came along..

412/724 scene, north of Pittsburgh. Lots of good friends met on the boards,
some still friends today.

------
davestephens
This is awesome, thanks for sharing. For yet more nostalgia, I recommend you
check out the /r/bbs Reddit, or for EVEN MORE nostalgia, take a look at ENiGMA
BBS - it's BBS software developed in Node and can be spun up on any Linux box
- [https://github.com/NuSkooler/enigma-
bbs/](https://github.com/NuSkooler/enigma-bbs/).

Thanks again, enjoyed this thread!

~~~
mmccaff
Thanks for those recommendations, I didn't know about r/bbs and Enigma looks
like an interesting project. I just starred it on Github and will definitely
check it out!

------
bungie4
Old sysops get shit done!

I ran BBS's from the late 80's through the 90's. All the local sysops are
still friends and we still wax nostalgic over the old days. To a person, we
all are still in IT and hold senior positions.

When I remember those days and compare them to today, by and large, nothing is
'easy' anymore. It's what happens when you get to far away from the metal.

~~~
mmccaff
Yes we did. It's amazing what teenagers were accomplishing at the time. Full
product release life cycles, done after school and homework.

A few memories:

1) I had a 2400 baud modem, and then upgraded to an external 14.4K US Robotics
Courier. They were $1000 at the time but USR offered it at $500 in return for
advertising their brand. Someone on my BBS paid that fee in exchange for
higher access.

2) I'd trade snippets of source code with other BBS authors. We'd exchange the
code to implement one feature for another.

3) There were a few beta testers, distributors, and artists.

It's what started my interest in building and releasing software, for sure.

~~~
bungie4
Okay, gather round chillen', the old guys are swapping stories.

Right after Caller ID was introduced, I thought it would be a great idea to
use it to log somebody into my BBS directly. So I wrote up the software that
would extract it, dip the db, and log the user in if found, otherwise, it'd go
to normal login (in case of calling from another DID).

I was a _STAR_

Then a user figured out how to spoof caller id and as I sat there, and watched
the user log in as ME. LOL! Took me all of 5s to rip that out :D

My first modem was a 300 baud that we tweaked up to 450 baud. When I shut down
my BBS years later, I was running 3 lines on TBBS and I had no files or doors.
It was strictly a message board with no networking (been there, done that). I
specifically limited it to the top 150 participating users. Doesn't sound like
much, but all 3 lines were busy constantly.

Around 150 users seems to the magic number. More than that and ppl who lose
track of whose who and stop participating. You have to go for big userbases to
recover. At least that has been my experience.

~~~
mmccaff
Great story!

I don't have a memory of caller id being around when I ran my BBS, or maybe I
just didn't have it.

------
revicon
So many memories sparking up from this thread. I ran The Dark Tower from my
bedroom in the late nineties on my Tandy 1000 286 from Radio Shack. Everything
I do professionally I started off on there.

------
driverdan
I fondly remember that "Kall Back Soon" ASCII art. I think I used it on my BBS
too.

I ran a single line PCBoard BBS in the mid to late 90's. PCBoard had its own
plugins called PPEs. A lot of them were distributed as shareware. After
finding a decompiler I had a lot of fun reading source code, making personal
keygens, and finding security issues.

~~~
davestephens
Likewise, I think it was used by a few different pieces of software. Mystic
BBS still has it as its default logoff art today...

------
1001101
Not sure if anyone saw this: [https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/04/a-198...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/04/a-1986-bulletin-board-system-has-brought-the-old-web-back-
to-life-in-2017/) Basically RPi + tcpser == Internet BBS. I ran a PCExpress
BBS - AMI Express for PC -- (USR Dual) for a while, and feel very lucky to
have been a part of that era. Have been thinking about doing something on
tcpser. Still part of that a bit, as we still make modems at the current gig.
Get nostalgic every time when I hear them training up.

------
fiorix
Just gonna drop this here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PJcABbtvtA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PJcABbtvtA)

~~~
henrikschroder
"Have you ever paid a toll booth without slowing down?", and then he _slides
his credit card_ through a thing in his car!!! :-D :-D

I mean, they got the prediction right, but their implementation is so so
wrong!

------
cyberferret
Nice! Way better than most BBS's that I used to frequent back in the 80's and
90's.

Great to see an OS/2 based one too - I remember switching to OS/2 for a small
time "play" BBS that I set up in the early 90s... I was astounded at the ease
of running multiple modem lines on OS/2 as compared to DOS or CP/M...

~~~
dade_
There was fantastic support from fellow sysops for OS/2 2 and Warp. OS/2 was
bulletproof, and the multitasking was key for multiline and allow maintenance
work while live.

------
k__
I remember back in 2002, I joined my first BBS.

It was a smallish (~30 people) anime & manga community and the twist was, that
the whole board was written by one of the founders in PHP.

I remember him hating on the other BBS because in his eyes they weren't "pure"
anymore and in his eyes, they had nothing to do with BBS at all. What can I
say... the community broke down because he insisted on his strange BBS and
people went to communities who embraced the "social web" with profiles,
timelines, blogs etc.

But this was in a time when people said, these new "blogs" were like
"guestbooks you write in yourself", which is true and in view of the
omnipresent guestbooks on every website, where people wrote that they visited
the website, a blog sounded hilarious. Now the concept of a guestbook sounds
hilarious and blogs are a backbone of the web...

------
sjs382
If you love BBS art, be sure to check out
[https://artpacks.org](https://artpacks.org)

------
meerita
I loved my BBS. I remember when I came home with a modem and my parents asking
me what was that. That thing was the device that skyrocketed the phone bill up
to a thousand dollars. I remember my parents screaming like crazy.

------
deepakhj
This brings back a lot of memories. I started in the bbs scene when my friend
gifted a 1200 baud modem in 1992. I began trading warez on a 8088 xt 1mb ram
40mb machine. From the local scene in Los Angeles (818). I modified WWIV and
ran my own bbs until my hard drive crashed and I eventually lost the source. I
also got into war dialing pbx's so that I could call famous bbses in New York
and Canada. I loved the style of bbs software like celerity and visionx and
the art of acid and ice.

I eventually made it to the it scene where I had access to and ran the top ftp
sites in the world.

I miss those days immensely.

------
mrlyc
In 1984, I wrote a BBS for the Commodore Vic-20 with up to 64 "rooms" (message
areas), email and an online game. Users could create a room and make it public
or private. The board was very popular with users spending an average time of
70 minutes on it.

That's how I started programming professionally. One of my friends hired me as
a programmer, saying "Anyone who can write a BBS for a Vic can program!"
Thirty-three years later, that same friend wants me to work with him at
Google.

------
hertzdog
Thank you for your post and thanks for all the comments... it takes me years
back. Maybe a dumb question: why we all miss those days? I don't think it is
only related to being young. I am convinced it is something related to a "less
noise/new tools" and probably I agree about "the more constraints more
creativity". Is there anybody who can better articulate or have a different
vision?

~~~
Kenji
The internet got popular. What that means: Government snooping, DMCA, lots of
non-nerds and idiots on the internet, websites that lock content down
regionally, bloated garbage websites.

There was lots of untapped potential back then which made things exciting.
Also, the communities were smaller, like families.

~~~
lucaspiller
I wasn't part of the scene (too young), but from comments here it sounds like
there was a certain romanticism about writing/building and running your own
BBS. It's not quite the same as spending 5 minutes to spin up a new Digital
Ocean instance and running a Docker image.

~~~
eveith
I think that the achievement of some home-made appliance that was actually
hard to get money-wise (and probably build) is one aspect of what makes those
memories fond.

But I have another explanation, which, I think, explains much of it. Being a
part of the BBS network meant one had overcome a bit of a hurdle and reached a
small community that actually cared about the system and the sense of the
community itself. Those BBS islands had their own rules, implicitly or
explicitly spelled out, they were full with lots of creativity (cf. the
ASCII/RIP art), and while the occasional troll or rude idiot can be found
anywhere, posting something to a BBS usually meant you got some response back.
It was a smaller circle (at least, it felt that way). You could actually make
friends through the BBS network. Today, when I try to post something on HN, I
cannot even find it immediately after posting, let alone hope that other
people find my submission. :)

The SDF.org bboard feels much in the same way.

~~~
selllikesybok
In my local calling area, the motives and reasoning were simpler. Some of us
just wanted more TW2002 and LoRD instances. Some of us needed to cut the phone
bill. And some of us did it to, well... 'do it' (cause there is nothing quite
so attractive as power -_^).

------
sathackr
I've been trying to find a "door" game I played that was themed around a
nuclear wasteland. There was an ansi-graphical map with tiles you moved
between.

IIRC you potentially would run into various wild/mutant animals or other
players that you could battle. I don't remember much else about it but I
remember enjoying it profusely and have been unsuccessful in finding even the
name of it now.

Also played a ton of Trade wars.

~~~
mancerayder
_I 've been trying to find a "door" game I played that was themed around a
nuclear wasteland. There was an ansi-graphical map with tiles you moved
between._

Land of Devastation?

ANSI first, then an EGA and I think VGA client later?

If it's that, I loved that one. A multi-user Wasteland rip.

~~~
sathackr
that looks alot like it but it doesn't quite seem to fit -- I swear the map
seemed bigger.

From video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7iQIXs6gpc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7iQIXs6gpc)

I remember there was a "replicator" item that that was rumored to exist, but
somehow only the admins could ever 'find' them. Always was suspicious about
that.

------
pibefision
My BBS was called CENTURY XXI. At first, it was just an Apple IIe with a
SiderII harddrive (just 20MB!). 24hs. GBBS was the software usted to manage
it, it was great. Based on Argentina, it was an awesome learning experience.
Check this link for more BBS in Argentina:
[https://goo.gl/7EXTMx](https://goo.gl/7EXTMx)

------
hoodoof
How old were you when you wrote this?

Looks like a big system - was this your first major project?

I seem to recall OS/2 and a C compiler cost money back? How did you get to be
using those, through work or did you buy them? Why did you choose OS/2 - did
you consider any other alternatives?

~~~
rsync
"I seem to recall OS/2 and a C compiler cost money back? How did you get to be
using those, through work or did you buy them?"

His new user questionnaire asked new users to identify/define several warez
release/courier groups.

I don't think he was licensing software ...

~~~
mmccaff
I'm not even sure that I used that new user questionnaire myself. It was a
feature of the software, for SysOps who ran warez boards.

I actually had a licensed copy of OS/2\. My dad taught computer science at a
small college and was able to get it for me.

------
wyldfire
Apparently WWIV is provided with an open source license and builds on modern
OSs [1]. You can run it as a telnet server!

[1] [https://github.com/wwivbbs/wwiv](https://github.com/wwivbbs/wwiv)

------
th0ma5
I wrote a thing in Turbo Pascal that would convert Prodoor (Proboard) mailbox
files to RBBS mailboxes. Or the other way around, I can't remember, but not
both directions I don't think. Anyway, I uploaded it to several boards back
then I think someone who was a retired Navy officer used it on their own
board. I also think the Prodoor people may have used several of the ideas
possibly, but in all the archives of BBS software, I haven't been able to find
it. Oh well! Turbo Pascal was so much fun, and reading the RBBS source was a
great education at the time when long distance phone calls were expensive.

------
hackermailman
Blue Board (Commodore64) software was the best I found for the late 80s/ early
90s, it was cheap, incredibly easy to run and customize, consistently updated,
and it came with a built in terminal so when no one was on your board you
could call other ones or easily script a file transfer/mail sync with a remote
board.

I remember a lot of STS chat boards too, In 1989, a DDial-like clone, Synergy
Teleconferencing System AKA STS was released for IBM PCs and until 1997 I
regularly would connect at 300bps to talk with local hackers at 3:00am on
these "big" 16 line STS boards until easier access to IRC killed them off.

------
niix
This looks awesome. I was a little later to the game, spent most of my
childhood time on AOL 2.5-4.0, writing "progz" in Visual Basic.

~~~
nickpoulos
ahhh dude that was my scene too! private room theselectfew a bunch of
others...jeez...some of my stuff is still up on lenshell.com. Cmon know you
remember that site, it exists still. my handle was filter back then and a few
others haha

~~~
niix
Haha yeah I was looking at lenshell not too long ago, amazing that it's still
there.

------
neuro
You just took me back to the 80s. Stale chips and cracks
screens([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlVmPU6dh1M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlVmPU6dh1M))
from downloading games till 4 AM in the morning on a 1200 baud modem with
friends. What an outstanding looking BBS! Thanks.

------
tdumitrescu
Awesome memories! Modifying WWIV for local BBSes was how I got started with C
when I was a young teen (after years of Pascal and Basic). For example putting
in a user-vs-user combat system that could lock out a defeated foe for the
day. Great for getting a board's users to keep out trolls collectively!

------
booleanbetrayal
I miss the ANSI art scene. I remember 800# access that would live and die on
the daily. That and phone bills.

------
dreva
I have many fond memories of the BBS scene...

I ran my own BBS from '92 through the early 2000's, starting on an Amiga. I
wrote it myself in C (Lattice C, later SAS/C compiler.) It had email and
Usenet newsgroups (through a UUCP feed to a local dialup ISP...)

Fun times. I eventually moved to Linux and FreeBSD...

------
jotjotzzz
Omg BBS. Did anyone remember Boardwatch mag?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwatch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwatch)
There were many BBS's posted there, and that's how I discovered them.

------
Safety1stClyde
Too bad you lost the source code.

~~~
mmccaff
I know. It was on a computer that burned down in a fire. So, it's very much
gone.

Both that and the message archives from the bbs itself would have been a
treasure trove of nostalgia.

~~~
chubot
What was your BBS handle? I was in the 609 area code and these ANSIs look
familiar :) I might have been on your BBS or one using your software. Although
it was most likely a long distance call to 908 so I don't think I called it
that often.

edit: Oh I guess it was Midnight Sun? I don't remember if we ever interacted,
but the ANSIs look familiar!

~~~
mmccaff
Yes, it was Midnight Sun and my BBS was called The Night Light.

You were long distance in 609, so we might not have ever met. My only memory
of the 609 area code was of a good Pascal developer named Ffejtable? (question
mark included in the handle.) What was your handle?

------
icelancer
Very cool. Thanks for the nostalgia. Played a ton of TW2002 and LORD on
Virtual Arcade BBS back in Cleveland, OH in the early 90s. Ah, back in the
days when I had the Internet AND local BBS access and the BBS was far more
compelling...

------
myth_drannon
You can get software for BBS and some shareware CDs from BBSs at
[http://cd.textfiles.com/directory.html](http://cd.textfiles.com/directory.html)

------
b0blee
Thanks! BBSing got me my first programming job in 1985. I ran several boards,
including one for the company, before the web came along 10 years later. I
really enjoyed your screen shots.

------
agentultra
I wish I had been able to preserve those door games I wrote...

------
endgame
All of you nostalgics in this thread need to get together and write a book. I
loved Exploding the Phone, and I'd love a volume that covered the BBS era.

------
jonahhorowitz
I ran a BBS back in the 90s called The Game BBS, it was hosted out of my
bedroom in Colorado. I'd love to find an old backup, but I doubt I have one.

------
aethant
This was a great post. I remember playing LORD and writing doors in turbo
pascal back in high school. Thanks for posting!

------
myth_drannon
anyone recommends active telnet BBSs?

~~~
myth_drannon
I think I found a good list -
[http://telnetbbsguide.com/](http://telnetbbsguide.com/)

------
grumblestumble
omfg! i was on many Dementia BBS' in SoCal back in the day. First board I
sysop'ed was a WWiV 3.21 - I was very proud that I modded the Pascal source to
support more than 9 discussion boards at the time.

~~~
mmccaff
That is amazing to hear!

Dementia's beta tester was in Modesto and he distributed the demo version
(limited to 5 users) around CA.

------
alexkavon
Oh man, I remember running my old acmlmboard back in the day. Great times.

------
cgrusden
I love this. Reminds me of my MajorMUD days, thanks for sharing

------
cJ0th
This system looks like a real life text adventure game :)

------
RyanRies
It's beautiful.

------
eternalvision
wardialing, redboxing, beige boxing for 900's, breaking into pbxes, east coast
bbs scene. good times for sure.

------
synrst
Ansi art, still 31337 af.

------
jv0010
omg this is amazing. even the ascii art brings back memories.

------
phaed
Dem feels.

------
Arizhel
Computers were a lot more fun in those days.

~~~
nimrody
Right. Something about hardware and OS staying stable long enough so that
people could focus on creating new interesting software -- instead of just
trying to keep up with ever changing APIs and constantly searching
StackOverflow for ready made solutions.

Sometimes severe constraints drive the really beautiful solutions.

~~~
Arizhel
Don't forget documentation. Sure, you couldn't look stuff up on StackOverflow,
but there was actual, real, paper documentation you could read, and it was
usually well-written and really useful. Try finding that these days, even in
digital form. (Personally, I'll vote for the Qt documentation, but that's
about all I've seen that's really that great.)

------
X86BSD
Maybe I missed it in the comments but was I the only one to run Wildcat!
software for their board? I loved Wildcat!

~~~
reiger
I ran it too - could never afford MajorBBS or the successors and it was easy
to scale from 1-24 nodes. I even ran the weird BBS/ISP hybrid WINS Server but
wasn't good enough to be considered a real ISP.

------
gus_massa
Nice post, but it's not a "Show HN".

From
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

> _What to Submit_

> _Show HN is for something you 've made that other people can play with. HN
> users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread._

> _Blog posts, sign-up pages, and fundraisers can 't be tried out, so they
> can't be Show HNs._

~~~
mmccaff
Ok, yes, I suppose I was a bit liberal with those rules.

It's something that I made but it is now impossible to play with because
dialup BBSs have gone extinct. By converting the ANSI images to PNGs, I tried
to show what it would have been like to play with in its time.

I removed 'Show HN' from title.

~~~
j45
Most BBS users had to use their imagination when navigating text based
interfaces, ANSI interface design and all - I had no problem traversing the
experience.

The WWIV BBS world reminded me of another Telegard based BBS software I used a
lot - Renegade BBS. You may not be able to get Dementia back up, but maybe
some of the ANSI artwork could come back to life, RG was pretty configurable
in it's time.

[https://renegadebbs.info/](https://renegadebbs.info/)

~~~
voltagex_
Interesting - wonder what they did to piss off Bluecoat (Content Blocked
(content_filter_denied), Content Category: "Malicious Sources/Malnets")

