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.
> 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. :-)
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.
For people wondering what we're talking about, FidoNet was organized into continents (Zones) and then into cities or small regions (Nets). Zone 1 was North America. A city like San Antonio typically existed as a Net. In San Antonio's case, it was 387, so all San Antonio Fido BBSes had an address like 1:387/somenumber.
Fido's hub-and-star system existed to more efficiently move mail. Many of the Net- and Zone-level coordinators didn't run huge BBSes with lots of phone lines that could move the large (for this era of slow modems) amount of mail that could be generated. Volunteers with more money and expertise formed a mail routing system outside of the Fido leadership hierarchy to get the job done. Some better-funded local person in your Net would step up and become a "hub". All of the local BBSes would send their mail to the hub, which would make a long-distance call a few times a day to send mail upstream to a "star", which was basically the same thing, just moving much more mail at a higher level in the hierarchy. Stars would call other stars and move the mail over long distances, including across continents. The stars were the real power-holders in Fido.
I was 2:201/274.9. My upstream node that I connected to was 2:201/274. He connected to his upstream hub, 2:201/200, who in turn connected to his upstream net coordinator, 2:201/0, whose upstream was the regional coordinator, 2:20/0, and finally up to the zone coordinator, who I think was 2:0/0 or something.
A zone was a continent, 2 was Europe. Regions were countries in Europe, 20 was Sweden. Each region could have any number of networks, Sweden had like 5, and network 1 was the Stockholm area. Each network had hubs and nodes, and the guy who ran the node I talked to was simply the 74th node of the 2nd hub. Finally, since I didn't have a public BBS, I was a private point, the 9th on my node.
So putting it all together, a Fidonet address is zone:regionnetwork/hubnode.point.
Why weren't there separator characters between the region and the networks, or the hub and the nodes? Who knows, it worked. :-)
> Why weren't there separator characters between the region and the networks, or the hub and the nodes? Who knows, it worked. :-)
Because the original scheme didn't account for these intermediate levels. 2:201/274 was supposed to talk to 2:201/0, which was supposed to talk to 2:0/0.
Doesn't scale, so they introduced the 10^n scheme for subdivision (whose precise limits differed between zones)
I loved how relaying got around long distance charges.
Bowmanville would call Oshawa which was a local call.
Oshawa would call Pickering which was a local call.
Pickering would call Scarborough again a local call.
Scarborough would call Toronto and Toronto would call Mississauga.
All the message relays would just use local calls, but if you left any of the stop out you would need a long distance call. So all our local message did not cost us.
My home BBS was in Shelburne, and every call to a metropolitan centre was long distance for them for quite some time. We used to get long delays on mail drops!
I was just a kid (teenager) so I didn't have the funds to run a BBS myself. But I remember the 60 minute limits, the long lists of local BBSes, the ANSI graphics, Maximus, RemoteAccess and others (I had played with a few in the hopes of starting a BBS, but that era was starting to end when I graduated in the early 2000s), Door games, RIP graphics (the very early days of vector art on VGA screens).
There were door games like Baron Realms Elite where BBS sysops would get together and play BBS against BBS (of course many people had player accounts of multiple BBSes but it was all part of the fun and the years of protection added a decent balance to the game).
Games from that era were so much better than this Free-To-Play with micro-transactions crap. I understand it earns mobile game companies a ton of money (from a tiny % of the population that spends $200 to $5000 on a single game), but the shareware model of first 10 levels free, next 30 levels for $x made for much better games. Plus it gave people something to exchange from board to board; the whole upload/download ratios (which kids from the torrent era should really learn about--because it existed then and for legal shareware on the majority of BBSs).
I remember once getting an amazing side scrolling shooter from Japan. It may have not been shareware, but it was impossible to tell. It had no readme and I couldn't read anything on the screen. :-P It was super fun though, and I remember thinking of all the hops it must have taken (those people who make long distance BBS calls, or maybe just someone who brought disks over on a holiday) to get to a BBS in my small town.
I also remember Doom coming out, and all the Sysops talking about how amazing a game it was. I think it was 3 disks though; took either three days (60 minutes time limits) or hopping to three different BBSes to get all the disks. Then it said I needed a 386 or higher (I had a 286). I took it to a friends house who had a 486. His mom was a super Christian. She watched us play a few levels and that didn't really end well.
Glad to hear someone still remembers RIPscrip graphics. I was a co-founder of TeleGrafix Communications, who made the RIPterm and RIPaint software for viewing and creating those graphics.
What a blast from the past. I remember TeleGrafix fondly; if I'm being honest, I didn't really use RIPterm all that terribly often; I've always felt more at home in text. But I did run a BBS (1:233/24) and I enjoyed hacking on it more, I think, than actually running it. So I spent a lot of time trying to shoehorn RIPscrip into Maximus, more for the novelty than for any actual demand on the part of my callers.
After googling, I just realized that Maximus 3.0 eventually included RIPscrip support built-in, but I had lost interest in my BBS and moved on to hacking on Unix systems by then.
But I remember RIPscrip being a nice format. Thanks for providing me with many an afternoon spent tinkering with it.
Hey I "volunteered" at your shop for awhile! I used to ride my bike an hour after school to get to the office, just to package up RIPterm/paint floppies and use that shitty FedEx PC in the back. I was a wanna-be code junkie and hoped I could glean some of the genius that went into making RIPscrip, though I'm sure it would have gone over my head anyways. It's a real shame that you guys didn't cash in, I always felt it was the natural progression from ANSI which dominated the BBS scene at the time.
Yes, I had so many DOOR games, and Solar Realms Elite (SRE) and Baron Realms Elite (BRE) were the only ones that I enjoyed playing myself.
I liked how they were turn based (each user got X turns per day) and one player played at a time, but you were playing in a multi-player world against other people who would take their turns for the day.
I always thought it'd be interesting to do something similar in modern day, where you could take turns offline in a game (eg. in a subway or something, without internet access) and when you had online access, those turns were submitted against other people in the game. I wonder if there is anything like that?
RIP graphics were progress and a great innovation.
One of the power plays in those turned base games was to take your turn just before midnight and then take another one right away when then day ticked over. Useful for launching a surprise attack on someone without giving them a chance replenish their defenses. Phone lines were often busy at those times for this reason.
Of course, these days you'd probably be able to just buy an extra day for 500 gold coins...
It is, but there was also a certain amount of vanity to it. If you had the cash, you were the dude. You could watch as an entire region's (or even entire countries') mail flowed through your system. You probably walked down into your office and watched your busy Fido server (or servers) and a sweet stack of USR Courier external modems blinking away (you never wasted time on cheap gear) and when you participated in group mailing lists, you probably signed your e-mails with a sig that said something like "Bob Smith, Southern Star, 1:10/2", your address being a coveted and sweet, low-digit number. You were respected for your technical mastery of the system and in the very political world of Fido, few would challenge you.
I dreamed of running a big Fido hub. Sadly, Fido vanished before I reached the income level where I could have a bank of phone lines making long-distance calls all day and not worry about it. Just running a single phone line was an expensive challenge for me as a young kid. It took a lot of bussing tables at a hamburger joint.
You could also use Frontdoor and the like to run non-Fidonet message nets, I don't remember the terminology but my BBS was part of one.
I made friends with a fellow in Texas that claimed he had won a counter suit against AT&T for false phreaking charges and settled out of court for some number of years of free long distance. Because of this he would call my board and push me the mail from our other nodes every day and save me the money.
Now that I'm older the story sounds implausible and I think the dude might have just been lonely.
It was a lot of fun getting messages from boards in South Africa and other places every day. A very prominent HNer ran a BBS that was also a member of the network though I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate being outed! Such fun times.
I used a mailer front end called Intermail, and I remember at age 15 it was unimaginably complicated to set up.
Even the talk of "long distance phone calls" makes me nostalgic.
I remember when, as a kid, if you answered the phone and it was a long distance call for mom or dad, we would run to get them yelling "Long distance! Long distance!"
Ham radio. 300 baud packet over HF (thousands of miles) is still a thing, as are newer data modes such as PSK31 and the JT family. I'm actively working on 1200 baud projects over VHF FM now. Back in the day BBS was very much in. These days the same tech is more often used for telemetry, tracking etc (APRS). Now you can do it all in software, ref https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf and friends.
Oh my, do I ever remember that. I'm sure you remember the days before digital long distance, when you would make a call from, say, San Antonio to L.A. and the line would be crackly and staticky. When I would call my grandma in Hawaii, you would talk and she would hear it about a second later. Made conversations tough and expensive!
> sweet stack of USR Courier external modems blinking away (you never wasted time on cheap gear)
USR offered substantial discounts to BBS operators to keep us from buying cheap gear. I pre-ordered some pre-v.34 (upgradeable) Courier V.Everything for my board at BBSCon for $249/ea. I think that's about what a Sportster 14.4K was selling for at the time.
Ah, FidoNET. Two things about Mastodon are what got me thinking about BBSs.
1) Administrators running their own instance that they can customize and have local conversations on, and
2) FidoNET, where instances relay messages to each other across a network.
I had worked on a similar network at the time which used Frontdoor in front of the BBS to call other boards and relay the messages (and receive calls from boards), but was never a part of the FidoNET network myself.
Haha - also "I was too scared of my parents" .. me too. There was not as much darkness as the skull images suggest, but trying to look 3l33t was /<-rad and all. RemoteAccess ("RA") was a nice software, I used that myself for a short time.
I remember that I had a strict limit of $13 a month that I was allowed to spend on long distance phone calls. I paid the bill myself, but my mother could not understand wasting more than $13 (I think it was originally $10, and I negotiated up to $13) a month on calling BBSs. I kept a hand-written log of how many minutes I spent in each area code and the price to call that area code so that I would not go over.
> it was the public internet before there was a public internet
The internet was invented several times. Many people assume that it wouldn't have happened without ARPAnet, but that doesn't line up with history. I remember the olden days :-) and anyone with two or more computers tried to hook them together by inventing a network.
It's like when the steam engine was invented (to pump water out of mines), one of the first things people tried was putting wheels on it. It's just obvious.
Thank you for the happy nostalgic reminiscence of my youth. I also remember the computer mags that had several pages devoted to BBS phone number listings (just before the program listings you could type in)
Do you remember Computer Shopper? I remember when it was an inch thick. I would ride my bike to the grocery store and buy it and spend days reading though every ad, marveling at the 2 GB SCSI hard drives (like 4" thick!!!) and wishing I had the $4000 or whatever to buy one for my BBS.
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...
Smartest decision I ever made was backing up all my old childhood 68k and PPC Macintosh systems to QIC using a friends SCSI drive. Later I bought a ClubMac (haha remember them) drive for nothing on eBay. A couple years ago I was able to restore some old old systems from the attic, nostalgia city ! I think I had some Mac specific BBS software in there somewhere, TeleFinder and FirstClass I remember. There was another GUI based one, I think NovaTerm. I sure wish I would have imaged some of the Apple IIgs software though before all the floppies went bad.
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.
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.
The current owners of Colorado Backup software IP made it freeware a number of years back as well. (Thanks!) Without that you'd also have to find ancient software to pull it off the tape.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I visited the sonic the hedgehog video game BBS nearly daily when I first got a computer and dialup at my home in the late 90/early 2000s. I don't remember any distance constraints, but I was between 9 and 11 years old during this time period.
also, it was constrained by a queue. Usually 1 phone line therefore only one person could be on at a time (cooperative multitasking if you will). busy signals (when was the last time you got a busy signal anywhere?) and auto-redials. good times!
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.
It was really fun way to communicate as a nerdy high schooler. One of my best friends was varsity football player, a jock who was a closeted nerd. We would both go home to our own houses at lunch time and dial up the local BBS and chat with each other about (what else?) BBSes.
My parents were very anti-computer at the time because I spent so much time on it and they would never let me spend any of the money I earned at my busboy job on computer parts so I had to be sneaky about it. I eventually pilfered the $150 to get a Zoom 14.4Kbps modem and me and my buddy took his car to CompUSA and bought modems on the sly. I had to pull mine out of the packaging and ditch the box and sneak it home in my backpack so my folks wouldn't see, then be sure to mute the modem speaker so they wouldn't notice the changed negotiation tones.
It seems so ridiculous now: computers became my meal ticket in a very big way and I'm eternally grateful that I had the balls to secretly buy that modem.
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.
I was (briefly) part of a BBS "movie" group that made movies using "Commodore 64 Graphics" which were actually just made using the C64's unique character set. It would record back every cursor movement and character change, so you could make a really cheesy animation that often turned out to be really fun to watch.
You'd actually have to add delays by moving the cursor to allow enough time to read the captions/speech bubbles. It was pretty funny because it would be much slower on a 300 baud modem vs. a 2400 baud, so you had to be careful how you tuned your delays.
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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.
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.
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.
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.]
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...
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
- 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 but was preserved by http://breakintochat.com/
I mean, ultimately that's what Eve Online is, a massive TW2002 "clone". Only everything made better.
I think the problem with an economic system is you need enough people to do it properly, or you have to figure out some kind of 'fake' where it can be dynamic enough for the concept of cross-space trading work, but also not be entirely unrealistic.
I did learn a lot about event-driven programming, state machines, and the telnet protocol however.
What are the TW games out there right now? I was not aware!
I've dreamt for years about licensing TW to make a mobile version consistent with the gameplay of the BBS days. Before scripts. I don't know if you fall in love with the first games you play as a kid, but 25 years later, I still yearn for a 6 month TW bang with a corp of 4 friends.
There are all kinds of game servers running! See my other post up-thread for two of my favorites. You can find more at http://www.classictw.com/.
They're only web-enabled as a convenience to people without old-school ANSI.SYS terminal emulators and DOS fonts. You can TELNET into all of them. SWATH is probably the best modern helper and runs well under WINE on FreeBSD, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Oh yeah. I recall writing Telix scripts to traverse the galaxy and then calculate the shortest path from a->b based on the portals it discovered. I also recall quite the scandal when a sysop peeked into the admin console and gave an advantage to someone.
Anyone remember LOD (Land of Devastation)? It never gained much traction but was an awesome idea at the time with it's downloadable tile packs. Unfortunately the really shitty gambling system made it godmode all around.
I don't know if ICE9 still does this, but they used to have a bunch of interesting customizations, like where sectors 1-2000 were a lightly regulated federation space were connected to a small 10-sector neutral zone, with the Star Dock sector being the jumping-off point into the wider universe. I loved playing there!
Oh man...TW2002...brings back memories....damn. I remember playing with Cruncher. I played heavily on the Fament BBS...
I was in middle school...so this would have been mid 90's.
I was connected to the Internet using a freenet that was provided by SEFLIN (South East Florida Library Information Network)...text based. People who had real internet ran applications, and using ICQ to chat (since you can scan the in network chat for teams chattering!) I was using plain ol text based Internet...and Pine was my email program. I still use nano very often as my editor of choice :)
One time my local BBS moved to Miami...but the area code was still 305. It was considered long distance, even though the area code was the same. I racked up quite a telephone bill.
Ah yes, I've seen SWATH before. Here's my issue: when I started playing, it was on a BBS where everyone played manually. There were no helpers or scripts. We'd manually keep track of sectors and port pairs and potential bubbles and so on. It was great. I belong to the camp that believes the scripts ruined the game :-/
You don't have to use the helper bits of SWATH! Just turn that stuff off and enjoy it's near-perfect terminal emulation. I've played several games like that (these were old school 5000-sector games with rate limits, like how God intended you to play).
My (online) social network got hooked on Diplomacy. Originally adjudicated via email. Then we found an automatic adjudicator, that ran as a door, but it kinda sucked. And someone in the group wrote a better one, which then got reasonably popular.
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 :-)
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.
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/.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not sure if anyone saw this: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/a-198... 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.
You'll recall that the first iPhone was exclusive to AT&T so it feels a little like they came through on this promise. Apple might deserve a little of the credit, I suppose.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
About missing those days - I still find joy in doing a lot of the same things around software, and although I did sell Dementia for $50/copy, it was a passion project and not a job.
If I was retired and didn't need to work, I'd still find some software to build and spend my time building it because that's something that I love to do. That's essentially what we were doing back then, so it was a good time.
I think there is some truth to what you're getting at with less noise and constraints and creativity.
Although - during this time, I dreamed of a future when every house and every business had their own BBS. That basically happened in the form of the www. The www and internet would have AMAZED a teenage me, it still does.
I remember that past fondly because they were exciting times for those reasons, but current times are also exciting. :)
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.
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.
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. :)
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 -_^).
I agree about childhood days, but I don't know if that's entirely it.
I think we now take technology for granted and apps/sites are less special of a thing than BBSs were. Users are fickle, so much is fad-based, and we move on to the next thing without a strong feeling towards the last. Using Snapchat isn't a primary hobby or thing that you devote time to, more of a thing you do while doing some other primary thing. If that makes sense. :)
I doubt that memories of Snapchat will be as strong to a user as memories of BBSs. But who knows.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
It was towards the end of middle school and through high school. So, my early to mid teens.
I had never worked on a larger project before that. It was great to have one single large project to work on, and to keep adding features to. I had messed around with code since I was about 7. It was based on the source code of something else which did the heaviest of lifting.
My dad taught computer science at a small college and was able to get OS/2 and C compilers for me. I forget which C compiler I used, I think I might have switched from Borland to something else at the time -- but I remember the one C compiler came with a set of books in a box that was about 4 feet long. I used the box as a footrest when I'd code. Haha.
I chose OS/2 because it was the first operating system that I knew of which allowed true multi-tasking. Two processes (instances of the BBS}) could actually run at the same time without one pausing the inactive one. It was also cool to try a new OS, to try something new.
OS/2 and C compilers were readily available for downloaded on BBses.
I'm pretty sure I downloaded Turbo C onto like 20 floppy disks over ZModem or something. Not only did it take forever to download, but installing it was a huge pain, with all the disk swapping. I guess the hard disk didn't have enough space for both the raw disks and the install? I don't remember exactly.
I never ran OS/2 but a friend did, and I'm pretty sure he downloaded it rather than paying for it. A primary form of social currency on BBSes is who had access to commercial software, i.e. the "zero-day warez".
> I guess the hard disk didn't have enough space for both the raw disks and the install?
Floppy-disk-based installers were often hardcoded to use the A: drive so even if there was space for the install and the floppy installer on the HDD, you'd need to copy the installer to the floppies to use it, unless you had some workaround.
Yeah Borland Turbo C in DOS was the way to go. My first board ran on multi-tasking DOS in DESQview before moving over to OS/2 -> Windows over the years.
Most software back then was openly pirated and traded. Even non-warez BBS's had pirated software in the 1980s. It wasn't even considered a bad thing, just, "I have this, want a copy?" or "I need this, anyone have a copy?" We had Commodore meet ups at the local library and everyone openly copied software. Local governments had little idea what a computer even did. The SPA hadn't been considered or was in it's infancy. Computer nerd was barely a term yet. It was our own little world.
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.
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.
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
You just took me back to the 80s. Stale chips and cracks screens(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.
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!
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...
I'm sure the vast bulk of the message archives from BBSs are long gone. Many were local and vanished when the systems shut down. And I'm not sure how many archives there are from FidoNet, PC-Relay and the like.
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!
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?
I'm in the opposite situation, I have all the ANSI art I created but none of the Remote Access database + config files. CRC error. Oh 3.5" floppy disks, how you made storage exciting.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
People may say it's just nostalgia but I think what I loved most was the competition and variety. It was like living in a golden age of home computing. You had the Amiga, Atari, ZX Spectrum, C64, all these sorts of incompatible home computing systems. And I think being incompatible was kind of a benefit for home computing culture. Because this spawned multiple magazines and communities that could survive because they could target various systems, rather than more consolidated cultures that have happened since the IBM PC days, where you end up with just a few big web sites no one can compete with. I miss that diversity, and also hacker spirit compared to today when building systems is often much like using big pre-built Lego blocks.
We need to give a new Internet traction just to relive this, haha... Use the opportunity to fix DNS and decentralize it while at it. :p Then get Haiku OS or something going...
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.
I ran it too! Was so much fun right before the time the internet connectivity expanded past universities.
I ran the BBS because otherwise I had to dial into Chicago (long distance - ha, what a concept!). For me it was much cheaper to just run a multiline BBS, and then read news on my own computer that sat in the basement!
I ran it too! A co-worker and I who were sys admins at a Canadian provincial ministry ran it on behalf of the ministry, because no one knew enough to tell us not to :)
Also, what about RoboComm? That thing was incredible to me back then.
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.
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.
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.