The BBS Days

[Malakai]

I've been reminiscing about the old dialup bbs days lately. Any one remember the bbs days? Or run one? I ran a PCBoard BBS system in the early-mid 90s and was probably one of the only people that paid for my copy around ($150 for 5 node version).

I had 2 full-time nodes, and 1 private node, used a lot of PWA, DOD, and home-made PPE programs, for the good ol' leet look. It used quarterdeck's desqview in DOS, which was a multitasking software for DOS. A big pain in the ass to setup, but it ran pretty well.

The BBS ran on a 486 sx 25 with 12mb ram (about $600 worth of ram at the time), DOS 6.22, 1.7Gig WD HD, PCBoard 15.22/5, using three modems - #1: Zoom External 14.4 MAC/PC modem, #2: Zoom Internal Modem, #3: US Robotics 14.4 internal modem.

Even though the BBS itself was legal, almost every thing on the bbs was not. I ran hacked versions of every game I could find: LORD, Usurper, BRE, SRE, Tradewars, and probably 35-40 more that I can't think of.

I built several PPE programs for pcboard, as well as hacked a few others. We were also connected to fidonet, and had a fairly large file area.

The most popular part of the board was LORD. In its prime, I probably had 4 different LORD games going on at once.

Near the end, I "tried" worldgroup, bought the "limited" version for $99, to see how well it worked and such, and was just totally unsatisfied with how limited it was and how expensive it would be to make a successful bbs with it. A friend of mine spent his life savings setting up a worldgroup bbs and pretty much went bankrupt about 3 months later.

Some of my most fun experiences came from logging on worldgroup and major bbs systems though. Mutants, Crossroads of the elements, and farwest trivia and chat was great....

 

[it290]

Hah, yep, I used to call BBSs all the time, starting with C64 boards and then moving on to the Amiga and PC ones as time went on. I mostly called the local H/P boards but also some general purpose ones. There was one local MBBS based board that had 4 lines and a chat, and I still frequent an IRC channel with some of the users of that BBS today. I don't really have much to say about those days other than that they were a lot of fun, and Internet message boards, no matter how good, can never really compare.

 

[Malakai]

Wow, only one reply on this thread in all this time. I guess most of the people on here either aren't computer nerds or are youngins....

 

[IceDigger]

Ah the good ol days.

 

[schi0249]

I remember them, I just wasn't into them. I use to hang out in the local computer store, and people talked about all the different BBS's they frequented. My cousin at 10 actually setup one for the Wisconsin bar association.

 

[ExCyber]

Someone call 303-458-3832 for me and see if it's still up. He was still chugging along a few years ago at any rate.

That guy is something else.

One thing that BBSes had going for them was that the latency was absurdly low, at least for local boards (I never needed long distance; Denver had TONS of boards). It was weird when I tried my first telnet BBS and it actually had lag. It would be cool to see the BBS scene revive to some degree via telnet boards, but I just haven't seen any that seem compelling at all. Maybe I should start one...

Originally posted by "Malakai"

Near the end, I "tried" worldgroup, bought the "limited" version for $99, to see how well it worked and such, and was just totally unsatisfied with how limited it was

It's right there in the name, man.

 

[Malakai]

There is one really awesome bbs that I frequent now, telnet to x-bit.org if you want to check it out. It's a Synchronet bbs, but they have hundreds of doors and quite a few inter-bbs leagues. You'll probably want to use an ansi telnet program like mtelnet (freeware) to see the bbs/door games correctly.

It is a 15 node bbs, and there are always people on it, although I've never seen all 15 nodes full at once. The BBSes of today have virtually nothing to do with chatting though. All they want to do is play their BRE and LORD games.

Barren Realms Elite alone is what got me into dialup bbs systems years ago. I eventually moved away from BRE to LORD, farwest trivia and chat, mutants, and crossroads of the elements.

Now days, I'm "trying" to figure out how to play trade wars 2002 and also just found a game called interstellar annihilation, which is pretty awesome.

Some doorgame authors of yesteryear have upgraded their dos door games to windows 32-bit, like Pimp Wars, Sim BBS, darkness, arena, virtual sysop, and a few others. The problem was that after MS went to the NT code, almost all of the DOS door games suffered, even though they are emulated fairly well under XP and such.. So, by upgrading them, they get a faster game and one that will *hopefully* be better when multiple users are in the same game.

They're even testing out a win32 *AND* and OS/2 32-bit version of LORD now.. LORD is still a pretty popular game, and it's also one that a lot of people say drags an NT system down with more than 1 or 2 users are in it.

 

[ExCyber]

I can't help but wonder how well it would work to run a telnet BBS by running DOS on accelerated QEMU. There would probably need to be some work done on it to support more than two users (unless there's a FOSSIL-friendly TCP/IP stack for DOS), but it seems like it might actually be feasible...

 

[Malakai]

There's a way to run dos bbs/telnet systems with inbound telnet only with DOS. Probably not all BBS systems supported it, but the original way dos bbses came online was through digiboards connected to terminal servers. They would run *nix as their terminal server and use serial the serial communications. When a visitor telnetted to the unix server's address, it forwarded it to a serial port from the digiboard. This is how clark development setup their first pcboard systems on-line, before the pcboard internet connectivity suite came out on DOS.

That setup, however, would not allow outbound telnet, rlogin, ftp, irc, or any thing like that. It also would not allow rlogin user information to be passed on through it, as far as I know. There may have been some types of dos bbs software that would have supported some thing like that though.

Add echo mail for fidonet and other networks, as well as e-mail, and inter-bbs gaming, through a front end mailer.

There were also a few chat doors that would allow the would allow bbs systems to connect to each other for chat. I think one of the packages was called Zchat. I also believe it supported connecting to IRC as well.

So, with all of those little things, you could have had a bit of a "net" experience with out actually giving users full internet access.

I think the only way to ever get the full speed out of any dos bbs is to either only run 1 line if you're on a windows or nt based system. If running more than 1 node, it'd probably be time to break out the 386s or 480s and learn how to do DOS networking, putting 1 node per PC. That'd also give a person a chance to add a dialup line, but I doubt many people would call.

I threw away probably 30 PCs a couple months ago. I should have kept a few around, to tinker with, not that I would have actually run a BBS on the net with 5-10+ 386/480 computers, but I do like messing around with networking and such, just to see what will happen.

It's amazing that our almost 4ghz pcs of today can't even emulate an old DOS BBS and com routines as fast as a 25mhz 486 PC.

 

[Mask of Destiny]

Part of the problem with emulating old PC software is that they often depend on high timer frequencies which modern operating systems (well general purpose desktop ones anyway) usually can't provide (in part because they tend to use the hardware timer for other things like swithing between processes/threads).

 

[dj898]

i used to run a small closed BBS back in early 90s

at that time Internet was something academics were using and I used the UNIX shell account to access before there was web browser called Mosaic...

ahhh.. memories...

 

[SkankinMonkey]

I ran a BBS where my friends had to call me and let me set it up before they dialed in. Despite that it still had like 20 active users at the time haha.

 

[Malakai]

Ya know, there were a lot of part time BBS systems up like that. Most would just set the bbs up for like 4-8 hours at night, and then use their phone line in the day to make phone calls (or to go on other bbs systems lol)

I use to do a lot of BBS calling late at night, and this one bbs had setup their fido mailers to call at like 2am. Well, several times, I called their bbs at that time, and they warned me several times after that, not to call that late, because they couldn't get their fido mail.

In the end, they were considering just putting their voice line up really late at night on a 2nd node just for me, but since I quit calling, that didn't happen lol....

Lots of stories about that era..

 

[it290]

Someone call 303-458-3832 for me and see if it's still up. He was still chugging along a few years ago at any rate. wink.gif

That guy is something else.

What board is that?

edit: 303 represent!

 

[ExCyber]

Originally posted by it290

What board is that?

Big Boy's. He kept a huge list of 303 boards.

 

[it290]

Oh yep. I never called the board, but I did have that list (The BBBBS list).

 

[Twillinx]

Remember BBSes? I'm still pretty active on one.

 

[mtxblau]

I vividly remember running up 245$ in phone bills one month. Those were the days.

 

[Malakai]

While I didn't have $200+ long distance charges for bbs calls, I did call quite a few long distance bbs systems, mainly for files and such, and occasionally, just to see what some of them offered.

I remember calling a long distance senior citizens bbs. I had heard it had some of the best porn in town. So, created the fake account and birthdate and all (i wasn't 18 yet).. And come to find out it didn't have any porn but apparently use to have some when it was first set up. Maybe they were warned against it or some thing, because of the laws and verification techniques they used were outdated.

I didn't think about it at the time, but being run by senior citizens, where the hell would those people go, what would they do.. they were pretty much at home 24/7.. So, the sysop came did a chat request, and we ended up talking about stuff for several hours.. I don't know what the hell we talked about, but I called back several times over the years and every time, he brought me in to chat.. Poor bastard must have been lonely as hell.

I even called several other long distance boards in the state and out of state, even one of the PWA boards, but never any of the german boards.. Man, those germans were software pirates from hell. If you got in good with them, you could have had access to all of the leet/warez boards.

 

[Quakester2000]

Ah the BBS days they were the fun days, when you first get your modem and try out it all out, BBS's were great i still miss the close community it was great, most of the BBS's i used to visit are gone now.