Who here remembers old school BBSs?

[dANt3R]

The sad thing is that the thing that made us nerds in Jr. High and High School is the same thing that makes kids kewl and popular today!!!

 

[warcleric]

dan: haha so true, my 12 year old is like the cool kid in his class because we have 4 servers and a T1 in the house.

 

[Shack70]

Yup! I remeber the old BBS. I started out on a 300baud modem and when I got to 1200 I was the man!

 

[dabuddha]

i still have my 300 baud modem with my commodore 64
those were the days
then with my XT, i tried to setup a board but parent's wouldn't let me use the line

 

[perry]

I used to run a WWIV board... It was awesome. Had the source code and I would spend hours hacking away at it just for the hell of it. I was one of the few people in the country running WWIV w/ a FidoNET front end. Actually wrote a text file detailing how to get WWIV working with all free tools (BinkleyTerm, Squish, etc). Ran OS/2 as my multitasker, so someone could be dialed in and I could still use the BBS as well. Fond memories.....

 

[DaveJ]

Man I remember those days! Ran a two node Spitfire BBS back in HS, networked with Lantastic... yikes! LORD, BRE, SRE, and *TradeWars* all rocked! I remember having to learn all about DOS batch files, having multiple errorlevels set up to run different maintenance at certain times of the day...

I remember the first BBS I was on that got gated from FidoNet to what was then the Internet... I remember thinking "E-mail? Who needs an E-mail address when you can talk over FidoNet? Bah, this'll never work!"

Dave

 

[Choralone]

I have some very fond memories of those days. Too bad everone in my area more or less closed up shop during the summer of 96. Man do I miss the old boards...

 

[dANt3R]

warcleric, you probably are having mobs of girls coming over too!!!! My daughter just turned 10 months old, and if this trend continues I'm throwing my computers out!

(okay, maybe I'll just hide them)

 

[pac1085]

There was a local BBS that used Galacticom Worldgroup that just shut down at the beginning of this year I remember the game Tele-Arena which was AWESOME...new games started to come out like Diablo and it got less and less popular...The old BBS days were fun...I miss em

 

[PliotronX]

Most FTPs have ratios, .diz files, and people taking slots for days to download with their bastard 56ks.

But yeah I remember those days when "elite" boards were kept very quiet about or else the FBI would take them down quick.

 

[warcleric]

Plio: only semi-public ftp's have ratios. Most people who are really close to the scene are going for credits, which means quickest to release and upload newly acquired software. Ratio sites are just a bunch of 11 year olds with cable modems lurking on irc. I have been around the scene for a long long time.

 

[Thorn]

<< Ran OS/2 as my multitasker, so someone could be dialed in and I could still use the BBS as well. Fond memories... >>


I've got ya beat, I used to run 3 WWIV nodes (2 dial-ins and 1 local) on Desqview (that setup still gives me nightmares). My lowly bbs consisted of a 386DX25 w/ 8MB RAM, 340MB HD and a CD-ROM. Combine that with a pair of USR Courier 19.2 HST/V.32bis modems and I was cookin'!

Ack! Anyone else remember having to fight with fossil drivers to get your doors to work? Some doors were easy like Ninja and Global Wars, while others like SRE and LORD were a real PITA.


<< Had the source code and I would spend hours hacking away at it just for the hell of it. I was one of the few people in the country running WWIV w/ a FidoNET front end. >>


I think FidoNet capability was finally built into WWIV v4.24. Although, I know I had to mod 4.21 and 4.23 to make them work with FidoNet... and then there were the mods to make WWIV look like Oblivion and Liquid (not to mention RipTerm support!). Man that was fun. I still remember Wayne Bell (1@1) and Frodo getting mad at me for distributing modded WWIV to other resistered SysOps (the ones that didn't know how to code and didn't care to learn). He threatened to revoke my registration on many occasions.

Wow, those were better days weren't they? Kinda...

Hell, I even had an account on Shinobi's Sword in Okinawa! :Q

 

[dANt3R]

I've gotta bump this cuz I'm enjoying the stroll down memory lane........

 

[Phil21]

I remember attempting to write my own BBS with a friend.. Buying &quot;C for dummies&quot; and like going nuts when we actually got the thing to dial and SAY STUFF! whoo!

oh man.. I could go on and on about the BBS days here. :/ sigh..

-Phil

 

[dabuddha]

<< Plio: only semi-public ftp's have ratios. Most people who are really close to the scene are going for credits, which means quickest to release and upload newly acquired software. Ratio sites are just a bunch of 11 year olds with cable modems lurking on irc. I have been around the scene for a long long time. >>



the best sites on the scene are ratio.
It's the crap ones that are leech.

I still have Terminate installed on this machine for the day BBS come back!

 

[esung]

those of you remember ZIP, I'm still remmeber ARC! and the x-modem days.. and Z modem later.. but later on there's error detection and correction build on modem... I had a Telegard BBS long time ago..

Of course, there's the online games, especially Tradewars! and food fight.... Dominion..

 

[UnixFreak]

ahh yes.. the good old days... I can still remember running a spitfire system back in the day &quot;distant realms&quot; had a lot of cool stuff, ran it for years in the pdx area, I had almost a thousand members.. those days were great, surfing the boards with procomm and telix.. the cool ANSI graphics, I was only like 16, and ran one of the more popular ones in the area. I was one of (or the) first boards in the portland area to have 28.8 access, I still remember when I setup RIP Graphics, and like, 4 people actually used it.. that never really took off like it should have. I finally killed my board in late 1996, it started really dying off quick, by then I had about 2 or three users every couple of days. But I can still remember the time when I added an extra line for all the users, about 30 a day. It was pretty sweet, really. I think I still have my registration numbers for L.O.R.D. Somewhere... Sometimes I think about adding an extra line and starting one, just for us nostalgic folks. I may do a telnet version instead.

 

[BMdoobieW]

I used to dial in to my friend's BBS and play some &quot;Kill Barney the purple dinosaur&quot; game. Now I'm going back 6, 7, 8, maybe 9 years here. I guess I just caught the tail end of that era.

 

[Delusion2001]

no.....but i've heard about them

 

[AncientPC]

Hmm, how coicidental. I just spent they day blowing dust off my 386's / 2-486's and hooking them up.

I remember BBS's briefly (I used them when I was 12) but not very much . . .

 

[nd]

<< I used to dial in to my friend's BBS and play some &quot;Kill Barney the purple dinosaur&quot; game. Now I'm going back 6, 7, 8, maybe 9 years here. I guess I just caught the tail end of that era. >>

The game is called Barney Splat, and it rocked. It was one of the few games to support ANSI music (which Terminate supported at least)

 

[THELAIR]

anyone had a fight over the proper pronunciation of Sysops?

It was either &quot;Sis Ops&quot; or SyyeOps..
hehe

there was a big debate over that...

I logged onto my first BBS in 1992 on a my packardhell 486sx20 with 4 megs of ram and a bult in 2,400 modem usin pro com plus


before that i had connected on a friends system back in 1990, but i was only 11 then and didnt really know what i was doin.

 

[Rakkis]

I'm only 20 so I barely used BBSs for about a year before they died off.
Does anyone know of a telnet BRE league somewhere?
I *love* that game.

 

[dANt3R]

I always leaned toward &quot;Syee sops&quot;. It just sounded cooler at the time. Seems kinda silly now.

 

[warcleric]

IT IS Sis Awps. do you call us Syye Admins now too?