I ran one in the 90s for a couple years. I was 15. I had two lines at 16.8kbps. 100 megabyte HD, which was enough to hold a giant archive of Amiga downloads. It was fun, lots of local folks on there and we'd meet up in person sometimes too. Felt like I knew everyone in town who was into computers as much as I was. Especially the Amiga people.
I'm holding a USRobotics Courier V.Everything V.34 in my hands right now. It was from the biggest BBS in my country. I got it when that BBS replaced the Couriers with access servers with E1/T1 digital interfaces. I keep it on my bookshelf, within reach from my computer chair. I was Co-SysOp on a PCBoard BBS, in the 90s. 8-)
What digital equipment did they use? I ran an ISP that we started in 1997. First with Portmaster 2's and USR Sportsters (we couldn't afford Couriers, and the Sportsters were cheaper and worked just as well for our purposes).
I always love hearing about different hardware people used for BBS/ISP's.
We eventually switched to Pormaster 3's.
Did anyone else here ever play 4 player Doom over modem? A company called ACPi made a spider dongle that let you do it... it was expensive.
That BBS grew very, very fast, backed by venture capital, and quickly became a major ISP - national level, one of the first in the country. It was perfect timing, just as the commercial Internet was taking off. I know they used a lot of Cisco, and other enterprise suppliers.
Our BBS, on the other hand, remained small (small town). The BBS ran half a dozen Sportsters on 2 computers and OS/2. Later, we also became a small ISP, providing dial-up access with Windows NT 3.51, an EISA DigiBoard multiserial and about 16 Boca modems.
The Couriers were used for some dedicated point-to-point lines, with FreeBSD and KA9Q.
I recently got my IBM PS/2 286 on my home internet via an old Ethernet card and the mTCP software suite for MS-DOS. There’s something really special about telnetting into BBSes on hardware of this era.
PCBoard was great. The documentation and ability to extend it was amazing.
I remember when the company shut down.
I felt quite sad about it. The BBS culture was interesting.
The anticipation of dialing in and sending a message, then dialing back to vheck for a reply, only to realise you might be tieing up a line preventing a reply from being written.
I started using BBSs in the 80s. Starting on 300 baud modem connections and then upwards. It was such a cool feeling like you were living in the future...all with that extremely slow 300 baud.
I guess I tried chasing that feeling for a while, but when the Internet came to consumers (I was on it about a year before it hit mainstream, and even before the World Wide Web), that feeling was there a little. But as it became an everyday tool to use by the world, it became mundane somehow. Hard to describe.
And of course, back then I thought it would be a tool to unite the world, but it's just torn it apart.
There's still a decent community of people running them either for nostalgia and/or bringing them into the Internet area. Some are telnet/ssh only, some have actual dial-up modems too.
I set up Wildcat! 4 (a DOS based BBS software) earlier this year and have had a blast with reliving the past. It was interesting to figure out how true to period vintage to run it vs letting some newness leak in, with 30 years of hardware and connectivity options to select from.
I wound up doing both dial-up and telnet access, and just last week got an UUCP gateway setup so it can dial out to a Raspberry Pi and send/receive internet email.
In the mid oughts I was doing point of sale gift card processing, and most was still dial up. Had to write something like socat for incoming connections, then later port to C. I seriously considered building for DOS with a more modern compiler. But it wouldn't have been justified and couldn't bring myself to seriously try it.
It's interesting how many tools there are now to make it easier.
This has a web telnet client which is pretty cool, it even shows a little capture of logging into the site -- pretty neat!
I've been trying to find info/screenshots/video of the old style 'lightbar' menus that were popular right at the apex of the BBS scene, when software like Renegade was all the rage. Been very hard to find, so if you have some info (don't send me to the BBS documentary I've seen it) I'd be happy if you reached out.
The Internet ruined everything. If I have any regrets in my life, it was not fully appreciating the magic that was the 1990s in the moments I experienced them.
I ran a BBS in the 90s, nothing big but it had a small local community, some of them just users (lusers) and some of the sysops of other boards. I only had one phone line but call waiting would just kick the user off if I got a call. It was really easy to one up, I was running Renegade but there were quite a few different systems that you just basically turn on and you're up. I spent way too much time customizing each menu with ANSI art for each menu and trying to pimp out the UX. There were multiplayer games and file boards and message boards and you could live-chat with the sysop or other users if the board had multiple phone lines. My buddy called long distance to Kansas to some warez board to download a paint program and ran up a huge phone bill. It was magical and so much fun. Internet still has not achieved that kind of decentralized p2p in the mainstream. Plug a Raspberry Pi into your cable modem and build your own little board, give access to whoever you want. Would be pretty cool to me, but I don't know if I'm just old and nostalgic or if anybody else would actually want to do it. But yeah, wild wild west was the best.
I ran a small board. Was fun but tried to do too much on 1541 (mods (games), and messages). I miss the 800 backdoors people put on party lines on. Hitting a newspaper box in a certain spot so it would open free. BBS meetups. War dialing. Local zines that were really cool programs
There were private FTP and IRC bots, DC++, etc. Private Minecraft and other game servers are still pretty common.
> Internet still has not achieved that kind of decentralized p2p in the mainstream.
BBSes were never mainstream. Personal computing in the 80s and early 90s was not mainstream. This is the insurmountable problem in trying to recapture that experience.
What I feel the most sadness for is that I will never be able to share with my kids the magic of 90s internet. It feels like the classic bluegrass song "Old Home Place". The place I came from is gone and it is irreparable. The internet was a pristine wonder that is now a dilapidated strip mall.
If there's anything I've learned (and it might very well be the only thing) its that life is just a long string of homes you can never go back to. Enjoy living in the moment because its the only thing that's real. Reminiscing is quicksand for the soul.
Apparently there are binary files to download, which is probably why this thing immediately folded when HN found it.
Previous versions have older versions of the zips, so search the history.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230606002640/https://www.telne...