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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.




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