Any BBS sysops here from back in the day?
As a not quite "old man" I was wondering how many former BBS sysops are here?
In the early-mid 90s, I used to run a single line PCBoard powered hobby BBS and dabble in making PPEs (PCBoards programming language for plug ins/mods). I also help friends set up SpitFire, Searchlight, Synchronet, WWIV and Aftershock (total PITAs from what I remember)--basically anything free, crackable or unlimited trial.
Since I was the only sysop that ran PCBoard I was invited to become an officer in our local User Group to run their whopping 3 line BBS and give classes (that was quite the technological achievement back then). That is something I truly do miss. I was, by far, the youngest member of the User Group (your average member probably had grandkids my age) but it was a meritocracy.
People seemed eager to learn and share information as they found it. Before computers, 3d cards and the internet was ubiquitous, you were automatically accepted into a knowing crowd if you put in the effort/time to join a BBS, forum or (early) MMO. Exclusion brought inclusion, if that makes sense. If you torched your reputation by acting like a jackass it was difficult to move on like a locust to another area.
So many stories. So many high jinks that would be deemed illegal today, lol.
Everything that is old, is new again.
I'm getting a lot of BBS vibes in the aftermath of Rexxit. The slower pace of Tildes reminds me so much of the BBS forums (while I know Tildes isn't new, it is growing in popularity in the aftermath.) Even the Fediverse harkens back to the days of early BBS synch nets.
Now if only I could find a modern remake of Tradwars 2002.
This reminds me of an embarrassing story that I hadn't thought about in years. I'm not a sysop, but used to dial into some local BBSes back in my freshman or sophomore year of high school. One of them had a restriction that you had to post on the message boards in order to get your game turns that day (probably Drug Wars or Legend of the Red Dragon). So I'd hop over, pick a board, post some gibberish, and happily play my turns.
This went on for a couple of weeks until a senior at school stopped me in the hall one day. He explained that that was his BBS and I was ruining his message board. He gave me some gentle schooling on online etiquette that lasts to this day. It turns out the message boards were pretty interesting once I actually read them, but unfortunately the BBS shut down after he left for college.
Not a sysop here, but I wanted to make a plug for a wonderful documentary of BBS history, straightforwardly called "BBS: The Documentary", by Jason Scott of textfiles.com and Internet Archive (and much more) fame.
You can download the documentary for free from the above website or, I think, watch it on Youtube. It is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen about recreational computer culture before the public internet, and particularly the WWW, took over.
The Wikipedia entry on the documentary is also worth reading.
This is something I think about a lot. There was always something I really liked about Tildes that I couldn't quite put my finger on, and I think you nailed it there w.r.t. its similarity to the "BBS experience".
In some ways, I think maybe there was something in the "raw shock" of going from rotary telephones and the Tandy 1000 you played Math Blaster on to seeing that amazing ASCII art streaming down the screen and everything that went with it.
It would be hilarious/amazing to find some way to attach Doors games (like TW2000) to Tildes somehow.
I was the SYSOP of a couple of 1 and 2-line BBSes in the 1980s, and later I would go on to work at Quarterdeck which made the DOS multitasker DESQview that helped some of these systems run on a single PC under DOS. So a lot of my 1980s and 1990s life had to do with that.
Running a BBS often meant running the BBS in one window and doing your other computer work in another, so even 1-line systems often ran DESQview. DESQview's memory manager, called QEMM, was even more popular. Quarterdesk was pretty far ahead of Microsoft in multitasking and memory management. The computer was already pretty involved but if you wanted a little more memory to run that "door game," then running QEMM could make the difference.
It was a turning point in my life, I went from there to work at Intel Corporation for several years, thanks to a minor 1-line BBS. Not too bad.
That's amazing!
Everyone I knew used the heck out of QEMM and DESQview. I mean, we didn't pay for any of it but.. LOL.
QEMM was like magic when you needed to squeeze every last drop of memory out of a system. I went "big time" and upgraded to 8MB of RAM when most people had 2-4MBs. It was around $40 a megabyte back then so it was a pretty serious investment at the time.
DESQView was also literal magic back then.. You mean my computer and do TWO things at once?! I ran it on my BBS computer so I could log in on a local node and people were amazed that there were two users on at once. It was a MUCH simpler time, lol.
While my career trajectory was different, running BBSs also got me into working in a local computer store which opened up so many different parts of my life from influencing my hobbies to great friends I made.
The quest for multitasking was truly holy grail worthy. TRS programs, DESQview, bimodem; I remember trying so many things that could help me parallelize my computer time.
Windows truly was a game changer…
Fascinating insight - thanks for sharing. I feel like I missed out on this history as my first experience with the internet was AOL. By the time I was in college, Ethernet NIC cards were in use though I'm sure they were fairly slow compared to today. Every so often I think it would be fun to get a modem and either connect to or run a BBS locally.
Back in the early 90s, I ran a single line BBS on a 2400 baud modem in small town Idaho. I built it on TAG BBS (obscure, I know) and it had a medieval castle theme. I remember spending days and days on the asciii art to get it just right. I had discussion boards, downloads (including an adult section), and of course door games. I think most of my traffic was fellow high school kids logging on daily to play their tradewars turns.
I, too, would love a modern remake of tw2002!
There are still some people who run a BBS. It's usually over telnet. Super small communities, but it can be a lot of fun. I've spent a solid amount of time on tw2002.
I was just talking with a friend that’s into retro PCs. He passed along this list of BBS:
https://www.telnetbbsguide.com
You've kind of reminded me, as someone old enough to remember dialing in to BBS as a kid, I would love to see a quality "BBS in a box," specifically geared at trying to return to the localized internet. Tools to bring your local neighbors together beyond just forums like Nextdoor. It would be especially awesome if they could be easily paired with each other to form a k8s mesh so the community could self-host a fault-tolerant system.
I think trying to bring back that, and onboarding kids through local community internet (IE starting out only friends they know IRL and families in public, auditable ways)
I've often thought about something similar but unfortunately I think the moment has passed. :(
Not to go all "get off my lawn" old but back in the day the exclusiveness of non-techies automatically created an inclusive community. The barrier of entry was high enough that if you did gain entrance you were already "in" with everyone. In addition, if you acted like an asshat and did something the community banished you for you couldn't just move on. Long distance calls were expensive so if you did something to earn the ire of the community you were either black listed by fellow sysops or had a greatly reduced list of options locally or paid dearly (in a literal sense) to use long distance BBSs.
I saw it happen in the MMO communities even before WoW. When Dark Age of Camelot was released there was like Ultima Online and Asheron's Call if my memory is correct. You needed a special 3d accelerator card to play these games. The 3d cards were NOT standard issue so it was the same phenomenon. By virtue of being in the game, you automatically were accepted as "in" because you had already shown a bit of technological prowess. Leveling the games were brutal where it took a year+ sometimes to reach max level. Anyone who "shit the bed" locally (scamming, stealing from their guild, being displeasant to be around, etc was ostracized. This was a HUGE deal if they were banned from raids, guilds, leveling groups or even a simple rez if they died in the wild. An incredibly small amount of people threw away a thousand hours+ character.
By the time 3d cards became standard issue in PCs the communities had changed drastically. Around this time WoW was released to a huge success which brought in an incredibly wider audience into MMOs and SCRiPTKiDDiEZ, trolls, spammers, scammers and griefers gained in numbers. That has since evolved into the X-Box lobby tomfoolery of the now.
Heck, even Tildes is what it is in large part (in my opinion) because the invite system. Exclusivity brings inclusivity--having a modem when most didn't, having a 3d card when most didn't, having an invite when most don't.
Without some kind of real world influence in the form of a punishment like in the days of yore (ostricization, loss of a massive time investment, etc) I don't know how else to create an inclusive good natured, honest community without including the cesspool of trolls, SCRiPTKiDDiEZ, edgy trolls or venom that are platforms like Nextdoor, local Facebook groups, etc.
I've found that Nextdoor is definitely a cesspool, but there are glimmers of what could be.
I think its hampered by a terrible company. You can't view posts chronologically, and moderation is basically 0.
I've had good luck with many local Facebook groups (BuyNothing is a good one that has one for mosr localities).
I think a local BBS system could work if:
That I could see working. Making a barrier to entry would keep the low effort trolls out, for sure. The other trolls would end up being banned sooner or later and I can't see anyone creating a fake ID jus to get into a local message group.
At some point philosophical quandaries would start appearing. Can someone be an unintentional troll? At what point does a truly uneducated person be labeled as a troll for not "getting" what people are telling them?
I could see a hybrid downvote + karma like system used on Slashdot being useful to hide "bad" posts. I think I would go one step further and make it a point based system so if you downvote someone else you lose a point of your karma. Hopefully that could combat a concern of Karens from running roughshod and brigading someone they don't like.
(Sorry for babbling, I often get excited at the intresection of tech and people's behaviors)
I've seen it myself. It basically happens when someone doesn't "get" why something is offensive/wrong, and refuses to accept education.
They might be horrifically nice people who otherwise think it's OK to throw around some slurs.
I'm honestly not trying to sound pedantic but do those really count as trolling?
If they honestly believe what they're saying that could be due to ignorance, bad manners or simply a difference of opinion. None of those things are trolling, though.
To me trolling is knowingly using false pretenses, exaggerations, pretending to be obtuse or any other deceitful means to get a rise out of someone or get them to otherwise waste their time.
Asking someone a question meant to get them to spend an exhorbitant amount of time replying to you just to say "Nah, fam, that's just your opinion" when you never really cared is trolling.
Disagreeing with them because your 6th grade science teacher said something different isn't trolling. It may be based on ignorance, unwilling to change your opinion or stupidity but it isn't trolling.
Archie Bunker was many things but I don't think a troll was one of them.
Ran one on a C-64 with a 1MB HDD when I was a kid. 😅
Out of curiosity, how did you advertise to get people to use it back then?
Up until High School I lived in a pretty populated area but in the mid-80s few people had something like an Apple ][e, let alone a modem. Then in '88 I moved to a pretty rural county (population of around 50k then, IIRC). I couldn't even use sneaker net for things.
My parents bought an Epson computer with dual floppies and no hard drive but I didn't get my first modem until around 91-92. It was an old external 2400 baud modem with a copy of Telix I think that I used to war dial phone numbers yearning to hear any kind of response other than a voice.
It wasn't until around 94 or 95 I think when I ordered parts to build my first 486 DX4 100, 4 MB ram, 425 MB hard drive, Soundblaster and CD-ROM that I met an old guru type that gave me a list of local BBSs. I was amazed that we had something like 12 listed ones and probably 6 more "private" ones that didn't advertise.
Telix… omg I had forgotten that. I remember using Procomm Plus before Telix…
Honestly, I don't remember!
Not a sysop but I was really into ANSI art back in the day. I was in several groups, not major ones like iCE or ACiD, but some second tier ones. I really miss those days.
That's pretty cool!
I toyed around with ACiDDraw for a crazy amount of time back in the day and even ever so briefly dabbled in making my own ANSI art demo files.
I was no way near 5th tier in terms of talent but I didn't think it was too shabby and a quite a few local sysops would ask me to make a landing page art for them.
talking ANSI art reminded me of 2 stories: Learning all the ASCII codes for ANSI art introduced me to my all time favorite: alt-255. It is an invisible character that I would use to prank so,so many people. I'd go into their computers and type "md c:\eat(alt-255)me" which would create a directory c:\eat me except they didn't know how to remove it. If they used a space in rmdir c:\eat(space)me it would return unknown parameter 'me'. Some directory names were a little more lewd.
The other story involved me selling my old XT computer with a 20 mb hard drive to a really good friend. I knew I had to do something to get him to learn some basics so I added a line to call an ANSI porn (yes that was a thing) I had found somewhere into the autoexec.bat file. My intention was for him to learn about the autoexec.bat file and some of its various uses and settings. What I didn't expect was for him to be so excited that he showed his mother the first time he ever turned it on after getting it from me. He called me up all flustered while I heard his mom just laughing in the background. I walked him through how to change it and we still laugh about it to this day.
I hosted a TriBBS server at home, loved sharing files and door games and shit like that.
Recently I was hosting an Enigma1/2 server, it's modern software that runs on NodeJS and connected it to DoorParty which is awesome. I might have to put it back up
Not exactly a sysop, just an enthusiastic user who remembers the BBS community with such fondness that I've kept one of them as a spouse for 30 years.
I did run a large modem bank and mainframe BBS-style chat system on a military base, but that's truly ancient history.
Does co-sysop count? Wildcat + DESQview.
I ran a BBS for quite a few years in the mid to late 90s using PCBoard, then Wildcat , and then settling on Iniquity. Had some amazing ANSI art that scrolled for a few pages on logon because much like an onion on your belt this was the style at the time.
Started with 9600, then 14.4, then 28.8, then 56K.
ZModem and IceZModem transfer protocols were the hotness, can't remember what came before that.
Desqview on the go so I could still use my (very expensive) PC for other tasks while people were fighting ASCII dragons in LORD.
I gave it away after making a mistake with a FIDONet configuration and doing repeated polling of another board that was a "community call" (I think was the term?) rate from where I was. It was not quite long distance, but was charged by time instead of straight flag fall. It was a simple mistake like polling every 24 minutes instead of 24 hours or something. I had a landline plan with a big allowance of local calls, but being a longer distance nothing was covered. I racked up the better part of $500 in a month due to the long call times multiple times a day and decided that was me done.
Ouch. We had this one little pocket that was considered long distance even though it was in the same county as us.
Thankfully I only lived a few miles from it so I already knew the deal. However quite a few sysops didn't realize that this one little itsy-bitsy community wasn't a local call. There were many a new sysop and user that got bit by that.
I remember ACiD being all the rage in ANSI art. I'd spend hours making ANSI art (never was too good but I didn't think I was horrible) and had a few sysops offer to pay me to make a splash screen.
My first computer that was my own was an XT with a 20 MB hard drive and an external 2400 baud modem. I didn't know it at the time, but I had been war dialing trying in vain to find another modem to connect to. Eventually I built a 486 with a 14400 modem from parts ordered from a magazine and got a list of BBSs from an old local guru type that helped answer questions as I was putting it all together. That got replaced with a 33.6k modem.
When I ran my BBS from my 486 system, I met a fellow sysop that had gotten a login to FIRN (Florida Information Relay Network) which was my first introduction to the internet. Gopher, telnetting, archie, etc opened up a whole other world of figuring stuff out, lol.
Looking back, I'm honestly always amazed at how much we could all do before we could just Google how to do something (fix an IRQ conflict, learn when to use VT100 or VT200 emulation, FTP a file from its home server to my FIRN user space and from there to my computer--that's right, it wasn't a straight download, etc etc).
I also had FIRN access, but not six months later a better local ISP showed up that was much better. The bonus was sneaking my external modem into school and using FIRN.
The big ones I remember were XModem, YModem, Kermit, TModem, and of course ZModem MobyTurbo
Don’t forget Sealink and Bimodem!
My friend group all ran a few small BBSes from lime 1990 to 1993 (it lost its draw once we all got "real" internet) and were all sysops of our own BBS and cosysops on each others and some other local BBSes. I personally used TriBBS and later Maximus since it let me (well forced me to) tinker with everything. It was a good time, we had pretty busy message boards and door games (Trade Wars 2002, LORD, and Usurper were my favorites). Honestly the biggest issue was maintaining a second phone line since we were all teens and none of our parents saw the value in this even though we paid the cost of the phone ourselves.
re: tradewars.. there is a community for it apparently. I never would have expected that little chestnut.
Thanks for that. I'll check it out for sure. I eventually got 1 of my friends into BBSs through Door games like TW2002, ISA (Interstellar Annihilation), LORD and I think Pimpwar. We'd terrorize whole universes together, lol.
it’s fun to dig around the bbs’ out there now. screw the fediverse! let’s move to a bbs :) it would be great.
i had a small one i ran from a friend's house because i wasn't allowed to have a modem.
teleguard on msdos, then os/2 for a short spell before i went off to college.
I ran a C-Net 12.0 BBS off of my Commodore 128 back in the mid-80s for a few years. It literally sat on my desk near my bed, and was modestly popular enough that I lost an unreasonable amount of sleep in that era. I was quite proud of the work I put into it, especially the ASCII art for it. I made some amazing friends, too, a few of which I still have contact with to this day.
Southeast Texas had a whole community built around Commodore, BBSs, and copy parties. The majority of sysops in the region were actually kids and younger adults.
Those were some incredible times to be a nerd. The average person had no idea what we were doing, how we were doing it, or why it felt so worthwhile and engaging to us. Live chat with a sysop while you were dialed in felt like witchcraft. Long-form conversations in the BBS felt very much like the wave of the future (and it was, of course). The BBS games were simplistic, but paved the way for greater things like MUDs, which in turn spawned several game genres of their own.
BBS tech aside, the C64 games were amazing, demos and crack screens produced by hacker groups were astounding, and the chiptunes being cranked out were an awesome foreshadowing of the Amiga tunes to come. There's still a vibrant demoscene community out there to this day. I wish I could rewind time and relive that age of wonder.
I am not a sysop, but I was a regular user of a BBS in my area back in the 90s and it's one of my most nostalgic memories. One of my best friends at the time was also a BBS user, and I also met my first girlfriend on the BBS and chatted with her daily. We all also loved to play the MUDs and other games that the BBS hosted.
Our favorite was called "Hack & Slash," an RPG with random procedurally generated dungeons. We both always made sure to get our turns in on that game. I was so addicted that my daily turns in the game weren't enough... It inspired me to start coding, and I tried to replicate the game on my TI-83 calculator as one of my first projects (though my attempt was crude at best) It was so influential to me, that nearly 20 years later, I summoned all of my google-fu and tracked down the original creator - TheFlyingApe / Robert Hurst, and found that he actually still hosted a version playable on Telnet!! It was awesome to be able to experience it again and recapture that nostalgia, though I got too busy and stopped a few years ago. He has recently released the source code on github here if anyone else is interested: Dank Domain
I was quite young at the time, but I was on quite a few BBS's in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) through the late 80s and early 90s. I wish I could find and reconnect with the people I spoke to on there.
One was called Slimeball, but the rest I forget.
There was a space game I played a lot, it involved logging in everyday and building a fleet and taking over planets against other players. It was good times, I miss it.
Inter Stellar Annihilation. I had such a system for that game that I could take over servers in a quick fashion.
Basically, every so often you'd get a visit from a black market vendor. I'd have whole planets just crank out the cheapest troop unit and sell them all to the black market vendor and use the money to buy the best troops.
At midnight our local BBSs would run their batches and games like ISA could send packets to other BBSs so you could raid other server games. I took them over too, lol. While most people had like 400-1200 planets I'd have a cool 40,000.
It also helped that I knew the servers all batched at midnight so I'd log in at like 11:30pm to take my turns and then log back in at like 12:15am when turns were topped off again (after the batch) so I could maximize my playstyle.