What did turbonerds do before the internet? 41 years ago, a load of BBS

BBS's - those were the days

Greetings.

BBS, my first florey into the world of connecting a computer to another via the telephone system. I had an Amiga 500 with a super-fast 14.4KB modem - all my mates had a 9.6KB. I could rocket a 1MByte file in just under 5 minutes. those were the days.

My BBS was called Guru-10, and I had lots of fun connecting and getting files. My mum was always annoyed that the telephone line was in use, so my parents thought about getting a second line fitted - just for me. But, I would have to pay the bill. I thought no, I can't afford that. me, being a student at the time with no money - except my grant.

With the BBS came FidoNET - the first email system generally available to Joe-Public. Absolutely brilliant, being able to send messages to people and getting replies back. The only issue was that to get the reply back in real time you needed to be connected.

So, what I needed was a Dialler / Offline Reader system - TRAPDOOR and APRIL were the tools I used. I created a system called AmiPoint v2.1 which automated the installation of these systems on people's Amiga. CU Amiga did a review and said "Amiga Point v2.1 Comms for the masses - exactly as it should be."

Those were the days, sometimes I wish it was all still like this - especially after receiving 1500 pieces of email junk in a day. time to SELECT-ALL and then DELETE. If its important, they'll email me back.

Oh yes..

I remember those days, filled with scouring Byte (no, physical copy, nearly didn't fit through the post flap) for modems because the game then was that local telco charged you a fortune for "approved" modems which tended to be rubbish in comparison of what you could order from the US - after all, if you're in the business of selling minutes, you don't want people to have access to stuff that lessens the duration of a call.

In those days I started travelling with a screwdriver and some crocodile clips, to bypass all that "we need to have a different plug than the neighbours" malarky that the electrics industry was using too - and, amazing as that sounds, that is still ongoing.

I cannot count the number of 25pin RS232 boxes I've made with switches for straight and cross over. Thankfully I started just after the rubber cup 300 baud times, but I did have a 1200/75 modem for a bit, upgrading as new standards came out.

As timing goes, a few days ago I actually came across a manual I wrote in 1989 which contained my then FidoNet address.

By the way, that was also the first time I became aware of the need for personal computer multi-tasking. It didn't take long before we started using DoubleDOS to run both BinkleyTerm and BBS and have some computing power left for doing other things, but then again, this was in an era where 640k indeed still appeared to be enough (well, ~ish - when we started moving to 286 and beyond, that limit pretty much went too).

I missed the beginning and almost the end

I first tried using a BBS in 1995 using the 14.4 kb modem I'd bought to access the internet at home. There were a few hobbyist resources that hadn't moved to the internet and some were better on BBS. But that changed quickly.

Back in the late 1980s, some work colleagues used a dialup connection to access hensa.micros, a big UK freeware/shareware software archive on JANET. Was this a direct connection or did some BBS operators have gateways?

HENSA: Higher Education National Software Archive, I think.

Ahm the days of non-resume..

I had a friend who had quite a well known BBS. Some evenings we'd amuse ourselves with clipping "spongers" (people who neglected the unwritten code of ethics that you were supposed to upload a few things as well if you wanted to download). We'd wait until the last 1% was in download and then drop the line. For that to work we'd have to switch off support for Zmodem as that would simply resume on reconnect, which would nullify our dastardy deeds :).

The spongers soon learned to go elsewhere.

Just in case you new kids thought being a BOFH was a new idea :).

Some would say ...

... that the BBS thing started with Community Memory in 1973.

Simpler Times Indeed

I got online in 98, so a little late to the party lines. But I was a good student of newsgroups (alt's: hacking a phreaking mostly) where alot of the then old hats lingered to offer history and support to newbies like me. Found my way onto hyperterm, and eventually into a few stateside boards. Things like that and messing with war dialling saw my first phone bill come in north of £200. Teen me's thirst for knowledge that month almost gave my mum a heart attack when she saw the bill.

I remember those days, I ran a couple of BBS system for customer support and used quite a few myself using Wards software on CP/M systems. There was very little fake news or other BS on any of them - it took an effort to get fired up and logged on, I never saw any automated access except to download stuff. Mostly it was techies but there were a few chatty systems around like The Well. People were mostly polite in those days, probably because Zuckerberg's younger brothers were wriggling around on the bathroom floor.

And then there was CIX

I was lucky enough to be in the same town as Europe's then largest BBS (Almac) so yippee for free local calls.

Sinclair Spectrum

I remember going online in the 80s with a Sinclair Spectrum and a 1200/75 modem (VTX5000)

Aside from Micronet 800 and Prestel there were a few hobbyists running BBSes on BBC Micros and even a Spectrum +3 with external drive.

Access hours were very limited - usually when the owner had gone to bed. I remember calling one night at 1am, they'd forgot to switch on the kit and the sysop's parents were very irate at getting a call at such an ungodly hour

Ah yes. After getting addicted to BBSs, then the quarterly bill came in, I wrote my own BBS software (for the BBC micro, later to be sold by Pace) so people could call me instead..! It worked, but I very quickly had to get my own phone line(s)! That ran for many years, even after I left home and moved to London for a new job; my dad got quite good at rebooting it when necessary.

Mis-use

I remember back in the mid-late 90s I was working for a small provider of Point-Of-Sale systems to a couple of niche industries. We had a requirement from one of our bigger customers to automate the sending of data from his shops to a central system but we had no way of doing it.

In the end I setup an instance of a BBS on each remote system (forget which one it was now), setup an "end of day" option on the system menu that would zip the data and put it into a specific place, then launch the BBS. Then I wrote a quick VB app to dial into each one and send the keypresses to initiate the download of that file.

Quite Heath Robinson but worked well!

Booting

I think the thing that stood out for me in this article was the bit about resetting. If I understood correctly, when the telephone rang they performed a "cold boot" on the computer and switched the disc motor on. Within a couple of rings (the PDF says the reset circuit had a 30 second grace period) the system was up and running and would answer the phone.

Fast booting was a given in the early days - I'll never forget the Boo-Beep of the BBC Micro - but that was a ROM-based system, not floppy-based. You'd be hard pushed to get a system up-and-running within 30 seconds these days. I think even my Raspberry Pis are barely within that time, even booting to the command line.

All good stuff. I first met a BBS at school. We used occasionally to dial-in to the TTNS (The Times Network for Schools) system and join "discussions" with other school children around the country.

I'm young enough not to have bought my own first modem until the late 1980s. It was a 2400bps Amstrad thing that came with (IIRC) £30 of M&S vouchers! Initially I used it to remote-in to the Polytechnic's bank of modems connected to their VAX system so that I could do coursework (or just read the Poly's message boards, one of which I used to moderate), but I soon discovered the delights of BBSes, though as I was still living with the parents at the time I had to be very careful not to overburden the phone bill. I actually paid real money for a VT100 terminal emulator to run on my Archimedes :-)

M.

Technically...

...you can run a BBS over teh internet, the problem is that nobody really want a text only client (but ASCII-porn is still cool).

My first "eureka" moment - understanding the concept of McLuhan's global village - came when posting a question (sitting in South Africa) on CompuServe (in Ohio) and receiving an answer (from Holland) ten minutes later.

For some or another reason this blew my mind, even though I had used FIDOnet for many a year.

mono.org

mono.org still going since 1992 - not many on it now, but it was what facebook is now. But used to have a good 50 users during peak times back in the day, there could only be a maximum of that number.

BBS's are on the Internet.

Some of the better ones allow both telnet/ssh *and* a web interface so you can choose your favorite method of logging in.

uncensored.citadel.org -- for example.

And your favorite community BBS is far more tolerable than the ultra-loud gibberishfest of the big socials.

Facebook BBS

From Fidonet to Facebook, it is all BBS to me.

I ran a BBS using wildcat from my bedroom. My users donated me another modem and paid for another phone line, used Qemm 386 to run two instances on the same PC. When i used to go to the pub and chat to girls about my interests, they always went with my mate baz for some reason. *shugs*

We might see a revival of some of that

I mean the web is getting increasingly complex technology wise, resulting in less and less browser engines (we're down to two!) and fewer websites. There is a growing discontent with the web as it is currently. You can see that by more and more people using browser extensions to disable Javascript selectively, or to disable trackers and ads.

There are more advanced terminal standards out there. The Videotex standards (you might know from Teletext, Minitel and Prestel) allow fancy graphics and even sound. In theory you could have something like Youtube on such a system if you extended the standard a bit. (there's official room for extension in the standard!)

https://github.com/bildschirmtext includes some software including a server and the old xcept code.

Today we have blazingly fast networks, we can afford doing all the hard stuff on the server.

Food Fight

Greatest BBS game ever. If you got the trenchcoat nobody could penetrate that armor and you could just pelt them with sloppy joes or something.

Road warrior

I can remember feeling like cool road warrior accessing my bbs mail on a Psion Organiser connected via the serial adaptor to a pocket modem that ran off a PP3 battery. Spent some time dismantling hotel phone sockets to get connected too ;-)

Vic-20 BBS

In 1984, I wrote a BBS for a Commodore Vic-20 with multiple rooms (message areas), email and an online game. Users could start their own rooms and make them public or private. It was very popular with users spending an average of 70 minutes on it.

One of my users got me my first job as a programmer, saying "Anyone who can wrte a BBS for a Vic can program!" Thirty-five years later, that same guy now wants me to work with him at Google.

Digital Corp

There it was. The workstation with modem and a muffler. Quick in the side door, via key escape, I blame BASIC reqs. #beepdoopbedoopbeep #soundlikethenewdoorbellimadeformyexamproject

In England in 1979 a passing acquaintance begged a room for the night. He then produced an acoustic modem and wanted to get on to various BBS - all in the USA. Given the price of transatlantic phone calls in those days - sorry no.

Happy days indeed

Made some good friends back in the day. Forum-80 Hull, Betelgeuse-5, the old BBC BBS (with Innocence the Sysop). Spent way too much dialling the damn things up, but it was good, clean fun. Amiga 1000 with a Hayes 1200/75/ +1200/1200 modem.

Fido *woof*

Ran a Maximus BBS + gateway to a couple of Fido networks(Including the real thing) and many many door games.

I seem to recall BRE-2000[?] was really popular as it hooked into the Fido dialer allowing raids on other BBS systems

Was the bulk forum/mail/fido mail thingie BlueWave?

I clearly remember zone mail hour & the songs the MFM drives + modem made as mail went in and out of that system :)

Ahhh the good bad old days :)

BBS Days and Links386 Golf Simulator

Back in the day, one of my best friends actually had a second dedicated phone line for his BBS named "The Pub" (USA for those wanting to know) and he and myself and some other close knit set of computer nerd friends would play a round of Links386, upload the "recorded play" file to the BBS, and each of us would then download everyone else's corresponding "recorded play" and then play it back in the simulator, and you could basically "watch" your previous round of golf (of which you knew the final outcome/score), but with the added bonus of watching your buddies playing their rounds (which you did not yet know what score they recorded on the course). So it was like playing golf against each other, only not in "real time", but was still fun to do. Heck I still have an old "printed out" score sheet of one of our matches, and I looked at the date on the scorecard the other day and it's March 1st 1993, and realized that was nearly TWENTY FIVE YEARS ago, amazing. LOL

Usenet anecdote

Tangential but worth recording for posterity.

A well known guitarist with an avid fan base passed on.

The next day a whole bunch of new newsgroups had been set up. Purpose? When looking at the list of groups by name in alphabetical order the new ones formed, graphically, the words "Jerry Garcia".

"I remember"

I can't recall when I've seen so many posts beginning with "I remember"

Nice. :)

The Common Link

In Sweden an enthusiast called Ulf Hedlund wrote a BBS system based on the university KOM system. It was called TCL and had strengths in its ability to thread topics and avoid a hierarchical menu system. It was tuned for discussions, so paradoxically I set up a BBS based on it which was a file tank using the fast HST modems which became available in the late 80's. I brought it with me when I moved back to England in 1993. I tried to make it bomb-proof. In 1996 we had a robbery which cleaned out all my tech stuff except for the BBS computers, which were caseless. I no longer had any way of administering it, but it ran continuously for 3 years until the power supply on the server failed.

Ham Radio

My use of BBS was limited to ham radio.

1200baud (or 9600 if you had an unfiltered audio port on the radio) and it was enough for everything we wanted.

In the latter years, you did it by simply plugging into the sound card of a PC and using appropriate software to work as a modem, which had the advantage of opening up other modes like SSTV (pictures) too.

Leconfield RCPM

I never said "goodbye" when I pulled the plug on this - the last SCSI drive died and there was nothing I could do. Started off with 4 or 5 10mb seagate drives

System was multiuser Turbodos (cpm clone) with the ability to drop out of the BBS bit into the command prompt and use system commands for up/downloading.

Such good fun.

SysOps ALT-MAN

Sorry, slightly drifting off topic .....

- does anyone remember (1990s) a great west of England BBS run by SysOp under the name of ALT-MAN? I forget the name - details please !!!

Huh.

Used to run a BBS. You can still find it in old lists published online, or at least last time I looked. It's gone by several names but you might find it as Ophiophile Opus.

I was in Pennsylvania for the Great Blizzard of 1978. It wasn't the center but still hit is pretty hard.

I was also in North Dakota for the Great Storm of 1975. Guess I was just lucky. These days I'm in northern California. Meteorologically dull. Don't really even get earthquakes up here.

There has been a telnet BBS resurgence

There are a lot of BBS out there now, actually. We're in something of a resurgence. The systems are just accessed via telnet, but often are running on vintage hardware by way of a bridge device. I rotate the system I use to "dial in" between Amiga 1000, Apple IIe, Atari 520ST, TI-99/4A, Apple //c, Apple IIgs, and a "new" Tandy 1000HX I setup over the holidays specifically to use as my main BBS-riding machine. Some of the BBS I frequent presently are:

Level 29 ( bbs.fozztexx.com ), Black Flag ( blackflag.acid.org ), Particles ( particlesbbs.dyndns.org:6400 ), A80sAppleIIBBS ( a80sappleiibbs.ddns.net:6502 ), Cottonwood BBS ( cottonwoodbbs.dyndns.org:6502 ), Heatwave BBS ( heatwave.ddns.net:9640 ).

I talk a bit about my BBSing in this post (among others) on my blog: https://bytecellar.com/2017/05/30/the-wonderful-wifi232-bbsing-has-literally-never-been-easier/

Some of these BBS have an actual dial-up line as well, but most are telnet only. Try it - it's great fun!

bp

Some flood to ur punch cards: @TBL

How do you find the idea to "switch off the IN" in some definite countries?