I am not quite sure how or what I was doing at the time, I guess I was just bumming around searching stuff on Google, but I came across this really great set of DVDs called BBS: The Documentary. This may be old news as the set was released back in 2005, but I have just finished watching it and though it was great.

It brought back memories of my brief stint in the BBS world, I am thinking it must have been somewhere between 1994 and 1996 just before I discovered the internet. I was even my own Sysop for a very short time, basically just my mates at the time would dial in to play games etc...

If you get a chance, and if you haven't already I would recommend the $40 price tag just for the trip down memory lane. There are some really interesting stories in there like the one about ARC and PKzip etc...

Was anyone here really big into the BBS scene back in the day ???

Cheers

Cris.

I was never in to all the FIDO stuff, but I used to be a fairly constant presence on an Atari 8-bit BBS in Brum called The ARK (later called The City)

The BBS software was custom written by the sysop, a guy called James Bastable, and when I started typing this reply, a phone number popped into my head... I had to dig out an old BASIC listing of a program I wrote and uploaded to the BBS, and I only had one digit wrong and two others transposed from the actual BBS number. I haven't called that number since about 1990!

The BBS was a lot of fun, but I wouldn't want the phone bills, or the 300 or 1200/75 baud connections again!

I think I'd seen that DVD advertised before, but you've reminded me they were working on one about all the old text adventures. I might just put in a pre-order for that one!
(Which sidetracks me neatly to this)

Yes. Heavily. But "back in the day" for me was between 1986 and 1993. I was already on the internet from 1989 and by sometime in 1994 it was pretty much all internet. I can't recall for certain but I think the last BBS I dialed into must have been no later than 1995 sometime.

Computers during that time... Commodore 64, Amigas (500, 2000, 3000) and a self-built Pentium 90 which ran the then-new Windows95 as its first and sole operating system. I'm proud to have never run DOS nor Windows 1-3.x

I threw away my ArcBBS+Manual sometime last year, spring clean and as much as it pained be to do, it had to be done.

Hugo's dedication in the front cover to his cats still bought a small chuckle.

I still long for some terminal software on windows & os x that are as good as (I remember it) ARCterm7. All the windows pieces of crap I've tried are,well, pieces of crap.

Yea, I hear that! Mt first modem was a 1200 model, I got it after a friend upgraded to a whopping 2400. In those days we used to go to computer fairs where you could get ex-corporate gear really cheap, but I can remember a 2400 being a really big deal and quite expensive.

Shrewsbury, where I am from lags behind the rest of the world, so in 1994 we must have been amongst a handful of people in the town doing this stuff. I can remember the first internet experience I had, I don't think I quite got it at the time. My mate had a Compuserve account and we used their gateway, I remember it being very very slow

I wish I could remember the name of the BBS I used to dial into, there was one locally to me in Ironbridge (of all places) and then another one I dialed long distance to, but at the moment it's lost in the archive section of the noggin.

I remember those times with great fondness, it really felt like we were doing something. The documentary brings up the topic that the internet seems somewhat removed where as BBS's felt very real and personal, and I think that's true on the whole. Even in a community like this.

Good times. It has got me looking for my old backup disks...

Cheers

Cris.

No true BBS experience for me. I was a little young. Closest I got to it was a video game BBS on Prodigy around 1992. Ah, Prodigy. How I don't miss you and your horrid timed pricing plans.

After a year on that message board, I didn't do much forum stuff for a looong time. I think I joined the Klipsch message board in 99-00, and then the empeg board in mid-2000, and those are pretty much all the communities I've been active in.

I somehow managed to miss the whole BBS thing, but that's mostly because, as a kid, I'd go with my father to his office on Saturdays where I had an account on the Unix systems (originally a VAX 11/780 running BSD in the early 80's, and typing on real, physical VT100's or CItoh clones of them), which means I was using Usenet, way way way back when.

I did a lot of old-school compuserve. I absolutely loved the wire service clipping they had. Long before anyone put newspapers online, the only way to get local news from across the country was a mailed subscription to a paper - 4 or 5 days late. Got my first real-world lesson in boolean searches there.

Now, I get most of my bbs time managing a modest vBulletin site.

-jk

I spent a lot of time as a kid in the 80s on BBSes, but I was never much into the social interaction. I was mostly there to play games and download games and generally poke around. Looking at an old phone list brought back some old memories. I also remember running up a huge bill on Compuserve one month by playing a lot of their online games. My mom was mad.

Ooh. Tymnet and Telenet. I don't quite remember what I did with those now, but it seems like I could use them to access long distance BBSes for free. I always got the impression that I wasn't supposed to be using it, though. Who knows?

Mine too!!! I think if they didn't go mad you weren't doing it right

I can remember doing 2 paper rounds during the week and working at the local computer games store on a Saturday to pay the phone bill and buy computer bits. I can't remember the year I was working in "Future Zone" but I know Rise of the Robots had just come out on the Amiga, because all I seemed to do was swap out duff floppy disks as I was on something like 14 discs and there was always one duff one in the set. I was an Amiga nut back then, I had a PC running MS-DOS but it seemed a little backwards at the time, which is why it got used for the BBS I think. I still have both my Amiga and that PC I think.

It just goes to show how behind the times we were in Shropshire, in 1994 having a modem was really cutting edge stuff! None of my Amiga owning friends had one, it was just us "freaks" with PC's as well. I can remember getting loads of pirate games for the Amiga but I never used BBS's for that, I can remember downloading loads of txt files on random stuff, and the odd grainy picture of half naked ladies.

It's really bothering me that I can't remember any of the names of the systems I dialled into, the BBS software I ran (my BBS was called X-Domain) or that I can't find my old floppy backups. Hmmmmmmmm.

Cheers

Cris.

I dialed into quite a few BBSes, with my first home PC, a "portable" 8088 with a built in 2400 baud modem. Usually logged into some to play the doors based games, and download a few of the fidonet group messages for offline reading. As I put together newer PCs, Telex was always the first program I made sure to get running.

One of the BBSes had an internet e-mail gateway, and that was my first visibility onto the internet. Back then I just figured it was a bigger fidonet.

Wikipedia has a list of all existing BBS software, sorted by system it ran on here.
I myself used ProBoard and later on PCBoard. I also tried Excalibur BBS later on, but ended up preferring PCBoard.

I started with a 2k4 modem (270 b/s download speed! Wow!), and then upgraded to 14k4, 16k8 (USR!) and later on 19k2 (Zyxel!). I still have my 16k8 US Robotics Courier modems (both ISDN and PSTN). Those modems were considered the nec plus ultra back then and most BBS'es I knew back then ran on those.

*Aaah*, the memories...

My first connection to the online world was Prodigy in 1991 on my Tandy 1000 EX with a 1200 baud modem. Later that year I was dialing into local BBSes, and by 1992 I'd started my own. After a brief experiment with WWIV BBS software, which I found a bit lacking in form and function, I ran Telegard and Renegade, eventually connecting to FidoNet (1:273/741, holla!) and becoming a hub for a couple of smaller Fido-style networks.

My board was focused on social interaction on the message boards, though the door games were pretty popular as well. We did a bit of warez trading in the file section, but I tried to keep that to a minimum to avoid the line being tied up 24/7 with file transfers.

I have many very fond memories of those days. Being part of the local BBS scene gave me a creative outlet, as well as a level of social interaction that I couldn't get in school. I made many great friends from local BBSes, including some that went to my school, but who I never got to know well until we started interacting online.

It was really fun because it all felt very cutting-edge and new at that time, and we were all part of this exclusive club (or at least we thought it was exclusive.) BBSing defined much of who I was as a teenager, and undoubtedly pushed me in the direction of a career as a software developer.

I connected to a few Internet-connected BBSes before I went off to college, but I think I liked BBSes more at that time because they had a local feel to them. Aside from the few folks who could afford unlimited long distance plans, a vast majority of BBS users were from the same area code as you were, which means you had a lot more in common with them, and you could go meet them in person if you wanted to. The internet felt too "big" to me at that time, whereas dialup BBSes had that Cheers "everyone knows your name^[[D^[[D^[[D^[[Dhandle" feel to them.

Going off to college and getting on the Internet more, I started to see the writing on the wall for the BBS scene as I knew it, but I still kept mine running for much of my freshman year. After I euthanized it, I kept a floppy disk backup of the BBS in the hopes of keeping it as a time capsule, but of course the disks went bad and it was irrevocably lost. I'd love to be able to peek at some of those chat logs and forum discussions some 15 years later.

I still haven't seen the BBS documentary, but I've seen some clips from it and it looks like something I'd enjoy watching. Thanks for reminding me about it and bringing back some good memories.

I once upon a time set up a Maximus BBS, but never really went live with it. I do remember the first time I dialed into a BBS though it was for a local computer parts seller. You would dial in to get their current price list. The first time I logged in they asked for a handle. I had no clue so started looking around my room for inspiration. I saw my waterbed there and Waterman popped into my head. I've pretty much run with it ever since. Adding numbers as "waterman" was already taken first on AOL, then on Yahoo.

The Millennium Empire, 2:335/633
My BBS, active from 1995 to 2001.

The Millennium Empire used to run Maximus (BBS), Squish (TOSSER), Binkley (MAILER). And, oh yes, my dad was sooo mad when I got my first phone bill over 1.000.000 lire (500 current euros) just on my own, pesonal line which I had convinced im to get me. Since then, I gave up a lot of slip and never got an even just close bill any longer.

TME used to run on a 486 DX2 66Mhz, but got upgraded a lot. It even had 2 ISDN dedicated lines on USRobotics Courier-I modems.

Then there was the Internet.

I still keep all software, message base, file base.

My good old "sysop" days.
Thanks for bringing back memories since then!

P.S.: I do know the BBS documentary pretty well. I bught it when it was released, and actually I've been keeping track of its early development, eagerly waiting for its release. I think I recall some discussion here on the Empeg boards regarding BBSs from some years ago.

My first 'online' experience was browsing the various Acorn BBS', including Hugo's old one. Although I had to do it with my Dad's old works Mac Classic and a fax modem pilfered from a Newton Messagepad. I'll be honest, it wasn't massively interesting. But it was infinitely easier to get PD software that way instead of having to get someone to stick them on a floppy and mail it to you!

My first experience of the internet was in 1994 while working for a radio station over the summer. They'd started with a Compuserve account and quickly moved onto Demon's 'tenner a month' service. First on a 14.4 modem then in 1996 they moved to ISDN. Browsing over dual channel ISDN was seriously speedy. I was their 'webmaster' until I left for uni in '97.

My first home internet experience was in 1995, using someone else's Demon account at weekends when I could pinch the school's old 14.4 USR Courier that they used for RAS! One of the perks of having a parent who's a teacher at said school...

There you go, the old thread since 2001

I can remember dialing into a few of the ones on this list:

http://bbslist.textfiles.com/716/

I spent most of my time on "The Tower of Zot"...I can't remember my handle though.

My friend started out with Compuserve, but I somehow bagged us tickets for a trade show at the NEC. There we picked up a couple of floppies for the new ISP Pipex Dial. The floppies gave you a months internet for free, you just paid for the call. When the month ran out we worked out a trick that got us another month, then another, then another... it was the closest we ever got to phreaking anything! I can't remember how long it was until Pipex changed something but it must have been a while because by that time BT had started their packages and I moved over to that as soon as it was released I think.

I remember being very excited that Demon had opened a PoP in Shrewsbury, or at least on a Shrewsbury number, but by this time I think it was 1996 and I had moved upto Leeds to work for BT. I can remember my first day on the job asking about what work I will get to do with the internet, and no one had a clue what I was going on about. It wasn't too difficult to rise to the top of that pool!

I remember getting all my Amiga PD stuff from 17 Bit Software in Wakefield. I used to go an visit them from time to time. They used to have what seemed at the time to be 100's of Amiga copying stuff all the time, but in reality would have been no more than 10-20 machines I think. I am not sure why, but I never connected my Amiga and the modem, it just wasn't something I thought the Amiga did, PC's did geeky stuff like that

Cheers

Cris.

Ooohh! Great(!) link, Claudio!

It even has a post by fvgestel, whom I kinda displaced, it seems.

Aaahh..

Nice look back. I remember having a cross compiler set up on an 8 way Xeon box at work. Made it nice and quick to roll in the various patches from fvgestel and the others. Then some linux kernel hacker came along and made it easier :-)