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Telnet BBS Guide

Telnet BBS Guide

kmstout

Comments (30)

  • atomic_cattlepr
    Definitely get a nostalgia buzz thinking about the early 1990's BBS scene. Had a very vibrant community of BBS users in my city during that time.It is ironic and somewhat interesting that the biggest aspects of the BBS scene that most people seem to miss (the community/local culture, meeting like-minded people in real life, some of the games, ANSI art, Echomail discussions), are all things borne from the technical limitations of the time. Slow modems and high long distance charges meant most people kept to their local boards. Games had to be designed in text with only a rudimentary colour scheme (sure, there was RoboBoard, RIP, NAPLPS and other graphical protocols - none which really caught on all that much) and still be compelling. Most were limited turn based (which meant being forced to only spend a couple hours a day playing, then having to wait). "World-wide" networks like FidoNet were dog-slow by today's standards (it was a toss-up whether a message would reach its recipient faster on an FTN network or via snail-mail), so discussion threads would last for days but only have several hundred messages in them to sort through.I remember the years and work spent to try to improve on these limitations. Galacticomm and eSoft had their huge hackish ways to get past the non-multitasking nature of DOS and the IRQ limits of PCs to allow people to run huge multi-line boards on regular PCs. We saw Planet Connect dramatically lower the cost of distributing FidoNet packets via satellite downlink (still needed telephone uplink if you were sending, though). We saw big serial breakout boards and modem boxes (Galactibox?) come out. And of course, faster modems. Up to rip-roaring 33.6kbps speeds at the peak of the BBS era.Ultimately, the internet and the "real" operating systems that are commonplace today overcame those limitations in ways that were pretty unfathomable to most of us common BBS users and sysops of the day. Unfortunately, BBS's today really only appeal to those of us who had lived through the struggle of configuring COM ports or QWK readers (or for many of us, a tosser/scanner, door game, FOSSIL driver, or getting DESQview working just right).
  • hollowonepl
    BBSes is one of those last places in the internet where you still can find your tribe without algorithms and, too much crying about politics. I’m glad it’s still hard UX entry to many as we don’t need many there. Just those enough few who get it
  • _whiteCaps_
    I spent a lot of time playing Barren Realms Elite and Legend of the Red Dragon when I was a teen.
  • bityard
    Wow, there are a lot more of these online than I would have guessed. Over a thousand. Feels like it would take forever to find one with a regular active user base. My off-the-cuff guess would be that 99% of them are ghost towns, kept online by the sysops only for the nostalgia factor. (But I'd very much like to be wrong about that!)Related: I'm (pleasantly) surprised to see the rash of BBS-related content on HN recently, as I've been working on my own (rather niche) BBS retrospective article for the past month or so.
  • beej71
    BBS story... A local BBS had an issue where one of the features would cause it to crash when activated. The sysop worked around it by changing the main menu to read: [T] Crash BBS and just trusted people wouldn't ever try it more than once.
  • gwbas1c
    I tried getting into Telnet BBSs 20 years ago, but quickly got so sucked in that I was afraid it would turn unhealthy and I stopped doing it.Tangentially, what do people use for telnet programs today? I used to just use the telnet command line on Windows, but that's gone for very obvious security reasons. Have most BBSes moved to ssh or similar?
  • smalltorch
    I think onion services are actually a really great way to make a BBS service. It's extremely easy to setup.Here's a little demo forum I've been working on. Can runs on a potato.https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torumplus/-/raw/main/Torum...
  • wickedOne
    speaking of bbs (and reading the sentiments in this thread) i just wanted to make you aware of "BBS the documentary" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460402/it's been a long time since i've seen it, but from my recollection it was a pretty descent watch
  • faded242
    Reminds me that I wanted to expose an old T.A.G. BBS to the web as a nostalgia project recently. Feel free to check it out, create an account, play some LORD, Trade Wars 2002, Usurper, Messages, etc. I just wanted the experience to live on as I remember it with nothing more than a modern web browser required. https://nightwatchbbs.com
  • nonethewiser
    I was playing around with making a Pico-8 like fantasy console, but DOS inspired. Telnet support is on the list of todos.
  • ChrisArchitect