BBSes

[amptor]

Here's a topic that comes to mind on many forums throughout the internet. Anyone else here remember BBS days? Not that I miss the low transfer rates and such but what got me started on computers, dos, and windows 3.0->3.1 etc were bulletin board systems that were advertised in free local computer magazines.

So here's a go, some more interesting ones that I can remember I was on..

The Lost Path, razor 1911 affiliated to some small extent, sysop I believe was archmage whom I bought my first SNES copier from.. 16 megabit Firefox, pro fighter clone
&TOTSE, yes they had a BBS and they have a web site that is still running
Spatula City, located in Vacaville..had a lot of console and was where I found advertising to pick up a brand new super wildcard dx with 32 megabit of ram..also had information where to acquire other devices which today are highly sought after

... names of a lot of boards escape me by now but if I loaded up a copy of terminate I could probably view all of them listed in there. Luckily I still have a trusty Pentium 233mmx that can run most of the old applications clear back to 386 days. I may have to fire up some backups on there and see what I can find.

Also I met the last sysop of BIT USA, (banned in the usa one of the popular boards in ACiD packs but in a time when warez boards were more supreme than art.. art boards came about later on as a fad after demo scene boards)

I used to have a long log from a bbs called USS Enterprise which was a large console board up til about the beginning of the N64 scene, but it got lost when I hit the save button thinking that it'd append to the log.

But looking back to the BBS days, I didn't know as many people as I know through the forum and irc and also things were quite a bit more strict. It wasn't just ratio but also how boards were administrated and the types of people you'd see posting. Gbatemp seems a lot more free flowing than the old dialup boards and there are a hell of a lot more posts here than any board I was on. The way things are set up kind of reminds me of the old bulletin board, particularly art boards I was on. What I mean is that you can watch your post ratio and try to raise it and of course some boards can implement other features such as online games a la LOTR and Trade Wars and also polls.

I also ran my own BBS while in high school but it was difficult to get affils and the courier group I had on it just flat out sucked (NBC - no bullshit couriers...but actually they were total bullshit by all means). Groups usually wouldn't cater to single node boards and pretty much had a strict elitist attitude which still prevails in some ways to this day on the internet.

 

[FAST6191]

Heh TOTSE, I recall that site. Never knew they had a BBS though.

Alas my internet usage only really started in the mid 90s with plain old http based stuff so I am unable to join you in nostalgia on this occasion.

 

[Devante]

This already has a topic, actually.

Here's the link -> link

I used to have a BBS in Dallas, TX for a long time.
Maximum Meltdown!

 

[rest0re]

HELL YEA

 

[pandas0nic]

intersting for those in the know:

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/

 

[amptor]

Well I can see why people miss bbses, back in those times members of boards were all local, depending on the board you were on. LD users were a pleasant community because they were paying for the calls unless phreaking which I don't think was very rampant when I was on boards.

I was just thinking about a few boards I was on, should still get that old terminate or telix out and check my list. I was on Lapse of Reason ][ sysop Pink Floyd but that was well after THG was abandoned so I didn't see the glory days of that bbs. It was kind of plain for a warez board but it was kind of interesting. I'm sure ol' floyd still has all his oldschool warez backed up on DC2120 tapes.

There was a BBS in Ukiah run by a guy called Tagger and I remember when his board was getting kinda run down then he added I guess a gig or two which was still big at the time and put all of his offline warez online and I could just go in and download whatever since I was LD it had like no ratio which was cool. Then I could bring those files down to the 510 and south 707 boards and trade them for credits. Ah this might be the one I was on: Ground Zero 707 Tagger 4 Nodes, I barely remember. It was a sweet board though.

Spatula City was a well known PC and console board in Vacaville running PC-Express. I used to up PC stuff there to get credits for consoles. Since I was LD I think I had a lenient ratio but I'd run out of credits pretty fast for SNES.

For The Ghetto a guy I knew let me use his account there. I'd just telnet in, although the place was extremely local to me but I don't even know if he had an actual telephone line modem hooked up any more at the time. That place definitely was nothing like it used to be after it was put back up, I guess people were worried that the board would get busted again or something I dunno. It just wasn't active on files, but it was pretty active in message boards and one liners. It had like maybe five snes games online lol. Ghetto was rumored to be mail couriered by Fairlight but I found out from the sysop that wasn't true. But he may have kept archives on DAT anyway. Actually he told me that since he was running AMI-X, he couldn't even USE the warez that his board had. He was basically a Fairlight drop site I guess.

And I was recently reminded a lot about art scene boards. These boards sometimes were warez bbses that sysops put back up on the same phone # but without the warez or pd sections and made the whole board about art. People would call in locally and they'd manage an art group on these boards. Soon afterwards they got people calling from long distance and got more competative in the art scene. It was a lot safer than warez because there was no piracy involved, but some boards got caught up in the free 1-800 # scam which basically was some sort of phreaking where they'd call the phone company and ask if their 800 # line was set up or something and basically would get a free 800 # line so that people could call LD for free. That was pretty interesting, but I remember at least one board actually paid for their 800# legit. Also 800#'s typically were busy constantly and the sysop could see who is on it and keep the quality art sceners on it and basically just drop carrier on people who weren't doing art.

I made my own ansi when I was in high school. I experimented a bit with ripping and then I was like nah I just want to make my own. So I made my own bbs logos and scroll ansi files and also made an entire ViSiON/2 bbs menu set based off of KNiGHT*TiME's V2 menu set. I was also in his group KoF (knights of fire) for a very small amount of time before he joined another group, I forgot if it was REM or ACiD trial or whatever. I don't think he ever got in ACiD though, that was real tough to get in. I remember one group like iCE or something split and I think a guy I knew Chainsaw/EXiLE (another art group which most ansi were made by him) joined. Hmm what was it called UNiON, I forgot how they came to be in existance I think it was a split off a group though.

I used 2 different nicks back in those days, amptor is an internet alias. Sometimes I would go by Jaguar, I think I may have used this on spatula city but it's been too long to remember. I wasn't too creative with nicks back then as I am now. I also used those aliases on irc back in 1992 up til I don't know when. My nicks were so common on the internet that eventually I had to think of something else. I think I came up with amptor in 1995 or 1996.

Well I still also do have my 14.4 Zoltrix ISA modem. I remember I went to datatex and bought it for something like $125. They had to order it because they didn't stock it, just had me show them an ad in the computer newspaper and at the time UPS was on strike, so I had to wait an extra week or two for it to be delivered. Then I sold my 2400 baud to a guy because I didn't need it any more. I bought it used for $20 and sold it for $20. He said it worked great always and I gave him an account on my BBS but he didn't really know how to navigate an elite board too well which is totally understandable, I remember what those things were like when I was new to it all.

USS Enterprise was also a huge console board. I used a "borrowed"

account on there for a bit and downloaded a bunch of stuff. I was crazy though because I called LD and couldn't figure out their telnet. My phone bill to enterprise typically was about $60/month including some short calls to Spatula City I'd imagine.

Surely enough I was on a lot of PD boards. Two of them had backdoors to warez eventually. One in Livermore was run by a guy who wanted to get the underground feel so he set up back doors and passwords to access that part of his board. Eventually he coded some high quality map editor for Doom and got really serious into that and probably shut down the pirate section for various reasons I can't recall. Also a board in Hercules started out PD but he had connections with a courier in Canada so he had it set up to charge user like $20 a month for unlimited downloads. So I saw a lot of PWA and Razor1911 releases on there but eventually he took his board down to go out and do other things.

I met the last sysop of BiTUSA, he's a cool dude. He basically bought the computer along with the BBS that was running on it and had the board running for a short time. I remember the guy was into having the latest video cards and stuff but he spent so much money on dating women that he normally would re-sell his 2 month old computer equipment to a friend.

I was on Freekworld Oldskool WHQ but I don't remember at all ever telnetting to it. I'm also on The Yard but I think it's down.

I can see what people miss about bbses opposed to being on the internet. Community, safe browsing, no spyware, no adware, no malware, no floods of spam, a lot easier to choose who you talk to, more privacy (freedom of information as long as someone didn't rat out your board I guess).

I believe I am one of the few who ran ViSiON/2 without too many problems. A lot of people complained it was too buggy and unstable. I can vouch that it didn't run good at all in Windows 95, but it ran fine for me in dos 5.0 and 6.0, 6.xx. Also in that Qemm Desqvu I had it running fine but later versions of Qemm386 gave me headaches. It was cool to troubleshoot though, just a learning experience. We used to have to set jumpers for our hardware back in those days too and resolve irq conflicts and such which most people don't have to deal with these days. I last ran ViSiON/2 0.84b and ran 0.72 for a long time. Some of the mid versions had way too many issues. I also didn't know how to code at all so I hacked my data file so people wouldn't be able to actually hack into the BBS with the new user exploit. I'm not sure why nobody ever hacked in that way, I caught a guy on my cosysops account and blacklisted my own cosysop then put my best friend on cosysop status after that too which turned out to be better for the board anyway.

btw - Road to Whiskey Town BBS sysop Euke had the best Tradewars 2002 games going ever. That was a ton of fun. Also KNiGHT*TiME ran LoRD which I'd play on his art board most and I eventually added all these games to V/2 as it wasn't hard. Come to think of board software, I wanted to run LiQUiD but couldn't get it to work well at all so I scrapped it and after ViSiON/X was a huge failure on my system I settled down with V/2. The latest razor1911 release of V/X was great but for some reason I just kept sticking with V/2 because it just grew on me so much and was just huge nostalgia as far as bbs software goes. Very cool stuff.

 

[lanman31337]

I got onto BBS with my Commodore 64 and Prodigy!

 

[amptor]

I got into bbses with an amd 386sx/33, turbo mode was 33mhz and deturbo mode was 16mhz. amd made good cpu's up til the pentium came out then it all went downhill and I stuck with intel from 486dx2/66 on.

I started calling the internet in 1992 in telix connecting to delphi and typing in the command "irc" to get on irc servers. I started somewhere then people told me to go to undernet for warez, undernet people told me to go to efnet. at least they were honest about where to go

Every time I used to get another delphi account, ID would come out with new warez to download from the internet lol. I got hexen then hexen II the next time I had an account. They were phreaked accounts anyway so I didn't pay for internet for years.

But seems that these days one wouldn't be using a terminal to connect to the internet, I'm not sure. It at least taught me a little bit how to use unix. Also going through shell even later on taught me how to type real fast and type numbers, which weren't covered very much in typing class. I learned how to type 3 times, it's not like riding a bike.

I still haven't got out my terminate or telix programs yet, they should be on FPS disc #1 my old bbs files archive. Amazing that with the amount of time I spent doing my bbs, I only ended up keeping/recovering 2 CDrom worth of data.

 

[Devante]

Anyone remember the door game "Crossroads" on MajorBBS systems?

 

[TrolleyDave]

Some boards I used to frequent in the UK were The Demons Forge, Flying Teapot, Graveyard and The Peach. I used to use an Anthrox board as well but I can't remember the name of it, it was run by The Beast.

I used to frequent a board in Canada (Missassauga) as well run by a sysop called Caffeine and a couple in the Toronto area. Plus I used to use the main THG board The Pits.

EDIT : Oh yeah, I got a couple of greets in some INC, THG and Anthrox intro's (can't remmber which releases) under the name Suicidal Tendencies from Night Ranger, Manx, Bryn Rogers and Hi T Moonweed if those nams ring any bells to anyone.

 

[amptor]

I managed to finally find a capture file, which I thought was long gone. I think I had more but I overwrote it when I hit print screen. I THINK this is USS Enterprise but DEATH ROW is listed on Pouet so this might just be DR I have no idea. I logged into a few places when I got in Oldskool and can't remember much, I mostly used ftp at that time and didn't really want to be slowed down by bulletin boards.

Here's a snippet:

DEATH ROW [5:SUPER NINTENDO] Menu (236 mins. left): l
Wait Damn-it! ...


Super-AmiLog by P0T-NOoDLE of ANTHROX ©1993 Gods'Gift

Node Name Group / Location On-Time Actions H:MM Up-K Dn-K
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Node 4 BEAViS - iNDEPENDENT - 02:40:29 [------] 0:02 0 0
Node 4 Elvin //-> M & S BBS M & S BBS PRESENTS

 

[TrolleyDave]

Pot-Noodle, that's a name I've not seen in a very long time! He was the king of Ami-BBS doors!

 

[rest0re]

there was pot-noodle interview at old hugi diskmagazine. i dont remember which one...

 

[Verocity]

I was being born in 1990..

 

[DjoeN]

Good Old Times

I remmeber my mother taking my 300baud modem and yelling i could work whole year to pay the last phonebill she recieved!
Telling it was her computer she paid for and she sure would not pay for the expenses i made, Asking where a called to.

When i explained bbs's outside belgium where better and had better stuff on it, she got totally nutz

So being tored away from my modem i could overtalk a friend in buying a 1200 modem (yeah i had a rich friend that day) for me
and he actually did in the form of a loan (i never had to pay off to him) i was damned happy

A Few years later a friend dropped RA on my desk telling how i could set up my own bbs, wich never got up due to my mother who found out

I also remmeber, getting an abo on pc-active (it had 5 1/2" flops with it) for newyears pressent from my mom in the hope i wouldn't use a modem anymore to get software, but the magazine just made me use the bbs more then she could ever wanted

And all that on a shitty good old XT 4,7Mhz (i still own that pc)

Oh yes, i also got a zx spectrum with modem then

and my friend gave his C64 to me cause he got an atari ST from his dad (dunno why, but i preffered the C64 instead of the Atari ST)

(About the friend, i lost contact a few years later, after i change school, but we where 2 hand on one belly

, My parentsd didn't like him as a friend of me, cause he was a bit higher in society, but his parentd didn't care, i could come in and out when i liked)

 

[amptor]

I pulled out my old BBS software on a CDR and tried running it. It won't run under vista but I can manage to get it running some way or another, maybe a virtual console of some sorts or just stick it on a PC with dos installed or boot off floppy etc.. I do have a P233mmx sitting next to my TV, it shoudl run fine on that as long as I put like dos 5.0 or above on it and don't try to tool around with windows 95. Err well windows 95 had dos7 right? that should work too. it was crying to me about EMS not being available. Last time I put up my BBS the user dialing in complained that it didn't display right but I dunno it seemed to work fine for me.. sometimes people don't have their terminal set up right for calling a board with so much ansi.

but sadly my second bbs installation isn't as interesting as the first, not sure if I backed it up but I got rid of the majority of my backup tapes and the drive is sitting somewhere. Actually what happened is I'd usually back up the warez to tape and then leave the board on its own on the hard drive. My guess is that if the hard drive would crash, I'd jump out to a bbs and download the software or pull the original software off tape or floppy with the ansi... bbses had most of my ansi anyways.

So I was looking at this program last night off of a wikipedia link and it says you can run any bbs software through telnet. So I might try to get it up and running but it's kind of a lost thing. I mean these bulletin boards provide a humongous amount more conversation than a bbs would. Plus the messages in mine mostly are flames between cambit, kyoshiro, and crono and I think that detracted a lot of users from my board. It pretty much became one of those typical 510 boards with not much activity. Everyone loved it when there was 2 or more nodes on a board. Some boards lied about having 2 nodes though.

I also found a lengthy text document within my bbs folder discussing how much NBC was a shitty group and people apologizing for applying to ACiD to create ansis for it. I don't think an ansi for that board was ever included in an ACiD pack, but I do remember they had some ansi and ascii for their courier group. Only good thing that came out of that was they gave me leech on an LD board but I didn't want to use it because the phone bill would be a lot of money. Nice board though, but overall I felt everyone in that group was lame, including the BBS they granted me access to. Heh I ended up calling out to Ground Zero and downloading there instead, which was much further away.

I'm going to try to see if I can get some logs from a guy on irc, but he's like real careful about stuff so I dunno. I wish he'd just take logs I want and do a 'replace all' on the passwords and stuff. Then we'd have some good text. The guy has huge logs of irc channels like #neogeo too.

 

[amptor]

I got my ViSiON/2 to load up in windows xp.. some menu sets are missing and my login screen changer program isn't working but I can probably get all that working too. not sure if I'm going to run it telnet, might try it out..but my board doesn't impress me a huge deal especially how things ended up. seems that I look back on it and everyone in the area code pretty much knew which nick belonged where and since I was on a lot of PD boards, I wasn't getting enough access to gain quality local and ld users so I pretty much got bored with it and took the bbs down. otherwise I can't see any evidence on my message boards of why I took it down. also my console sections aren't there, not sure why... maybe it was late and I just didn't see them last night. I supported PC and SNES, not sure about genesis... genesis files were hard to come by because everyone was hard pressed that snes was the superior console and that genesis sucked. however these days... I'd rather play genesis than snes because it seems to have more quality titles... snes was getting too many shitware in my opinion.