Ye Old Neighborhood BBS

Any of you 'old folks' here remember any old BBSes you used to hang out on?

I first got on the Internet dialing up a scuzzy little local BBS that had Usurper, L.O.R.D. and a few other neat door games running. They ran the thing from a smokey trailer on a rundown old lot outside of town. Eventually, they began offering Internet access through pa.net and ran off with everyone's money once it added up.

I bring this up because I just happen to have recently downloaded a copy of Usurper and the local-play patch. Pretty neat game actually.

http://come.to/usurper

I'm thinking of setting up a BBS to let people play stuff - only trouble is the long distance charges...

Anyway... how many of you geriatric geeks (like me) remember doing that stuff? How many of you whippersnappers don't even know what a BBS is?

/me is a whippersnapper with not a clue what the old fogey is speaking of. my first internet experience was with dial-up Prodigy account. my friend and I, 11 years old at the time, spent hour after hour in lesbian chat rooms being little asswipes ...lol, and no matter how many hours we spent it NEVER got old, that is until our parents account was terminated and we were beaten.

BBSs were fun until a bunch of little punks took over... (I'm really showing my age, I was old when people BBSd!)

LORD and fidonet, had to have my daily fixes. I wasn't much into Usurper, but there were a few others if I could remember what they were called...

I remember dialing up with my old C-128 (had fun hacking that thing to upgrade the video memory... soldering memory chips is fun... NOT) on a 1200 baud modem (I was ecstatic when I got my Hayes 9600) and downloading my fido subs. Fido was SO much better than USENET. The lag and ease of banning kept away the trash.

CTB,
PA.net is still around. Maybe not the same place, but definitely still around. They are in a building just around the block from my Carlisle, PA computer store. At least it is one of their locations.

They have expanded somewhat. They are an isp, and they are selling T1's.

My first online was with Compuserve, back when it was a big thing. My first modem was 9600, and then I upgraded to a 14.4!! Smokin'....

Then I spent big bucks to get a Creative Labs ISA sound card/modem combo, at a whopping 28.8.

Now, I find myself complaining about my T1.

I hated BBSs...seemed all I could find were little kiddies trying to show off their skills or sysops who demanded a whole bunch of hero worship. No thanks. Of course I was a kid back then to, but not a kiddie...

I ignored the internet all together until broadband came around in the late 90s. I think my last modem was a 9600 then I went straight to cable.

Yeah, I participated in two BBS's years ago. Good 'ol days on a 2400bps modem and an IBM XT, haha.

I used BBS a few times but not that ofte. When the internet started coming out I used it a bit, was dialling using 14.4Kbps Hayes modem... man those were the days. When Netscape Navigator was king of the browser market and some people still used NCSA Mosaic.

I was not old then, I was about 13 or 14 when this was happening. I didnt use the net that much since I didnt have my own account till a while later.

First modem - Hayes 2400. Blazingly.... slow. Eventually we "upgraded" to a 14.4 modem. To this day, I've never actually gotten Internet access in my house up over 33.6 thanks to a crummy phone system in the nieghborhood

Heh - LORD is fun, but it's not nearly as involved as Usurper. I like buying all the various types of equipment (I don't like "classic" mode where you can only buy a weapon and an armor and nothing else). But man, how can you not love a game that lets you go from a brothel to a drug dealer to church with little or no consequence?

thedude -

pa.net is still around, but the folks that they were using to sell Internet access to in western Perry county aren't because they split with everyone's money (can't remember who they were... they used to run their access point out of a dirty little trailer on the outskirts of Newport). I think pa.net got smacked by that pretty bad and it really held them back when they had a chance to blow up in the area.

I used to play that game where you flew around from planet to planet trading various commodities like "trinkets", "ice packs", etc. That game was great not for its play value, but for its sense of humor. I also used to play a more serious one where you could nab a planet to operate from and you had to go from port to port trading minerals, agriculture, and technology or something like that.

infamous -

Heh... You started at my "2nd stage" of Internet wonder... I eventually got an AOL account and used to spend a lot of time in the "Teen" chat rooms being obnoxious (and self-righteous). Guess the more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?

Oh yeah, I remember BBSes fondly. My first experience was my HS mainframe computer which I helped write a BBS for. Afterwards, I got a 2400 modem and found BBSes I could dial into. I used that for about 3 years. Then I had a 14.4 for a couple years after that. What speed!

After I got married, my wife was always bored around the house (she doesn't drive) and so I tried to get her interested in BBSes, but it was too nerdy for her. So ignorently, I got her an AOL account where she could talk to people in chat rooms. Boy was that slow on a 14.4 modem and a 16Mhz Mac! So we upgraded to a Mac clone and a 56K modem.

It was about that time that I learned that when I want something new, all I need to do is convince my wife that she wants it too. Hehe. Everytime I upgrade my computer, she gets my old one, which is better then her old one.

Good old times...

I ran my own BBS for several years, using a self written program on a 286, later 386. The final version could even network several nodes via ZCONNECT (those who know fido probably know it too). I called it "number nine", also the name of my BBS, because It took me 9 approaches till it finally worked like I wanted it to
This was how I started "real" programming. Started with hayes 2400 too, when it broke I got a 14.4. Hanging out mainly in the german BBS scene, US calls were like $6 per minute then and I was not into phreaking and that stuff...

Gee, I really could not understand what people like about that "internet" at first. It was so different. Our scene was small and you knew most users personally. You could even trust some of them

to dog135: I managed to "infect" my GF too. I showed her XPoint (a offline multi-network-homed newsreader, maybe somebody remembers it?) - and she liked to chat.

I just re-read the thread...


There is still BBSs around... No long distance charges if you use telnet

My office buddy used to run his BBS (Success BBS) out of Riverside, California. He says, he used Wildcat software and can't remember how many members he had (he says, "it's was a lot, over a 1000 for sure").

Me, I went straight to the net back in 86 (or was it 87) or so, thanks to dad. In those days, the only thing available was e-mail. My dad had this 1200 Baud modem and a 10 MHz 386 with a 80 MB drive. Since DOS 3.3 could only use a max of 32 MB per logical drive, he had two 30 MB DOS partitions and used the remaining 20 MB for a Xenix partition (Yes, my first *NIX was written by Micro$oft ). The Xenix partition was used, whenever my dad needed to send or receive e-mail (IIRC, mail delivery was by UUCP and got delivered twice a day or so).

Sorry I got a little offtopic there

nah, no long distance - then I just have to content with another 6000 potential security hazards