BBS Days - Who's been around since then ?

**Gobby** · 03-02-2005, 01:48 PM

Yeah, I used to run a BBS with my Dad, we had 6 incoming nodes running on a 8port serial card with 6 38,400 modems, we also had a 6 CD Pioneer CD autochanger, its still about somewhere. We ran it before the 'net became popular, still have the board backed up somewhere! And it all ran on a low end pentium Pro

**Custommx3** · 03-02-2005, 02:33 PM

lol I was dialing up on BBS w/ my 800 baud modem on my c64. lol @ all the c64 stuff I had. I had my own wildcat BBS for a year or so.

**mpfjr** · 03-02-2005, 03:49 PM

I was a sysop of a VBBS board in so.cal. It was really really nice and a lot of fun. I think I hosted over 30 door games and since I was a multi-node bbs a lot of them were multi-player.

Also was a regional cordinator for wwiv net and virtualnet and fidonet.

**Gunmaster** · 03-02-2005, 05:48 PM

http://www.synchro.net/sbbslist.html

**Question** · 03-02-2005, 09:36 PM

ah vbbs...many an hour i spent writing vscript..

**mpfjr** · 03-03-2005, 04:03 PM

Originally Posted by Question

ah vbbs...many an hour i spent writing vscript..

Yah, until version 7 came out and changed a bunch of stuff then I kinda gave up.

I ran the os/2 version of vbbs.

It was HEAVILY scripted. You couldn't even recognize it as a vbbs board.

Did you belong to any of the scripting groups?

**tj!2k4** · 03-04-2005, 02:51 AM

O werd, just saw the thread, haven't read through it yet, but felt the need to share, since the BBS era is so near and dear to my heart.. =)

I ran two boards in 914 (Westchester, NY) in the early/mid 90s. My first was called "The Punk Planet", which lasted about a year, until I graduated from high school. Then I moved upstate and started my second BBS "..iNSOMNiA.." which was up for a little over 2 years. Although PCBoard was ever so popular, I went with Wildcat! - and painstakingly went through each and every prompt string and customized the entire board. Aside from the initial logon telling you that it was WC you would never have known. =) Had over 100 doors.. oh man.. bnu/fossil drivers, seperate node configurations.. some of those doors were a real pain in the *** to get running properly!

When I get done with a couple of other projects I'd love to revive it as a telnet board =)

Although I enjoyed playing all the Sierra games when I was younger (King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry), BBSing/communcation was actually what got me really interested in computers. A friend of mine ran a BBS, and when I saw what he was doing, I thought it was the coolest **** I'd ever seen, and spend pretty much all night every night for the next couple of years in front of the computer calling BBSes up/downloading and working on my own BBSes.

And then, just as video killed the radio star, the Internet slaughtered the BBS era.

What's funny is that one day in the early '00s, I decided to do a search for BBSes and I came across a listing for the 914 BBS list at http://bbslist.textfiles.com, and as I was going through it, I thought to myself "I remember that board.. and that one.. and that one.. and I used to work with that guy.. and that guy.. and there's my buddy's board.. and there's my protege's board.. and oh **** there's mine!" =) And I can honestly say, it was not until I saw this list for the first time a couple of years ago, that I found out that there was another of another board in 914 with a similar name.

There's actually a BBS documentary that's supposed to be out soon http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/. My gf pre-ordered it for me, but it's still not out. Damn delays.. =\

Anyway, here's to the glorious BBS days

**alti** · 03-04-2005, 03:39 AM

wow, thanks for that link that is by far the most complete list I ahve seen. I found some on there I had forgotten I visted. My two favorite were "the link" and "the outer limits" but there were so many on there I visited.

good times

**tj!2k4** · 03-04-2005, 03:43 AM

To be honest, when I came across it initially, I was shocked that I even made the list! Not due to lack of popularity as the modems were literally always off the hook, but I never knew anyone was keeping tabs..

**alti** · 03-04-2005, 03:50 AM

ya that is real good, some of those were real obscure, I even searched for my own name because I had one I put up a night for my friends as i did not have a dedicated phone line, it would have scared me if they had that on the list

think I am going to do a quick search on the net and try to find a copy of VBBS, now i want to try to set it back up for nostalga.