For the old-time BBS freaks
 

Just so you know, there are a LOT of "old-time" BBS's operating on the internet through telnet. Telnet BBS's run old Wildcat! and PCBBS software and have all the kickass door games like Barren Realms Elite, Solar Realms Elite, Legend of the Red Dragon, Tradewars 2002, etc. Just fire up a search for "telnet BBS" and the names of old door games you liked to play. You'd be surprised at the memories it brings back :)

SpaceAce

You sure have a nice sig...
:)

LORD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Where how!?!?!?!?

I had a BBS for several years! - used to play this almost every mornning! before school :)

Hi Spaceage,

wow, those were the days.

We used to run big wildcat and major bbs boards in the early to middle 90's.

Tradewars was fun, Major Mud, etc.

great to see some oldtimers around here:)

peace

Todd

I'm not sure how to tke the sig comment, so I will assume it is a genuine compliment :)


As for LoRD... Just do a search like I said! Try "telnet BBS Legend of the Red Dragon"... I first found these places about a year ago and, just like in the real BBS word, about 75% of them have LoRD :)

SpaceAce

I just got an idea!

I still have backups of most of my BBS data, it was running on Renegade - can I upload it online?

:thumbsup

Hi, sextoyking,
Yep, I guess I am an old-timer when it comes to the BBS scene. I remember wher 9600 baud modems were brand new and even with the "webmaster discount" USR offered, they cost like $1,800!

I remember Major BBS. It wasn't my favorite software, but it was widespread. The first BBS I ever got on ran Wildcat! and I remember the days of "elite" boards with quizzes like "What do these mean: FLIGHT, THP, FiRM" so you could get access to the "special" areas :)

BBS's were somehow cooler than the internet. Not as much information at your fingertips but a much stronger sense of community because most of the people on any given BBS lived withint 1/2 hour of you. We had picnics, parties, everything. Sadly, they seem to be pretty much gone :( Oh, well, they kicked ass while they were here.

SpaceAce

I could beat your ass at LORD any day of the week....unfortunately, I have a life now so I do not play ANY games. :(

This thread does bring back some good memories though. Per minute and per download charges over a 14,400 modem...ah...those were the simple days. Plus people would pay per minute to play the doorway games. Too funny. I do not even remember how many add on's I had on each LORD game. Fuck...what were those add on called?

Friday,

That's pretty cool. If you run Windows, you could probably just your BBS back up as a telnet BBS. Look into it, that would be neat.

SpaceAce

Dang if I still had t-1 lines at the office and not cable, I would setup major bbs or wildcat 5.x on a windows server.


our old bbs was rose city online, rosey.com

of course in this crowd I could turn on adultbbs.com :))


peace

They are still there. Most of the people on those BBS's were wannabe techie idiots who never made any money and still have the original 286 that they started with.

The Internet opened a lot of cool doors. Now we can do business with people all over the world instead of talking about playing Magic The Gathering with a bunch of 30 year old kids who do not know what soap and hot water is.

Yeah, there is an exception to every rule but let's face it...The average BBSer from back in the day was a real freak show.

I remember Rose City Online. I think Ardvark is still up and running these days.

I'm not sure what BBS's you hung out on, but that was definitely not my experience in either the Florida BBS scene or here in Cleveland. We had one or two freaks, but most of the people were pretty cool with perfectly acceptable hygiene. I met literally dozens of intelligent, technology savvy people and only a few freakshows/idiots/jerks.

Maybe things were worse as the BBS scene was winding down, but I didn't notice it. Hell, I don't think Magic: The Gathering even existed when I was heavy on BBSing.

SpaceAce

Hey Aaron,

I remember that board also.

I still think you can find some local bbs's at:

http://www.computerbits.com

alot have telnet / net access I think.

Yeah, I used to advertise my BBS with them. I think I will pass on looking them up though. I can work and post to the boards at the same time but once I get into a game of LORD then nothing else matters.

I used to run ProBoard. Actually I served as the US support for a time period. I thought I was a big shot being the ProBoard US Support when I was like 16.

Anyway, anyone remember setting those bastards up?

Front Door?

Mail tossers?

Door Games?

Making ANSI screens?

Those were the days...

Anyone still use FidoNet? Does it even exist? I remember I invested about $2k in a satellite to pull down FidoNet feeds and shareware all day then sold it a year later for like $50.

TheDraw 4.61 for your ANSI needs, baby! I used to make really awesome ANSI animations. I don't have much art skill, but I would put little stick arms and legs on the smiley-face ANSI characters and make long karate fight movies out of them. Remember iCE and ACiD? WOW could they crank out the ANSI art!

FidoNet was awesome. Definitely the civilian precursor to the internet. Remember when you could first get email addresses through BBS's and the addresses were always like "[email protected]"

Looking back, that sucked. It was fun at the time, though.

Satellite BBS's kicked ass. Every twenty minutes you could do a search and find new files.

SpaceAce

Also, unless you were calling a national bbs there was a sort of local flare to the bbs world. Some of the boards I frequented in my youth were full of kids from my school but you only knew their handles so you had to guess who they were. One of my best friends in school was a sysop of a popular BBS and it was like he was a cult celeberty amongst some of us while the rest of the school didn't even know our world existed.

I remember being declared brilliant in science class because I knew what the word download meant.

Lee Noga used to run the first and only porn BBS in central florida back when i was a kid, i remember hacking passwords to gain access, oddly enough many years down the line i end up good friends with her haha

The funny part is, I used to know how to crash about 3-4 different types of BBS', and I thought I was this big "Hacker" back when I was 13-14...too funny...

I used to love Pulling down the fido msg's with Dbridge, you guys remember that program??

also, loved the door games, remember Studs and Studdettes.

A good old friend from Portland used to write alot of good door games, Mike Jordan.

We used to only charge 15.00 per month, but it rocked, had 60 lines on major bbs, parties all the time, etc. Met alot of good ppl in those days. good thing about bbs's is that you got to know local ppl.

TheDraw. Oh I hated that bitch..

I remember trying to run Desqview so that I could use my computer while the BBS ran. Multitasking in DOS was a bitch and dont' even think of running one under Windows.

Yeppers,

Deskview worked ok, but it sure to alot of memory:)

thedraw was cool, and what was the program called that was supposed to be the new hit for graphics??

shit.

RIP Draw? I know RIP was to be the next big thing but it never caught on. It wasn't support by many systems and when it started to get popular BBS software writers starting trying to make versions for Win95 which could then use bitmaps and True Type fonts.

Yeah Desqview was hard to use because it took almost all of your "upper memory" or was it "lower memory"? Dunno but you almost had to use QEMM with Desqview which made for a system that could crash constantly. I remember trying to write reports in DOS Edit because I couldnt' think of loading Windows in a Desqview window.

I used to log onto Wildcat 5 BBS's when V 5 first came out. There was a @LOGOFF@ command that you could use on anybody...Including the Sysop. That was some funny shit...even though it got me in trouble a couple of times. :)

Ga,

you are the man!! yep rip graphics, damm bought that program, and had 1 of our graphic guys do some cool logos with that.

Dig ... Dig ...




I ran amiXpress for a while. Then i switched to pcXpress.
3 Pc's Running deskview multitasking softwate/ 1 Novell Lite Server. 6 phonelines, hacking phonesystems in Macau, and bahrein ... Blue Beeping ... MAN my parents where stressed out :Graucho

Razor 1911 For Life hehe....

Hah!

I only remember on C-Net's, if you posted three messages in the same area within a minute, the whole thing would shit...

There was a dork in our school who ran a C-Net, and I swear to God, we crashed it every single day for about a year and a half...

LORD :thumbsup

Yep, the RIP protocol (RIPTerm) was just catching on when the internet really broke out. Remember, 16 whole colors! EGA graphics right there on a BBS, LOL! Actually, just before BBSing really died out around here, my favorite board was a RIP BBS. It really did kick a fair amount of ass, even better than the internet in some ways. When you were at a RIP BBS, it was really like you were just running a program on your desktop because it was all very graphical and self-contained. It never really had a chance to take off, though.

DBridge, yep. I remember sometimes when I would be the first person on a BBS after midnight, I would have to wait while it did all its network stuff before I could finish logging in. It was cool because you knew it meant more messages.

Anyone remember SLMR? How about Blue Wave? Offline readers were the shit when networking got big because there were too many messages. Remember taglines (especially from SLMR)? You could download files of hilarious oneliners.

"This is a moebius tagline. Thie is a moebius tagline. This is moebius..."
"Wake up, it's time for your sleeping pills."
"On a clear disk you can see for miles."
"Reality.sys not found. (A)bort, (R)etry, (P)anic."
"# It takes 1.00000 +/- 0.000001 Vulcans to change a lightbulb."
"100,000 lemmings can't be wrong."

There were billions. Some MUCH funnier than those, but it has been many years and I can only remember a few off the top of my head.

SpaceAce

C-NET! One of the first BBS's I hung out at was a C-Net board. I don't remember it having any problems like the one you described, but it _was_ the first place I ever hacked a password. Not only did I hack a password, the account belonged to a co-SysOp. C-Net had a feature where you could list the name of every user (in case you forgot your handle) and I picked out "White Wing" and in 1-2 tries, I got his password ("fly"). It kicked ass until I finally told the SysOp and he made a new password rule.

"Sanctuary of the Krasnians", that's what it was called. The SysOp was a guy named Bob who only had a pinky and thumb on one of his hands. Very amusing people.

SpaceAce

Fuck!

I miss my BBS!

:mad:

Look what you did!!! :)

We had picnics, parties, everything.

Yep! I met my SO on a local adult board. We used to have GT's about every month to 6 weeks. :thumbsup

ACiD is actually still around... They even have an FTP server up with the old school art packs all the way back until 1990..

ftp://ftp.artpacks.acid.org/pub/artpacks/artpacks/

I used to run a Renegade BBS for like 3 years in south florida, with 300+ members and tons of warez & porn. We'd have some big parties and get togethers, I'd say everyone was pretty much in high school, with the occasional old guy freak in the mix.

I still remember laying in bed, and never being able to get much sleep cause every time I heard that click of the modem I had to jump out of bed to see who was logging on... damn those were the days... :winkwink:

renegades in south florida...

you ever hit the floating pancreas, pyro's palace, cheezy genitalia? we were on the TAG side of the fence, kept mostly to text files and flame boards.

this thread did bring up some good memories. also made me feel old.

-shane

I, and my oldest son put a BBS up in '81. I wrote the code for it.

Without my knowledge he and some of his friends got into "freaking" and the FBI became interested in his group of "freakers".

He came to me and confessed to me about what was going on and that the FBI had already talked to some of his friends. I shut down the BBS the same day, and his friends did not give him up, so never had a visit from the FBI.

The FBI did not prosecute any of his local friends but did take down some of the ring in San Francisco if I remember correctly.

By the way, if I remember correctly, we initially operated at 300 Baud and when we went to 1200 Baud thought it was really a big deal.

Actually, I know ACiD is still around because they shifted over to VGA and SVGA graphics as things were changing. I still think the ANSI is the most impressive, though.

Where in South Florida? I lived in Ft. Lauderdale, Pompano Beach and Port Charlotte. Port Charlotte is where I discovered BBS's. That was the 813 area code (just across the bridge from Punta Gorda). Was that your area?

SpaceAce

Pyro's Palace? Hmm, I know Ur'Lord Pyro -K ran a BBS for a while, but I can't remember what it was called. I wonder if it's related.

I don't feel old, just nostalgic :)

SpaceAce

That's "phreaking" to you, gramps :)

SpaceAce