Back in the BBS days.....
 

Here is something interesting. Does anyone rememeber the golden years of the internet? Back when 1300 and 2400 baud with the best thing you could hope for and 56k was an urban legend? Now most of the boards were run with WWiV 4.24 (World War Software, or sometimes Wildcat), but they always seemed to have these strangely amusing "on-line" games such as trade wars, studs, The Pit, and some other assorted ASCII character masterpieces. Well I just happened to find the other .zip file and source code directly from the 80's. :thumbsup So what do I do. Unzip......I begin to tinker around with the the welcome screens and the source code and it started bringing back memories from back in the old days when porn on computers was really beginning to get big, But instead of movies they used to used a series of animated gifs and beeps from the pc speaker :winkwink: .... and the only way you get more was on the free sites that your buddy's freind from high schools, sister's roomate knows. Damn those were the old days of programs you see now a days in the future. Dialers, Membership, etc etc. Try to imagine this, Being 15 years old and asking your mom if you could order this new "game" for your "new" cd rom drive that you saw in a catalog, and better yet having her give the CC info on the phone to order it , Not even bothering to check what exacty this "game " was about. In fact what she had purchased was not in fact a game as all. But, It was going to make her son a little extra spending cash during the pre-bar era. It was an old school adult image disc which contained a description file that you could import into the BBS and it would recognize the file and match up the file names and desc. for you . etc etc, But there wasn;t enough room on my hard drive to keep all of the pictures so I kept them on the disc and rotated it around during the week and just posting the schedule of what genres would be on the page on what days and also charging or people who dialed up you bbs phone line and "surfed" your site if they wanted acceses to the adult pictures they would have to pay you a fee of being able to access per month for that content on your site. Ah...the ol days...:) Sorry if i rambled a bit much, i am on baby watch this evening while the women goes to a bridal shower and thought i would share this thought with all of you (and the couch surfing will soon begin)

Ps. Anyone have a favorite "old-school" online game......?

:glugglug :glugglug

later.....

Youngster!

300 baud, 120 meg HD's were locked in safes when not in use as well. 386s were still expensive to the point of crazy, and about 2 people withing 10 miles could help with a question IF you lived in large cities. :D

I started back on the 8086's hooked up to mainframe in the cold room. Had 640k mem, NO Ram chips, maybe 3 megs of a HD if you were lucky.

The old man played the Legend of the Red Dragon on a BBS in the early 90's. Played until he won like 6 times going up the chain of whatever the things were called and quit.

Last I saw him touch was Wolfenstein... 8 yrs ago or so? . I just do the card games. No interest in them.

He still plays with 2-3 and 4-586s for fun. Just tinkers with old programs like that ripdraw. First pic I ever saw on a BBS was one he sent me in email. The board wouldn't support any other graphics.

c:\>park c:

lol! Yeah I know what you mean! I remember the first time I layed eyes on my freinds shiny new "huge" 386-sx and I almost crapped myself! I used to get a kick out of the game studs, pimpin hoes and banging beeotch's, Ah those were the days. just look at how far things have come over the years. Have you seen.....DaMnit , I can't remember the name, it has Arnold in it, anyways it has this VR chick that just comes out of thin air right when you walk in the door she gets on her knees and well...

anyone see the jackass flick yet? I am getting ready to go.. Later!

c:\>doskey - rules!

Trade Wars rocked. My favourite BBS game :thumbsup

I once paid about US$400 for a used 5.25" disc drive. A few years later I would pay roughly the same amount for a huge 20mb harddrive.

I can recall stuffing a full-height 10mb HD in my Compaq portable. Then came the RLL controller, I was in heaven.

The hubby says he has some 20's he'd sell ya! :winkwink:

Things came far and fast. My original 486 was 4000 with a printer and a 9600 baud modem. No CD either. :(

I had a homemade 300 baud modem hooked up to my C-64 back in 1985. :thumbsup

Damn you guys make me feel old... :thefinger

The first computer I bought back in 1982 was an Atari 600 with 16K of memory and a cassette tape drive for storage.

The hottest adult software at the time was a text only version of Leisure Suit Larry.

I was hooked from day one...

Well, I'm 47 and have been into computers as long as I can remember...if I start telling stories, I'll REALLY feel old :)

I was addicted to the old BBS's. I remember piggybacking on an internet connection from a college way back when government and universities were about the only ones that could get internet. Some of my fave things to do was to hack other student accounts and find their porn stashes!!! :thumbsup

Are you referring to Leisure Suit Larry? Awesome game!!!!

Yeah, my first connections to the internet were UUCP for email and newsgroups sucked down from university providers. Took a real uberGeek to set it up those days. I had a hacked up version of Waffle sitting on my BBS drives, using a DOS version of UUCICO to fetch the mail every hour or so... And another utility to convert out of those nasty formats into the BBS message base.

I still kick my own ass daily for not getting more domains back then. At the time, it cost absolutely nothing to register them. The trick was finding someone who was willing and able to provide DNS...

Yup...set up a few UUCP servers myself, even as recent as about 7 years ago. Worked for a company that had quite a few overseas clients that still used user!company addresses. UUCP was not for the faint of heart :)

This is a bit interesting..
Prices for UNIVAC 1108 components as of 1968

Description - Purchase Price - Installation Fee

CPU - $566,460 - $2,200
131 K word Core Memory - $823,500 - $2,250
FASTRANDtm Controller - $41,680 - $600
FASTRAND II Storage Unit - $134,400 - $1,080
FH-432/FH-1782 Drum Controller - $67,360 - $600
FH-432 Drum (capacity 262,144 words) - $34,640 - $480
FH-1782 Drum (capacity 2,097,152 words) - $95,680 - $540
Console (TTY-35) - $29,365 - $200

what do you mean LSL on Atari 600?

I thought first version of LSL was for PC, late 1980s

..

i bought sinclair spectrum first but soon replaced it with schneider cpc 464 :)
1985 yr

wow

BARREN REALMS ELITE - BBS interactive wargame.

That was the first real mulitplayer game that kicked ass.
Each day you got to run your industrial areas, farms, factories, you got money from your realms and bought new realms or tanks, infantry, fight jets, bombers.

It was very cool and it got a world wide following, our sysop spent $100's a month connecting to USA, Europe, it was great, cause you could work as a team on your BBS and BOMB other BBS's entire realms, instead of funneling money into your own war planes and tanks etc, you would put it all into a super weapon that then got sent and blew the shit out of other BBS's.

We got so good at it our little New Zealand BBS was freaking HUGE.

It would be funny playing it now, only 5 minutes of play each day, that would drive me nuts now days, I'd want to play it non stop.

It was a text based game only btw. Anyone else here played it?

Sammy

your site doesn't work in netscape

Hmm yep still have several Lesiure Suit Larry games. I forgot we had plaed with it a few times. lol

And he had at least one girl that walked out on the desktop if that was what you mean.

No doubt still on the 486, p1, p2 and a 586 tucked in the closet fully loaded. He put them in there in 97 and they have never been out except to get something else. :) ahhh the days of DOS!! What he and I learned on.

NEVER touched the 'game systems' that were converted to puters.

Always IBM or once I got back with him he started building all of ours. He took the 486 Laser away from me almost immediately. Built me a new 586 dx something, stripped the laser and resold the huge tower for what he paid for the new parts.

LOVED that but didn't miss killing my new on the laser. Darn thing weighed about 50-60 pounds.

or text based "nethck".

"The gnome hits--more--You die..."

Funny thing is, just 15 mins ago the wife and I were lookign for tw2002 clones that worked
properly over tcp/ip to play. I started with a 2400 baud, and actually
avoided the internet for a long time. It was too graphical and bloated for me.
I ran a board for a while too, until I went to college and decided to try the 'net'.
Got into irc and the board was offline all the time so I quit.
I still have the urge to get into the old door games (BRE was my favorite - followed by TW2002) now and then,
but just can't find good places to play. Thought about setting up my own board
with telnet access a few times, but all the good door games are for dos, and dosemu
just doesn't quite cut it (I run linux).

This is my all time favorite game. I actually contacted the new author after it
Mehul patel or whatever his name was sold it and offered to do a port to linux. No reply to the email so I gave up.
I ran it on my own board, multiple games, although the best game I played was a very large multi-bbs game via fido with boards all over northern ontario. I didn't win,
but was the only one to do any serious damage to the board that did win.
(got emails and stuff from that board saying "Come play here!" to which I replied...
uh.. no, that's a 0.60/minute phone call every day. :)
Those were the days. Waiting to play until 11:30pm so you could play, log off, wait 5 mins, log on, play again to
be sure you really crushed someone good.... :)

hahah yes I remember staying up late many many nights, bomb the shit out of them at 11:45pm and have your 2 other friends in on it too bombing him at the same time, all working together. 1 guy vs 3 who bomb him 2 times before he logs on. Thats how we took control of our board, we had a few enemies on our board who hated us but we were better players so we kicked there ass a few times before they decided that working together was a better idea :)

My site doesn't work in Netscape. I've been told that before, but it works in Mozilla and ie4,5,6. And I really don't know if I can be fucked fixing it. Infact I can hardly be fucked updating it ;) To many other important jobs to do, these tgp's make so little money. Paysites are my main concern.

Sammy

Wow ThePit! You are bringing back memories man... The only door games that I had registered back then for my 2 node BBS were TW2002 and ThePit... How about Operation Overkill (OOII) -- personal favorite... Yankee Trader, Global Wars, Freshwater Fishing (awesome ansi)... and Hack N' Attack hehe... The most competitive games though were definitely TW2002 and Global Wars.

I started with a registered Wildcat... Of course I tried most all BBS's... RBBS, Telegard, WWIV, UltraBBS, blah blah...

Know anywhere online where a decent BRE game runs? I've thought a few times
about writing a clone, wouldn't be too hard to do, except figuring
out all the proper formula's for calculating things (game balance and all).
Time requirements would be up there, alot of code to write,
but I don't think any of it would be that difficult.
Bah, I need to get this "Write a game" crap out of my head before I go too far
and actually take on the burden of doing it. Been tossing around the idea of
trying to do a "pirates" (microprose/sid meyer) multi-player thing lately.
Of course, idea's, talk, and putting my money where my mouth is are far apart, so I doubt it'll happen.

I ran TriBBS (newbie friendly) then VBBS (Virtual BBS), and finally settled on remote access.
Ever play Time of Chaos? Awesome game, downside was it was based purely on time.
Meaning: 2400 baud user lost to 14400 user who lost to sysop who could display screens locally very quickly.
A turn based time of chaos would have been great.
How about vga planets? I still have a copy installed, and the wife and I play it now and then.
Great game, downside is, after a while your turns take so long it gets to be a nightmare :(

Thinking about door games. Anyone play Exitilus? Decent door, had
all the right idea's about how to make the perfect door game,
but implementation sucked. Buggy, un-balanced, ect. But I'm sure if
the authors had kept it up, it would have turned into an amazing game once the bugs
and the game balance were fixed.
Also an opinion.. LORD, awesome game, very little time required/day,
but kept users coming back. IGM (In-Game-Modules) killed it though.
Nobody would play without them, and with them, it just became unbalanced and fucked up IMO.

not an online game, but my fave nonethe less, was 'Money Walk" on a sharp MZ80K !

No there was actually a real game called STUDS, The object was to fuck women and get off. when you ran out of mojo your turns were spent and you had to come back the next day and hump again!

Yeah I remember going to NC state and playing on the "internet" for the first time. I was flabbergasted when I saw a cat named "neo" which followed the mouse cursor.

RAGE ON! That game was the shiznizzle

10 meg Rodime MFM hard drive and 4.77 smoking mhz all powered on a IBM PC Portable connected courtesy of Uncle Dennis and a 1200 baud Hayes smart modem. Using hijacked analog line hidden in the bowels of Scientific Atlanta running that free version of RBBS. Now thats how you start a BBS called GonZoland.

Who'd a thunk that in 1985 Id been using that fucked up waffle client and a unix to unix copy plus Ed Hoppers message tosser to be crosslinking usenet areas int0 fucking BBS message conferences --jamming up my own mailing lists and then cross echoing all the shit via FidoNet and TomCat to talk to the people running Wildpussy. That damn PCBoard was one solid mother fucker till they went to OS2.

ANd they thought I had lost my fucking mind when I registered gonzo.com back in 1993.

My First XXX Game... Sex Games on C64...
And yes, Leisure Suit Larry, an all time favourite...
Actually I am back in collecting off old console and games, my favorite being the Intellivision...

The good old days... Not that I am much old yet.. :1orglaugh
Unbelievable how things changed fast...

Jon

You are hardcore man... I never got connected to FidoNet -- that was based on message hubs, right? I used one of the hierarchy message networks -- I think it was called iNTELLEC net or some shit like that... at a certain time of day this program on my machine would block normal incoming calls and wait for the message robot whatever to call my PC and transfer all the messages...

I think, it's impossible....

Hey Chad, how you doing honey?

I use to run a 32 line BBS in South Florida. I started with 4 WANG ? 2400 modems in an old IBM AT 286. It started off as a hobby and turned into a business. I add a bridge and offered telnet but it wasn?t long after that when the web was born. Once I spotted the web I ditched the BBS. I wasn?t sinking any more money into that Galticomm money pit. There were tons of die hards who believed that the web was a passing fancy like laser disk and that people logged on for the sense of community and to be local. I knew things were going to rapidly change.

I wasn?t much into games online or on the PC. Today I like free cell and would have played it if I knew about it back then. I was more into chatting.

I owe my PC knowledge to some idiot that worked for COMPUSA. I strictly used my old AT for copy writing and a simple spread sheet. I hired him to come over and fix it. He brought a PORTABLE, NOT a laptop but a thing the size of a suit case. He asked to use my phone line, plugged in and I watched him chatting with people and downloading files. He was one of those guys who loves to intimidate women and I?m one of those women who hates guys who do this. I was, however amazed at this new technology. The next morning I woke up, waked to my home office and the same problem I had before reared again. I tired contacting him via pager and phone. He wouldn?t return my calls so I bounced his 500.00 check. I got every book I could and torn that, ?sound like an airplane taking off? AT PC apart! I then research until I found out what a BBS was and within 8 months had four lines up. Needless to say the idiot logons and breaks into SYSOP chat with me. ?Nice board buddy!? ? ?Thank you. I owe it all to you asshole. ?

I?m sure his worthless ass is still floating around out there and I hope he?s reading this now.

Dianna Vesta

Oh my god, BBSers!

lol... I ran BBSes from about 1985 on.. you know, rocking that 300 baud modem.

And, believe it or not... someone prompted me a week or so ago to set up a BBS door server for tradewars 2002 and BRE. Not to sound like I'm spamming, but if anyone wants to join us in tradewars... I have 2 games running right now... 1000 sect with 5000 turns/day and 5000 sect with 1500 turns/day... going to be adding a few more for variety.

telnet use.unixforever.net if anyone is interested is screwing around with us in TW2002, LORD, Usurper, Planets: TEOS, BRE, etc.. :D

That aside, I remember the first real hard drive our BBS had... it was a whopper, 5MB, MFM... and that sucker cost me more then I care to admit now (more then my workstation now cost, and my workstation now kicks ass). I think I was running the BBS at the time on an Epson 8088 computer. 640k of ram, however I had a full length 512k expansion card (that never did freaking work lol) as well. Don't remember the modem speed at the time... either 300 or 1200 baud.

Anyone mind if I get old school and post a "BBS ad" to this thread? lolol

Fido was one of the first actually. It went out on some of those damn systems like renegade [FUCK COTT LANG]. Intellect was another one of those high and lofty networks like RIME. They hated porn. I was in the cool ones like LuciferNet [RIP Pearson] and ThrobNet. It was all QWK based and I got bored and started crosslinking shit.

Hardcore? Nah we were actually building the net as you see it today. I went out on a limb and ran Excalibure on a 12 line system right before the net took all the way off. And of course you know I was crosslinking shit into that too.

I'm suprised not many people have mentioned LORD, Legend of The Red Dragon ..

That was a great game when you where skipping school...

:thumbsup