TL;DR: I have launched my #BBS!
Find a suitable Telnet client (syncterm works reasonably well), or connect from your favorite retro machine with whichever serial-to-telnet contraption you might have. The address? Why, floppy.museum
of course! Or bbs.anduin.net, if you prefer. Welcome to the fabulous world of Bulletin Board Systems!
An important part of BBS history (as described in the fabulous documentary*) is how some of them became safe spaces for the LGBT community, allowing them to connect and, for many, discover that they were not alone. In my very tiny way, I want to honour that incredibly beautiful story and dedicate my BBS to those pioneers of on-line community building.
I also need to share a picture of the machine it's running on. The custom RAM with LEDs is provided by Siliconinsider (look them up on Tindie!), and it looks ... stunning.
The BBS is connected to #DOVE-Net, a message exchange with other BBSes around the world. I don't have a lot of files there yet (mostly old #OS/2 software), but I plan to add more in the coming weeks and months.
Connect and join the BBS community! Also, poke me if you have any problems - either here or on the BBS.
(Note: The Guest account is currently disabled due to .. can you imagine .. spamming!)
What are some other good sources for news, maybe rpg discussions?
One thought I had while browsing is how it would be nice if all those sites allowed you to login with your own made up identity that already exists. Like if I could log in as my mastadon randomwizard to go leave a comment.
so way back in 1990, my family still hadn't made the jump to a PC yet. all we had was a TRS-80 Color Computer, and a Mattel Intellivision.
but we had just moved to an acreage in another province, and i found out that one of the neighbours' dads had a computer: a Zenith AT/XT
my friend's dad would come home with random diskettes, probably copied from someone at his chemical engineering job. we'd pop them in and usually find something decent to play.
we played a lot of cga two-player SOPWITH.COM and a moon patrol clone that was honestly pretty good, even in eyeball-piercing magenta.
but one day he came home with a disk that just said 'JOLT' on it. we ran the exe, and i was instantly blown away. it was a jolt can, perfectly digitized in VGA, spinning around in circles faster and faster, until it was barely recognizable. i watched the animation a dozen times before my friends got bored and wanted to play something else.
the next day, i told my best friends at school about the animation. no one believed me, and the diskette "mysteriously" disappeared the next time i visited my buddy's house.
i was haunted by the jolt cola can animation for decades. that is, until a while ago i ended up finding it buried in an ms-dos demoscene site.
here it is, over 30 years later, with an original file date of February 22, 1990. ❤️
Fifteen years before the commercialization of the internet, millions of amateurs across North America created more than 100,000 small-scale computer networks. The people who built and maintained these dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSs) in the 1980s laid the groundwork for millions of others who would bring their lives online in the 1990s and beyond.
Hey BBS knowers of the fediverse: question that’ll help me with research for something I'm writing.
Have you ever seen an offline BBS archive? I don't mean the files, but an actual way to browse a snapshot of a BBS at a point in time, with the original interface and content all preserved?
#TBT
The Kats Alley #BBS in 1990 ran Image v1.2a BBS on a #Commodore64, 1581, two 1541's & a CBM d9060 5meg hard drive at 2400bps! Today it runs on VICE emulating a beefed up c64 w/a CMD emulated hard drive at 38,400bps!
Log on today for an original social media experience!