I Found a 40 Year Old BBS Session Transcript
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ส.ค. 2024
- While doing research for my upcoming video on the COSMAC ELF, I discovered a few interesting pages at the back of a booklet that came with one of my original machines. To my surprise, I discovered it was a transcript or printout of a BBS session from 40 years ago today, using an historic piece of BBS software called CBBS, which was written by Ward Christensen and the recently departed Randy Suess one snowy evening and created the first dial in computerized bulletin board system. This printout offers a tantalizing glimpse of what a CBBS login looked like, possibly from the SysOp's perspective, and also offers a few clues as to the unique challenges of BBSing at a time when home computers were still relatively new and modem speeds were often a paltry 300 baud!
This little trip down memory lane has inspired me to create a followup video, soon to be posted, that will show me setting up a Telegard BBS just like the one I ran in the early 90s from scratch! We will see how much I remember and what it was like to be a SysOp 13 years after CBBS came out.
![ฮักเทื่อสุดท้าย - บอย ศิริชัย [OFFICIAL MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/-1PoPoQ-B-k/mqdefault.jpg)
![ทางเดินชีวิต - ธีเดช ทองอภิชาติ x อ.ไข่ มาลีฮวนน่า [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1f3wcG16dd4/mqdefault.jpg)
This video will probably only be of interest to a select few but I thought I'd share it anyway - I don't think there are too many preserved original printouts/transcripts of CBBS sessions out there. The followup video which shows the process of setting up a BBS during my era (1991) should be up within a day or two - I planned on doing it as one video with this one but it got too long (hence why I say 'for this video'). It'll also feature some exploration of what was then a really revolutionary BBS software package I almost switched to - RoboBoard.
EDIT: If you watched the video, did you catch was was missing from the login sequence????
PLEASE SCAN THIS. If you need assistance, please let me know - I'd be happy to help.
For sure. I have been scanning everything paper related in case of fire. I try to store it all in separate places too in case of fire or flood.
A company I took a job at in 1995 was still operating a BBS for customers who were not inclined to learn how to use FTP. They kept it operational until around 2005.
if only they had still kept it running today the world and our lives wouldn't suck so much
When I bought my Siemens T100 Teletype it came with a roll filled with messages from 1986, Its a wonderful time capsule and Iv been tempted to archive it in some capacity.
Having been born in 82 and grown up under the impression that my cohort were the first ever people outside of like nuclear bunkers to have general access to computers, videos like this are incredible. Thanks so much for this and I hope your subscriber count continues to shoot up!
So, um, one of the other concepts back in the day was RCP/M or “Remote CP/M” where you dialed into someone’s BBS and could exit the BBS software to get to the system’s CP/M prompt. And then restart the BBS software to get back to the BBS.
Changing your baud rate. Yes, possible, sometimes desirable. Remember, flow control was sometimes necessary, and sometimes not correctly implemented, so you might want to slow things down. And this was possible, maybe more so back when everything was over Bell 103 FSK modulation: what needed to agree was the bits-per-second of the “host” and “terminal” serial ports, and you could tell the remote host to change its “baud rate” and then go into your settings and change yours.
40 years ago today I likely would have been dialing in to my local Tandy user group's BBS using the Novation CAT 300 attached to our TRS-80 Model 1. I did at some point most days back then.
The company I worked for installed a Northern Telecom SL-1 phone system. There were a number of them in town so we formed the SL-1 Users Group. I ended up setting up a BBS using RBBS I think for the group. It actually ran on the 286 in my office. This was probably around 1984 or so. I also was a member of a commercial BBS for the magazine Circuit Cellar for quite a while.
How TH-cam pointed this vid to me is funny. I logged into CBBS a couple times but I was a user of a different system that Randy ran. Was over at his place a few times for LAN parties back in the late 80's. The CBBS machine was in the corner but only had a single modem on it by then. :-)
I like how it says, 'logging your name to disk' as thought it is going on your permanent record and it can't be erased or undone, ever. I was a sysop for 15 years over I think 3 different systems. Renegade, Telegard and CNet, I still have all my old data files and can bring them up anytime I want. It's funny how they really can take you back in time by reading them to the moment they were posted.
It's interesting that in sci-fi it's common to see a character or a story about mechanical people who can't be killed or destroyed. If they are damaged the essences of what they are can be downloaded into another body. Bringing up an old BBS from backup is just like those sci-fi stories and it's a great feeling to bring that mechanical friend back to life.
I feel your pain with about the BBS backups. When I shutdown my board in the mid 90s, I backed it up to floppy disks, along with the code base (wrote it myself in quickbasic). Can't find those disks to save my life :-( Might be on an old QIC tape, but I don't have a drive to read those that functions anymore. In a fit of nostalgia, I set up a DOS VM on my server (telnet access), with front door, fidonet, renegade, and a few door games. Get a few callers a month.
I really wish I had been a better archivist. But I was just a kid and didn't think anyone would be nostalgic or interested years later. I really hope I find that tape!
I am playing around with Telegard again but there is so much I've forgotten. I cannot for the life of me remember how to configure door games.. I remember it had something to do with door.sys I think?
@@TechTimeTraveller Yes, telegard should generate a door.sys (or something similar) file with the connection & user information to pass on to the game. There were a couple other formats that I vaguely remember that could pass information from the bbs to the game.
Send me a link to your BBS, Id love to check it out.
I ran a BBS in Silicon Valley in the mid 80's. It ran on my Apple II+ and four floppy drives. It ran Applenet which was mostly written in apple basic and you could modify it to add features. It was relatively simple but a huge load of fun. My best comouting days. I also met a lot of people through organized picnics etc.
my buddy and i set up a BBS in 1985-86 in Santa Rosa CA ..it was 4 lines using WWIV 3.0 BBS software running on TRSDOS Tandy 2000 (i worked at Tandy.)..WWIV was written in Turbo Pascal..at the time i was learning to write in Turbo Pascal 3..so i would modify the software and my buddy would run the hardware and board...it was operational for 3 years...At the time AT&T offered a flat fee (also offered half price per minute calls) for long distance calls from midnight to 4am ..which helped our users..most of our calls during the day were local and at night were from long distance...
Ah, the memories. Memories of starting a command and watching hair grow as the command completes. Or constantly redialing. Or investing in a second phone line.
Back in the day (early 90s). I frequented a local BBS which had multiline high speed downloads (maybe 14.2 back then???) which I could leave running overnight. Anyway, it was a pay system and I asked the guy how to pay him, he said to drop the money in an envelope in his mailbox.... in today's world it would have looked like a drug house to the neighbours with people dropping envelopes in his mailbox all day.
I checked the CBBS source code I have and found something interesting. The version number is listed as 3.5.0 and the most recent comment was dated January 3rd, 1982. I wonder how the folks running the BBS featured here had a version of CBBS that really didn't exist? Did they tweak the version based on their own changes?
Lol I was 2. Two years later my parents opened up a restaurant just right next to an Apple dealer. I remembered that colorfull logo on the large window and there was only one desk in that space.
Pretty cool to see these logs. In essence not much different today if you leave out the UI.
Now I'm triggered to try out bbs on my vintage machine.
Rummaging through various toy catalogs picking out last minute ideas for my 4th birthday?
Lucky enough to have been all in on the bbs fun back in the day, with my Commodore XT clone, dual floppies, no HD and tons of fun. We would buy $5 and $10 access chits at the local electronics store, fire up the 1200 baud modem and have a blast. Miss the bbs days almost as much as I miss the hair I had back then.
I think I was capping my diapers at that exact moment...
I wasn’t around then but I know on September 16th 1983 my Casablanca ceiling fan was made
I used to go on BBSs before the web. Had a modem that sounded like robo-cat vomiting a hairball. I was more into USENET though just cause it was mostly lunatics.
PET was a Commodore computer from that era.
True. I don't *think* I've heard of anyone running a BBS off one though. I wonder..
What where you doing 40 years ago?
Yeah, I wouldn't of existed yet for another 10 years... All this stuff is still fascinating though.
I have recently started reading "Hacker Crackdown", a free book about the early phracking and hacking scene. It describes some famous BBS that were around, aswell as the content you could find there.
I would have loved to experience the BBS era first hand, but I was simply born too late.
Somewhere in all of my data, I should have copies of Telegard and tons of other BBS software. Not only the software, but I remember having the source code. Some day I need to dig that out and see if I can still compile it, let alone run it!
I remember when the source code got leaked or whatever. Was a mini scandal, even though I think Telegard had borrowed from WWIV
That message about 8 inch drives on an Apple II caught my eye. I had 8 inch drives on a Apple II (Actually a Laser II clone board). The mainboard was mounted inside the HUGE case that contained the drives and ran off it's power supply. I had cobbled together some kind of external keyboard, but I forget the details.
Very cool! I'm guessing you'd want an 8 inch for CPM related stuff?
@@TechTimeTraveller That was my original thought, and I did use it a bit with a CP/M card but mostly it was because the 8 inch drives and the Apple II controller for them sort of fell into my lap. Since the clone board was cheap, I decided that I needed an Apple II again. Not too long after that I got a PC clone, and it became a game machine that my son played with. I had some regular 5 inch drives as well, and the 8 inch drives mostly ended up not being used. I remember that early on I hadn't secured the Laser board all that well, and it fell against the keyswitch for AC power and fried the keyboard connector and character rom. Took me a while to get it working again after that.
Wow youngsters exploring CP/M based BBS lol... So funny listening to your assumptions :-) Ah 8k took us 5mins at 300bd using xmodem in the good ol days. Yes, the user was allowed to a CP/M prompt albeit in a relatively safe way.
So they didn't have actual 'sections' like more modern BBSes right? It's all basically available off that one menu?
So they didn't have actual 'sections' like more modern BBSes right? It's all basically available off that one menu?
@@TechTimeTraveller The early systems were like that, yes. The BBS you feature here based on the "cbbs or cp/m" question, it may be using a program called "BYE" to handle the modem routines. BYE allowed for a thing called "RCP/M" or Remote CP/M. It basically allowed for modem I/O and console I/O at the same time. If you want to know more about how boards ran on CP/M, let me know. I'd be happy to write something up for you.
40 years ago today, I was probably drinking out of a baby bottle and my mom was pregnant with my brother.
I was 1 year old and prob laying in daipers shitting myself LOL
So was a BBS just a serial terminal link to a computer over a phone modem? How would multiple users be on? Multiple modems with software multitasking? Great video as always.
Yeah basically the BBS software was like a database, sitting there listening to the serial ports. You'd have a modem attached externally, or one would be installed internally (configured as its own serial port) and then it'd sit there waiting for calls. You could do multiline if the software supported it - my board in its last years had two lines. I used software called Desqview for DOS and it ran my BBS software in two separate windows and they shared the same database. My second line was my personal line and had a distinctive ring pattern set up that the second modem knew was someone calling for the BBS vs a voice call. Most board were single line so, you'd try to call, but if someone was using it you'd get a busy signal and have to try again. The biggest multiline board I called as a user back in the day had 14 lines but you had to pay for access to help cover its horrendous telephone bills.
If a user hung up the call without telling the software would the next caller be taking over that users session? The software is a fascinating mystery to me but if it was just like serial over a modem it would need to reset to the main menu for the next caller. The earliest I go back is Prodigy in the 90s but i’m guessing that’s more advanced as it was a national service. Look you got me all excited about this subject now.
@@sandvikcity No, the software was smart enough to see the modem hang up, and end the session.
I wasn't born yet