Setting up a new Telegard BBS in 2021
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 ก.ย. 2021
- #bbs #pc #dos A couple weeks ago I stumbled upon a printout of a CBBS bulletin board system session that happened 40 years ago last month. As a former BBS user and sysop, this was really exciting to me as CBBS is the grandaddy of all bulletin board software. I immediately wanted to set up a CBBS system afterwards and see what it was like, and how it compared to the Telegard system I ran as a youth, but...
Yeah CBBS is a lot more complicated to install. That will take a while for me to figure out, and then there's the non-trivial matter of finding the right hardware. So that's a future project. But I've got serious BBS nostalgia right now! So I decided to dust off Telegard 2.7 and install it just as I would have 30 years ago this fall, when my highschool had me set one up for them.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this little trip down memory lane. I'd originally wanted to restore a backup of my original BBS that I made to tape, but alas, I cannot find it! So we'll just have to start from scratch and see what I remember.. or not. - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
![ความรักไม่ได้น่ากลัวขนาดนั้น (TRUST ME) - LYKN [ OFFICIAL MV ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/9np-lAtCRpQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Just a note - TH-cam is nuking ALL comments with links in them EXCEPT for those from actual spam bots. Yeah.. I know. Anyway, if you post a comment to this or any other video of mine with anything that even looks like a link, TH-cam will kill it, and I cannot retrieve or approve it. Which is unfortunate because there have been some really informative comments that just get lost, and of course I cannot message people directly without an email address or such. But anyway yeah, it's NOT me being a tyrannical/arbitrary jerk or anything. Many thanks to everyone watching this video!
It is just TH-cam being the jerk. I realize they are just trying to keep people from sending links to malicious websites that might try to install malware on a computer.
It's in your settings. You have the option to allow links in the comments or not.
@Tech time Traveller Did you ever change to Usenet-News Discussion? Did you then use one News-Reader Software instead of the BBS?
Not a link, but if you note what's mentioned at 20:09, replace Classic Daisywheel with ASCII, and go to Wikipedia, there's an article, with external links.
Can you make a video on Mystic BBS next???
As a member of the ACiD artgroup, I of course need to recommend using AcidDraw for all your ansi drawing needs.
ACiD is legendary. Had an entire download section of ACiD works on my VBBS system.
@@krozareq Awesome. I wrote the code for RemorseView (the ascii division of acid) and The Product 2 e-mag... also did a bunch of ascii work for Remorse.
@@misterkite @Krozar TAL
Would you both know where I could find copies? I'm trying to put together a bbs of my own. But I love the history and passion of the people involved with the bbs.
Wow! A bit starstruck here. I remember really respecting your stuff.
@@MindStarsSoulStops I have a copy of AcidDraw v1.0 here if you would be interested. However, I'm afraid if I paste a link here, my comment will be sucked up into the void. You will have to contact me somehow.
Nice video. A friend of mine, Chad, and I started a BBS in 1991 too. Amiga Online in Northern Indiana. ;) I remember in 1991 walking over after school with him to some local computer business that wasn't quite a retail store and more of a consultant, to get a copy of what I think was called Sky or SkyNet BBS software. He ran it on his Amiga 500 and made me a co-sysop. It drove him nuts that I'd put that title in my email signature though. I remember as an admin being about to see user's passwords in clear text, including his, which was just 'DDD'. He connected us up to Fidonet as well, which I thought was pretty cool. Just 6 years later I set up a website hosting provider in my dorm room. ;)
Ah man, pretty crappy software that stores passwords in the clear! Hadn't Skynet heard of hashing!? You could even do it in BASIC, which the BBS was probably written in.
That said here we are in the future and every other week some major company gets their database hacked, including user names and passwords, stored in the clear... Unix has only been hashing passwds for like 50 years, I'm sure it'll take off any time now...
I love hearing old stories about the early Internet in people's dorm rooms. One of the few places with affordable (or free!) high-speed Internet. I used to DREAM about a T1, as an ordinary home-dialling pleb! People set up all sorts of things hanging off there, legitimately or otherwise, and of course so many repositories of... files, we'll just call them files.
Fidonet was cool (I never used it, here in the UK phone calls were EXPENSIVE, not free!), in that it was basically the Internet but with response times of maybe 24 or 48 hours, rather than milliseconds. Usenet too, that's something I loved in my early days on dialup. Til the ISPs all dropped it as one, as they shifted towards corporatism (and Usenet was ever a liability!) and away from the hobbyists who were the first public Internet users.
Because of our lack of free calls, British BBSes, and the bigger businesses who provided similar functions to, eg, Compuserve, including Compuserve itself, had offline readers. You'd download your messages as a batch, much quicker than you could read them and probably compressed. Then hang up the phone, spend however long composing your replies, then call back up and send them off as a compressed batch. Actually Usenet readers often had that option, certainly Forte Agent did, I still have a Windows 3.1 version of it that still works! Not that there's much to ever read.
Having accessed hundreds of BBS', I never even really thought about what things might be like on the Sysop's end. Great video, as usual.
As a sysop, I was sometimes asked to have a tour of the BBS and to meet the staff. LOL
A friend in high school ran Black Stallion BBS and called himself Thunder and I remember writing his little brother about our TradeWars game after I moved away, but he never logged in again.
I have TradeWars on both computers that I currently use, but each time I start a new game I lose interest within a day.
Really enjoyed the video. I ran my bbs from about 1990 to 1996. I remember laying in bed the first night after bringing it on line and jumping up when I heard the modem answer the first call. It truly drove me into a career in computers, it grew to the point where I had netware and a few diskless nodes. When you said Fossil driver, I instantly recalled what the acronym stood for, or at least what I remember, Fido Opus Seadog Standard Interface Layer.
I started my first BBS in 1979 on a TRS-80 model 1, having built my own software to do so after reading about Ward Christiansen's work on the West Coast. Version 1 was run all in memory in a 16k of RAM machine, because I didn't have money to buy the uber expensive disk drives. I used a lot of crazy memory saving techniques, including using that 8th bit in the beginning of the actual message text to store status and other information. Later, I upgraded to 48K of RAM, and then to floppy drives. I got a job, a girlfriend, and several lifelong friends by running the board. As I moved from one house to another, and my new wife demanded my time, I decided that the end had to come in 1987. I still have the entire system in boxes in the attic. As I recall, the operating system doesn't know about dates beyond 1988, so turning it on today would require setting a date in the far past. Talk about a "flashback"!
Have you considered resurrecting it using a TRS-80 emulator? Assuming your disks haven't been corrupted by the heat in the attic, you could load the software to a virtual machine. The only problem might be dial-up phone service may no longer be available in your area. When I moved in 2020, my new place was not eligible for traditional phone service for new customers; it's now a grandfathered service only, and is being phased out completely over the next several years.
This was a fun video to watch. I did the BBS/sysOp thing when I was in high school/college in the early 90s.
I think I started with a Telegard BBS, moved to a Renegade, and then even moved onto trying to build my own BBS software from scratch with a small team of friends. That project never completed, but had a good start. :) I was "The Dragon's Nest BBS" in the Minneapolis, MN area, back then.
This is incredibly fascinating. As you rightfully concluded, I too think the main differences between today's Internet communities (aka social networks) and BBSs, or even the early Internet communities (forums, IRC channels, newsgroups etc), stem for the fact that one had to actively seek for a specific one he was interested in, and they required to adhere to specific rules (like netiquette). These entry-level matters made those communities much more tight-knit. In a sense, they mimic the difference between the first personal computers and today's PCs: the former asked you to invest some effort to use them, the latter require almost no effort to do anything. Unfortunately, this comes at a cost: fewer and fewer people are willing to learn, or to respect any kind of rule, and they often feel entitled to everything they have.
Also censorship replaced netiquette. Finding really useful information was a lot easier in the early 1990'ies, when it was mostly universities on line, than it is now.
Fun fact; my first MoDem was a 300 baud. LOL
Well said. Even though I missed the BBS era, I wish we could go back. We take so much for granted now.
@@grimfpv292 That's a great point. We knew a world where search results were not crammed with garbage, SEO-optimized content mill articles. But today's youngest internet users may never know such a world, and how scary is that?
Just wanted to Say I'm a fellow Ontarian who grew up in the 80's and used a Tandy 1000 HX to BBS. My PC jr didn't have a modem.
I have great nostalgia for Tandy and PC Jr stuff as well as bbs and dos stuff from the mid 80's.
Thanks for the great flashback.
Really enjoyed this! Your sense of humor is right up my alley. I ran a BBS called Silicon Sysop for years. Started out in 1986 with one PC and Wildcat but eventually purchased PCBoard. I added a second line and tried running both on a 386 with DoubleDos which was pretty unstable. Then I found Desqview and it was rock solid. I had Tradewars and a bunch of other doors active. When I got a third line I tried Windows 386 but it was nowhere near as stable as DV. I remember going from generic 14.4s to my first US Robotics Courier that made me feel like I had made it! In the end, I had three lines running on a 486 under OS/2. Started on LI and eventually moved to Hartwick NY and my buddy started Silicon Sysop ][ . I just now installed DosBox and PCBoard and what a rush! Thanks for this.
Telecard was (kind of) derived from the Turbo Pascal sources of WWIV 3. Wayne Bell (author of WWIV) re-wrote the whole BBS program in Turbo C for the v4 release. He started charging for the source code at that point. (my brain is packed with weird little trivia bits about BBS software. :D )
I just learned that the dude who makes these videos was practically a neighbour of mine. Greetings from late '80s Newmarket.
Wait, - without York Region, would 8-bit channels on TH-cam cease to exist?
I ran BBS in my area for a very long time. Started when I was in first year high school, BBS introduced to me by a good friend. I dialed in every weekend (via family computer) and loved it. I saved up money and bought myself a run of the mill computer and modem. One year later I decided to run a BBS, with help of my good friend we bought additional phone line and ran a one node BBS using. Eventually, few years later we had 4 nodes via Wildcat at 9600 baud. Over the years we upgraded to 56k before the internet took over. We never had membership fees or request donations. All of this came out of our pockets for the name of fun and hobby. Good times!
You can buy Wifi serial modems these days which behave like regular Hayes modems but let you accept Telnet connections from the internet. So you could actually put your BBS online if you wanted, even with vintage hardware that has no idea what TCP/IP is.
Lots of nostalgia in this video. I loved using bbs’s. I would occasionally get my hand smacked for not maintaining my upload to download ratio. I lived in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio and we had a lot of bbs’s to choose from. Most were running Wildcat BBS. I had a Tandy 1000 EX with 384 kb of ram, 1.2 and 1.4 mb floppies and a 1200 bps modem. I setup a bbs with a program called mini host but never went live . It had a drop to dos option that acted like a Remote Desktop.
This video is nostalgic.... I turn 6 tomorrow ... 6 decades that is. Those were the glory days.
It was a lot of fun wasn't it?
So much WWIV in my area. It was what pretty much everyone ran. I think there may have been 1 Renegade, and 1 other one that I can't recall. So many good times were had.
Oh man this takes me back to the good old days. I think it is time to bring my board back but maybe on a thin client. Ty for the video :)
As a 22 year-old who previous to this video had only heard about BBS in passing as a piece of ancient history, this was extremely interesting. I knew about dial-up connections and some of the pains of connecting through a phone line, but using a similar system for freaking forums? It's hard to imagine nowadays. It kinda makes me appreciate how much the Internet simplified things.
Greetings from Portugal, remembering these times is fantastic. I used BBS for the first time in 1997, when they were at the end of their lives. The one I used for a few months ended at the end of that year 1997.
But it was interesting. Good year 2024 to you. Remembering is living.
Great video! I really enjoyed it. My 1st IBM style BBS was also Telegard after upgrading from the C64 BBS world. Tim Strike, a popular TG modder, took over as the author when I was using it and put out Telegard 3.0 after about a year of owning it. The community really beat him up, the guy had a day job and wasn't getting paid for his services... was a shame he was a cool dude. I forget who took over after Tim but during that time frame I switched to Renegade which was essentially the same thing.
Like you said, BBSing was a world unto it's own. We had out get togethers as well. Called BBQ's and there was a great sense of community. Everyone knew everyone. It was a fun time before the Internet came and changed everything. Thanks for making the video!
Watching this video was a joy. I was transported back to being 12 years old in the summer of 1991 and discovering the world behind the modem for the first time. Than k you for making this. Your experiences were my experiences.
One other note; a few years back I came across some resources on the internet where people are running things like Telegard with a TCP/IP portal in front of them. It got me quite excited at the time. Not sure if people are still doing it but apparently running BBS systems on the internet because and is still possibly a thing. Would love to revisit that subject when I have some more time.
I have used Telnet to connect to BBSes for 20 years or so.
Thank you so much for posting this! I was a Telegard beta tester as a kid and haven't seen any of these screens in more than 30 years. This was a serious nostalgia trip for me, and I can't thank you enough.
When I was in 8th grade, I wrote a BBS for the TRS-80 Color Computer (original) that I had at the time, I had only one floppy, so I had to boot off one and then swap in the data disk. I swore at that time I invented the linked list, as I used that structure for the data storage for the BBS. I later upgraded to a Color Computer 3, where I could get a whopping 512 KB of ram, and I had a whopping 3.5 inch floppies that I could store.720k each, and given OS/9, I could use the computer while others dialed in as well.
While the BBS never became popular, it had at least 50 users, and with two phone lines and a local terminal the computer could easily handle 3 users at once. I ported some games over, but unless they were in C it was difficult, and most games were not. This is also when I learned that I did not, in fact, invent the linked list.
I still have 2 or 3 CoCo's in a box somewhere
thanks for showing all this! so cool!
I miss the days of wwivnet... And OPUS. (Fireweed OPUS, in Anchorage). And the wonkiest board I was on: Bilbo's Burrow, who had an out of area phone number - the board was in Nome, the phone line had an Anchorage. Later, he moved to Anchorage.
The sense of community just doesn't exist in most online groups.
And the door game that I most played? Solar Realms Elite - on 4-5 different.
Legend of the green dragon was a distant second.
Thanks for the nostalgia hit.
I ran Searchlight BBS software. Brings back memory of when I had a Fidonet node number. I lived in Burlington and before they changed telephone area codes we were able to call BBS in various parts of Ontario till they modified the 416 calling area and changed 905.
I grew up in the web era but I can imagine how exciting and cool this must have felt.
I loved L.O.R.D.! Just found your channel and I really enjoy it. Thanks for taking the time.
At one point L.O.R.D. allowed sub-doors. One allowed you to wander through a graveyard, find random treasure, and potentially gain millions of gold.
Another subdoor allowed you to add stats for gold, based on your level, so I had a ridiculously-overpowered level 1 that could kill anyone and everyone.
I just needed to stay away from trainers! :)
so cool! I had an BBS at home but it was just for classmates to share stuff for fun, never serious but just for fun.
good memories
Ahh the memories...mistyping the phone number and waking up some granny to the blast of a modem trying to connect!
I missed the heyday of BBSes, so many shut down before I found them, and I woke up some granny calling the correct number.
This really takes me back. I never set up a BBS but I dialed in to a couple a lot. I loved them and miss them. Was lucky enough to have a dedicated phone line for the computer.
I repackaged the files on my BBS to add a FILEID.DIZ. I had a BinkleyTerm/Maximus/Squish system running on OS/2. Most fun I ever had on a computer. Thanks for the nostalgic video!
Only one mention of Binkley here? That and the nodelist were the glue that held the network together.
Zmodem with CRC error checking was a lovely thing.
You forgot to mention that the original xmodem protocol transferred data in 128 byte chunks. As modem speeds increased this became quite a bottleneck. YModem and Zmodem supported CRC error checking to replace Xmodem's simple checksum and the ability to transfer data in 1KB (1,024 bytes) chunks. This was far more efficient and significantly improved transfer speeds on fast connections. My go to terminal program back the was was Qmodem (shareware) which had very flexible UART (COM port) settings and a bunch of additional features.
@@belljoxer I remember Qmodem. My first terminal was ProComm+. Wasn't too bad. Terminate! V1.4 was my favorite.
So many file transfer protocols. Who remembers the Punter Protocol from C64 BBS' ? Or jumping forward a few years, BiModem was an amazing innovation when it became available.
@@FlightEagle C64 was just before my time. I do remember bimodem though. That was some amazing capability at the time.
Lovely throwback. I ran a BBS in Sweden for a couple of years. Still have the files including the EasyCom binaries as well as my and ANSI and AVATAR menus and graphics made with The Draw.
Love your content, man.
Thanks for this really helpful and informative video. I plan on setting up a BBS someday. This video will be very helpful to do so!
I remember I got creative in getting myself credits on a couple BBSes by recording sound clips from the TV show “Animaniacs” to audio tape, then recording the audio tape playbacks into the sound recorder in Windows 3.1, then uploading the WAV files.
Loved your video. I felt the same about BBS' when I was a kid. They were my escape and connection to other people. I remember working for part of a summer to get enough money to buy my C64 300 baud modem. I remember that feeling when my buddy and I connected our computers and I said "Hello" and saw his text on my screen. Total Matrix moment. I eventually ended up running one of the more popular and long running BBSs in the Dufferin County area, the Ash Ock Underground (AOU) from 1992 to 1997.
I met many people that I'm still friends with today via the BBS scene and had some great experiences. It was a magical time.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
thank you for this video. i wanted it for years.
Aaww man what a walk down memory lane! I used to run a BBS back in the late '80s and early '90s and I enjoyed it and nowadays I sort of Miss playing all of the games like trade wars, global war, and legend of the Red dragon!
Man, this really brings back some memories.
I was born in 86, so my very early computer experience was on Windows 3.11 and I’m not really a computer guy, but this I find very interesting! Nice video! Greetings from Germany
Ahh the memories come flooding back, both as a user and as a Sysop. I think echomail conferences were the early equivalents of today's forums, and net mail was the early equivalent of email. I remember off line echomail readers like Bluewave.
I ran ProBoard and Maximus software, using either Frontdoor or Binkley as the mailer frontend. This allowed either users to access the BBS (press esc twice to enter BBS) or another mailer system to call into your system for mail/file transfer.
Spectacular batch files with hundreds of lines of code to manage everything, passing speed parameters to the BBS via error levels, after call maintenance to handle any messages posted, clean up after file uploads, run door maintenance, nightly maintenance, generate door.sys files depending on parameters passed by BBS, the list goes on.
I ran the usual gamut of games, LORD, BRE, TW2002, Usurper and lots of local games written specifically for the BBS software I was using at the time.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane
Orac
Sysop: The Elevated Hights BBS
3:800/444
Front door!! I forgot about that one! Thank *you* for reminding me. I think that's what I used way back when. Boy those were fun times.
A friend of mine ran 'Red Dwarf BBS' in Northern Virginia in the early 1990s. It was a themed BBS devoted to all things Red Dwarf British Sitcom.
Underrated channel.
as a person who wasn't even born when bbses were still a thing... this is fascinating stuff!
Wow the feeling!!! WWIV. I met so many sysops running on it. I suddenly uncovered a whole warehouse full of memories in my brain while looking at those screens. I'm emotional. Suddenly I'm remembering with detail all those years. The meetings with other sysops (I just pretended to be one), the extremely late nights... Definitely BBSs exploded my passion for computers (and blueboxing after ;-) ) So many friends I made with BBSs, and that evolved into jobs for years to come. My life was defined by them. Wow.
This video has cause a fair number of dormant neurons to fire. I set up my BBS in the early mid-1990's, but went with Renegade instead of Telegard. I still have it inside an OS/2 VM that I fire up from time to time.
I even had it on the internet for a couple years starting in 1997, when I got a cable modem. My OS/2 serial port driver (Ray Gwinn's SIO) had a neat feature which emulated a modem on a virtual COM port, which would tell the BBS there was an incoming call when someone connected to the appropriate port using telnet. At its peak, I had two physical phone lines and four or five telnet lines.
I was also part of FidoNet. Your description of how it worked is basically right. You'd have a local hub configured, and you would automatically dial out during inactive hours to send messages originating from your BBS. The hub would call you when new batches of messages were available for the forums you had subscribed. I used a program called FrontDoor to actually answer incoming calls on the main line and handle FidoNet message traffic if another mailer was calling, or pass the connection on to the BBS if it was something else (i.e. most likely a person calling the BBS).
I also had an offline message system in place called ReneWave (clone of BlueWave). Callers could archive up new messages in their chosen forums and download the messages for offline reading and replying. They'd upload their replies next time they called in.
And I had plenty of door games, including Tradewars 2002. One of my personal favorites was Land of Devastation.
OK, that's enough of a nostalgia dump for now.
I share your nostalgia with Telegard. I remember being so excited to find the Turbo Pascal source code for the 2.5 version at the time Renegade was being developed. Great memories. I had a PS/2 model 25 with a 40 meg hard drive at the time.
Lol. Love this throwback. Thank you!
Great video!
OMG, I ran a BBS running Telegard in the early 90s. Crazy that it's been 30 years ago!!!!
1:58 Wow, a 2400 baud modem! Your generation built incredible things given the many constraints of the time. Great video!
2400 baud was f-a-s-t . Go back a few years before that and you were playing with 150 or 300 baud acoustic couplers or direct connect modems. I remember it was common for C64 BBS' to be able to push their 300 baud modems to 425 or 450 baud (line quality dependent). When 1200 came out it cost a fortune, 2400 was a smaller price increment.
I like the idea of a bbs. Id like to some day set up my own. glad i found your youtube channel
Great video, I watched the whole thing! :)
I was very late to the game, and got my IBM PS/2 Model 50 386-16 in 1995 (as a hand-me-down from my older cousin) . I had a 2400 baud modem and ProComm Plus and dialed into the local BBS to play games. Some Legend of the Red Dragon, but mostly Lunatix ! That game was very fun ! Unfortunately, I got a virus from a kid a school who gave me a copy of the spider man game on floppy and for some reason, I was so mad, that I literally smashed the computer with a sledge hammer. My dad was pissed. That was the dumbest thing ever !
Not the sharpest tool in the shed back then, eh? 😁
I had never heard of Lunatix! I just looked it up and it doesn't sound familiar at all!
The website I found hasn't been updated in decades! :D
FOSSIL was a serial port driver that made it easier for different programs to share the same serial port. Such as a BBS passing control to a door game. There were a few different configuration file formats used to pass connection information from the BBS to the door game. They were called drop files, and door.sys was just one type.
Takes me back. I wrote and ran my own homebrew BBS in Ottawa the late 1980s. First ran on an Apple II, and then I ported it to a PC clone. All in Turbo Pascal. Back in the day the local sysop get togethers were pretty evenly split between homebrew and Fido compatible, at least until the demand for message sharing became irresistible. No online warez, but there were IRL parties for that sort of thing.
I ran a Fido BBS (1:106/31) in the 1990's called the PIC of the MID Town. It was running a long forgotten Turbo Pascal Base software called PICS. Towards the end I had two ISDN lines coming into my house. I also had a text based web browser called Lynx that I was able to shell to from the BBS so uses where able to surf the Internet at a speed @ 128 kbs. The OS when I first started was CP/M based by the time I closed it in 2001 I was running OS/2 Warp 4. I closed it because the ISP I was working for shuddered there doors after a flood ruined their business.
I had fun doing it. I had plans to make my BBS available on the Internet through a gateway but that never happened because I could not afford the ISDN Internet connections as those were provided to me by my employer plus OS/2 had a Y2K bug that IBM decided not to fix. The date at the stroke of midnight had a date of 19100. The amazing thing is the BBS software did not crash. OS/2 users fixed the date issues in the open source software created a subroutine that would convert the date to 2000. OS/2 at the time I was using it was better than Windows as OS/2 had true multitasking like Unix did not like Windows did with preemptive multitasking.
Thanks for the look back.
Somehow implementing this into an SSH server would be nice. There are a lot of the old BBS doors (games) that work over SSH/Telnet now with a number of servers. Plus there's the MUSH (Multi-user shared hallucination) community that continues to play and make multi-user text based RPGs. /r/bbs subreddit may give you some ideas of what's possible these days. Unfortunately most BBS software was written for DOS instead of a POSIX OS.
So many memories of BBS'ing in the 80's. Great times indeed. As for software, OPUS for the win. :D
My first taste of BBSing was in the early/mid 80's. I had a CoCo 2 with an RS232 cartridge hooked to my 300 baud modem... I used the CoCo until '88 and got out of the "online" world for a few years -- 'till I bought my 2400 baud modem -- woohoo!! SPEED! I *think* I went to a 14.4 after that - eventually getting a 56k modem.. (There was another speed in-between there, but I've forgotten it.)
ANYWAY - Thank you for the video -- I have many fond memories of logging on to the BBSes in my area. In fact, I still have some friends that I met through the BBSes all those years ago.. And yes... I'll be 50 sooner than I'd like to admit :-)
28.8k....which was the fastest I ever had, and still have it in my desktop Pentium III that's been running (almost) 24/7 since 2001.
Awesome video; don't know if you remember but Telegard was written by a guy up in Grosse Point, MI US. Some people that knew him broke into his room one day and stole the teleguard source code and leaked it into the 'grey' BBS world. I happened to get my hands on it. Telegard was so awesome and having the source code was like a treasure trove to see how it worked under the hood (it was written in C IIRC). I still have a copy somewhere, but like your backup I haven't found it in a long time.
So many fond memories of TradeWars 2002 in my misspent youth.
This brought back a lot of memories. I had my BBS in 1986 that I ran on a Macintosh Plus with Red Ryder software. I really enjoyed running the board. EDIT: The name of the BBS was "The Mouser"
I have such fond memories of the BBS days. I was Sysop of a BBS in the Vancouver area from 1994-98, running RemoteAccess 2.02 and later 2.50. I amassed a giant collection - 3 entire gigs - of porn on a little 386/40 on 1.2 and 1.6 GB hard drives, which was a lot at the time (I started with 130 MB). Porn proved to be a huge hit. Thanks to my porn distributing generosity I traded for warez, made good friends with the local general manager of cinemas who gave me and my friends free movies, the GM of the Hard Rock Cafe which gave me VIP status and 80% off, a local Hells Angel, and other interesting characters. Some are still friends almost 30 years later! It was pretty fun for an unassuming high school nerd.
i was born in 2002 but found it funny how similar some of these memories are to stuff in my childhood. Not being able to set this forum up because you shared the only computer with your family instantly made me think of how annoyed i was i couldn't set up my own Minecraft server for me and my friends/anyone to play on together, because i played on my dads computer. He had lots of photos and work stuff on it so i wasn't allowed to experiment with any bigger things where i didn't know exactly what i was doing and wouldn't mess any files up and stuff, plus other issues with having a limited amount of wifi per month, which hosting a server would probably have ate up a lot of. Anyway, so apart from setting up a youtube channel, hosting your own multiplayer server in a game is probably the most similar experience to this i can think of
Around the 6:30 mark, I started wondering if you were in the same part of the world I was ... looks like you were! I ran a BBS in Newmarket from about 1989-1992 and was the local Fidonet guy. Aurora was Newmarket's pass-through for phoning Toronto free. Looks like might have crossed paths years ago! - Scott from Scott's Basement BBS
Back in '89 there was a BBS here in Pittsburgh/Monroeville hosted 24/7 by Lowfat.
It’s very impressive that you managed to find a woife by BBS
Hello, This Video brought fun Memories. I had a BBS in California. I had 4 lines in 1992 using an IBM 8088. and it was Called Heat In The Night. it had multi user games, and single user games. I also had Adult hum hum stuff ):-) I did try using Telegard, BUT I Preferred " Renegade" and that is what I was using., However, I shut it down in 2005 .Anyway I Just wanted to send you this message. have a Good Day.
Good times. I think I tried running Renegade but couldn't get used to it. And then there was RA BBS I think it was called.. that was another popular one. I just found the sysop interface for telegard to be easy to use.
@@TechTimeTraveller I Forgot to tell you another BBS Software that I also Used. It was Called ROBO/FX BBS . it used Graphix and Ansi . I still have both Their Software, Renegade, and ROBO/FX. I Would LOVE to watch you Install ROBO/FX that would make a Great Video.. Thank you for keeping us Old well Almost Old People entertained :)
BBSs were glorious.
I had a BBS running every friday night (it was cheaper at night) hosting a lot of "grey market" warez in about 1995... It was fun while it lasted.
You might be surprised to hear that the BBS scene is alive and well. Still only a handful of people in there, just like back in the days.
But it all runs over telnet now.
Oh man, I connected to a lot of BBSes back in the day and also set up a Renegade system that I "ran" for like two weeks part time. None of my friends were interested aside from connecting once and trying to wait for my elaborate ANSI splash page to load.
Alas I was already at the tail end of the BBS age, being around 1995 by that time. Still, it was an exciting time to be online, even if it meant being a level away from it. I remember FIDOnet messages weren't instantaneous either, there were maybe a handful of deliveries a day?
My local school board also had a FirstClass-based BBS as well.
I've heard of other BBS systems still running down in the states and thought about logging in to one just to see what it was like. Cool to see the software let you use almost any computer of the time to access it. Also I live only a couple hours from Aurora Ontario lol.
I have nothing but amazing memories of running my own board. At one stage, for my school like you.
I used Remote Access BBS with front door as my mail handshaker. Was a node for Fido, also for a local state based group that did get other events.
For my school in 1991, we used a Xenix based machine so for both tcp/ip network access via internet and dialup also. It was my first Time using internet and Usenet.
You used to have to convince artist friends, to do awesome animations for ANSI and also Avatar, an alternative to ansi.
Remote access bbs used to have language options. There was Jive as an option, which was always a laugh.
Cosmac elf! I used BBSs occasionally, but in the 80s I had access to my collage's 3081D which gave us access to the fledgling network that would become the internet. So I found that more exciting. But I agree that using computer networks in that era was much different than now.
"..became hooked." gold!
Please show that video on Roboboard. I ran one back in the 1990s and it was really ahead of its time. Long live Seth Hamilton
Ran a BBS from the 80s till 1998 started on a C64 then 8086 and last was a 486sx running TriBBS. Then started one in 2004 till 2007 via Telnet using Synchronet. That one is now in storage after the many moves to probably never be booted again sadly. I was amazed to be part of fido in the 2000s again after having a node back in the 90s.
Thank you for this video!! I ran a Telegard BBS 1991-1993 w/ Fidonet (I think) and have many times wished I could play "Galactic Warzone" again. :) We spent countless hours ruling the galaxy, all my high school friends, lots of crazy stories came from those days. I had moved from Detroit to Sioux City Iowa and the BBS was how I discovered my new high school friends.
I don't recall hearing of Galactic Warzone or that author's other game, Land of Devastation, but he says the former was based on TradeWars and similar to it.
@@drippingwax ya, IIRC it was TradeWars with some fancier ANSI graphics, so that's what we installed, played for years. If the source code is somewhere I'd love to see it!
@@deafferret ConstructiveChaosBBS seems to have it. I just played TradeWars 1000 for the first time. It is weird! :D
@@drippingwax holy crap!! thanks!! They actually have Galactic Warzone!
Awesome.
22:36 Ah, yes. Samantha Fox.
Nice video.... I ran a BBS in Scarborough, Ontario called The Forbidden Zone back in the day... I still have some of the code somewhere.... it was a PC variant of the F.O.R.E.M BBS program extensively rewritten....
Hey, just rewatching this video, because I’m planning on setting up a bbs once I graduate from uni in the spring. Just so happened to notice from the number of your old bbs that at least at the time you were just on the other side of Toronto. If I actually manage to pull it off hopefully I’ll see you dial in someday!
I logged onto my first BBS thorugh a 300 baud modem connected to my C64 back in the mid 80s. I still have friends I met back then.
For a time I ran a few different BBS's (BBSes?) also in Ontario Canada (in the 519). Nothing terribly successful though. The software was CNET DS2 running on a C64 and 1541, then later a 1581 that could hold a ton for the UD section. Hard drives weren't really an option back then.
We'd do our best to speed up our connections. Sometimes my 300bps modem managed to run 450bps if the board I was calling allowed me to adjust the speed mid-call. Getting a 1200 baud 1670 modem was a revelation, then getting a 2400 baud Supra Modem...well, that was even a little too fast for the C64 at times.
I also remember calling (or watching while others called) the really big boards up in the 416 with "zero dayz warez'.
Those were the days.
I ran a WWIV BBS ("Raistlin's Study") around that same time. Man, those are some memories there.
I miss those days. Was such a unique time.
Trade Wars, the reason I started The Pinetree BBS using Wildcat BBS software from Mustang.
Turbo Pascal! That takes me waaay back to about 1989 and creating apps on an IBM XT with a 10gb hard drive. One of the files I created was an editor for 4D sports boxing, which got me lots of credits on various BBS systems as it let you change pretty much every aspect of each boxer. I kinda miss BBS systems even though a lot of early web pages looked a lot like they'd been migrated across to HTML
Omg so many long dormant corners of my brain have been unlocked. Good times.
BBS's were fun til the day you dial one and you hear a voice through the modems speaker...you pick up your phones handset and quickly apologize to the individual you woke up who is cursing you at 1am lol...and then you realize its '97 and local BBS you used to dial are now permanently offline...so telnet was the only other way from that point going forward!
Great video BTW...I tinkered around with trying to set up a Wildcat BBS back in the day but figured its pointless considering what we have now :0)
Hey thanks for the video man! I used to run WWIV back in the 80s and 90s and - wow! What a time-warp! I still have like 5 modems in storage bins, I started running BBS's in 1982!
I agree with you! Being a Sysop sure gave us the power! Great video!
I probably have the software on 5 1/4" and 3.5" and even backup tapes OMG LOL! That's going to be an adventure to go back into a time capsule, if I ever doso and resurrect ye ole SCSI gear. A tad of tinkering yes, but it can be resurrected! I wonder if it would work over a VOIP land-line - I know my fax does! I pay 6$ / mo for that merely to fax but I have not used a modem on it yet - I would need to connect to another BBS to test it - now isn't this going to be fun!
ATS11=28, ATDT1112223333
CONNECTED OK
I think that's about how it went! Ha Ha! Our talents are realy overlooked these days. If you want to be on the down low away from any type of censorship BBS!
Peace to you, DJ-Mood Frequency
This brings back memories. I ran a board called Swap Mania, from 1989 to 1994. My Sysop name was Zipper. Good times swapping files back then. 1MB file took 1 hour on a Hayes 9600 Baud External Smart Modem.. Some times it would take me two weeks to get one game at that speed. How times have changed.
Such a trip down memory lane
I ran a single line BBS using WWIV program back in the early 90's in Oxnard, CA. it was pretty fun trying to get a DnD txt game working on it.
This sent me in search of Wildcat BBS software. Found it, too…..it was an exciting time in home computers.
I lived in the 313 area code during the early 90's. I had four or five BBSes that I used to be a regular on.