Retro Tech Adventure: How We Called BBS in the '80s!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 ม.ค. 2022
- Hey there, fellow retro computer enthusiasts! Are you ready to take a trip back in time to the days before the World Wide Web? Well, hold on to your floppy disks, because I've got a treat for you!
Back in the late eighties and early nineties, Bulletin Board Systems were all the rage. And guess what? Our very own Tom was a Sysop of a BBS! That's right, he had complete control and ran a BBS on his trusty Commodore 64.
And let me tell you, running a BBS was no joke. It was all about being Elite and having the latest and greatest games. And our Sysop, Tom, did not disappoint. He provided a platform for retro computer users to share software and get their hands on the latest games. It was a joyous time indeed!
But wait, there's more! Our Sysop had one very special user - none other than The 8bit Guy! That's right, before he was a TH-cam superstar, he was a regular caller on Tom's BBS. How cool is that?
Now, you might be wondering, what was it like to call a BBS back in the day? Well, it was awesome, my friends. You could read the latest posts on the message board, check out the newest games, and chat with other retro computer enthusiasts.
And now, our Sysop is taking us back in time to show us how his BBS, The Temple of Syrinx, looked and how it was used back in the day. Get ready for a blast from the past, folks.
So, let's take a trip down memory lane and check out The Temple of Syrinx. It was all about Warez and being Elite, and our Sysop had it all. Get ready to relive the glory days of retro computing!
#bbs #commodore64 #8bitguy
Floppy Deep Dive • Floppy Deep Dive - เกม
Hi, Tom, I’m.sure at 56 I. A bit older than you. From around ‘85-‘87 I ran a multi-line chat system on software called Diversi Dial; before that, Wildcat. Thanks for the retro memories
I was thinking about those multi-line chats the other day. Wondering how that all worked back in the 80s.
Howdy, there is a wikipedia entry for "Diversi-Dial" It explains it better than I could at this time as it was a long long long time ago :)@@FloppyDeepDive
I used to host my own BBS back then in the 90s too 😊. So many memories
Thats awesome
My FAV BBS Board was called "The Dart Board" and I won an "ASCII art" contest there...remember those? LOL
I’m really thankful to you BBS users. You all helped drive interest and innovation in this field. The way my nephew would go blank if I tried explaining dial up and Netscape Navigator, is the way I felt trying to keep up with this video. There are levels to the game I suppose. Thanks for being pioneers (and spending some serious dough on equipment). The price tags I see in old advertisements make me nervous and that’s even before adjusting for inflation.
I was just a kid having fun with a computer and figuring out what all we could do with it. Thanks for Watching!
Just found your channel... Thank you, this brought back so many memories. I was a C64 user and ran a BBS (Hell Fire BBS) for a week before I completely annoyed my parents back then tying up the phone line and having my modem screeching all day.
Awesome! Thanks for Watching!
We never had a BBS but we called all the ones in the local Seattle area back in the mid 80s. My friends and I had handles Bubba Smith, Firefox, Bad Kaveckis Boy. We cracked games and swapped warez. Blank diskettes were as good as cash for us. If anyone reading this was a Commodore 64 nut in the Seattle or Renton area, refresh my memory of the BBS we used to call. I have all my equipment in storage, I think this is the year I break it out!
Break it out! Thanks for Watching!
Do you remember the "hack" with floppy disks where you could cut a notch in the corner and make them 2-sided, doubling your storage?
@@waynehearst317 Yep, th-cam.com/users/shortsVh78ISYQY6k?feature=share
@@waynehearst317 of course! I sprung for one of those Notch makers from mowing lawn one summer!
Fast Hack'Em by Basement Boys Software was very much my friend when it came to copying disks back in the day. :)
Loved those days. And a fellow Rush fan as well.
Thanks for Watching!
i used to run The Boiler Room on a C-64 for about 10 years. I started with floppies and upgraded to a 5 meg HD. I switched from a Cnet 10 that I heavily modded to Image 1.2 with a CMD 20 meg HD. We started a network after I got the networking disks and had a dozen or so boards on with 3 being local. After a while I contacted other Sysops running different software and got their network packets so I could do a conversion program to and from Image to their format. After it was all over we had over 100 boards hooked in and running smoothly. We shared mail and messages which at the time was pretty awesome since the internet was still pretty much a thing of the near future. Since then have lost touch with almost all the old DS2 and Cnet 128 Sysops. Those were the days.
Wow!! What an impressive network you had going. That's incredible in the ’80s! Awesome memories!!
That's incredible. You were cutting edge. Did you end up being a systems engineer as a career? Or tech related?
I've never met another person that had a hard drive on their 64. I had a Lt. Kernal (which I still have) and my journey was very similar to yours. Thanks for sharing! Cheers!
Awesome you still have yours, I was co-sysop at Watchamacallit BBS in cleveland ohio in the late 80's, we ran TriBBS till about 93 when I took over and went with the big boys and got PCBoard V14 multi node, by close in 95-96 we had early internet usenet topic groups imported into the message system and users could message people in other states about every topic but that was about the end anyway. It's funny now how I can't go a week without something messing up on this newer old laptop but the chopped and hacked 486dx would run an autoexe batch file at midnight that would compress our outgoing messages, connect to the hub bbs to transfer the messages and collect new messages, decompress the new messages, import them to the bbs and reload the bbs for years all on it's own. Good times, thanks for sharing.
Thanks for watching! It was great times. It was the wild west for our generation!
Love that manic mansion poster👍🏼
Thanks! Thanks for Watching!
I remember these BBS. Great time, 300 Baud Modem :-)
Yep, great times for sure!! Thanks for watching!
I was a little late to the game, maybe 93-94 IIRC. I was either too lazy or not smart enough to dig deeper into how they worked etc, so I really just scratched the surface.
I was fortunate enough to have a dedicated line as my Dad's union paid for his PC and a "fax" line (whatever that meant...it was a physical 2nd POTS line, nothing special, but I guess telcos had a way of marketing it)
Anyway, I met a family run BBS that had many lines. I ended up going to one of their meetups. My Dad knew I was careful, but he thought it was a little weird so he was a bit cautious to drive downtown from the burbs and drop me off at a Pizza Hut.
Another time they invited me to their house to check out their setup. The couple were probably in their 40s, and their 2 kids were probably late teens/early 20s. Their house was in a fairly rough part of town, but compared to today, it probably wasn't that bad.
Anyway, I wish I'd made more of an effort to learn how to code or whatever. Maybe I would've had more financial success lol.
Very cool video!!! Brought back a ton of memories!!! I still have My VICMODEM 1600 and MODEM?1200 1670, both still in their boxes with all the manuals and paperwork that came with them including their receipt of when and where I bought them. 1200 is the fastest I ever had with my Commodore. My first 2400 was a half-height card that I put in my first PC in 1989 which was a Tandy 1000 HX. I still have all my Commodore stuff and none of my many many PC's, so you can see what I loved then and still today!
Thanks! Those were specials times for sure, the Wild West of being online for the first time. Thanks for watching.
Marvellous. Many thanks.
Glad you liked it! Thanks for watching
I love the BBS name! 2112 is amazing
Thanks!
I got my first computer and went online I the early 90s. That was when the word "modem" was also a verb.
Thanks for Watching!
I love the name of your board! You have impeccable tastes. :)
Thanks!
Loved connecting to BBS boards on my TRS-80 back in the day. Hayes Compatible 300 baud modem. I could literally read the text FASTER then it would appear on my monitor....that's how slow the info came in. So to watch a 4K video, streamed on to my 4K phone screen while I'm walking around the park, untethered to a phone line, is just a bit of a FREAKING miracle to guys like me.
Amen! We have come a long way since then, but it was a glorious time to be at the beginning. Thanks for watching!
Lol I had a trash80 as well and CoCo 2, and comodedoor then my Amiga which I still have.
Never called yours, but in central Ohio with my Hayes 2400, we called AcmeAcres and Heartland all night long. HEARTLAND bbs was I think the first multi line BBS, which essentially made it the first ever chat room. Since it would be years before , Compuserve, Prodigy and later AOL existed.
Very cool!!
Oh man, the good 'ol BBS days! It was a lot of fun playing and engaging on BBS' at that time. Despite how slow it was and tying up lines when you dial-up it was an exciting time, and the simple games were a great time. Great story about your BBS and David being a big user back in the day!
It was the best. The Wild West of dial up. Everything was new.
I ran a few.. The Killer Wolves BBS, Excalibur IV, was going to run The Dominion but when the old sysop was bringing over his equipment to my house my grand mother scared him off LOL I was 11 and he was I think 27 🤣 But I ran them on Renegade... but I knew Sysops from Area 51, Demonic Toys and Thrill Kill Kult... also knew Fiend from Texas who made the inEquity software that I helped out w/ the beta to find bugs and ideas of improvement but everyone was starting to use dreamweaver and making websites at that time and we just parted ways etc.. but those days were so much fun!! miss those days a lot!! BTW anyone remember ACiD draw??...🤣
Great stories and memories! Thanks for watching!
I love TH-cam automatic captions. According to them, your BBS was called "temple of Syrians" 😊
Yes, in my earlier videos I rarely checked or corrected so who knows what is out there.
Soooooo wish I had still had my RemoteAccess BBS I ran from 94-99. Fellow Rush fan too, mine was called Fly By Night, because my original model was nighttime hours only so as not to tie up the line during the day (although I eventually got a dedicated line, the beautiful ANSI FbN cover art I used as a title screen locked the name in.
I had the entire thing archived on ZIP disks.....which someone stole along with a bunch of other computer equipment (and all the disks), back around 2002. :(
That’s awesome! Great memories! Those were the days. Love the name of it. Thanks for watching!
Very cool. I was stuck to calling in my own area, so out of state calls were not really something my parents wanted to see on the phone bill. haha My BBS was Space Age BBS from 1987-1989. After that I merged with another local BBS to form City Limits BBS from 1989-1991. These were run using Color64 BBS software and 4 drives including 2 1541s, a 1571 (in double-sided mode) and a 1581 + 1764 REU. It made for a decent experience for not having a hard drive. Thankfully I still have the whole setup we used and all the board files. My favorite BBS to call was probably Records Department, which was a local multi-line IBM type BBS that was pretty big and had something for everyone. I feel the same as you, those were amazing times and some of the best memories.
We have lived a very similar computer journey my friend. I never could call long distance either. Local BBS’s were my options. Luckily we had some good ones! Thanks for sharing and watching!
The 1581 was a nightmare on a BBS - very problematic, continually crashed my board. I replaced mine with an SFD-1001 pretty quickly.
@@krispykush313 Bummer as we had very few problems. Maybe you got one of the buggy ones?
@@RacerX- I started with a buggy one for sure. I gave up on that one very quickly and then tried a newer one a year or two later with the same results. Once I got an SFD-1001 for the 64 board I left the '81 on my personal 128 and never looked back. Of course it could have been the BBS software (C-Net.) but it was easier to change the drive than the software! As you said, those were exciting times. :)
I ran Computers Underground in Delaware from about 1989 until about 1991. Just something about the close community that you were a part of back then. I ran Spitfire and was known around the community for having the most door game pgms loaded. I had circuitnet email which was very primitive email exchange pgm. and it took 24 hours to refresh to go propagate to other servers. Damn good days
That's awesome! The BBS era was pure joy! I will never forget it. Thanks for watching!
Online forums before online forums existed
Yep! It all came from here.
I used to make PETSCII intro screen artwork for Commodore boards back then. I used to frequent many boards including g C-NET on 64s and 128s as well as 6485 boards and Ivory boards. It was a bid deal when I got a 2400 bad modem adapted to my C64. Who made your intro art? I was a kid/teenager back then. Stopped using my C64 in 91 or 92 and did not power it on until I restored it in 2018. Wish I had all of my old disks. Only have a small few left and not my art files. Thanks for the nostalgia!
One of my users made my Art. Thanks for watching!
Thank you for the demo. My equipment never moved beyond the all mighty disk drive, but I knew of course about modems from movies etc. 😁 Aren't there a retro resurgance happening in BBS's now that old computers has SD-storage addons? Perhaps the X16 could find it's killer app in that category 🥰
Thanks for watching!! There are still many BBSs alive out there to check out today!
BBSs AND online services like Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, etc.
Well, AOL was later.
I remember there were services where you could get some pretty good files from a catalog of discs. Some of the ones I dealt with eventually morphed into being shareware distributors. Edit: War of the lance was awesome back in the day. I played so much of that with a friend.
Very cool. I never really purchased anything back in the day, it was all downloading and trading floppies with friends. Thank for watching!
Very cool, the only tmi got to,get on a BBS was in the mid 90’s when I was stationed in Japan. I picked up a my 64c plus 2 floppy drives, 2 modems, a printer, FastLoad cartridge and a 1750 ram module. I finally got time to start playing with my old C64 and might run a BBS for fun. What’s some good C64 BBS software to run?
CNet is always a good option.
Hi Tom, I still have my original commodore 64 and vic 20 and my modems that I used. I remember 1 bbs that stood out in my mind which was called (the Scottland Yard) had you ever heard of this one? I used to go on it a lot. I hope to look into my old files and see what else I ventured onto. 😃
Hey Sean! I never heard of that one. I only called local BBS’s around me. Let me know what you find checking out your old files and thanks for watching!
Interesting video - suprised to see email in 1990 !!!! No hard disk on the 64, where would peoples uploads save to ? A blank floppy on one of your drives ?
Yes, you would leave a blank floppy in one of the 1541’s so they could upload. Thanks for watching!
@@FloppyDeepDive and i guess the downloads were from your disks on the floppy drives, i think that you said you had 8 drives going at once ?? If so then you may have had 25 games going at once.
There was a hard drive on the Commodore 64 back then - it was called the Lt. Kernal. It was a 20 meg drive.
I think I ran Ivory BBS back in the 80's. I can't remember how to load the ANSI files for each screen viewed, like the Welcome, Message and Goodbye screens. Would you have any idea? Thanks!
There was a setup section in the BBS to add all your screens and info. Thanks for watching
Is Thunder Bay still operating?
No idea. Thanks for watching
Hey now, if it wasn't for the Elite folk you wouldn't have most of the games you played. ;)
That is true!
@FloppyDeepDive I was on both sides of the fence so I do understand your comment. I did, however contribute to your software collection. 😇 Ivory BBS was THE standard for elite boards but I bucked the system by running C-Net, for a couple of reasons. Thanks for taking the time to make this video!
Thanks for Watching!
I feel stupid asking this but why did/do bbs operators have so many floppy drives?
So you can have the latest games out there for your calllers to download. That’s how we all got the latest games.
@@FloppyDeepDive thanks this helped a lot I knew how you could download games of off a bbs but I just couldn't connect the dots
BBS were on the internet - perhaps you are conflating the internet with the www?
Yes sir