TACKER:  macpro (melvin ahching) SUBJECT: .. Did you BBS? DATE:    19-Aug-05 23:57:32 HOST:    sdf Long ago in the mid to early 1980s I bought a Macintosh Plus. After running the thing with only 2 floppy drives, I eventually got a hard drive and then a 2400 baud modem. I knew I wanted a modem for the longest of time as I had heard about BBS's and the things that were available on them. Living out here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (Honolulu HI) finding a local BBS was not very hard after initially finding 2 or 3 actually listed in the phone book. I remember my first login at a place called "Rat's Nest BBS" which I found a bunch of strange online conversations (posts), software that I could not run on my Mac, a picture format called GIF that never displayed well on my Mac and a list of about 50 to 70 other BBS's in town. That was the goldmine. After screencapturing that list, I dialed into just about everyone of the listed BBS's (all a local call) and eventually became a regular member of
about a dozen or so of them. I used to enjoy the BBS's that ran on the old GT Power software as those featured something called "echomail" and "echo messages" (similar to fidonet) where we could participate in long distance online discussions on a variety of topics. I remember each night at around 1 or 2 AM, people were not allowed to call into certain BBS's because that is when they did their mail and message runs, which was cool. The next day on login we'd get a bunch of new mail and discussion messages. I used the Mac Plus for about 5 years before moving on to a color Macintosh IIsi and a Supra 14.4 modem. This was around 1991 and BBS's were still very popular in Honolulu. I think by 1991 to about 1994 there were about 100 to 150 local BBS's people could dial into. Most had CLI interfaces similar to what we have here at SDF. I grew to like some of the BBS interfaces over others... RB Connect, Wildcat, others. From those I always fell back to GT
re many in Honolulu. Soon graphical interfaces were made available. By 1990 or so I was on GEnie Star Services.... for $5 a month you could call into during the night and peruse some of their message areas without incurring the per-minute charges. That was cool because around 1994 or so they provided me with my first internet address: [email protected] or something like that. GEnie had a GUI but it was only for PCs. Most Mac users remained with the CLI which wasn't all that bad. Someone in time had a Hypercard GEnie GUI that kind of worked some of the time. Probably the best of the Mac GUI's for BBS's was and is Telefinder. We had at its peak about 3 or 4 Telefinder BBS's in Hawaii. Telefinder offered users a nice Mac-like GUI that had a familiar look and feel for Mac users... folders, windows, icons, etc. Very nice. In time after I got in the internet with my Mac IIsi and the ol' 14.4 modem, I was using Mosaic to cruise the web and Telefinder allowed us to
S's that were at one time plentiful through the internet. I remember logging into Telefinder BBS's in the Virgin Islands and Austrailia... those were cool. As we all know the WWW quickly eclipsed the BBS's and in short time during the late 1990s many and nearly all the local Honolulu BBS's closed down. Everyone it seemed had migrated to the web. Tell you guys the truth, I miss the little online communities we used to have on the small BBS's. Here in Hawaii some of the BBS operators and members had real life get-togethers which were cool as you got to meet other members face to face. Another thing about BBS's was that most of them were hobby boards and users almost never got spam email through the local system. That was nice. Times have changed and I guess we all grew up and now live in the rough and tumble world of the internet. So much for the old days. <BBS.1.2> [ <SPACE> to follow thread, (R)EPLY or (Q)UIT ] CONTINUE TACKER:  macpro (melvin ahching) SUBJECT: .. Did you BBS?
-Aug-05 00:22:03 HOST:    norge Forgot to mention another great thing about the old BBS's were the online door games... Tradewars, Fishing, Card Sharx, etc. A note on Telefinder... there is one telefinder BBS that I know still operates... www.headgap.com. They still run their Telefinder BBS where there are lots of old Mac, Commodore, Amiga and I think some PC files to download. Check them out at the URL I just listed. <BBS.1.3> [ <SPACE> to follow thread, (R)EPLY or (Q)UIT ] CONTINUE TACKER:  smj (Stephen Jones) SUBJECT: .. Did you BBS? DATE:    20-Aug-05 01:59:13 HOST:    mx macpro - You're definately welcome here.  There are quite a few BBSers here amongst the newbies.  When I first saw TeleFinder in action I thought it was amazing.  A very powerful concept. <BBS.1.4> [ <SPACE> to follow thread, (R)EPLY or (Q)UIT ] CONTINUE TACKER:  apelogic (Santiago Mainetti) SUBJECT: .. Did you BBS? DATE:    20-Aug-05 15:13:54 HOST:    ukato wow, I feel so new..
arround 1996 when I got into MUDs there was a few of them that you had to access by dailing in to certain BBSs, and if I remember correctly, I think I read something about there being some muds within this one. I guess you could also consider each mud its own BBS. oh yeah, my first internet connection was through AOL, GUI BBS.. if that counts.. I haven't been arround to long in the world of BBSs, but I've actually notice the difference on how things used to be then compared to the now, and I really miss the networks of 90's _I'm one of those so called newbies hehehe.. <BBS.1.5> [ <SPACE> to follow thread, (R)EPLY or (Q)UIT ] CONTINUE TACKER:  fkasner (Fred Kasner) SUBJECT: .. Did you BBS? DATE:    20-Aug-05 17:30:05 HOST:    otaku The high priests never allowed me to get close to the UNIVAC at the U. of Chicago. I couldn't even load the input for stuff I wanted to run. We did it on coding sheets where all the data and commands were binary inputs. I
ne. Even so it was down half the time anyway. When I did the six months of calculations for my doctoral thesis I sent out the data and equations (a weighted chord based least squares fit of data to a power series - usually quadtratic but sometimes cubic) to first Minneapolis Honeywell. A colleague and friend worked there and then to Oak Ridge Nat. Lab. The latter screwed the equation but when I straightened out both computer folks they confirmed my hand calculated results. I used a BBS to convince myself that the Apple ][+ actually ran about as fast using floating point as did various CP/M boxes and the early IBM boxes. Also got lots of interesting software via this route. And this all started with a 300 BAUD modem on the Apple. When I got an IBM clone model it graduated to 1200 bps then 2400 bps and then 9600 bps. Wow was that fast (NOT). I presently use a 300 KB/s DSL line but when I have to download through this venue it frequently doesn't come close to that speed. But then
l character is what we all dreamed about as being available in the BBS days. Thanks, smj for keeping such things alive. FK <BBS.1.6> [ <SPACE> to follow thread, (R)EPLY or (Q)UIT ] CONTINUE TACKER:  fkasner (Fred Kasner) SUBJECT: .. Did you BBS? DATE:    20-Aug-05 17:47:42 HOST:    otaku Now that I am reminded of this by the comments above, I do miss the community of the small BBS. We had one in the Chicago area and had a couple of dozen very active members who were willing to get together every now and then. It was run by the book editor of a Chicago newspaper and as he was hearing impaired he never seemed to be willing to join our occasional lunches and other kinds of get-togethers. He lived just a few blocks away from me but I actually never met him personally. I suppose those who are totally deaf become rather shy about the difficult communication with strangers. I had a friend in college who was deaf from birth and spoke
had no basis for correction) and also my uncle (by marriage) had a totally deaf sister so I was used to connecting with the hearing impaired. We used CP/M OS then for that BBS. And he used WordStar (I used it on an Apple and then on a IBM clone) and I wrote for him using C a program that counted words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages for both WordStar and for ASCII text. It was my thanks to him for the kindness of his hosting the BBS. Shortly later he retired from his job and moved to the upper peninsula of Michigan. Miss that lot. The only one who appears to still be around is a guy who is on a major AM radio station as both a food critic and business reporter. Others, not old farts like me, are probably still around but have faded into the anonymity of users of the internet. Sad. FK <BBS.1.7> [ <SPACE> to follow thread, (R)EPLY or (Q)UIT ] CONTINUE TACKER:  macpro (melvin ahching) SUBJECT: .. Did you BBS? DATE:    21-Aug-05 08:37:55 HOST:    norge
n "oldie but a goodie" like me. As the dialup BBS's were dying out, some of the old BBS's and perhaps several new ones made their way to the internet as either ISPs or BBS's that users could dial into or telnet to with a terminal interface. Kind of something like what we are using right now at the SDF shell. After all this conference is called BBOARD so I guess its origins go back to the old BBS monicker of days gone by. I always find it a challenge and a learning experience to get myself with a new BBS, especially the ones with mostly a CLI interface (think DOS, think