from Hacker News

A look at my BBS Software from '93

by mmccaff on 4/19/17, 1:39 PM with 212 comments

  • by chrissnell on 4/20/17, 3:53 AM

    The late 80s/early 90s BBS scene was an amazing time for me. I was in high school and I've never been as interested in computers and communications as I was then. I never ventured into the "dark" side like OP--I was too scared of my parents--so I ran a legit FidoNET BBS using the RemoteAccess BBS software and the Frontdoor mailer (and later, Maximus and BinkleyTerm).

    The most amazing thing about it all was that it was the public internet before there was a public internet. E-mails sent over FidoNET had an amazing weight to them that's hard to describe. It took a ton of effort just to get your BBS to participate in the network and once you did, data moved so slowly that you became very observant of each step of the process of communicating. First, you wrote the email in your mail editor (I loved GoldED). Then, another program bundled it up with other emails into some kind of binary packaging and passed it along to the mailer. The mailer took this bundle of mail and dialed out on the modem to the local FidoNET hub. If you lived in a rural location, this meant that you had to make a long-distance call to deliver the mail. My local hub was in Seguin, TX (~30 miles away) and it felt like a very big deal when my computer dialed him up to do a delivery. From there, the hub delivered it to a "star", which was a regional hub that dealt in larger volumes of mail. This was usually run by someone with money because their modems were making long-distance calls (including overseas) on a regular basis. From the star, your mail was shipped across long distances and then the process repeated in reverse until the recipient's system picked up the mail from their local hub. Then, when they replied, the whole thing happened again in reverse. It regularly took days to get a reply from across the world but it was so fun! Every single mail that you received in your inbox felt as important as someone writing a letter by hand and sending it via the postal service. I cherished getting emails, even if they were stupid.

    I still dream about reviving a modern FidoNET (yes, I know it still exists) for the HN crowd. I write a lot of Go and I even read some of the FidoNET technical standards with the thought of a Go implementation of the protocols but never got anywhere in it. It's an enormous amount of work and I haven't had a real phone line in over a decade. Doing Fido over TCP/IP just doesn't feel the same. It's way too easy.

  • by apaprocki on 4/20/17, 2:48 AM

    Re: losing BBS/source from the 90's -- I was fortunate enough to regularly back things up to QIC tape, and lo and behold, 22 years later a hacked up box restored the BBS perfectly and it ran in DosBox on my laptop. I was pleasantly surprised that it all worked immediately. Hardest part was finding parts for a floppy tape and installing the right Windows version. Seeing the ANSI art made it all worth it...

    https://twitter.com/apaprocki/status/550432891201941504

  • by EvanAnderson on 4/20/17, 2:20 PM

    Being involved in the late 80's / early 90's BBS "scene" was formative for me. I wrote and "sold" some unimaginative "Door" programs (even going to far as to register my copyright on one of them). I wracked-up a lot of long-distance bills! I always wanted to run a board, but never got my act together enough to do it.

    Since the audience here is very diverse I'll selfishly throw out a couple nostalgia requests:

    A friend's board ran a door game called "Cyberspace" that was a TinyMUD-esque "single user dungeon" game. At one point we had 10 - 12 people actively building rooms, adding mobile NPCs, etc. It was loads of fun even though only one person at a time was interacting with the software. I've looked periodically over the last 20 years to see if I can find the people who wrote it on the 'net, but I've had very little luck. (It was Turbo Pascal-based, and originally written for WWIV, but we "adapted" it to work on Searchlight and later Renegade.)

    I'd love see if anybody from the old 203 board "Bit Truth" or the classic 602 "Unphamiliar Territory" is on here. Any takers?

  • by lsc36 on 4/20/17, 6:25 AM

    Here in Taiwan BBS is still popular, PTT [0] has ~120k avg. concurrent users every day.

    For those interested, their codebase is available on GitHub [1].

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System

    [1] https://github.com/ptt/pttbbs

  • by davidy123 on 4/20/17, 2:35 AM

    I wrote a lot of BBS software starting from 1986. This was in Toronto mainly on the C64 (28k RAM… plus some available via switching out ROM using assembler), so Spence BBS was an inspiration, but with a friend we wrote software called M1 which had creative features like user contributed ongoing stories and a way to display files or run simple scripts from any command, like a shell.

    Eventually around 1990 it was extended to support federated message exchange, but by then UNIX systems were entering consciousness so we switched to multi-line, uucp capable Waffle software on DOS, then Xenix, BSD/OS and finally Linux around 1993 as it became https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internex_Online

  • by whatever_dude on 4/20/17, 1:56 PM

    One thing that always fascinated me is that although BBSs connected people, they were necessarily constrained by distance given the difficult (and price) of long-distance calls. That reflected on the shape of the community around it. There were some things that would be common between them but overall different area codes had very different scenes. This is somewhat diluted today, since you can connect with whatever community you want. It creates a different sort of bubble.

    Anyway, that constraint was also somehow reflected on the choice of tools, maybe in this case especially in the software used by the BBS itself. The US had plenty of different BBS software being used. I know Wildcat was popular in Europe. In my native Brazil it was dominated by PCBoard (major) and Remote Access (minor), and the underground scene was heavily invested in the "cool" Oblivion. I actually thought PCBoard was a major player until I realized very few boards in the USA used it.

  • by nkozyra on 4/20/17, 2:58 PM

    Most of my BBS talk/nostalgia is embarrassing but by far my most embarrassing anecdote was that I set up a BBS exclusively to chat with my high school girlfriend late into the night.

    This is only noteworthy because, in 2017, this would be entirely normal behavior for a 14 year-old. But the amount of effort and expense it took to get the equipment, extra line, BBS and then _teaching my girlfriend how to use a modem_ put me squarely in the superdork category.

  • by eric_arrr on 4/20/17, 2:23 AM

    Fellow obscure BBS software author here.

    Mine was Apocalypse / ApX (a hack of Havok, which was a hack of something else, which was a hack of Emulex/2, which I think was a hack of Forum?), around '92.

    I, too, remember recruiting ACiD guys to help out with the menu art.

    Ah, memories.

  • by bananaboy on 4/20/17, 10:46 AM

    Does anyone remember the terminal software "Terminate - the final terminal"? Does anyone know what happened to the original author, Bo Bendtsen? I'd love to send a registration check, since I never registered it as a youngster! There's a Bo Bendtsen from Denmark on twitter but alas it's not him (I asked!).

  • by wccrawford on 4/20/17, 10:59 AM

    WWIV BBS and "doors" (games, basically) were my intro into system administration and further experience programming back then. I had so much fun setting that up. My parents even let me have 2 telephone lines so that I could have 2 users (plus someone in the house) on at the same time. I had exactly 1 multiplayer "door", but that was fine.

    My favorite door was Legend of the Red Dragon (LoRD) and I remember playing it a lot back then. My users (all half-dozen of them) did, too. It was a small town, and I was surprised to get that many people.

    So much nostalgia, and I can definitely link it to my career today.

  • by JohnLeTigre on 4/20/17, 2:19 PM

    I miss those days

    I miss live-chatting with the sysop if he was around

    I miss gaining access levels and discover new files/areas

    I miss re-loging at 12:01am to have double turns for my attack in BRE

    I miss the discovery involved, how you would need to come up with interesting/new content to maintain you UL/DL ratio

    I miss the epic mail convos we had in my BBS community

    I miss GT's

  • by jmspring on 4/20/17, 4:02 AM

    In the east bay (primarily - Contra Costa County, but there was an offshoot (maybe two) down towards Dublin/San Ramon), there was a multi-line chat BBS known as Popnet. The main office was in Walnut Creek, socials were a regular thing, online chat and games were an important part of socializing. It was custom written software by the father/son team. If I recall rightly, they even had an online version of Diplomacy (the board game). I still have friends from that era.

    It's interesting to see Dementia was based off of WWIV. The WWIV BBS software was well written and easy to update/customize/modify. TML, Innerdot, and others were amongst those that ran it in the 80s to early 90s.

    Interestingly enough, I actually feel like the BBS days did more to foster social interaction than "social networks" now. They were (unless warez sites) hyper local. In the east bay, we had regular pick up tackle football games (going from several a year in the early days on 1/x year in the 2000s) that ran for around (maybe more than) 20 years. Many of those involved are still friends.

  • by hoodwink on 4/20/17, 2:06 AM

    Anyone play TradeWars 2002? That's what I was doing in '93 on my BBS.

  • by wiz21c on 4/20/17, 1:58 PM

    As a wannabe-hacker, I had the super pleasant surprise, once trying to login into a BBS (for which I had no password, of course) that the line was interrupted in the middle of the screen and the sysop started typing "what are you tryin' to do"... It was just like in a movie. This was my first day on the "scene". BBS was located in Belgium, don't remember the name... I wonder if one could do that with, say, ssh (and without IRC :-))

    After that, the problem was paying for long distance calls to more "3l33t" BBS's (usually in Sweden). But we had our ways :-)

  • by exogeny on 4/20/17, 3:17 AM

    I spent an absurd amount of time modding my Renegade board, drawing ANSI, listening to the latest mods out of the demoscene and failing miserably at learning Assembly circa 1993-1996. And then IRC came along..

    412/724 scene, north of Pittsburgh. Lots of good friends met on the boards, some still friends today.

  • by davestephens on 4/20/17, 8:26 AM

    This is awesome, thanks for sharing. For yet more nostalgia, I recommend you check out the /r/bbs Reddit, or for EVEN MORE nostalgia, take a look at ENiGMA BBS - it's BBS software developed in Node and can be spun up on any Linux box - https://github.com/NuSkooler/enigma-bbs/.

    Thanks again, enjoyed this thread!

  • by bungie4 on 4/20/17, 12:11 PM

    Old sysops get shit done!

    I ran BBS's from the late 80's through the 90's. All the local sysops are still friends and we still wax nostalgic over the old days. To a person, we all are still in IT and hold senior positions.

    When I remember those days and compare them to today, by and large, nothing is 'easy' anymore. It's what happens when you get to far away from the metal.

  • by revicon on 4/20/17, 6:47 AM

    So many memories sparking up from this thread. I ran The Dark Tower from my bedroom in the late nineties on my Tandy 1000 286 from Radio Shack. Everything I do professionally I started off on there.

  • by driverdan on 4/20/17, 3:23 AM

    I fondly remember that "Kall Back Soon" ASCII art. I think I used it on my BBS too.

    I ran a single line PCBoard BBS in the mid to late 90's. PCBoard had its own plugins called PPEs. A lot of them were distributed as shareware. After finding a decompiler I had a lot of fun reading source code, making personal keygens, and finding security issues.

  • by 1001101 on 4/20/17, 2:16 PM

    Not sure if anyone saw this: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/a-198... Basically RPi + tcpser == Internet BBS. I ran a PCExpress BBS - AMI Express for PC -- (USR Dual) for a while, and feel very lucky to have been a part of that era. Have been thinking about doing something on tcpser. Still part of that a bit, as we still make modems at the current gig. Get nostalgic every time when I hear them training up.

  • by fiorix on 4/20/17, 4:40 AM

  • by cyberferret on 4/20/17, 1:43 AM

    Nice! Way better than most BBS's that I used to frequent back in the 80's and 90's.

    Great to see an OS/2 based one too - I remember switching to OS/2 for a small time "play" BBS that I set up in the early 90s... I was astounded at the ease of running multiple modem lines on OS/2 as compared to DOS or CP/M...

  • by k__ on 4/20/17, 8:54 AM

    I remember back in 2002, I joined my first BBS.

    It was a smallish (~30 people) anime & manga community and the twist was, that the whole board was written by one of the founders in PHP.

    I remember him hating on the other BBS because in his eyes they weren't "pure" anymore and in his eyes, they had nothing to do with BBS at all. What can I say... the community broke down because he insisted on his strange BBS and people went to communities who embraced the "social web" with profiles, timelines, blogs etc.

    But this was in a time when people said, these new "blogs" were like "guestbooks you write in yourself", which is true and in view of the omnipresent guestbooks on every website, where people wrote that they visited the website, a blog sounded hilarious. Now the concept of a guestbook sounds hilarious and blogs are a backbone of the web...

  • by sjs382 on 4/20/17, 4:19 AM

    If you love BBS art, be sure to check out https://artpacks.org

  • by meerita on 4/20/17, 8:40 AM

    I loved my BBS. I remember when I came home with a modem and my parents asking me what was that. That thing was the device that skyrocketed the phone bill up to a thousand dollars. I remember my parents screaming like crazy.

  • by deepakhj on 4/20/17, 6:14 AM

    This brings back a lot of memories. I started in the bbs scene when my friend gifted a 1200 baud modem in 1992. I began trading warez on a 8088 xt 1mb ram 40mb machine. From the local scene in Los Angeles (818). I modified WWIV and ran my own bbs until my hard drive crashed and I eventually lost the source. I also got into war dialing pbx's so that I could call famous bbses in New York and Canada. I loved the style of bbs software like celerity and visionx and the art of acid and ice.

    I eventually made it to the it scene where I had access to and ran the top ftp sites in the world.

    I miss those days immensely.

  • by mrlyc on 4/21/17, 12:44 AM

    In 1984, I wrote a BBS for the Commodore Vic-20 with up to 64 "rooms" (message areas), email and an online game. Users could create a room and make it public or private. The board was very popular with users spending an average time of 70 minutes on it.

    That's how I started programming professionally. One of my friends hired me as a programmer, saying "Anyone who can write a BBS for a Vic can program!" Thirty-three years later, that same friend wants me to work with him at Google.

  • by hertzdog on 4/20/17, 6:09 AM

    Thank you for your post and thanks for all the comments... it takes me years back. Maybe a dumb question: why we all miss those days? I don't think it is only related to being young. I am convinced it is something related to a "less noise/new tools" and probably I agree about "the more constraints more creativity". Is there anybody who can better articulate or have a different vision?

  • by sathackr on 4/20/17, 3:02 PM

    I've been trying to find a "door" game I played that was themed around a nuclear wasteland. There was an ansi-graphical map with tiles you moved between.

    IIRC you potentially would run into various wild/mutant animals or other players that you could battle. I don't remember much else about it but I remember enjoying it profusely and have been unsuccessful in finding even the name of it now.

    Also played a ton of Trade wars.

  • by pibefision on 4/20/17, 9:11 AM

    My BBS was called CENTURY XXI. At first, it was just an Apple IIe with a SiderII harddrive (just 20MB!). 24hs. GBBS was the software usted to manage it, it was great. Based on Argentina, it was an awesome learning experience. Check this link for more BBS in Argentina: https://goo.gl/7EXTMx

  • by hoodoof on 4/20/17, 2:09 AM

    How old were you when you wrote this?

    Looks like a big system - was this your first major project?

    I seem to recall OS/2 and a C compiler cost money back? How did you get to be using those, through work or did you buy them? Why did you choose OS/2 - did you consider any other alternatives?

  • by wyldfire on 4/20/17, 1:38 PM

    Apparently WWIV is provided with an open source license and builds on modern OSs [1]. You can run it as a telnet server!

    [1] https://github.com/wwivbbs/wwiv

  • by th0ma5 on 4/20/17, 5:32 AM

    I wrote a thing in Turbo Pascal that would convert Prodoor (Proboard) mailbox files to RBBS mailboxes. Or the other way around, I can't remember, but not both directions I don't think. Anyway, I uploaded it to several boards back then I think someone who was a retired Navy officer used it on their own board. I also think the Prodoor people may have used several of the ideas possibly, but in all the archives of BBS software, I haven't been able to find it. Oh well! Turbo Pascal was so much fun, and reading the RBBS source was a great education at the time when long distance phone calls were expensive.

  • by hackermailman on 4/20/17, 1:02 PM

    Blue Board (Commodore64) software was the best I found for the late 80s/ early 90s, it was cheap, incredibly easy to run and customize, consistently updated, and it came with a built in terminal so when no one was on your board you could call other ones or easily script a file transfer/mail sync with a remote board.

    I remember a lot of STS chat boards too, In 1989, a DDial-like clone, Synergy Teleconferencing System AKA STS was released for IBM PCs and until 1997 I regularly would connect at 300bps to talk with local hackers at 3:00am on these "big" 16 line STS boards until easier access to IRC killed them off.

  • by niix on 4/20/17, 4:44 AM

    This looks awesome. I was a little later to the game, spent most of my childhood time on AOL 2.5-4.0, writing "progz" in Visual Basic.

  • by neuro on 4/20/17, 4:16 AM

    You just took me back to the 80s. Stale chips and cracks screens(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlVmPU6dh1M) from downloading games till 4 AM in the morning on a 1200 baud modem with friends. What an outstanding looking BBS! Thanks.

  • by tdumitrescu on 4/21/17, 12:10 AM

    Awesome memories! Modifying WWIV for local BBSes was how I got started with C when I was a young teen (after years of Pascal and Basic). For example putting in a user-vs-user combat system that could lock out a defeated foe for the day. Great for getting a board's users to keep out trolls collectively!

  • by booleanbetrayal on 4/20/17, 4:14 AM

    I miss the ANSI art scene. I remember 800# access that would live and die on the daily. That and phone bills.

  • by dreva on 4/20/17, 8:33 PM

    I have many fond memories of the BBS scene...

    I ran my own BBS from '92 through the early 2000's, starting on an Amiga. I wrote it myself in C (Lattice C, later SAS/C compiler.) It had email and Usenet newsgroups (through a UUCP feed to a local dialup ISP...)

    Fun times. I eventually moved to Linux and FreeBSD...

  • by jotjotzzz on 4/20/17, 1:51 PM

    Omg BBS. Did anyone remember Boardwatch mag? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwatch There were many BBS's posted there, and that's how I discovered them.

  • by Safety1stClyde on 4/19/17, 1:41 PM

    Too bad you lost the source code.

  • by icelancer on 4/20/17, 8:52 AM

    Very cool. Thanks for the nostalgia. Played a ton of TW2002 and LORD on Virtual Arcade BBS back in Cleveland, OH in the early 90s. Ah, back in the days when I had the Internet AND local BBS access and the BBS was far more compelling...

  • by myth_drannon on 4/20/17, 1:10 PM

    You can get software for BBS and some shareware CDs from BBSs at http://cd.textfiles.com/directory.html

  • by b0blee on 4/20/17, 6:33 AM

    Thanks! BBSing got me my first programming job in 1985. I ran several boards, including one for the company, before the web came along 10 years later. I really enjoyed your screen shots.

  • by agentultra on 4/20/17, 4:04 AM

    I wish I had been able to preserve those door games I wrote...

  • by endgame on 4/20/17, 9:59 AM

    All of you nostalgics in this thread need to get together and write a book. I loved Exploding the Phone, and I'd love a volume that covered the BBS era.

  • by jonahhorowitz on 4/20/17, 5:31 AM

    I ran a BBS back in the 90s called The Game BBS, it was hosted out of my bedroom in Colorado. I'd love to find an old backup, but I doubt I have one.

  • by aethant on 4/20/17, 4:59 AM

    This was a great post. I remember playing LORD and writing doors in turbo pascal back in high school. Thanks for posting!

  • by myth_drannon on 4/20/17, 1:15 PM

    anyone recommends active telnet BBSs?

  • by grumblestumble on 4/20/17, 3:47 AM

    omfg! i was on many Dementia BBS' in SoCal back in the day. First board I sysop'ed was a WWiV 3.21 - I was very proud that I modded the Pascal source to support more than 9 discussion boards at the time.

  • by alexkavon on 4/20/17, 6:00 AM

    Oh man, I remember running my old acmlmboard back in the day. Great times.

  • by cgrusden on 4/20/17, 2:23 PM

    I love this. Reminds me of my MajorMUD days, thanks for sharing

  • by cJ0th on 4/20/17, 10:12 AM

    This system looks like a real life text adventure game :)

  • by RyanRies on 4/20/17, 2:58 AM

    It's beautiful.

  • by eternalvision on 4/20/17, 7:28 AM

    wardialing, redboxing, beige boxing for 900's, breaking into pbxes, east coast bbs scene. good times for sure.

  • by synrst on 4/20/17, 2:25 PM

    Ansi art, still 31337 af.

  • by jv0010 on 4/20/17, 12:31 PM

    omg this is amazing. even the ascii art brings back memories.

  • by phaed on 4/20/17, 12:39 PM

    Dem feels.

  • by Arizhel on 4/20/17, 2:38 AM

    Computers were a lot more fun in those days.

  • by X86BSD on 4/20/17, 5:07 AM

    Maybe I missed it in the comments but was I the only one to run Wildcat! software for their board? I loved Wildcat!

  • by gus_massa on 4/19/17, 2:49 PM

    Nice post, but it's not a "Show HN".

    From https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

    > What to Submit

    > Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.

    > Blog posts, sign-up pages, and fundraisers can't be tried out, so they can't be Show HNs.