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Secret Sys-admins among us

M

Micom 2000

Veteran Member
Joined
Mar 6, 2004
Messages
1,284
Location
Manitoba North of 50 degrees Latitude
I ran across a list of all the BBS's sorted by telephone area over the years. My search was for the "204" area. Unfortunately I don't have the URL but it must be easily available.

204 is the Manitoba telephone prefix. In browsing thru it, I was astounded by the number of BBS's which had been available in the 90's. not only in the city of Winnipeg. whose population was under 500K but also in isolated northern towns like Thompson in northern Manitoba and Churchill which is a port on Hudson Bay. The place that tourists go to see the rapidly disappearing Polar Bears. I also ran across a Winnipeg BBS which had been run by one of our newer members "Bungo Pony" until 1998.

I lived and breathed BBS's in the late 80s and 90s. They were much of my computer entertainment, source of programs and info on computer problems.

It occurred to me that there must be many other BBS "sysadmins" on this forum who have never mentioned it, even tho still retaining a certain pride in thier contributions to IT.

Who are you unheralded BBS devotees amongst us. Let us all know about it and what BBS you hosted. I for one would enjoy it.

Lawrence
 
Not really a BBS per se, but I did have a dial-in Cromemco system set up back in the '80s for our Ontario Cromemco Users Group. The OS was Cromix, a sort-of-UNIX, and with its built-in mail and message functions and up/download capability it was the equivalent of a BBS. I'd love to put a similar system back up but even with today's cheap long distance rates POTS access isn't too popular any more, and since I'm still using dial-up for internet access putting it on the 'net wouldn't be too practical.

But if & when I finally spring for permanently-connected access it'll probably happen.

mike
 
I was never a sysop but I was certainly a devotee. During the late 80s-early 90s I virtually (no pun intended) lived on our local BBs's in the evenings. In my small city there were at least 7 or 8 that I can remember.

I used an Xt clone via Telix. Originally with a 300 baud modem but eventually with a 2400 one. I used to have fun posting up jokes I found on rec.humor.funny, which I subscribed to through my University's (then brand-new and amazing) Internet link.

Tez
 
I ran a RBBS-PC system in the early 1980s in New York which I turned over to the Long Island PC Users Group when I left for California. A few years later I ended up in Texas where I started a WWIV based board that ran for a number of years until the early 1990s.

My claim to fame is that the ASCII menus I came up with for the WWIV board made it to the majority of other boards shortly after I posted them on mine. . . :D
 
Cool posting, let's us all get a little pride again ;o) Ah I really want to get a BBS back up again.. even if nobody logs in but me and my friends I'd atleast get to play some of my favorite door games again lol.

I ran (for a VERY short time) "The Second Moon" and was a co-SysOp of Elfin with "Figment" (main SysOp) here in Austin. While Elfih was growing I moved my setup to somewhat be Elfih 2 which we called "Elfin PRIME" and tried to get some internal stuff between to two sort of as a second board but also a mirror of the primary board.

Yeah I played with all sorts of those BBS packages. RBBS was great with it's simple administration and upfront menu editor although it didn't have the cool (but useless) factor of all the ANSI screens, etc. I really enjoyed Renegade (although a simple ctrl+c would kill it and drop you to a dos prompt lol so I didn't use it but still thought it was cool). Elfin was hosted on VBBS on OS/2 and I ran it on Dos until the author ended up being less than friendly and some weird pricing things happened.

I can't quite remember I want to say Powerboard was a fun one with a bunch of function key commands as a SysOp that you could auto type little things and you could do fake static, bump a user with fake static, clear the screen and flash "MORON" in ascii art and a few others that sort of cracked me up at the time.

Another friend had WWIV setup and they had bought a family plan phone plan for a while and networked their BBSs together with WWIVnet which cracked me up.

What menus did you do Erik? I probably had them or saw them at some point.
 
In the 1985-1987 timeframe I wrote BBS software that ran on a PC XT that a friend had. The BBS was in New York City, and it was called PC Creation. I still remember the phone number 20 years later. The sysop (Nick Sklav) later became a Mac person and used the same phone line for a successful Mac BBS. (I think he was featured in the recent BBS documentary.)
 
I also ran across a Winnipeg BBS which had been run by one of our newer members "Bungo Pony" until 1998.
Click to expand...

Ah yes, my beloved BBS. I still have the whole thing archived. I've been meaning to pull it out of the archives and get some screenshots of it.

I actually ran it a little later in the game (2000-2001). It seemed like I was up for a lot longer than a year considering the size of my board and how many members I had on it. I had to take it down due to a sudden financial crunch (in other words, my significant other decided to end our relationship.) I thought about putting it back up for a while, but after seeing how everything moved to the internet and how telnet BBSes don't seem to have that "magic" to them, I decided against it.

I had over 50 door games, Fidonet, and I was working on setting up an internet door so users without internet access could get on it. I put that idea to bed when I realized I only had a month left of running the board, and organized Winnipeg's last BBS Bash. I think 6 people showed up :p
 
Micom 2000 said:
<snip>
I lived and breathed BBS's in the late 80s and 90s. They were much of my computer entertainment, source of programs and info on computer problems.
<snip>
Lawrence
Click to expand...
---------
Well, since you were presumably still in this part of the world in those days, you & I were quite likely on some of the same boards; CRS, PCCT and TPUG come to mind...

I still have a list of BBS commands taped to the wall in my basement above where my terminal used to sit; time to do a little renovation I'd say...

mike
 
I spent a lot of time from the late 80's through the mid 90's on the local BBSs in Virginia Beach and Norfolk, Virginia. There were tons of them, but I was a broke sailor, and couldn't afford the pay boards, and never visited long distance boards.

I used a PC clone and Procomm Plus for DOS (and later, for Windows) during that time. I did some BBS'ing with my Model IV and my Model 100 as well.

It was a great time. I miss the camaraderie you would have on the boards, once you became a "regular". This site brings a lot of that back, minus the modem noise ;-)

(Not that I don't miss the sound of my modem too!)
 
Oh, I don't know, the modem sounds were part of the experience; maybe we can get erik to simulate them when we log in here ;-)

BTW, there was a dial-up M100 BBS still in operation until just a couple of months ago.

Guess the internet has spoiled us; these days we could afford remote BBSs with cheap and flat rate LD rates...

m
 
Ran a BBS for a few years back in the late 80s called NebuNet.

It was an 8 line TBBS setup on a Compaq 386/20 with two rotating banks of modems, one set at 2400 and the other running 4 USR 14,400 DS driven by a digicomm 8 port board.

It has real-time interline chat, real time multi-user games, ANSI menus, the whole 9 yards.

We used to strip Canada Remote Systems bare (automatically) every day and had extensive download areas for all the major computers and, of course, an "adult" section. It did quite well.

It was, of course, a pay board and I wouldn't do it again with a gun to my head. Then, as now, everyone thought everything should be free unless THEY were doing it. Same as auctions where nothing is worth what it's listed for unless it's your stuff LOL
 
I belong to a few geniune dial-up BBSes, including my favorite, RDFIG. Rdfig.net telnet, or 972-329-07eight1 dial-up. I like it because I can dial in with my vintage machines and e-mail between the worlds, and thusly I use it as my main address. Fun games too, but not many new posts. I still think that we should all throw cash into a pile and have this forum accessable as a BBS. Just have it all on a server, and every time a thread is updated/made/posted to, post a copy on the BBS. When a reply happens there, put it here on the site.

--Ryan
 
lol, you heard him Erik. Script up some perl to parse Vbulletin to fidonet ;o) Actually that would be a fun thing to see is some fidonet traffic back again.

A few years back I wanted to get a consortium of bbs stuff from past sysops just in the event they paid for door games, etc that aren't used anymore but maybe still supported (like trade wars or possibly Usurper, etc) to see if I could get them and host them and keep it registered in their name as a dedication. I haven't had time but I'd still be interested in anyone wants to part with their serials that they own to get a plethora of games on a telnetable board (I was honestly hoping to figure out how to rig a few emulators to one system and allow cross platform communication). Still is still a project of mine but it hasn't gotten the dedication it's been needing to get anywhere. Plus as I probably yapped about before I was REALLY trying to host it on something other than Windows but OS/2 and ECS and the free boards I found that support telnet are unbearably slow to answer the telnet connection (on my own LAN I gave up several times until realizing the connection was taking around 45 seconds to establish).
 
I used RA under PC-MOS, believe it or not - worked well.
I got The Software Link to provide the author a copy so he could add code to allow multi-user uner PC-MOS, and it worked well. From what I remember, RA was responsible for selling a few copies, and the Sysops were given a discount price, I believe same as dealers - 40% off list.

I also played around with Waffle for a while, as it had built-in email and UUCP, and I went through the University of Miami (FL) for the UUCP in/out traffic.

Ah - weren;t those the days. Not too hard now, with serial ethernet devices to put a BBS back up, and telnet across the net to them. Or anything serial, for that matter!


T
 
Back in 1985-86, Jason Ward (RIP) and I wrote a BBS called MicroMagic which ran on a Tandy 6000HD system running Xenix. We ran the BBS for several years in Sumner, WA before hard drive failure shut it down. We had four phone lines with 1200 baud modems. The BBS had no download area, just a Citadel-like message board and real-time chat. The chat area was terrifically popular, and all four lines would typically be busy between 4:00 P.M. and 2:00 A.M. Users had a maxium of 30 minutes online per session, and as one got bumped off, another would connect.

I have the original Xenix code, but not the messages or user list. I eventually rewrote the BBS and ran it under SunOS and Linux for several years in central PA, before retiring the system in 1999.
 
I knew there were a bunch of sys-ops sequestering amonst us. "^) How could it be elsewise. The question is how do you turn that same dedication into a vehicle which like this same forum trumps the mercantile majesties into the sort of vehicle we can all live with. Possibly another Fido-net type network which is based on computer functionality rather than sales. Of couse the marketers will always be with us but there could be guidelines which could resrtrict their presence and once more allow us to access needed Data without having to pass thru thier diversionary sales pitches.

For example would you allow a sales pitch which didn't really represent the site's Aims.
I think not.

Lawrence
 
Undoubtably Mike. I was an Atari ST enthusiast and a member of the Toronto Atari Federation as well as frequenting TPUG the Commodore BBS. I also frequented a Weston BBS which I believe was part of the massise CRS, some nodes of which required payment.
Adversty to payment or financial contributions was always a gripe of the larger BBSs.

My favorite tho was a small friendly BBS from the "Beach". I joined the Freenet revolution in the mid-90s which didn't requre the expensive fees of Compuserve, yet still allowed you to access the actual I-net as opposed to the feeds of the I-net and FIDO on the BBSs.

I always felt that FIDO had the feel of local BBSs as opposed to the more impersonal I-Net.

The Freenets did have some of the camadrie of BBSs but most content was alienated. A forerunner of the present-day Web. Alta-Vista, Yahoo, and Google soon followed. The more friendly Usenet of Deja-Vu rapidly died, but still persists in Google and Yahoo Groups.

One of the attractiions of VCF is that it has the community feel of the old BBBs. I can address you as "Mike" because I know some of your history. It's not impersonal.

Lawrence


MikeS said:
---------
Well, since you were presumably still in this part of the world in those days, you & I were quite likely on some of the same boards; CRS, PCCT and TPUG come to mind...

I still have a list of BBS commands taped to the wall in my basement above where my terminal used to sit; time to do a little renovation I'd say...

mike
Click to expand...
 
Actually, other than the nostalgia factor I don't see what's so great about a BBS today; forums like this one have the same social aspects but world-wide, they're free, and when you look at all the platform- and topic-specific ones there's something for everyone out there. Software & hardware swapping etc. is more active than ever, and there are lots of places and ways to play games etc. And since my 'Net access is still dial-up (Toronto FreeNet BTW), I even still get to hear those modem tones (although they sound a little different these days).

Yeah, I remember paying for CRS; still have a few of their 8" disks. And memberships for TPUG, PCCT etc. as well... I sort of missed the late 80s & early 90s altogether when I was just computing professionally and just got back into the "scene" when I ran across the CCTALK list back in the late 90s and realized that people still had some of the junk that had piled up in my basement and were still playing with it and talking about it; have wasted many, many hours since then... ;-)

m
 
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