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The Vintage Computer telnet BBS

T

TandyMan100

Veteran Member
Joined
Jan 7, 2009
Messages
632
Location
At my computer
I think that one of the coolest things ever would be a telnet BBS that mirrored the forums and presented them in an old-computer-friendly format, as well as having live chat and e-mail functions. I would do it, but my modem is borked and I can't portfoward anything. My nomonees for the honour of running this BBS (yeah, I know, I'm sugarcoating it) are Mike or Erik. Mike (of rubbermallet fame) because he has expirience with IRC servers, HTTP servers, and runs them on 486s and 8800s. Erik because he owns the main site, so why not?

Ideas? Comments? Suggestions on what software to use?
 
I don't think that echoing this forum would be easy. However, a simple thing would be to set up a BBS for everyone here to use. Mike Brutman was working on code and showed some interest in setting up a BBS - perhaps not just for VCF though. Still, anybody could do it and invite all of us. How hard can that be?

Live chat would be fun with members but everything else already happens here. However, we could all invade some existing BBS and have a forum set up for us there. There are lots of boards out there which have almost no traffic but are just waiting ... and waiting. I bet we could talk someone into it.

Get up and running with telnet (on any computer) and you and I can go hunting for a suitable board and ambush them with a brilliant suggestion. No?
 
I have my own telnet BBS that I wrote from scratch, including the TCP/IP code. It handles up to 8 connections on a machine like a PCjr. A 386 or 486 would be overkill for it ..

However, there is a lot of code to write. Most people would consider it to be unusable. Think back to 1984, with no ANSI graphics. It doesn't have the style of something more modern ... In another year I might be ready to put up a BBS full time.

We have live chat already - IRC over to gimp.net, channel #vc.


Mike
 
One of these days I do want to set up a BBS, but I just dont have time/materials. Mirroring a internet forum for BBS and having it update on both ends would in fact be awesome (and I had been thinking about it for some time now).

As far as one way communications, you could build an app that will crawl the forums for updates (but it would only be able to do it every few hours or so), and then update them in BBS format.

For two way communications, I was thinking if an app was built that will interface directly with the forum's database. This would require knowledge of how the software actually posts the data to the dabase as well as BBS software knowledge. I think it's very possilbe to do do both (especially if the database is SQL), but it won't be easy. Theoretically with SQL and the right access it would be possible to do anything.
 
I just surface a Motorola Universal Data Systems 212A form my pile. Can this modem be used for BBS? Can some one shows me how to do it or tells me how I can get a manual.

Dougtronics
 
Dougtronics said:
I just surface a Motorola Universal Data Systems 212A form my pile. Can this modem be used for BBS? Can some one shows me how to do it or tells me how I can get a manual.
Click to expand...

If it will answer you can use it. Type "ata" and it will tell you. If you relish giving someone an earful, wait for the phone to ring, and you will both know. :p Use host mode on you commprog.

Your question seems a bit odd to me. :) No one can really answer without knowing what program you plan to run or even which OS you plan to use. There are lots of BBS programs. Look at this Wikipedia list. Unless you want to go really retro, I'd suggest you grab a copy of Synchronet, and read the docs. It runs on OS2, DOS, *NUX, and even MS-Windows.

From a client's point of view I prefer MBSE. Get that from them and it includes the docs.

To get some idea of the basics perhaps just set up host mode in your communications program with a welcoming screen and play with that. In DOS I use Lync, but some prefer Procomm or Telix.

Good luck, modems are fun!
 
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