For the first time today, I tried to dial up a BBS on a vintage computer. I had missed the heyday of BBSes back in the early 90s, and my only memory of needing to use text-based online services was telnet for my email when I first went to college (late 90s). That was over very quickly when I discovered that you could use Outlook Express for college email once you got the IMAP and POP server names.
Since I have downloaded from FTPs, read and posted to newsgroups and joined IRC channels and downloaded from servers there, I would hardly say that I was a newbie with some of the more venerable methods of online communication. I recall using a dial up modem to call a friend and play Quake, not always successfully. I had not used a dial up modem since 1999, and then essentially just to get access to the ISP.
As I mentioned on page 9 of this thread, when I acquired my Tandy 1000SX some time ago, it came with a Tandy 1200 BPS internal modem. At the time I could fathom no use for it, but as it was a true Tandy product of the 1000-era, I thought it may have been worth something to somebody. This thread inspired me to find some use for it, even if not a very impressive use either at the time nor today. Since my ISP, Comcast, does not provide dial up Internet access and I would think that Netzero and Earthlink would require Windows PCs to maintain an ad-based Internet Gateway, I decided that I could try to dial up a BBS.
First, I had to get the right software. Having no prior experience before, I could only hope I could find a simple enough to use Terminal Emulator. I had used Telix 3.15 back in the days when I was making serial null-modem transfers from my XP machine to my 5150. I got numbers from
http://www.telnetbbsguide.com/dialbbs/ I tried two of the current numbers and they both worked! I was able to connect, start new accounts and explore the bulletins and file servers. At 1200BPS, I could see the text draw itself across the screen, and the main menu screens took half a minute to load.
I also found that I had to enter letters on the keyboard with care. Sometimes there would be some garbage characters at the prompt, and sometimes the text output would appear corrupted. I wonder whether this was due to the modem speed, CPU speed 8088 @ 7.16MHz, the Tandy 1000 keyboard or some less than stellar line quality.