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BBS / DOS / Telnet server ...making them play together, anyone?

3

33black

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Oct 23, 2011
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Los Angeles, California, United States
Anyone have experience setting up and running a DOS based BBS through telnet?

I have my 486 DOS box with a 16-bit ISA Netgear ethernet card hooked up to my router. I'd like to run a PCBoard telnet BBS on it...but I"m not sure how.

I only have Win 3.1 on that computer...I'd rather not have to upgrade to Win 95 and use Netfossil or something of the like. I'm sort of fuzzy on the process and details of setting everything up and making it work together.

I've googled around, but there's lots of different information, and though my 13 year old self would probably get it back in the day when it was current, my current self is having a little trouble focusing on it.

Can anyone guide me through a step by step and tell me exactly what I need?

Cheers!
 
There really should be some better FAQs out there. Maybe you could write one ;-)

There are two parts to your issue, one is getting the network card driver set up for dos. This may or may not include a network stack program, perhaps Mike's mtcp package could handle this? Second is getting a "tcp wrapper" to translate the telnet based traffic to a virtual serial port that your bbs software listens to (unless the BBS software has support for telnet natively). That's where you end up with that serial to fossil driver, etc.

Do you have a floppy or anything that your network card may have come with for a dos driver? As a side topic I wonder if dosbox or another simple emulator could handle this for anyone practicing?
 
Actually the adapter I have is NIB. The guy I got it from on evilBay actually paid ME 2 dollars for it.

He started it at a .99 bid with free shipping, probably assuming it was going to hit at least 10. I put in my .99 bid and won. It cost 3.03 for him to ship it. :)

Anyway, I have the actual disk with the packet driver on it. NETGEAR EA201 16-bit ISA ethernet card.

I want to run PCBoard 15.3...which was the last one they kinda coughed out before Clark shut down. It has telnet/fossil support built in supposedly.

I used to run the PCB BBS at my high school, as well as a Spitfire one at home...so maybe even Spitfire will do, since they are currently still developing that.

I understand the whole thing in THEORY, it's just that the digging and piecing things together from mostly old information is hard.

I would be HAPPY to write a FAQ on this once I do it.

I'll put it up on the BBS. :) I was trying to decide on a theme for it, and it will probably be retrocomputing. Basically this board with all the fixins, on a BBS where everyone can actually use their machine, whatever the year, to hop on, and exchange. Current info, using old tech.
 
33black said:
Okay, was playing around with mTCP, and got it to recognize the card and everything...but the problem remains of a DOS TCP wrapper in order to get PCBoard to recognize it's on the internet....
Click to expand...

Yes .. mTCP isn't going to work for this purpose. The mTCP TCP/IP stack is compiled directly into applications - there is no way to make existing applications use it.

I liked PCBoard a lot. But my answer to the question is just to write a BBS that works over telnet from the ground up. I have a telnet BBS partially implemented that can handle 5 to 10 users comfortably on a low end machine like a PCjr. Faster machines can handle more. Eventually I hope to setup a full time telnet BBS running that code, but I still have a fair bit of user-interface type work to do.


Mike
 
Yeah, I'm an idiot and realized most of this and that DOS isn't multi-tasking, so you couldn't run a telnet server in the background. The telnet server would have to be built into the BBS.

I'm looking forward to checking yours out at some point! I definitely do not have the coding ability to program a BBS from the ground up..or even the last 10% of one.

BTW, nice work with mTCP. I telnetted to NYAN cat on my 486 machine. At least I know I got it working on the network. :)
 
I think that Mike Chambers was working on code that would let the BBS use the FOSSIL interface to convert the serial stream to telnet connections. But even if you can get the TSR and the TCP/IP part of it perfect, there is still a tremendous amount of overhead. Anything coded for serial is expecting to send and receive one byte at a time to talk to the UART. That matches a user typing fairly closely, but every time you paint the screen or send a menu a lot of CPU time gets wasted. Telnet and TCP/IP solve that problem by making you send a minimum of 40 characters with at least two different checksums every time you want to send something, even if it is just one byte. (Or no bytes, as in the case of the required acknowledgements.)

Wait, I think I made a funny there .. nevermind. TCP/IP and Telnet overhead can be pretty brutal too. But if you build the telnet server into the code directly you can make up for a lot of the sin.

The mTCP telnet client serves two purposes - it is useful as a telnet client, but it also let me test my telnet options handling code in a real environment. That is preparation work for the BBS. The FTP server serves a similar purpose - it lets me test my multiple connection handling code very well. I'm working on adding Xmodem and Ymodem to the telnet client now which is useful for downloading from Unix machines that have the sx/sb/sz commands and also from downloading from telnet BBSs.


Enjoy ..

Mike
 
mbbrutman said:
Yes .. mTCP isn't going to work for this purpose. The mTCP TCP/IP stack is compiled directly into applications - there is no way to make existing applications use it.

I liked PCBoard a lot. But my answer to the question is just to write a BBS that works over telnet from the ground up. I have a telnet BBS partially implemented that can handle 5 to 10 users comfortably on a low end machine like a PCjr. Faster machines can handle more. Eventually I hope to setup a full time telnet BBS running that code, but I still have a fair bit of user-interface type work to do.
Click to expand...

In my opinion, the BBSes (as I understand them now, as I didn't get involved with them in its prime time) were the poor-man's micro-computer implementation of the Internet-connected mini-computers running UNIX.

In UNIX, already in 1985, you had USENET (basically a world-wide distributed bulletin system), and email, and FTP, and telnet to play text games on telnet-servers for games. It seems to me that panoply of options available to Internet-connected UNIX users is what the BBS scene tried to emulate for users of dial-up-connected micro-computers.

So, now that (thanks in no small regard to you work with mTCP) the micro-computers (at least, those x86 based) of vintage can access the Internet itself, and use telnet to remote to UNIX system with USENET, email, FTP, etc., what's the purpose of "upgrading" the BBS experience to be Internet-connected, when the mere fact of making the Internet available to vintage micro-computers (at least, x86 based) makes the BBS tool a totally unnecesary one?

In other words: the purpose of BBS was to socially network micro-computer users, who had no Internet access. Now micro-computers, even vintage, do have Internet access, so the BBS tool is no more needed. Ain't it so?
 
Pepinno said:
what's the purpose of "upgrading" the BBS experience to be Internet-connected, when the mere fact of making the Internet available to vintage micro-computers (at least, x86 based) makes the BBS tool a totally unnecesary one?

In other words: the purpose of BBS was to socially network micro-computer users, who had no Internet access. Now micro-computers, even vintage, do have Internet access, so the BBS tool is no more needed. Ain't it so?
Click to expand...


I think you're missing a few things there. :) The BBS is still relevant, but perhaps in a different way. Note too, that "vintage" computers weren't vintage when they were made, and some were using the internet. I was using BBSs and Fidonet when the internet became available through the local ISPs that started to spring up. Many people (particularly on Fido) were complaining loudly about the shift to the internet. They were not happy about it at all. Fido, you see has some superior points that were getting lost. One of the main points is that it was self regulating and we were able to avoid spam, and jerks who wanted to take over - either by trolling or by commercial interest. A few Fido adherents never gave up and the network exists today.

Another thing about BBSs is their independence. Fido (as an example) was a kind of mesh network, and it operated outside of government or corporate control. With all the (at least attempted) government control of the net these days, this is something which is of interest to some people. Perhaps most noteworthy in that regard is that there are still dialup BBSs running Fidonet. This allows connection of people all over the world in a non-commercial and internet free way.

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that the BBS was not simply obsoleted by the internet - although it was mostly superseded by it. The net was better in most ways, but not all. I personally like the telnet BBS, but the people who are into that these days are (with some notable exceptions) mostly not interested in anything other than games and BBS nostalgia. That's not very forward looking stuff! Still, I think there is a future there if enough people want to carry the idea forward.

PS: I forgot to say, that I think that forum software serves some of the most important functions of BBS software.
 
I dunno, you're right it was a social network usually. I'm not sure it was technically competing or trying to mimic the unix equivalent but I guess the more I think about it you're not that far off either. BBSes were popular among companies prior to ftp servers for files, updates, notifications. State agencies had their own hosted BBSes (which I thought was awesome) for announcements like bad weather days, etc as well as public bulletins. It was just a localized/area computer which was the purpose I was made aware of. The internet wasn't big yet and most of the ISPs were charging by the hour or amount transferred that month on your bill so you weren't going to sit idle on the internet or phone at that time since that would rack up your bill.

The thing that "killed" the BBSing for me was once the internet did start to grow I found myself there more and more in other chat areas with like minded people, etc and being available was an increasing trend. Eventually the ISP I used (actually longer story was the state agency was dropping their BBS and creating a "homeplace" or whatever they were called on AOL instead) AOL went to unlimited minutes per month. *THEN* I started idling and set up my 98 system to host the internet to the rest of the computers in the house. Once that was established, me breaking the available connection the family used to get online was more of a pain and our second phone line was tied up pretty much exclusively to AOLs dialup service. My availability to connect to other local BBSes started to shrink. Then of course the internet became more popular and was all the buzz for businesses to get a webpage up for their company to host the once dialed into information.

It was still a fun social scene where you could chat with others who were likely in your area, voice your opinion on usenet/fidonet then get flamed for that unpopular view, and play early games where you were competing against the other frequent callers to get the highest rank and potentially knock them down a peg.

The part I miss and I don't know about others though was the ANSI art/animations and games. I suppose you could also once again start hosting your archive of X software again or demos etc (vintage drivers would be common amongst us). It would be in a less (for a period of time) searched area of the net until it becomes a growing problem again.
 
Your opinion does not reflect my observations of online life through the 80s, 90s, etc.

BBS systems go back to at least the late 1970s - if you had a micro computer and a modem, you could run a BBS. I came to things fairly late - I started with a 1200 bps Hayes in 1984.

In the early 1980s you would have been hard pressed to find a Unix system outside of a university or government environment. Going 'online' via proprietary services like Compuserve started to become popular in the 80s, and general dialup access via an ISP for a basic Internet connection did not become widespread until the mid 1990s. (When I started working for IBM in 1992 dial-up access via an ISP was non-existent. Most people still got online through a university connection, or a gateway from a corporate system.)

To call BBSes an alternative to Internet connected Unix machines is highly debatable. They developed in parallel. Most BBSes served a geographically small area (a city) because at the time telephone rates were often based on per-minute pricing, not the flat rate pricing that became later. And long distance rates were painful too. Fido-net was a notable exception - by having data transfer between nodes they were able to forward messages to a far wider geographic area. Contrast that to Unix machines at universities, government and industry, which often had backbone or leased line access. UUCP was getting quite out of date in the late 80s. If you have basically unmetered bandwidth between machines on a fast network your services look quite different.

You also miss the point of doing an old style BBS - to remember and enjoy the way the online environment just to be. If I could emulate the modem screeching over telnet I would.


Mike
 
mbbrutman said:
basic Internet connection did not become widespread until the mid 1990s.
Click to expand...

Yep. I think it was about Jan 98 when I first got an internet connection. Even then there were only a few ISPs who had just started up. Also, I was still using BBSs in 1999 - there were still lots of them.

You also miss the point of doing an old style BBS - to remember and enjoy the way the online environment just to be. If I could emulate the modem screeching over telnet I would.
Click to expand...

Telnet is a hurdle of course, but I haven't seen any vintage sites that play a modem screech sound file when you land there. Somebody's gotta do that soon. The blinking cursor at the C:> prompt is just a start. ;)
 
I'm actually half seriously thinking of adding a 2400 bps modem connection sequence to my DOS telnet client. Just for giggles of course. ;-0

(I need to figure out a good way to digitize the noise and get it into a form I can play on the standard speaker.)


Mike
 
Something was buzzing at the back of my mind that I had read recently, and it just came to me. The world's first commercial ISP went on-line in 1989. They're still in business. http://www.theworld.com/

"On a fine Boston (OK, Brookline) day early in November 1989, our first customer logged on and The World was born."

Here is the story about how they first went on-line with six 2400 baud modems:
http://www.indra.com/homepages/spike/isp.html
 
When I first borrowed access to the internet in '92 what hooked me (besides Commodore FTP sites) were MUD's and IRC (Efnet). I still would dial local BBSes until the mid 90's though. That was dialing up to a university system specifically a VAX cluster. Even if one did not connect out to the internet there were still "boards" one could join which were like apps created by students for local use on the cluster... but those "boards" many times would direct you to other places such as MUD's, IRC, telnet BBSes, etc..

I remember finding a list of telnet-able modems with area code. I could telnet into a modem then dial out (hayes commands) to remote local BBSes!
 
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