Shadow Lord
Veteran Member
Not really a "new" project but an old one that I keep kicking around in my head. I've been planning on setting up an honest to goodness BBS for a while now: you know something w/ PCBoard or WWIV that you can actually dial into with any baud rates from 300 to 56K. You can show your friends how it was really done! On it I'd host vintage programs (SW, FW, PD, etc.) and drivers (there is sorely a need for a good organized location where people can pick up driver disks for old HW). It would have all the bells and whistles like UL/DL ratios, file_id.diz support, maybe a forum (strictly for discussing the files, etc. as I think this site is a gold mine and can never be replaced/matched for sheer knowledge) etc. And there would be protocols of course from B-Modem to Z-modem. Of course this being the year 2013 modems are scarce (present company excluded - I am sure we all have 2 or 3 or 15 somewhere..... ) access would also have to be provided through the internet through telnet and/or WWW and it would be nice if the files could be accessed via FTP. And of course like the BBSes of ye olden times there would not be unlimited bandwidth. This would run off of my home connection and I would keep a very tight leash on the number of users at a time. Of course you can dial in and DL away all you can with in the log-in time limit (remember those? good times) :D.
One of the things I have been thinking about is what kind of HW and OS would I run this on? Back in the day an AT w/ DOS could pull duty as a dedicated BBS but for what I have in mind I may need something beefier. Maybe a Pentium or PPro? If I can get my hands on a "real" server machine from back in the day (a rack mount unit at that) that would be very cool as well. I need the HW to have either ISA or PCI slots to support internal modems (I don't want to go external as I want to keep things nice and neat). It would need to also be "new" enough to support IDE drives (shouldn't be a problem in most systems) and have FDD, a real serial port and LPT port (for easy file exchange).
The OS? Well DOS could work but networking is a pain, not to mention no way I am getting it setup to run FTP and Telnet and WWW servers alongside the BBS. WfW as a minimum but it is error prone and crashes so often that I don't think it could run 24x7. So either NT 4.0 or Win2K. I could go to 2K3 but that wouldn't really be vintage now. Heck even 2K is pushing it but it might be a nice compromise as it probably support more recent SW then NT 4.0 - plus it is a very stable OS. The questions becomes how will the HW behave? The old BBS programs accessed the HW directly so 2K may not like that. Although, I do recall some windows based BBS SW as well. I'd probably partition the drives as NTFS for OS, FAT32 or NTFS for Win9x and above files (mostly to allow for LFN) and FAT16 to enforce good clean 8.3 names for Win 3.x and DOS. I know 2K can handle that but I don't have enough experience w/ NT 4.0 to be sure...
So what do you guys think? Right now it is pie in the sky stuff and I have too much on my plate as it is. But it never hurts to dream in a new year.....
One of the things I have been thinking about is what kind of HW and OS would I run this on? Back in the day an AT w/ DOS could pull duty as a dedicated BBS but for what I have in mind I may need something beefier. Maybe a Pentium or PPro? If I can get my hands on a "real" server machine from back in the day (a rack mount unit at that) that would be very cool as well. I need the HW to have either ISA or PCI slots to support internal modems (I don't want to go external as I want to keep things nice and neat). It would need to also be "new" enough to support IDE drives (shouldn't be a problem in most systems) and have FDD, a real serial port and LPT port (for easy file exchange).
The OS? Well DOS could work but networking is a pain, not to mention no way I am getting it setup to run FTP and Telnet and WWW servers alongside the BBS. WfW as a minimum but it is error prone and crashes so often that I don't think it could run 24x7. So either NT 4.0 or Win2K. I could go to 2K3 but that wouldn't really be vintage now. Heck even 2K is pushing it but it might be a nice compromise as it probably support more recent SW then NT 4.0 - plus it is a very stable OS. The questions becomes how will the HW behave? The old BBS programs accessed the HW directly so 2K may not like that. Although, I do recall some windows based BBS SW as well. I'd probably partition the drives as NTFS for OS, FAT32 or NTFS for Win9x and above files (mostly to allow for LFN) and FAT16 to enforce good clean 8.3 names for Win 3.x and DOS. I know 2K can handle that but I don't have enough experience w/ NT 4.0 to be sure...
So what do you guys think? Right now it is pie in the sky stuff and I have too much on my plate as it is. But it never hurts to dream in a new year.....