First post, by konc
- Rank
- l33t
I hope I'm posting in the right place after the recent forum/categories changes... If not, I did try 🤣
So, I really don’t know why I haven’t posted this earlier…
Long story short: I used to run a BBS (link for the younger among us 😀 ) in the early 90s. Things moved on of course and the first sparkles of dial-up Internet were enough for me to forget everything about it.
Until ~2013 when, while going through some old boxes about to have a close encounter with the recycling bin, I found some backup CDs of mine. One of them had the BBS directory!
I used DosBox (plus a lot of tweaking) just to get it to run one more time locally and the feelings… Oh. My. God. The feelings.
That was an era guys, a special era. I couldn’t just pass. (Big parenthesis: this thing http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ is the best thing ever if you want to learn about BBSs or recall those years. I’m telling you, it’s excellent)
I had to get it back online. So I did 😀
First of all, the goals: This was not going to be of course an active BBS, operating like 20 years ago. I envisioned it as an “attraction”, not a live system. A BBS demo if you want, being online for everyone to learn what a BBS is, or revisit one. A lot of outdated things had to go. For example message boards, time banks, connection limits, FidoNet, BlueWave… Did I ring a bell for anyone or not yet? 😁
The most important goal was to keep the feeling of what a real BBS was. Things that had no meaning anymore were indeed removed, but others like Menu navigation methods and popular Doors all are authentic, exactly as they were back then!
So back to reality, it had to be accessible over the Internet, which means Telnet. And probably some web site because I’m not sure everyone would go through the Telnet thing just to see some ANSIs.
And it is,
Old Time’s Sake BBS is available through:
1) Its web site: http://otsbbs.eu
A nice HTML5 WebSocket plugin does the rest. Should be working even for mobile devices, no money-back guarantee for this though. (Obviously click "Connect"!)
2) Direct telnet at konchoulias.no-ip.org, port: 2323
A proper Telnet client which can display ANSIs correctly is attached below (doesn’t even need installation, and yes, Windows telnet client sucks big time):
The web site is perfect for anyone who just wants to see what all this is about, whereas direct Telnet is highly recommended from a real retro-PC.
Trust me, it can't get more real than some pure DOS PC running mTCP and Telnet-ing to konchoulias.no-ip.org:2323 for a full screen ANSI orgasm!
Finally and for once more: Don't expect to find a live community here with people exchanging messages. This is only a sight-seeing, a dead-but-real snapshot of what a BBS looked like in the early 90s.
The "Guest" account/username is completely unrestricted, anyone not really interested can log in with it and browse around. But hopefully some will go thought the process of creating a 100%-no-purpose-account, just for the "Old Time's Sake" of it 🤣
In case anyone is interested more in the BBS scene, http://www.telnetbbsguide.com/ is essentially the ultimate guide for it nowadays.
OK, since the advertisement is over I'd really like to read some comments. BBSs were a huge, elusive for many and determinant for others subject.
Thanks for reading all this! 🤣