> Internet still has not achieved that kind of decentralized p2p in the mainstream.
BBSes were never mainstream. Personal computing in the 80s and early 90s was not mainstream. This is the insurmountable problem in trying to recapture that experience.
Ran them since the early 80s and really loved the “online communities” we had. Difficult to recapture that experience in today’s environs.
What's stopping you?
I always love hearing about different hardware people used for BBS/ISP's.
We eventually switched to Pormaster 3's.
Did anyone else here ever play 4 player Doom over modem? A company called ACPi made a spider dongle that let you do it... it was expensive.
Our BBS, on the other hand, remained small (small town). The BBS ran half a dozen Sportsters on 2 computers and OS/2. Later, we also became a small ISP, providing dial-up access with Windows NT 3.51, an EISA DigiBoard multiserial and about 16 Boca modems.
The Couriers were used for some dedicated point-to-point lines, with FreeBSD and KA9Q.
Internet forums never were quite the same to me.
Also, L.O.R.D., and RIPTerm.
Apparently there are binary files to download, which is probably why this thing immediately folded when HN found it.
Previous versions have older versions of the zips, so search the history.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230606002640/https://www.telne...
I was turning the ringer off on my parent's phone and hoping nobody would call outside of my 10pm-6am BBS host time.
I guess I tried chasing that feeling for a while, but when the Internet came to consumers (I was on it about a year before it hit mainstream, and even before the World Wide Web), that feeling was there a little. But as it became an everyday tool to use by the world, it became mundane somehow. Hard to describe.
And of course, back then I thought it would be a tool to unite the world, but it's just torn it apart.
I set up Wildcat! 4 (a DOS based BBS software) earlier this year and have had a blast with reliving the past. It was interesting to figure out how true to period vintage to run it vs letting some newness leak in, with 30 years of hardware and connectivity options to select from.
I wound up doing both dial-up and telnet access, and just last week got an UUCP gateway setup so it can dial out to a Raspberry Pi and send/receive internet email.
It's interesting how many tools there are now to make it easier.
I still recognize many of the alias...almost 25 years.
I've been trying to find info/screenshots/video of the old style 'lightbar' menus that were popular right at the apex of the BBS scene, when software like Renegade was all the rage. Been very hard to find, so if you have some info (don't send me to the BBS documentary I've seen it) I'd be happy if you reached out.
I think you can also still find pockets of similar communities among esoteric social/distributed networks.
