[HN Gopher] Ansiwave BBS, a modern BBS with ANSI art and MIDI music
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Ansiwave BBS, a modern BBS with ANSI art and MIDI music
Author : sekao
Score : 108 points
Date : 2021-12-24 09:15 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ansiwave.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (ansiwave.net)
| [deleted]
| gavinray wrote:
| This is a cool idea, I dig it!
| ilaksh wrote:
| It seems like its not showing people's username, only 'modleader'
| when he posts (assuming that is the site creator).
| sekao wrote:
| There are no usernames, only tags, of which modleader is one
| (and multiple users can have it). Only mods can edit tags, so
| you can think of them somewhat like flairs on reddit.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| So is there any way to get to know fellow users? If posts
| don't have usernames, how do I know that this post is by the
| same person as that post?
|
| Getting to acquainted with fellow users is one of the big
| benefits of any communication system... even HN.
| sekao wrote:
| You can click on a post and go to "see user", which will
| show their user page. You could also add a signature to
| your posts -- they're more fun and personalized anyway.
| Right now that's manual effort, but i will probably add the
| ability to preset the editor with something so it's there
| every time you make a new post.
|
| Usernames just don't work because they require an
| authoritative server to divvy them out. Ansiwave is
| designed to eventually be partially or completely
| decentralized -- all users are just ed25519 public keys,
| and the ID of a post is the signature of it, so there will
| never be conflicts between users/posts on different
| servers.
|
| In theory we could one day have a decentralized way of
| registering unique usernames, similar to that DNS-like
| thing they made on ethereum. But i'm not even close to
| thinking about that right now.
| aphroz wrote:
| Opening this website crashes Chrome on my Android device
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| It's a feature.
| nougatbyte wrote:
| +1
| peakaboo wrote:
| I run Vivaldi because it's actually awesome on the phone (but
| I don't like the desktop version). Works perfectly.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Shouldn't a modern BBS support normal videos, images, and audio
| too?
| sekao wrote:
| I hesitated with the word choice but when i say "modern" i mean
| that the project dispenses with the implementation details of
| BBSes that are not relevant to the "BBS experience", such as
| the use of telnet/ssh, outdated text encodings, and long signup
| forms asking for copious amounts of personal info. I think
| adding images/videos would definitely affect the experience.
| peakaboo wrote:
| Or maybe it's nice to not have those things. It's a very
| different feeling.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Well you can download them through {X,Y,Z}-Modem if you want
| jcims wrote:
| Personally i would say no. I think the lack of that in HN is
| part of its recipe for success. A file area would be fine, but
| not inline.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| We can compromise and use RIPScript.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Google says that was used it BBS from the 80s and 90s. I
| wouldn't call it modern.
| danachow wrote:
| Google is wrong.
|
| In BBS terms it very much was modern. First it dates to
| 1992, so very late in the BBS era - just prior to the point
| where larger BBSes were starting to offer shell or SLIP/PPP
| access and inevitably becoming just ISPes. And it never
| really caught on. I remember the one time I dialed into a
| BBS in 93, the video mode changed and this graphical mouse
| driven screen was rendered. It seemed cool but BBSes as
| more than an ISP were already dying. The company that made
| it was a bit interesting - once the web came out they tried
| to improve it away from its EGA origins, add audio/video
| and pivot to directly compete with HTML and then Flash - it
| did not work out.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19980114110236/http://www.teleg
| r...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20160820155221/http://www.kytty
| ....
| [deleted]
| ztjio wrote:
| Okay but, can I play Legend of the Red Dragon and Barren Realms
| Elite? Been a few decades since I had my fix...
| motohagiography wrote:
| Git as a protocol for this brilliant. I don't know it well enough
| to know what kind of client side moderation policy enforcement
| might be viable, or curation tools, but very, very compelling
| idea.
| hereforphone wrote:
| Can it run door games like LORD? Are the ANSI graphics "real"?
| These are important things to look for in a modern BBS system for
| me.
| sekao wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by real :D It's all unicode text, but
| you can actually share old school ANSI art in the .ans format
| because it includes a cp437 to utf8 converter. No door games
| but i hope to extend the MIDI scripting language to do other
| things, including eventually making games. Little
| programs/games embedded directly inside posts is an exciting
| idea.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| So no ansi animations then?
| sekao wrote:
| Nope no animations. I think that functionality would come
| from extensions to the scripting language i mentioned, but
| that would of course be a different format than original
| ansi animations.
| zquestz wrote:
| Great idea, but it would be nice to have https...
| guytv wrote:
| This is really awesome. But I did not see any posts from users,
| what am I missing?
| mmastrac wrote:
| Something is really busted with this site and Firefox on the mac.
| I cannot read it at all.
| ytjohn wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing, even considering going into dev
| tools to try and change the font. Didn't realize it was a
| firefox on mac thing. I went ahead and opened it in Chrome.
| It's still pretty difficult font to read, but it is a bit
| brighter in Chrome.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/KB5irZv
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| A bit of a tangent, but the trust factor was pretty high with
| BBSes compared to the Internet of today. Many, including the
| Renegade BBS I ran, asked for your real name, phone number, and
| home address when signing up. I never thought twice about giving
| out that info and never had anyone complain to me about needing
| to provide it.
| j45 wrote:
| Oh, Renegade.
|
| What would so many have done without Cott Lang democratizing
| creating BBSes without commercial software.
| EarlKing wrote:
| ...run any of the 50+ other non-commercial BBS softwares
| instead, including Telegard, the software Renegade was a
| literal hack of.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The kind of bbses I was on required references but never a real
| name.
|
| I visited big warez bbses locally/Europe.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Shout out to a fellow Renegade sysop. I don't believe I asked
| for anybody's home address, but maybe I've just forgotten. In
| the town where I lived, most of the BBS people knew each other,
| plus everyone was in the phone book anyway, so it wouldn't have
| made a ton of difference.
|
| But I agree that I was so much less concerned about privacy
| back then. Likely that was out of ignorance, but also because
| the threat to privacy is different on the internet. In a widely
| networked world, the .001% of people who are malicious actors
| still amount to a huge number of malicious actors that didn't
| exist in a community of a couple hundred people.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Thanks to local toll or long distance fees your local BBS was
| literally local. Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an
| ass you were close enough to get punched in the face. Contrast
| with Usenet where trolling and flamewars were rampant because
| instigators could hide behind a veil of anonymity or pseudo-
| anonymity.
|
| The BBS era was also long before public doxxing and spammers
| scraping any and all personal info. At least before the
| Internet made such things easily amplified and trivial to do.
| williamtwild wrote:
| On the bigger local BBSs there were many people who were
| phone phreaks. What you say might be true for your area but
| certainly was not for mine.
| jcims wrote:
| >Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were
| close enough to get punched in the face.
|
| That and getting banned actually hosed you.
| gavinray wrote:
| > "Thanks to local toll or long distance fees your local BBS
| was literally local. Everyone on it lived nearby and if you
| were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the
| face."
|
| What? This is mindblowing to me, being born in 1997. I can't
| imagine an online experience like this, it sounds pretty
| neat.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| Yeah. Not uncommon to have BBS picnics at the time, where
| you would meet like all the other people on the internet.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| My hometown had 300 BBSes that I wrote a set of expect-like
| automation scripts in {COMMO} to dial in, download a ZIP of
| any new DMs and forum posts, and then log off and rotate on
| to the next one. When the number was busy, the dialer would
| move to the next, and when it connected successfully, the
| dialed would mark it completed until I clear them.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Sometimes the people on the local BBS would even get
| together for stuff! See a movie together, have a potluck
| out in the local park... you know, human social stuff. Hang
| out with the people you've been chatting with regularly.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Yeah, we had "get-togethers" at one of the local malls.
| depingus wrote:
| We called them GT's for short!
| junon wrote:
| Remember that the internet as we know it today is young. At
| the peak of BBSes, you called actual phone numbers to
| connect to places. If you've ever seen Hackers or War
| Games, the hardware wasn't _too_ far from reality
|
| If the phone number was long distance, you had to pay more
| - just as it is today. Local calls were usually free. Hence
| the GP's comment :)
| 300bps wrote:
| He's not kidding. When I was 14 I mouthed off to the
| brother of a friend of mine on a local BBS.
|
| He knocked on my door 45 minutes later to talk to me about
| it.
| 01100011 wrote:
| It wasn't the only online experience, but maybe it was the
| most common one. You also had services like
| Q-Link(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7jLBOIvxhg), which
| later became AOL.
| giantrobot wrote:
| With BBSes you were literally dialing in to the machine via
| a modem. Local calls were free but long distance charges
| were expensive. There were even local toll calls, a number
| might be in your area code by far enough away you were
| charged to call. You wouldn't pay long distance rates but
| it wasn't free. Charges were also billed to the caller
| rather than callee.
|
| So just by nature of tolls you wouldn't call many out of
| area BBSes. If you did it was brief calls for a post or to
| check mail but not sit around playing a door game or
| downloading some big file.
|
| That all meant BBSes were _very_ local for most people.
| This is in addition to the fact only a small fraction of
| homes had computers, a fraction of those had modems, and a
| fraction of _those_ actually called BBSes. That aspect also
| meant the populations were relatively small. A small web
| forum might have a hundred users spread over a large area
| while a BBS would have a dozen in the same town.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The phreaking scene opened up access to any bbs bypassing
| long distance/toll charges.
|
| What some use to do is put a 1-800 on a 1-900 number. By
| calling a 1-800 number you could connect to a sexline for
| free. We had so much as kids calling and making fun of
| the operators.
|
| A few years back I got a tv for Christmas. Christmas
| night I setup it up and it scans the cable channels
| available. Next day I notice some channels with fractions
| like 88.2 were programmed but the screen was blank. I
| rescanned and discovered new channels at different freq
| and they were playing really new movies. I watched a
| movie and when it finished there wasn't any content. I
| rescanned often and new movies would popup during the
| night. Then sex movies started to show up. I realized
| whatever anyone ordered via ondemand in my building was
| being broadcast and my tv could pick it up. If someone
| paused the movie I would have to wait. Mornings were a
| mix of cartoons and fast-forwarded porns. Day was mostly
| cartoon. Evenings were when people would order the hit
| movies.
|
| Interesting things are constantly happening no matter
| what era you are in.
| danachow wrote:
| > There were even local toll calls, a number might be in
| your area code by far enough away you were charged to
| call. You wouldn't pay long distance rates but it wasn't
| free.
|
| And in the late 80s long distance rates meant something
| like $4/minute inflation adjusted. Even "local" toll
| calls were up to $1/minute. Of course the billing scheme
| was far more complex. The paper phone book would usually
| have a page or two to determine the rate between various
| exchanges.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were
| close enough to get punched in the face.
|
| Didn't stop folks from flaming and trolling. The BBS
| Documentary [1] has an example of a kid who follows around
| and threatens a BBS owner who owns a computer so because he
| didn't like the computer it ran on.
|
| [1]: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Didn't stop folks from flaming and trolling.
|
| Definitely not but the prevalence was far less. The local
| nature of BBSes inspired a lot of prior restraint we don't
| see a lot on the Internet anymore. That's not to say
| anonymity or pseudo-anonymity is _bad_. It just creates a
| different environment than what you 'd typically find on
| BBSes.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Oh totally. Plus you were using your cash on minutes so
| there's only so much bad behavior you could do.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > there's only so much bad behavior you could do
|
| Or _afford_ to do. Trolling is a lot less attractive at
| 1200 baud for a dollar a minute.
| Dowwie wrote:
| Can a Sysop interrupt a session, entering a chat with the user?
| Where are the doors?
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Why have MIDI music when you can have ANSI music? ESC[<BASIC
| style music string>^N
|
| I miss the days of my animated, musical ANSI signature!
| IronWolve wrote:
| Too bad its not a plugin for browsers, and you could post
| ansiwave content on any site, browsers just detected its its
| ansiwave code, like an extension to html.
|
| Imagine reading a tweet or reddit post with ansiwave content
| imbedded. (Like Microsoft Chat tried with gfx and irc)
|
| Internet really needs to break free from all the control. An
| overlay network like that disenter browser plugin, you could read
| comments on any site. Now that all popular sites are closing down
| comments, kinda shame it died.
|
| Also for video, I remember small rle text stream videos on modem,
| just black and white, pretty easy to do now with unicode, a small
| 64x64 text box.. (example).
|
| Also midi's and awesome .sf2 sound banks.
|
| Good times back then, seems the internet lost so much in exchange
| for government and corporate control.
| ms123 wrote:
| There's also https://midnight.pub (much more low key though!)
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(page generated 2021-12-25 23:00 UTC)