Back when I got started... reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- guidzilla · 2013-07-25 02:00 I was just reminiscing a bit as I was going through some old equipment. When I first got online I was 8 years old using a Tandy CoCo 2 with a 300 baud modem. I believe my dad has us initially using the crazy per hour expensive Delphi. Probably a year later I found some local bbs's and was eventually co sysop on a few MajorBBS , wildcat, searchlight, etc systems. It was an exciting time, it really was. Anyone else care to share their start? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- goretsky · 2013-07-25 04:17 Hello, A Commodore 64 connected to a 12" or 13" color TV, with a 1541 disk drive and 1670 (1200 baud) modem. This would have been 1979 or 1980, I think. Eventually had an SX-64, a C128, Amiga 500 and then a 2000 before moving on to PCs. The last PC I used a modem with would have been an Intel 850E motherboard with a Pentium 4 CPU and a US Robotics Courier V.Everything modem. That would have been around 2004, but at that point it was just as a backup connection in case broadband failed, or for faxing. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Sysop_2400 · 2013-07-25 05:09 1991 got a C64, 1993 a 486 dx2 with 8mb RAM (oh shit, son) and a 2400 baud modem. Kid in school told me to dial this number. Busy 64 line MajorBBS with TW2002. I was hooked. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Zahne1977 · 2013-07-25 13:20 My family never had enough money for a computer until my mother won $5,000 in the lottery. She took that cash, and turned it around to buy a VERY nice computer. At the time, she purchased a 386 with 2 megs of RAM. It was so powerful and high-end that we had people literally come visit just to see it. (In hindsight, she didn't need to purchase anything THAT crazy. Most people were using 286's with a fraction of the RAM at that point) The modem was a 2400 baud without error correction, and I started with a terminal program called Bitcom. Bitcom wasn't capable of displaying ANSI at that point. Within the next couple years, I upgraded to a modem with Error correction and discovered Telex. Things became much better. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- guidzilla · 2013-07-25 13:48 Tradewars... me and some friends every couple years STILL fire up a TW server. I still have my original Swath license haha. First game I can remember really being hooked on. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- guidzilla · 2013-07-25 13:50 Some great old equipment there. My dad was really into the CoCo's, hence why I started there. I did like the Amiga's too. Some old friends ran a small BBS on one called Nemesis I believe. Our first foray into PC's was an 8088 XT smokin 8 mhz paired to a monochrome monitor. I actually used that for quite some time. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- guidzilla · 2013-07-25 13:56 Ah Telex, we certainly ran that too for awhile. Life definitely got better when we upgraded our 8088 to an Acer 33MHz VGA Beast. No longer was I designing ANSI/ASCII graphics for folks in monochrome! That Acer I believe is also when I started running Telemate, which to this day I still think was an amazing piece of software. By this time I believe we were up to a 28.8 modem... I think we went 300, 2400, skipped 14.4 for some reason, and up to 28.8. Eventually leaping to 56k of course. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FozzTexx · 2013-07-25 14:45 I got into it during my last year of high school. I had an Apple IIgs with a 2400. There were 5 or 6 local BBS numbers that I would dial into all the time. I was always dreaming of running my own BBS and I spent a lot of time building my own BBS software in BASIC using ModemWorks. By the time that I could finally afford to have my own phone line though the internet had come along and I was running the computer lab at the college. I never really did get my BBS online. These days though I spend most of my time building the modern BBS: web sites. I still have the software I wrote though and I keep thinking about using [tcpser](http://manned.org/tcpser/e8754729) and putting the BBS online with a real Apple. Also if you have pictures of your old computers you should post them to /r/RetroBattlestations! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Zahne1977 · 2013-07-25 14:54 I actually moved to Terminat eventually. I still have the last install with my phone list intact. As for upgrades, I've owned basically everything in between 2400 baud and now. My BBS (If you are curious) was just brought back up a month or two ago. You can access it via telnet at: linenoisebbs.istmein.de:4242 or over the web via a flash portal at: http://linenoisebbs.istmein.de/ftelnet.ssjs /shameless plug off :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Sysop_2400 · 2013-07-25 14:54 Seriously. Then I learned to be a pirate. Oh man, totally different game. ...then I found MajorMUD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- spork_king · 2013-07-25 15:17 I have such fond memories of my early BBS days. I was in Junior High School (around 1985-1996) when my dad brought home an IBM XT from work that he got because "it was broken". We fixed it up and got it working and it was amazing. Compared to our trusty old Apple 2+ (which I loved and learned to code on), it was so advanced. A 10MB hard drive ("how will we fill that?!"), capable of producing color (not that we had a color monitor, still using a green screen) without adding a card to it to handle it, and capable of lower AND upper case letters on the screen. Totally amazing. My father and I used to talk about what the future of computing would be and this seemed one step closer. He kept telling me when I was a kid that one day, we'd just buy a computer without having to figure out what's inside it. "It will come with enough of everything, you won't need to care". Looking back on it, it seems like for a significant percentage of the population that is true already. I couldn't even tell you the specs of my iPad, for instance. The computer itself didn't have many files. I remember my father bringing home a box of disks (remember this was 1986, these were 5.25" floppies and cost a small fortune) with all kinds of shareware programs on them. He also brought home Prolog, which is a programming language and it blew my mind being so different from the Apple 2 basic I already knew. After a couple months of playing with the games and programs I had, my father brought home a printout of files. Filenames, sizes, and a brief description, all categorized. I couldn't even run half of them if I wanted to because there were several types of computers supported. His company (a fairly large engineering company) had a BBS you could dial into and this was the entire file listing. Not having a modem at that point, I highlighed the ones I wanted with a thick yellow highlighter he brought home for the purpose (I had never used a highlighter before, and that seems so odd now thinking back on it). Every once in a while, when he would have lunch with the guy that ran the BBS at work, he would give him a couple of disks and return home with a batch of new files for me to play with. Eventually my father bought us a US Robotics Sportster 1200 (1200 baud, baby!) to plug in to the computer. This was the exact point when phone calls both to and from our house became a pain in the butt. I was ALWAYS on this thing (no call waiting at that point). The only BBS I knew about was the one at my dad's company so I dialed into that. 300 baud only, which at the time really didn't bother me. I was just amazed that I could actually call this other computer and tell it to do things for me. The BBS itself had a 60 minute time limit per login. I downloaded constantly, filling and refilling my download directory on the hard drive. There was a special class of files on the BBS that were so large they couldn't be downloaded unless you logged in and initiated the download immediately. Otherwise, after 60 minutes you got booted. I can't even remember what the files were, but I remember being so happy when I finally typed quickly enough to do it and NOT get booted two or three blocks from the end of the download. Now that I look back on it, the fact that this BBS only ever supported 300 baud is so mind boggling. This company literally put things into space on a regular basis, and this was all they had. Amazing. During all of that, I managed to find a listing of other BBSes in the area on the company BBS. Most of these supported 1200 baud and had door games and different files. I would come home every day after school and log into each one, in the order I preferred them. I'd read EVERY message in the message areas, play my door games (Tradewars was my favorite), and download files. I made a lot of friends this way. One BBS was special. "The Pentagon". Nobody knew who ran it. The sysop NEVER logged in (really, never). And most of all, it had FOUR telephone lines. This was so different from the others (active sysops, single line, lots of rules). Nobody got banned from this place for being a jerk. There was nothing significant to download, and I don't remember there being message boards. You could chat with people in REAL TIME and make actual friends. I met the girl I went to my prom with on this BBS. I never found out who the sysop was ("The President"), nor why he maintained what had to be an expensive thing at the time. Maybe he was one of the regulars on there, but if he was, none of us ever figured it out. One day after I went to college my little sister (who also used to dial into BBSs and made some good friends) told me that Pentagon stopped answering its phones and was dead. I eventually ran two BBSes while in high school, convincing the student government to fund my new "computer club" for $150 so I could buy a 2400 baud modem. Having to answer questions about the likelihood of somebody in the club doing what they did in Wargames to get the money (yes, seriously) seemed easier than spending my own money. My friends and I commandeered an IBM PS2 from the computer lab and used it to run a BBS with QuickBBS (which we also paid for). After I got a job, I could afford a phone line and I remember crawling around the basement, with guidance from my father (an electrical engineer) on how to run the phone line from one end of the house to the other. I used our IBM XT, which by that time had been replaced at home with some kind of Gateway 386, I think. I hooked this BBS up to FidoNET and could send messages all over the country to all kinds of people. This was so much better than chatting with the same 60 or so people in my local calling area. Right before I went to college, our faithful XT died. I never figured out why it broke, but I was so sad when it did. In high school, I got a reputation for knowing how to program and modified several WWIV installs for local sysops. I made an attempt at writing my own door games in Pascal, but none of them turned out great. I remember being more interested in how the library I was using managed to know if the phone was still connected so it wouldn't hang the whole BBS if you hung up. After going to college in Boston, I got into the BBS scene there (this is the early 90s) for a while but schoolwork and access to UNIX machines and (eventually) large parallel computers largely kept me away from it after the first semester or so. I could go on and on about how BBSes shaped me. I wouldn't be the same person I am today without my father having "invested" in me like that. He saw how much I loved programming and computers and really encouraged me in that respect. I make a great living doing something I love now, and I mostly have him and my experiences with BBSes to thank for it. Sorry for the wall of text. :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- guidzilla · 2013-07-25 18:26 Great story, love this stuff. And yeah its hard to imagine that once upon a time 300 baud was bleeding edge compared to what we're doing now. I remember when Fidonet started getting hooked up to a couple local BBS's. For a bit there it was a bit of a "mind. blown." experience that we all really enjoyed. I definitely have my father to thank as well for exposing me to the online world so young. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- compaqxp · 2013-07-26 04:20 Heh, I've got Telix on my 1000TL. I dial in with it every now and then.