BBSing in the 90s reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HaveTilFive · 2016-03-25 09:56 I got into BBSes around '95, even ran my own JetBBS then Wildcat! for about a year or so. I was getting into the whole thing right around when people started talking about the Web. In fact, I would dial up my local college BBS and use the all text web and gopher. Once I got an ISP in '96, I rarely called BBSes anymore. Sucks because I wish I wasn't a teenager when I was using them: could've met up with a lot of cool people. My favorite was Clockwork Orange here in Philly. I also liked writing on FidoNet. Good times and very cool to see this sub. P.S. Trade Wars and Barneysplat FTW ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ReallyBigSchu · 2016-03-25 12:27 You did get in at the tail end of BBSs, but at least you were in, and that's cool. I started with CompuServe in the late 70s, and BBS in the early 80s, and it was a great time. I do miss the BBS scene... more personal. The fun, the fights, the get-togethers. I also ran a MajorBBS system from about 1990 to 1994. then the Internet became available for the masses and things changed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HaveTilFive · 2016-03-25 12:46 Door games on MajorBBS with multiple lines FTW. I miss those days. Sometimes I'll telnet into still active BBSes. Not the same. I had no idea CompuServe was around in the 70s. BBSes got me into Usenet. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ReallyBigSchu · 2016-03-25 12:50 CompuServe started in the early 70s I think. I remember around 1978 or so... walking into a Radio Shack and having one of the sales people show me CompuServe in all its text based glory. I was hooked from that point. Had to get a modem, CompuServe, and BBS shortly after. Rang up quite a large phone bill I recall. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HaveTilFive · 2016-03-25 13:00 Oh, gosh. Remember trying to figure out the non-long distance exchanges in your area when you'd get a BBS guide? My mom flipped her lid when I was charged extra cents per minute for dialing the next county over. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Paco_Smithereens · 2016-03-25 18:45 I actually had to take my BBS down because I was a poor student who could only afford the one extra phone line, and I was using it on my university's shell account all day. It just got to a point where I didn't want to have to go to the library anymore to do this and my interest in the Internet killed my own BBS. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HaveTilFive · 2016-03-25 19:39 Yeah, my interest in the Internet killed my BBS, too ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2016-03-26 00:15 that time is the 90s is what a lot of people call 'the third wave', which was a very active time right before it fizzled out. the reason i took my bbs down was because i ended up being the last guy in town running a bbs, and that was no fun. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HaveTilFive · 2016-03-26 00:31 Really? What was the second wave? It's funny, I was like 13 or 14 when I started BBSing. Seemed like I was doing it forever. But by the time I was 16, I had a GeoCities site haha. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- travisjd2012 · 2016-03-26 00:58 I know it's at the right but seriously, if you're feeling nostalgic.. I highly recommend watching http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ It is excellent. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- derfherdez · 2016-03-26 04:10 then download [Synchronet](http://www.synchro.net/), and join [DOVENET](http://www.synchro.net/docs/dove-net.txt) and we can all be alone, together. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- recourse7 · 2016-03-26 04:47 Mid 80s was the second wave. Why you pick wildcat for your board? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HaveTilFive · 2016-03-26 09:32 A friend was running a BBS and he was using WildCat! and I really liked the stuff you could do with ANSI at the time. JetBBS was kind of clunky for people to use. Plus, parents were pissed it had to dial out to Washington State nightly. Got a local FidoNet connection before I quit BBSing ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HaveTilFive · 2016-03-26 09:33 This looks amazing. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- recourse7 · 2016-03-26 13:59 I miss the bbs days. I ran a wwiv board for a few years. Was on FIDO and wwivnet plus a local stl one called IvoryNet. Was a lot of fun. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HaveTilFive · 2016-03-26 14:43 WWIV was a pretty cool BBS format. I remember the messaging was easy. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2016-03-26 15:21 i'm not a fan of the bbsdocumentary. it seems like jason scott's friends got most of the facetime despite the fact that he traveled all over the country to interview developers and other prominent people. i dont know if all these interviews were THAT bad, but it seems most of them ended up on the cutting room floor and they were reduced to 2 minute snippets. i liked the pkware vs sea one, just because it showed the animosity sea had against phil katz. later in the textfiles blog more information came out to shed more light about how horrible sea was but it was too late. basically sea wanted money if they THOUGHT they influenced your programming. and in their mind since they released it open source it MUST have. the bbs documentary should have shown more about the bbs softwares and the bbs users. it was his first attempt at making a film and it wasnt as bad as getlamp, so i give it props for the hard work. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2016-03-26 15:22 it doesnt have to by synchronet. it can be mysticbbs, vadv32, renegade or whatever ---------------------------------------------------------------------- travisjd2012 · 2016-03-29 03:07 Then go out and make a better one. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2016-03-29 22:18 i'm not a film maker and i dont want to drive around interviewing all those people. plus i work for a living. if you give me 2 million dollars i will. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2016-03-31 03:39 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2016-03-31 20:57 those were his personal friends. i know the guy you were talking about btw, and he had his bbs back up. he was a user of mine, too. he took it down after a short amount of time due to boredom. i know jason scott did interview a lot of people, we just didnt get to see most of it. what we did see was a few snippets here and there. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2016-03-31 22:23 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2016-04-02 14:53 well, you are easy to please. there's not much content if you really LOOK at it. but like i said, it was his first attempt so he did a better job than most could. i looked at his other film making attempts and they really pale in comparison to the bbs documentary. it's just too bad we wont get to see the actual interviews and only see a minute here and there ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2016-04-02 15:25 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2016-04-03 15:37 all you need to look for is the actual interviews. they're not there. it's only a few mins of each person hopping around except for the people that are jason scott's friends. this includes the female you were talking about and the guy who 'lost' his bbs and that bald dude with the metallica shirt. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- things4thinkers · 2016-04-11 05:21 I remember getting a modem around 1991 or so. I went with my dad to some computer thing that had a bunch of hardware. I picked out the modem expecting to be able to play games that in my head at the time looked like Planetside actually did. Imagine my shock when I found out it was text based, even more shocking was THIS was so much better than what I had expected. I ran a BBS on an Amiga computer using CNet Amiga 3.05d. Internet really started to get attention from everyone around 1995 when you got into it. That of course was because of WWW going mainstream. Activity started dwindling down rapidly from there... Some things I really miss, like people calling the board to play Tradewars. You should go to youtube and look up "BBS the documentary" It's very good. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- things4thinkers · 2016-04-11 05:26 I liked it, especially the bit on Fido since I got my board on that network. It was really cool being able to use a form of email back at that time since the email we use today wasn't really the same when ISPs weren't around. I do agree though, they certainly should have gone more into the software and bbs users. Remember boards that would deny you access based on the computer you used? "This board is only for PC users, not Amiga users" etc. Ahhh the old days.... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HaveTilFive · 2016-04-11 09:13 I Telnetted to a few BBSes earlier this week, amazingly through an Android app. The nostalgia was real but it's not the same. BBSes were kind of like a micro Internet and far more intimate. LORD and Trade Wars were my favorites. I kind of just remember one day I was on a BBS and a few years later, I was on the Internet. I was so young and the transition was so quick. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2016-04-11 20:54 tom jennings would have also made a great long interview. that guy is super cool and full of stories. everything that guy does is funny and interesting. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2016-04-11 20:55 whats with this guy deleting his posts ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2016-04-11 20:56 there's really no real users anymore. it's too bad. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HaveTilFive · 2016-04-11 21:10 Something tells me there will be a nostalgic resurgance when some of us start hitting 40. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2016-04-13 03:19 nope ---------------------------------------------------------------------- au1977 · 2016-04-18 04:41 Cool, glad you enjoyed Barneysplat! I had a blast writing it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HaveTilFive · 2016-04-18 09:21 Wow. You are legend. One of the best door games. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Officer_Coldhonkey · 2016-04-27 23:31 >not the same No, not at all. I still telnet into a few boards to play LORD and The Pit and a few other doors but it's not nearly as personal. I was engaged in months long feuds with people in LORD back in the day. Logging in to see he had killed me, then promptly killing him. Back and forth it went. Playing the chat trivia games, FoodFight!, and some wild west gunslinger game in MajorBBS chat rooms, 1v1 or 1v1v1v1 dwango5 map 1 doom 2 DMs for hours on end with the same people every night... Waiting until 12 AM for all of your characters to regen in games. I'm not naive, I understand a lions share of the enjoyment came from it being such a new and foreign concept to interact with other humans on the computer but goddamn if it wasn't fun sitting there at 11:59 on a summer night waiting for the clock to change just to get a busy signal for a while. Hanging out in Razor's IRC chat, waiting for them 0 hours then running to upload them to my local boards. I felt like a fucking celebrity when Sysops would boot people offline just to let me get on to upload that new heat. Goddamn that shit was fun. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Officer_Coldhonkey · 2016-04-27 23:37 Maybe I missed it but it seems that they completely overlooked the entire warez scene. They touched on the art groups (ACiD, iCE, VoR, etc) but never really got into the whole games/utils aspect of the "scene". Weird seeing as how they were so closely related. There were quite a few elite boards in my ac (703. Northern VA/DC Metro area), a few of which were showcased in the Artscene ep. I mean Razor 1911 is apparently *still* doing their thing. They couldn't even get a mention? I remember it was like getting your dream career when you were accepted onto boards that boasted 0 day releases... Having to be invited to APPLY to get in, knowing the new user password, that little test of acronyms and definitions they'd give you that current users were able to review prior to making a vote on your acceptance or denial, UL/DL ratios.. Just seems like it was a rather large subsection of the community that wasn't really discussed. A subsection of the community that could have very easily filled an entire episode. Wonder why it wasn't even really mentioned considering it was so prevalent. EDIT: Nevermind, just saw part 6. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HaveTilFive · 2016-04-28 09:26 All this. I was always too young for the meetups and stuff. I never found anyone I talked to on BBSMates. Ah, the days gone by. The precursor to all this. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dzendian · 2016-06-19 01:47 LORD FTW! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2016-06-20 22:06 Game ruled. So did TW ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ThrakaAndy · 2016-06-28 20:58 What did he say in them? I missed them. Anyway, some of the extended and extra interviews are available on archive.org. They are fun to listen to. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ThrakaAndy · 2016-06-28 21:01 That really is the only problem with them. The BBS' that are available right now are filled to the brim with message areas and doors, but no users. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2016-06-29 02:34 well it's not the only problem. there's a lot of problems. like sysops who dont want or dont care what users want. sysops with stability issues. and bbses dont give people what they are interested in nowadays. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2016-06-29 02:36 there's not that many and not too interesting. i'd like to see the entire interviews instead of 20 seconds total of vid from these guys. i mean he did drive across country and he ONLY used snippets from these people ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ThrakaAndy · 2016-06-29 07:45 That's true I guess I should have said one of the main issues.