Anyone remember BBS Direct? reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bwann · 2021-10-11 03:31 In the late 90s this was a life saver for me, I paid $5/hour for a 1-800 dialup connection, which was cheaper than long distance calls to several of my favorite boards. I got a SunOS 4.1.3 shell account, PPP internet access, and direct connections to boards like the Mustang Software BBS. I'm really interested in the details of how board operators at the time connected to this service and how it worked. Anyone remember any of the details? It all seems lost to time now ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gnu2tux · 2021-10-11 05:16 I used to give free shell accounts for people for a while in the early days of the net until my box got rooted haha. Good learning experience. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-10-13 17:46 never heard of it. i used metropolis bbs. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ScalarWeapon · 2021-10-24 16:15 Sounds neat actually. I was not aware of it! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- threeio · 2022-02-15 00:36 At least for my setup, we had a leased line back to our location, and few dedicated servers that would be used for intake and distribution of the traffic to the servers. The reason you had access to BBS's is that they'd also have that line and so it was just a routing decision. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ThinkingBigThoughts · 2023-01-19 18:51 I know I'm late to reply, but thought I'd add a few more details here anyway, so it's not completely lost to history. (I worked for Concentric, the company that created BBS Direct.) We ultimately had two tiers of that service. The first tier was reserved for the most popular BBS's (like Mustang) with the largest number of users. This one involved installing T1s/fractional T1s (dedicated lines) between the BBS and the closest (physical) location on the Concentric Network. At the BBS's site, we put a Xylogics terminal server. This magic device had a bunch of serial (rs232) cables that connected to the computers running the BBS software (say, Wildcat). We used the Xylogics device to spoof a Hayes compatible modem...so when we "sent" a user to the BBS, the terminal server would raise DSR/DCD on the rs232 port, just like a real modem set to ATS0=1 would. The BBS would then "answer" the call, thinking it was connected to real modem, being none the wiser to our crazy scheme. The second tier of BBS Direct was an outdial service. We had network locations (what we called points of presence) in many cites throughout the country. So if a BBS was too small for a dedicated line (which were expensive), we'd just dial up that BBS for you. The real innovation here was that we could dial up that BBS for you by making a local call, assuming the BBS was near one of our network locations. (For example, if we had modems in Chicago, and the BBS was also in Chicago, it was a local call.) So the call you made into us was local (edit: or toll free), and the call we made to the BBS for you was also local - avoiding long distance charges for everyone. And, we had to use rlogin to shuttle people around the network, because we tried and tried and tried, but were never able to make a SunOS implementation of telnet completely 8 bit safe. (I.e., the telnet escape sequence you'd randomly hit during a zmodem file transfer would kill your connection to the BBS, which made people very unhappy.) Enjoy. :-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bwann · 2023-01-19 20:10 Thanks! That's awesome, that's exactly what I wanted to know! I guess I hadn't thought about hauling the traffic around the network to outdial from a local POP. Getting Internet access through Concentric's 1-800 service is a big influence in what caused me to start my own ISP in rural Oklahoma in the 90s where nobody had local dial-up access to anything. It's odd how 25 hours of Internet usage seemed like a lot back then! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ThinkingBigThoughts · 2023-01-20 01:48 I think we all had that "ah ha!" moment of inspiration from someplace. As a kid, I discovered the internet through an open terminal server at the University of Oklahoma. They let me telnet out - and I found shell accounts, IRC, usenet newsgroups, and gopher (Veronica helped me on several term papers). It was all amazing, and the idea of democratizing access to information led me to help build (and then break, and then fix) some of the stuff you once used. Since you were paying $5/hour (and not the flat rate for local dialup users), I only hope you experienced BBS Direct sometime after the summer of 1994. When we first launched the service, we were using these under-powered, memory-starved Wellfleet routers, all (incorrectly) set up in a single OSPF area (like a routing zone). Every time one of the BBS Sysops bumped a cable, or the lights flickered in a Payless shoe store (all our POPs were literally in shoe closets), the whole network went down for a few minutes while each router very, very slowly recomputed its routing table. It was a mess. If 25 hours of Internet usage seemed like a lot, then trust me -- even a few minutes of downtime felt like an eternity! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bwann · 2023-01-21 08:30 That's funny because I made friends with a sysop at OU back then when I was discovering Linux and he was kind enough to download and mail me a QIC tape with all the Slackware Linux floppy sets on it. Much faster than downloading them over my 14.4k modem at the time! I was intrigued by the SunOS shell accounts that Concentric offered, it seemed like many binaries were altered to keep nosy users like me from poking around too much. It was 94/95/96 when I was using BBS Direct, I don't recall any problems with it. I think long distance was around 20-30 cents a minute then, as a teenager mowing lawns I had to be very deliberate in what I dialed up and for how long. After that I had my own 56k frame relay line for the ISP and stopped BBSing, altho now that itch is coming back if just for nostalgia sake. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ThinkingBigThoughts · 2023-01-21 17:43 QIC as a file transfer protocol! That's genius. If I had a tape drive, maybe my personal BBS would've gained more traction. As it was, I was always taking it down for half a day to download (mostly useless) shareware that I (as a kid) couldn't afford to buy anyway. Oh, and our shell accounts weren't technically 'real' SunOS accounts. They existed solely in a virtualized environment that a really smart guy (not me) created for us. For example, if you 'cat /etc/password', you didn't see the host's real password file. In fact, it wasn't a file at all - just something that was created dynamically in software. All customer accounts essentially ran under one UID on a collection of Sun SPARCstations. (This is the reason you couldn't compile your own software. If you didn't use our heavily modified set of SunOS libraries, like libc, you would jailbreak the sandbox.) Pretty much every other shell account provider statically assigned accounts to servers - and if the server is overloaded, or if it's down, all the accounts on that machine would suffer. By creating this sandbox environment, we were able to dynamically allocate users to servers based on system load and availability -- and why, if your session was slow, exiting and re-entering 'the internet gateway' would make things better. If you ask yourself the question "what's the simplest way to do X?", take that answer - and then imagine the opposite, which is what we almost always ended up doing. :-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bwann · 2023-01-22 01:52 Oh, and the usage of slirp and TIA to provide SLIP/PPP access from the shell before Concentric provided it natively was interesting. I like to think I'm very versed in Unix/Linux now and even read the TIA docs, but it still seems like magic how that worked.