Folks who ran large multinode boards: How did they work? reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vga256 · 2021-10-24 03:55 I can understand how a 3-4 node system would work with the average ISA motherboard of its time, running multiple modem cards and external modems via serial... but how did multinode systems scale to 16+ nodes? Were there port replicators of some kind? Did you have to start running specialized hardware to handle the load? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- roger_ramjett · 2021-10-24 05:58 I was running a 20+ line board for awhile. This was in the 90's so my memory isn't perfect. I had a netware server that did all my fidonet mail and did file services. I recall buying a 1Gb hard drive and no one knew what 1 Gb was. The netware server was a full size tower and was full of disks from the top to the bottom. All full height full depth. I had two power supplies, one for the system board and a couple of disks and another for the rest of the disks. Had to program the scsi controller to spin up the disks one at a time, otherwise would blow the power supply. I always had a spare as I used to burn up a power supply a couple of times a year. I didn't like how qemm handled multiple modems so I had one computer for 2 modems. 286's were dirt cheap at the time so most of my machines were 286's. Most of those computers booted off of floppy as the software needed to get a node running easily fit on a single disk. V32Bis had just came out when I did the jump from 5 to 20 so I got a good deal on a pile of them. All external modems. Had some USRobotics that I used for any long distance, mostly for Fidonet stuff. Had to go through a big pile of red tape to get a T1 to my house. I wonder what the next person to own the house thought about the panel with all the phone jacks in the basement. 4 speed cdrom drives were just coming out and there was a 4x4 drive (4 speed with a 4 disk changer). They were great because before I had all 1 speed drives and each drive would take a drive letter. That was becoming a problem because there are only so many letters in the alphabet. With the 4x4 each disk could be a sub directory. So I was running out of drive letters because I had something like 20 cdroms on the network. I actually had a library of several hundred CD's and there was a program where people could browse the files and select files they wanted to download. If the file was on a disk which wasn't currently mounted, it would create a message to me to switch the disk. Once the disk was loaded it would copy the file over to the netware server and message the person that had requested the file so they could DL it the next time they were on. I'd check for requests and swap disks a couple of times a day. Also had a couple of the parallel port tape drives that I used for backups and general file storage. I was heating my home (In Canada) with my bbs. I had a ton of door games, including a couple that allowed more then one person to play at the same time. I also had some nodes that could be used to dialup/play Descent multiplayer. I've been trying to figure out what door game I had that allowed you to attack players on your server, or you could attack players on other bbs's. There were a lot of bbs in my city that were a part of the system so there was always attacks going on between the systems. I just can't figure out what that game was. It would be cool if some of the current bbs's were running it these days. I built a business where I used the bbs to sell custom built computers. Prices updated daily. I had a wholesaler that I bought from and I was able to compete against local computer shops. Prebuilt systems were not really a thing at that time so there wasn't any competition from the big box stores. I think one year I did over a 1/4 million in gross sales just in hardware. Mind you a decent computer at that time was $5k or more. Sorry for the wall of text, I just haven't had anyone to tell this to in a long time. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Taclink · 2021-10-24 09:56 Glorious! Love hearing about the backbone bit for BBS back in the day! Makes me sorta happy everything's TCP-IP now for the most part. Although having a bank of 20 USR's all glowing would be beautiful. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vga256 · 2021-10-24 13:38 That is absolutely incredible. Thank you! Do you remember what BBS software you were running? I did not realize that multiple machines could synchronize their file base/message base data. I do remember that Barren Realms Elite allowed for multi-bbs warfare - which was incredible at the time. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jcs · 2021-10-24 14:05 There are serial port cards with 4 or 8 ports on them, that have one external connector which requires a special cable that breaks that out into 4/8 DB9 ports. [Here's a random one I found on eBay](https://www.ebay.com/itm/Stargate-ACL-II-500122-03-ISA-Serial- Multi-Port-Card-740122A-02-8-Channel-/332570877209) though it's missing the cable. It would look like [this newer PCI card version](https://www.ebay.com/itm/8-port-RS-232-COM-DB9-serial- controller-to-PCI-card-16C1058-8xRS232-with-Cable-/182164785948). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vga256 · 2021-10-24 14:19 Yow! Had no idea these existed at the time. Thank you. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Acceptable-Analyst30 · 2021-10-24 15:39 Hi, This is an interesting question. A father of a friend who ran a BBS for his local community with 7 nodes and he explained us a few times how it worked. Beware this is based on my memory as a child / teenager so probably I will miss a few details. This BBS was more or less standalone and since it was in Europe it was inspired by teletext more than pure BBS. There was no connections to bigger networks (no fidonet, etc). Its organization was around pages that you could load and each pages was a simple TXT file. It was just a way for the people around to communicate and post things like the schedule of the church or the local festivals/events. Since real time communications, instant messaging and notifications were not yet a thing it simplified greatly the setup. You have also to keep in mind this was a mostly "read" only system, there was no games and no fancy ANSI artwork. It was two computers running in parallel two identical BBS. There was 7 modems one for each node, 3 for the main server and 4 for the secondary server. If the data you were requesting was on the other machine you would be placed on a queue to get it. Every days his father, the sysop would quickly go through the queue and manually copying the files and the data from one system to the other with floppy disks. Initially this worked great but what happened with increase popularity people would call one node and create an account on the first server then check out latter in the day and connect to the second server just to discover they had no account or the system did not have what they wrote (since it was on the other system). It was also tedious to maintain and latter a fully digital queue was made by hacking the serial printer connection to link the two computers since all other ports were used by modems. When you were connecting to the system the user database could now be shared and it did not matter to which server you connected. Every night, the system was stopped for "maintenance". In the background, what was happening it was synchronizing all the main data between the two system keeping everything up to date. To speed up everything and free slots in the queue, the most popular files and recent messages were duplicated from one system to the other so you would not need to "wait" to get them. One of the drawback was if you would login and someone was transferring files in the queue from the other machine you might need to wait a few minutes to be able to login. The queue always prioritized logins but if a transfer was already in progress you had to wait it to finish. In the end what stopped this was the advent of the WWW when he created for the local community a web page. Now that I look back at this it is incredible to see how much things have changed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kweiske · 2021-10-24 16:10 Back in 1991, I ran intel hardware with Digiboards, Intelligent serial boards with onboard processing and multiple serial ports for non-BBS applications. One was a SCO UNIX system with 10 serial terminals, the other was a dial-up WAN called Excellenet with 16 modems. The boards handled all of the processing. I later used them for a faxback system that I'd set up. Both were running OS/2, for the win. Boardwatch magazine used to run Digiboard ads all the time. Many dial-up BBSes used separate DOS PCs and network shares. &TOTSE, for example, had 2 wire racks full of 386SX systems, each running an instance of RemoteAccess with a serial port and modem. They were networked (Can't remember the name of the network used) and shared the data files over the network. In the early 90s, The sysop was running 8-10 nodes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Android8675 · 2021-10-24 18:02 Now all you’d need is a raspberry pi. Think about it. Great story though. I think your memory is in tact. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PraiseBobSlackOff · 2021-10-24 18:06 Never got to do that, but a buddy of mine had a pretty big setup and was always complaining about failing “Robo Boards”. I guess these were like the serial cards someone else was talking about on here. He had his whole garage setup for this. Towers and monitors strewn about. Fans blowing hot air around like a sauna. The “public” side of the bbs was for porn and the “hidden” side was a big time warez depot for people that sold counterfeit software overseas and computer swap meets. Was quite an operation. This was around 95-96. First person I knew to get an ISDN drop and 7 disc cd tower setup. He did all this with money he won in the state lottery. He totally got busted. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vga256 · 2021-10-24 18:17 Incredible to hear what a real dark board was like. We had a few of them with back rooms only for "high level" users, but they were extremely difficult to get access to. Perhaps your buddy was talking about [RoboBoard/FX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBOARD/FX)? We had a handful of boards running it in my area code. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vga256 · 2021-10-24 18:21 Thanks for this. OS/2 was a unicorn in my time, and despite knowing about its superior multitasking capabilities, it was so rare to find anyone actually running it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- skyrocker_58 · 2021-10-24 18:42 I ran an 8-line board in the Pittsburgh area for a few years between 85-92. I ran the OS/2 version of Synchronet and it worked flawlessly. Except when it didn't, lol. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- denzuko · 2021-10-24 18:56 Historically.. Couldn't say too much about how other boards worked but for mine back in the mid 90's I had a collection of 286 and 386 machines. Internally they were connected as via 10base-t token ring and used network shares to sync door32.sys, echo mail, and other board files.. That we'd have a machine that would have at least two modems in the pool then run three doors per machine. One for console access, one for dial in, the other for dial out. With a null modem connected to the other nodes for access via doors. Since these where MCA systems we had to use external modems but eventually acquired a 486 that ran RH6 linux and installed a few Micom ISA VIP Cards. But by this time we also invested into DSL for our uplink and wrote custom software for our linux systems so the wildcat boards eventually got completely replaced by linux servers that ran mgetty. Currently all that has been abstracted away with asterisks, something I toyed with in the mid 00's and picked it backup a few years ago to finish it. Hardware wise, VMs in the cloud and a cluster of Raspberry Pis with USB modems and obihi ATAs. The asterisk server is setup with each DIN routing to a dial plan that executes: ``` exten => 133#,1,Answer exten => 133#,2,PPPD(/srv/mystic/mystic -N#) ; where '#' is the last digit in the DIN exten => 133#,3,Hangup ``` In the current architecture I'm borrowing again from the older net share style as well but this time I'm also using socat/ssh/docker to execute connections to other doors and nodes instead of null modems, c-kermit, and the BNU Fossil Driver. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PraiseBobSlackOff · 2021-10-24 19:20 I probably have the name of that card wrong. I know the RoboBoardFX software. He didn’t run it. These were these long isa cards with a multi-serial dongle sticking out the back to support many modems at once in, I think, groups of 8. I guess these things were ghastly expensive and prone to failure. Never mind it was an oven in the garage! Edit: fkn typos ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PraiseBobSlackOff · 2021-10-24 19:36 To further elaborate, there were 3 of these giant syndicate boards for the pirates. One in NYC, one in Chicago and the 3rd was west coast, belonging to my pal. Once they got the ISDN lines, they started the packaging and sales of software with someone overseas. The board didn’t have the traditional look of an npd board with fancy ansi and such. Just boring ole Wildcat with goofy stock art. Function over fashion as I guess Wildcat was good with multinode and the ISDN setup (unsure how that worked). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vga256 · 2021-10-24 19:48 Ah, I misread your post - my bad. You could very well be talking about the [Digiboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/bbs/comments/qeke4a/folks_wh o_ran_large_multinode_boards_how_did_they/hhvipio/) that /u/kweiske pointed out. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- slewp · 2021-10-24 20:59 Maybe he meant Boca boards? Bocaboards were popular with the majorbbs operators. I recall I had one that gave you 16 serial ports from one ISA card. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PraiseBobSlackOff · 2021-10-24 21:59 Yes! That rings a bell. Digiboards. Thanks for helping me remember that. Those were his biggest gripe. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- IasthaiScreed · 2021-10-24 23:09 Was it LORD your were thinking of... ? you could attack ppl online unless they logged out in an inn. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- roger_ramjett · 2021-10-25 05:42 I think the bbs software was Remote Access. There were only a few boards that were running it. It was a fork of some earlier bbs if I recall. The last year I upgraded to Wildcat in order to have the browser style graphics, but by that time people were moving to online (internet) and the bbs scene was dieing. Yeah BRE may be it. Are there any of the current boards that are running it? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- fang-castro · 2021-10-25 13:33 RA came from QuikBBS didn't it? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- roger_ramjett · 2021-10-25 16:00 Digiboards were around when I was running my system. But they were more expensive (for me) then using a seperate pc for every couple of modems. I had a source for cheap 286's. Also, if a node went down, it only took out a couple of lines. If a computer with digiboard went down, that would take out 1/3 of my lines. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- roger_ramjett · 2021-10-25 16:12 This is very similar to my board. I had the public side which had all the fidonet and shareware stuff and the door games. If you had a private account you could access an area for pirated stuff (has the statute of limitations run out for pirating software?). That was the biggest part of my user base. I was a part of a distribution group and moved a lot of data (for the day). That was what the 2 USR nodes were for. I didn't do any pbx hacks or anything like that. I paid for my phone bill. For the pirated section I had a setup that helped me get stuff without having to pay as much for long distance. If you uploaded verified pirate software and someone later downloaded it, you got a credit. The more times the program was downloaded, the more credits you would earn. You could use those credits to download other stuff. If you didn't have stuff to upload you could buy credits (with cash money). That income was not much when it came to the cost of keeping the system running, but it did reduce the amount of leaches on the system. I also had an adult section. That section required a paid subscription and that income was also a help for keeping the board going. But the public section where I posted prices for hardware and services was the biggest income as it generated sales for computer related hardware and services. For a couple of years that became my full time job. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- roger_ramjett · 2021-10-25 16:25 The problem with Digiboards was that you still had to run some sort of time slicing software (qemm?) as true multitask wasn't really a thing. A 286 couldn't do it due to memory limitations (I believe). I could get a ton of 286's and external modems cheaper than a digiboard and a powerful computer. Also, with qemm there was always a lag between typing and the echo of the key stroke. Some door games (like Pit) would stutter and be almost unplayable. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- roger_ramjett · 2021-10-25 16:32 When i built my network I got a deal on a box full of Arcnet boards. These were the ones that used co-ax cables that needed terminators at both ends. I didn't have a hub or switch so the cable ran from computer to computer. A break anywhere on the network took down the whole network. I think that logically it was a token ring network but at the time I really didn't understand networking. It was IPX (due to the novell server). Novell cam on floppy disk and I think there was something like 20 disks in the box. It was a retail box with a legitimate license. I think there was something like 20 pounds of manuals that came with the package. That and the scsi controller was probably my biggest expense when I really grew the board. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- denzuko · 2021-10-25 19:25 >Arcnet boards I heard about DECnet, IPX, and novell back in the day but never Arcnet. In a retro sense they look rather interesting. Surprised to find out they still make them too: https://www.ccontrols.com/arccontrol/pci20ex.php ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Duckula-MBBS · 2021-10-26 07:04 I ran several systems that were 20-odd nodes back in the day using The Major BBS (not surprising 😜). Galacticomm also produced galactiboards which allowed 8 modems and galactiboxes which allowed 16 galactiboards (yes you could have 8x16 modems in this configuration) which was pretty advanced for their time. The Major BBS allows for up to 256 lines although in theory that was difficult to achieve on a dose box due to memory limitations of the Phar Lap system used. The 256 node limit became more achievable when Worldgroup for Windows NT was produced. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vga256 · 2021-10-26 13:23 Wow! I had no idea these limits were actually possible. Thank you for reminding me of Worldgroup Server - I had not heard that name in 20 years. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Duckula-MBBS · 2021-10-27 04:54 You might be surprised to hear it is still available and a new version is being worked ok. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- elblanco · 2021-10-30 03:25 Sorry I can't answer this directly, but I remember a couple of very large boards in the D.C./Northern Virginia area. One I used frequently was called IDS (I think it was something like Infinite Data Systems) and it had a couple dozen nodes or something, and for an extra fee an honest to god internet email gateway messaging system. I used this frequently until the mid 90s and I believe they had a subscription system for a few dollars a month that offered more minutes per day and a few other perks. In the mid-90s I helped start an ISP that used shucked US Robotics modems mounted in a full telecom rack and some kind of serial port multiplexer thing on the base. I don't remember the details as I didn't build the rack. It connected into an early Linux system which routed callers onto a T1 line for access out to the Internet. I believe the basic equipment was designed for large BBSs as this was the time period ('96/'97) when the BBS/ISP switch started to really take full effect. We used to have to buy new modems pretty frequently as the consumer boards would die pretty often after running 24/7 in a hot rack. The plus side is allowed us to advertise various upgrades to our customers as we went from I think 14.4 eventually up to 56k -- having to replace the serial multiplexers a few times in the process as well. We eventually upgraded our equipment to pro-level stuff, had a 10Mbit/sec peered backbone into a tier-3 provider (dropped a cable through a drilled hole in the floor as they were in the same building), and support single and double channel ISDN. We were eventually driven out of business once ADSL popped up and the telco's basically reclaimed the ability for people to connect to the internet, driving us middle-men from the market. We sold to a large regional dial-up ISP and moved on. I feel like the period of the small ISP is sort of as interesting as the BBS period that directly proceeded it and wish it was documented better! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vga256 · 2021-10-30 04:21 Thank you! I too helped operate and build a small ISP in 96-97. This one was in northern Canada, and ours also used consumer grade 28.8k modems (10-20 at first iirc). These were attached to a Livingston Portmaster (2e?) via serial, which in turn was fed into our BSD UNIX box and SQL box, which handled customer billing and the usual suite of Internet services. It was an exciting time to be a teenager surrounded by expensive equipment and a T1 to the outside world. I too wish there was documented history on these early ISP startups. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- eastcoastweb · 2021-11-02 14:51 I ran The Eleventh Hour BBS in Virginia, although I ran several BBS packages before growing to the size we did (110 lines). PCBoard, WildCat! and TCBBS but I can't comment on how those worked since it was still a one-liner then. Once we started going multi-line, we switched to MajorBBS. Going by memory, after I was forced out of my house because the neighborhood had no more phone lines to give after 16, I moved into a commercial zone (office space) and we ran all Cardinal 56k modems and those connected to Rocket Ports. I think there was 16 ports to each external board. Just going by memory from the early to mid 1990s though. Something like this: https://comtrol.com/products/rocketport-multi-port-serial-cards ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Aplos9 · 2021-11-04 13:04 CombatNet has a set up where you can create a door that links to them and sever BBS's are currently active.