Subj : Re: BBS platforms
To   : Nightfox
From : tenser
Date : Fri Sep 16 2022 05:20 am

On 15 Sep 2022 at 08:19a, Nightfox pondered and said...
 
 Ni>   Re: Re: BBS platforms
 Ni>   By: tenser to Nightfox on Fri Sep 16 2022 12:34 am
 Ni> 
 Ni>  te> For things like this, I use OpenBSD, either on ARM or x86
 Ni>  te> (or at home on RISC-V). Then again, I kind of feel that
 Ni>  te> the idea of a "BBS" is redundant with the idea of a timesharing
 Ni>  te> multiuser operating system. I think I'm in a distinct minority
 Ni>  te> there, though.
 Ni> 
 Ni> I suppose I see what you mean.  But when I think of a BBS though, I tend
 Ni> to think of it as still something on its own, with the ANSI-based menus
 Ni> (or possibly RIP or other graphics protocol), message areas, files for
 Ni> download, door games, etc..  All that could be done with a multiuser OS,
 Ni> but a BBS package is specifically designed to provide an easy way for
 Ni> users to do all that, I suppose.

As I wrote in the first post over at fat-dragon.org, calling
a BBS felt sort of like visiting someone's home.  You got to
see something of the sysop's interests and aesthetic style.
That part was pretty cool....

But the same was often also true of a timesharing computer.
I started working with Unix before Linux was really a thing,
but at a time when second-hand machines running useful
software were becoming pretty common.  Especially around
universities, you'd see someone get a hand-me-down Sun3 or
VAX or MIPS machine and set it up for themselves and friends;
often, as a result, individual systems had a distinct personal
flavor: decorations with ASCII-art (the ANSI thing was never
particularly big in that world, in part because CP437 was
pretty specific to PCs), goofy programs and games, etc.

It was fun.

 Ni>  te> Back in the 90s, when I ran a dialup BBS, I sort of wish that
 Ni>  te> I had discovered Coherent earlier. This was a clone of, basically,
 Ni>  te> 7th Edition Unix, written originally for the PDP-11 but ported
 Ni>  te> around and eventually running on PC-class hardware. It was often
 Ni> 
 Ni> I'd heard of Coherent.  I remember my dad trying it out on his PC for a
 Ni> bit.

It's open source now, and one can run it under emulation.  I
imagine it would install on a sufficiently old PC if one wanted
to try real hardware.  Ca 1991 that would have been a pretty
sweet BBS setup.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

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