Telnet BBS Guide(telnetbbsguide.com) |
Telnet BBS Guide(telnetbbsguide.com) |
It is ironic and somewhat interesting that the biggest aspects of the BBS scene that most people seem to miss (the community/local culture, meeting like-minded people in real life, some of the games, ANSI art, Echomail discussions), are all things borne from the technical limitations of the time. Slow modems and high long distance charges meant most people kept to their local boards. Games had to be designed in text with only a rudimentary colour scheme (sure, there was RoboBoard, RIP, NAPLPS and other graphical protocols - none which really caught on all that much) and still be compelling. Most were limited turn based (which meant being forced to only spend a couple hours a day playing, then having to wait). "World-wide" networks like FidoNet were dog-slow by today's standards (it was a toss-up whether a message would reach its recipient faster on an FTN network or via snail-mail), so discussion threads would last for days but only have several hundred messages in them to sort through.
I remember the years and work spent to try to improve on these limitations. Galacticomm and eSoft had their huge hackish ways to get past the non-multitasking nature of DOS and the IRQ limits of PCs to allow people to run huge multi-line boards on regular PCs. We saw Planet Connect dramatically lower the cost of distributing FidoNet packets via satellite downlink (still needed telephone uplink if you were sending, though). We saw big serial breakout boards and modem boxes (Galactibox?) come out. And of course, faster modems. Up to rip-roaring 33.6kbps speeds at the peak of the BBS era.
Ultimately, the internet and the "real" operating systems that are commonplace today overcame those limitations in ways that were pretty unfathomable to most of us common BBS users and sysops of the day. Unfortunately, BBS's today really only appeal to those of us who had lived through the struggle of configuring COM ports or QWK readers (or for many of us, a tosser/scanner, door game, FOSSIL driver, or getting DESQview working just right).
People still login to play games (I'm writing a new one!), and chat. Downloads here and there when you have hard to find history items, etc. Certainly nothing like it's heyday, but enough to keep me happy anyway :D
Contrast to a modern social media platform where you're just perpetually bombarded by mountains of shit... because they can.
I met many local people though BBSs. It was an amazing way to find like minded geeks near you.
Of course, we can't forget the rampant elitism among sysops (and no, I'm not counting myself outside of that group - I was downright insufferable back in the day).
Here's a little demo forum I've been working on. Can runs on a potato.
https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torumplus/-/raw/main/Torum...
[T] Crash BBS
Tangentially, what do people use for telnet programs today? I used to just use the telnet command line on Windows, but that's gone for very obvious security reasons. Have most BBSes moved to ssh or similar?
* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/nvt-client.xm...
It works well enough on several of the Telnet BBSes listed here, although BBSes are not what I wanted the tool for, and the operating systems I use it on actually retain either their original telnet client in base or a packaged one.
That's because I tested it against a handful of the Telnet BBSes listed here when I wrote it. (-:
SyncTerm: https://syncterm.bbsdev.net/ Zoc: https://www.emtec.com/zoc/index.html
- IcyTerm - SyncTERM - TERMinator - NetRunner
All support SSH. The top 3 support audio, sixel, RIP, and others as well. Even support for Amiga and C64 fonts/etc.
Enjoy!
But Telnet Client has not been enabled by default for a while now.
https://www.laptopmag.com/how-to/enable-and-use-telnet-on-wi...
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38136404