Any old sysops or bbsers

[renegade600]

just wondering, anybody here remember the good old days of bbsing. Where fidonet, tradewar, and ansi graphics was the latest rage?

[Blair]

I got in on the BBS's using dial up, mostly downloading files... way before napster.

[enat66]

Can you translate for those of us born yesterday?;)

[renegade600]

Can you translate for those of us born yesterday?;)

BBS = Bulletin Board Systems. They were the precursor to the internet - just local access unless you wanted to pay long distance. AOL , Prodigy, and Compuserve basically started this way. The bbs basically did everything the internet today does but on a small/slower scale.

Sysops are similar to webmaster except more had technical duties. Maybe you can also consider them an isp.

[enat66]

thank you:)

[Spider]

That's going waaaay back. I use to run a BBS. I has a buddy who ran a hub for Fidonet
and we use to get on the Web from there only it wasn't called the Web back then we
just called it hubs and spokes. It was all text orientated then and if I remember right we
started on 300 baud modems and later when the technology was up to 1200 baud a few
of us ran BBSs and we would provide connection to the Web for the members.

I ran all that on an Amiga a4000 with a Motorola 030 CPU @ 33MHz. I remember the
switch when you could color the fonts on the BBS software, we all thought that was the
greatest thing. Mainly we used it for file transfers and that's what other users liked was
the ability to log on and get files that were larger sizes than the floppy technology at
the time.

Us sysops would waste days tweaking the BBS to do stuff that now-a-days would be
considered so lame but in those days it was the latest technology and we all though
it was the most fantastic thing a computer could do. I remember three of us at a gathering
connecting the very first modem we ever saw. This is just days after the technology was
out and we hooked everything up and dialed up another guy sitting at home with another
modem. We were all aware of what the claims were of the hardware and couldn't wait to
see if it was actually true that one could connect to another computer via a phone line.

So we dial, we watch the screen reports, and then were sitting at the dos prompt. We
type "are you there?" and our buddy types "YES!!! IT WORKS!!!" we were jumpin' around
and we just couldn't believe it. That's all we played with after that.

To think of what happens now with telnet, ftp, newsgroups, SEs, WWW, email, routers,
NATs, PHP/ASP/CGI, streaming, WOL, remote connection etc. It's quite the leap from
getting all giddy from getting your buddy responding on your screen from his computer.

[renegade600]

I really missed those days of bbsing and the searchlight bbs I ran for a couple of years. The only thing I do not miss is the 300+ plus monthly phone bill because of downloading messages, files, doors and other items for the bbs. Everything was long distance for me and was the only bbs in the town I lived in.

I started the bbs with a 2400 baud modem and eventually the final upgrade before shutting down was a lightning fast 28k modem.

I remember getting up early in the morning after the nightly updates to be the first one to play door games such as tradewars2002 and LORD. I remember a chat door called LISA where someone would page the sysop and carry on a conversation with LISA. At times it was almost embarrassing watching someone chat with software thinking it was a real person - especially when one visitor, a preacher, started witnessing to LISA. I had to break connection on that one with a "garbage in the line" problem.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted... :D