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Telnet BBS Guide

telnetbbsguide.com

80 pointsmindcrime22 comments

Anyone interested in this should try to "telnet telehack.com"

It's a simulation of arpanet/usenet from around 1985-1990, which includes 25,000 hosts and BBS's, thousands of files from the era, a collection of adventure and IF games, a working BASIC interpreter with a library of programs to run, simulated historical users, and more.

More information here: http://telehack.com/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telehack

Let me take this opportunity to promote this awesome, free documentary by Jason Scott about BBSs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary. It’s on YouTube. I discovered it in 2005 but only watched it a few years ago. It’s so good. Looking forward to trying BBSs over Telnet.

There are two[1,2] BBS (in Japanese) related to airplane addons development for YSFlight[0] simulator: first is related to C.K.Packs[3], and second is related to ORANLEED COLLECTION[4]

[0] http://ysflight.org

[1] http://mrsandj.sakura.ne.jp/ht/oranleed/cgi-bin/joyfulckp/jo...

[2] http://mrsandj.sakura.ne.jp/ht/oranleed/cgi-bin/joyfuloran/j...

[3] http://mrsandj.sakura.ne.jp/ht/ckp/

[4] http://mrsandj.sakura.ne.jp/ht/oranleed/

Are these still active? How many people actually use them? I'd love to join, as my first internet encounter was in the windows 95 era.

I know this one is active: https://bbs.fozztexx.com/

It is slow, but it works fine. It even detects using xterm with 209x75, with ASCII character set, and allows overriding them if the auto-detection doesn't work (I don't know what other possibilities are supported; maybe PC character set with DOS ANSI.SYS? and presumably also shellinabox, which I have not tried). They support both by telephone and internet; I didn't know they still did that. Also, the menu does not resemble the picture in the web page.

There are many active boards, and a lot of activity between them on FTN style networks such as fsxNet and ArakNet.

I still login to a few every week. See you on FidoNet!

I enjoyed BBSing in my youth and appreciate that BBSes are still around. But two factors that are missing today are 1. BBSes were local to me (reflecting the people in my city) and 2. It was “hard” to find then and connect to them.

Wow...a flashback to the 80s! That US Robotics modem was my pride an joy (same one they have pictured, but came out in the early 90s). My first modem was a 300bps, and 2nd was 2400. This was a huge step up, and was painful waiting for BBS's to upgrade their 9600's to get that sweet speed. IIRC, it took about 7 minutes to download a 1.44MB floppy.

From what I remember of the 56kpbs days it def took longer than 7 minutes to d/l 1.44mb

I remember about 10min/MB

One of my top ten favorites on HN, ever.

Why? It's history from a time when most people did not have access to the Internet (when there were no commercial ISP's, no fiber or cable to the home that carried digital signals), and BBS's were the only way you communicated electronically with groups of people via a mostly text-based computer...

Once this internet fad is over, BBS will return!

It took me several years of exposure to see the point of the internet. I had been running my own BBSes for quite a while by then.

We already had email more or less, at least in ways that mattered. And the experience was non-commercial and personal, with operators putting a lot of time and effort into their quirky online worlds.

Some of it's still around if you go look for it, but I can't shake the feeling that we lost something worth keeping.

Ah, count me in the nostalgia pool too. Had lots of good times and good friends in the 412/724 BBS scene.

And what a great outlet for creativity! Drawing ANSI, modding Renegade, composing MODs for other people to download. It was great.

Link to Telnet BBS Guide > Downloads Lists page[0]

[0] https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/lists/download-list/

Huh, I've never used a bbs before and it's very cozy.

It would be even more fun if you could search for other Telnet BBSes over Telnet.

If only there was some kind of telnet google that would hunt down telnet bbs's, crawl them and make them searchable.

I run a hobby BBS, but it is a ghost town, no active users.

My bbs is telnet://chksmak.cnetbbs.net:2600

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