The Birth of Rusty N Edie's BBS | Hacker News Reader

The Birth of Rusty N Edie's BBS

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They were raided by the FBI[1][2] in 1993 and sued by Playboy[3]. It was later settled in 1998[4].

[1]http://textfiles.com/bbs/r&estory.txt

[2]https://web.archive.org/web/20050922215812/http://www.pixi.c...

[3]http://www.internetlibrary.com/pdf/Playboy-Russ-Hardenburgh-...

[4]https://ia802900.us.archive.org/1/items/gov.uscourts.ohnd.43...

Some vintage splash screens:

https://defacto2.net/g/rusty-n-edies-bbs?

Yeah, kinda amazing they didn't cover that part, isn't it? :D

That case was actually kind of groundbreaking since it came about in a time long before the Communications Decency Act and the Section 230 carve-out that we all know and enjoy today.

I wonder when the writeup is from... rne.com was online in 1997 pulling from wayback. So this post must've been earlier than that.

Fifth gen x86 processors were around 1994. So I'd guess earlier than that from the age of the machinery they're using.

But the 486 was seeing use in 1990. So after that but before 1994 would be my guess.

It's possible it was ongoing litigation at the time.

the post advertises hosting 15GB which puts it somewhere around mid-1992 based on the progression seen in the splash screen history [0]

[0] https://defacto2.net/g/rusty-n-edies-bbs

But the 486 was seeing use in 1990.

"Seeing use?" Maybe, but unlikely. When it was announced, it wasn't even going to hit manufacturing until 4Q1989. The first 486 computer wasn't even announced until just before Christmas of '89 and wasn't available until a long time later.

Widespread? Absolutely not.

In 1990, the town where I lived allowed locals to use its computer labs at off-hours. The machines were all 8088's. There was a guy I knew through the campus computer club who had an 80286, and he was considered "the future!"

I used to build my own computers, and I didn't get a 486DX2 until 1997.

Back then, people didn't upgrade major components all the time like they do now.

Oh man. I remember Rusty N Edie’s. I was a pre-teen just exploring the online world. The Demo scene was being born, music and was collecting MOD files and of course, the games. There were wholesome fidonet on-ramps and BBSes too.

I’ll never forget those first modem days of a teenager discovering the world.

Back then you had something in common with anyone on the BBS just by virtue of being on a BBS.

Young me would be proud of the geek I still am today.

95% of the porn I downloaded when I was 12 was watermarked with these two names.

Don't forget Event Horizons! :-P~~~

I don't BBS anymore but I was in the 519 area code and my handle was Thanatos (still my IRC nick).

I remember seeing ads for this BBS in "Boardwatch" magazine, back in the day (early to mid 90's.) I was really into the BBS scene but didn't do much long distance calling.

We had several local warez boards, many of which masqueraded as more legitimate operations. Typically you registered with a regular account, then sent the sysop a private message that so-and-so referred you and mentioned the warez.

I ran a BBS myself but was more into the H/P scene.

You weren't a member of Plovernet or CDC were you?

I was not. I read a ton of CDC text files though!

Did you ever do any phracking yourself? Do fall into the warez scene?

I did some hacking, yes. Local universities were like swiss cheese in the 90's. I needed free internet access, and they were a good way to get it.

What exactly was on the internet pre-WWW that people were willing to hack for? Ftp servers? Or something else?

IRC. Gopher. FTP. It was "elite" just to be on. Also it was something to do after school!

I remember regularly driving past the computer store in Boardman or Youngstown or whatever with the “home of Rusty n Edie’s BBS” sign out front.

I called it a few times but it was never one of my regular ones, despite being active on several other BBSs in the area.

It's really an ironic shame that the region - which had various flavors of corrupt politicians always promising to "bring back the jobs" it lost from the Steel Mill Days had this concentration of activity in this nascent explosive industry: there was a huge concentration of BBS numbers in the Cleveland/Youngstown/Akron area code and rather than trying to grow the industry they just let it float away... While clutching their pearls about "the jobs".

I only just now realized it's Edie and not Eddy. My Berenstain Bears moment here. I swore it was "Rusty and Eddy's", and I never called it because it just didn't sound as cool as something like "The Hell Pit" or "Nun Beaters Anonymous".

> "Nun Beaters Anonymous"

Go on. Give in to the urge.

(Watch no one get that.)

Guido Sanchez! One of the most extroverted people I've met. I heard he became a gourmet chef!

Only time I met him was the early 90s, he came skateboarding into the hall in Chicago's Union Station wearing this ridiculous getup with goggles on his head like some character from "Hackers". Amazing.

"Go on: kick the habit", I thought?

Anybody know what year this was written?

A related past submission:

Rusty and Edie's BBS seized by the FBI (1993) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27007938 - May 2021 (1 comment)

> 128 (one for each node) 16Mhz 286's.

Geez. I wonder what their electricity bill was in those days.

Rusty N Edie's was perhaps the biggest and most well-known BBS of the era. Iirc it had declined somewhat before the fact, but "the raid" kinda marked the end of the "BBS era".

Heh. "1200 baud was the best money could buy and on sale for only $279.00!"

I bought my first 1200 baud modem for more than twice that! The Hayes Smartmodem 1200 was $599 at the time of my purchase. It was a great upgrade from the Novation D-Cat (300 baud) modem that I had been using.

I seem to remember that BBS operators were given a significant discount by the modem vendors. This makes good sense because it drives product demand.

Miracom did indeed have a hefty BBS SysOp discount. Less than half price for their modems, in limited quantity, though the application process was somewhat lengthy.

My first modem was a 300/300 acoustic coupler. Then later a 1200/75, and then a little later, a Hayes 1200/1200.

Nowhere near the setup this couple had, but in my indiscrete youth I ran a multiline BBS "back in the day," from 1982-ish to 1996, until finally retiring it due to switching countries for work. At the end it ran on an Amiga 2000 though the BBS was hosted ona few different machines over the years prior. A couple of modems (2400 baud, then Miracom 9600, then 14.4K and finally US Robotics 56K), with a couple of gigabytes of SCSI drives. The BBS also offered a "telnet portal" whereby during certain hours of the day I placed a call to the local Uni that gave me an Janet connection, which could then be reached from anybody else on Janet, or the Internet if they could gateway in, to the BBS itself over dial-up. With that Janet gateway the BBS could host a few dozen people before it became overloaded, though of course, file transfers for anybody coming in via the Internet/Janet gateway were slower than molasses in a Minnesota winter.

Interestingly I had two features on this BBS that were prescient in a way. People with two modems & phone lines, or access to the Janet/Internet portal, could trade bits of files via a modified Zmodem protocol, the BBS acting as a warehouse tracking who had what bits. I later used that same protocol to trade warez on the warez scene FTP I ran for several years. I did say my youth was somewhat indiscrete.

https://justinlloyd.li/blog/multipass-protocol/

And the BBS also offered a way where you could post short 128 character messages, what I called "quick chat", on the front page wall, and people could respond to your post with their own 128 character message, "follow you" (alerting) so they would see your messages at the top of the wall whenever they logged in, or just block you because you were annoying.

https://justinlloyd.li/blog/thats-a-really-short-skirt/

I've read Rusty & Edie's write-up before, and my mind always returned to "why?" Not "why" did they do it but "why such a terrible h/w configuration?" They obviously had enough money to pour in to this for the A/C, the power bill, the hundred+ phone lines, computers, the storage, but rackmount equipment existed, small, reasonably affordable multi-user UNIX minicomputers existed, multi-line ISA cards existed, including multi-user BBS software for IBM PC. I am missing something about their setup and why it was that way that is blindingly obvious, but I cannot figure out what it is.

There were multi-node PC BBSes around here that did the same thing back in the late 80's, early 90's. An 8 line BBS consisted of 8 lower-end PCs plus a higher PC acting as a file server on a Novell network, running PCBoard. They simply didn't know how to do it any better. Most people knew DOS.

There were a couple of Unix BBSes locally, but they were few and far between. I started mine on an Amiga but eventually moved to Linux.

As for Rust and Edie's, that setup must've been nuts. 100 PCs in a house must've been insane back then, especially in a residential setting. It would've been a pain just getting that much power and phone lines brought in.

Interesting.

I only ran in to PC based BBS' running a few lines or so. Anything more was Amiga or, more usually, UNIX (or some variant) on either a microcomputer or a minicomputer.

I agree, a hundred or more PCs in a home, burning between 100W and 300W would have been absolutely insane.

There were other PC alternatives, like DESQView (386 multitasker) or OS/2, but most PC sysops didn't seem to go that route for whatever reason.

I spent part of my childhood in Boardman. Rusty N Edie's BBS was a local number. I didn't know how good I had it until we moved to another state. I recall that "Fred Martin's BBS" was another fantastic local BBS in the Youngstown area.

I wonder what the equivalently large-scale home server installation would be today. Maybe piping a 10 gigabit (or higher) connection into one's home, transferring out terabytes per month, and hosting hundreds of terabytes of files?

An equivalent setup would be a Raspberry Pi. :-)

But an equivalently large-scale setup is probably a half-dozen racks in the basement.

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