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Comment by virgulino | Hacker News Reader

I'm holding a USRobotics Courier V.Everything V.34 in my hands right now. It was from the biggest BBS in my country. I got it when that BBS replaced the Couriers with access servers with E1/T1 digital interfaces. I keep it on my bookshelf, within reach from my computer chair. I was Co-SysOp on a PCBoard BBS, in the 90s. 8-)

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What digital equipment did they use? I ran an ISP that we started in 1997. First with Portmaster 2's and USR Sportsters (we couldn't afford Couriers, and the Sportsters were cheaper and worked just as well for our purposes).

I always love hearing about different hardware people used for BBS/ISP's.

We eventually switched to Pormaster 3's.

Did anyone else here ever play 4 player Doom over modem? A company called ACPi made a spider dongle that let you do it... it was expensive.

That BBS grew very, very fast, backed by venture capital, and quickly became a major ISP - national level, one of the first in the country. It was perfect timing, just as the commercial Internet was taking off. I know they used a lot of Cisco, and other enterprise suppliers.

Our BBS, on the other hand, remained small (small town). The BBS ran half a dozen Sportsters on 2 computers and OS/2. Later, we also became a small ISP, providing dial-up access with Windows NT 3.51, an EISA DigiBoard multiserial and about 16 Boca modems.

The Couriers were used for some dedicated point-to-point lines, with FreeBSD and KA9Q.

I recently got my IBM PS/2 286 on my home internet via an old Ethernet card and the mTCP software suite for MS-DOS. There’s something really special about telnetting into BBSes on hardware of this era.

PCBoard was great. The documentation and ability to extend it was amazing. I remember when the company shut down. I felt quite sad about it. The BBS culture was interesting. The anticipation of dialing in and sending a message, then dialing back to vheck for a reply, only to realise you might be tieing up a line preventing a reply from being written.

Internet forums never were quite the same to me.

Nostalgia. USRobotics..

Also, L.O.R.D., and RIPTerm.

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