BBS: The Documentary (2005) | Hacker News Reader

BBS: The Documentary (2005)

bbsdocumentary.com

185 pointspelagicAustral65 comments

It’s surprising how much of this era has just disappeared. I recently searched around to see if I could find a few of the door games from my youth (Legends and Virtual SysOp) and there really isn’t much out there. Some games like Tradewars live on, but software for TBBS/TDBS is basically forgotten.

I believe Usurper and Legend of the Red Dragon are still running somewhere. They’re basically just old DOS games running on someone’s computer you dialed into.

I remember years ago someone made a PHP version of Legend of the Red Dragon, I think it was Legend of the Green Dragon if not mistaken. I wish I still had my original registration code that was mailed to me and signed by Seth Robinson.

Is this it? https://github.com/stephenKise/Legend-of-the-Green-Dragon

I had Usurper back in the day. It’s one of those items I lost during a move.

I remember playing an Eragon version of this game when I was a kid. I couldn't figure out what the software was for years, and finally figured it out a couple years ago. Unfortunately I couldn't find any information on the specific instance I played, but it was nice to get an answer :) Good memories there

They definitely are running, in more than one of the BBSs I call regularly.

If you haven't come across this already: the most comprehensive archive I could find is http://archives.thebbs.org/

It's dial-up slow when downloading files, but maybe you'll find what you're looking for.

There’s a service to play vga planets over the Internet as well. Googling will find it.

To relive a little nostalgia, check out "The Last Call BBS" game [1]. This is a collection of games framed as BBS online games, and very well done.

[1] https://zachtronics.com/last-call-bbs/

I spent hundreds of hours playing Tradewars as a kid.

Tradewars is still sold here: https://www.classictw.com/

TWGS is Tradewars Game Server that uses Telnet to run on a Windows PC over the Internet: https://www.eisonline.com/downloads/

It runs on WINE but it won't do the Big Bang, you have to Big Bang the universe from a Windows PC and then export it to be imported into WINE.

Working on that… see tbbs.org and the link to the discord…

Heyyyyy Phil! Great to see you here. - Jason Scott

BBS's are mostly a pre-web thing (and were largely divorced from the internet--for which you basically had to work for a small number of companies or universities to get on) so this documentary from @textfiles is a valuable piece of pre-web computer history. BBS's were a pretty important part of my early computer experience once PC's came out.

BBS's were the first point of access for the internet for many - the more professional or BBS-as-a-service charging fees, one local one for example had something like 20 concurrent users possible (20 phone lines in) - were some of the first to get T1 lines following universities, etc.

Yeah, my commercial BBS was my first ISP for a time until I got broadband.

I am so glad my teenage hijinx did not survive the transition to internet and I feel deeply sorry for children today. Sooo much cringe.

The inherent locality of BBSes was pretty nice however, sure there were some long distance users but most people on most boards were local. I recently rediscovered this photo where 16 year old me recreated the on-login BBS quote wall by asking BBS friends that came over to sign my wall: https://nt4tn.net/photos/wall.jpg

It's been a few years since I've talked to anyone I knew from the BBSes (moving to the other side of the country no doubt contributed, some of them have died, etc) but they hung on longer than anyone else I knew as a teenager.

The day I was able to upgrade my 'shoebox' 110 baud modem to a 300 baud modem was the day I thought "I'll never need this kind of speed, but it's nice to have."

Thanks for posting about this documentary. I ran a BBS from 1983-1986 on a Commodore 64, a 1200 baud modem and 5 1541 floppy drives. An amazing time for this technology.

Which BBS? I was on a lot of C64 BBSs.

I actually built my own 300 baud modem for my C64 from electronic components I got at Radio Shack. I was kind of a nerdy kid.

Cool. Did you ever do a write up on how to do it, or know of one. I'm just curiuos, I assumed it was pretty involved.

A 300 baud modem was pretty simple actually, it was just a tone generator/decoder with digital controls. I think I used a simple PLL chip to decode the tones and probably 555 timers to generate tones. Anything faster than 300 baud was far more complex. I built it as a final project for an electronics class I was taking in like 1989 or something.

Modems used to cost about a dollar per baud.

Rich folks with their 56k.

And 501k!

As a teen, I used to enjoy playing around with the limits of what I could do with Amiga C-Net's MCI commands as well as the standard terminal ANSI escape codes.

I used to enjoy posting comments with those sequences embedded to make the reader think they had left the forums and were now elsewhere on the BBS. They eventually gave me co-sysop access so I could write games, which is when I really started programming for others.

Now I do mostly UX design and implementation. I miss the simplicity of 80x24.

The videos are at https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary (via the first link below).

Related. Others?

The Full BBS Documentary Interviews Are Going Online - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16221915 - Jan 2018 (1 comment)

BBS the Documentary (2013) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9521867 - May 2015 (23 comments)

I used to hang both online and IRL with one of the folks in the documentary. Seems like yesterday. Still have nostaligic memories of being enamored by his stack of USR 16.8k HST modems and the T1 (iirc) he managed to get to his residence.. (again, iirc), his house was like under 1000 feet (loop length) to the CO (central office) where the 4ESS (telephone switch) was located. (could be inaccurate recollections..)

As I recall, I never knew any of the people in the documentary, but definitely used to hang out with various people in the community who were members of a large Cambridge MA BBS.

I am really happy to have experienced bbses during my youth. Being too young (born 1983) for their golden age, I was lucky to have an older brother who allowed me to get a glimpse into this world.

Check out https://16colo.rs/ for good art from the time. And from groups who keep releasing such art to this date.

I was born in '83 as well but seemed to catch the tail end of it - definitely part of my formative years, with experiences like stumbling upon my first "sex chat bot" at age 11 or 12.

BBS's were also my introduction to MUDs [multi-user domain/dungeon games] as well, though it was only once we got dialup internet at home did I find a copy of CircleMUD to then implement ideas I had for my own MUD I called Fallen Shadows - and where a small community of voluntary contributors to create rooms and mobs formed over a fairly short period; someone even made an awesome ASCII art login page spelling out Fallen Shadows in gothic-like style.

Love the documentary; fond memories from those days of 2400bps. It has been posted here many times before; this is the one with most comments [1], 9 years ago.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9521867

I think it's a comfy Christmas must watch...

I got a 2400bps modem to hook up to my C64 and was a bit unhappy that I would get all kinds of errors when receiving data from BBSs, and I figured out that the C64's native serial port code was too slow, it was dropping bits. I was using CCGMS terminal program at the time so I figured out how to hack CCGMS and wrote my own bit-banged serial I/O code in assembly language and that fixed the problem up nicely.

https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary in case you're looking for a version which isn't 27GB.

There's also a torrent there, in case you feel guilty about their hosting bill for direct-downloading 27GB.

I still have the DVDs in shrink-wrap. Have never watched. The documentary has a glaring omission, not covering COCONET from Coconut Computing.

I was gonna say take it up with Jason. Looks like that has been done http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3415

It's a shame when a documentary series like this is made by someone with . . . issues.

Brian, never change.

They are that Brian. I went to work for a BBS software company straight out of high school and can't recall ever hearing of COCONET outside of this beef with Jason.

I have no idea if it's chance, but my middle school "first class" BBS system was named... Yup. Coconet. Strange memory recall.

The documentary is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licensed. I've not heard of COCONET but it seems like a relatively small piece of BBS history. You should set up a cellphone and record yourself talking about it and put it up on archive.org and YouTube.

BBSs were much more personal and local than the internet. I remember going to local board (BBS) parties where you met the face behind the avatar. Online games, chatting with sysops, downloading filez... Those were the days.

Fidonet - 2400K baud modems - it was awesome for this sheltered loner.

2400K baud?!

That would have been a fast modem. And a very high physical bandwidth phone line.

Yep. Good old days… I also had a bbs with a friend in Brazil, we would make very expensive international calls twice a month to other bbs to download the news. Ah… and of course there was a group called applemaniacos that would send apple II disks every month by mail, with a very funny zine.

My USR HST 14.4 model was a gateway to another world, and as it turned out, a career. The SysOp discount encouraged me to start my own BBS. Somehow I don't think this marketing ploy is given enough significance. It was partly responsible for the explosion in BBS numbers.

Are there places where BBS is still in active use?

Well, there is about a thousand on https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/

If you’re near the Bay Area, CA, there’s a few N0ARY BBSes accessible via packet radio. For example, there’s one on Mt. Umunhum in the Santa Cruz mountain range.

The Umunhum packet bbs has great range. I can work it from northern Marin maybe 90 miles away. But sadly, whenever I've logged in it seems kinda dead except for national network traffic. Maybe there is local stuff I missed in the flood of non-local stuff.

You can telnet to many BBSs. If you want something a bit similar to the original modem experience, you can buy device that emulates modem but actually uses WiFi and connects to telnet instead of a phone number.

I just built one of those today, the Wirsa v2 (its on github) and it's great for getting older devices "online". You can telnet, or playback text files, or download files from sd card all via a DB9 serial - you can use a DB9-DB25 converter if you want. I got it so I can get my TRS-80 Model 100 online, and maybe even an Epson HX-20, but I still need to build a cable for it.

A few years back I realized I had a non-used landline due to DSL and I thought it would be fun to try to log into every BBS remaining in the country. I picked up a nice external courier modem from weird stuff for a couple dollars and started dialing.

I was thwarted by two factors, one is that the vast majority of the numbers I could find were now answered by humans who I felt bad for bothering. The other was the apparently even a lot of landlines (including my own) have VoIP steps in their transport that modem traffic doesn't work well across.

Now I'm wondering:

1) Can you get a digital line to support 56k BBS hosting anymore?

2) Can you even get an analog copper line from AT&T for outbound calling? (I know the FCC recently said carriers aren't required to offer it anymore.)

3) Absent either of the above, what's the best speed you can reliably do over VoIP, assuming G.711 / no compression?

So I found the modem unreliable even with it constrained to lower speeds. I don't recall what I used, but I'd WAG it was V.32 (9600 bps) as that's the lowest speed that still has forward error correction (and also happens to be fast enough to be reasonable to use).

Maybe I also tried 1200? Not sure, as mentioned I also had the issue of accidentally harassing people.

I think in general the issue is that there is a jitter buffer and async clocking that causes timing slips that upset the modem. A sufficiently advanced(tm) demodulator could presumably handle it, but I can't control the remote side... There is a lot of text out there on getting fax to work right, but there are options for fax that don't apply to the general case of modems.

Very very few BBSes were _ever_ 56k. V.90 eliminates the extra low resolution A->D stage from the provider to the user by having the provider connect digitally (via ISDN PRI or T1). So in the downstream direction the only A->D stage is in the users modem and can be higher resolution, so all codewords are reachable.

33.6k BBSes and 28.8k (including in the async HST form) were certainly a thing.

By the time technology for 56k was available (1998?) we were well into the internet access age, and the monthly cost for a PRI or T1 was well out of budget for all except the largest BBSes (many of which were transitioning or had transitioned to be ISPs by that point in any case).

ssh://bbs@ptt.cc is the largest one in Taiwan with ~60k concurrent user at this moment. You'll need to switch to BIG5 encoding to display properly.

There's also a web version https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/index.html , which supports Unicode.

(2005)

Also available in the IA: https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary

Some more recent related threads with nice anecdotes and connections:

2022: Really Enjoyed Jason Scott’s BBS Documentary (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31740247)

2021: Ask HN: What was it like to use BBS? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29140217)

2016: Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System https://spectrum.ieee.org/social-medias-dialup-ancestor-the-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12784307)

Hah, learned about the existence of this documentary just 3 days ago while researching how .zips work[0]. The last episode is supposedly about Phil Katz, co-inventor of the format and kind of a tragic figure.

Fun fact: Due to their structure, the first two bytes of many .zips are 0x50 4B, or PK–his initials–in ASCII.

[0] https://indieweb.social/@jonasmerlin/111617397581024775

Not only are BBSes alive and well today so are many ansi artists who make the block art to power them. Be sure to give the ansi archive a look (https://16colo.rs). Create an account and give some rating love to artists who still keep this medium alive.

These are really great documentaries, I have watched them twice.

Highly recommended for anyone under 40 years old to see where things came from.

Just a reminder that you can relive the good ole days and run your own BBS with doors FidoNET and all sorts of legit oldskool features all in a modern system running in Node

EnigmaBBS:

https://nuskooler.github.io/enigma-bbs/

Oh, THAT old thing?

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