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Comment by divbzero | Hacker News Reader

Are there places where BBS is still in active use?

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.

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

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.

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