Relive the Heady BBS Days
June 5th, 2006
Steve Conley has written a BBS emulator that takes the old ansi art and telnet world and presents it in beautiful, AJAX-y HTML. He’s designed his entire site in the BBS style, and has included an ajax ansi art editor, and is working on the ability to connect to any existing BBS that’s accessible through telnet.
Check it out at sysoplink.com sysoplink.net
Very cool. What’s crazy is that Steve himself is only 18, so he didn’t get a chance to play with these systems as a kid! He approaches the project with the same wonderment of a cultural anthropologist, marvelling that we ever lived in an online world so different from the net today.
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Handheld Music
June 5th, 2006 at 3:54 pm
It’s dot net …
http://www.homestarrunner.com/firsttime.html
June 5th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
Fixed it! Thanks!
-Eric
June 6th, 2006 at 7:45 pm
I still remember using BBSs at 2400 baud with a dial-up modem. I must have had 10 or 12 DOS programs that would allow you to host a BBS on your 286 PC. (I still have them, in fact, and they may come in handy some day when AT&T will start charging cell-phone type fees for access to the Internet.) AOL got started as a giant bulletin board, as I remember. Its great to be an Internet geezer…
June 6th, 2006 at 11:20 pm
Indeed. I can’t claim to have used my commodore online (since I had no idea what that 300 baud modem in the store at Toys R’ Us even did) but once I got my first PC, my father got me in touch with a guy he worked with at the Arsenal.
His friend hooked me up with Danjen, and I explored the files there for a while and found the 518 BBS list. I spent the next year of my life dialed into BBS’s around the capital region, and had my first internet email address at global2000.
That first year was a mix of older BBS’s, homebrew systems, and Major BBS, all dialed into using procomm or ripterm.
As we evolve the web from HTML to AJAX enabled online applications, I’m sometimes struck by a sense of Deja Vu and realize how ahead of its time ripterm was. It was, essentially, an application that lived completely on the network. Your machine held the base classes and libraries, and the BBS told it where to draw widgets and graphics. You could write applicaitions in ripterm if you had the patience.
Looking through the 518 list at textfiles.com is like taking a walk down memory lane. I was on every one of these with more than one line (and that wasn’t long distance. I learned that year that a phone call can be long distance even in your own area code).