Anyone interested in BBSes?

[t0p]

Hi! I've recently been checking out the new breed of telnet-accessed BBSes. If you don't know what a BBS is, there's a bunch of info at http://www.textfiles.com/bbs. But briefly:

A BBS Bulletin Board System was an online community system that folk had on a home microcomputer, pre-internet. A BBS typically consisted of discussion forums, an email service, online games, and a collection of software and textfiles that members could download from and upload to.

Back in the day, the sysop (system operator) would link his computer to a few phonelines so members could dial in. But there's a modern-day breed of BBSes sprung up, who connect to the internet via telnet. There's a list of such BBSes at http://synchro.net/sbbslist.html.

I've checked out a few of them, and all the ones I've looked at are pretty quiet. Which is a shame, cos some of them offer pretty good stuff, like free Usenet access, and the ability to use a FTP client to get downloads.

Of course, I've looked at just a few. Maybe some of the other boards are livelier. Is that right? Anyone here a member of a good BBS? Or are they just a retro thing, a novelty that has no real home now we've got the world wide web?

[HermanAB]

Citadel.

[bionnaki]

looks interesting.
but what do you do with these that a webpage cant do?

[Bungo Pony]

I ran one back in the day. MysicBBS all the way! It was a lot of fun watching your users dial in, log on, play games, send messages, and try to hack into your PC :)

I don't know, it seems to lose something with Telnet though. The echo is really crappy over the net.

[mips]

It was fun in the days before internet but I do not really see the purpose today? Nostalgia?

[Wizard of Aahz]

Herman mentioned Citadel previously. And yes. Citadel is a groupware server with BBS roots. An actual bbs that runs Citadel and is actually the home of Citadel would be Uncensored BBS. You can telnet to uncensored.citadel.org (uncensored.citadel.org)if you're looking for that old fashioned bbs greenscreen look. (Fast response time - Try it if you don't believe me) or for the new fangled webcit interface http://uncensored.citadel.org.

At Uncensored you'll find a group of people who are online most of the time. Newbies and veterans from the BBS heyday in the 80's and 90's. Citadel and Uncensored grew up with the internet. Instead of folding up shop when the world went to the internet, Citadel just shifted along with the changes.

-Aahz

[matthew]

It was fun in the days before internet but I do not really see the purpose today? Nostalgia?That's all I can think of. I used to frequent several in the late 1980s, but since I got an internet connection at home in the early 1990s, there hasn't been any point for me to use a BBS.

[Incense]

Anyone else remember playing L.O.R.D.(Legend of the Red Dragon?) on BBS's back in the day?

[p_quarles]

Anyone else remember playing L.O.R.D.(Legend of the Red Dragon?) on BBS's back in the day?
I can't say I played that one specifically, but there were several that I wasted a lot of time on. One was sort of generic space conquest game, and another was a D&D-type combat game.

Anyway, I ran my own for a short time. That was a lot of fun. I really wish I could remember the name of the software I used -- I'm going to have to look for it.

[djsroknrol]

Anyone else remember playing L.O.R.D.(Legend of the Red Dragon?) on BBS's back in the day?

No, but I did play "Pimp Wars" quite a lot on Corvette BBS in Las Vegas in the mid '90's. BTW, they're still up and running...

[HermanAB]

I don't see why you want to run a BBS over telnet these days. These Ubuntu forums is the modern version of a BBS. It is just the protocol that changed and the display became a little better.

So if you were wondering who's interested in BBSs - there are hundreds of thousands of people subscribed right here. BBSs are alive and well and more popular than ever before.