Anyone remember old bbs systems before true isp's

[John Picard]

Unfortunately, I lived in a tiny town where most people had no computers to begin with, much less ones with modems, and calling outside the city limits was long distance. So, no BBS for me. I remember how cool I thought my 40MHz 386DX with 4MB of RAM and a 200MB hard drive was at the time. And the video card could display 2^15 colors!

It's funny that we've come to a point where people can wax nostalgic about the early days of the PC and pre-mainstream Internet and its predecessors.

Back when it was called a "bus board" and the motherboard was separate.

 

[Meredith]

Back in the day you would post on a punch card and then mail it to a mainframe in an envelope and 1cent stamp.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

I used to have to dial 1200 baud ... both ways!

OK, enough old man jokes. I was talking about this with a guy at work and we did pretty well dialing up with Commodore 64's (I even upgraded to a 128 at one point and could do 80 column surfing with ANSI graphics, woo-hoo big stuff).

We downloaded lots of pirated "warez", played multi-player games (though everyone wasn't always logged on at the same time) and read FIDO news and e-mail. Yeah, it took a while to download sometimes but files were small then. You'd think the authorities wouldn't have been as on the ball back then but I remeber some kid who got his computer taken away because he was running a pirate BBS on a Commodore 64.

I remember too when what would later be the basis of the IMDB consisted of a database that fit on 7 floppies.

We didn't know what we were missing back then though so those games were just as fun as what we have now.

 

[General_Phoenix]

Yeah some bloke got in trouble in my area for doing that, he would operate a "late night BBS" and had illegal files, and porn. He was only 14 years old though (not much older than I was back then), he got into some trouble although I'm not sure how serious it was. He never logged on to another local BBS though from what I remember, so he was either too embarrassed to show himself, he had his PC taken away, or his parents grounded him for awhile.

Anyone remember playing the first Duke Nukem game? 2D platformer... I would bring up that game all the time to people playing Duke 3D - most were baffled by it.

 

[LapsedTrekkie]

I remember them quite well, as I was a Co-Sysop for one (called Merchants of Wonder on Galacticomm BBS software. I also got quite addicted to Trade Wars

Heh. I was a subscriber on Merchants of Wonder for a while...

 

[Alpha_Geek]

I deny any knowledge of fidomail, BBS systems of any sort, 300, 1200, or 2400 baud modems (both acoustic coupled and direct connect) or massive long distance bills to access far-away systems.

AG, still capable of whistling a modem carrier for 300 baud. Oops, ok so maybe I do have a little knowledge of such things...

 

[TerriO]

Gods, remember when we thought 2400 baud was fast?

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Anyone remember playing the first Duke Nukem game? 2D platformer... I would bring up that game all the time to people playing Duke 3D - most were baffled by it.

Hell yeah, I remember that. I loved all the old Apogee platformers. Cosmo, Commander Keen, Duke, all of 'em.

That really was a great time for PC gaming. I played all the shareware I could download, and even bought some.

It's a shame the shareware concept didn't really survive, and all we get now are hugely crippled "demos."

 

[Guartho]

I have fond memories of getting up at 5AM to play Legend Of the Red Dragon and Outpost Trader. (From what I have learned since, sort of a ripoff of Trade Wars.)

 

[Brent]

I remember, I use to log on to a local BBS and play multiplayer games through it, very crude stuff by today's standards, but not back then! Got online with my 2400 baud modem!

 

[splodenode]

them was the days. i ran my own for a while in the mid 90s

 

[Saturn0660]

Trade wars... Wow talk about a take back.. My buddy ran a board and of course he gave me endless shit for his tradewars. Red Dragon was great too..

 

[USS Triumphant]

The first BBS I was on was GEnie. I participated in "roundtables" with KRAD, Straczynski, Bermuda (Weird Al's drummer), and a bunch of other less well known but still incredibly cool people.

Then I found a list of phone numbers for local BBSes, and we had a ton of 'em at one point. Grandpa's, He Said She Said, CCC, F.R.E.D., and a grunch of others. Door games like LORD were kinda fun. I already had most of the stuff they were offering for sharing (I got hold of some compilation CDs of those sorts of things from someplace, can't even remember where now, but neat) so I didn't really get into that part of it. The best, and maybe also the worst (long story, won't get into it here), part of the local BBSes was that they were inhabited by people you were likely to run into in the real world. And they were all a bunch of freaks like us, or in some cases worse than us!

I even ran one, very briefly - Knight Time BBS. But they all dried up practically within a couple of years of AOL going to an unlimited monthly rate.

 

[Buck Rogers]

Well in the Baltimore area during that time I remember my Commodore Users Group RCUG having a BBS,and some of our members being sysops,co-sysops.

As well as the beginning of the internet dating Via the Purple Haze BBS including trying once a chat with a friend as an experiment between our two Commodore 64's,and having my parents telling me to go to bed.

Signed

Buck Rogers

 

[darkshadow0001]

Lot of free shareware.

I used to get online with my old Commodore 64, and then it was just to a single computer -- no networks. Ahh, the good ol' days

 

[Neopeius]

Gods, remember when we thought 2400 baud was fast?

Oh yeah! When I got one for my BBS back in spring of 1991, I thought I was flying. And it cost me half as much to download porn from Rusty and Edie's... ^^;;

BTW, I met my wife through a San Diego bulletin board, Fly by Knight.

 

[General_Phoenix]

Anyone remember playing the first Duke Nukem game? 2D platformer... I would bring up that game all the time to people playing Duke 3D - most were baffled by it.

Hell yeah, I remember that. I loved all the old Apogee platformers. Cosmo, Commander Keen, Duke, all of 'em.

That really was a great time for PC gaming. I played all the shareware I could download, and even bought some.

It's a shame the shareware concept didn't really survive, and all we get now are hugely crippled "demos."

Yeah, I would wake up at the wee hours of the morning and log on to my favorite BBS, and download like crazy. Everything from Cosmo to Wolfenstein, Major Stryker, Bio-Menace, Commander Keen, and who knows what else that I've long since forgotten.

Trade Wars 2002 was always a personal favorite of mine, as was Yankee Trader which was basically the same thing, only slightly scaled down. Barren Realms Elite was another favorite, and I used to have a competition with some bloke on a Star Wars trivia game, and I pretty much dominated this music trivia game.

 

[Neopeius]

I could never get into TW 2002 though my wife was addicted to it. It was impossible to map, and I hated that.

I did have fond memories of TW 1.02, however, which was mapped to a simple hex grid. *That* I played a lot of. I remember logging on at 11:50 PM (volume off, scared I'd wake up my parents) taking my turns and then logging on again at 12:00 AM for the next set of turns.

 

[General_Phoenix]

Yeah I played an early version of Trade Wars for awhile there. I don't remember what version it was, I just remember the main bad guys were the Cabal, instead of the Ferringhi.

 

[Alpha_Geek]

The first BBS I was on was GEnie...(

GEnie was an online service and competitor to the likes of Compuserve, Delphi, Prodigy, etc. BBSes were much smaller operations.

AG, former Delphi account holder (rsman) and avid TAPCIS user (some ungodly number starting with a 7...)