back in the early 90s, there were many, many different options for running a bbs on IBM/DOS compatibles. many were descendants of source code that had been written, and re-written, and modded by various authors. arguably, the most beautiful of all of them (in terms of built-in ansi menuing) was iNiQUiTY by mike fricker. iniq was a rewrite of Telegard, which itself was a rewrite of WWIV's source code.

in the late 90s, the web was already going full tilt and i started to feel a pang of nostalgia for ansi and dial-up. i found out that mike released the software into the public domain, and iniquity had a new website, and new owners were rekindling development. it died after that, and the website and all knowledge of the site disappeared into obscurity

tonight, after trying to remember an url for 20 years (because I misremembered it), i finally found the original url for iniquity's website. i really miss this era - it was trying to reconcile ansi, ascii and web graphics in a single design:

https://web.archive.org/web/20030322235549/http://iniquitybbs.com/

mike went on to an incredibly successful career in game development, and is now the technical director at epic games

from a very brief mention in the bbs doc from @tomjennings, i tracked down a copy of the SEAdog store-and-forward mailer

i'm blown away that this much functionality was packed into an MS-DOS based program that could run on an XT with 256kb of ram. it even had its own routing system.

https://archive.org/details/SeaDog_4.0_Operations_Manual/

today's archival/software preservation work -

i noticed that PCBoard BBS software's wikipedia article mentioned something kinda weird - that just before clark development went bankrupt in 1997, it was building a server called MetaWorlds... an attempt at bridging the ansi-based BBS with the WWW.

sadly, the software never made it out of beta, and was nowhere to be found.. until today it seems! i managed to dig it out of the glorious ibm wgam-wbiz collection, and i've uploaded a copy to IA:

https://archive.org/details/metaworlds_beta

i honestly don't really understand what MetaWorlds does, so i'm hoping a PCBoard wiz manages to get it talking to their pcb instance, and lets us know how it all works.

update: located a newer beta. uploaded here: https://archive.org/details/metaworlds-beta-17

final update: version 1.02 (final) found!
https://archive.org/details/pcb-metaworlds

if you were bbsing in the 90s, you probably heard of Rusty n Edie's BBS. i used to run across nfo's and file_id.diz's advertising their (long distance for me) board all the time. if you came across porn gifs or PCXs in the 90s, it was almost always a scan from their board

how many boards could say they had 128 nodes?

recently i looked up an old street view of the location in youngstown OH, and amazingly, the sign still mentioned the old BBS - decades after its closure

i loved their old logo, and managed to dig up their original bbs homepage - prior to their FBI raid:
https://web.archive.org/web/19981205104028/http://www.pixi.com/~irvdili/page-22.htm

they also ran a web-based bbs for a very short time:
https://web.archive.org/web/19961114032209/http://www.rne.com/

I was reading a story today about #theoldnet and how if you leave an “&” symbol at the end of an #email , it means you want the recipient to reply back. Does anyone remember this or still do this today? I don’t recall that being a thing or maybe it was and I didn’t notice. Gonna tag below with adjacent words in hopes of response.

#aol #bbs #vintagecomputing #retro #retrotech @ActionRetro #dialup #486 #windows95 #prodigy #netscape #icq #compuserve #angelfire #geocities #irc

come see and play my piece "lam3r" at the SAIC gallery! open now to the public.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
#cyberpunk #bbs #ansi #ansiart #hackerart #retrocomputing
#graffiti #punk #diy

Out there, in the worrying world of today is a little #Zilog #Z80 computer with a mere 64KB of #RAM and running the #1970s CP/M operating system.

This little machine is connected to the #intertubes and it's serving a #singleuser #bulletinboardsystem for you, the worrying souls of #yesteryears to visit.

Take a break from today, connect like it's 1985 - here on RC-BOX BBS, the world's first and (currently) only #rc2014 based bulletin board system in the world!

Check out the #alttext or my #profile info for information on how to connect.

#bbs
#rc2014bbs
#rcbox

TIL about #SysOpsFinest #BBS #SysOp

https://www.sysops-finest.org

RetroSwim: Pool's Open - The RetroSwim BBS
telnet://ezycom.retroswim.net:2323

The full 80GB archive of VogonsDrivers, now browsable, searchable*, and downloadable on more systems than ever!
https://bitbang.social/@retroswim/114260519091055456 #bbs #retrocomputing

Self Portrait

thank you @acn128 for setting up the world's first globaltalk FirstClass BBS! it is amazingly functional, and even has a Usenet feed via eternal-september

(apologies for the terrible photo - my phone grabbed the aperture grille by accident)

for those unfamiliar with FirstClass, it was one of the *very* few fully graphical BBSes of the 1990s, with a point and click graphical client. it predated larger systems like Lotus Notes by a decade

Viele Menschen versuchen derzeit sich von grossen Anbietern zu lösen. Auch wir haben uns vor Jahren von Twitter getrennt und auf #Mastodon eine gut funktionierende Alternative gefunden. Kurz darauf haben wir unter BBSindex.TV unser eigenes Videoarchiv gegründet.

Inzwischen ist das Feediverse weiter gewachsen und bietet eine solide Grundlage mit #PeerTube als Videoplattform an. Wir haben uns deshalb bei #MakerTube um einen Kanal beworben und diesen unter https://makertube.net/@bbsindex einrichten dürfen. Aktuell laden wir immer mal wieder unseren Content dort hoch.

Um nicht alles mit unseren Videos in der Liste was es neues gibt zu fluten laden wir nicht alles auf einmal dort hoch. Derzeit pushen wir unseren #Amiga Content nachdem wir bereits unsere #BBS Tutorial Videos dort veröffentlicht haben.

Das bedeutet nicht das wir von der grossen Plattform verschwinden oder unser Videoarchiv einstellen. Wir wollen lediglich Euch alternativen anbieten das Ihr eine bessere Auswahl habt wo Ihr Content anschaut.

Wenn Ihr noch nicht wisst was mit Videos im #feediverse geht dann nehmt Euch doch mal 15 Minuten Zeit und entdeckt diese immer besser werdene alternative. Mehr Creator und wachsende Communitys sorgen dafür das diese Plattformen in Zukunft bestehen können.

Vielen Dank!

#WintermuteBBS - that's my second, #Linux based #BBS running the #MBSEBBS software - is now #back #online !

I've updated MBSE BBS to the latest version 1.1.0 (this is a pre-release but I don't mind) and purged quite a bunch of inactive users.

There will be smaller updates and changes throughout the next weeks, as some of the #rss #feeds no longer work and will either be updated or removed (most likely the latter) .

With the code to support plain #ASCII terminals being rewitten in this new release, I will try to rework some of the ASCII screens - but this is may take some time.

tinkering around with the latest release of #Synchronet #BBS on #Linux and I must say, things have improved for the better over the past two decades - nice!

back in the early and mid-90s, getting on the net meant you were a university student, or had corporate access through a big company. getting online wasn't easy.

worse, even if you had a dialup number and login, there was no such thing as a tcp/ip stack built-in to Windows 3.1.

even if you *did* have a winsock stack, you'd still need a file downloading protocol, gopher client, world wide web client, ftp client, email client. just getting your machine off the ground was nearly impossible unless you could grab these from a local BBS

to make things simpler, universities began offering dial-up internet software packages to their students and staff.

in 1994, my mom was an undergrad student at the University of Alberta. our family had just bought an IBM PS/1 with a 2400 baud modem, and i was abusing the hell out of our single phone line at night visiting local BBSes.

she somehow found out that the university was selling internet dial-up software for $10 to students, and brought home the diskette pack with her. along with a USR Sportster 14.4k modem, she gave me the install diskettes as a valentine's day gift.

it had a slick setup program that enabled SLIP using Trumpet Winsock, and provided a local (free!) dial-up number for access.

after 25 years, i finally tracked down a few versions of those diskettes. i've imaged them and uploaded them all to IA.

the first version of the dial-up package in 1994 was called WinSLIP. it had no PPP support yet, but contained some really cool shareware internet utilities like HGopher and NCSA Mosaic. this would have been the earliest programs offered for Windows 3.1

WinSLIP/MSKermit 1994/95:
https://archive.org/details/ua_winslip

The second version of the software was renamed to NetSurf. It stripped out most of the obscure shareware sadly, and replaced them with Netscape 2 and Eudora Light. The new version of Trumpet Winsock offered PPP which was a huge improvement:

NetSurf 1996/97:
https://archive.org/details/ua_netsurf_96

Now well into the Windows 95 era, the 1997/98 software was shipped on a CD with a hilarious "multimedia" installer/help program designed in Macromedia Director:

NetSurf 1997/98:
https://archive.org/details/netsurf-97-starter-kit

I hope this brings back some memories for fellow U of A alumni :)

just found a treasure trove of extremely obscure BBS history stashed away on IA

thank you hard-working book scanners for preserving this rarity.

if you're familiar with BBSing in the 90s, you'll remember just how fast the vast majority of boards disappeared in 1995. it went from multinode 24/7 bbses to disconnected phone numbers in just a few months

this book accounts for the very small number of BBSes that made the transition from telco-only to "telBBS" or telnettable/web-accessible boards

3/4 of the book is a carefully curated list of 500 boards with screenshots of their homepages and bbs login/title screens. most importantly, the URLs of these boards is preserved so we have a chance to look them up on WBM some day.

https://archive.org/details/internetbbss00rich

@Commodore1351 @Zitruskeks @heinz_hjo @Hal_9000 @torus

Neulich gabs einen überraschenden Besuch vom 8-Bit Guy in der 40 Jahre alten #Commodore64 Mailbox Snobsoft. Natürlich loggte sich David Murray nicht mit irgendeinem 0815-Rechner in den #BBS Dinoaurier ein, sondern stilecht mit seiner eigenen Retro-Computerkreation, dem Commander X16.
Snobsoft User DGeoffri haute ebenfalls an seinem X16 in die Tasten.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHzA5RgFOVk