OK I feel stupid asking this but.... Options

[kensplace]

For those of you old enough to remember dial in bulletin boards, here is a question for you...

How on earth do you dial in to a bulletin board using broadband??????

[Grumpus]

Usually, BBS software is accessed through a telnet client. If the BBS is running on the internet, you can telnet to the IP address that it's hosted on rather than dialing into it and connect that way.

Then again, it may be set up differently, but there are many ways to access it depending upon how the BBS software is set up. If there's a specific BBS you have in mind, point me to it and I'll have a look.

G.

[kensplace]

Thanks G,

Just curious as I came across a telephone number for a BBS I would love to have access to, but I doubt I would be given a pword for it, as its in a weird area.

Its a BBS for a major manufacturer of AWP (fruit machines/slot machines) where you can download new bios updates etc for the machinese. But seeing as the whole industry in the UK is regulated by the government, the gangster type people and corrupt programmers, its hard to imagine getting access to the board being a owner of only one machine.............
But I suppose a phone call to try wont kill me


Handy to know how to get in just in case though.

[Grumpus]

You might be allowed access. You bought the machine, so it would seem (to my sense of justice in the world, anyway) that you would be eligible to download your flash updates for it. <shrug>

Not all boards are going to be connected to the internet. If they publish a phone number, but no IP address, I'd imagine that they probably only have dial-up access. Windows comes with a cheesy telnet app (it's not very good at rendering ANSI graphics that most BBS systems use) so really all you'd need would be a modem to connect. I forget exactly where your telnet program is in Windows, but if you type "telnet://127.0.0.1" into your browser window (or replace that IP with one you know has a server running on it) it'll load up. (I think it's in C:/windows/telnet.exe but I'm not certain...)

Most of the BBS's that are running nowadays are going to be hobbyists who are running some of the old classic "Door Games". (They are called door games because they are games that are not actually a part of the BBS software, but rather, they are accessed by entering through the BBS program, and going through the "door" to the game program). There's a list of them here. It's been a while since I used that, so I'm not sure how up-to-date it is, but many will probably still be working.

Back in the olden days (i.e. the early 1990s and slightly before that, even), BBS's were all over the place. People ran them out of their house and your small computer sales/repair shops would set them up with as many as 10 lines coming in. For a while, I had two lines (in addition to my regular phone line that I would occassionally add to the rollover queue if I wasn't expecting phone calls). Most, though, had but one phone line coming in - and you thought AOL (or the UK equivalent) was a pain in the butt with busy signals!

Nowadays, except for those systems that are running the old door games for fun, the features of BBS's have all been replaced by stuff on the Internet. The most popular things people would do (aside from games) was downloading files (scanned Playboy pictures were BIG) and messaging. Boards would have a set of local message threads that people would post to - sort of like the forums here, but actually it was closer to usenet in format. But, bigger boards also subscribed to FIDONet which were public forums that were echoed around the country (and even world in the case of some subjects). The huge boards would be updating almost constantly, but smaller boards like mine would send messages out and download new ones over the network in the middle of the night so as not to tie up phone lines. In the Hartford Connecticut area (which is just north of halfway between New York and Boston) we set up a fairly complex polling network where one machine would make a local phone call and then that machine would make another phone call and so on over the course of the night. Eventually, the way it was timed out and scheduled, the stream would reach Boston and/or New York without anyone needing to make a toll call on their phone. (The round trip took about 4 hours, but it worked well). If you were sending an e-mail or public post from an isolated area to another isolated area, it would frequently take longer than the Post Office for the message to get there. But, it was trendy and cool.

In 1993, one of the guys who was a local call to me bought a satelite dish. In exchange for taking him out for free beer every now and again, he acted as a hub in the Hartford area which kept us much closer in the loop. We could poll him several times a day and, via his satelite connection, he was always up to date with polling the major hubs. Very cool, since it shaved 12-24 hours or so off the overall propogation time of our mail transfers.

I don't have many claims to fame, but my BBS (in it's latter years, anyway) was the very first fully "point and click" BBS systems in the Northeast US (and probably one of the first 10-15 in the world). I was even a few years ahead of AOL (which started out as really nothing more than a big honkin' BBS with thousands of lines and a natioal dial-up network). In order to call my BBS, you would telnet in and then download a special client that knew how to handle the graphics and "hot spots" for clicking. I even tried to get some investors to help me expand to more lines and possibly even get on a national network (Compuserve was the big national player back then and they were doing well). Everyone told me I was nuts, though, because no one wanted to download a special program to access the BBS. No one would sit and wait for a 250K download (took over 4 minutes back in those days to get 250K). I, of course, countered with the fact that I could mail out disks upon request if the people didn't want to wait. Again - they told me I was nuts and no one would put any money into it.

Then, AOL hit the scene - you could call up and download a 400K program or request to have one mailed to you. They had a point and click interface and, as we all know, within a few years they had their name appearing in front of both "Time" and "Warner" - two of the most recognizable brand names in the world. Guess I missed the bus, huh?

Hometown BBS's still lived on happily for a few years after AOL hit the scene (and after Compuserve went to a graphical interface) because they weren't directly connected to the internet. They subscribed to most of the same FIDONet message forums as we did (though they did offer many of their own exclusive forums). They had a $20 a month fee as opposed to our $20 a year fees (or in some cases, we just asked for voluntary donations that would give you access to the extra lines while non-payed members got the old slow modem and a lot more busy signals).

So, we did well - until AOL hooked itself into the Internet (in 1994?). Then we were screwed. Everyone could then build their own BBS and have it hosted on someone else's machine (thus, no hardware investment) by using a language called "HTML" and scripts written in a language called "perl". USENet was similar to FIDONet, but rather than taking a day or two for messages to get through, it all happened in an hour or two.

A few of us got dedicated connections to the Internet (thanks in no small part to my friend with the satelite dish). This helped to keep a few of us "alive" for 6-8 months longer than we probably rightly deserved. People could dial into their internet connection, then telnet to us via our IP address. This opened us up to the world and did well for a while - sort of. But, in my case, people didn't like it beause they needed their AOL client to connect, and then they needed a separate client for my board. Others didn't have much luck because the web was all "point and click" (hyperlinks and such) so why take a step backwards in time to ANSI graphics and command driven interfaces?

By the end of 1995, there were only a handful of BBS's left in the Hartford area. Compare that to the hundreds in our area code that had appeared over the years. (And that list isn't all that accurate - it only lists my last BBS incarnation - there were also a few more other systems that I'm not seeing on that list).

Those were the glory years of computers, if you ask me. Thanks for bringing up this topic to give me the chance to reminisce a bit. I visited a fun place in my mind that I hadn't been to in a while.

G.

[DianeV]

Stock, this is such a great post that I blogged it. It sounds breathtaking; I'm quite sure that those were incredible days. Thanks for telling your story.

[Grumpus]

Cool. Now it's written in a few places on the web that I'm broke in the 2000's because I didn't press hard enough in the 90's.

:badday:



G.

[DianeV]

Next time ...

[kensplace]

Nice claim to fame G, the only thing I ever did with BBS apart from use a few, was almost set up a wildcat (I think that was the name, my memory sucks) system at work once....

There are a lot of people out there who missed the bus, and many who took the bus, only to find out it crashed, so I would not dwell on it too much (now why cant I follow my own advice lol)

Perhaps the people that made the money, and now have the control, are the ones that understood business, not technology..... It seems all the big names now had advantages - cash, or mates in the printing industry etc.

Many firms used people, good people to get were they are now, and discarded them when they were no longer needed - the only problem is, these firms are now all running on borrowed time lol. Time is a great healer, and has no respect for money.

[AbleReach]

Grumpus,

I remember sampling Compuserve, "Plodigy," AOL (glorified BBS by the hour, just pre Internet) and whatever home BBS I could get to with Hyperterminal. I briefly had a Wildcat (think that's was it) BBS on my home machine, for sharing files with other homeschoolers. The best part was the aski art. :-) We didn't last long. I am not big into anything with a command line :oops: - I just want it to work.

People from the New York area would shrug and say how prosaic we from the upper left US are, and that we had no idea of what a real BBS community is like. I wonder how much of that was you??

Once point and click html hit I was a happy camper, even when I was doing mouseless nongraphical Internet and Pine email via some updated version of Hyperterminal and my public library's Internet connection.

Then we got image tags and pictures and upgrading my machine became a passion.

I originally got a computer so I could keep a big spreadsheet of a big mailing list for my art-related business. The modem was a bonus.

I did not expect to get hooked on COMMUNICATION. If not for the glory days of BBS, I would not be here. A lot of us owe those like you a vote of thanks.

Elizabeth

p.s. The beat goes on. When not immersed in school activities, my teenager is deeply into the weird and wonderful www.kingdomofloathing.com
It's like a text-based RPG with icons, tables and leet-n-geek puns like "the fickle finger of f8."

[ukdaz]

Hi Kensplace

You mentioned you were after a new bios for a fruit machine you own

My father runs a business operating gambling fruit machines in Bristol, UK so if you let me know the machine and manufacturer I will get the hardware he uses to download it to a new chip at his office and then send it to you with the new flash update - if not you can always arrange to send me the one in your machine and I'll ask them to update that one.

Another idea might be to contact the manufacturer directly - they used to send us new chips in the post before we got the machine.

PM me if you never had any luck with the manufacturer - I'd be happy to try to help.

Daz