Were you ever the sysop of a BBS?

[The_LED_Museum]

The subject line says it all...were you ever sysop (system operator) of a dial-up or telnet computer BBS (Bulletin Board System)?
BBSs were rather popular in the 1980s and 1990s.

You need not say the name of your BBS or furnish any other details for that matter; a simple "yes" or "no" answer to this poll will suffice.

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I ran a BBS from 07-21-89 to 07-21-99 - exactly ten years - give or take several minutes.

I started mine on a Commodore 128 computer in C=64 mode, and called it "Phone Sys: The Douched Moose". After a month or two, I changed the name to "The Pink Triangle BBS", and several months later, I remaned it one final time to "The Toylet Bowl BBS".

For the first three years or so, I ran it on the Commodore, using a modified (by me) version of Ivory Joe 6485 BBS software, which I named TDMBBS v7.0.

For the last seven or so years of operation, I ran it on a pee-cee using Searchlight BBS software. The computer that ran this BBS had a blue LED power-on indicator; something that cost me ~$28.00 in 1992.
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[DUQ]

I wasnt a sysop but I was a user back in the day on my Aptiva.

 

[TheMechanic]

Yep. Coincidentally, I was a U.S. rep for Searchlight Software for a very short period of time...

-=[ Grant ]=-

 

[Nitroz]

Yes. The name was Oxygen and I ran it off of an Amiga 1200 with two phone lines. The software was CNET.

After a year or two I sold the Amigas and bought my first Compaq PC. I know Compaq...Sheeez!

 

[shanover]

Yep, Mustang's BBS, Cnet, C=64, Two (count 'em! 2!! 1581 drives!!!)St Petersburg, Fla. 1986-1989

Got reassigned to another post and never set up another BBS

 

[X_Marine]

Yep, here in Houston for to many years.. ')

Used to d/l data from a bbs in Woodhaven NY @ 300baud.. wow
X

 

[raggie33]

hell i wasnt realy sure there was the internet in the early 90s was there the internet in the 90s for real?.i didnt realy find the net to like 2001

 

[The_LED_Museum]

Yep. Coincidentally, I was the U.S. rep for Searchlight Software for a very short period of time...

-=[ Grant ]=-

Kewl!!!
Did you happen to know Frank LaRosa - the creator of Searchlight BBS software?

 

[matrixshaman]

Yes - set up over 50 different BBS's - always setting up different programs to run BBS's - customized the heck out of all kinds of BBS proggies, some Commodore, some Amiga and a lot PC. Many were 'hacked' BBS programs with little or no documentation and it took a lot of work to get them running right. I ran them right up until the very first web browser came out and the Internet started taking off big. Before that I had $300 to $400 a month phone bills calling all over the place to other BBS's. I actually had checked out the Internet before there were any web browsers at all but it was just too 'boring'. I'm trying to remember as I write this what that graphic format that had just started to get popular on BBS's - just before web browsing popped into existence. It wasn't ANSI - came after that - seems like it started with R - maybe RTL? and was just getting popular when the Internet exploded into existence and that was the last I did anything with BBS's.

 

[PEU]

I never was Sysop, but I was one of the few geeks here in Argentina who had a modem and a PC back in 1985...
I knew a lot of people, and I still have many very good friends from the days.

A few years later I used to connect to the X.25 networks to use outdials and call BBS in the USA, it was extremelly cool. Also visited via X.25 every night places like QSD (France) Altos (Hamburg) and many other places.

Great memories from that time, thanks Craig!


Pablo

 

[The_LED_Museum]

... I'm trying to remember as I write this what that graphic format that had just started to get popular on BBS's - just before web browsing popped into existence. It wasn't ANSI - came after that - seems like it started with R - maybe RTL? and was just getting popular when the Internet exploded into existence and that was the last I did anything with BBS's.

I believe you are referring to RIP - Remote Imaging Protocol.
This was an EGA (640x400, 16 colors) graphic/GUI mode that many BBSs had starting in the early-1990s.

Here is an example of a RIP screen from a BBS:

 

[BillCurnow]

I was one of the sysops of The Windmill Company BBS in Lubbock, TX. Windmill was around from 1982 to 1998 and in its heyday was an alpha tester for pcBoard, featured three message networks from two satellite feeds, and was the first BBS in the area to provide tcp/ip connections to its users. I joined the "staff" around 1994 and stayed on through 1999 as we transitioned from a BBS to an ISP.

 

[matrixshaman]

I believe you are referring to RIP - Remote Imaging Protocol.
This was an EGA (640x400, 16 colors) graphic/GUI mode that many BBSs had starting in the early-1990s.

Ah - Thanks! That is it - RIP - and that's how I remember it looking too. I got on the Internet very early on so just as RIP was getting started I was off into InternetLand and never looked back.

 

[The_LED_Museum]

This is a RIP2 screen from my old BBS (the screen you got after logging off); after I moved it to a pee-cee.

 

[Trashman]

Well, I voted no, but I did have a copy of Snapp, which I ran on my Apply IIc. I only gave the number to a couple of people, just for kicks. I used to call a few local boards, though. I was "online" for many hours, everyday: a bit in the morning, before school, and the rest of the day, after to school. This was back in 1985-86, when I was in 7th and 8th grade. I lost interest after 9th grade and didn't get back into the whole online thing, until I finally started logging onto CPF regularly. I remember the names of a couple of the local boards I used to call--The Citadel, and the Dark Side. I liked the Dark Side, because it had a cool RPG game written by the SysOp (The Byter). My handle back then was "Vespucci."

 

[TheMechanic]

Kewl!!!
Did you happen to know Frank LaRosa - the creator of Searchlight BBS software?

Wow - there's a name from the past! Is he still around?

It's been a long time and my memory may be faulty, but after I downloaded the first PC version of Searchlight and played with it long enough to be impressed, I contacted Frank to be a dealer. I don't know if I was the first, but I was at least one of the first. This lasted until (IIRC) there became a requirement that, to be a dealer, you actually had to sell a certain number each year. I think that I was able to sell all of one copy, so I was dropped from the dealer list.

I always maintained an extensive Searchlight download area on my BBS, where I had the latest shareware version plus all of the utilities that I could find for SLBBS. I can remember living through the addition of Fido Netmail and Echomail (for those born after 1980, the store-and-forward equivalent of email and newsgroups, respectively) to SLBBS, and the appearance of RIP graphics. We all thought that was just the coolest thing we'd ever seen!

Thanks for the screenshot - brings back memories!

-=[ Grant ]=-

 

[The_LED_Museum]

I don't know if Frank is still affiliated with SLBBS (or is even still "Among the Living" for that matter) any more.

They still maintain a website at http://www.slbbs.com/ but again, I don't know if Frank LaRosa is still affiliated. I'd have to do some digging to find out if that's still the case or not. Frank might have sold the license for SLBBS to Telegrafix, the company that invented RIP graphics.

I did get to meet Frank in person once; they had the Searchlight Western Lights Convergence in Seattle in 1992, and my now-deceased friend Paul Casey invited me to go to the convergence with him (because I was an SLBBS sysop at the time) - so I did. Both of us installed & ran Western Lights v3.0 of SLBBS after the convergence was complete; this was not all that long before a RIP-capable version came into being. Paul & I were beta testers of that, and I quickly learned how to use RIPaint and made screens for both of our BBSs.

You know, I still might have the name pin from the 1992 Western Lights con; I remember seeing it not all that long ago.

 

[myk]

I ran a little one called "The Loop" for a few years - 3 or 4? Started as wildcat ended up as oblivion/2


I had a door game addiction. LORD, Trade Wars
i remember just waiting for midnight for my turns to reset =)

also remember when I had 1200 baud which was just painful, moved up to 2400 which still took pretty much dead on an hour to download 1 meg, then a 9600, then a 14.4 "soft modem" which was also quite slow, then i paid to jump all the way to the 33.6 skipping 28.8 completely, and by the time I got internet access at home I had a 56k modem and none of the bbs's could do anything over 33.6 =(

 

[The_LED_Museum]

Here's another RIP2 screen from my BBS - the "User Statinator" screen that you received shortly after login.

And this was the Main Menu.

The toliet bowl in both of these screens was from the woman's room of the now-defunct Six Eleven Tavern.
Note the hose clamp around the cistern; this was to prevent stolen wallets & other small articles from being hidden there.

 

[luigi]

Yes!
I run a BBS in the late 80's and early 90's here in Argentina called "Information BBS"
At the peak it was among the 10 biggest BBSs here (nothing compared to the US boards).

Information started with RA (Remote Access v1.0)
Then moved to RA 2.0 (this was a very short period)
Then moved to Renegade and was the first BBS here with a graphic interface
The Renegade times lasted long
And then I moved to "Dominion" final setup was a 486PC with Os2 from IBM (not Warp), this was connected to a smaller 386 PC via a Lantastic Net (paralell cable) so I could use both while the BBS was running. (Anyone remembers deskview?)

Information had about 3000 registered users and was famous for the distribution of freeware in a zip file with a cloud as a banner.

Information BBS was known to be very friendly to the users that followed the rules and terrible insensitive to the ones that didn't follow, it operated from 10pm to 7am and a typical conversation was:

9:58pm "ring ring"
me: "Hello?"
XX: "zzzgggg ggghhh"
me: "Hello?"
XX: "I, was trying to connect..."
me: "The BBS starts at 10pm, it's 9:58 now"
XX: "er... yes I was trying to be first"
me: "Great, what is your username?"
XX: "my username is zz"
me: "Thanks ZZ, good luck at 10pm"
me: deleting ZZ from the BBS userlist...

The ALT-L to lockout a user was probably the most used key combination on my keyboard, specially when I forgot to turn off the sysop page call and got bells and whistles at 4am in the morning.


I also run a Fidonet node and had several points playing with echomail through my node, without a doubt Fido's echomail was the precursor of the Internet message boards and Fido's netmail was the precursor of email.
The Fido node run Frontdoor, Fmail and Golded (of course), ZMH was attended religiously.

Very nice memories.