I can go play a retro videogame and be taken back, but I've never felt that way with a BBS. Maybe it's just the intensity of what the BBS world was back then. It was a way into another world.. an exclusive world.. the first taste of digital life, long before it was taken over by the masses. An intimate community, but also a gateway to esoteric and faraway lands.
I was 12 when I got my first modem in '87. Suddenly I was no longer trapped in my town but connected to something secret yet global. Sure, long-distance charges kept things local for the most part, but it wasn't long before I found a way around that. Stolen calling cards, open PBXes, then Tymnet/Telenet and then in '90 an internet gateway of a local university. Wardialing, finding strange systems in the night... poking around until something gave way. Arrested. Reset. Probation. No computers. It all came to a halt. Then one day at Boeing Surplus I found an old green screen terminal and a 300 baud acoustic modem. Back online.. but the world began to change. MBBS, multi-line systems, and the world began to open. The world wide web began to take shape, Yahoo awoke, and the old steamship rolled into port for the last time.
Server closed connection.
I'll have to wait my turn! :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6RPdD2DyJs
and here at 2:52....
I hosted Barren Realms Elite and we had so much fun with it.
Great to see this.
Remember when dial-up was “unlimited”, until it wasn’t? I would stay connected 24/7 because I was running FTP servers announced on IRC. Well, eventually unlimited became a restricted number of hours in a month and I had to disconnect. I then discovered the whole BBS underground and was amazed.
I would find BBS numbers online, in magazines, anywhere and everywhere I could find them. Well, I dialed into all of them. All around the world. I would stay connected for hours.
One morning I was getting ready for school and heard my parents arguing like crazy with the phone company. It was a multi-thousand dollar bill. Well, back in the day, not only were there long-distance charges, but apparently there was also a connection charge as well each time. So when I dialed in and would inevitably get disconnected after a few minutes and re-dial, there would be a connection charge each time. My parents were saying (more like yelling), “There is no way we could dial that many numbers!” I had no idea what the heck was going or why they were talking about that. Then it hit me like a shock to the system. “Holy shit, that’s from all my BBS dialing!”
They continued to argue with the phone company about not paying the bill and there must be something wrong somewhere. Then they wrapped up the call.
As we left for school I causally asked what all that was about.
They concluded it must have been the cordless phone and someone was making calls on our line by connecting to our cordless base station.
:->
My BBS days were obviously over.
http://lord.stabs.org/playlord.html
I used to host LoRD and Usurper on a local Renegade BBS back in the mid 90s
| Region | Area |
| 10 | South west (CA, NV) |
| 11 | Mid west (AZ, NM, UT, WY, CO, IL, IA, KS, MO, NE, OH, IN, KY) |
| 12 | Eastern Canada (MB, NU, ON, QC, NB, NS, PE, NL) |
| 13 | Northeast (DC, DE, MD, NJ, NY, PA, VA, WV) |
| 16 | Northeast (CT, MA, ME, NH, RI, VT) |
| 17 | North west / Western Canada (AB, AK, BC, ID, MT, OR, NWT, SK, WA, YT) |
| 18 | South east (AL, FL, GA, MS, NC, SC, TN, PR, DO) |
| 19 | South (TX, AR, OK, LA) |
Region 14 and 15 were merged into 11.
To be Nodelisted in Zone 1 you agree to Policy 4 and you are required to demonstrate a system that can exchange Netmail.
Grab the latest Nodelist or Dailylist, setup your software correctly, then send a Netmail to your Region or Network Co-ordinator.
(c) 1994, bbs@darkrealms.ca