NotesOld Commodore 64 BBS graphics are not easy to find. A lot of it was probably never saved, and thereās not really any obvious place for it online either. So I was thrilled to get a whole bunch disk images from Sixx: more than 1,000 PETSCII graphics and animations! Iāve gone through it, removed duplicates, identified artists, etc, and captured it as images and videos. Iām not done yet, but Iām presenting it as is. FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesSimply hop on Xibalba BBS and let me (NuSkooler) know youād like to join in. Youāll get an @YourName@Xibalba.l33t.codes Fediverse address with the ability to both post and read public and private messages.FeedUnfurl
NotesItās not the most beautiful ANSI art, but it is something that someone made for me and Iāve always been a little bummed that I canāt look at it in one of the many ANSI viewers (or DOS emulators) that exist today.
Letās fix that!FeedUnfurl
NotesIt occurred to me today that ActivityPub is the new, modern FidoNet(-style) networking. Sure you have W3C publishing official specifications, but what you mostly have is every day āhackersā putting the protocol to work building decentralized communications. Anyway, the specifications are quote vague at best, which in this case, Iām going to consider a feature. In other words, a lot like FidoNet. FeedUnfurl
NotesI shared this video with different BBS enthusiasts. Since I now knew how to scroll the background continuously, and I knew how to mask frames to allow transparency, I began to wonder about parallax scrollingFeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes Popular social computing began in the lateā1970s with the emergence of dialāup bulletināboard systems (BBS). For nearly two decades before the privatization of the stateāsponsored internet, tens of thousands of dialāup computer networks were run out of the homes and offices of hobbyists, volunteers, and entrepreneurs throughout North America. It was on these bulletināboard systems that personal computer owners first began to use their machines for popular communication. The history of BBSing portrays amateurs, hobbyists, and enthusiasts as key agents in the development and diffusion of social computing. Indeed, the users and administrators of early BBSes were the first to confront the fundamental challenges of living and working in online communities. Their experiences and experiments with anonymity, identity, privacy, sexuality, and trust established norms and values that were reproduced in the commercial services and social media systems to follow. Restoring the popular memory of the BBS movement confers legitimacy on amateur users to speak with authority about the present and future of internet technology and policy. Unfurl
NotesThere are many open source BBS resources out there for Linux, but I came up short in finding anything even remotely mentioning renegade and Linux in the same sentence. This left me feeling nostalgically challenged so I set out to find a way to run a telnet multi-node Renegade BBS from my Ubuntu system. In this instructable, I will show you how I achieved this and hopefully inspire some much needed creative improvements as well.Unfurl
NotesAs we speak, certain vigilante Wikipedia users are hard at work erasing whatever scraps of little-known BBS door game history that resides in Wikipedia's databases. The first casualty in this war was the entry for Space Empire Elite, which was deleted early this morning.FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes"There was a time when "online game" usually meant a text-based game played over the modem on an amateur-run bulletin board system (BBS). Most of these BBSes supported only one phone line, so players took turns dialing in and playing, but they still competed against each other."Unfurl
Notes"There was a time when "online game" usually meant a text-based game played over the modem on an amateur-run bulletin board system (BBS). Most of these BBSes supported only one phone line, so players took turns dialing in and playing, but they still competed against each other."Unfurl
Notes"n Solar Realms Elite (SRE), you rule a solar empire. The goal is to become and remain the most powerful empire. You can gain strength by buying forces, and you can gain size by colonizing planets. You start with 6 planets, and a little bit of money. You are required to feed your people and army, and to pay to maintain your planets and army. If you fail to do these things, disastrous results may occur. You are given 20 years (āturnsā) of protection, during which you can not attack or be attacked. You can not perform covert operations (except Spy). This provides a way for smaller empires to build up their defenses and planets before they enter the āreal worldā. "FeedUnfurl
Notes"In its most fundamental form, the BBS was simply a computer connected via a modem to a phone line. On the computer was software that, when it detected that someone was calling the modem, would pick up, connect, and then provide the calling person with a menu. From this menu you could post and read messages from other users, send or receive files, or play games. What happened to BBSes, especially as it looked like theyād be around in some form forever, was multi-threaded connection to the Internet, especially Trumpet Winsock, a program that allowed PPP (Point to Point Protocol) on Windows systems."Unfurl
Notes"One thing thatās important to demarcate for Rob over a lot of my other interviewees was that he was one of the few BBS software authors still actively writing and maintaining his software. In fact, he still maintains it to the present day. Add on top of this that he was originally a commercial developer of the software, closed the business, and then turned his product into a totally free one, and you start to see why his perspective was so cool."Unfurl
Notes"Consider for a moment, if you will, how much computer you're seeing in this shot. Each of those machines is a fully set up PC compatible, with the attendant costs of memory, hard drive, and internal cards. They are all connected to modems (some of which you can see stacked on top) and all of this collection of hardware are plugged into the masses of power strips along the back. The room was obviously never designed for these computers - it has a regular carpet and those power strips are ad hoc. Consider how much effort was expended to make this system even work, to keep it all running, to make it function, to administer the software. This was a hell of a way to make a buck."Unfurl
Notes"Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD) is a text-based role-playing game written in Pascal and run on Bulletin board systems as a third party door game. It was created by Seth Robinson of Robinson Technologies and is currently maintained by Michael Preslar. The player's goal is to improve his or her skills in order to defeat the Red Dragon which has been attacking the village"FeedUnfurl
Notes"I had the pleasure of attending the ANSI Gallery showing this past January, and I also had the chance to purchase one of the items being shown; one of the small handful of ANSI display boxes against the wall"Unfurl
Notes"this networking facility allows people to go from 0-60,000 displays of a stretched rectum in just a couple days, where that same period of time can lead to hundreds of people "discussing" what is essentially a prank, and the bell-curve of likelihood of "Unfurl
Notes"his book does what my film couldn't; go front to end on one boy's story to turning into a man online. And for that, I thank him, and I think a lot of others will too."Unfurl
Notes"These few remaining dial-up BBSes understandably receive very few calls these days, so they tend to feel a little eerie and lonely, like digital ghost towns."FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes"I've tried to make a decent, good, solid loaf of bread here, which tastes good, is what it says it is, and doesn't cheat you." Definitely happy I bought this.Unfurl
Notes"Because treating my customers/audience like moronic criminals is not what intelligent beings do." Hooray - almost makes me want to order the documentary again. Maybe I will, for a birthday gift or somethingUnfurl
BBS PETSCII, 1986-1993 (WIP) | text-mode.org
ActivityPub Beta on Xibalba BBS
Recreating ANSI Art from a screenshot | bertrand fan
xtrn/mrc Ā· master Ā· Main / Synchronet Ā· GitLab
The Internet Origin Story You Know Is Wrong | WIRED
ActivityPub is the new FidoNet
Parallax-scrolling effect ā¦ in ANSI | Break Into Chat
Renegade BBS in Ubuntu Linux - Telnet|Multi-Node
VC&G | Revisiting Hotline, the 1990s Internet BBS Platform
VC&G | Wikipedia is Deleting BBS Game History
Solar Realms Elite 0.995: Documentation
Legend of the Red Dragon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
VintageComputing.com | The Dial-Up BBS Revisited