Retro Tech Adventure: How We Called BBS in the '80s!

I think I ran Ivory BBS back in the 80's. I can't remember how to load the ANSI files for each screen viewed, like the Welcome, Message and Goodbye screens. Would you have any idea? Thanks!

Interesting video - suprised to see email in 1990 !!!! No hard disk on the 64, where would peoples uploads save to ? A blank floppy on one of your drives ?

I used to make PETSCII intro screen artwork for Commodore boards back then. I used to frequent many boards including g C-NET on 64s and 128s as well as 6485 boards and Ivory boards. It was a bid deal when I got a 2400 bad modem adapted to my C64. Who made your intro art? I was a kid/teenager back then. Stopped using my C64 in 91 or 92 and did not power it on until I restored it in 2018. Wish I had all of my old disks. Only have a small few left and not my art files. Thanks for the nostalgia!

Is Thunder Bay still operating?

Very cool. I was stuck to calling in my own area, so out of state calls were not really something my parents wanted to see on the phone bill. haha My BBS was Space Age BBS from 1987-1989. After that I merged with another local BBS to form City Limits BBS from 1989-1991. These were run using Color64 BBS software and 4 drives including 2 1541s, a 1571 (in double-sided mode) and a 1581 + 1764 REU. It made for a decent experience for not having a hard drive. Thankfully I still have the whole setup we used and all the board files. My favorite BBS to call was probably Records Department, which was a local multi-line IBM type BBS that was pretty big and had something for everyone. I feel the same as you, those were amazing times and some of the best memories.

Hi Tom, I still have my original commodore 64 and vic 20 and my modems that I used. I remember 1 bbs that stood out in my mind which was called (the Scottland Yard) had you ever heard of this one? I used to go on it a lot. I hope to look into my old files and see what else I ventured onto. 😃

I remember there were services where you could get some pretty good files from a catalog of discs. Some of the ones I dealt with eventually morphed into being shareware distributors. Edit: War of the lance was awesome back in the day. I played so much of that with a friend.

Oh man, the good 'ol BBS days! It was a lot of fun playing and engaging on BBS' at that time. Despite how slow it was and tying up lines when you dial-up it was an exciting time, and the simple games were a great time. Great story about your BBS and David being a big user back in the day!

I love the name of your board! You have impeccable tastes. :)

I remember these BBS. Great time, 300 Baud Modem :-)

Very cool video!!! Brought back a ton of memories!!! I still have My VICMODEM 1600 and MODEM?1200 1670, both still in their boxes with all the manuals and paperwork that came with them including their receipt of when and where I bought them. 1200 is the fastest I ever had with my Commodore. My first 2400 was a half-height card that I put in my first PC in 1989 which was a Tandy 1000 HX. I still have all my Commodore stuff and none of my many many PC's, so you can see what I loved then and still today!

I love the BBS name! 2112 is amazing

Soooooo wish I had still had my RemoteAccess BBS I ran from 94-99. Fellow Rush fan too, mine was called Fly By Night, because my original model was nighttime hours only so as not to tie up the line during the day (although I eventually got a dedicated line, the beautiful ANSI FbN cover art I used as a title screen locked the name in.

I had the entire thing archived on ZIP disks.....which someone stole along with a bunch of other computer equipment (and all the disks), back around 2002. :(

BBS were on the internet - perhaps you are conflating the internet with the www?

telnetbbsguide

Thank you for the demo. My equipment never moved beyond the all mighty disk drive, but I knew of course about modems from movies etc. 😁 Aren't there a retro resurgance happening in BBS's now that old computers has SD-storage addons? Perhaps the X16 could find it's killer app in that category 🥰

Very cool, the only tmi got to,get on a BBS was in the mid 90’s when I was stationed in Japan. I picked up a my 64c plus 2 floppy drives, 2 modems, a printer, FastLoad cartridge and a 1750 ram module. I finally got time to start playing with my old C64 and might run a BBS for fun. What’s some good C64 BBS software to run?

Loved connecting to BBS boards on my TRS-80 back in the day. Hayes Compatible 300 baud modem. I could literally read the text FASTER then it would appear on my monitor....that's how slow the info came in. So to watch a 4K video, streamed on to my 4K phone screen while I'm walking around the park, untethered to a phone line, is just a bit of a FREAKING miracle to guys like me.

I ran Computers Underground in Delaware from about 1989 until about 1991. Just something about the close community that you were a part of back then. I ran Spitfire and was known around the community for having the most door game pgms loaded. I had circuitnet email which was very primitive email exchange pgm. and it took 24 hours to refresh to go propagate to other servers. Damn good days

Marvellous. Many thanks.

I feel stupid asking this but why did/do bbs operators have so many floppy drives?

I ran a few.. The Killer Wolves BBS, Excalibur IV, was going to run The Dominion but when the old sysop was bringing over his equipment to my house my grand mother scared him off LOL I was 11 and he was I think 27 🤣 But I ran them on Renegade... but I knew Sysops from Area 51, Demonic Toys and Thrill Kill Kult... also knew Fiend from Texas who made the inEquity software that I helped out w/ the beta to find bugs and ideas of improvement but everyone was starting to use dreamweaver and making websites at that time and we just parted ways etc.. but those days were so much fun!! miss those days a lot!! BTW anyone remember ACiD draw??...🤣

i used to run The Boiler Room on a C-64 for about 10 years. I started with floppies and upgraded to a 5 meg HD. I switched from a Cnet 10 that I heavily modded to Image 1.2 with a CMD 20 meg HD. We started a network after I got the networking disks and had a dozen or so boards on with 3 being local. After a while I contacted other Sysops running different software and got their network packets so I could do a conversion program to and from Image to their format. After it was all over we had over 100 boards hooked in and running smoothly. We shared mail and messages which at the time was pretty awesome since the internet was still pretty much a thing of the near future. Since then have lost touch with almost all the old DS2 and Cnet 128 Sysops. Those were the days.

Awesome you still have yours, I was co-sysop at Watchamacallit BBS in cleveland ohio in the late 80's, we ran TriBBS till about 93 when I took over and went with the big boys and got PCBoard V14 multi node, by close in 95-96 we had early internet usenet topic groups imported into the message system and users could message people in other states about every topic but that was about the end anyway. It's funny now how I can't go a week without something messing up on this newer old laptop but the chopped and hacked 486dx would run an autoexe batch file at midnight that would compress our outgoing messages, connect to the hub bbs to transfer the messages and collect new messages, decompress the new messages, import them to the bbs and reload the bbs for years all on it's own. Good times, thanks for sharing.

When I got a 9600, I strutted around like I owned the world. That's right, filthy peasants, envy me. So dumb.

Hi, Tom, I’m.sure at 56 I. A bit older than you. From around ‘85-‘87 I ran a multi-line chat system on software called Diversi Dial; before that, Wildcat. Thanks for the retro memories

Love that manic mansion poster👍🏼

Online forums before online forums existed

I got my first computer and went online I the early 90s. That was when the word "modem" was also a verb.

BBSs AND online services like Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, etc.

We never had a BBS but we called all the ones in the local Seattle area back in the mid 80s. My friends and I had handles Bubba Smith, Firefox, Bad Kaveckis Boy. We cracked games and swapped warez. Blank diskettes were as good as cash for us. If anyone reading this was a Commodore 64 nut in the Seattle or Renton area, refresh my memory of the BBS we used to call. I have all my equipment in storage, I think this is the year I break it out!

I used to host my own BBS back then in the 90s too 😊. So many memories

Never called yours, but in central Ohio with my Hayes 2400, we called AcmeAcres and Heartland all night long. HEARTLAND bbs was I think the first multi line BBS, which essentially made it the first ever chat room. Since it would be years before , Compuserve, Prodigy and later AOL existed.

Hey now, if it wasn't for the Elite folk you wouldn't have most of the games you played. ;)

Loved those days. And a fellow Rush fan as well.

I’m really thankful to you BBS users. You all helped drive interest and innovation in this field. The way my nephew would go blank if I tried explaining dial up and Netscape Navigator, is the way I felt trying to keep up with this video. There are levels to the game I suppose. Thanks for being pioneers (and spending some serious dough on equipment). The price tags I see in old advertisements make me nervous and that’s even before adjusting for inflation.

Just found your channel... Thank you, this brought back so many memories. I was a C64 user and ran a BBS (Hell Fire BBS) for a week before I completely annoyed my parents back then tying up the phone line and having my modem screeching all day.

I was a little late to the game, maybe 93-94 IIRC. I was either too lazy or not smart enough to dig deeper into how they worked etc, so I really just scratched the surface.

I was fortunate enough to have a dedicated line as my Dad's union paid for his PC and a "fax" line (whatever that meant...it was a physical 2nd POTS line, nothing special, but I guess telcos had a way of marketing it)

Anyway, I met a family run BBS that had many lines. I ended up going to one of their meetups. My Dad knew I was careful, but he thought it was a little weird so he was a bit cautious to drive downtown from the burbs and drop me off at a Pizza Hut.

Another time they invited me to their house to check out their setup. The couple were probably in their 40s, and their 2 kids were probably late teens/early 20s. Their house was in a fairly rough part of town, but compared to today, it probably wasn't that bad.

Anyway, I wish I'd made more of an effort to learn how to code or whatever. Maybe I would've had more financial success lol.

It was 1994. I was 12. I started a board using Renegade? it was all on a 486 SX 33 MHz running Dos 6.22 and Windows 3.1 on a 9600 baud modem. It was called The Arcadia. didn't get a whole lot of traffic. Just a couple friends locally who wanted to chat about anime and play door games. Unfortunately that computer is long gone. the HDD I kept for years after until my ex wife dropped it on a tiled floor. 850 MB of files and history gone. I am planning on rebuilding that computer. Currently I am setting things up on 86Box. If I can just fiugure out how to share the networking between DOS and Windows more seamlessly...