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Any BBS sysops around?

For someone to be able to conflate user dribble on a BBS with CC data or anything else of real value is certainly a stretch, at the least. IMO, it would be way more work to do this than to just extract and cash in on the actual CC data itself! :)

I have no idea, since I'm not in the racket.
 
Is there any practical use for a BBS today?

It depends on what you mean by "BBS"... we could certainly run something that functioned very much like a BBS over telnet or ssh. Some people I think still do that. Once you've connected yourself to the Internet though, you have a slippery slope, with your BBS eventually turning into a forum.

As far as an old POTS modem BBS, I don't see any practical use. Yes, you could achieve some degree of intrusion prevention by physically disconnecting yourself from the internet, but a hypothetical intruder could still reach you through the modem.
 
It depends on what you mean by "BBS"... we could certainly run something that functioned very much like a BBS over telnet or ssh. Some people I think still do that. Once you've connected yourself to the Internet though, you have a slippery slope, with your BBS eventually turning into a forum.

If you're talking about messaging, then IRC seems to be pretty close to multi-user BBS chat. For file storage, I'd say that ftp is pretty close to BBS file sections.

Non-chat BBS messaging seems akin to email.

In short, the capabilities are there; we've just given them (new) names, historically speaking.
 
I know there were BBS systems online a decade before I put mine up in 1988 but I was wondering if there were many other BBS sysops hanging out in here?

I was one of the sysops of Mount Olympus BBS out of Washington D.C. in 1988 and 1989, until a hard disk crash took it offline. We used QuickBBS 2.03 and had a small number of other boards that we did echomail with using Binkleyterm. I toyed with putting it back online and improved the setup until about 1992.

I've had screen shots of the improved setup up on my web page for a long time but had never found a backup of the board as it was actually online for use. A few weeks ago while going thru old floppy disks I found a ZIP file that contained all of the ANSI and ASCII menu display files, as well as a PowerBasic program I'd written to move around them as if you were actually logged into it. I wrote the program around 1992 but the menu files are all dated in 1988.

I'd love to hear about other sysop's boards

Jeff
I had a BBS system running on my Atari 1040st with 256k baud modem (until I upgraded.) I was in Pleasanton, California and was about 1986 or '87. The software I ran it on was called BBS Express ST. The reason I found this thread was because my BBS was called "Olympus BBS." Only a few friends would ever login and mostly posted jokes or nudes that took up to three hours to get a photo out of. Every once in a while, some random would register and figure out that there was not a lot going on on my BBS and usually not return, but a few friends were made. I was only 14 years old.
 
I ran the Lost Cities from about 1989 to 1992, renamed to Center of the Universe till about 1995 (till a "hard card" crash -- on Tandy 1000 early hard drive, they had this "hard card" option with the drive attached on an expansion card). But I also recognized the transition to the internet coming after using OS/2 Warp throughout 1994, multitasking on a PC before Win95 came out. This was in Gainesville, Florida (UF). Used various BBS software (including QuickBBS) but primarily forked my own Turbo Pascal-based software using Forum BBS as a baseline.

I think one of the major forgotten things about a BBS is how it tied up a phone line. And because of this, user accounts typically had a time limit to how long they could be on. At think at my peak, I got maybe 30 calls a day on average - each person using less than 30 minutes. And one highlight was running some D&D campaigns (hosted by a local fireman!). Two popular "games" were TradeWars and ThePit (probably the only two that I registered :D ). I think modern social media could learn a lesson from this time-limitation - we take 24/7 connectivity for granted today (and basically unlimited connected sessions), but it seems to me that sites like FB, etc. should somehow offer a "daily time limit" or "daily post limit", maybe it would help people slow down and think about what they are about to say a little bit more...


Another aspect about BBS and using the old phone lines: not having to enter an area code. Implicitly, you only connected to a BBS that was in your local area -- and this mean all the other connected users were generally from your local area as well. While the internet has made us all "more connected", and yet I know more about stuff going on 1000 miles away than I do on things just down the street from me.


One of the best BBS's still running that I've seen recently is Absinthe BBS (accessible via telnet and in WiModems on my vintage systems), hosted on an Amiga. It has a lot of just fun little features that modern social media doesn't have -- for example, when you log off, you have the option to add a paragraph to a story (where the previous user did the same), so throughout a day each user evolves this story. It's a simple little thing, but we did stuff like that in middle school (passed around a paper notebook, each person adds a paragraph), and you end up with these crazy sequences of stories can are often a lot of fun. It's just one feature of Absinthe that I thought was clever -- they also have this point system, and "inter-BBS" chat, lots of stuff.



The "largest" BBS I ever connected to (not counting something like CompuServe) was Dragon Keep, with at least 8-16 lines in its heyday, and offered multi-user chat and early text-based MMOs. They had FidoNet, and one of the earliest BBS's that I knew of that could set you up with an "email address" (yea new stuff in those days!). At a local Tech Conference, the SysOps sold T-shirts. I still have mine, and here is the logo/image they had -- curious if someday anyone else runs across this and remembers them, they had an ASCII art of this logo every time you logged in.

DSC00659A.jpg
 
I ran a nicely modified WWIV board in the early 90s. I still have it on backups (though can't find my damn source any more).
 
I ran a few BBSes back in the day in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada:

Middle Earth BBS - a self-written BBS on a Commodore 64 with 1541 drive in 1985
MEBBS ][ BBS - running on an Amiga 500 with 3 MB RAM and a Quantum 105 SCSI hard disk with TransAmiga with TrapDoor for a FidoNet front end in about 1990-1994 (Fido 1:140/140)
Prairie Strato Baseball BBS - same software as above, in about 1995 (Fido 1:140/222)

It was fun! I particularly enjoyed it on the Amiga when I could do about 80% of what I wanted to do while the BBS was still running. Multitasking was a big deal back then!
 
I was a user of a BBS out of the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana while I was stationed near there at the now closed Chanute AFB and was asked by the SysOp at the time if I wanted to Co-SysOp and I agreed. He was a graduate student at the time nearing the end of his grad period. This was mid 1987 then about 6 months later I get a system message from the SysOp that he had taken a job with Johnson's Wax or some company in Wisconsin and he had changed me to SysOp level and put himself to basic user as he had left over the weekend for WI. Ok great except I had never seen the machine physically as it was 15 miles south of me on the college campus in the Theoretical Chemistry building so I could run it remote like I had been but a hardware problem was going to be an issue. I did have the office phone number for the professor that was the contact person there so if power tripped the IBM 5170 that the BBS was on he could start it back up but he knew nothing aboutthe BBS software, the hardware in the machine, etc. I ran it for over a year remotely, even managed to change from Fido BBS to Maximus BBS remotely but one day he told me that reset or power cycle wouldn't fix it as one of the two ST225 20mb MFM drives was clacking. Just happened to be the boot drive of course. Well I set up a time to go down and physically look at the machine on a weekend and it seems that the janitor was buffing the floors and banged the leg of the table the PC was on pretty hard and crashed the main drive while it was running. I told him we needed a new drive and he flat told me they wouldn't provide any funds for a machine that wasn't on their inventory anymore and that I could either replace it (nope) or take the machine, modem, keyboard and monitor with me and do what I wanted with the hardware. I did the take out and that ended the Hacker's Anonymous BBS. I used the machine with a 40mb plus the #2 20 mb drive at my housing unit on base to create my own BBS that I named Midwest IBM Softsource BBS and at first ran it on Maximus but then changed it to Opus BBS. Phone charges for Fido Mail were killing me so I first killed off inbound/outbound mail and ran as just a regular dial in till about 92 when we had to start packing as the base was closing and I had orders to Wichita KS for June of 93. Omce we got settled I set the BBS of the same name up with no in/out mail but later changed to Proboard BBS and then changed over to a 386DX machine I was given. The IBM AT I got from UofI CU was traded at a Wichita surplus electronics store for an external 2 drive SCSI CD unit and an ISA SCSI controller plus I bought another 2 bay unit just like the first and a cable to daisy chain to the first unit so I had shareware CDs online that way. Of course I kept the 20 and 40 mb drives from the AT and I still have the 20mb in storage and it still works though the file and message areas have been wiped clean. Anyway in 95 I was offered early retirement a year early (I should have retired from the USAF in mid 96) and I took it so the Wichita version of Midwest IBM Softsource was shut down. Moved to my parents' property in mid 95 and it took a while to get utilities setup and get our doublewide set being rural property but I worked on setting up a new Proboard BBS on the same hardware in early 96 then decided to get Fido, vetnet and some other mail networks again since I could call the hub as a local call despite it being 30 miles away. I named this one Blue Moon of Ky BBS due to the area we are in being the area known for Bill Monroe and apparently the origins of what is called Bluegrass music. The setup worked nicely but by fall of 96 it got to 1 caller a week so by the end of 96 I realized that the internuts had killed off most BBS traffic and rather than keep a second line for the BBS I shut it down.

I did find out later that BBSes were still around but through telnet but never had time to worry about getting back into it especially not sure how it all worked and I was busy running an IT service business that took most of my time. I shut the business down the end of 2015 and have had a kind of itch to do a BBS again but this year I finally found equipment I liked for running one under Windows and have the machine trimmed out but working on a tape backup on it I've had ratholed for a while. I would have gone Linux for the OS but I would have to compile the source myself for Synchronet BBS and nah I don't need that hassle so I have an AMD Athlon x64 on a Geforce AM2 motherboard with 4gb ram that I first installed and activated W7 Pro on then ran W10 Pro as an upgrade to get it activated and on the MS server's database then wiped it and clean installed W10 Pro 32 bit then got rid of all the bloat and spyware they put on it (incl the ones they don't make it easy to uninstall like Cortana) so it's just about ready to run Synchronet's most recent Windows version on. I plan on using the same Blue Moon of Ky BBS name but maybe put ][ at the end to denote it being a rebirth of the original. Strictly telnet once I get it up, no dial-in this time but will have multiple nodes since the internet allows more than one at a time unlike dial-up unless you have multiple and expensive landlines.
 
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