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BBS Nostalgia Surprises

Back in the day (1983 - 1989, which I'm sure is recent memory to some of the elder hackers amongst us but personally I was in middle school in 1983), I ran a bulletin board system (BBS). This predated ubiquitous Internet access, but it allowed for many of the same sorts of things. It also was my first exposure to the open source culture.

My BBS was named The Enchanted Toilet. Don't ask. I ran various iterations of it. Too bad I don't have any of the data from those systems anymore. The first iteration of it was on a Commodore 64 + VICmodem at 300bps using C-NET software (which I'm almost sure was commercial and pirated at the time). Why I don't know, but it was a heck of a lot of fun. I had my own phone line kindly provided by my patron (my mother). When the phone rang, at first I'd need to actually get up and put the modem into send mode because the VICmodem had no autoanswer. I got some other modem that did do autoanswer a few months into it. That was pretty deluxe. It might have been an actual honest-to-god Hayes modem although more likely a Xyzan () or Megahertz or something because the Hayes modems were ungodly expensive at the time. That said, it was still pretty laughable, because I ran the system on two intensely slow 180k-per-side C1541 5.25 floppy disk drives. When someone wanted to download a file larger than that or one that was on another disk (I had a filelist up; mostly ASCII porn and crack codes for C64 games if I remember correctly), I'd have to either flip the disk(s) currently in the drive(s) over or go find the proper disk and put it in the right drive. C-NET also had basic communications facilities; drop-box email and bulletin board sort of things. My next door neighbor would leave me email. Shrug.

Then in my freshman year of high school, I got serious. I saved up enough cash through painting houses and doing other odd jobs to buy a Commodore Amiga. I later even got a hard disk for it; a 30MB Seagate ST238. A friend who was a hardware hacker built a hand-built wire-wrapped RLL controller for it (and it worked good!). As you do, I had to run a BBS on it. I played with a few different BBS systems for the Amiga, but I settled on Citadel68k . This was a really incredible piece of software, one member of a somewhat confusing and inbred family of Citadel BBS systems. Its configuration and usage were of course completely obtuse. It was the UNIX of bulletin board systems. It had this intense feature, whereby you could network a bunch of different systems running the same software together; they could exchange email and room (bulletin board) data. Much like uucp or FIDONET, neither of which I had much of a clue about; that was serious stuff, we were just doing BBSes. It was a store-and-forward kind of thing. My machine called and was called by a bunch of other Citadel systems in the South Jersey area operated of course by other freaks like myself; we'd meet up in person every so often and gawk at each other. The oddest thing about this networking was that some of these people ran Citadel on other kinds of systems. One guy ran it on an Atari ST. Quite a few ran it on DOS on their 80286s (or if they were really rolling in the dough, their 386s). Nobody ran UNIX; it just wasn't available for PCs. But my system talked to the other Citadel systems, exchanged email with them, exchanged files with them just like that. I was amazed. And hooked. I've been doing it ever since.

So today I downloaded the latest version of the Citadel software for UNIX . It's still just as obtuse, but guess what It's still maintained. This version is GPLed. That's not suprising given its roots. And now it does SMTP. And IMAP. And POP3. It can replace your MTA and your IMAP server. And you can still visit it in a command session with telnet or whatever and it even has a web client. Who knew I've been playing around with it a bit; I doubt I'll try to replace sendmail andor Cyrus IMAP with it very soon, but who knows. Little BBS has grown up! I doubt I'll be able to have quite as much fun with it as I used to, but it's weird how nostalgia can actually turn you on to something that might be very useful.

Created by chrism
Last modified 2004-04-24 1151 PM