Hi All,

Not even sure how I stumbled upon it, but while searching for computer history videos I found a wonderful 8 part documentary about BBS's.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRap7uw9iWI

It made me extremely nostalgic about the good old days of BBSing. This period of time was the first time I ever played a multiplayer game over a network. I remember being blown away that I could chat with other players and we could explore a (text based) world together. I think the first game I got into was TradeWars 2002, and I fondly remember the first time someone said meet me in sector X and I was amazed when I went there, that they were there too!!

Sounds crazy, I know, but remember, there was no internet at this time, home computers were rare and very few people had experienced anything like this before!!

Some of my other favorite games were: Legend of the Red Dragon, Usurper (I loved Usurper), The Pit, Major MUD and TradeWars (Which I still play to this day, off and on as it was ported to telnet years ago).

After watching the documentary, I did a google search for telnet BBS's and there are dozens out there!! I am actually playing LORD and Usurper on one called Convolution if anyone wants to join me, I just started last week. I am Dr. Hoads there too! Great telnet program to use is called syncterm.

What were some of your favorite game(s) or memories from the old BBS days?

Legend of the Red Dragon is the one BBS door game I remember most, but I wasn't particularly into the games as much as finding interesting new shareware titles, interesting text documents, and even a few .gif files.

I met some great friends on local BBS's that became good real life friends through meet-ups. I think I used Qmodem on DOS before Procomm Plus on Windows 3.x. I even ran my own board for a time. I think it was running on Renegade, eventually through a 28.8 modem (did those ever connect anywhere above 19k?). I had my own phone line so I could use it with my old PC in the corner.

The things I remember most besides the forums were trying out the various file transfer protocols. Z-something was probably fastest, but I also remember there was one that was bi-directional with chat which was cool.

My first taste of the Internet was through a big local BBS. I don't remember how it worked, but you could dial in and login regularly and then connect to a text-based version of the rest of the Internet.

Forgot to add, thanks for the link to the documentary. I am sure it will bring back some very fond memories!

Good times. LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon) and Usurper were a lot fun for me. Also Barren Realms Elite the strategy game. I actually managed to take the throne and make myself king back in Usurper once. Admittedly though, that was in the later days of bbs popularity and there wasn't much competition left. Felt good though. :)

I too started my own BBS. (Wildcat maybe?) much less sophisticated though. 2400baud only on from 9pm to 9am (on my parents main phone line) haha... needles to say, only a few of my close buddies called in and it did not last for very long. My fist internet provider was also my local BBS (The MagicBus). You could dial in with POPe protocol or something like that and get online with netscape.

There was an interesting part of the documentary where they talk about BBS's as early cabins on a new frontier before it was developed (the internet) with modern cities. I never thought of it that way, but I really feel fortunate that I got to experience those early beginnings. (now I have access to crazy fast internet on my phone anywhere/anytime.. lol)

Sorry to necro this topic, but always great to see people posting about their memories on BBSes - I ran a board myself for a number of years in the early 90s (Renegade software).

LORD and Usurper were definitely some of my favorite Doors - I would always make my rounds on the local boards to get my session in every day. Also loved BBS Crash (fun "hacking" simulator), The Pit (great action/strategy arena fighting game), and Legends (deeply detailed MUD for TBBS). Trade Wars 2002 was always a hit too. ASCII/ANSI graphics is all you REALLY need. ;)

I'll just leave it here that that YouTube video was a piracy of the BBS Documentary by Jason Scott. He also made the text adventure documentary Get Lamp and the old text file archive textfiles.com, and is pretty cool!

I didn't look at the link, but both the BBS Documentary and Get Lamp are equally great! (own them both on DVD - others should buy them too!). Jason seems like a nice guy, he's been at a few of the retro conventions I've been at, though I haven't talked to him.