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Setting up a new BBS - Questions

lyonadmiral

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Jun 3, 2009
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Location
Peru, New York
Hello Ladies & Gents,

To my pleasant surprise, the Verizon Wireless Home Phone Kit which is essentially a POTS-LTE bridge, is compatible at least to 14.4 and might be compatible for higher, so what I would like to do is setup a BBS and am wondering for those of you what can and do remember, what is good BBS software that would run a PC with 640k.

Thanks,
Daniel
 
I liked Auntie, but PCBoard was also quite prevalent. Either ran quite well on Windows NT. I've got a few other sample disks, such as Sapphire.
 
A friend and I ran WildCat! until the mid 90s when the Internet invaded. We ran our board on 286 and 386 systems tied together with an Arcnet network. I'm pretty sure WildCat! would run on a 640K 8088 machine though. I believe Winserver was the Windows version of WildCat! so avoid that one.

A quick search found this site dedicated to WildCat! on DOS to this day. Go figure.

http://www.wildcatbbs.com/
 
A friend and I ran WildCat! until the mid 90s when the Internet invaded. We ran our board on 286 and 386 systems tied together with an Arcnet network. I'm pretty sure WildCat! would run on a 640K 8088 machine though. I believe Winserver was the Windows version of WildCat! so avoid that one.

A quick search found this site dedicated to WildCat! on DOS to this day. Go figure.

http://www.wildcatbbs.com/

I looked at the page but can't find a download link for a version that will work on the PC/XT.
 
I used to use TriBBS. But that was a long time ago. I don't know if it's still kept up to date or not.

If I were to run one today, I'd probably try Mystic and run it on Linux.
 
No, I don't think so--from the release announcement of "Picasso":
Red Hat Software is pleased to announce the release of its latest edition of the Red Hat Linux Operating System. We are particularly pleased with this release as it not only represents a significant improvement in all the Red Hat functionality and reliability, but also again demonstrates the remarkable creativity of the growing worldwide Linux development community. With its ease of installation, system management, automatic upgrades, and preconfigured tools, Red Hat Linux is easier to use and manage than ever. Highlights of release 3.0.3 include:

o Linux kernels up to 1.3.57. The stable 1.2.13 is the officially supported kernel.
o A new version of RPM (2.0) that provides many new features and dramatically faster performance.
o Now installs and runs on PC's with only 4MB memory! ...

"Only 4MB"

There were early versions of Xenix that could probably fit in 640K, but I don't know of BBS software that worked with them.
 
Lots of people as of late seem to be coming up with quick basic ascii / text bbs' which is great. But does noone remmember excalibur BBS software in the mid to late 90s? It was fully graphical and unlike all bbs software before it. In my memory is was short li ed as bbs' were already dying off. I just remember dialing in and having a bbs load with full graphics being amazed.. And yes i had a 14.4 at the time
 
If I recall correctly, those were RIP graphics. More software than just Excalibur supported it (but not many), as well as a few door games. For some reason LORD 2 comes to mind, but I don't actually remember playing it in RIP, always ANSI.
 
I ran a WWIV BBS in the early 90s. Full access to the C code to do mods/enhancements (mostly adding ANSI graphics). Later switched to PCBoard. I ran both on
486/Pentium running OS/2.
 
If you're running a DOS-based BBS, you're probably better off using a more modern computer to run it. Get an old P4 system and utilize that. That's what I moved my old DOS BBS to. You'll have more reliability, more storage, higher baud rates, etc. It might be different if you wanted to run system-specific software such as Commodore or Apple.

If you are willing to go the route of a newer computer, I'd highly recommend Mystic since it's currently supported and actively being developed.
 
If you're running a DOS-based BBS, you're probably better off using a more modern computer to run it. Get an old P4 system and utilize that. That's what I moved my old DOS BBS to. You'll have more reliability, more storage, higher baud rates, etc. It might be different if you wanted to run system-specific software such as Commodore or Apple.

If you are willing to go the route of a newer computer, I'd highly recommend Mystic since it's currently supported and actively being developed.

I also run mine on modern hardware. Some important benefits to consider:
-Power consumption. You can use a Pi, thin client, Atoms...
-Size and noise. Unless you have the space to waste, you can do it on a headless Pi and connect to it remotely.
-Virtualization. I run a VM for the BBS. This way you can have whatever obsolete OS the BBS software requires, if it's not recent, isolated from your LAN. You can also respond immediately to hardware failures and take scheduled backups of the whole VM over the network.
-On the host system you can run software for the modern needs. For example something to update your dynamic DNS service, telnet server to make the BBS accessible over the internet instead of it being dial-up only...
 
I also run mine on modern hardware. Some important benefits to consider:
-Power consumption. You can use a Pi, thin client, Atoms...
-Size and noise. Unless you have the space to waste, you can do it on a headless Pi and connect to it remotely.
-Virtualization. I run a VM for the BBS. This way you can have whatever obsolete OS the BBS software requires, if it's not recent, isolated from your LAN. You can also respond immediately to hardware failures and take scheduled backups of the whole VM over the network.
-On the host system you can run software for the modern needs. For example something to update your dynamic DNS service, telnet server to make the BBS accessible over the internet instead of it being dial-up only...

Telenet Server: Could you amplify on that? Sounds interesting.
 
Telenet Server: Could you amplify on that? Sounds interesting.

It's pretty common actually for people running BBS' nowadays. Some software has support for it, others/older need their proxy.
I use NetFoss as a modern, internet-aware FOSSIL driver, https://pcmicro.com/NetFoss/
which comes with the nice telnet server Net2BBS, https://pcmicro.com/netfoss/guide/net2bbs.html

So if you want to run some old BBS software that only talks COM ports and make it accessible from the internet, it's basically
telnet client connects to the telnet server -> telnet server feeds the FOSSIL driver -> FOSSIL driver translates it for the BBS software as if it was dial-up

You can even have a telnet plugin on a web page if you want to make it perfectly easy for people. They don't even need to run a telnet client to connect, it's directly from their browser. Check mine for example: http://otsbbs.eu/
 
It's pretty common actually for people running BBS' nowadays. Some software has support for it, others/older need their proxy.
I use NetFoss as a modern, internet-aware FOSSIL driver, https://pcmicro.com/NetFoss/
which comes with the nice telnet server Net2BBS, https://pcmicro.com/netfoss/guide/net2bbs.html

So if you want to run some old BBS software that only talks COM ports and make it accessible from the internet, it's basically
telnet client connects to the telnet server -> telnet server feeds the FOSSIL driver -> FOSSIL driver translates it for the BBS software as if it was dial-up

You can even have a telnet plugin on a web page if you want to make it perfectly easy for people. They don't even need to run a telnet client to connect, it's directly from their browser. Check mine for example: http://otsbbs.eu/

Thanks for the reply. It's been a while since I dabbled with any of this and I may give it another shot. My son is a 'telenet guru' and maybe between us we can get something up and running.
 
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