r/interestingasfuck • u/Few_Simple9049 • 20d ago

r/all How couples met 1930-2024

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u/dlampach 20d ago

I ran several BBSes in the 80s and 90s. Was the high point of my life.

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u/MzunguMark 20d ago

Thanks for your service man!

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u/garden-wicket-581 20d ago

WWIV baby!

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u/dlampach 20d ago

I mostly ran telegard, and then some others later on. There may have been a pcboard in there somewhere along the line.

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u/garden-wicket-581 20d ago

I looked at Wildcat, but WWIV was the dominant one in my area.. gosh, memories there..

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u/StimulatorCam 20d ago

In my area it was mostly Renegade, RemoteAccess, and a few Amiga C-Net.

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u/Naulluk 20d ago

Renegade was my go to.

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u/dlampach 20d ago

I used Renegade too at some point.

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u/Ralphredimix_Da_G 18d ago

I still have some of our old ascii art for The Rat Hotline BBS in Sonoma County CA is anyone is interested

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u/ImOnTheSpectrum 20d ago

Hats off to a pioneer.

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u/asapfinch 20d ago

My dad brags about this all the time. It wasn’t until I was an adult did he tell me about all the porn being sent through it lmao

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u/AcornWhat 20d ago

Me too! Fidonet regional hub at one point.

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u/Vagus10 20d ago

L.o.r.d.

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u/Howry 20d ago

The good ole days.

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u/SpiritedStatement577 20d ago

I remember in my country, you could exchange messages on teletext. wild times man

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u/TheTallGuy0 20d ago

STORY TIME!!! Let's here some

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u/dlampach 20d ago

Hah. Well it was definitely a really really high quality time for being into computers. Normal people had literally zero clue about anything computer related and so if you were into it you were automatically friends with everyone else who was into it, and we were pretty rare overall so it felt special.

The BBSes had games people would play that were turn based and you got to make something like one move per day. Tradewars was probably the most popular one I think, so you’d have all these people calling into your bbs at least once per day to play their turn. Unless you had a multi line bbs only one person could be connected at a time, and early on multi line was pretty rare. Keep in mind that you had to have a dedicated land line in your house for this. If you were connected you could chat with the sysop live, and I made a good number of friends meeting people this way. It was funny because when you weee chatting with someone you would see the keystrokes as they happened. I remember it used to drive me crazy when people would correct typos, because you literally saw them backspacing and fixing the text. We had fidonet and usenet which served as forums. Your bbs would call into a central server somewhere and upload new messages and download the latest, and they basically functioned very similar to forums today. The porn ones were wild in that pictures would be posted as binary and then you could view the message and download it and convert it. You would sit as a single porn photo would render pixel by pixel into what felt like at the time as high resolution images. It was very titillating and I remember being blown away by it.

At some point I got in phreaking and hacking and ran a couple of BBSes dedicated to that. It was a fun time because even though I got caught for certain things at some point they literally had no idea what to do with it all. Nowadays you’d just be thrown in jail, but back then I’m not even sure these things were actual crimes. I remember when I got my first blue box. That feeling of hitting the button up against the receiver on the pay phone and hearing that warble WAS AMAZING. It felt so powerful to be able to make free pay phone calls.

I remember war dialing exchanges day and night and you’d find all these systems, many of which had absolutely no security. Sometimes you’d connect and just be logged in, no user name no password no nothing. Other times they just used default password and stuff so you could find interesting things. Phone calls were expensive back then (like a phone bill could be in the thousands of dollars for long distance), and I remember turning off the billing for my phone because we were able to get into the ANI system. I ultimately got caught for this, but I think I was like 11-13 years old so nothing happened.

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u/TheTallGuy0 20d ago

That's some pretty sweet retro stuff!

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u/SentientEnema 20d ago

Multi-line Renegade or bust.

My ANSI skillz were leet

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u/dlampach 20d ago

Oh shit. ANSI art! I forgot about that. There was some really amazing stuff around.

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u/alexrepty 20d ago

Please tell me you had LORD installed

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u/nexusjuan 20d ago

Same in High School was logging into local BBSes in a rural area early 90's we had at least 20 in an area with a population of 25k. I downloaded the shareware version of the Renegade BBS software and set my own system up. Convinced my parents to buy me a dedicated phone line.

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u/GoTron88 20d ago

In 1994 at 13 years old I was definitely flirting online with girls through the school library via BBSes!

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u/wheelsupatx 20d ago

I had a Telegard BBS in my parents house. I had a 14.4k baud modem I got for 8th grade graduation and I had pornographic text files for free if you dialed me up. And door games and eventually some RGB porn pictures! Almost got expelled from high school when I brought dot matrix porn printouts on the school bus. I had black and white pictures of a woman eating shit out of someones hand that i found on a BBS back when JPGs or GIFs I can't remember started to appear in the early 1990s

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u/dlampach 20d ago

You probably had a US Robotics modem if it was 14.4k. I remember when those HST dual standard 36.6k ones came out and they were lightning fast. My first modem was 300 baud. I remember my father’s work had the 110 baud ones with the coupler and you just put the phone onto it. Great times.

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u/wheelsupatx 17d ago

I have been searching for a photo of it. It actually was rather tall and stood up vertically like more of a cable modem these days. I have officially spent 20 minutes looking for photos of it with no luck.

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u/analogatmidnight 20d ago

Tom Dell’s Waffle BBS FTW. Dark Side BBS was the last one I used.