BBS Documentary: NO CARRIER

[unbibium]

The documentary episode that chronicles the end of the BBS tells us about the BBSes that are still up and running, some on phone lines, and others hacked together to run on the Internet.

There's a RetroBBS mailing list to which I'm subscribed, but don't participate, because mailing lists are hard to participate in for me.... too much wading through quoted text, etc. That's the one thing I miss about BBSes: no quoted test. You'd just hit 'P' and the previous message would appear if you got confused.

I also remembered, for some reason, the most fun I ever had on a nearly-empty BBS.

It was called Catalyst, and ran on TBBS, a program designed for multi-line BBSes. But the only active participants included me, author Diane Duane, and a 15-year-old probably named Scott who had a zit so big he named it. We all called at least once every two days. I had my computer rigged to read the output aloud with a program called SAM, but I not only forget how, I also forget whether I did it on an Atari or a Commodore 64.

Diane Duane wrote "Spock's World", in which we learn that the Enterprise has a BBS that the crew uses.

Comments

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

but, but... there were Mac BBSes! And even if there weren't, just about any computer could call any BBS in plaintext ASCII.

Except for the oldest Apple II's, which couldn't type in lowercase.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

I knew I remembered the Enterprise having a BBS. I've spent too many brain cycles trying to figure out how they handled anonymity and / or if anyone got in deep shit for impersonating a command officer.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think SAM had a version for both the Atari and the Commodore 64, so that's no help.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

One version had better BASIC integration.

I'm betting it was the C64 version, as it was easier to whip together a terminal program in BASIC that worked at 300 baud.