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Before the Internet: The Bulletin Board System II

Posted by ccie14023 on March 23, 2020
Posted in: NetStalgia. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . 6 comments

In my last post, I discussed the BBS and how it worked.  (It would be helpful to review, to understand the terminology.)  In this post, I have resurrected, in part, the BBS I used to run from 1988-1990.  It was called “The Tower”, for no particularly good reason except that it sounded cool to my teenage mind.

Now, bringing this back to life was no simple task, but was aided by some foresight I had 20 years ago.  I had a Mac with a disk drive, and realizing the floppy era was coming to a close, I decided to produce disk images of all the 3.5 inch floppies I had saved from my Apple II days.  Fortunately, my last Apple II, the IIGS, used 3.5″ drives instead of the 5.25″ that were more common on the Apple IIs.  The Macs that had floppy drives all had 3.5″ drives.  Additionally, Apple had included software to on the pre OSX MacOS to read ProDOS (Apple II) disks.  Thus, in the year 2000, I could mount an Apple II floppy from a dozen years prior and make an image out of it.

I did not have a full working version of my GBBS, however, so I had to download a copy.  I also had to do a lot of work to bring it up to Macos (not MacOS, but Macos, Modified ACOS), which was a modified form of the GBBS compiler I used at the time.  All of my source files required Macos and not the stock GBBS software.  Believe me, even though I ran the BBS for a couple years and wrote a lot of the code, remembering how to do any of this after 30 years was non-trivial.

Rather than hook up my old IIGS, which I still have, it made a lot more sense to use an emulator.  (It also enabled me to take screen shots.)  I used an emulator called Sweet16, which is a bit bare bones but does the trick.  In case you’re not familiar with the Apple II series, the early models were primarily text-driven.  They had graphics, of course, but they were not GUI machines.  After the Mac came out, there was a push to incorporate a GUI into the Apple II and the result was the Apple IIGS (Graphics and Sound).  While it had a GUI-driven OS (ProDOS 16 at first, replaced by GS/OS), it was backwards compatible with the old Apple II software.  The GBBS software I ran was classic Apple II, and thus it was a bit of a waste to run it on an Apple IIGS, but, well, that’s what I did.

In this screen shot (Figure 1), you can see the Apple IIGS finder from which I’m launching the BBS software, the only GUI shot you’ll see in the article:

Figure 1: The Apple IIGS ProDOS Finder

The next shot (Figure 2) shows the screen only visible to the sysop, while waiting for a call.  As sysop, I had the option to hit a key and log in myself, but if a user dialed in the system would beep and the user would begin the log in process.  I’m not sure why we’re awaiting call 2 which will be call 1 today, but it looks like a bug I need to hunt down.  The screen helpfully tells me if new users have signed up for the BBS, and whether I have mail.

Figure 2: The landing page while waiting for a call

(If you want to know why I used the silly handle “Mad MAn”, please see the previous article.)

The next screen shows the BBS right after logon.  The inverse text block at the top was a local sysop-only view, showing user information including the user name and phone number, as well as the user’s flags.  These are interesting.  Some BBS software provided access levels for controlling what a user could and could not do.  Instead of sequential access levels, GBBS provided a series of binary flags the sysop could set.  Thus, I could give access to one area but not another, whereas the sequential access levels mean that each access level inherits the privileges of the previous level.  Very clever.  A few other stats are displayed that I won’t go into.  I’ll turn off the sysop bar for the remaining screen shots.

Figure 3: The main level prompt with sysop bar. Be sure to report error #20!

Note the prompt provided to the user in figure 3.  It tells you:

  • That the sysop is available
  • That the user has not paged the sysop
  • The double colons (::) normally would display time left on the system.  Since this was a dial-up system, I needed to limit the time users could spend on the BBS.  But as sysop, I of course had unlimited time.
  • The BBS had different areas and the prompt (like an IOS prompt) tells you where you are (“Main level”)

Next, in figure 4 you can see the main menu options for a user logged into the BBS.  This is the default/stock GBBS menu, as my original is lost.  Despite the limited options, this was like entering a new world in the days of 64K RAM.  You can see that a user could send/read mail, go to a file transfer section, chat (or attempt to chat) with the system operator, or read the public message boards.

Figure 4: The BBS main menu. This is the GBBS default, not the custom menu I built

Next, the user list.  I had 150 users on my BBS, not all of them active.  I blacked out the last names and phone numbers, but you can get a sense of the handles that were used at the time.  In addition to these names, there were a lot of Frodo’s and Gandalf’s floating around.  Also note that most BBSing was local (to avoid long-distance charges.)  Sadly, none of these users has logged on since 1989.  I wish they’d come back.  Oggman, whom I mentioned in my last post, was a user on my board.

Figure 5: My user list

Conclusions

I recently interviewed a recent college grad who asked me how she could be successful at a company like Cisco.  My answer was that you have to understand where we came from in order to understand where we are.  You cannot understand, say, SD-WAN without understanding how we used to build WANs.  Go back to the beginning.  Learn what SneakerNet was.  Understand why we are where we are.  Even before SneakerNet, some of us were figuring out how to get computers to talk to each other over an already existing network–the analog telephone network.  As a side note, I love vintage computing.  It’s a lot of fun using emulators to resurrect the past, and I hope to do some physical restorations some day.  Trying to figure out how to boot up a long-defunct system like this BBS provides a great reminder of how easy we have it now.

Before the Internet: The Bulletin Board System

Posted by ccie14023 on August 15, 2019
Posted in: NetStalgia. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . 1 comment

It’s inevitable, as we get older, that we look back on the past with a certain nostalgia.  That said, I think that computing in the era when I was growing up, the 1980’s, was more fun and interesting than it is now.  Personal computers were starting to become common, but were not omnipresent as they are now.  They were quite mysterious boxes.  An error might throw you into a screen that started displaying hexadecimal with no apparent meaning.  Each piece of software had its own interface which you had to learn, since there were really no set standards.  For some, there might be a menu-driven interface.  For others there might be control keys you used to navigate.  Some programs required text commands.  Even working with devices that had only 64 Kilobytes of memory, there was always a sense of adventure.

I got my start in network engineering in high school, in fact.  Computer networks as we understand them today didn’t really exist back then, in the 1980’s, except in some universities and the Defense Department.  Still, we found ways to connect computers together and get them to communicate,  the most common of which was the Bulletin Board System, or BBS.

The BBS was an individual computer equipped with a modem, into which other computer users could dial.  For those who aren’t familiar with the concept of a modem, this was a device that enabled computer data to be sent over analog telephone land lines.  (I hope I don’t have to explain what a land line is, but I’m even finding today that young people aren’t familiar with the concept! I had to drive to a local restaurant when their phones weren’t working to order some food, and when I explained to the teenage hostess that I was getting a busy signal, I got a blank stare in return.  I don’t think she knew what a busy signal is.)  Virtually all BBS’s had a single phone line and modem connecting to a single computer.  The host computer ran special BBS software which received connections from anyone who might dial into it.  It then had a set of functions users could execute, such as sending email, posting messages on public message boards, text-based video games, and file transfers/downloads.  (Keep in mind, the BBS was text-only, with no graphics, so you were limited in terms of what you could do.)  An individual operator of a BBS was called a System Operator or Sysop (“sis-op”).  The sysop was the master of his domain, and occasionally a petty tyrant.  He could decide who was allowed to log into the board, what messages and files could be posted, and whether to boot a rude user.

Because a BBS had a single modem, dialing in was a pain.  That was especially true for popular BBS’s.  You would set your terminal software to dial the BBS phone number, and you would often get a busy signal because someone else was using the service.  Then you might set your software to auto re-dial the BBS until you heard the musical sound of a ring tone followed by modems chirping to each other.

How did you find the phone numbers for BBS’s in the era before Google?  You might get them from friends, but often you would find them posted as lists on other BBS’s.  When we first bought our modem for my Apple II+, we also bought a subscription to Compuserve, a public multi-user dial-in service.  On one of their message boards, I managed to find a list of BBS’s in the 415 area code, in which I resided.  Then, I dialed into each of them.  Some BBS on the list had shut down and I could hear someone saying “Hello??” through the modem speaker.  Others connected, I set up an account, and, after perusing the board, I would download a list of more BBS numbers and go on to try them.

Each sysop configured the board however seemed best, so the BBS’s tended to have a lot of variation.  The software I used, which was the most common among Apple II users, was called GBBS.  GBBS actually had its own proprietary programming language and compiler called ACOS, which allowed for heavy customization.  I re-wrote almost the entire stock bulletin board system in the years I ran mine.  It also allowed for easy exchange of modules.  I delegated a lot of the running of my board to volunteer co-sysops, and one of them wanted to run a fantasy football league.  He bought the software, I installed it, and we were good to go.  I had friends who ran BBS’s on other platforms that did not have GBBS, and their boards were far less customize-able.

Each user on a BBS had a handle, which was just a screen name.  I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that mine was “Mad MAn”.  I don’t really recall how I thought of the name, but you always wanted to sound cool, and to a 15 year old madman sounded cool.  This was in the era before school shootings, so it wasn’t particularly threatening.  I spelled it with two words because I didn’t know how to spell “madman”, and this was before every spelling mistake was underlines in red.  The second A was capitalized because I was a bad typist and couldn’t get my finger off the shift key fast enough.  Because the BBS population consisted largely of nerdy teenage boys, a lot of the handles came from Lord of the Rings and other fantasy and sci-fi works.  I can’t tell you how many Gandalf’s were floating around, but there were a lot.  I had a Strider for a co-sysop.  Others, like mine, attempted to sound tough.  I had another co-sysop whose handle was Nemesis.

Since each BBS was an island, if someone sent you an email on BBS1, you couldn’t see it on BBS2.  So, if you were active on five BBS’s, you had to log in to all five and check email separately.  At one point a sysop who went by the handle “Oggman” launched a system called OGG-Net.  (His BBS also had a cool name, “Infinity’s Edge”.)  Oggy’s BBS became a central repository for email, and subscribing boards would dial into it at night to exchange emails they had queued up.  This of course meant that it could take an entire day for email to propagate from one BBS to another, but it was better than before.

I’m writing this post in my “NetStalgia” series for a couple reasons.  First, it’s always important to look back in order to know where you are going.  Second, I’ve resurrected my old BBS using an Apple II emulator, and in my next post I’m going to share a few screen shots of what this thing actually looked like.  I hope you’ll enjoy them.

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