Ask YC: How many people here were regional BBS users back in the day?

I used a local BBS set up for Amiga users. Didn't really use it for communicating with others, mainly for file uploads/downloads... freeware games and what-not.

I remember being so excited to have access to "literally thousands of files!" Back then it was totally awesome. :-)

I was a BBS user, and also ran a multi-line TAG board (you probably wouldn't know TAG unless you were from Michigan) for a while. Was a FIDOnet node, and was active on the CyberCrime (I think that was the name of it) that some guy out of FL (I think) administered, plus a few other 'nets that I've long since forgotten.

During my short college stint in '91 I found one of the main patch panels for our campus and patched an unused line to my dorm room to run a small BBS out of the dorm for a while. The dorms were setup then so that 2 rooms shared 1 phone line (and 1 bathroom as well). My dorm room had the shared line, a dedicated line, and "access" to the phone lines of the room above us, as the inhabitants never seemed to be there on weekends and it was a waste to fight over phone usage when there was a free line just sitting there...

I'm not too young for that era (37) but I have never used a BBS. Didn't even know how to operate a computer before I got one in 1996...

I caught up pretty quickly though.

I wrote the code for moondog BBS (Santa Barbara, CA) - using all but about 10 bytes of memory on a Commodore 64 with a floppy drive. I invented a db system that made us look like a big IBM system. It was really great fun (coded it while in HS).

Yeah, I was on local Amiga BBS's in the 613 area code. Fun times.

I was on the Index BBS in Atlanta, as well as gobs of smaller ones. I was a L.O.R.D. addict, so I'd run out my turns on one BBS and then hop to the next.

I was totally into the BBS scene in high school. There were three run by friends within our local calling area, and I remember dialing & redialing each of the three, getting a busy signal, cursing my timing, and trying again.

I spent waaaaay too much time playing TradeWars back then...

I used BBSes in Columbus, OH and remember them... fairly vaguely. Not much of a user until the multi-user systems came along, with 8 or even 16 modems at a time, on multiple phone lines -- those were much more interesting.

I remember that in my freshman year of college one of the primary uses of my awesome 10Mbit fiberoptic dorm-room Ethernet connection was to telnet to an open machine at Ohio State that happened to have an outgoing modem that you could use to make local BBS phone calls in Columbus. No password required. Man, those were innocent times on the Internet.

I still find it painfully ironic that I had such great broadband connectivity in college, from 1989 to 1993, when HTTP hadn't been invented yet and all there was to do was FTP, Telnet, and eventually Gopher.

BBS The Firm FTW! 2af / LOD

;)

I ran a BBS in Brisbane, Australia which was fairly successful. Still shows up on some current Fidonet listings :) http://bbs.ricta.net/zone3ip/n640.html

Century 21 BBS. +54-9-11-4632-7070 I was sysop of on of the first Argentinean BBS. Nice times!

I ran one using Osiris XLT up until 1994 or so. I remember mowing lawns to save up for a ($200) 14.4 modem and to pay for my private line. :-)

Too young. My early scene was meeting up with the local kids to swap BASIC programs, pirated games, and 8-bit video game cartridges.

There were regional BBSes?

That’s funny. One of my favorite software ideas is to create means for local communication so that people can form actual human real-space relationships, including marriage and enduring friendship. Wait long enough and old things become new again.

I was on BBS's whenever I wasn't in high school in the early 90's. Met my first 2 girlfriends on there. 619 a/c - San Diego.

There were a bunch of bulletin boards that I used as a teenager in upstate/central NY. My favorite in terms of bulletin board software were the the ones using Citadel.

It was a BBS that first introduced me to the beauty of multiplayer FPS goodness as well as the infamous MUD, Legend of the Red Dragon. My friend and I used to play Doom on a local BBS using a program called MILK. Those were good days.

I started out with British Telecom's Prestel, moved on to a VAX-based BBS that all the kids in my town had accounts on, moved on to local Wildcat! BBSs and ended up on a telnet-based BBS (which has been around since before JANET supported TCP/IP) and I'm still there. I did meet my wife online, but not on a BBS (and not on news, and not on the web).

I used for a couple of years in Brazil.

Guilty, regional and national. Quite the little phreak.

Not too young for that. I actually used BBS software, sort of, to run a UUCP node at home and receive low-volume mailing list digests.

When I got started, there were BBS'es, but there was also a local internet "onramp", which was, I decided, way cooler than screwing around dialing into a bunch of BBS'es.

hell, they're still around! hehe, http://members.aol.com/sfritz2994/pdxbbs.htm

I used to run my own BBS back in early 90th based on OS/2 and Maximus, it had an 8-lines modem pool, it was a Fidonet node hence was loaded with tons of usenet news and Fido echos and no-one knew what TCP/IP was and that was tough! Oh, I love those old days... :~-[

There was a local paper called ComputerNews (it may still be around) that had multiple pages of BBS numbers listed. My brother and I would just keep trying each one until we got through and found a Legend of the Red Dragon game we could get in. Nothing was worse than being in the middle of the game when the connection time limit expired.