MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Re: What if you had to use dialup BBSes today.

One of my favorite boards was in Columbus, OH known as the "Dead Leeeeeeeech Society BBS & Mortuary" (where a good leeeeeeeech is a Dead Leeeeeeeech). It was a very warped board running WildCat! and was the home for various utilities for that specific BBS software (the sysop/author really hated how the existing WC! utils for WCDISP to ANSI weren't very good so he rolled his own).

The running joke was that there were no ratios so anyone was free to download anything and everything, hence the leech reference. As for the "dead" part he kept a small archive of login screens from dead BBSes. The sysop was also a Howard Stern fan, RHPS and horror movie buff and was really into candelabras. Another of his gripes was that not all term software could handle ASCII 127 to display the candles' flames properly so he had to change to another character. He even made a fabric flag with the candelabra logo with the proper flames.

As serious as it ass appear to sound it had some serious humor that pokes fun at a lot of BBS standards. On his local forums the occasional "Five Word Message Thread" would break out without warning and those would last for weeks until they died out or started elsewhere. It got to the point that top posters would rank past 100,000 in total messages sent due to those threads. So it wasn't unusual for hacks to be done to the ranking software to allow for the extra sixth digit. Earlier the reporting software had to be hacked just to overcome the 16-bit integer limitation. ;-)

Fro networked forums the sysop really didn't like FidoNet. But he did have feeds to WildNet! and other small networked conferences. With a decent QWK reader I was able to browse my favorite conferences offline and it would only take me a few seconds to exchange QWK/REP packets (the sysop prebundled my QWK's for no-wait downloads).

It was one of my favorite BBS. Geeky, not very serious and fun! The sysop had a LOT of doorgames set up but the only one I played now and then was "Netrunner" (I was into cyberpunk stuff back then). It was that place that got me into ANSI and coding. And sometimes I wonder if the sysop is still alive.

I may have to do a bit of research and give him a call. :-)

I was also on a bunch of WWIV BBSes which were quite fun as well. I was even a part of the underground before the Internet got commercialized and was opened up to the public. It reached that point that I even had my favorite file transmission protocol (Ymodem/G at 33.6kbaud) and term client (Telemate). I wasn't much of a leech but was more of a contributor, uploading more than I leeched.

Fun times. Then I moved back from Columbus, Ohio to Western Pennsylvania and realized that the Pittsburgh BBS scene didn't match up with the midwest. So I kept in touch with my faraway friends. As least until the Internet caught my attention.

There's more but I'll leave it at that. :-)

--Bekki

Combating functional illiteracy with latex-clad drama since the '80s, because old video games rule!