BBSs & PPP

From: Tothwolf <tothwolf_at_concentric.net>
Date: Sat Nov 2 19:40:00 2002

On Sat, 2 Nov 2002, Glen Goodwin wrote:

> In the days before 'net access was commonly available to ordinary folks
> like me, I used to spend a fair amount of time on BBSs, so I thought it
> might be fun to use my older machines to do some BBSing.
> Unfortunately, results from Google suggest that most BBSs are now only
> Telnet-accessible.
>
> Anyone know where to get a fairly current list of dial-up BBSs?

Here in Houston, there used to be a local BBS listing included in an
electronic publication called "Connect! Magazine", which was distributed
by a BBS called "Atomic Cafe". At one time, it contained 100s of active
BBS listings, and was redistributed by nearly all the other local BBS. The
listing was discontinued around 1998 or so, as there were very, very few
public BBS systems still in local operation. You should still be able to
find some FidoNet nodes that have dialup access, but there may not be any
in your immediate area. I wish I knew of an archive of those "Connect!
Magazine" publications, as space was tight back then, and I didn't think
to archive copies...

Most of the BBS systems that lasted past the commercialization of the
internet became telnet accessible, and eventually most phased out dialup
lines, since they cost much more to provide.

I've been playing with the idea of setting up my own BBS on a system, and
using a home-brew phone system simulator/PBX to handle dialing/switching.
I haven't yet found plans for one that exactly meets my needs though, so I
haven't done much past planning out the requirements and basic structure
planning. My ideal system would include both pulse and tone dialing (gotta
have pulse dial for those vintage modems...), and should be easy to
expand/interconnect with another identical system so I could expand it as
large as I'd ever need. I expect that somewhere between 32 and 64 "lines"
would be way more than enough for my current systems, but I also expect
the number of systems I own to increase over time.

> I'm also having a hell of a time trying to find an ISP which can provide
> a dial-up shell account (with POP3 email) which doesn't require PPP or
> SSH. I could code PPP drivers for a vintage micro (although it would
> suck up a lot of time), but I doubt that I could get both PPP and TCP/IP
> running on a system with 64 KB RAM or less.
>
> Anyone know where to find an ISP which provides plain old dial-up access
> from a micro running a terminal program?

This seems to be harder and harder to find. I choose my current ISP simply
because they offered a dialup accessible shell account, but in late 2000,
they discontinued the service, citing y2k bugs. IIRC, the server ran
Solaris, so I personally believe they just wanted to get rid of the
maintenance and overhead, and used "y2k issues" as a convenient excuse.

-Toth
Received on Sat Nov 02 2002 - 19:40:00 GMT