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I'm a member of the ISCA BBS; in days of yore, this stood for the [University of] Iowa Student Computer Association, though ties with its namesake were broken about a decade ago. In its heyday in the early 90's, the ISCA often had 1300+ simultaneous users online, and hundreds more queued to get on, only limited by the lowly T1 and the HP DOMAIN Unix system on which it ran.
In the years since, usage has dropped and at any given moment, there may be 10 or 20 concurrent users. As one might guess, the appeal of a text-based Citadel BBS doesn't have the same draw that it did 20+ years ago. Despite this, it's still very much a live (though dramatically diminished) system. I am sure that there are still those "out there" who no doubt would enjoy a trip to retroville, and an infusion of fresh blood would be fun for all.
So, I'm looking for suggestions on how to go out and get them? I'd be willing to throw some money at it if I thought the odds of success were reasonable.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Monday July 20 2015, @07:03PM
I was born in '88, so I wasn't around for the "golden age" of BBSes. My earliest computing experiences was via a shell account on a SGI IRIX box at my dad's work I could dial into called brenner. Pretty sure someone plugged it in ages ago and never removed it; I don't ever remember anyone showing up with 'who', though I occassionally chatted with the sysadmin via mail.
My parents eventually got AOL, and with it, and Windows 95, I was able to use winsock applications for the first time. Later we also got CompuServe due to actually needing to be able to do PPP from non-Windows machines (!go pppconnect for anyone who remembers), as I was using OS/2 Warp at the time. I'd played with FreeBSD but it wasn't until some time later I even experimented with Linux, and it was several years later I actually switched fulltime.
At that time, it was still possible to use the text interface on CIS to browse the forms. As such, most of my impressions of BBSes come from CompuServe, and not the general BBSes users here might be familiar with. I must be honest though, part of me is somewhat nogistic for the days of using Procomm Plus for DOS on a secondhand laptop (which could barely run Windows 3.1).
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @07:41PM
Alright, you are forgiven. However, you are an influential member of this site as well as elsewhere, and sometimes you make statements that can be perceived as fact by others, but may not be accurate (consider the dwarf guides--lots of well thought out ideas, but with some details that were not accurate.) Many people are happy to help or correct an issue, but the presentation is important--stating things as true when they are not can get one in trouble.
I wouldn't want you to have good ideas that get derailed by other people's facts!
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Monday July 20 2015, @08:06PM
I probably should change my signature to say "Can be wrong, corrections welcome" ... I did manage to figure out how to use the ISCA BBS after some trial and error, I was chatting in Babble> for awhile.
That being said, I'm slightly suprised since I can't imagine that many people frequent /r/dwarffortress or Bay12 and here to know that I wrote a military guide for DF :P. Looking at my last message, I also realized I wrote OS/2 Warp which isn't right. I used OS/2 2.1, installed from 29 floppy disks (and frequently needed to reinsert 23 of them whenever you changed system settings).
Still always moving