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Building A Community For Old BBSes?

posted by NCommander on Monday July 20 2015, @04:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the make-something-count dept.

Slartibartfast poses a question for the SoylentNews community:

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

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by sjames on Monday July 20 2015, @08:33PM

    by sjames (2882) on Monday July 20 2015, @08:33PM (#211560) Journal

    I've occasionally wondered (purely idly) what it would take to get FIDO up and running with TCP sessions emulating modem connections (including for batch transfers).

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  • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Monday July 20 2015, @09:56PM

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Monday July 20 2015, @09:56PM (#211609) Homepage Journal

    Fido supports "OtherNets", but Wikipedia suggests the original Fidonet is still alive and kicking. A brief Googling didn't show anything, but there's got to be at least a few nodes still around connected to each zone.

    --
    Still always moving

    • (Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday July 22 2015, @09:01PM

      by sjames (2882) on Wednesday July 22 2015, @09:01PM (#212477) Journal

      It took some digging, but I found this [telnetbbsguide.com].

      In between, I found a lot of dead links and even a webring full of dead and nearly dead links.