@RedOak VMWare is awesome. It’s a good way to keep all your virtual machines isolated. You can test software that could render your machine useless. If you use VMWare and it does that, you can simply revert back to a previous snapshot.
It’s another way to have multiple operating systems on one machine. I use it on my Mac and have OSX, Windows XP, and Windows 8 running.
It’s funny that sometimes a person would create a “hack” for a program on the Mac but it is an exe file that requires you to run it on a PC. Weird but you can do that by using VMWare.
VMWare allows me to write to an NTFS partition without having to purchase a license to Paragon’s NTFS tools on the OSX side.
I ran a BBS back in the 80’s and 90’s and wanted to go back to see it running again for nostalgia reasons after watching a documentary on BBS’s. I needed to install Windows 3.11 but didn’t want to format the hard drive on a real computer so I used VMWare to do it.
@f00l I did have doors/games and people did use them but not as much as the message boards and the file section. I had a massive file area. My first 1 TB drive cost me $2,600 and I had two of them in a file server running Novel Netware. I had 3 phone lines for BBS use plus the 3 nodes in the house for a total of 6 BBS nodes. I also had 2 voice lines so you can imagine my monthly phone bill was high. That was the reason I had to discontinue it as it was just a hobby that didn’t earn me any income but did cost a lot to maintain.
Here’s a listing of my Doors directory. I cannot remember what all of them did or how to play them.
I had message boards but didn’t encountage their use. And no one used them.
I had v limited hours. The line was used for something else during the Day. .
There were great BBS’s around for social and games and stuff. One of my friends had 7 lines going into his house when he was a teenager. The neighbors would have thought he was a drug dealer had they not known him.
He was way way into B/W big format photography, Christianity, and tech. His BBS stayed busy.
Mine was just file req’s from all over the world, back when the govt was trying to get at Phil Zimmerman.
@f00l I couldn’t have a BBS with limited hours. People don’t pay attention to the hours and would all all day and all night. My system was usually engaged 24 hours a day for each line. I had to limit people’s time to 60 minutes per user and prevented people from creating multiple identities by having an authentication system that called them back for validation.
Some of my favorite users were allowed to use a time bank to deposit unused time that they could use another day. The #1 complaint I had was that people were unable to sign in because the line was busy all the time.
@cengland0
You had a great one then. A good BBS was a lotta fun.
Mine was never publicized. People didn’t know it existed. The filelist was pushed out. That’s where all the action was.
I think no one ever called it as just a user, except a few sysops for testing. There must have been some way to prevent that. I don’t remember now exactly the details.
I made a point to set it up so that the files were visible, but that users doing file req’s couldn’t see the BBS was there. Again, I forget how we managed it, but it worked.
I used the echos all the time, just like the Meh forums now, for conversations with other sysops. I didn’t have time for the non-sysop threads. I got some really good friends from those days who are still part of my life.
Also interacted a tiny bit with some notorious sysops: a few disturbing folk, both of whom wound up in huge (serious criminal) legal trouble. One of them got a long sentence, tho not for anything involving his BBS activity. The other, IDK what eventually happened, but he for sure attracted exactly the wrong kind of attention from law enforcement at a serious level.
The local sysops were mostly a really great bunch. We hung out a fair amt and did a few stupid fun things together. I lost track of some I still miss.
There were a few great local BBS’s who were kinda like yours writ somewhat larger. I think there was a tight time limit on non-subscribers. If you wanted more time, you paid a little. It wasn’t bad. They only tried to cover expenses, not time.
In the days before VOIP you could really spend $ on phone lines.
@f00l You might be interested in the documentary that I watched then. Here’s part 1 of 8:
When you watch that one, there is a link to part 2 and then 3, etc. It brought back some memories and that’s why I wanted to get my BBS back up and running to see my own configuration.
The prob with BBSs was that they couldn’t compete with the internet.
The great strength - to me - was they were normally small enough to have a shot at a real community.
I had accounts at various times during the 80’s or early 90’s with AOL (never bothered with it much), Compuserve (liked it a bit better, for getting info), and The Well (kinda loved it, but just read, never posted there).
And I had a shell account at Netcom that I was on all night (got cheap data-only LD from Sprint at night).
It was the Well and Netcom, complete w Usenet, that felt to me like a Brave New World, so to speak. A bit like Vernor Vinge’s True Names. Like I had stepped into some new and barely knowable universe.
The social stuff on AOL kinda turned me off and on Compuserve the social side never grabbed me.
The conversations on The Well were fascinating. But I was going thru a dark personal time and would only read, not speak. Same for Usenet. And Usenet had so much damned noise.
I knew BBS’s were there, but didn’t mess w them. Then I started messing w BBS’s locally, late at night, in the year after someone died and I couldn’t sleep. Someone mentioned one, I tried it, found it interesting. Tried a few more. On one I found a lifelong friend, tho at the time he was a brilliant mess. He wanted a BBS, that sounded fun, so we grabbed the hardware and did a file-only Fido thing. I joined the sysop echos to keep up to speed, and found a bunch more friends.
And then came Netscape and http and primitive tcp browsing connections. I remember the first time I saw Netscape, we put it on OS/2 And wow.
Now that was a Brave New World. With all the wonder and all the irony.
And it killed the BBS world. Mine had little point anymore except for the sysop echos I used, anyone could get PGP off the web.
People bought ISP accounts and stopped messing with teeny little BBSs. Sysop tried putting their BBSs on the net, but no one bothered with them. The BBSs came down. People vanished.
And for a little while, the net, accessible to the world, looked like it would be something possibly pure and good and clean and full of a kind of utopian grace.
Well, we know how that turned out.
BBSs were a tiny, but beautiful phase or interlude in the digital world.
Perhaps kinda like the Pony Express. They were works, mostly, of love and passion.
@f00l There wasn’t any competition with my BBS and the Internet because I ran it way before “Al Gore Created the Internet”
I did simultaneously use the non-Al Gore version of the internet while running my BBS – I mostly use IRC and Usenet. Today, I still use Usenet as a primary source of binaries. Usenet was intended for messages only but we circumvented that limitation by using uuencode and yenc to convert binary files to messages. Works great and is still a viable solution for acquiring binary data.
Since the file section was the major reason for my BBS – a way to receive and share files, I figured IRC file sharing was a better source (although the channel names were changing daily which made it hard to keep up with and the moderators would drop users if they were only leeching). Usenet was also great and the channels remained the same throughout the years. I no longer needed my BBS and the help of my users so I discontinued the service. I did have to subscribe to a premium usenet provider because the local ISP filtered most of the channels that had binary data.
@dashcloud Yes I did consider that. In fact, I recently logged into someone else’s telenet BBS just to see how the new user experience was. Wouldn’t want to keep an entire PC running for it though but I wouldn’t mind using my Raspberry Pi 3 to do it but I’m not sure Renegade would port to it.
Before I discovered audible.com (a year or a few years after they got started?) it was impossible to find or afford unabridged audiobooks (which often ran $50-$80 per book!
So I got them off Usenet and IRC.
To be precise, my irc fanatic friend, king of the netsplits, got them off irc.
I didn’t and don’t like dealing a irc much.
At first it was a huge pain. Then we would up buying a Usemet only service from Internet America at some point. They carried everything.
For a while a local isp guy let us come in and grab stuff off the T1. Cause I did some stuff for him, and found his best ever employee for him.
(PS Robert Maynard, who I never met, is a perpetual asshole, in many local peoples’ opinion.)
Then audible.com came onto the scene and I went legal. I’ve since bought most of what I once grabbed for free. If I never bought it, that almost certainly means means I never listened to it. But it still bothers me some about the freebies.
I will not do that now, unless there are huge licensing rights probs and something can’t be purchased or legally acquired here. Even then I will purchase the cd’s or get the from the library. Unless there no way or something.
But back then the library didn’t have unabridged. IRC and Usenet were it, if you wanted unabridged.
Oh yeah, we got lots of other binaries too. Till I started feeling way too sleazy.
Some of that stuff is still hanging around on old slow hard drives somewhere I guess. Most of it was never used. It was just “it’s available, grab it.”
@f00l I used frontdoor too but I thought that was to determine if it was a user calling or I was receiving fidonet updates. It was a piece of software running that would drop control to either the BBS or the fideonet connector. It also took the BBS offline after midnight and the last caller dropped to do daily maintenance such as compiling stat pages (top callers, top message posters, top downloaders, etc).
@cengland0
I’ve really forgotten the details. I know Binkley was a PITA to set up. And then it worked flawlessly.
I think my actual BBS interface received fewer than 10 calls, and those were all test calls I asked other sysops to make.
The other phone calls were EchoMail and file reqs.
My logs showed calls from all over the world. That was the PGP.
So I was the opposite of the kid with the 6-7 phones lines to his bedroom (I got to know him about 25 years ago. he’s now in his 40s and still a great friend.)
3 of my very best friends in the universe - so close that we routinely tell each other “you are being an ass” or “you are being really stupid” about some specific issue or other - were fellow sysops. I met the first one while I was still just a user, he and I setup the BBS together.
We’ve now known each other for more than 20 years.
There was a great degree of trust and cooperation that went along with running on of these things. And also a lot of trust that developed within the local communities of people who posted in forums.
I really miss that part of it. I really miss some of the people I’ve lost track of.
I consider “meeting thru a BBS” to be a far far more solid opening to good possibilities than “meeting they the Internet”. On the internet, it’s just to easy to be a sleaze and not show it. Or to play at relationships and not ever let it go anywhere.
It heartens me to hear that you met that way, since you’ve made something great out of it.
@f00l meh…but if I complain it makes me feel worse thank you for asking…
One of my first dates with my husband was a “howling at the moon” sledding party with a local bbs group at our friendly sysop’s house…
We still have friends from those days…it was cute when one of the young sysops came bowling with a group of us…my husband broke the guy’s heart when he told the guy I was already taken. I saw that they were friends on facebook the other day…
Hubby had dated my cousin when they were in college…so he recognized my last name and introduced himself…not sure our paths would have crossed again without bbs… I think I would have a completely different career too…hmmm
@dashcloud Thanks for the link to the BBS documentary series to purchase. I already watched it so I don’t need to watch it again. I could probably have created my own documentary with information they didn’t even mention. Although, I have to admit, they went back into the 70’s I think and I didn’t have a computer back then.
I hope the people at in-person VMUGs are better than the folks I met when I attended the online VMWare Days- the kinds of questions that got asked in some of the sessions makes me scared that those folks are running the infrastructure somewhere.
With an enticement like that I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
@RedOak VMWare is awesome. It’s a good way to keep all your virtual machines isolated. You can test software that could render your machine useless. If you use VMWare and it does that, you can simply revert back to a previous snapshot.
It’s another way to have multiple operating systems on one machine. I use it on my Mac and have OSX, Windows XP, and Windows 8 running.
It’s funny that sometimes a person would create a “hack” for a program on the Mac but it is an exe file that requires you to run it on a PC. Weird but you can do that by using VMWare.
VMWare allows me to write to an NTFS partition without having to purchase a license to Paragon’s NTFS tools on the OSX side.
I ran a BBS back in the 80’s and 90’s and wanted to go back to see it running again for nostalgia reasons after watching a documentary on BBS’s. I needed to install Windows 3.11 but didn’t want to format the hard drive on a real computer so I used VMWare to do it.
@cengland0 yes, I understand VMware is nice.
But “exciting”? It has been around for years.
@cengland0
Fido?
@f00l Renegade. It was a rewrite of Telegard so I felt it was better. Very few sysops ran Renegade. I was part of Fidonet though.
@RedOak some parts are.
@cengland0
I ran Fido. I had a dial-in setup with games and stuff, but no one ever used that. I was mostly a file source.
Spreading the evil of PGP across as the universe …
@f00l I did have doors/games and people did use them but not as much as the message boards and the file section. I had a massive file area. My first 1 TB drive cost me $2,600 and I had two of them in a file server running Novel Netware. I had 3 phone lines for BBS use plus the 3 nodes in the house for a total of 6 BBS nodes. I also had 2 voice lines so you can imagine my monthly phone bill was high. That was the reason I had to discontinue it as it was just a hobby that didn’t earn me any income but did cost a lot to maintain.
Here’s a listing of my Doors directory. I cannot remember what all of them did or how to play them.
@cengland0
I had message boards but didn’t encountage their use. And no one used them.
I had v limited hours. The line was used for something else during the Day. .
There were great BBS’s around for social and games and stuff. One of my friends had 7 lines going into his house when he was a teenager. The neighbors would have thought he was a drug dealer had they not known him.
He was way way into B/W big format photography, Christianity, and tech. His BBS stayed busy.
Mine was just file req’s from all over the world, back when the govt was trying to get at Phil Zimmerman.
@f00l I couldn’t have a BBS with limited hours. People don’t pay attention to the hours and would all all day and all night. My system was usually engaged 24 hours a day for each line. I had to limit people’s time to 60 minutes per user and prevented people from creating multiple identities by having an authentication system that called them back for validation.
Some of my favorite users were allowed to use a time bank to deposit unused time that they could use another day. The #1 complaint I had was that people were unable to sign in because the line was busy all the time.
@cengland0
You had a great one then. A good BBS was a lotta fun.
Mine was never publicized. People didn’t know it existed. The filelist was pushed out. That’s where all the action was.
I think no one ever called it as just a user, except a few sysops for testing. There must have been some way to prevent that. I don’t remember now exactly the details.
I made a point to set it up so that the files were visible, but that users doing file req’s couldn’t see the BBS was there. Again, I forget how we managed it, but it worked.
I used the echos all the time, just like the Meh forums now, for conversations with other sysops. I didn’t have time for the non-sysop threads. I got some really good friends from those days who are still part of my life.
Also interacted a tiny bit with some notorious sysops: a few disturbing folk, both of whom wound up in huge (serious criminal) legal trouble. One of them got a long sentence, tho not for anything involving his BBS activity. The other, IDK what eventually happened, but he for sure attracted exactly the wrong kind of attention from law enforcement at a serious level.
The local sysops were mostly a really great bunch. We hung out a fair amt and did a few stupid fun things together. I lost track of some I still miss.
There were a few great local BBS’s who were kinda like yours writ somewhat larger. I think there was a tight time limit on non-subscribers. If you wanted more time, you paid a little. It wasn’t bad. They only tried to cover expenses, not time.
In the days before VOIP you could really spend $ on phone lines.
@f00l You might be interested in the documentary that I watched then. Here’s part 1 of 8:
When you watch that one, there is a link to part 2 and then 3, etc. It brought back some memories and that’s why I wanted to get my BBS back up and running to see my own configuration.
@cengland0
The prob with BBSs was that they couldn’t compete with the internet.
The great strength - to me - was they were normally small enough to have a shot at a real community.
I had accounts at various times during the 80’s or early 90’s with AOL (never bothered with it much), Compuserve (liked it a bit better, for getting info), and The Well (kinda loved it, but just read, never posted there).
And I had a shell account at Netcom that I was on all night (got cheap data-only LD from Sprint at night).
It was the Well and Netcom, complete w Usenet, that felt to me like a Brave New World, so to speak. A bit like Vernor Vinge’s True Names. Like I had stepped into some new and barely knowable universe.
The social stuff on AOL kinda turned me off and on Compuserve the social side never grabbed me.
The conversations on The Well were fascinating. But I was going thru a dark personal time and would only read, not speak. Same for Usenet. And Usenet had so much damned noise.
I knew BBS’s were there, but didn’t mess w them. Then I started messing w BBS’s locally, late at night, in the year after someone died and I couldn’t sleep. Someone mentioned one, I tried it, found it interesting. Tried a few more. On one I found a lifelong friend, tho at the time he was a brilliant mess. He wanted a BBS, that sounded fun, so we grabbed the hardware and did a file-only Fido thing. I joined the sysop echos to keep up to speed, and found a bunch more friends.
And then came Netscape and http and primitive tcp browsing connections. I remember the first time I saw Netscape, we put it on OS/2 And wow.
Now that was a Brave New World. With all the wonder and all the irony.
And it killed the BBS world. Mine had little point anymore except for the sysop echos I used, anyone could get PGP off the web.
People bought ISP accounts and stopped messing with teeny little BBSs. Sysop tried putting their BBSs on the net, but no one bothered with them. The BBSs came down. People vanished.
And for a little while, the net, accessible to the world, looked like it would be something possibly pure and good and clean and full of a kind of utopian grace.
Well, we know how that turned out.
BBSs were a tiny, but beautiful phase or interlude in the digital world.
Perhaps kinda like the Pony Express. They were works, mostly, of love and passion.
I miss the feeling, a bit.
@f00l There wasn’t any competition with my BBS and the Internet because I ran it way before “Al Gore Created the Internet”
I did simultaneously use the non-Al Gore version of the internet while running my BBS – I mostly use IRC and Usenet. Today, I still use Usenet as a primary source of binaries. Usenet was intended for messages only but we circumvented that limitation by using uuencode and yenc to convert binary files to messages. Works great and is still a viable solution for acquiring binary data.
Since the file section was the major reason for my BBS – a way to receive and share files, I figured IRC file sharing was a better source (although the channel names were changing daily which made it hard to keep up with and the moderators would drop users if they were only leeching). Usenet was also great and the channels remained the same throughout the years. I no longer needed my BBS and the help of my users so I discontinued the service. I did have to subscribe to a premium usenet provider because the local ISP filtered most of the channels that had binary data.
@cengland0 Have you considered running a Telnet BBS? There’s some around and you can run some of the same door games.
@dashcloud Yes I did consider that. In fact, I recently logged into someone else’s telenet BBS just to see how the new user experience was. Wouldn’t want to keep an entire PC running for it though but I wouldn’t mind using my Raspberry Pi 3 to do it but I’m not sure Renegade would port to it.
@cengland0
I got lots of binaries off Usenet.
Before I discovered audible.com (a year or a few years after they got started?) it was impossible to find or afford unabridged audiobooks (which often ran $50-$80 per book!
So I got them off Usenet and IRC.
To be precise, my irc fanatic friend, king of the netsplits, got them off irc.
I didn’t and don’t like dealing a irc much.
At first it was a huge pain. Then we would up buying a Usemet only service from Internet America at some point. They carried everything.
For a while a local isp guy let us come in and grab stuff off the T1. Cause I did some stuff for him, and found his best ever employee for him.
(PS Robert Maynard, who I never met, is a perpetual asshole, in many local peoples’ opinion.)
Then audible.com came onto the scene and I went legal. I’ve since bought most of what I once grabbed for free. If I never bought it, that almost certainly means means I never listened to it. But it still bothers me some about the freebies.
I will not do that now, unless there are huge licensing rights probs and something can’t be purchased or legally acquired here. Even then I will purchase the cd’s or get the from the library. Unless there no way or something.
But back then the library didn’t have unabridged. IRC and Usenet were it, if you wanted unabridged.
Oh yeah, we got lots of other binaries too. Till I started feeling way too sleazy.
Some of that stuff is still hanging around on old slow hard drives somewhere I guess. Most of it was never used. It was just “it’s available, grab it.”
@cengland0
PS I used BinkleyTerm and Maximus if I remember. A bunch of local people used Frontdoor.
@f00l I used frontdoor too but I thought that was to determine if it was a user calling or I was receiving fidonet updates. It was a piece of software running that would drop control to either the BBS or the fideonet connector. It also took the BBS offline after midnight and the last caller dropped to do daily maintenance such as compiling stat pages (top callers, top message posters, top downloaders, etc).
@cengland0
I’ve really forgotten the details. I know Binkley was a PITA to set up. And then it worked flawlessly.
I think my actual BBS interface received fewer than 10 calls, and those were all test calls I asked other sysops to make.
The other phone calls were EchoMail and file reqs.
My logs showed calls from all over the world. That was the PGP.
So I was the opposite of the kid with the 6-7 phones lines to his bedroom (I got to know him about 25 years ago. he’s now in his 40s and still a great friend.)
@f00l heheh my honey and I met each other thru bbsing … 27 years later, he is still a great friend!
@mikibell
3 of my very best friends in the universe - so close that we routinely tell each other “you are being an ass” or “you are being really stupid” about some specific issue or other - were fellow sysops. I met the first one while I was still just a user, he and I setup the BBS together.
We’ve now known each other for more than 20 years.
There was a great degree of trust and cooperation that went along with running on of these things. And also a lot of trust that developed within the local communities of people who posted in forums.
I really miss that part of it. I really miss some of the people I’ve lost track of.
I consider “meeting thru a BBS” to be a far far more solid opening to good possibilities than “meeting they the Internet”. On the internet, it’s just to easy to be a sleaze and not show it. Or to play at relationships and not ever let it go anywhere.
It heartens me to hear that you met that way, since you’ve made something great out of it.
How are you feeling today?
@f00l meh…but if I complain it makes me feel worse
thank you for asking…
One of my first dates with my husband was a “howling at the moon” sledding party with a local bbs group at our friendly sysop’s house…
We still have friends from those days…it was cute when one of the young sysops came bowling with a group of us…my husband broke the guy’s heart when he told the guy I was already taken. I saw that they were friends on facebook the other day…
Hubby had dated my cousin when they were in college…so he recognized my last name and introduced himself…not sure our paths would have crossed again without bbs… I think I would have a completely different career too…hmmm
@cengland0 @f00l In case you really wanted to own the physical version of the BBS Documentary, the very last physical copies are for sale here: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/reserve/
@mikibell I also met a lot of people through my BBS but not Mrs cengland0. She doesn’t even own a computer
@dashcloud Thanks for the link to the BBS documentary series to purchase. I already watched it so I don’t need to watch it again. I could probably have created my own documentary with information they didn’t even mention. Although, I have to admit, they went back into the 70’s I think and I didn’t have a computer back then.
I hope the people at in-person VMUGs are better than the folks I met when I attended the online VMWare Days- the kinds of questions that got asked in some of the sessions makes me scared that those folks are running the infrastructure somewhere.
@dashcloud so far yes.