Comment by spdustin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spdustin | Hacker News Reader

I used to run a BBS in Florida (904 area code) on an Atari 800XL with two acoustically coupled 300 baud modems. I eventually found a pair of 1200 baud USRobotics modems at a garage sale (!) for $50 (!!), and started curating ANSI graphics and RIP menus and Atari demoscene (such as it was), along with all the code and scans I could find for Atari projects (like a WeFax decoder, my favorite).

Man, I was so addicted to Door programs like TradeWars.

I ended up going to a few (I guess you'd call them) meetups of other SysOps and learning all I could about FidoNet and NNTP gateways and so many things I think I'm starting to ramble out of pure nostalgia.

Those were the days; watching a roughly pixelated scan of a swimsuit model slowly paint on the screen while downloading at 300bps via ZMODEM.

Yep. Those were the days.

Especially when your BBS was running on your home phone lines, and your older brother needed to call his $%{*3H# NO CARRIER

My first paid programming gig was $20 for a piece of relcoatable machine code to calculate the XModem checksum in a USR$ call instead of in BASIC for the BBS operator who had just upgraded to a 1200 baud modem and found the transfers were only barely faster.

I remember thinking I was doing great in tradewars

Then overnight I got my ass kicked, handed to me, and my hold was filled with money (or whatever it was). Happened to a lot of people -- someone who really did do well was clearly fed up with not having any real competition.

I was always a huge fan of Usurper. We played it enough that we eventually figured out a class combination that could kill even the strongest players. When we started actually doing it those guys lost their minds. You’d never guess how much being the big dog in those games meant to people.

If you ever get a chance to play it, the Troll Alchemist is basically cheating. :)

One of the first computers I heavily used were the Atari 520/1040 ST's.

Tradewars was right up there with titles like Usurper.

I used to log into Datalink BBS in 1994 in the 904 area code. Were you the sysop of that by chance?

> Man, I was so addicted to Door programs like TradeWars.

I still dream about re-making SRE/BRE.

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