An old photo of a large BBS
rachelbythebay.com
rachelbythebay.com
Apparently they ran PCBoard [1] for their BBS software. I know a fair amount about BBS software, and had no idea PCBoard could support this many nodes.
Typically high node count boards of this time ran MajorBBS [2] instead, since it did its own multi-tasking and allowed you to have a crazy number of nodes / modems on a single PC! However, that also meant it couldn't run typical DOS door games, instead opting for its own plugin/game SDK.
It was great to have a local node too on the computer so the SysOp could log in at the same time as users. That was a great use case even if you didn't have multiple phone lines.
OS/2 took over DESQview's role pretty quickly, after version 2.0 came out. Porting BBS software was easy and many did it. The was even FOSSIL drivers available (a better performing serial driver than what the BIOS provided).
OS/2 never became very popular in the BBS scene in my area, at least by the time I got into the scene (~1993). My impression is that it had mixed success in the BBS world as a whole. For one data point, I do know the author of Synchronet invested a lot of time into a native OS/2 port and then his company promptly went bankrupt!
Later in the 90s, BBS software started to be ported natively to Win32, including some commercial options: Wildcat WINServer, MajorBBS WorldGroup v3, etc.
Actually, your point likely explains why the BBS in the OP was set up the way it was: Software Creations BBS was a major shareware file distribution hub, so a much greater focus on file transfers.
There was also the trick of making every call a local call (when British Telecom still used the old crossbar systems rather than the newer switching networks) if you knew how to dial all the single digit area codes between you and the number you wanted to call. Pentyrch (the town) to Penarth (the town) was not a local call, at a distance of about 20 miles, but you could dial 5 for Radyr (about 2 miles), pause, then dial 3 for Fairwater (another 2+ miles), and so forth, until you reached the local exchange in Penarth, and then could send the actual phone number. Unfortunately each area, to dial another exchange, had different numbers, so Pentyrch to Radyr might be 5, but Taffs Well to Radyr might be 9. People on BBS's would exchange area code lists and exchange routing lists like they were precious commodities.
Dialing through to London over a great distance using single digit exchange codes wasn't possible though, because London had a more modern telephone system, and you were limited by the number of digits you could send before the first exchange system would timeout and drop your call.
>up to five A2232 can be installed into one machine giving a total of 36 serial ports
and for example http://www.nikom.org enabling multi node on single machine
also found this https://www.reddit.com/r/bbs/comments/qeke4a/folks_who_ran_l...
The difference I'm discussing is between BBS software that required a multi-tasking OS (such as DESQView, OS/2, or yes AmigaOS) to achieve multi-node, and those that did not.
Nearly all BBS software is in the first category. "Multi-node" support just meant the BBS software only knew about file sharing/locking, and how to yield the processor when idle. That's about it. Multi-node with N nodes meant running N copies of the BBS software process. Due to RAM limitations, that often meant you could only get a few nodes per PC.
MajorBBS/WorldGroup was in the second category. It implemented its own multi-tasking / event loop, and ran in a single process. It could support a huge number of nodes despite running on DOS, which of course is not a multi-tasking OS.
I learned about programming DOS comms, interrupts, TSRs, etc as a young teenager by writing a shareware door support library for PCBoard and QuickBBS in Turbo Pascal called TriDoor. It was only mildly successful as shareware (I think I made a total of about $300) but it taught me a lot and I made a bunch of friends along the way. I later embarked on writing a MUD like BBS package, but went off to college before it was finished. As soon as I had access to the net, the BBS got way less interesting for me.
My games were also multi-user, the most popular being a MUD that eventually ran on a few hundred boards. Developing a MUD that could run as a DOS-based BBS door game was pretty challenging, since each user had their own copy of the exe running (due to how doors inherently worked), but DOS didn't provide IPC primitives.
So I shunted all real gameplay processing to a single one of those processes (whoever entered the game first) and the others just communicated with that one via shared append-only files. If that player exited the game, there would be a brief pause while the next lowest node number took over gameplay processing. I don't remember what happened if that next-lowest-node player also left at the exact same time, but probably the game froze/crashed, lol.
I later ported my engine to Win32 using a more sane architecture (multi-threaded background process using real win32 IPC to communicate with the door processes), but like you I rapidly lost interest in the BBS world before doing much with it.
Each BBS had its unique ANSI. A room for files, another for XXX content, one for messages to other members. Some felt lively and bustling. Others felt like walking into a quiet dark cave. You never really knew what you might find.
My dad ran a small Wildcat BBS in the late '80s. I still have all of his files. Probably a couple hundred megs in total. Not sure how he picked that software. He had every BBS software you could imagine. He had a friend at the time that he would trade floppies with. One day his friend brought over a copy of Leisure Suit Larry. I was really intrigued by a game that I had to leave the room when they played. Everything was a bit seedy back then. You ever seen CGA porn that runs from a .COM executable you downloaded on a BBS? It might be porn. It might also destroy your entire computer. 1980s equivalent of a risky click.
Now, a single click and you're watching a real donkey show streaming in 4k for free.
I am genuinely worried/curious how society and children coming of age now are going to develop when they have access to such dramatically different and stronger pornography. I could see it going both ways, like marijuana legalization, it becomes less cool so less kids get into it. But reproduction is such a low-level, fundamental driving force in all life (esp humans), that it probably can't be simply not viewed by especially horny male teenagers.
There were good places and bad places, same as now. I recall a post where an acquaintance of mine was angry at his teacher and was pondering whether, hypothetically speaking, it would be better to rape her and then kill her, or first kill her and then rape her. And there was always drama, people getting banned from BBSes or signing up with a name designed to look like somebody else's, etc.
I believe those are IBM 386 computers on the right based on the front of the machine, the megahertz display and the turbo button. The ones on the left are most likely 8086 machines. IBM brand I believe based on the front and the case design.
Several PC based BBS machines supported multiline operation without the need for mulitasking, though as modems got faster, supporting 16 modems on a single machine became impossible, and it was often cheaper to buy a new commodity desktop PC rather than a much more expensive machine with a 16-port serial card capable of handling the IO.
The machines might have been running a "DOS" flavour, but for the most part, the BBS software was the entire machine. Boot from DOS, but then what we consider DOS is effectively removed from RAM and the BBS software takes over.
The 386's might have been using DESQView or equivalent, and running a single line BBS as two separate instances on the same machine.
The machine would not boot either from network or harddrive. Network boot was mostly unreliable and a bad node on a token ring network would easily disable your entire ring. Internal harddrives would have been costly, power hungry and unreliable. I can almost certainly guarantee they booted entirely from floppy disks. There was no doubt a token ring network that kept them all communicating. A token ring could be wired to tolerate failure, but it drove the cost up.
Those are Miracom Courier modems on top on some machines, a mixture of 9600 and 14.4, and Hayes Smartmodems, on others, 2400 on the black & silver, 9600 on the all blacks. Almost certainly there are no 56k modems in that picture. And they would have almost certainly be plugged in to a dual port serial card that supports dual 16550 UARTs because the 16550 could handle up to 119kbps (118,500) IIRC (typing from memory, feel free to google it), and they had a 16-byte FIFO buffer so the CPU didn't need to poll or IRQ for data quite so often. Therefore they could support 56Kbps on two lines, though at that point, it would have probably be pegging the CPU with two users transferring files using a non-compressing XModem or ZModem.
Also, all the drives have been upgraded from five-and-a-quarter to three-and-a-half.
Also, supporting more than one modem at a time is literally the definition of multitasking. You can't do it without multitasking. Are you talking about not needing a multitasking OS, because the software does its own multitasking?
"I know for a fact" - why so accusatory? No, I'm saying those particular machines were sold with 5.25" drives and then upgraded to 3.5" because none of the plastic matches.
"supporting more than one modem at a time is literally the definition of multitasking" - no, it isn't. You might as well claim that a single threaded application that can respond to the UI and also do processing in the background is multitasking when it clearly isn't.
"You can't do it without multitasking" - yes, you can. There is a vast difference between a multitasking OS or multithreaded program and simply polling a couple of devices or getting IRQ'd. Now this I know, "for a fact" and we can argue about that until the cows come home, but frankly, I have more productive things to be doing.
"Sounds like overconfident and incorrect speculation" Take five minutes and just chill. There was an awful lot of speculation in my post, and I was very clear to say "I believe" an awful lot, based on a grainy image, and a hazy memory of wrangling those kinds of BBS setups but apparently reading comprehension isn't your strong suit. This isn't reddit, you don't need to go full bore attack because someone said something on the internet you think might be wrong.
And I am going to take back my "56k in one direction" statement and say: I think we capped out at around 33k on the analogue to analogue connections even though they "supported" 56k so I am probably quoting our crappy marketing rather than our physical capability.
A 56k modem at a bbs would just work at 33.6k
This one looks to be set up much more professionally.
There were about 100 analog modems on metal shelving racks, each with its own phone line, serial cable, and power cable. These were regular, consumer-style modems. There was no power management, so we had power strips connected two or three layers deep. There was also no air conditioning, and it could be hot-as-hell in the summer. Some of the modem cases were warped, slightly melted and discolored due to the heat. Nothing special was done wth the phone lines, so there was also a river of RJ-11 cables coming out of the wall. It was a hazard to even go behind one of the racks, since both the power and phone line situation were incredibly chaotic.
And we didn't know any better:)
It was fun though. Met a lot of people who were at least equally weird as myself.
So then, when you see this picture (and remember, it might only be showing
half of the whole setup), do you think "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all
of that", or do you think "OMG they *had* to wrangle all of that"? It's an
important distinction to make, and I think someone's gut reaction to this
amount of hardware in one place might influence how they approach building
new systems.
Old gear is less efficient but today's computers have so much more computational power that we use a lot more power today per machine.
EDIT- a bit here on how one system did it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Major_BBS
Basically everything happened in a polling loop.
TBBS[1] is the only other DOS BBS software I'm aware of that natively handled multi-line.
Source: Former MBBS operator and briefly was a Galacticomm employee around '96.
I posted this on my Facebook when MBBSEmu came up here a few months back:
---
How'd I never hear of this before? My first "real" job was with Galacticomm and their software is probably most directly responsible for me becoming the computer geek I am today.
Story time: I ran a Major BBS in high school. My longest-time friends ought to remember 'cause it's probably the biggest catalyst for us becoming lifelong friends. My dad financed it with dreams of making Rusty-N-Edie money but I don't think it ever paid its own phone bill.
Pops saw in the paper that Galacticomm was going to make a big announcement at a local business conference. Maybe it was MBBS 6.25, or the first showing of Worldgroup, I don't recall exactly. But the key part is that I was under 18 and not welcome to attend said conference.
I was displeased. I let Galacticomm know of my displeasure.
And... Scott Brinker reached out personally to invite me to their offices for a demo. By him. Maybe Tim Stryker was also in the room, I don't remember it all. But Scott, a very young CEO or President at the time, took the time out of his life to make sure this younger, perhaps a bit entitled, fellow geek with a similar geeky backstory was not excluded.
It's such a little thing, but for me, it really mattered. Galacticomm and their people have always had an outsized place in my heart.
And now I'm crying 'cause I wish I could talk to my dad.
The GSBL was a significant achievement. OUTBSZ to 16384 and let it rip.
(It's funny how some things stick in your mind. OUTBSZ, uacoff, FNENN439L...)