Absolutely wonderful article and find! I was a RBBS-PC guy myself, and ran a one-line bbs for a while on it, but it never got popular with anybody. I interrupted one guy looking around one time and brought him in to chat mode, and we ended up good friends; the whole reason I kept the bbs up was so he could beep me and call me into long chats a couple nights a week.
It was a IBM-PC or XT, with two Seagate half-height 20MB ST-225 hard disks laying to the side of each other in the two bays--don't stack them, they will fry each other even with added fans installed!
It made such a ozone smell in my bedroom I ran a dryer vent hose from the exhaust fan out my bedroom window.
That's about all I remember, but I do have a copy of the software if anybody needs it.
RBBS-PC. I used to call one of those sometimes -- but it was in the next town over, and in-state long-distance charges were more costly than calling across the country was. It was a nice board: Two lines, lots of software (IIRC 1.2 gigabytes), with 19.2k Telebit Trailblazers at a time when 9600 was still considered fast.
I was more into WWIV. It ran OK on the whitebox DTK Computer clone build from the very local computer shop that the guy was running in what had been the garage behind his house.
But the 16450 serial port UART in that 10MHz 8088 barely kept up with the 14.4k SupraFAXModem that came a bit later; keeping that stable was tricky.
I miss the grunts from the ST-225 at startup.
At one point someone donated an ST-419. That was a full-height disk that, when formatted MFM, held only 15 megabytes. But 35 total megabytes was a lot more than the 20 that the ST-225 offered.
It didn't fit inside of the desktop case at all so the lid was always off and things were just kind of stacked up, including the extra power supply that I used for staging power turn-on.
Because, you see: That ST-419 was so slow at spinning up and becoming usable that the controller would completely give up on it from a cold start. So I'd fire that up first, and give it a moment, and then power up the rest of the system.
Other fun hacks included a 2-megabyte EMS memory card. That thing had 72 socketed DIP chips on it and it did not arrive populated. Half of the memory served as a disk cache for Stacker and the other half as a RAM disk that got populated at every boot with some often-read, never-automatically-written BBS stuff that callers previously had to wait around for.
Anyway, I made a number of great friends back then with the BBS. I talked to one on of them on the phone just tonight, and a bunch of others of us still hang out together like we started doing 35 years ago.
Way back then, they named that first computer "The XT from Hell".
Somewhere around the age of 12, I got a 57.6 modem and my parents got a fax line. I realized that what I wanted was warez, specifically anything related to 3d modeling which I was obsessed with. All I had to trade was porn gifs I'd been downloading from other BBSs since I was about 9. The first board I ran was Hermes on a Mac IIsi. Local Los Angeles 213 area code, only after hours when I'd turn off my parents fax machine. The porn for warez trade was surprisingly effective, and I ended up with copies of Strata, Renderman, Playmation, Infini-D and actually a working copy of ElectricImage, which was a coup even though it was basically unusable.
I definitely feel the nostalgia here. I remember the first time I got a modem in the early '90s and dialed out to a few local BBSes as a teenager. I didn't quite know what they were or what they were for.
It was the most amazing experience to see this text and ASCII/ANSI art appear on my screen that was running off somebody else's computer. It's hard to describe the feeling I got when I realized I was connected to somebody else's computer somewhere within my city. It felt futuristic. At first I felt like I was being watched (possibly) by whoever owned the computer, seeing what I was doing on the system.
Also neat was I was using an IBM PC and some of the BBSes I connected to were using Apple computers or something else. It blew my young mind.
Eventually I ran my own BBS and made my own BBS door games that I made a little bit of money with. I released them as shareware and people would send checks in the mail to me to register the software.
I still have the data from my BBS that I could probably run in DOSBox to log into for old time's sake.
La Cueva!!! I was an assiduous Nopal BBS user, then sysopped Coyoacan BBS for a few years. All these being local, the community was very tight-knit, both among users and operators of these and other Mexico City BBS like laberinto, Tierras Extrañas and others. This was before internet access became ubiquitous and wiped all these BBSes out.
It's a rather weird combination of year, CPU and memory.
Z80 is (still) an 8-bit CPU with 16-bit addressing. It cannot access more than 64kiB at a time. The hardware and the software needed to overcome that limit was worth more than an 8088/8086 (or compatible CPU) with MS-DOS and Telix.
In 1993,the age of 80286 and 80386, 8088/8086 were considered low-low-end CPUs, let alone the Z80, even in Mexico.
I'm pretty sure I wrote Z280 checking yep, the Zilog Z280 can address 16 MB of memory. It has separated MMU mapping for code and data (64K + 64K mapped anywhere) ideal for operating systems, but if you never enter this mode, then you can access at the same time 64K at the lowest memory address using the normal instructions, 64K using LDUP, and 64K using LDUD. Of course, you can update the MMU registers as required to access other memory spaces, I used the 8K page size. Besides the CPU has a small cache, so it was faster by a magnitude than a Z80.
Just as some perspective: in Uruguay in ‘93 things were still all over the place. I was still running an XT until about the end of the year, where we jumped straight to a 486 (alas… SX). And as late as ‘95 I had a classmate (who went on to graduate as both electrical and computer engineer) who was doing high school papers on a Spectrum.
I don't remember the specifics but I can confirm he was brave :)
I know a local company at some point had a disk-drive-like interface to better use tapes (HiLow Datadrive) so maybe he had that, because saving work to cassette the way I saved things to cassette in the 80s would have been painful (not that it wasn't painful in the 80s of course!)
My recollection is it was basically the same computer he had since the 80s. I always have trouble identifying a specific sinclair version because I had clones (tk-90x, then tk-95).
You're welcome. I was just commenting with a friend that I should have captured a lot more of my BBS sessions. There was some amazing ANSI art I never saw again. People really put effort in making their BBS look original and attractive.
Thanks, this takes me right back to middle school. I was on a 80386 back then. You had to dial in, and the phone line was tied up the whole time. An hour online cost me a whole month's allowance. Worth it, though.
What a nostalgia blow! I remember La Cueva in Argentina as well. In Argentina we had the LocoList, the list of all official BBS and I had one BBS calle Malé BBS.
Absolutely wonderful article and find! I was a RBBS-PC guy myself, and ran a one-line bbs for a while on it, but it never got popular with anybody. I interrupted one guy looking around one time and brought him in to chat mode, and we ended up good friends; the whole reason I kept the bbs up was so he could beep me and call me into long chats a couple nights a week.
It was a IBM-PC or XT, with two Seagate half-height 20MB ST-225 hard disks laying to the side of each other in the two bays--don't stack them, they will fry each other even with added fans installed!
It made such a ozone smell in my bedroom I ran a dryer vent hose from the exhaust fan out my bedroom window.
That's about all I remember, but I do have a copy of the software if anybody needs it.
RBBS-PC. I used to call one of those sometimes -- but it was in the next town over, and in-state long-distance charges were more costly than calling across the country was. It was a nice board: Two lines, lots of software (IIRC 1.2 gigabytes), with 19.2k Telebit Trailblazers at a time when 9600 was still considered fast.
I was more into WWIV. It ran OK on the whitebox DTK Computer clone build from the very local computer shop that the guy was running in what had been the garage behind his house.
But the 16450 serial port UART in that 10MHz 8088 barely kept up with the 14.4k SupraFAXModem that came a bit later; keeping that stable was tricky.
I miss the grunts from the ST-225 at startup.
At one point someone donated an ST-419. That was a full-height disk that, when formatted MFM, held only 15 megabytes. But 35 total megabytes was a lot more than the 20 that the ST-225 offered.
It didn't fit inside of the desktop case at all so the lid was always off and things were just kind of stacked up, including the extra power supply that I used for staging power turn-on.
Because, you see: That ST-419 was so slow at spinning up and becoming usable that the controller would completely give up on it from a cold start. So I'd fire that up first, and give it a moment, and then power up the rest of the system.
Other fun hacks included a 2-megabyte EMS memory card. That thing had 72 socketed DIP chips on it and it did not arrive populated. Half of the memory served as a disk cache for Stacker and the other half as a RAM disk that got populated at every boot with some often-read, never-automatically-written BBS stuff that callers previously had to wait around for.
Anyway, I made a number of great friends back then with the BBS. I talked to one on of them on the phone just tonight, and a bunch of others of us still hang out together like we started doing 35 years ago.
Way back then, they named that first computer "The XT from Hell".
Somewhere around the age of 12, I got a 57.6 modem and my parents got a fax line. I realized that what I wanted was warez, specifically anything related to 3d modeling which I was obsessed with. All I had to trade was porn gifs I'd been downloading from other BBSs since I was about 9. The first board I ran was Hermes on a Mac IIsi. Local Los Angeles 213 area code, only after hours when I'd turn off my parents fax machine. The porn for warez trade was surprisingly effective, and I ended up with copies of Strata, Renderman, Playmation, Infini-D and actually a working copy of ElectricImage, which was a coup even though it was basically unusable.
I definitely feel the nostalgia here. I remember the first time I got a modem in the early '90s and dialed out to a few local BBSes as a teenager. I didn't quite know what they were or what they were for.
It was the most amazing experience to see this text and ASCII/ANSI art appear on my screen that was running off somebody else's computer. It's hard to describe the feeling I got when I realized I was connected to somebody else's computer somewhere within my city. It felt futuristic. At first I felt like I was being watched (possibly) by whoever owned the computer, seeing what I was doing on the system.
Also neat was I was using an IBM PC and some of the BBSes I connected to were using Apple computers or something else. It blew my young mind.
Eventually I ran my own BBS and made my own BBS door games that I made a little bit of money with. I released them as shareware and people would send checks in the mail to me to register the software.
I still have the data from my BBS that I could probably run in DOSBox to log into for old time's sake.
La Cueva!!! I was an assiduous Nopal BBS user, then sysopped Coyoacan BBS for a few years. All these being local, the community was very tight-knit, both among users and operators of these and other Mexico City BBS like laberinto, Tierras Extrañas and others. This was before internet access became ubiquitous and wiped all these BBSes out.
Cool! I was also registered in Tierras Extrañas. I just have added a link to a FB group for Mexican BBS people.
Anyone from Argentina? I was cosysop of Century XXI BBS. Good times! :-)
here... sysop of Sudaka's BBS :-)
It's a rather weird combination of year, CPU and memory.
Z80 is (still) an 8-bit CPU with 16-bit addressing. It cannot access more than 64kiB at a time. The hardware and the software needed to overcome that limit was worth more than an 8088/8086 (or compatible CPU) with MS-DOS and Telix.
In 1993,the age of 80286 and 80386, 8088/8086 were considered low-low-end CPUs, let alone the Z80, even in Mexico.
Not pointing my finger, just stating some facts.
I'm pretty sure I wrote Z280 checking yep, the Zilog Z280 can address 16 MB of memory. It has separated MMU mapping for code and data (64K + 64K mapped anywhere) ideal for operating systems, but if you never enter this mode, then you can access at the same time 64K at the lowest memory address using the normal instructions, 64K using LDUP, and 64K using LDUD. Of course, you can update the MMU registers as required to access other memory spaces, I used the 8K page size. Besides the CPU has a small cache, so it was faster by a magnitude than a Z80.
Sorry, my bad sight tricked me.
Just as some perspective: in Uruguay in ‘93 things were still all over the place. I was still running an XT until about the end of the year, where we jumped straight to a 486 (alas… SX). And as late as ‘95 I had a classmate (who went on to graduate as both electrical and computer engineer) who was doing high school papers on a Spectrum.
ZX +3? If not, he was brave...
I don't remember the specifics but I can confirm he was brave :)
I know a local company at some point had a disk-drive-like interface to better use tapes (HiLow Datadrive) so maybe he had that, because saving work to cassette the way I saved things to cassette in the 80s would have been painful (not that it wasn't painful in the 80s of course!)
My recollection is it was basically the same computer he had since the 80s. I always have trouble identifying a specific sinclair version because I had clones (tk-90x, then tk-95).
It was a Z280, not a Z80. And apparently, the person's father's, who also bought and programmed some transputers. See the other posts in the series.
"I'm glad I found this file..." nice! wish I had also some captures of old BBS sessions safed like this one - thanks Oscar!
You're welcome. I was just commenting with a friend that I should have captured a lot more of my BBS sessions. There was some amazing ANSI art I never saw again. People really put effort in making their BBS look original and attractive.
One of Nopal’s sysops, Capulina, was an accomplished ANSI artist. He went on to become an accomplished musician.
You may also like https://github.com/l3nz/pangea-2023/blob/main/Storia_en.md - it tells the story of a Worldgroup BBS system that was run as a “Civic network” between the 1996 and 1999
The last part is incomplete but it reads like a report from an alien civilization.
Thanks, this takes me right back to middle school. I was on a 80386 back then. You had to dial in, and the phone line was tied up the whole time. An hour online cost me a whole month's allowance. Worth it, though.
What a nostalgia blow! I remember La Cueva in Argentina as well. In Argentina we had the LocoList, the list of all official BBS and I had one BBS calle Malé BBS.
hm...lots of pr0n gifs there .. ahahah was typical on BBSs back in time.. (too fast anyway)