Setting up a new Telegard BBS in 2021

#bbs #pc #dos A couple weeks ago I stumbled upon a printout of a CBBS bulletin board system session that happened 40 years ago last month. As a former BBS user and sysop, this was really exciting to me as CBBS is the grandaddy of all bulletin board software. I immediately wanted to set up a CBBS system afterwards and see what it was like, and how it compared to the Telegard system I ran as a youth, but...

Yeah CBBS is a *lot* more complicated to install. That will take a while for me to figure out, and then there's the non-trivial matter of finding the right hardware. So that's a future project. But I've got serious BBS nostalgia right now! So I decided to dust off Telegard 2.7 and install it just as I would have 30 years ago this fall, when my highschool had me set one up for them.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this little trip down memory lane. I'd originally wanted to restore a backup of my original BBS that I made to tape, but alas, I cannot find it! So we'll just have to start from scratch and see what I remember.. or not.

[TechTimeTraveller]

Just a note - Youtube is nuking ALL comments with links in them EXCEPT for those from actual spam bots. Yeah.. I know. Anyway, if you post a comment to this or any other video of mine with anything that even looks like a link, Youtube will kill it, and I cannot retrieve or approve it. Which is unfortunate because there have been some really informative comments that just get lost, and of course I cannot message people directly without an email address or such. But anyway yeah, it's NOT me being a tyrannical/arbitrary jerk or anything. Many thanks to everyone watching this video!

[misterkite]

As a member of the ACiD artgroup, I of course need to recommend using AcidDraw for all your ansi drawing needs.

[sycyourtube]

Just wanted to Say I'm a fellow Ontarian who grew up in the 80's and used a Tandy 1000 HX to BBS. My PC jr didn't have a modem.
I have great nostalgia for Tandy and PC Jr stuff as well as bbs and dos stuff from the mid 80's.

Thanks for the great flashback.

[BigBadWolfst]

Really enjoyed this! Your sense of humor is right up my alley. I ran a BBS called Silicon Sysop for years. Started out in 1986 with one PC and Wildcat but eventually purchased PCBoard. I added a second line and tried running both on a 386 with DoubleDos which was pretty unstable. Then I found Desqview and it was rock solid. I had Tradewars and a bunch of other doors active. When I got a third line I tried Windows 386 but it was nowhere near as stable as DV. I remember going from generic 14.4s to my first US Robotics Courier that made me feel like I had made it! In the end, I had three lines running on a 486 under OS/2. Started on LI and eventually moved to Hartwick NY and my buddy started Silicon Sysop ][ . I just now installed DosBox and PCBoard and what a rush! Thanks for this.

[deltaray]

Nice video. A friend of mine, Chad, and I started a BBS in 1991 too. Amiga Online in Northern Indiana. ;) I remember in 1991 walking over after school with him to some local computer business that wasn't quite a retail store and more of a consultant, to get a copy of what I think was called Sky or SkyNet BBS software. He ran it on his Amiga 500 and made me a co-sysop. It drove him nuts that I'd put that title in my email signature though. I remember as an admin being about to see user's passwords in clear text, including his, which was just 'DDD'. He connected us up to Fidonet as well, which I thought was pretty cool. Just 6 years later I set up a website hosting provider in my dorm room. ;)

[bliksemdonder]

This video is nostalgic.... I turn 6 tomorrow ... 6 decades that is. Those were the glory days.

[MikeGalusha]

Really enjoyed the video. I ran my bbs from about 1990 to 1996. I remember laying in bed the first night after bringing it on line and jumping up when I heard the modem answer the first call. It truly drove me into a career in computers, it grew to the point where I had netware and a few diskless nodes. When you said Fossil driver, I instantly recalled what the acronym stood for, or at least what I remember, Fido Opus Seadog Standard Interface Layer.

[ChingasoClown]

Oh man this takes me back to the good old days. I think it is time to bring my board back but maybe on a thin client. Ty for the video :)

[QuintusCunctator]

This is incredibly fascinating. As you rightfully concluded, I too think the main differences between today's Internet communities (aka social networks) and BBSs, or even the early Internet communities (forums, IRC channels, newsgroups etc), stem for the fact that one had to actively seek for a specific one he was interested in, and they required to adhere to specific rules (like netiquette). These entry-level matters made those communities much more tight-knit. In a sense, they mimic the difference between the first personal computers and today's PCs: the former asked you to invest some effort to use them, the latter require almost no effort to do anything. Unfortunately, this comes at a cost: fewer and fewer people are willing to learn, or to respect any kind of rule, and they often feel entitled to everything they have.

[craigtiano]

I started my first BBS in 1979 on a TRS-80 model 1, having built my own software to do so after reading about Ward Christiansen's work on the West Coast. Version 1 was run all in memory in a 16k of RAM machine, because I didn't have money to buy the uber expensive disk drives. I used a lot of crazy memory saving techniques, including using that 8th bit in the beginning of the actual message text to store status and other information. Later, I upgraded to 48K of RAM, and then to floppy drives. I got a job, a girlfriend, and several lifelong friends by running the board. As I moved from one house to another, and my new wife demanded my time, I decided that the end had to come in 1987. I still have the entire system in boxes in the attic. As I recall, the operating system doesn't know about dates beyond 1988, so turning it on today would require setting a date in the far past. Talk about a "flashback"!

[llaffer]

This was a fun video to watch. I did the BBS/sysOp thing when I was in high school/college in the early 90s.

I think I started with a Telegard BBS, moved to a Renegade, and then even moved onto trying to build my own BBS software from scratch with a small team of friends. That project never completed, but had a good start. :) I was "The Dragon's Nest BBS" in the Minneapolis, MN area, back then.

[XalphYT]

I just learned that the dude who makes these videos was practically a neighbour of mine. Greetings from late '80s Newmarket.
Wait, — without York Region, would 8-bit channels on YouTube cease to exist?

[odbo_One]

I ran BBS in my area for a very long time. Started when I was in first year high school, BBS introduced to me by a good friend. I dialed in every weekend (via family computer) and loved it. I saved up money and bought myself a run of the mill computer and modem. One year later I decided to run a BBS, with help of my good friend we bought additional phone line and ran a one node BBS using. Eventually, few years later we had 4 nodes via Wildcat at 9600 baud. Over the years we upgraded to 56k before the internet took over. We never had membership fees or request donations. All of this came out of our pockets for the name of fun and hobby. Good times!

[kveller]

As a 22 year-old who previous to this video had only heard about BBS in passing as a piece of ancient history, this was extremely interesting. I knew about dial-up connections and some of the pains of connecting through a phone line, but using a similar system for freaking forums? It's hard to imagine nowadays. It kinda makes me appreciate how much the Internet simplified things.

[fsim]

Telecard was (kind of) derived from the Turbo Pascal sources of WWIV 3. Wayne Bell (author of WWIV) re-wrote the whole BBS program in Turbo C for the v4 release. He started charging for the source code at that point. (my brain is packed with weird little trivia bits about BBS software. :D )

[stevesmusic]

Ahh the memories...mistyping the phone number and waking up some granny to the blast of a modem trying to connect!

[stocksj]

Cool update on BBS SW. That PS/2 you got, I think they were one of the most hi-tech looking PCs back in the day

[theoasisbbs]

Great video! I really enjoyed it. My 1st IBM style BBS was also Telegard after upgrading from the C64 BBS world. Tim Strike, a popular TG modder, took over as the author when I was using it and put out Telegard 3.0 after about a year of owning it. The community really beat him up, the guy had a day job and wasn't getting paid for his services... was a shame he was a cool dude. I forget who took over after Tim but during that time frame I switched to Renegade which was essentially the same thing.

Like you said, BBSing was a world unto it's own. We had out get togethers as well. Called BBQ's and there was a great sense of community. Everyone knew everyone. It was a fun time before the Internet came and changed everything. Thanks for making the video!

[paulojorgetadeu]

Greetings from Portugal, remembering these times is fantastic. I used BBS for the first time in 1997, when they were at the end of their lives. The one I used for a few months ended at the end of that year 1997.
But it was interesting. Good year 2024 to you. Remembering is living.

[TrueThanny]

FOSSIL was a serial port driver that made it easier for different programs to share the same serial port. Such as a BBS passing control to a door game. There were a few different configuration file formats used to pass connection information from the BBS to the door game. They were called drop files, and door.sys was just one type.