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#THE BBS ZINE#
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#BY MHJ#
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#Issue 5 - For the week of 9/22/19 - 9/28 #
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########################### #Date Published - 9/24/19 #
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#Frightfully Mundane#
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Index:
Foreward
Alpha Centauri
Amiga City
Linux and BBSes
The DOS era
Guest column
Game of the Week
Music of the Moment
Links
Outro
Contact
Next Issue Preview

##########
#Foreward#
##########

It’s really amazing what people are capable of being ignorant of. If you
asked 4/5 people today what a BBS is, most likely they would have no
answer. People have no knowledge of the computing past, they are only in
it for the latest and greatest technology and fail to learn from the
past regarding what made those particular things important.

I’m not here to rant though, I just find the state of modern communities
online to be in a sad state of affairs. There is some pushback, like
with tilde.town(and the wider tildeverse), mastodon, gopher and BBSes
that are still around, but to most people, they have no understanding of
that type of thing. I suppose we could blame accessibility for this, as
in, it’s rather difficult to get those places unless you know how to use
specific applications(except mastodon)… but it’s also because I think
that some of those places want to remain insular.

It’s their choice to remain that way and should be respected, but I
think that alternatives for everyone else should be developed, because
at the rate we’re going, the net itself will become akin to just a theme
park.

If you have the means to do so, fight back against these forces and
teach others the benefits of what made and make BBSes what they are and
encourage others to understand everything about their online lives.

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#Alpha Centauri#
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Cool art here, from the opening, that is. It seemed to be a bit on the
decidedly average side though.

I didn’t explore the text files though, which I imagine there were lots
of, given it’s prominence on the main menu. Seemed to be running a
commonly used BBS software, in any case.

Regarding the BBS games, it has a small number, but I would still
consider giving this BBS a shot.

The Main Menu

[Main menu]

The Games Menu

[Games]

The BBS List

[BBS]

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#CONNECTION METHODS#
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telnet://acentauribbs.no-ip.org:2002

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#Amiga City #
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Amiga, certainly a name people probably haven’t heard of it in a while.
This name certainly brings back the time in the early 90’s or late 80’s
when the Amiga ruled the scene, especially in the UK. This BBS loads up
with nice artwork, and then you’re greeted with a good looking main
menu.

As far as the files go, they have a nice selection. I saw stuff for
AmigaOS(Of course!), and various BBS-related things that were of great
interest to any Amiga owner. I highly recommend checking the files out
if you have one!

The games were amazing, they have at least 13-14 screens of games you
could pick from. The SysOp must really know his games, because they’ve
seemingly implemented every single one that I’ve never heard of.

I highly recommend checking out this place, it seems very effecient and
there’s so many games to choose from!

Main Menu

[Main Menu]

Games Menu

[Games]

Files Menu

[Files]

#########################
#CONNECTION METHODS#
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telnet://amigacity.xyz

ssh://amigacity.xyz:3459/

##############################
#Linux and BBSes#
##############################

If you’re a Linux/BSD user like myself, you’ll be glad to know that
there exists many clients for BBSes made specifically for those
Unix-like OSes. Lets go over all the BBS clients and also take a look at
some of the servers.

Syncterm is a nice client that I use for this zine, and it provides a
very nice and easy to use interface, and so that in turn makes it easy
for me to in turn just plug in a BBS and go browse it.

Netrunner is another client, which I haven’t used much, but I heard from
others that it’s pretty good. I would give it a shot as well.

You have the venerable Telnet command itself if you absolutely can’t get
any other client.

Another one is PuTTY, which is also available on Windows.

Then there’s zssh, which also has telnet support, but it might be an
afterthought. I haven’t played with that one yet.

There’s numberous other ones that I haven’t even heard of until today,
such as cgterm, fqterm, qelly, quickrdp and finally pcmanx.

Regarding the servers, there’s many of those as well. I believe
Synchronet is very popular, since it can run on a raspberry pi.

There’s also Mystic.

As far as the others goes, I think it’s harder to find the sources
and/or binaries for them, but if you know any different, send me an
email!

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#The DOS era#
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The DOS era was a time of great upheavel in the computing world. Home(or
micro) computers were still a thing, but then IBM brought out the PC,
and that was the beginning of the end for the micros. IBM also brought
along with it standardization, and thus, the path of the i386
architecture was established, and PC’s came to dominate. One of the most
popualer operating systems for these machines was MS-DOS, which was
based off of CP/M.

Having grown up in the era when DOS PC’s were becoming standardized, I
remember mostly all the fun games you could play on them, such as
Thexder, King’s Quest, Space Quest, Commander Keen and many others. My
particular favorites were Stellar 7 and MechWarrior 2.

What stands out to me most about this era was that home computing was
still in it’s infancy. Not everyone had a computer at home. Also if you
used a computer you were seen as a “nerd.”

I believe my most fun time spent online back then was using CompuServe
to download preview images of video games, like one for Mega Man, and
finding any discussion on new games coming out for the NES and Genesis.
Game magazines were still in their infancy as well, so it was a blessing
to find online info.

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#Guest article#
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The following article is by cat, you can reach them at:
gopher://baud.baby.

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#BBS and Gopher#
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What up y’all, I love BBS but I also really, really love Gopher so I’m
going to share with you two very neat places where BBS and Gopher
intersect.

Ok, let’s start from the Gopher side.

In his Zaibatsu Gopher hole,
dokuja(gopher://circumlunar.space/1/~dokuja/telnetbbs) maintains a list
of telnet BBS services. I know you’ll all have seen one of those before
but what makes this one interesting is that the list is formatted using
Gopher’s standard telnet item type. From this list you can quickly
connect to any of the BBS listed, I’ve tested in lynx and vf1 and it
works great. It’s a really fantastic way to find new BBS to explore.

Now from the other side!

One of my favorite BBS is aNACHRONiST’s
aBSiNTHE(telnet://absinthebbs.net:1940), it’s a really nice board with
excellent attention to design. It also has a neat application that I’ve
not seen anywhere else; an implementation of lynx called aBSiNTHE lYNX,
and you guessed it, you can use it to access Gopher.

Once you’re in the core menu of aBSiNTHE hit 6 for aBSiNTHE lYNX and
then g for Gopher and you’re in! It’ll start you off on a portal but
then you’re free to browse Gopher space as you wish, you can even read
FAX SEX files!

#######
#Links#
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Synchronet: http://www.synchro.net/

zssh: http://zssh.sourceforge.net/

#################
#Game of the Week#
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LORD II

LORD II was definitely a different experience from the original LORD. It
was very much inspired by roguelikes like Nethack and such. For the time
I got to play it, I didn’t fight anything as I feel I wasn’t a high
enough level. So it kinda ended a uninspiring note. As I am in the
beginning of the game though, I think I’ll go back and play it, so long
as no one kills my character.

I think I would give it a chance as it seems even more like a primitive
MMO than the first LORD was. If you have time to kill, give it a go!

###################
#Music of the Moment#
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Outrun - Magical Sound Shower(C64 conversion):
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESwrrCshV6s)

#######
#Outro#
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I hope you enjoyed this issue of the BBS Zine. I’m using a program
called pandoc to make everything from one file, it’s a wonderful
utility. If you have document formatting needs, visit them over at:
https://pandoc.org

#########
#Contact#
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For questions, concerns, comments and anything else, please contact me
at the following: mhj@sdf.org

Thank you.

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#Next Issue#
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BBSes:
Alley Cat BBS
ALTERANT
Columns:
Music and BBSes
Security and Privacy and BBSes
Guest column
Game of the Week
Links

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