Omaha Area Bulletin Board Systems of the 80's and 90's...

[Jim]

I visited a number of interesting BBS's back in the day. I'm going to start with some of the systems that I first visited in Fall of 1984.

A VIC-20 Board

I visited a BBS whose operational hours were something like 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. each night. The board ran on a rather spartan hardware setup with a Commodore VIC-20 at the heart of the system with a VIC-1600 "VICModem".

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vic20_01.jpg (28.72 KiB) Viewed 328 times

The BBS was a little sluggish, but I was willing to cut it some slack because of the sheer coolness factor of a BBS running on minimal hardware. I ended up chatting with the Sysop ... who I will refer to as "MM" ... as did a mutual friend. The three of us soon met to talk about the board and other things. There are a couple of things that really stood out about the physical design of the BBS.

The first thing that stood out to me is that MM ran the BBS on a VICModem. That modem does not have auto-answer capability. When the phone rang, MM had to insert the phone cord from the handset into the VICModem. ( He might have left the handset cord in the modem and could have just used the handset as an answer/hangup switch ... I don't know for sure how MM handled the situation. ) Okay, that took some dedication. MM was part of the machine, so to speak.

The other part that was very interesting to me was the way that user profiles and messages were stored on the system. The BBS didn't have a disk drive! Each user profile and message was stored in memory by altering the running BASIC program! The Commodore VIC-20 and C-64 computers both had full-screen editors. If you wrote code to clear the screen, display a line of BASIC code, set the cursor to "home", and then issue a few POKE commands to stuff the keyboard buffer with carriage-returns, the displayed line of BASIC code would have become part of the existing BASIC program.

MM used this technique to embed DATA statements into the running program. Since the technique required the code to drop out of BASIC, he'd follow those lines up with a RUN or GOTO that would re-invigorate the BBS. It was a real "Rube Goldberg Device", but the payoff for a BBS with no disk drive was enormous. At the end of the night, Mike just had to SAVE the BASIC program to cassette... which could be checked with the VERIFY command to make sure that it saved correctly. That one SAVE would keep all of his message and user data.

The next night, he'd load up the BASIC program and take up where he'd left off before. He could perform any kind of maintenance that he needed on the user info or the messages right from the BASIC editor. I really don't know what he did as far as long-term maintenance of those DATA statements. At some point, he'd have to get rid of older messages and such to make room for new ones since memory was scarce. There were a lot of "renumber" and "BASIC aid" utilities for those machines that I suppose he could have used.

I don't think the VIC-20 Board stayed up for very long, but it was an interesting thing to stumble upon in this era. Many of the BBS's of this era were home-brewed in some way and each had their own charm, but I think this board took that spirit to the extreme. It also employed one of the most creative (and minimal) technical approaches I've ever heard of.

[allenhuffman]

How much memory did you have in it? 3584 BYTES FREE, if I recall from my VIC-20 startup screen.

[Jim]

How much memory did you have in it? 3584 BYTES FREE, if I recall from my VIC-20 startup screen.

Hi, Allen. He had some RAM add-ons in 8K increments. He talked about having it topped out at 24K or something like that at one time, but at the time of his BBS's presence, it might've been that 3K plus an additional 8K or 16K.

[Jim]

The Greater Omaha Commodore User's Group (GOCUG) BBS

One of the first sites I visited during my earliest forays into BBSdom was the GOCUG board. I don't know if it had that acronym at the time, but that's the acronym that it eventually held. The GOCUG BBS was written by a local gent named John Stephenson. I'm not sure if I ever managed to spell his last name correctly, so there are some other possible spellings for that last name. John went by the handle "American Flyer" or just "Flyer".

The BBS was written completely in BASIC and was compiled using the popular Blitz! compiler. It had it's own personality as did many of those boards. The board ran almost flawlessly although I did encounter some pauses that were almost assuredly the C64's BASIC string garbage collection routines (which still plagued Blitzed programs ) tying up BASIC.

I chatted with John over the Sysop chat feature very early in my BBSing days. I tended to converse with him via messages on his board. I had expressed an interest in the C64 Z-80 cartridge and the C64 version of the CP/M operating system. John happened upon the cartridge and disks and sold them to me. That was the only time we'd met face-to-face.

Local legend has it that John won some kind of car in a local basketball free-throw contest and he sold the car very quickly. He took the money from the car sales and bought a bunch of computer gear, like a true nerd. At one time, he had a PDP in his basement. I never saw the PDP and when I met up with him, I don't think the place he was living in had a basement.

It seemed that John had given up hosting the BBS in maybe 1986 or 1987-ish. The GOCUG BBS lived on for many years but it used more commonplace BBS programs until it came to an end. I lost touch with John as I moved away from C64 computing. His name is difficult to search for as it's a common name with a lot of spelling variations. I'd enjoy a good chat with him some time if he remembers those glory days of being a C64 BBS sysop.

[Jim]

The Cracking Zone

In the mid 80's, there was a local Commodore 64 legend who went by the alias Lexas. Lexas had stood up his own BBS just as I was beginning to wander around in Omaha's BBS community. At the time I first logged in, Lexas had just turned 17 years old. I was a couple of years older

Lexas' BBS was known as The Cracking Zone. It ran on a Commodore 64 and ... as you might guess .. offered bootleg cracked copies of C64 software. He was quite an astute programmer, but not just in the realm of BASIC. Lexas was pretty savvy with 6510 assembly language. The primary code for his BBS was in Blitzed BASIC, but he used machine code where it would speed things up. Lexas named the BBS software "Xavian". He sold copies locally for about $40.

In the early incarnations of Xavian, he used to store multiple messages in separate sequential files. The phrase "Accessing disk, please wait..." usually followed every command that one typed in. After a detailed article on RELative files in Compute's Gazette, Lexas changed Xavian so that it used random-access disk routines which sped up the message bases.

One of the things I found interesting about Xavian BBS's was that the message bases and file-transfer areas were tied together like Special Interest Groups (SIGs) in CompuServe. It didn't just have one massive file-transfer area.

I ended up chatting with Lexas over the Xavian chat function and we ended up talking voice from time-to-time. He and a cohort who went by the handle Lord Lucifer stopped over once. We compared our C64 software/hardware collections and we talked about coding. Lexas let me borrow his HesMon cartridge for a while. I ended up going out to his home once to return the cartridge. He was pretty cordial. He transferred me a copy of FirstTerm using a terminal called MidwestTerm (because that's the only term I had with file-transfer capability at the time.) Once I had FirstTerm, I could use Steve Punter's famous Punter protocol for file transfers.

I chatted with him over the BBS one day and he said that someone had figured out a bug in his system and was taking down a few of the local Xavians by entering 99e99 in the intial prompt for a user number. The entry prompt used BASIC to obtain the user number and the floating-point number 99e99 overflows C64's BASIC. Try this some time on a C64 or a C64 emulator:

Code: Select all

10 input a
20 print a

If you enter 99e99, it'll look something like this:

xavian_02.jpg (14.94 KiB) Viewed 307 times

To quickly remedy the situation, Lexas implemented a machine code subroutine that triggered on the IRQ timer ( vectored through $0314 / $0315 ). The interrupt routine would check to see if the system was back in BASIC READY mode. If so, it would stuff the characters 'r','u', 'n' and a carriage-return into the keyboard buffer to re-run the board. This way, any glitch that terminated execution of the BBS would cause it to start anew instead of just sitting idle at a BASIC prompt.

On one fine morning, I was looking through my new issue of Compute's Gazette magazine, and I saw this ad :

xavian_01.jpg (71.72 KiB) Viewed 307 times

I called Lexas later. The above ad made it sound like he was moving into the big time.

He got an Amiga 1000 when they first came out which I think took his interest away from the C64 a bit. He was soon off to college and his board went down so I lost touch for a good long while. I located him in the early Internet era and exchanged a few emails with him. The BBS thing didn't sound like it really panned out for him, but he's had a really good career in tech.

For those interested, a version of the Xavian BBS can be found at a number of C64 software archives.

[Jim]

Sanctuary

I called a local BBS named Sanctuary often. Often enough, that I still remember the phone number. ( Those things get drilled into your head when you have to manually dial the phone for your "dumb" VIC-1600 modem. ) Sanctuary's sysops ... Andre De Courtney (Bruce) and Casca the Eternal Mercenary (Tom) were cordial hosts. I met with Tom and Bruce shortly after I started visiting Sanctuary. We had a nice chat. Later on, Tom talked me into trying out Turbo Pascal on my C-128's CP/M system and I'm glad he did.

Sanctuary ran on a Commodore 64 but I don't know that it had 1541 drives which were common on other boards. It might've used a CBM dual-drive of some sort at one time. Sanctuary had one of the smoothest, responsive presentations of any of the local BBS's. Message retrieval was very quick and I never saw an instance of string garbage collection delays like you'd see on other C64 boards. Tom was pretty proud of this, but he never did reveal any of the real tech details to me. I know that Tom was pretty good at coding in assembly language, but he kept a lot of the board's tricks close to the vest.

As far as participation goes, lot of local folks ... mostly teens and twenty-somethings ... frequented this board. Although they temporarily stood up file-transfer as a sort of experiment for a while, Sanctuary was better known as a BBS specializing in conversations with frequent chatter. I dropped out of the BBS hobby for a short while and by the time I resurfaced, I believe that Sanctuary was gone. This was before the BBS's were fading away as consumer Internet access was ramping up. I'm not quite sure what happened. I was sorry to find out that it had gone as it was a fun place to visit.

[Cam]

I have fond (albeit spotty) memories of BBSing in the 90s. Procomm Plus, the screech of the modem, going from 2400 to 14.4 to 28.8 to 56k baud, my mom picking up the phone line halfway through my hour+ download of Doom shareware, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, Wolfenstein 3d, Tradewars 2002, Legend of the Red Dragon, dozens of other shareware programs and games I might be able to remember if I try (dope wars, scorched earth, maybe a gif of a girl in a bikini) It was a special time, and I'm happy to have been there for it!

[Jim]

I have fond (albeit spotty) memories of BBSing in the 90s. Procomm Plus, the screech of the modem, going from 2400 to 14.4 to 28.8 to 56k baud, my mom picking up the phone line halfway through my hour+ download of Doom shareware, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, Wolfenstein 3d, Tradewars 2002, Legend of the Red Dragon, dozens of other shareware programs and games I might be able to remember if I try (dope wars, scorched earth, maybe a gif of a girl in a bikini) It was a special time, and I'm happy to have been there for it!

Very cool. I'll bet the ones you called are either on the area code 402 list of BBS's:

http://bbslist.textfiles.com/402/oldschool.html

[Jim]

DRBBS - Dynamic Remote Bulletin Board System

DRBBS, like Sanctuary, was largely a board that was conducive to conversation. The group that frequented the board was largely part of the Omaha Computing Society. I have dinner with some of these folks from time to time.

When I first logged on to DRBBS, I had been using an alias (Cintaks Airer) on most of the C64 boards that I visited. I felt compelled to use my real name on DRBBS, so I did. However, the folks who maintained the board later told me that there was a bet among them that my given name ... Jim Lawless ... was actually a pirate-board alias.

DRBBS was written in C (Lattice C) and had been somewhat modeled on RBBS. It ran on a CP/M system. The software was later ported to run on the Commodore 128's CP/M and there were MS-DOS ports that ran on DOS gear. The BBS itself was just amazing. Some of the early participants were using teletype terminals so the very first thing that the board software did was ask "How many nulls do you need?"

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The board software would send the specified number of nulls after each newline character so that the print arm had time to go back from the right-hand side of the paper to the left for those using teletype terminals. As far as I can remember, this prompt greeted one during the whole of DRBBS's existence. I'm not sure if any of the other folks who ran the DRBBS software on other machines had the prompt, though. (I don't think they did. )

The board was very responsive and it had a lot of participants. The sysop and author of the software, jsw is a big-time techie. He had DRBBS linking to Usenet feeds and had Internet mail before any other Omaha BBS's that I'm aware of. He also had a FIDONet mailer called YBBAT ( which had initially been called TABBY, but there seemed to be another program out there with that name. ) All of this happened on a 64K machine.

I really enjoyed that board until the BBS heyday sort of came to a close in the mid-90's. For a while, DRBBS was available via a Usenet feed but that also dwindled.

jsw was a participant in one of the first Omaha-based Internet Service Providers. The company was called GONIX - Greater Omaha public-access uNIX. It was where I stood up my first web pages. ( See viewtopic.php?t=21 ). That company was sold to another provider.

I *think* that jsw was going to demonstrate DRBBS as a telnettable BBS at one of the DefCon conferences, but I don't know if that ended up happening. Hopefully, he can stop by and set me straight.