*I was one of the people who ran the first BBS in NYC, starting in 1976: "Modem Over Manhattan", or "M*O*M" for short. The earlier BBS's did NOT have hard drives, which were **_incredibly_** expensive, as well as huge, power hungry, and up to 100 pounds back then. We used 4 floppy drives when we started (which was considered **_huge_** at the time), and nobody (including us) had more than one line until roughly 1979 or 1980.*
@@AnonymousSquirrel123 Would love an entire episode over this board :) Anything that we can read online? I think that I have found all that I could for MindVox. Thank you!
I've met Ward, but not Randy. I knew Bill Blue for a few years, That's 2 of the 3 first BBS system operators/writers of all time. And yes, early BBSs commonly used floppy drives - I ran one for a few years.
I ran a BBS called "Boondocks" back in the day. It had an Amiga, Console, and an AscII section. IF I'm not mistaking, the board had a C64 section also. It ran on 6 nodes eventually. It started with a USR 14K4 HST and eventually each node ran on a USRobotics Dual Standard v34 56k. I had the time of my life back then running the BBS. People from all over the world called constantly and within no time it became (one of) the fastest board(s) in the world. Poeple called with Calling Cards, Credit Cards, PBXs, BlueBoxing and/or hacked lines, and many foreigners even called normally because they wanted to download/upload a release as fast as possible. Man, those days were the best days in my life. I miss it so very much.
That rings a bell with me, but I would have to check my old software still loaded on my ancient machine if it'd ever boot up. I remember using ascii, pr was it ansi, to move the cursor up into other peoples posts above mine when mine would load, then edit what they had said, lol. It was pretty funny until the sysop asked me to stop because it was confusing people.
Yes, I remember the days of pirate boards. I bought my first modem in 1981. It was 300 baud. It was the fastest consumer modem available. Speed was not a concern because simply being able to connect to other systems was mind blowing.
Modem protocols included x modem, y modem, z modem. All of them supported using the Kermit terminal program/upload download tool. Kermit has a piece of software is an amazing tool. To help me get through college and on to the universities DEC and VAX via dial up from a commodore 64
Yeah, especially one in an accent that I can 100% understand and sounds like someone I knoew and probably grew up with. Its a shame that at school nerds were scattered very thinly - but at least we end up gathering on channels like this.
What was funny about those BBS was that most of them were operated by individuals and it happened often that they closed after a few months. There was no search engine back then to find BBS that were reachable locally (ie no long distance calls). What I had at the time was a list of BBS that was compiled by a local computer store. The problem is that this list was grossly outdated and I can’t remember how many times that while trying to reach a BBS in the middle of the night I would ear someone answer the phone just before the modem sent a loud sync tone. This happened when the phone company would reassign a phone number that was formerly used by a BBS. Every weekend this would happen 4 or 5 times, that I accidentally wake up a random person that was unlucky enough to get one of those phone numbers that were previously used by a BBS.
There used to be a 'Top List' of all sorts of stats from different BBS's ranked in a table that used to circulate the message bases or could be displayed on a door or even MCI scripted into part of the logoff on the boards that signed up to it.. not only that there used to be other BBS numbers on the final logoff screens of most boards, but to be honest once a board went down everyone knew... my guess you were just starting out and hadn't been validated as any sysop that was switched on, became very security conscious and limited access of a new user until validated, but many did try to run a board and found it wasnt for them and jacked it in after a short while, but the ones that stayed were made of the right stuff...
@@DevilbyMoonlight I remember at the time that most higher end BBS that were using multiple phones lines on a single phone number were not free. The BBS that I was using were free and they were using cheaper residential phones lines and were most likely operated by a teenager like me at the time. And the problem with those was that as soon as the phone company figured out that the phone line was way more busy than a normal residential phone line they would ask to switch to a much pricier commercial line or terminate the service. But anyway, good memories.
Wardialing all local prefixes was fun here in IL, USA. I recall toneloc? Or I think Telemate allowed for something similar. Parents got sister a used car - I pressed for my own phone line. Not much, today, really gives that vibe of discovering things in an unknown digital frontier.
I'm the lead engineer for google cloud at a well known retailer here in the UK, in charge of GKE (Googles kubernetes offering) and was looking to escape k8s, low and behold you've managed to shoe horn it in to a retro video. I take my hat off to you good sir, and `kubectl delete ns kube-system` as a personal attack
I have another idea for running BBC mirco work loads, with econet emulation in k8s. I think I might do one "I did something stupid in kubernetes" video each year, until someone invites me todo the most stupid presentation at kubecon.
I think you'd be surprised at the size of the overlap here, as a lot of us that started on BBSes are now the people building and running these Kubernetes environments.
And here I was ready to say "you're not alone", but I guess I'll just add to the responses here. I wasn't online until the advent of DSL, so I had people tell me how awesome that tech was, and now pods are in my day job.
ive done neither, i only barely understand any of this but i find it fascinating, my little construction worker brain is trying to make sense of networking since im building a server for radarr and sonarr and slsk stuff. im learning about p2p file sharing, IRC chats, etc. its quite interesting, im also interested in BBS from a communications perspective since im into HAM radio, stuff like teletypes interest me
To avoid theft, my school in the 1980s let the kids take home BBC Micros across holidays. I borrowed one of them, plus a CUB monitor, and a modem. And I accessed Prestel from home. It's hard to explain to anybody nowadays how amazing this was. I mean, it was like gaining a superpower. Suddenly, the home computer could break out of the four walls of the home. It was no longer a dumb bit of beige plastic. Its blinkers were removed. It could see for miles. Alas, I couldn't log into Prestel because I didn't have a username (school had one but it was a closely-guarded secret). However, I did figure out how to access other services, and download some programs... Again, this was just mind-blowing at the time. Programs. Free. You just download it. What?!? No tape required. No typing in a listing from a magazine.
That was a cool school! Not quite what contemporary images of American schools imply. OhGod! You made me remember typing in listings from magazines. That was such a painful experience. Well except for the moment of truth when after hours of typing you tried to run the thing for the first time. I was so grateful when they started to use checksums... Ah, the old times...
My Mom worked at Derby Collage and it was the same, she would bring home a BBC micro. I loved those things and I thought I was weird in that I didn't really play games, I couldn't get enough of 1) the basic and 2) the disk drive. My daily driver was a squidgy spectrum. 40 Years on an I bought a BBC micro and made one good Cub Microvitec from two duff ones and my box of disks including my programs all still read and work. And its amazing that the muscle memory is still there, remembering the star commands etc.
I'm a principal technologist at one of the big five technology companies, and I still think successfully configuring Front Door to work with FidoNet and my Telegard BBS is the greatest technological accomplishment of my life thus far.
I never ran a large BBS but I ran several smaller ones. My first was running on a color computer with two floppies. I swore back then that I invented the linked list as that’s what I used to store messages. That was in jr high. In high school, I had a color computer 3, and ran os/9 so I could have a BBS running while still using my computer. I also had a small hard drive but it wasn’t large and was very slow. In college I ran that same BBS but with a larger and faster hard drive. I also had access to our Vax which had access to Bitnet. I wrote a Fidonet interface to upload bundles to the Vax and send them as files over Bitnet. This made it possible to participate with others with Bitnet access. Suddenly my little node had free access to the world. All fifteen users were thrilled. :)
My first taste of the internet was through a BBS! One BBS system I used had a section for accessing various internet things like email, newgroups, and internet relay chat (IRC). It needed compatible BBS client software that allowed the internet protocol to pass through to other DOS programs that used those services. This was before the world wide web service started on the internet, not long before though, I'm not THAT old! 😛 I started using BBS's late in their lifespan a few years after I got my first PC and was fully employed as a programmer. I did not bother with them in my Spectrum and Atari ST days as modems back then were expensive. A few years ago I tried running an old school BBS on my PC that's accessed through the internet. It worked but I lost interest in it once it was working fine.
Ohhhhhh memories. I owned Dynasty Online in Orlando, Florida (FidoNet 1:363/1000) back in the 90s (My first BBS I started in 1980) .... second largest in the world. At its peak we had 197 incoming lines. We were second only to one BBS that was larger by a FEW phone lines and that was EXEC-PC.
Howdy! Crystal Wind BBS in Palm Beach County here. I was always in awe of your setup. I met most of my close friends in high school through the BBS scene, including Panther's Byte.
@@EvanEdwards I remember CWB. Yes, the old "get togethers"we used to have on the weekends. I still know a lot of people back from that time period and to include some of my best friends.
@@EvanEdwards CWBBS - that's a name I haven't heard in a loooong time. I think that's the only one mentioned in the comments thread I actually connected to once-upon-a-time.
I actually wrote my own email system with backend and client in quick basic, with a fidonet and internet email gateway, and the emails + client were then distributed on floppy disks to the users in my school. Every day I would process people's mails and generate new disks.
Around 2003-2007 I wrote and ran a digital signage system for a major corporation. Bare in mind I wasn't employed there as a programmer. I was an A.V. tech. So we had to use floppy disks and eventually thumb drives to distribute our content because the real computer guys wouldn't let us near THEIR network. I used a compiler called DarkBASICPro because it was regular old BASIC with a whole slew of multimedia features like opening images and copying and pasting image data to the screen, etc. Good times!!!
I ran a Fidonet node in 1992. Today, I work with OpenShift and Kubernetes. I can not believe I'm in the middle of the Venn diagram. sort of. 😮 Brill video, cheers!
I ran two BBSes in the late 80s, early 90s. ANSI graphics, message forums. I loved EXEC-PC for their huge file collection. I think you can still telnet to them for the old experience. My first experience was around 1980 where a computer company I worked for ran FORUM-80 which ran on a TRS-80 Model II.
@@rarbiartIt is an excessive stack to run a DOS BBS, but that's rather the point of the video. To show a cloud scale stack, and apply it to running a BBS a thing that was never really cloud scale.
Oh, they are. They describe it as doing it in an "offensively modern way". I mean, if I did a modern BBS on my Linux box.. I'd of course install the software, possibly give it it's own user account to run in, and it can store it's files there. Done.
28:56 "I could really do without introducing another layer of abstraction" Proceeds to add _four_ layers of abstraction. (Is that even the right number?)
The overlap is far from just you; a lot of us older Infra guys grew up in the BBS scene, and it was great seeing you address how to use modern infra for old-school BBSes. Thanks for the good time!
I ran a BBS on my C64 with a 300 baud modem... that evolved into a MUD, on two 386 computers running Linux, with four phone lines and four 14400 baud US Robotics modems. So many great memories.
I used to run a BBS back in the 90s. I was there for when the fancy new "Information Highway" (aka Internet) was rolled out widely across New Zealand when the national telecom finally started to offer a dialup service. Within three months BBS went from 200+ connections a day to maybe 1 or 2 connections. To be fair I'd become quite enthralled with the Internet too.
Yessssss!! Awesome stuff. Just to make you all laugh, us radio amateurs still run BBSs - AX.25 packet on 145MHz(ish). Most people stull use gear from the 80s... the classic Baycom modem chip is everywhere. 1200 baud FSK baby ;)
@@DevilbyMoonlight Amazingly 30 years later it's still totally a thing. Less useful than in the past of course, this thing called the internet became ubiquitous haha
Oh how I miss the BBS days! Watching this makes me want to get another PCBoard BBS up and running. I used to have a legit 100 node version of PCBoard 15.3 with PPL and the printed manuals, purchased from Clark Development before they went under. I had written PPE's to customize just about everything possible, but sadly all of that is long gone. A few of the PPE's I made public are still floating around the internet, but I don't have the source code for them any more.
Similar w/ PCBoard, although not that many nodes. It runs well under DOSBox... Reminds me of disecting the Goldbug virus I found in a file -- it was evil and aside from hiding in various places during reboots, had a small ongoing random chance of using your model to dial 911.
@@rickgreer7203 LOL! I never heard of a virus calling the cops before, but I can believe it. Ever heard of Iniquity BBS software? That software WAS a virus! I installed it, spent like 2 days making all my custom menus and setting everything up, and when I was just about to go online with it, my computer just hung on a blank screen with the hard drive accessing non-stop. I was pretty sure I was losing everything, but I just sat there and waited, and waited, and waited, and a couple hours later I was sitting there looking at a nice blank hard drive.
I still remember the day that I was dialing into BBS'es with a 2400 baud modem when I was a kid. It was a magical time and I am glad I actively lived through that era.
Not to be "that guy", but try doing so with a 300 baud acoustic coupler. You could watch the text refresh across the screen. Actually, you could read faster than the refresh. Wasn't long before 1200 baud became available and the race was off. I helped admin a BBS for a while...feels like a different life.
Oh boy bringing back some sorted memories. I ran a 16 line BBS from the late 80's to the early 90's. From a discarded XT to a 386, all on DOS using "Boyan BBS". Briefly went to ISDN but very soon with the AOL hack and other methods of getting to that new fangled Internet thing, BBS business dropped off. Didn't help that I as in the target area for the beta of the first GTE cable modems. But I thought I forgot all of the headaches of running that BBS and now after watching this I can honestly say they are all returning. Now if you started the whole build not from a clean Rocky9 install on the bare hardware but as a VM inside a Proxmox host, now THAT would have been the icing on the cake.
One of the best things about Demon was that we gave everyone a static IP, which made it great for hosting stuff like this when dial-up Internet took over. I had multiple telnet servers, mail servers and staff-only newsgroups running from my bedroom!
@@colingale it was always funny when you walked into their (demon, amsterdam) office and they had the same list of scriptkiddies on their whiteboard that were 'never to get an account there' as we all had too haha :P (just that we didn't write it on a whiteboard for everyone to see ;) the internet industry back then was a bit 'weird'. lol. 'oh i'm gonna bring this guy that works for a direct competitor to our corporate meeting with the ceo' and noone batted an eyebrow at it. :P lol 'there is free beer, just come' lol.
-some of them- are -not- part of 'that deal' tho. mainly leaseweb, bevelander, and nina brinks world online (now tiscali) were always a bit of a paria lol ;) but as for all the other ones, they weren't really seen as 'direct competitors'. it was really weird.
the words 'corporate espionage' definately were not in the dictionary of any of those hippies lol. 'oh some guy of a competitor, let's just give him beer and let him use our computers' lol.
also why most of them are set up in more or less exactly the same way. lol. although the whole nfs+yp+radius thing ofcourse is more or less copied from some university networks.
The first BBS systems were run on 8 bit machines. I developed one of the first BBS systems for a TRS-80 model 1. It ran entirely in memory. Floppy disk drives were crazy expensive then, and a hard disk was completely a pipe dream. A 300 baud modem was $500, so I built my own modem from plans I found in a magazine. When the price of floppy drives came down, I upgraded the BBS to use the floppies, which held all of 256k bytes. I ran it for about 10 years. In the late 1980's, I sunsetted the BBS when I moved from one house to another. At that point, I had parlayed my knowledge of developing online systems into a real product run on a super micro computer with multiple CPUs and banked memory capable of handling 16 simultaneous users. The original BBS hardware is in a box in my attic, with the software for it safely stored in my home office waiting for 1980 to come back again.
Wow! This brings back memories!😉 I had 2 BBS programs actually. I started with DOS-based 'Tri-BBS' in the early 1990's and eventually had the resources to do two phone lines with a matched set of 56K hardware modems on an IBM 80486 with a 2 mb. RAM card and a 20 mb. hard drive.😄 Later on, I bought Excalibur BBS ($199 for a 2 node system!), and ran it first on Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, and later on Windows 95. It was actually a graphical interface, and the caller would have the option to download the graphical client for their machine on the first call-in, and then use the client for subsequent connections that would give them a nice GUI to work with. It was very customizable, but unfortunately Excalibur went belly-up in 1999, when the actual internet was already a thing since 1996 or so, and private (and commercial) BBS's were fading quickly. That said, if I got the urge to try to spin up one of my old BBS's just for fun, I'll just pull one of my old machines out of storage and do it right on bare metal hardware!👍👍
I fall into about 5+ of your Venn diagrams you brought up. I have an Amiga 500 with the same GVP A530 Turbo, 40mhz with a 100mb SCSI drive (still functional). I ran a Wildcat BBS (still have the floppies) on a Tandy Sensation 486SX25. Built a NULL modem cable with parts from Radio Shack to transfer data between PC and Amiga, had different pinouts. Remember Kermit? I used to work with Novell NetWare. Remember token ring? I remember file locking issues/corruption with Samba shares for MS Access DB files. Early adopter to Docker and Kube. Great explanation, and how kernel/hardware forwarding works. I use VirtualBox to run multiple instances of Android, for emulated games that can use my PC's powerful video card. I've used FIDOnet. Remember Lycos? Anyone still play VGA Planets by Tim Wisseman?
I worked for Racal-Vadic, (a modem company in San Jose) in the '90's. I was also involved with the comity that decided on what to include in the 'AT' command set. I also ran a 2-line BBS at my home in Santa Cruz, CA It was called: Ocean Breeze BBS. I could accept any, buy I preferred: ZMODEM, (protocol) Handshake. It was faster then anything out their, and had unbelievable amount of command switches!
@@bricefleckenstein9666 - They originally set the BASIC commands, but never did much after that. We at Racal-Vadic and Zyxcell and other manufactures formed a committee to extend the command set. For instance, we could change the setting of the modem at the other end once connected. Hayes could not do that.
@@tubeDude48 Oh yeah, the extended AT command set. I'd forgotten about the extensions to the original Hayes set that became an industry standard (and eventually officially so as I recall).
@@bricefleckenstein9666 - I should have said that Hayes didn't want to be on the Standards Committee that we were a part of! They went in their own direction. We had many more 'AT' commands they did not implement.
This was an absolutely wonderful journey. I've watched a fair number of k8s explanations/tutorials, and by far this is my favourite + explains things very practically and effectively compared to the proper tutorials I've seen.
My first internet connection was _via_ a BBS. There was a menu option for SLIP Gateway which would print an IP address and then talk SLIP protocol to allow you to send & receive IP packets to the Internet.
That's fantastic, I remember wildcat BBS making a big deal of the fact they had introduced slip/ppp support. Unfortunately I had to move to demon to get my first ever ip connection. So by the time some BBSs near me offered ppp, I had already shifted on to demon.
@@RetroBytesUK Bill Blue's PeopleNet software ran on Unix - and had native access to Usenet. He also allowed select long-time users to have access to the underlying UNIX to use TRN/RN and the like instead.
I absolutely love this video, like all your videos I knew it would be great, but it had a USR courier modem on the thumbnail so it was going to be extra special. This video absolutely exceeded my extra high expectations as you also had docker and asterisk too. I run my own pbx on asterisk on an 8pi cluster along with other bits and bobs including a econet to bbs bridge (all inside the pi cluster). My first bbs experience was with my 2400 baud modem calling a bbs in Selby. But a few years later I had a usr hst courier modem and eventually when it came out the usr dual standard v. Everything courier modem. At that time I was calling bbs’s in the USA and Germany a lot. Thank you for sharing, I think I maybe pretty close to to centre of your Venn diagram.
Haven't the slightest clue during half the video (I know by name docker/kubernetes/ceph but... yea it's not my domain) but it was fun :D I was a bit too young for BBS, my time was more IRC :)
Some where out there several people are in the process of typing very long comments, as to exactly why they disapprove of everything I just did in that video.
@@RetroBytesUK Haha yes exactly! While I'm very much one to do things on period correct hardware, I admire the creativity and immense hackery of this project, lol! The idea of having a fully modern cloud service severely kneecapped with dial-up is just amusing to me. Well done, you! Also greetings from the land of meatballs across the pond.
Wow! Awesome video and a walk/run down memory lane. As the author of the DOS Telecom program Qmodem, I remember well the fun and excitement of getting "online". Cheers! John "Qmodem" Friel
Around here the local computer stores usually ran a BBS with a handful of modems. It was so you could download utilities and drivers and games. You could usually find lists and numbers of other BBS' to dial into from there. I ran a Renegade BBS, a DOS based BBS, for a few years for fun. Never got much above 2-3 lines as it was just a hobby. Apparently Renegade BBS got updated on May 6 2023 with Version 1.33 for DOS. My earliest run-ins with the actual internet were the door FTP downloaders.
I had a BBS in germany in early 90s, here ISDN was big so at the end I got 2 phone-lines with 2 ISDN cards and 4 maximum connections, analogue adapter so you can dial in via modem also (but only at the speed of 33k6 and 28k8). I also bought a used licence for "Remote Access", but only version 2, not 2.5. Since Harddrives where expensive I got 2 4xCD changer working really hard to deliver the files (some people would hang up if the file would not start downloading in a minute). Got a lot of doors (mostly games) and started developing my own games (like tic-tac-toe, 4-in-a-row or other mini-games, some even multiplayer or a real-time-chat interface). It was running on a network consisting of 2x 486 and 1x 386, using OS2 as underlying multitasking system so I could run 2 nodes on each 486 and the 386 was the file-server (horribly slow), using "Kirschbaum-Network", some BNC cables and only 10mbit. That was a nice thing to remember while watching your video. THX
Indeed - I once installed a certain version of a 'NAS OS' that turned out to be a Kubernetes Trojan horse - that got very quickly wiped in favour of something else before I found my house had been sacked in my sleep!
As someone who has years of experience running this the old school way and dicking with mariadb replication, i cant even wrap my head around how this works. This can keep a stable copy of mariadb across multiple nodes that come up and down or you have to use nosql with this?
I was enthusiastic about Kyubeynetes before I had to use it for work then it was a nightmare and now I want to not use any technology invented before 2010 lol
Kubernetes is awesome. Idk what you are on about. I learned it on my own and run it internally for most of my services. Don't even have to touch it for work. Though I probably will soon. I would absolutely hate to have to run all these containers manually.
I ran several iterations of a BBS on Renegade. Really loved that software. I can still remember the SysOp page on it. It was only a single line. There were a ton of single lines around where I lived. There were multiple multiline BBSes around though. The one I spent the most time on was a 4 line Amiga CNET BBS system. The school district had a 16 line BBS but I don't remember what software it was running. The newspaper company of our neighbor city started a BBS right before the web exploded that was the cadillac of BBSes. Single phone number that rolled over 32 lines if I remember correctly. It had a chat room and tons of files and became the place everybody called into to talk. The challenge back then was that the two cities had different exchanges and to call someone in the other city was long distance UNLESS you had a "metro" number. So there were a lot of systems that were only available to one city or the other unless you had a metro line or they upgraded to a metro line.
Shame about the timing for the local newspaper, they where impressively ahead of the curve for a local newspaper. I cant imagine any local newspaper in the UK being that forward thinking back then.
I'm a beginner in both spaces, and this was an awesome video! I'd wondered how BBS systems worked (before my time, sorry) and this introduces it really well (and now I kind of want to try to make something similar based on SSH for a project), and I've also failed to set up Kubernetes in my lab because I never got past the "write a bunch of yaml files and try to convince K3S to run them" step, to which I've now seen the next layers. Very exciting, will be sharing this one.
In high school (1996 i think) I built a renegade BBS for me and few buddies. The real reason, as sysadmin you can reset the day in LORD2 so I could get more turns and play it more. 😂
So many things that I’d forgotten that I knew lol, mixed in with some things that I took for granted or didn’t know at the time, that time being circa 1993 when BBSes were a good way to get access to the Internet. Now I know I’m old lol. Love the simple way that you described containers too - I remember trying to explain the concept to people back when Solaris introduced them many years ago.
This was an awesome overload of information. Really enjoyed the retro application to modern overlap. Back in the day (early 90’s) I ran a mustang bbs. Always wanted to “revive” the old style feel of it with modern stacks.
I had a BBS running on C64 with two floppies, two modems and a war dialer, that was fantastic. It was not uncommon to lose a modem to a nearby lightning strike.
I ran a BBS for an Apple user group in the 80s. Apple //e running ProDOS and a program called GBBS using a variant of BASIC called ACOS. Lots of fun and we networked each night with other Apple BBS systems to trade messages and email. At one time we actually were able to link into FidoNet. All this on a machine running at 1Mhz and 128k of RAM. Storage was handled with a single 60 Megabyte SCSI drive connected to an Apple high speed SCSI card. Fastest speed of connection was with a US Robotics 14.4K modem. 56K was only being talked about back then with 28.8K just starting to come on the scene. There were several modem telecommunication programs available for the Apple 2 series with TIC, (Talk Is Cheap) being a favorite shareware program.
So a friend of mine ran a major Amiga warez BBS back in the late 80s-mid 90s. Psychokinesis was the name IIRC. Dude had people connecting from around the world using questionable methods. He had like 40GB worth of cracked software running on tape drives of all things. It took a fair bit of time to seek to the right download, but after that it was full speed ahead. Wild times. Meanwhile, I ran one on an Apple //e through much of the 80s. No warez, but it was still pretty fun.
😮Wow! This was a very complicated system for a hobby project. I learned some things about Kubernetes and Ceph along the way, thanks! BTW, besides XModem there was the Kermit protocol which was quite advanced.
Back in the 80's my favorite BBS software was called Red Ryder by Scott Watson for the Mac. I think I still have a hard copy of the manual laying around here somewhere.
I am dead in the center of the venn diagram. At work I am building a k8s cluster and I was a former sysop and FidoNet user. I tried running JetBBS and Wildcat in a qemu VM a few years ago with little success but now I'm inspired. I want to play tradewars.
Thanks for the thorough and comprehensible explanation of how Docker containers work and how they differ from Virtual machines, what Kuberneats is and how it makes Docker containers hot swap-able across multiple servers. From there, seeing the rest of the stack of tools used to make this functional made my brain hurt. Sill, nothing like recreating the past for showing off the future! 🙂
I guess I started using local BBSs around 1989 at the age of 12 or 13. Basically all we did was download ASCII books, games and trackers / modules. We used software called Telix. I still remember the first time I used it to a text chat with my friend down the street. It was pretty mind-bending that I could type something on my computer and he could read it on his computer in real time.
Fun video! I ran a BBS using Fido (Data/SFnet, then Solbury HIll BBS), and was an early Fidonet node, I am sure it was one of the first 500, and maybe one of the first 200 nodes, I was node 163/5. LIke many, I went from Fido, to Opus and then Maximus. Before that I had accessed BBS using an Apple ][+ I had built. A friend ran an Apple 2 based BBS for many years, up until the //gs. I have on and off thought about bringing Solsbury Hill BBS back via the Internet, although I still have my US Robotics Courier V.everything modem. :-) So I will be watching to see how this projects goes...And I probably won't put together such and "Enterprise" level system, but I have a Rapsberry Pi 4b that is currently not being used, and might make a great candidate...maybe. Good Luck!
I ran one of the only metro-capable BBSes in the Dallas-Fort Worth area back when it was long distance to call between the cities (unless you had a metro-capable line that you paid extra for). I got up to 4 lines before ISPs started popping up - where I ended up working for a while.
Fabulous video, BBSes were a thing I could never afford to get into, but looked at enviously from outside with my nose pressed against the glass of the window. These days spend a lot of my time in the trenches with docker. Overlap is almost certainly larger than you think.
I'm constantly amazed and impressed by your breadth and depth of knowledge. Our computing paths must have been extremely similar, as you know all the technology which I know.
Fellow BBS and Kubernetes enthusiast here. Enjoyed the video. :D As an American, I got a laugh from the "and if you are feeling particularly American, *some pronunciation that I've never heard*". I think it's time to start confusing my coworkers with a new pronunciation :D. I had, at some point, started setting up a BBS on top of Kubernetes and eventually lost interest. Ended up running a single Mystic container on docker in a little throw away VM instead. I connect my old computers to it through a serial to wifi device.
I didn’t get into bbs till the early 90s but really enjoyed it. I ended up having a couple hundred regular users until a person from Canada decided to log on all the local bbs systems of which I had made friends with the sysops and then steal my BBs name. They went on to create a large multi node BBs and then became an isp and sold the name to a larger isp. Needless to say it killed my BBs. But it was fun while it lasted. Most of the people were players of trade wars.
I don't exactly know how this ended up in my recommended since I'm a tad too young to have experienced BBS (I was born in 1990 and didn't become aware that computers could comunicate to each other until my dad introduced me to the internet around 97 or 98) and most of the Kubernetes stuff went right over my head but I'm glad I watched this whole thing since it was quite interesting and I learned a number of things, for example I think I finally grasped what containers and docker are. This project does seem to be some serious overkill for the scope of what it's supposed to do but I can see why you go with this approach, it just seems fun to mess around with these many layers and have it all work exactly how you want it to do so, specially if you already had all that hardware and didn't have to buy anything.
This is, nearly verbatim, the same tech stack I manage at work for running big scientific computing for the space program. Except for the BBS stuff, obviously. The only differences is that we use rke2, the government-focused version of k3s, and we do put rancher on top of it all like you mentioned. Its a lot to wrap your head around at once, but once you do, its terrifying powerful (and easy to rack up cloud bills if you aren't smart enough to run in on your hardware).
Fun throwback video, but I would have to say that it's snapshot in time was well into BBSes history. When I started, there were far more systems running on computers like the Apple II, Commodore 64, TRS-80, TI-99 and even a Coleco Adam BBS in my area than were running on PCs. My first BBS ran on a PC with two 360k floppies and 640k ram on Fido BBS software.
This was an awesome breakdown and description of how to get things working. I think the only thing I would add is a hypervisor under your k3s layer so that you can run all of this on multiple "nodes" (VMs) on the same box, allowing you to scale up the physical hardware count later with minimal configuration.
had way too long a nap after work so its 3am and I'm watching this and as someone who made their first working dockerfile literally days ago i feel like i have been given a glimpse into the highest echelons of the dark arts i am just starting to dabble in
Nostalgia, oh nostalgia! 2:05 Look at that computer! Aaawww good times! Thank you for the trip to memory lane with enlightenment of the devices we had then to play with!
I added TCP/IP connectivity to my BBS in 1997, after I got a cable modem for high speed internet, so the concept is hardly just modern. In my case, my operating system was OS/2, and my serial drivers (SIO by Ray Gwinn) had built-in support for virtual serial ports that were mapped to TCP ports. I used a DOS BBS package called Renegade, which has no idea which serial ports were attached to modems, and which were attached to TCP sockets. File transfers and door games worked transparently, too. At that time, I also gated a selection of UseNet groups into my BBS, to supplement the existing FidoNet groups. It didn't last long, but there was a period of time where the BBS world and newly-accessible internet world blended fairly well together. I had quite a few new users from across the world. I really only closed up shop because I moved to an area with only dial-up internet access for while. Once I did finally have high speed access again, there didn't really seem to be much point in firing the BBS back up again. People had moved on.
I agree. I started with WWIV. Had all the games. Later I switched to PCBoard. I don't remember why but WWIV must have been missing something I thought I needed. Lost many user during the switch. Had 2 lines under OS/2.
I ran a TriBBS BBS and then a PCBoard. I even got into coding PPE’s for PCBoard. Was a lot of fun. A group of friends who ran BBS outside of local dial areas we got together and made a network and synced data nightly so there was a mini internet going on with some door games and message boards, tons of fun, different time.
I ran a 2 line bbs in 1990-ish...and then I used one line to dial out for internet access to it and then played Scrabble in real time via text display on Lambdamoo with people around the world. Today, everyone can do that... Back then, we were special.
My friends and I were on BBSs a lot in the early 80's. I connected with a 300 baud modem. That's where we learned how to hack into our school's computer from home. The school didn't have a network of computers, just one Apple IIe shared by the office staff and administrators... I believe that was around 1983, maybe. We did have a small computer lab with older Apples that I learned to "program" BASIC on, but mostly we all just played games.
I ran a BBS in the early to mid 90s. It was so much fun. And then talking with other local Sysops to get new ideas for modding mine. Actually got a small article in the local paper about what BBSs were and what mine was and how I got started. Those were the days. I miss them. Too bad I never kept a backup of my board as I moved on to other things after the Internet pretty much killed off BBSs. I ran mine first on DOS. Then moved to DesqView and later OS/2 which ran it just fine. And OS/2 had the option of a virtual modem and since I had two phone lines I could actually allow an online user to call out on the 2nd line and connect to the early Internet.
*I was one of the people who ran the first BBS in NYC, starting in 1976: "Modem Over Manhattan", or "M*O*M" for short. The earlier BBS's did NOT have hard drives, which were **_incredibly_** expensive, as well as huge, power hungry, and up to 100 pounds back then. We used 4 floppy drives when we started (which was considered **_huge_** at the time), and nobody (including us) had more than one line until roughly 1979 or 1980.*
I've head one or two people I know mention M*O*M
@@RetroBytesUK
It rapidly became a Phreak board, so it's legend has survived longer that I would have thought.
@@AnonymousSquirrel123 Would love an entire episode over this board :) Anything that we can read online? I think that I have found all that I could for MindVox. Thank you!
I've met Ward, but not Randy. I knew Bill Blue for a few years, That's 2 of the 3 first BBS system operators/writers of all time.
And yes, early BBSs commonly used floppy drives - I ran one for a few years.
I knew it, however I wasn't able to connect, because oversea phone calls were extremely expensive 😅
I ran a BBS called "Boondocks" back in the day. It had an Amiga, Console, and an AscII section. IF I'm not mistaking, the board had a C64 section also. It ran on 6 nodes eventually. It started with a USR 14K4 HST and eventually each node ran on a USRobotics Dual Standard v34 56k.
I had the time of my life back then running the BBS. People from all over the world called constantly and within no time it became (one of) the fastest board(s) in the world. Poeple called with Calling Cards, Credit Cards, PBXs, BlueBoxing and/or hacked lines, and many foreigners even called normally because they wanted to download/upload a release as fast as possible. Man, those days were the best days in my life. I miss it so very much.
That rings a bell with me, but I would have to check my old software still loaded on my ancient machine if it'd ever boot up. I remember using ascii, pr was it ansi, to move the cursor up into other peoples posts above mine when mine would load, then edit what they had said, lol. It was pretty funny until the sysop asked me to stop because it was confusing people.
Yes, I remember the days of pirate boards. I bought my first modem in 1981. It was 300 baud. It was the fastest consumer modem available. Speed was not a concern because simply being able to connect to other systems was mind blowing.
everyone always asks "y modem" but never "how modem" and i'm glad you're here to teach them.
I always went one better.
and if you paint it green and stick your hand up it... you got kermit.
Modem protocols included x modem, y modem, z modem.
All of them supported using the Kermit terminal program/upload download tool. Kermit has a piece of software is an amazing tool. To help me get through college and on to the universities DEC and VAX via dial up from a commodore 64
@@felderup Its not THAT easy being Kermit.
> everyone always asks "y modem"
To which I answer by pointing to my modem and saying (in my worst German accent) "Ze Modem!!!"
Honestly wasn't expecting a video about creating a BBS to include one of the most comprehensive explanations of containers I've ever seen on youtube
Yeah, especially one in an accent that I can 100% understand and sounds like someone I knoew and probably grew up with. Its a shame that at school nerds were scattered very thinly - but at least we end up gathering on channels like this.
What was funny about those BBS was that most of them were operated by individuals and it happened often that they closed after a few months. There was no search engine back then to find BBS that were reachable locally (ie no long distance calls). What I had at the time was a list of BBS that was compiled by a local computer store. The problem is that this list was grossly outdated and I can’t remember how many times that while trying to reach a BBS in the middle of the night I would ear someone answer the phone just before the modem sent a loud sync tone. This happened when the phone company would reassign a phone number that was formerly used by a BBS. Every weekend this would happen 4 or 5 times, that I accidentally wake up a random person that was unlucky enough to get one of those phone numbers that were previously used by a BBS.
There used to be a 'Top List' of all sorts of stats from different BBS's ranked in a table that used to circulate the message bases or could be displayed on a door or even MCI scripted into part of the logoff on the boards that signed up to it.. not only that there used to be other BBS numbers on the final logoff screens of most boards, but to be honest once a board went down everyone knew... my guess you were just starting out and hadn't been validated as any sysop that was switched on, became very security conscious and limited access of a new user until validated, but many did try to run a board and found it wasnt for them and jacked it in after a short while, but the ones that stayed were made of the right stuff...
@@DevilbyMoonlight I remember at the time that most higher end BBS that were using multiple phones lines on a single phone number were not free. The BBS that I was using were free and they were using cheaper residential phones lines and were most likely operated by a teenager like me at the time. And the problem with those was that as soon as the phone company figured out that the phone line was way more busy than a normal residential phone line they would ask to switch to a much pricier commercial line or terminate the service. But anyway, good memories.
Wardialing all local prefixes was fun here in IL, USA. I recall toneloc? Or I think Telemate allowed for something similar. Parents got sister a used car - I pressed for my own phone line. Not much, today, really gives that vibe of discovering things in an unknown digital frontier.
I'm the lead engineer for google cloud at a well known retailer here in the UK, in charge of GKE (Googles kubernetes offering) and was looking to escape k8s, low and behold you've managed to shoe horn it in to a retro video.
I take my hat off to you good sir, and `kubectl delete ns kube-system` as a personal attack
Could be worse, could be AKS.
I have another idea for running BBC mirco work loads, with econet emulation in k8s. I think I might do one "I did something stupid in kubernetes" video each year, until someone invites me todo the most stupid presentation at kubecon.
@@RetroBytesUKyou should present this on Kubecon 2025! It will be in London next year. This is just soooo awesome!
@@RetroBytesUK >BBC mirco work loads, with econet emulation in k8s
This is surely a must! :-)
@@Nee861 no, this is horrible hackery. OS packaging + a change management process is where it's at.
I think you'd be surprised at the size of the overlap here, as a lot of us that started on BBSes are now the people building and running these Kubernetes environments.
I second that!
former bbs and fidonet user (a point) here and I have worked with k8s. So +1 to that Venn intersection.
Yes
And here I was ready to say "you're not alone", but I guess I'll just add to the responses here. I wasn't online until the advent of DSL, so I had people tell me how awesome that tech was, and now pods are in my day job.
ive done neither, i only barely understand any of this but i find it fascinating, my little construction worker brain is trying to make sense of networking since im building a server for radarr and sonarr and slsk stuff. im learning about p2p file sharing, IRC chats, etc. its quite interesting, im also interested in BBS from a communications perspective since im into HAM radio, stuff like teletypes interest me
To avoid theft, my school in the 1980s let the kids take home BBC Micros across holidays. I borrowed one of them, plus a CUB monitor, and a modem. And I accessed Prestel from home. It's hard to explain to anybody nowadays how amazing this was. I mean, it was like gaining a superpower. Suddenly, the home computer could break out of the four walls of the home. It was no longer a dumb bit of beige plastic. Its blinkers were removed. It could see for miles. Alas, I couldn't log into Prestel because I didn't have a username (school had one but it was a closely-guarded secret). However, I did figure out how to access other services, and download some programs... Again, this was just mind-blowing at the time. Programs. Free. You just download it. What?!? No tape required. No typing in a listing from a magazine.
It really did feel like a superpower. Like when you first got that blue squid from BT or built your first smoothwall.
That was a cool school! Not quite what contemporary images of American schools imply.
OhGod! You made me remember typing in listings from magazines. That was such a painful experience. Well except for the moment of truth when after hours of typing you tried to run the thing for the first time. I was so grateful when they started to use checksums... Ah, the old times...
My Mom worked at Derby Collage and it was the same, she would bring home a BBC micro. I loved those things and I thought I was weird in that I didn't really play games, I couldn't get enough of 1) the basic and 2) the disk drive. My daily driver was a squidgy spectrum. 40 Years on an I bought a BBC micro and made one good Cub Microvitec from two duff ones and my box of disks including my programs all still read and work. And its amazing that the muscle memory is still there, remembering the star commands etc.
Prestel, that's a blast from the past!
"Blinders" I think you meant.
I'm a principal technologist at one of the big five technology companies, and I still think successfully configuring Front Door to work with FidoNet and my Telegard BBS is the greatest technological accomplishment of my life thus far.
I never ran a large BBS but I ran several smaller ones.
My first was running on a color computer with two floppies. I swore back then that I invented the linked list as that’s what I used to store messages. That was in jr high.
In high school, I had a color computer 3, and ran os/9 so I could have a BBS running while still using my computer. I also had a small hard drive but it wasn’t large and was very slow.
In college I ran that same BBS but with a larger and faster hard drive. I also had access to our Vax which had access to Bitnet. I wrote a Fidonet interface to upload bundles to the Vax and send them as files over Bitnet. This made it possible to participate with others with Bitnet access. Suddenly my little node had free access to the world.
All fifteen users were thrilled. :)
My first taste of the internet was through a BBS! One BBS system I used had a section for accessing various internet things like email, newgroups, and internet relay chat (IRC). It needed compatible BBS client software that allowed the internet protocol to pass through to other DOS programs that used those services. This was before the world wide web service started on the internet, not long before though, I'm not THAT old! 😛
I started using BBS's late in their lifespan a few years after I got my first PC and was fully employed as a programmer. I did not bother with them in my Spectrum and Atari ST days as modems back then were expensive.
A few years ago I tried running an old school BBS on my PC that's accessed through the internet. It worked but I lost interest in it once it was working fine.
Ohhhhhh memories. I owned Dynasty Online in Orlando, Florida (FidoNet 1:363/1000) back in the 90s (My first BBS I started in 1980) .... second largest in the world. At its peak we had 197 incoming lines. We were second only to one BBS that was larger by a FEW phone lines and that was EXEC-PC.
Howdy! Crystal Wind BBS in Palm Beach County here. I was always in awe of your setup. I met most of my close friends in high school through the BBS scene, including Panther's Byte.
@@EvanEdwards I remember CWB. Yes, the old "get togethers"we used to have on the weekends. I still know a lot of people back from that time period and to include some of my best friends.
@@EvanEdwards CWBBS - that's a name I haven't heard in a loooong time. I think that's the only one mentioned in the comments thread I actually connected to once-upon-a-time.
Old sysop of "The Rebel's Roost BBS" checking in and offering a salute to all you other pioneers of cyberspace! You're all legends!
I actually wrote my own email system with backend and client in quick basic, with a fidonet and internet email gateway, and the emails + client were then distributed on floppy disks to the users in my school. Every day I would process people's mails and generate new disks.
That's very cool
Around 2003-2007 I wrote and ran a digital signage system for a major corporation. Bare in mind I wasn't employed there as a programmer. I was an A.V. tech. So we had to use floppy disks and eventually thumb drives to distribute our content because the real computer guys wouldn't let us near THEIR network. I used a compiler called DarkBASICPro because it was regular old BASIC with a whole slew of multimedia features like opening images and copying and pasting image data to the screen, etc. Good times!!!
Your "Let's get modern" chapter should be extracted as a stand-alone video. It's hands-down the best intro to Docker video I've seen.
Bookmarking this for later 🎉
I ran a Fidonet node in 1992. Today, I work with OpenShift and Kubernetes. I can not believe I'm in the middle of the Venn diagram. sort of. 😮
Brill video, cheers!
I ran two BBSes in the late 80s, early 90s.
ANSI graphics, message forums.
I loved EXEC-PC for their huge file collection. I think you can still telnet to them for the old experience.
My first experience was around 1980 where a computer company I worked for ran FORUM-80 which ran on a TRS-80 Model II.
watching the software stack piling up docker, Kubernetes, Ceph etc for such a small workload: i am convinced RetroBytes is pulling a prank on us.
having watched these instructions, i definitely have to bleach my eyeballs. i want to unsee this rube goldberg software stack.
@@rarbiartIt is an excessive stack to run a DOS BBS, but that's rather the point of the video. To show a cloud scale stack, and apply it to running a BBS a thing that was never really cloud scale.
ua-cam.com/video/y8OnoxKotPQ/v-deo.html
Oh, they are. They describe it as doing it in an "offensively modern way". I mean, if I did a modern BBS on my Linux box.. I'd of course install the software, possibly give it it's own user account to run in, and it can store it's files there. Done.
28:56 "I could really do without introducing another layer of abstraction"
Proceeds to add _four_ layers of abstraction. (Is that even the right number?)
The overlap is far from just you; a lot of us older Infra guys grew up in the BBS scene, and it was great seeing you address how to use modern infra for old-school BBSes. Thanks for the good time!
I ran a BBS on my C64 with a 300 baud modem... that evolved into a MUD, on two 386 computers running Linux, with four phone lines and four 14400 baud US Robotics modems. So many great memories.
I used to run a BBS back in the 90s. I was there for when the fancy new "Information Highway" (aka Internet) was rolled out widely across New Zealand when the national telecom finally started to offer a dialup service. Within three months BBS went from 200+ connections a day to maybe 1 or 2 connections. To be fair I'd become quite enthralled with the Internet too.
As a CKAD-certified software engineer boy howdy am I excited for the insanity I'm about to witness
Yessssss!! Awesome stuff. Just to make you all laugh, us radio amateurs still run BBSs - AX.25 packet on 145MHz(ish). Most people stull use gear from the 80s... the classic Baycom modem chip is everywhere. 1200 baud FSK baby ;)
I looked into doing this myself in the 90's
@@DevilbyMoonlight Amazingly 30 years later it's still totally a thing. Less useful than in the past of course, this thing called the internet became ubiquitous haha
Yes, indeed. A HAM myself and love using digital modes. 73
Oh how I miss the BBS days! Watching this makes me want to get another PCBoard BBS up and running. I used to have a legit 100 node version of PCBoard 15.3 with PPL and the printed manuals, purchased from Clark Development before they went under. I had written PPE's to customize just about everything possible, but sadly all of that is long gone. A few of the PPE's I made public are still floating around the internet, but I don't have the source code for them any more.
Similar w/ PCBoard, although not that many nodes. It runs well under DOSBox... Reminds me of disecting the Goldbug virus I found in a file -- it was evil and aside from hiding in various places during reboots, had a small ongoing random chance of using your model to dial 911.
@@rickgreer7203 LOL! I never heard of a virus calling the cops before, but I can believe it. Ever heard of Iniquity BBS software? That software WAS a virus! I installed it, spent like 2 days making all my custom menus and setting everything up, and when I was just about to go online with it, my computer just hung on a blank screen with the hard drive accessing non-stop. I was pretty sure I was losing everything, but I just sat there and waited, and waited, and waited, and a couple hours later I was sitting there looking at a nice blank hard drive.
I used to run a BBS back in the late 80s/early 90s. I even had a few users donating to help the running of the board.
I still remember the day that I was dialing into BBS'es with a 2400 baud modem when I was a kid. It was a magical time and I am glad I actively lived through that era.
Teaches one patience. 😆
Not to be "that guy", but try doing so with a 300 baud acoustic coupler. You could watch the text refresh across the screen. Actually, you could read faster than the refresh. Wasn't long before 1200 baud became available and the race was off. I helped admin a BBS for a while...feels like a different life.
@@Mike80528same, 300 baud acoustic coupler for me first as well.
Harddrives were notoriously expensive back then, until the arrival of the Kalok 100 Mb
And huge. When a head fell in an office you could literally smell it.
Oh boy bringing back some sorted memories. I ran a 16 line BBS from the late 80's to the early 90's. From a discarded XT to a 386, all on DOS using "Boyan BBS". Briefly went to ISDN but very soon with the AOL hack and other methods of getting to that new fangled Internet thing, BBS business dropped off. Didn't help that I as in the target area for the beta of the first GTE cable modems. But I thought I forgot all of the headaches of running that BBS and now after watching this I can honestly say they are all returning. Now if you started the whole build not from a clean Rocky9 install on the bare hardware but as a VM inside a Proxmox host, now THAT would have been the icing on the cake.
One of the best things about Demon was that we gave everyone a static IP, which made it great for hosting stuff like this when dial-up Internet took over. I had multiple telnet servers, mail servers and staff-only newsgroups running from my bedroom!
Demon internet was my fav growing up and yup that public ip and web server made it great to setup systems.
@@colingale it was always funny when you walked into their (demon, amsterdam) office and they had the same list of scriptkiddies on their whiteboard that were 'never to get an account there' as we all had too haha :P (just that we didn't write it on a whiteboard for everyone to see ;) the internet industry back then was a bit 'weird'. lol. 'oh i'm gonna bring this guy that works for a direct competitor to our corporate meeting with the ceo' and noone batted an eyebrow at it. :P lol 'there is free beer, just come' lol.
-some of them- are -not- part of 'that deal' tho. mainly leaseweb, bevelander, and nina brinks world online (now tiscali) were always a bit of a paria lol ;) but as for all the other ones, they weren't really seen as 'direct competitors'. it was really weird.
the words 'corporate espionage' definately were not in the dictionary of any of those hippies lol. 'oh some guy of a competitor, let's just give him beer and let him use our computers' lol.
also why most of them are set up in more or less exactly the same way. lol. although the whole nfs+yp+radius thing ofcourse is more or less copied from some university networks.
The first BBS systems were run on 8 bit machines. I developed one of the first BBS systems for a TRS-80 model 1. It ran entirely in memory. Floppy disk drives were crazy expensive then, and a hard disk was completely a pipe dream. A 300 baud modem was $500, so I built my own modem from plans I found in a magazine. When the price of floppy drives came down, I upgraded the BBS to use the floppies, which held all of 256k bytes. I ran it for about 10 years. In the late 1980's, I sunsetted the BBS when I moved from one house to another. At that point, I had parlayed my knowledge of developing online systems into a real product run on a super micro computer with multiple CPUs and banked memory capable of handling 16 simultaneous users. The original BBS hardware is in a box in my attic, with the software for it safely stored in my home office waiting for 1980 to come back again.
Living in Southern California in the mid 80's I often connected to many local BBSs that ran off of Commodore 64s.
Atari 800xl and 130xes too..... 😂
you're easily in my top three favorite computer youtube channels. you're a great storyteller!
Back in the mid 1990s I ran two line WWW IV BBS on OS/2 Warp. Before that I ran CMBBS on the Commodore 64 in the 1980s for awhile. Good times!
OS/2 seamed to be a particularly good OS for running a BBS.
Wow! This brings back memories!😉 I had 2 BBS programs actually. I started with DOS-based 'Tri-BBS' in the early 1990's and eventually had the resources to do two phone lines with a matched set of 56K hardware modems on an IBM 80486 with a 2 mb. RAM card and a 20 mb. hard drive.😄 Later on, I bought Excalibur BBS ($199 for a 2 node system!), and ran it first on Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, and later on Windows 95. It was actually a graphical interface, and the caller would have the option to download the graphical client for their machine on the first call-in, and then use the client for subsequent connections that would give them a nice GUI to work with. It was very customizable, but unfortunately Excalibur went belly-up in 1999, when the actual internet was already a thing since 1996 or so, and private (and commercial) BBS's were fading quickly.
That said, if I got the urge to try to spin up one of my old BBS's just for fun, I'll just pull one of my old machines out of storage and do it right on bare metal hardware!👍👍
I fall into about 5+ of your Venn diagrams you brought up. I have an Amiga 500 with the same GVP A530 Turbo, 40mhz with a 100mb SCSI drive (still functional). I ran a Wildcat BBS (still have the floppies) on a Tandy Sensation 486SX25. Built a NULL modem cable with parts from Radio Shack to transfer data between PC and Amiga, had different pinouts. Remember Kermit? I used to work with Novell NetWare. Remember token ring? I remember file locking issues/corruption with Samba shares for MS Access DB files. Early adopter to Docker and Kube. Great explanation, and how kernel/hardware forwarding works. I use VirtualBox to run multiple instances of Android, for emulated games that can use my PC's powerful video card. I've used FIDOnet. Remember Lycos? Anyone still play VGA Planets by Tim Wisseman?
I used to use gnome warpad to play VGA planets, not sure it was ever an official client.
I was there at the beginning. I was using an Atari 800XL with a 300bps modem to connect to BBS'es.
Me too, I upgraded to my 130xe and even went up to 9600 baud eventually with a US Robotics modem.
Sitting on the Docker the Bay....
superb work, John!
I worked for Racal-Vadic, (a modem company in San Jose) in the '90's. I was also involved with the comity that decided on what to include in the 'AT' command set.
I also ran a 2-line BBS at my home in Santa Cruz, CA It was called: Ocean Breeze BBS. I could accept any, buy I preferred: ZMODEM, (protocol) Handshake. It was faster then anything out their, and had unbelievable amount of command switches!
I thought Hayes originated the AT command set?
@@bricefleckenstein9666 - They originally set the BASIC commands, but never did much after that. We at Racal-Vadic and Zyxcell and other manufactures formed a committee to extend the command set. For instance, we could change the setting of the modem at the other end once connected. Hayes could not do that.
@@tubeDude48 Oh yeah, the extended AT command set.
I'd forgotten about the extensions to the original Hayes set that became an industry standard (and eventually officially so as I recall).
@@bricefleckenstein9666 - I should have said that Hayes didn't want to be on the Standards Committee that we were a part of! They went in their own direction. We had many more 'AT' commands they did not implement.
This was an absolutely wonderful journey. I've watched a fair number of k8s explanations/tutorials, and by far this is my favourite + explains things very practically and effectively compared to the proper tutorials I've seen.
My first internet connection was _via_ a BBS. There was a menu option for SLIP Gateway which would print an IP address and then talk SLIP protocol to allow you to send & receive IP packets to the Internet.
That's fantastic, I remember wildcat BBS making a big deal of the fact they had introduced slip/ppp support. Unfortunately I had to move to demon to get my first ever ip connection. So by the time some BBSs near me offered ppp, I had already shifted on to demon.
@@RetroBytesUK Bill Blue's PeopleNet software ran on Unix - and had native access to Usenet.
He also allowed select long-time users to have access to the underlying UNIX to use TRN/RN and the like instead.
I absolutely love this video, like all your videos I knew it would be great, but it had a USR courier modem on the thumbnail so it was going to be extra special. This video absolutely exceeded my extra high expectations as you also had docker and asterisk too. I run my own pbx on asterisk on an 8pi cluster along with other bits and bobs including a econet to bbs bridge (all inside the pi cluster).
My first bbs experience was with my 2400 baud modem calling a bbs in Selby. But a few years later I had a usr hst courier modem and eventually when it came out the usr dual standard v. Everything courier modem. At that time I was calling bbs’s in the USA and Germany a lot.
Thank you for sharing, I think I maybe pretty close to to centre of your Venn diagram.
Haven't the slightest clue during half the video (I know by name docker/kubernetes/ceph but... yea it's not my domain) but it was fun :D
I was a bit too young for BBS, my time was more IRC :)
When you were talking about VMs, then containers, I began to wonder if your were going to go down the k8s rabbit hole. Didn't disappoint!
This is an incredibly disgusting way to set up a DOS BBS.. Somehow I approve of it.
Some where out there several people are in the process of typing very long comments, as to exactly why they disapprove of everything I just did in that video.
@@RetroBytesUK Haha yes exactly! While I'm very much one to do things on period correct hardware, I admire the creativity and immense hackery of this project, lol! The idea of having a fully modern cloud service severely kneecapped with dial-up is just amusing to me. Well done, you! Also greetings from the land of meatballs across the pond.
I loved it too even though it kind of lost me a bit, obnoxious indeed but highly intriguing, love your style
Wow! Awesome video and a walk/run down memory lane. As the author of the DOS Telecom program Qmodem, I remember well the fun and excitement of getting "online". Cheers!
John "Qmodem" Friel
I loved Qmodem when I was young! It was one of my favorites. Thank you for that!
I used QModem a LOT! Thanks for that. If I remember right, Dan Horn built a small BBS that ran in QModem that I ran for awhile. Fun Fun Fun!
Pretty sure I used that back in the day. Great piece of software.
Came for DOS BBS, stayed for devops 101 and then some
Around here the local computer stores usually ran a BBS with a handful of modems. It was so you could download utilities and drivers and games. You could usually find lists and numbers of other BBS' to dial into from there. I ran a Renegade BBS, a DOS based BBS, for a few years for fun. Never got much above 2-3 lines as it was just a hobby. Apparently Renegade BBS got updated on May 6 2023 with Version 1.33 for DOS. My earliest run-ins with the actual internet were the door FTP downloaders.
A made my own own 300baud phone coupler modem,the case was made out of balsa wood. Circa 1981
1985 in Germany there was building instruction for a illegal "Datenklo"-modem in the "Hackerbibel". Estimated 25000 exemplars where build till 1988.
Always a happy day when a new Retrobytes video is released 🎉🎉😂
Love the subject ❤
Ironically, BBSs were where I got the first "internet" ip addresses (there were no URLs).
I had a BBS in germany in early 90s, here ISDN was big so at the end I got 2 phone-lines with 2 ISDN cards and 4 maximum connections, analogue adapter so you can dial in via modem also (but only at the speed of 33k6 and 28k8). I also bought a used licence for "Remote Access", but only version 2, not 2.5. Since Harddrives where expensive I got 2 4xCD changer working really hard to deliver the files (some people would hang up if the file would not start downloading in a minute). Got a lot of doors (mostly games) and started developing my own games (like tic-tac-toe, 4-in-a-row or other mini-games, some even multiplayer or a real-time-chat interface). It was running on a network consisting of 2x 486 and 1x 386, using OS2 as underlying multitasking system so I could run 2 nodes on each 486 and the 386 was the file-server (horribly slow), using "Kirschbaum-Network", some BNC cables and only 10mbit. That was a nice thing to remember while watching your video. THX
I ran a small BBS on an Amiga 500 and NO hard drive. It was pure fun.
One is not enthusiastic about Kubernetes. One has Kubernetes inflicted upon them.
here it was clearly self-harm and should be reported before others start to copy him 😅
Indeed - I once installed a certain version of a 'NAS OS' that turned out to be a Kubernetes Trojan horse - that got very quickly wiped in favour of something else before I found my house had been sacked in my sleep!
As someone who has years of experience running this the old school way and dicking with mariadb replication, i cant even wrap my head around how this works. This can keep a stable copy of mariadb across multiple nodes that come up and down or you have to use nosql with this?
I was enthusiastic about Kyubeynetes before I had to use it for work then it was a nightmare and now I want to not use any technology invented before 2010 lol
Kubernetes is awesome. Idk what you are on about. I learned it on my own and run it internally for most of my services. Don't even have to touch it for work. Though I probably will soon. I would absolutely hate to have to run all these containers manually.
Hearing about the heyday of XMODEM is wild, considering that I use it on a semi-regular basis today for firmware upgrades on "modern" network devices.
Reminds me back in the 80's I used to bring my old modem at work and used a VT100 dumb terminal to call in to the 4-5 BBSs I used. :)
I ran several iterations of a BBS on Renegade. Really loved that software. I can still remember the SysOp page on it. It was only a single line. There were a ton of single lines around where I lived. There were multiple multiline BBSes around though. The one I spent the most time on was a 4 line Amiga CNET BBS system. The school district had a 16 line BBS but I don't remember what software it was running. The newspaper company of our neighbor city started a BBS right before the web exploded that was the cadillac of BBSes. Single phone number that rolled over 32 lines if I remember correctly. It had a chat room and tons of files and became the place everybody called into to talk.
The challenge back then was that the two cities had different exchanges and to call someone in the other city was long distance UNLESS you had a "metro" number. So there were a lot of systems that were only available to one city or the other unless you had a metro line or they upgraded to a metro line.
Shame about the timing for the local newspaper, they where impressively ahead of the curve for a local newspaper. I cant imagine any local newspaper in the UK being that forward thinking back then.
I ran a Piracy BBS at an Amiga at the 90's 😀 .. Running with 3 Nodes USR Courier HST Dual Standard
I'm a beginner in both spaces, and this was an awesome video! I'd wondered how BBS systems worked (before my time, sorry) and this introduces it really well (and now I kind of want to try to make something similar based on SSH for a project), and I've also failed to set up Kubernetes in my lab because I never got past the "write a bunch of yaml files and try to convince K3S to run them" step, to which I've now seen the next layers. Very exciting, will be sharing this one.
In high school (1996 i think) I built a renegade BBS for me and few buddies. The real reason, as sysadmin you can reset the day in LORD2 so I could get more turns and play it more. 😂
So many things that I’d forgotten that I knew lol, mixed in with some things that I took for granted or didn’t know at the time, that time being circa 1993 when BBSes were a good way to get access to the Internet. Now I know I’m old lol. Love the simple way that you described containers too - I remember trying to explain the concept to people back when Solaris introduced them many years ago.
This was an awesome overload of information. Really enjoyed the retro application to modern overlap. Back in the day (early 90’s) I ran a mustang bbs.
Always wanted to “revive” the old style feel of it with modern stacks.
I had a BBS running on C64 with two floppies, two modems and a war dialer, that was fantastic. It was not uncommon to lose a modem to a nearby lightning strike.
Made my first BBS when I was 11 using a Packard Bell 386 w/2400 bps modem.
I ran a BBS for an Apple user group in the 80s. Apple //e running ProDOS and a program called GBBS using a variant of BASIC called ACOS. Lots of fun and we networked each night with other Apple BBS systems to trade messages and email. At one time we actually were able to link into FidoNet. All this on a machine running at 1Mhz and 128k of RAM. Storage was handled with a single 60 Megabyte SCSI drive connected to an Apple high speed SCSI card. Fastest speed of connection was with a US Robotics 14.4K modem. 56K was only being talked about back then with 28.8K just starting to come on the scene. There were several modem telecommunication programs available for the Apple 2 series with TIC, (Talk Is Cheap) being a favorite shareware program.
So a friend of mine ran a major Amiga warez BBS back in the late 80s-mid 90s. Psychokinesis was the name IIRC. Dude had people connecting from around the world using questionable methods. He had like 40GB worth of cracked software running on tape drives of all things. It took a fair bit of time to seek to the right download, but after that it was full speed ahead. Wild times. Meanwhile, I ran one on an Apple //e through much of the 80s. No warez, but it was still pretty fun.
😮Wow! This was a very complicated system for a hobby project. I learned some things about Kubernetes and Ceph along the way, thanks! BTW, besides XModem there was the Kermit protocol which was quite advanced.
Let's not forget Zmodem!
Back in the 80's my favorite BBS software was called Red Ryder by Scott Watson for the Mac. I think I still have a hard copy of the manual laying around here somewhere.
Great video. I hadn't ever even thought about running a DOS workload on my k8s cluster.
This is the most understandable container vs vm explanation I have seen.
I am dead in the center of the venn diagram. At work I am building a k8s cluster and I was a former sysop and FidoNet user. I tried running JetBBS and Wildcat in a qemu VM a few years ago with little success but now I'm inspired. I want to play tradewars.
This is a ridiculous setup, totally cursed and I like it ;)
It’s awesome in its work arounds, pointless, utterly ridiculous and utter fabulous at the same time:)
Thanks for the thorough and comprehensible explanation of how Docker containers work and how they differ from Virtual machines, what Kuberneats is and how it makes Docker containers hot swap-able across multiple servers. From there, seeing the rest of the stack of tools used to make this functional made my brain hurt. Sill, nothing like recreating the past for showing off the future! 🙂
I guess I started using local BBSs around 1989 at the age of 12 or 13. Basically all we did was download ASCII books, games and trackers / modules. We used software called Telix. I still remember the first time I used it to a text chat with my friend down the street. It was pretty mind-bending that I could type something on my computer and he could read it on his computer in real time.
Fun video! I ran a BBS using Fido (Data/SFnet, then Solbury HIll BBS), and was an early Fidonet node, I am sure it was one of the first 500, and maybe one of the first 200 nodes, I was node 163/5. LIke many, I went from Fido, to Opus and then Maximus. Before that I had accessed BBS using an Apple ][+ I had built. A friend ran an Apple 2 based BBS for many years, up until the //gs. I have on and off thought about bringing Solsbury Hill BBS back via the Internet, although I still have my US Robotics Courier V.everything modem. :-) So I will be watching to see how this projects goes...And I probably won't put together such and "Enterprise" level system, but I have a Rapsberry Pi 4b that is currently not being used, and might make a great candidate...maybe. Good Luck!
this guy could talk about anything, the voice is simply enough to enjoy it. and even then, he chose an interesting topic ! 10/10 stars!
I ran one of the only metro-capable BBSes in the Dallas-Fort Worth area back when it was long distance to call between the cities (unless you had a metro-capable line that you paid extra for). I got up to 4 lines before ISPs started popping up - where I ended up working for a while.
dear lord, I forgot Renegade was written in Pascal
Love to see this blast from the past. I use to run the Lucky Irish BBS back in the day. :)
Fabulous video, BBSes were a thing I could never afford to get into, but looked at enviously from outside with my nose pressed against the glass of the window. These days spend a lot of my time in the trenches with docker. Overlap is almost certainly larger than you think.
I'm constantly amazed and impressed by your breadth and depth of knowledge. Our computing paths must have been extremely similar, as you know all the technology which I know.
Fellow BBS and Kubernetes enthusiast here. Enjoyed the video. :D As an American, I got a laugh from the "and if you are feeling particularly American, *some pronunciation that I've never heard*". I think it's time to start confusing my coworkers with a new pronunciation :D. I had, at some point, started setting up a BBS on top of Kubernetes and eventually lost interest. Ended up running a single Mystic container on docker in a little throw away VM instead. I connect my old computers to it through a serial to wifi device.
I didn’t get into bbs till the early 90s but really enjoyed it. I ended up having a couple hundred regular users until a person from Canada decided to log on all the local bbs systems of which I had made friends with the sysops and then steal my BBs name. They went on to create a large multi node BBs and then became an isp and sold the name to a larger isp. Needless to say it killed my BBs. But it was fun while it lasted. Most of the people were players of trade wars.
I don't exactly know how this ended up in my recommended since I'm a tad too young to have experienced BBS (I was born in 1990 and didn't become aware that computers could comunicate to each other until my dad introduced me to the internet around 97 or 98) and most of the Kubernetes stuff went right over my head but I'm glad I watched this whole thing since it was quite interesting and I learned a number of things, for example I think I finally grasped what containers and docker are.
This project does seem to be some serious overkill for the scope of what it's supposed to do but I can see why you go with this approach, it just seems fun to mess around with these many layers and have it all work exactly how you want it to do so, specially if you already had all that hardware and didn't have to buy anything.
This is, nearly verbatim, the same tech stack I manage at work for running big scientific computing for the space program. Except for the BBS stuff, obviously. The only differences is that we use rke2, the government-focused version of k3s, and we do put rancher on top of it all like you mentioned. Its a lot to wrap your head around at once, but once you do, its terrifying powerful (and easy to rack up cloud bills if you aren't smart enough to run in on your hardware).
Fun throwback video, but I would have to say that it's snapshot in time was well into BBSes history. When I started, there were far more systems running on computers like the Apple II, Commodore 64, TRS-80, TI-99 and even a Coleco Adam BBS in my area than were running on PCs. My first BBS ran on a PC with two 360k floppies and 640k ram on Fido BBS software.
This was an awesome breakdown and description of how to get things working.
I think the only thing I would add is a hypervisor under your k3s layer so that you can run all of this on multiple "nodes" (VMs) on the same box, allowing you to scale up the physical hardware count later with minimal configuration.
had way too long a nap after work so its 3am and I'm watching this and as someone who made their first working dockerfile literally days ago i feel like i have been given a glimpse into the highest echelons of the dark arts i am just starting to dabble in
Nostalgia, oh nostalgia!
2:05
Look at that computer! Aaawww good times!
Thank you for the trip to memory lane with enlightenment of the devices we had then to play with!
Brilliant explanation. Gonna share this with my Junior Devs
I added TCP/IP connectivity to my BBS in 1997, after I got a cable modem for high speed internet, so the concept is hardly just modern. In my case, my operating system was OS/2, and my serial drivers (SIO by Ray Gwinn) had built-in support for virtual serial ports that were mapped to TCP ports. I used a DOS BBS package called Renegade, which has no idea which serial ports were attached to modems, and which were attached to TCP sockets. File transfers and door games worked transparently, too.
At that time, I also gated a selection of UseNet groups into my BBS, to supplement the existing FidoNet groups. It didn't last long, but there was a period of time where the BBS world and newly-accessible internet world blended fairly well together. I had quite a few new users from across the world. I really only closed up shop because I moved to an area with only dial-up internet access for while. Once I did finally have high speed access again, there didn't really seem to be much point in firing the BBS back up again. People had moved on.
I miss the BBS days... WWIV, LotRD, Tradewars, The Pit.... These were my jam back in the day!
I agree. I started with WWIV. Had all the games. Later I switched to PCBoard. I don't remember why but WWIV must have been missing something I thought I needed. Lost many user during the switch. Had 2 lines under OS/2.
I ran a TriBBS BBS and then a PCBoard. I even got into coding PPE’s for PCBoard. Was a lot of fun. A group of friends who ran BBS outside of local dial areas we got together and made a network and synced data nightly so there was a mini internet going on with some door games and message boards, tons of fun, different time.
I ran a 2 line bbs in 1990-ish...and then I used one line to dial out for internet access to it and then played Scrabble in real time via text display on Lambdamoo with people around the world. Today, everyone can do that... Back then, we were special.
Thank you , just finished watching hoping for a part two
I absolutely loved this video. Thanks. Didn't feel remotely long, and brightened a Saturday of tedious DIY!
"an ASCII Controe Cold" LOL. I do that all the time. Its so refreshing to hear someone else do it!!!!
Brilliant, I was unaware of the Astrsk Modem module. , I actually do have a working modem at home tided in to my home PBX, might dial in
My friends and I were on BBSs a lot in the early 80's. I connected with a 300 baud modem. That's where we learned how to hack into our school's computer from home. The school didn't have a network of computers, just one Apple IIe shared by the office staff and administrators... I believe that was around 1983, maybe. We did have a small computer lab with older Apples that I learned to "program" BASIC on, but mostly we all just played games.
A sublime mix of the both the modern and the retro. Well done! Cheers!
I ran a BBS in the early to mid 90s. It was so much fun. And then talking with other local Sysops to get new ideas for modding mine. Actually got a small article in the local paper about what BBSs were and what mine was and how I got started. Those were the days. I miss them. Too bad I never kept a backup of my board as I moved on to other things after the Internet pretty much killed off BBSs. I ran mine first on DOS. Then moved to DesqView and later OS/2 which ran it just fine. And OS/2 had the option of a virtual modem and since I had two phone lines I could actually allow an online user to call out on the 2nd line and connect to the early Internet.
Fidonet, Waystar Marlboro MA. I remember that local BBS well.
Bows in utter respect....