126 Sentences With "BBSes" | Random Sentence Generator

Some fathers buy you a modem and let you call BBSes all night.

Bobbleheads.com. Royal has been around quite a long time, and spent time running BBSes before he got into the internet business.

The web, and dial-up BBSes and Usenet before it, incubated and distributed knowledge and commentary; later, blogging platforms democratized the power of publication.

For most of my life, the internet, particularly its social media — BBSes, Usenet, LiveJournal, blogosphere, even Myspace, early Twitter and Facebook — consistently made people happier.

Not exactly pleasant noises, admittedly, but I anticipate they will bring back a flood of memories, Proust-style, of BBSes, hours-long download times and pirated screen savers.

BBSes may not be in heavy use anymore, and the scene around warez art is considerably diminished, but some of these pieces are still viewable in their original format.

ASCII porn, back then, moved through early forums called bulletin board systems (BBSes), Telenet, Usenet, and the sneakernet—the term for transferring files around on physical hard drives, CDs and floppy disks.

In 1993, a pair of BBSes found themselves sued for allowing users to upload images taken from Playboy, with courts at the time generally holding the board operators liable for copyright infringement on their systems.

Digital isn't pure retro tech fetishism, though, and based on my own experience I can confidently say that a fondness for those old-fashioned BBSes is not a prerequisite for appreciating what it has to offer.

It offers a re-creation of that world so loving that, as my father observed me dialing into various boards using the numbers scattered like breadcrumbs across the other BBSes in the game, he told me with complete sincerity that he "better not see any extra charges on the phone bill".

Screenshot: safecrackersIf you grew up in the age of BBSes, chances are the image above (or something like it) is familiar to you—a big splashy piece of artwork made with only ANSI characters, often accompanying a piece of software some faraway group of kids had cracked for all to use.

According to the FidoNet Nodelist, BBSes reached their peak usage around 1996, which was the same period that the World Wide Web and AOL became mainstream. BBSes rapidly declined in popularity thereafter, and were replaced by systems using the Internet for connectivity. Some of the larger commercial BBSes, such as MaxMegabyte and ExecPC BBS, evolved into Internet service providers. The website textfiles.

The Alex terminals did double duty for connecting to text-only BBSes.

It wasn't long before others became interested in the BBS software, and it went on to have over 500 authorized BBSes and about three times that number using it in an unauthorized manner. It was very popular in the underground pirate, hacking, and phreaking community as well as with legitimate systems, including church BBSes, non profit group BBSes, many shareware distribution systems, and a governmental BBS in Portugal.

Some Hong Kong BBSes had used encodings in ChinaSea fonts before the introduction of HKSCS.

Large systems used all 26 DOS drive letters with multi-disk changers housing tens of thousands of copyright-free shareware or freeware files available to all callers. These BBSes were generally more family friendly, avoiding the seedier side of BBSes. Access to these systems varied from single to multiple modem lines with some requiring little or no confirmed registration. Some BBSes, called elite, WaReZ or pirate boards, were exclusively used for distributing cracked software, phreaking, and other questionable or unlawful content.

"704 Area Code BBSes Through History" John Lawlor co-founded EmailChannel.com, an early ESP (Email Service Provider), in 1995.

A door in a bulletin board system (BBS) is an interface between the BBS software and an external application. The term is also used to refer to the external application, a computer program that runs outside of the main bulletin board program. Sometimes called external programs, doors are the most common way to add games, utilities, and other extensions to BBSes. Because BBSes typically depended on the telephone system, BBSes and door programs tended to be local in nature, unlike modern Internet games and applications.

BBSes with multiple phone lines often provide chat rooms, allowing users to interact with each other. Bulletin board systems were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web, social networks, and other aspects of the Internet. Low-cost, high-performance modems drove the use of online services and BBSes through the early 1990s. InfoWorld estimated that there were 60,000 BBSes serving 17 million users in the United States alone in 1994, a collective market much larger than major online services such as CompuServe.

As time went on, shareware CD-ROMs were sold with up to thousands of files on each CD-ROM. Small BBSes copied each file individually to their hard drive. Some systems used a CD-ROM drive to make the files available. Advanced BBSes used Multiple CD-ROM disc changer units that switched 6 CD-ROM disks on demand for the caller(s).

Most early BBSes operated as individual systems. Information contained on that BBS never left the system, and users would only interact with the information and user community on that BBS alone. However, as BBSes became more widespread, there evolved a desire to connect systems together to share messages and files with distant systems and users. The largest such network was FidoNet.

Popular commercial BBS programs were Blue Board, Ivory BBS, Color64 and CNet 64. In the early 1990s, a small number of BBSes were also running on the Commodore Amiga. Popular BBS software for the Amiga were ABBS, Amiexpress, C-Net, StormforceBBS, Infinity and Tempest. There was also a small faction of devoted Atari BBSes that used the Atari 800, then the 800XL, and eventually the 1040ST.

These events were especially popular with BBSes that offered chat rooms. Some of the BBSes that provided access to illegal content faced opposition. On July 12, 1985, in conjunction with a credit card fraud investigation, the Middlesex County, New Jersey Sheriff's department raided and seized The Private Sector BBS, which was the official BBS for grey hat hacker quarterly 2600 Magazine at the time.This Day in Geek History: July12, thegreatgeekmanual.

First appearing around the time of BBSes, The Scene is composed primarily of people dealing with and distributing media content for which special skills and advanced software are required.

The warez scene started emerging in the 1970s, used by predecessors of software cracking and reverse engineering groups. Their work was made available on privately run bulletin board systems (BBSes). The first BBSes were located in the U.S., but similar boards started appearing in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and mainland Europe. At the time, setting up a machine capable of distributing data was not trivial and required a certain amount of technical skill.

March 17, many university BBSes (including Unnamed of Peking University, Terra Cotta of Xi'an Jiaotong University, etc.) closed their public access one after another. Meanwhile, searching keyword "Tsinghua University" in the popular Baidu search engine no longer returns the entry "Tsinghua University BBS" which used to rank the second. Similar screening has been done to other university BBSes as well. Shortly after the blocking, students of Tsinghua University found various means to express their discontent.

Some general purpose Bulletin Board Systems had special levels of access that were given to those who paid extra money, uploaded useful files or knew the SysOp personally. These specialty and pay BBSes usually had something unique to offer their users, such as large file libraries, warez, pornography, chat rooms or Internet access. Pay BBSes such as The WELL and Echo NYC (now Internet forums rather than dial-up), ExecPC, PsudNetwork and MindVox (which folded in 1996) were admired for their tight-knit communities and quality discussion forums. However, many free BBSes also maintained close knit communities, and some even had annual or bi-annual events where users would travel great distances to meet face-to-face with their on-line friends.

These BBSes often had multiple modems and phone lines, allowing several users to upload and download files at once. Most elite BBSes used some form of new user verification, where new users would have to apply for membership and attempt to prove that they were not a law enforcement officer or a lamer. The largest elite boards accepted users by invitation only. Elite boards also spawned their own subculture and gave rise to the slang known today as leetspeak.

What PCBoard was for warez BBSes on the IBM PC, was Amiexpress for BBSes running on Commodore Amiga computers. Despite the high price tag Clark Development Company sold more than 50,000 PCBoard licenses by 1995. The last full release of PCBoard by Clark Development Company was version 15.3 in September 1996. Clark Technologies, a division of Clark Development Company announced on July 29, 1996 the availability of source code and OEM licenses for the PCBoard BBS software.

One such game was Seth Robinson's Legend of the Red Dragon, and another popular dystopian RPG: Operation: Overkill, another was Mutants!. BBSes often published high scores, encouraging players to beat others. InterBBS leagues allowed users of different BBSes to compete against each other in the same game. A modern version of this known as BBSlink exists allowing sysops to offer door games on their BBS which are hosted on a remote server, thereby increasing the user base of the game.

Jim Maxey is the founder and president of the world's most financially successful Bulletin Board System, Event Horizons BBS which, along with most BBSes, became defunct or migrated to the world wide web in or around 1995.

Open PTT is a BBS implementation known for its ease of installation, which is why many BBSes directly run Open PTT as their system. It can be set up with little manual configuration, and it is well documented.

The government reacted by closely monitoring these BBSes. Two sites in Peking University were temporarily shut down. SMTH was closed for one day. The following month, SMTH closed its Military, History, Salon and Time-Space Report discussion groups.

Chips 'n' Bits : the Northern Territory Computer Users' newsletter, catalogue.nla.gov.au, retrieved March 15, 2009 In addition, in the US, a major monthly magazine, Computer Shopper, carried a list of BBSes along with a brief abstract of each of their offerings.

Plonk has similarly been used on BBSes, online forums, blogs, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and wikis (which usually do not have filters). It is occasionally used in reference to blocking a user on instant messaging (IM) or a social media site.

Due to the costs of toll calls which often varied between peak and off-peak times, mailer software would usually allow its operator to configure the optimal times in which to attempt to send mail to other systems. BBS software was used to interact with human callers to the system. BBS software would allow dial-in users to use the system's message bases and write mail to others, locally or on other BBSes. Mail directed to other BBSes would later be routed and sent by the mailer, usually after the user had finished using the system.

Many SysOps also adopted a theme in which they customized their entire BBS (welcome screens, prompts, menus, and so on) to reflect that theme. Common themes were based on fantasy, or were intended to give the user the illusion of being somewhere else, such as in a sanatorium, wizard's castle, or on a pirate ship. In the early days, the file download library consisted of files that the SysOps obtained themselves from other BBSes and friends. Many BBSes inspected every file uploaded to their public file download library to ensure that the material did not violate copyright law.

Remorse continues to release ASCII in the same traditional artpack format that it started with. These packs are now distributed via the internet on IRC and FTP servers; decorating FTP sites, telnet BBSes, NFO files or art for the sake of art.

ACiD Productions (ACiD) is a digital art group. Founded in 1990, the group originally specialized in ANSI artwork for BBSes. More recently, they have extended their reach into other graphical media and computer software development. During the BBS-era, their biggest competitor was iCE Advertisements.

Early 1990s editions of Boardwatch were filled with ads for single-click install solutions dedicated to these new sysops. While this gave the market a bad reputation, it also led to its greatest success. During the early 1990s, there were a number of mid-sized software companies dedicated to BBS software, and the number of BBSes in service reached its peak. Towards the early 1990s, the BBS industry became so popular that it spawned three monthly magazines, Boardwatch, BBS Magazine, and in Asia and Australia, Chips 'n Bits Magazine which devoted extensive coverage of the software and technology innovations and people behind them, and listings to US and worldwide BBSes.

Online games designed for BBSes initially used ASCII as the character set, but since the late-1980s, most BBSes employed colored ANSI art as the graphical standard. These online games became known as "BBS door games", as connecting to a BBS opened the "door" between the client and the games on the BBS. However, terminal emulators are still in use today, and people continue playing MUDs (multi-user dungeon) and exploring interactive fiction. The Interactive Fiction Competition was established in 1995 to encourage development of and explore independent interactive fiction titles, and has since held annual competitions for who can develop the best such game.

The reason it was usually done was for technical challenge. The BBSes typically hosted several megabytes of material. The best boards had multiple phone lines and up to one hundred megabytes of storage space, which was very expensive at the time. Releases were mostly games and later software.

The introduction of inexpensive dial-up internet service and the Mosaic web browser offered ease of use and global access that BBS and online systems did not provide, and led to a rapid crash in the market starting in 1994. Over the next year, many of the leading BBS software providers went bankrupt and tens of thousands of BBSes disappeared. Today, BBSing survives largely as a nostalgic hobby in most parts of the world, but it is still an extremely popular form of communication for Taiwanese youth (see PTT Bulletin Board System). Most surviving BBSes are accessible over Telnet and typically offer free email accounts, FTP services, IRC and all the protocols commonly used on the Internet.

They also created some artwork and demos. All their productions were freely available to download from BBSes and the internet. In the 1990s, they were known for having many of the tracking scene's top musicians as members. Their early presence on the Internet made them one of the first netlabels.

However, some versions of the software, from small community BBSes to large systems supporting thousands of simultaneous users, are still in use today. Citadel development has always been collaborative with a strong push to keep the source code in the public domain. This makes Citadel one of the oldest surviving FOSS projects.

In the 1980s, the revolution of the personal computer and the popularity of computer bulletin board systems (BBSes) (accessed via modem) created an influx of tech-savvy users. These BBSes became popular for computer hackers and others interested in the technology, and served as a medium for previously scattered independent phone phreaks to share their discoveries and experiments. This not only led to unprecedented collaboration between phone phreaks, but also spread the notion of phreaking to others who took it upon themselves to study, experiment with, or exploit the telephone system. This was also at a time when the telephone company was a popular subject of discussion in the US, as the monopoly of AT&T; Corporation was forced into divestiture.

Amiga 3000 running a two-line BBS Unlike modern websites and online services that are typically hosted by third-party companies in commercial data centers, BBS computers (especially for smaller boards) were typically operated from the SysOp's home. As such, access could be unreliable, and in many cases, only one user could be on the system at a time. Only larger BBSes with multiple phone lines using specialized hardware, multitasking software, or a LAN connecting multiple computers, could host multiple simultaneous users. The first BBSes used homebrew software, quite often written or customized by the SysOps themselves, running on early S-100 bus microcomputer systems such as the Altair 8800, IMSAI 8080 and Cromemco under the CP/M operating system.

Most of these went unreleased although a few were eventually released by other companies. Some titles originally planned for cartridge release such as the C64 Mario Bros. were released on disk instead for cost reasons. Other titles such as the IBM port of Stargate were completed, but never published; they were leaked to BBSes.

WWIV was a popular brand of bulletin board system software from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. The modifiable source code allowed a sysop to customize the main BBS program for their particular needs and aesthetics. WWIV also allowed tens of thousands of BBSes to link together, forming a worldwide proprietary computer network, the WWIVnet, similar to FidoNet.

ASIC is a compiler and integrated development environment for a subset of the BASIC programming language. It was released for MS-DOS and compatible systems as shareware. Written by Dave Visti of 80/20 Software, it was one of the few BASIC compilers legally available for download from BBSes. ASIC allows compiling to an EXE or COM file.

Renegade is a freeware bulletin board system (BBS) written for IBM PC- compatible computers running MS-DOS that gained popularity among hobbyist BBSes in the early to mid 1990s. It was originally written by Cott Lang in Turbo Pascal, optimized with assembly language, based on the source code of Telegard, which was in turn based on the earlier WWIV.

Since most early BBSes were run by computer hobbyists, they were typically technical in topic, with user communities revolving around hardware and software discussions. As the BBS phenomenon grew, so did the popularity of special interest boards. Bulletin Board Systems could be found for almost every hobby and interest. Popular interests included politics, religion, music, dating, and alternative lifestyles.

WWIVnet was a Bulletin board system (BBS) network for WWIV-based BBSes. It was created by Wayne Bell on December 1, 1987.WWIVnews Specific History of the creation of WWIVnet on December 1, 1987. textfiles.com. The system was similar to FidoNet in purpose, but used a very different routing mechanism that was more automated and distributed.

Planet was originally published as a quarterly e-zine (electronic magazine) in plain text, DOCMaker (Macintosh only), and later Adobe Acrobat 1.0 formats, the latter two using full color and illustrations. Issues were posted on CompuServe, AOL, eWorld, and various Bulletin Board Services (BBSes). It converted to a webzine (HTML) format in mid-1996 and began using the planetmag.com and planetmagazine.

Artwork in high resolution VGA format The group originally specialized in the creation of ANSI artwork for BBSes and MCGA graphics. During the BBS-era, their biggest competitor was ACiD Productions. The ANSI artscene was in a continual state of flux, with intense rivalry between artists and groups. In addition, ANSI artists tended to switch loyalties often, moving from group to group.

6park () is a Chinese Internet forum specializing in community-written news, launched in 2003. Its Chinese name means a place which made people are reluctant to leave. It is a "mega-BBS" with forums for subjects as diverse as economics, health, marriage, and online movies, etc., but its style is unique and unrelated to other mega-BBSes such as 2channel.

While plagued by the ills common to BBSes, the site empowered residents. Due in part to the placement of publicly available terminals in libraries, homeless persons and their issues received considerable attention on PEN. The SWASHLOCK (Showers, WASHers, and LOCKers) plan was developed on PEN and implemented in 1993. PEN also served as a center to organize opposition to the 1990 proposal to redevelop 415 PCH.

SPITFIRE's most successful release (Version 3.2) came in 1992, just before the World Wide Web exploded on the scene. By 1994, many SysOps began converting from running BBSes to becoming Internet Service Providers. Mr. Woltz was greatly admired by loyal SysOps, but was known for being somewhat stubborn. Due to his unwillingness to add Internet connectivity to the software, SPITFIRE's usage dwindled significantly throughout the United States.

It was not unusual in the early 1990s to find Blue Boards still thriving while BBSes run on far more powerful computers languished or were relegated to shareware file depositories. The real death-knell to Blue Board was the rise of multi-line chat systems, starting with DDial and progressing to STS and MajorBBS. It is not known whether any Blue Boards are still operational today.

Copy protection for computer software, especially for games, has been a long cat-and-mouse struggle between publishers and crackers. These were (and are) programmers who defeated copy protection on software as a hobby, add their alias to the title screen, and then distribute the "cracked" product to the network of warez BBSes or Internet sites that specialized in distributing unauthorized copies of software.

The copier devices and dissemination of hardware information through BBSes made it possible to start developing software on the video game consoles. The software evolved from crack intros to demos, and finally to home-made games. The homebrew software development scene is still active on multiple contemporary platforms. Also the availability of such ROM binary dumps allowed the birth of Video game console emulators.

Operation Sundevil was a 1990 nationwide United States Secret Service crackdown on "illegal computer hacking activities." It involved raids in approximately fifteen different cities and resulted in three arrests and the confiscation of computers, the contents of electronic bulletin board systems (BBSes), and floppy disks. It was revealed in a press release on May 9, 1990. The arrests and subsequent court cases resulted in the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Twenty- seven search warrants, resulting in three arrests, were issued and executed on May 7 and 8, 1990. Police also took around 42 computers and approximately 25 BBSes, including some of the most infamous and elite hacking BBSs in the world at that time, such as Cloud Nine. This was the largest crackdown on electronic bulletin boards in world history. Finally, about 23,000 floppy disks were also seized.

After a number of years, the DOC source code was finally released under the GNU General Public License. It is presented mainly for 'academic interest' due to its complexity, specificity to ISCA BBSes PA-RISC hardware, and poor documentation; however, at least one branch from an earlier version of DOC is being developed under the name vDOC (or variant DOC), which is known to work on Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD systems.

Nowadays ANSI graphics have a niche utility for a few telnet BBSes still active and is mainly created by artists for the sake of it and exhibited as an example of retro digital art. The creation of newer Microsoft Windows compatible software like ACiDDraw, TundraDraw and the currently most used PabloDraw, which runs on both Windows and Mac, allowed the small number of remaining artists to keep creating ANSI art.

Telehack is a text-based simulation of an early version of the Internet. Telehack is a virtual museum that allows one to see what the Internet was like in the 1990s, when young hackers were browsing through different bulletin board systems and shell accounts. One can learn exactly how they hacked in a safe and simulated environment as well as view real documents saved from BBSes thanks to textfiles.com.

The JAM Message Base Format was one of the most popular file formats of message bases on DOS-based BBSes in the 1990s. JAM stands for "Joaquim-Andrew- Mats" after the original authors of the API, Joaquim Homrighausen, Andrew Milner, Mats Birch, and Mats Wallin. Joaquim was the author of FrontDoor, a DOS-based FidoNet-compatible mailer. Andrew was the author of RemoteAccess, a popular DOS-based Bulletin Board System.

In the December 8, 1991 edition of the Dilbert comic strip, Scott Adams refers to the mere mentioning of trellis code modulation as a means for stopping a casual conversation cold. In the 2017 track "We Do It Different on the West Coast," from the album Goths, John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats sings, "Trellis modulation for the children," in reference to dialing into Goth subculture-oriented BBSes in the pre-World Wide Web era.

In 1984, Steve Punter released a successor to PTP called C1, or New Punter. C1 was the standard protocol for use on Commodore BBSes, and was rarely supported by terminal or BBS software for other operating systems. The C1 specification was rife with inaccuracies and ambiguities, making it difficult to implement from scratch. Nevertheless, the protocol came into widespread use because Punter released the source code for the original implementation into the public domain.

In case of loss of connectivity, the transmission could be restarted from that part. The process was slower but much more reliable. It also allowed people who accessed the Internet only through email using dial-up lines to download files that were located remotely. Unlike FTP, files could be transferred through FTPmail even if the user did not have an online Internet connection (for example, using BBSes or other specialized e-mail software).

The auctioneer/seller would post a notice on a system bulletin board, describing the item for sale and setting a minimum bid and closing time. CompuServe was sponsoring such auctions through its classified ad system in 1980. But individuals ran their own online auctions as early as 1979 on both CompuServe and The Source, which were in beta the first part of that year. Such auctions were also run on the earliest public BBSes, going back to 1978.

It was also possible to use it as an answering machine as well as for voice recording. The tape recorder was installed for compatibility with the old model, and was removed in the MZ-2520, which is an inexpensive version in which does not have the MZ-80B / 2000 mode. Communication-aware design The MZ-2500 included a serial port and dedicated modem phone socket for "personal computer communication" i.e. to connect to data services online such as BBSes.

This led to one of the earliest implementations of Electronic Commerce in 1996 with replication of partner stores around the globe. TCP/IP networking allowed most of the remaining BBSes to evolve and include Internet hosting capabilities. Recent BBS software, such as Synchronet, Mystic BBS, EleBBS, DOC or Wildcat! BBS, provide access using the Telnet protocol rather than dialup, or by using legacy DOS-based BBS software with a FOSSIL-to-Telnet redirector such as NetFoss.

It originally began as a project of Brendon Woirhaye (The Byter) and David Hicks (Moebius) in 1990 to quickly modify an existing BBS package to meet a simple organizational need (separate conferences for IBM PC users and Amiga users), and to meet the needs of high speed (9600 bit/s) communication, as most BBSes of the time could not pump data to the modem quickly enough. The I/O and display subsystems were rewritten, and the BBS package got its name.

The root of Taiwanese "kuso" was not the Japanese word kuso itself but . The word kusogē is a clipped compound of and , which means, quite literally, "crappy (video) games". The introduction of such a category originally was to show gamers how to appreciate and enjoy a game of poor quality—such as appreciating the games' outrageous flaws—instead of becoming frustrated by them. This philosophy soon spread to Taiwan, where people would share the games and often satirical comments on BBSes, and the term was further shortened.

While the use of FidoNet has dropped dramatically compared with its use up to the mid-1990s, it is still used in many countries and especially Russia and former republics of the USSR. Some BBSes, including those that are now available for users with Internet connections via telnet, also retain their FidoNet netmail and echomail feeds. Some of FidoNet's echomail conferences are available via gateways with the Usenet news hierarchy using software like UFGate. There are also mail gates for exchanging messages between Internet and FidoNet.

But it was not long before hobbyists were able to combine the Smartmodem with new software to create the first real bulletin board systems (BBSes), which created significant market demand. The market grew rapidly in the mid-1980s, and as the Smartmodem was the only truly "universal" modem on the market, Hayes grew to take over much of the market. By 1982, the company was selling 140,000 modems a year, with sales of $12 million annually (). Heatherington retired from what was then a large company in 1984.

Wake-on-Ring (WOR), sometimes referred to as Wake-on-Modem (WOM), is a specification that allows supported computers and devices to "wake up" or turn on from a sleeping, hibernating or "soft off" state (e.g. ACPI state G1 or G2), and begin operation. The basic premise is that a special signal is sent over phone lines to the computer through its dial-up modem, telling it to fully power-on and begin operation. Common uses were archive databases and BBSes, although hobbyist use was significant.

The Advanced Video Attribute Terminal Assembler and Recreator (AVATAR) protocol is a system of escape sequences occasionally used on bulletin board systems (BBSes). Its basic level was designed explicitly as a compression of the much longer ANSI escape codes, and can thus render colored text and artwork faster over slow connections. Even when the terminal didn't understand it, the data on disk could use the AVATAR format and so take up less space. AVATAR was adapted to Advanced Zansi/Avatar Terminal Handshaking Output Transfer Handler (AZATHOTH).

Airspace was probably the first organization of its kind to adopt a modem based bulletin board system (BBS).604 Area Code BBSes Through History Airspace was also one of the first organizations of this nature to have a web site. Some screen shots from an early version of the site turned up in internal documents from Philip Morris.Document 2047549852/9854 and Document 2084063121/3130 The organization's public persona is the Grim Reaper, used it to create a form of street theatre at tobacco promotions.

Slade became one of a small number of researchers who can be called the world's experts on malware. Fred Cohen named Slade's early work organizing computer viruses, software, BBSes and book reviews Mr. Slade's lists. Slade is one of fewer than thirty people worldwide who are credited for contributions in the final version of the VIRUS-L FAQ, which, with the Usenet group comp.virus and the VIRUS-L mailing list, was the public group of record for computer virus issues from 1988 to 1995.

He asked them to find a reasonable Macintosh- based e-mail system that offered both LAN and modem support, a real GUI, and supported both private e-mail as well as public discussion areas (forums). He wanted a system that "even teachers could use". BBSes offered modem support and public forums, but typically had no LAN support and were character-based. Various LAN e-mail systems existed, those on the Mac had reasonable GUI's, but they tended to have poor modem support and few offered forums.

9600 bit/s was not even established as a strong standard before V.32bis at 14.4 kbit/s took over in the early 1990s. This period also saw the rapid rise in capacity and a dramatic drop in the price of hard drives. By the late 1980s, many BBS systems had significant file libraries, and this gave rise to leeching, users calling BBSes solely for their files. These users would tie up the modem for some time, leaving less time for other users, who got busy signals.

It was released in the end of 1989, and before it saw widespread use, HS/Link was created which was easily added to BBSes and allowed for file lists and bidirectional transfers. Part of the problem with BiModem is that very few sysops and users wanted to wade through the instructions. To simplify installation, a ZIP file with BiModem and a preconfigured shareware copy of ProComm with a batch file to run BiModem was created. The final version (BiModem 1.25) was released in 1991.

Between March and April, the SMTH community organized a kite-flying party and received a large publicity nationwide as CCTV (China Central Television) recorded and aired the event in its Our Generation program. SMTH was accessible to the entire campus community around the end of April and saw its traffic peaked. The number of online visitors often ran to the triple digits. September 18, 1996, radical opinions regarding Diaoyu Islands (as known in China, Senkaku Islands as known in Japan) issue appeared on many BBSes across China.

Since the 1980s in the days of the dial-up BBSes, the term carding has been used to describe the practices surrounding credit card fraud. Methods such as 'trashing', raiding mail boxes and working with insiders at stores were cited as effective ways of acquiring card details. Use of drops at places like abandoned houses and apartments or with persuadable neighbors near such a location were suggested. Social engineering of mail order sales representatives are suggested in order to provide passable information for card not present transactions.

For a few years this was a very popular form of MUD, hosted on a number of BBS systems, until widespread Internet access eliminated most BBSes. In 1984, Mark Jacobs created and deployed a commercial gaming site, Gamers World. The site featured two games coded and designed by Jacobs, a MUD called Aradath (which was later renamed, upgraded and ported to GEnie as Dragon's Gate) and a 4X science-fiction game called Galaxy, which was also ported to GEnie. At its peak, the site had about 100 monthly subscribers to both Aradath and Galaxy.

A crime forum is a generic term for an Internet forum specialising in computer crime and Internet fraud activities such as hacking, Online Identity Theft, Phishing, Pharming, Malware Attacks or spamming. During the early days of the Internet public dial up BBSes would serve to put miscreants in touch with one another to share tips of credit card fraud, hacking and other illicit services. By the 2000s and the rise of the web, modern Internet forum software was preferred, with private invite-only sites being the most long lived. Sites like ShadowCrew, counterfeitlibrary.

They first appeared on Apple II computer in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and then on ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC games that were distributed around the world via Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) and floppy disk copying. By 1985, when reviewing the commercially available ISEPIC cartridge which adds a custom crack intro to memory dumps of Commodore 64 software, Ahoy! wrote that such intros were "in the tradition of the true hacker". Early crack intros resemble graffiti in many ways, although they invaded the private sphere and not the public space.

Cracking groups would use the intros not just to gain credit for cracking, but to advertise their BBSes, greet friends, and gain themselves recognition. Messages were frequently of a vulgar nature, and on some occasions made threats of violence against software companies or the members of some rival crack-group. Crack-intro programming eventually became an art form in its own right, and people started coding intros without attaching them to a crack just to show off how well they could program. This practice evolved into the demoscene.

Although BBSes have been eclipsed by the World Wide Web and the Internet, WWIV and other popular software still exist and are supported today. One popular WWIV support site is owned by Frank Reid, who runs Eagle's Dare BBSEagle's Dare BBS near Washington, D.C. The current 5.0 release has enhanced Internet gateway capabilities such as telnet accessibility, and other modern features. WWIV is now owned by Dean Nash aka Trader Jack; his BBS is at bbs.wwiv.com. WWIV uses the Synchronet FOSSIL driver and is released under the Apache Software License.

During this time, exploration of telephone networks diminished, and phreaking focused more on toll fraud. Computer hackers began to use phreaking methods to find the telephone numbers for modems belonging to businesses, which they could exploit later. Groups then formed around the BBS hacker/phreaking (H/P) community such as the famous Masters of Deception (Phiber Optik) and Legion of Doom (Erik Bloodaxe) groups. In 1985, an underground e-zine called Phrack (a combination of the words Phreak and Hack) began circulation among BBSes, and focused on hacking, phreaking, and other related technological subjects.

VIDTEX is a family of telecommunication software developed for CompuServe for use with its online dial-up service. VIDTEX client software was available for Atari and Commodore 8-bit microcomputers, and was noted for its ability to directly display RLE graphics and its support for file transfers using the CompuServe B protocol. Its popularity led to third-party VIDTEX terminal emulators, such as CBterm/C64, as well as stand-alone programs for displaying VIDTEX graphics. Large collections of VIDTEX graphics could also be found on independently operated BBSes.

From the 1990s on, most BBS software had the capability to "drop to" doors. Several standards were developed for passing connection and user information to doors; this was usually done with "dropfiles", small binary or text files dropped into known locations in the BBS's file system. Most doors were responsible for operating the serial port or other communications device directly until returning control to the BBS. Later development of FOSSIL drivers have allowed both BBSes and their doors to communicate without being responsible for direct operation of the communications hardware.

Much of the shareware movement was started via user distribution of software through BBSes. A notable example was Phil Katz's PKARC (and later PKZIP, using the same ".zip" algorithm that WinZip and other popular archivers now use); also other concepts of software distribution like freeware, postcardware like JPEGview and donationware like Red Ryder for the Macintosh first appeared on BBS sites. Doom from id Software and nearly all Apogee Software games were distributed as shareware (Apogee is, in fact, credited for adding an order form to a shareware demo).

A tank and truck made using ASCII art The "Roflcopter" as an example for animated ASCII art ASCII art is used wherever text can be more readily printed or transmitted than graphics, or in some cases, where the transmission of pictures is not possible. This includes typewriters, teleprinters, non-graphic computer terminals, printer separators, in early computer networking (e.g., BBSes), e-mail, and Usenet news messages. ASCII art is also used within the source code of computer programs for representation of company or product logos, and flow control or other diagrams.

Unauthorized copying has been an ongoing phenomenon that started when high quality, commercially produced software was released for sale. Whether the medium was cassette tape or floppy disk, cracking enthusiasts found a way to duplicate the software and spread it without the permission of the maker. Thriving bootlegging communities were built around the Apple II, Commodore 64, the Atari 400 and Atari 800 line, the ZX Spectrum, the Amiga, and the Atari ST, among other personal computers. Entire networks of BBSes sprang up to traffic illegal software from one user to the next.

Lex joined KOS in early 1984, but after a few suggestions about new members were rejected, Lex decided to put up an invitation-only BBS and form a new group. Lex contacted those people who he had seen on BBSes such as Plover-NET and the people that he knew personally who possessed the necessary knowledge that the group he envisioned should have, starting around May 1984. After a number of Alliance Teleconferences, Lex Luthor, Karl Marx, Mark Tabas, Agrajag the Prolonged, King Blotto, Blue Archer, EBA, The Dragyn, and Unknown Soldier became the original Legion of Doom members.

Many BBSes also allowed users to exchange files, play games, and interact with other users in a variety of ways (i.e.: node to node chat). A scanner/tosser application, such as FastEcho, FMail, TosScan and Squish, would normally be invoked when a BBS user had entered a new FidoNet message that needed to be sent, or when a mailer had received new mail to be imported into the local messages bases. This application would be responsible for handling the packaging of incoming and outgoing mail, moving it between the local system's message bases and the mailer's inbound and outbound directories.

A porting effort started, involving Jennings, Madil and Baker. This caused all involved to rack up considerable long distance charges as they all called each other during development, or called into each other's BBSes to leave email. During one such call "in May or early June", Baker and Jennings discussed how great it would be if the BBS systems could call each other automatically, exchanging mail and files between them. This would allow them to compose mail on their local machines, and then deliver it quickly, as opposed to calling in and typing the message in while on a long-distance telephone connection.

Growth continued to accelerate, and by the spring of 1985, the system was already reaching its limit of 250 nodes. In addition to the limits on the growth of what was clearly a popular system, nodelist maintenance continued to grow more and more time-consuming. It was also realized that Fido systems were generally clustered – of the 15 systems running by the start of June 1984, 5 of them were in St. Louis. A user on Jennings's system in San Francisco that addressed emails to different systems in St. Louis would cause calls to be made to each of those BBSes in turn.

Basic FirstClass "desktop", circa 1993 After renaming the product to the more generic FirstClass, they started demonstrating early versions to Toronto-area Mac BBSes. An Apple Canada employee, Mark Windrim, set up a FirstClass BBS in Toronto called MAGIC (the Macintosh Awareness Group in Canada). Local Mac users heard of the system and established accounts, quickly turning it into the largest Mac-oriented BBS system in the area. Having started with a single phone line and a tiny user base, MAGIC became a commercial entity called "Magic", eventually reached 6,000 users, and had 48 phone lines.

A bulletin board system or BBS (also called Computer Bulletin Board Service, CBBS) is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting. In the early 1980s, message networks such as FidoNet sprang up to provide services such as NetMail, which is similar to email. Many BBSes also offer online games in which users can compete with each other.

The earlier machines generally lacked hard drive capabilities, which limited them primarily to messaging. MS-DOS continued to be the most popular operating system for BBS use up until the mid-1990s, and in the early years, most multi-node BBSes were running under a DOS based multitasker such as DESQview or consisted of multiple computers connected via a LAN. In the late 1980s, a handful of BBS developers implemented multitasking communications routines inside their software, allowing multiple phone lines and users to connect to the same BBS computer. These included Galacticomm's MajorBBS (later WorldGroup), eSoft The Bread Board System (TBBS), and Falken.

Other popular BBS's were Maximus and Opus, with some associated applications such as BinkleyTerm being based on characters from the Berkley Breathed cartoon strip of Bloom County. Though most BBS software had been written in BASIC or Pascal (with some low-level routines written in assembly language), the C language was starting to gain popularity. By 1995, many of the DOS-based BBSes had begun switching to modern multitasking operating systems, such as OS/2, Windows 95, and Linux. One of the first graphics based BBS applications was Excalibur BBS with a low bandwidth applications that required its own client for efficiency.

Before commercial Internet access became common, these networks of BBSes provided regional and international e-mail and message bases. Some even provided gateways, such as UFGATE, by which members could send/receive e-mail to/from the Internet via UUCP, and many FidoNet discussion groups were shared via gateway to Usenet. Elaborate schemes allowed users to download binary files, search gopherspace, and interact with distant programs, all using plain text e-mail. As the volume of FidoNet Mail increased and newsgroups from the early days of the Internet became available, satellite data downstream services became viable for larger systems.

Although Worldgroup initially had some success, the initial proprietary client/server model was an unfortunate strategic choice, as the world wide web was just emerging as a dominant phenomenon. The popularity of the text-terminal-based BBSes, as well as America Online's proprietary client model, faded as online use became web-oriented. Galacticomm's slow response in adapting to the web- based online model probably was fatal. Founder Tim Stryker committed suicide on August 6, 1996, in Colorado, and the company was sold by his widow Christine to a group headed by Yannick Tessier, owner of Tessier Technologies, who developed software as an ISV.

The user could write emails with the Juno client and would periodically sign in by dial-up. Upon doing so, the Juno client would upload any emails the user had written, download any new incoming emails in the online mailbox, and download targeted advertisements, which were displayed in the client. This was similar to "QWK" and similar less automated offline readers that had been used for years by BBSes to save phone line connect time. In June 1998, Juno expanded its service to offer premium support for paying subscribers, and added the ability to browse the web in addition to use of email.

These included the automated distribution of files and transmission of data for inter-BBS games. By far the most commonly used of these piggyback protocols was Echomail, public discussions similar to Usenet newsgroups in nature. Echomail was supported by a variety of software that collected up new messages from the local BBSes' public forums (the scanner), compressed it using ARC or ZIP, attached the resulting archive to a Netmail message, and sent that message to a selected system. On receiving such a message, identified because it was addressed to a particular user, the reverse process was used to extract the messages, and a tosser put them back into the new system's forums.

During the late 1980s the growth of the FidoNet upset this balance somewhat. Now a user could call into their local free BBS system and have conversations with users from all over the world—although practically this was limited to North America. PCBoard did support a Fido-like system known as RelayNet (or RIME), but this was supported by PCBoard only and thus had a much smaller amount of traffic than the platform independent Fido. For some time CRS offered RelayNet hub service known as NAnet to other PCBoard operators throughout North America in order to increase the user base, going so far as to offer a 1-800 number for these BBSes to call in on.

The system was expensive to operate, and when their host machine became unavailable and a new one could not be found, the system closed in January 1975. Similar functionality was available to most mainframe users, which might be considered a sort of ultra-local BBS when used in this fashion. Commercial systems, expressly intended to offer these features to the public, became available in the late 1970s and formed the online service market that lasted into the 1990s. One particularly influential example was PLATO, which had thousands of users by the late 1970s, many of whom used the messaging and chat room features of the system in the same way that would become common on BBSes.

The hierarchy of FidoNet BBS nodes, hubs, and zones was maintained in a routing table called a Nodelist. Some larger BBSes or regional FidoNet hubs would make several transfers per day, some even to multiple nodes or hubs, and as such, transfers usually occurred at night or early morning when toll rates were lowest. In Fido's heyday, sending a Netmail message to a user on a distant FidoNet node, or participating in an Echomail discussion could take days, especially if any FidoNet nodes or hubs in the message's route only made one transfer call per day. FidoNet was platform-independent and would work with any BBS that was written to use it.

Text-based games were also early forerunners to online gaming. From the late-1970s until the worldwide dominance of the Internet in the mid-1990s, home computer users could still interact remotely with other computers by using dial-up modems, connecting them via telephone wires. These computers were often directed via text-based terminal emulators to hobbyist-run bulletin board systems (BBSes), which tended to be accessible—often freely—by area codes to cut costs from more distant communications. Without a graphical program for clients, most online computer games could only run using textual graphics, and where the user did have such a program, the often limited bandwidth of the modem made downloading graphics much slower than text.

At its peak just before the rise of the World Wide Web, it supported more than a thousand users online simultaneously and a virtual velvet-roped queue in which hundreds more waited to log in when the system was very busy. The popularity of ISCA as a meeting place, hangout, and occasionally a virtual dive bar gives a glimpse of what modern day chat rooms would become. Between serious discussion on topics ranging from social issues and politics to computer and home repair, lighthearted babble about almost any topic can be found. In addition, instant messaging (called eXpress Messages - or simply Xes - in the lingo of DOC BBSes and other citadel-derived systems) provides a venue for private discussion and conversation.

Abene's first contact with computers was at around 9 years of age at a local department store, where he would often pass the time while his parents shopped. His first computer was a TRS-80 MC-10 with 4 kilobytes of RAM, a 32-column screen, no lower case, and a cassette tape recorder to load and save programs. As was customary at the time, the computer connected to a television set for use as a monitor. After receiving the gifts of a RAM upgrade (to 20K) and a 300 baud modem from his parents, he used his computer to access CompuServe and shortly after discovered the world of dialup BBSes via people he met on CompuServe's "CB simulator", the first nationwide online chat.

Block ASCII display via Notepad versus ACiDView for Windows So-called "block ASCII" or "high ASCII" uses the extended characters of the 8-bit code page 437, which is a proprietary standard introduced by IBM in 1979 (ANSI Standard x3.16) for the IBM PC DOS and MS-DOS operating systems. "Block ASCIIs" were widely used on the PC during the 1990s until the Internet replaced BBSes as the main communication platform. Until then, "block ASCIIs" dominated the PC Text Art Scene. An Abbreviated History of the Underground Computer Art Scene by Napalm, 11/10/1998, The History of Art and Technology The first art scene group that focused on the extended character set of the PC in their art work was called "Aces of ANSI Art" ().

Mistigris (pronounced "misty-gree") is an artscene group founded in late 1994 by Cthulu of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The group primarily operated out of BBSes within the city's area code 604 (with a significant outpost in Quebec's area code 418) joined across suburbs and provinces by the group's echomail network known as KiTSCHNet. In addition to numerous music disks, games, loaders, BBS utilities, applications (such as the PabloDraw ANSI art editor), issues of their house diskmag KiTHE and other one-off projects, Mistigris released thirty-five artpacks between October 1994 and June 1998. Though initially identifying with the card-playing conceit of a variant of poker after randomly selecting the name from a dictionary, in later years its mascot became an alley cat.

The anonymity made it safe and easy to ignore copyright restrictions, as well as protecting the identity of uploaders and downloaders. Around this time frame, pornography was also distributed via pornographic Bulletin Board Systems such as Rusty n Edie's. These BBSes could charge users for access, leading to the first commercial online pornography. A 1995 article written in The Georgetown Law Journal titled "Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway: A Survey of 917,410 Images, Description, Short Stories and Animations Downloaded 8.5 Million Times by Consumers in Over 2000 Cities in Forty Countries, Provinces and Territories" by Martin Rimm, a Carnegie Mellon University graduate student, claimed that (as of 1994) 83.5% of the images on Usenet newsgroups where images were stored were pornographic in nature.

Dave's own version of Citadel (DOC) is a variant of the Citadel/UX Bulletin board system (BBS) software which was developed specifically to run ISCA BBS in the late 1980s. It is based on Citadel/UX 3.0 but very heavily modified to suit the specific needs of ISCA BBS, which at its peak was a massive system supporting hundreds of simultaneous users. DOC and its descendants are now used by a number of Internet BBSes, including some in Latin America, which have been heavily modified, support 8-bit characters, and are presented in Spanish. Along with its offshoots DOC has inspired at least four clone codebases, including YAWC, which is likely the oldest, Jammin (code), which has since become WeIrDo, bbs100 (which is licensed under GPL), and A better Citadel (ABC).

On some of these BBSes, Abene discovered dialups and guest accounts to DEC minicomputers running the RSTS/E and TOPS-10 operating systems as part of the BOCES educational program in Long Island, New York. Accessing those DEC minicomputers he realized there was a programming environment that was much more powerful than that of his own home computer, and so he began taking books out of the library in order to learn the programming languages that were now available to him. This and the ability to remotely save and load back programs that would still be there the next time he logged in had a profound effect on Abene, who came to view his rather simple computer as a window into a much larger world.Q&A;: Mark Abene, from 'Phiber Optik' to security guru, cnet.

The IBox software included the Winsock program and TCP/IP stack that were needed to connect a computer running Microsoft Windows to the Internet in 1994. The IBox package also included a licensed copy of the NCSA Mosaic web browser called AIR Mosaic, AIR Mail (an email client), AIR News (an NNTP news client), AIR Telnet, AIR Gopher, and an FTP Network File Manager. Combined with InterServ's dial-up access, Internet in a Box provided a complete solution for members of the general public to access the Internet, a network previously available almost exclusively to government and collegiate users, or to the public only indirectly through e-mail gateways provided by hosted systems such as BBSes and CompuServe. The inclusion of a web browser further gave access to the then-nascent World Wide Web.

WWIVnet consisted of several participating BBSes, each referenced by a unique number called a node number. Originally, WWIVnet nodes were numbered by area code. The format was TXYZZ, where X and Y were the first and last digits of the area code, and ZZ was a number that ranged from 00 to 49 in area codes with a middle digit of 0, or a number between 50-99 in area codes with a middle digit of 1. The T portion of the node number was only used if a particular area code ran out of node numbers in their assigned range and needed more, the T would become 1. Thus, node 5802 would be a node in the 508 area code, and node 12263 would be a node in a very busy 212 area code.

Citadel is the name of a bulletin board system (BBS) computer program, and of the genre of programs it inspired. Citadels were notable for their room-based structure (see below) and relatively heavy emphasis on messages and conversation as opposed to gaming and files. The first Citadel came online in 1980 with a single 300 baud modem; eventually many versions of the software, both clones and those descended from the original code base (but all usually called "Citadels"), became popular among BBS callers and sysops, particularly in areas such as the Pacific Northwest, Northern California and Upper Midwest of the United States, where development of the software was ongoing. Citadel BBSes were most popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but when the Internet became more accessible for online communication, Citadels began to decline.

Many of these ANSI graphics were created by Drew Markham, who went on to form Xatrix/Gray Matter Interactive and develop Redneck Rampage and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, among other titles. The rise of the internet caused the decline of both BBSes and DOS users, which made ANSI graphics harder to create and to view due to the lack of software compatible with the new dominant operational system Microsoft Windows. In the end of 2002, all traditional ANSI art groups like ACiD, ICE, CIA, Fire, Dark and many others, were no longer making periodic releases of artworks, called "artpacks" and the community of artists almost vanished. Since then this form of art is no longer practiced to the degree it once was, but was still kept alive by fewer newly created groups like SENSE, 27inch and the late Blocktronics Textmode Art Collective, founded in 2008, and that currently releases artpacks created by artists from all around the world.

Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, BBSes numbered in the tens of thousands in North America alone. Message forums (a specific structure of social media) arose with the BBS phenomenon throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. When the World Wide Web (WWW, or "the web") was added to the Internet in the mid-1990s, message forums migrated to the web, becoming Internet forums, primarily due to cheaper per- person access as well as the ability to handle far more people simultaneously than telco modem banks. Digital imaging and semiconductor image sensor technology facilitated the development and rise of social media. Advances in metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) semiconductor device fabrication, reaching smaller micron and then sub-micron levels during the 1980s1990s, led to the development of the NMOS (n-type MOS) active-pixel sensor (APS) at Olympus in 1985, and then the complementary MOS (CMOS) active-pixel sensor (CMOS sensor) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1993.

The early history of the Internet in the Philippines started with the establishment of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) by computer hobbyist and enthusiast. They were able to link their BBS’s using a dial-up connection protocol enabling them to participate in discussion forums, send messages and share files. 1986: Establishment of first BBS in the Philippines, Star BBS was formed by Efren Tercias and James Chua of Wordtext Systems. Fox BBS was operated by Johnson Sumpio. First-Fil RBBS a public-access BBS went online with an annual subscription fee of P1,000. A precursor to the local online forum, it ran an open-source BBS software on an IBM XT Clone PC with a 1200bit/s modem and was operated by Dan Angeles and Ed Castañeda. 1987: The Philippine FidoNet Exchange, a local network for communication between several BBSes in Metro Manila, was formed. 1990: A committee helmed by Arnie del Rosario of the Ateneo Computer Technology Center was tasked with exploring the possibility of creating an academic network of universities and government institutions by the National Computer Center under Dr. William Torres.