![[You're a wizard]](pics/icon.png){kind=icon}
Today has been fairly eventful, at least for me. I let my daughter play around on the Amiga for a little bit, she even created a new icon for my TCP/IP stack, because as she put it mine "Looked like a penguin!" I have to agree with her, my artistic skill mostly equates to making stick figures. I think she did a pretty remarkable job, considering the limitations she had to work with.
Otherwise, I felt the nostalgia bug hit me once again. This time, I wanted to go way back, to the days of my first networking experiences. I mean, all the way back to the BBS days. As the such, I spent a couple of hours trying to find just the right telnet client to connect to, the right settings, the right font.. and alas I got it all to work perfectly.
I connected to a great BBS called lightningbbs.com created an account "guest", and messed about while I tried to configure my telnet correctly. I wonder what the sysop will think when he goes into his log file and sees all of the connect/disconnects he received from my IP. Here are a few screenshots from the BBS, and a few doors it hosts, there are several more there as well. Unfortunately, I did not see my all time favourite door "Exitilius".
![[BBS doors image]](pics/doors.png)
![[L.O.R.D BBS door]](pics/lord.png)
![[Usurper BBS door]](pics/usur.png)
This last shot shows how having the right font is a must, this is one of the better screenshots I got as well. I just could not find the right font to display all of the characters correctly, especially using ANSI. I know in the 90s Amigas were used very frequently on BBSs, it is the reason I originally became interested in them. Eventually I found a font that works perfect called "HyperAnsi" - I'll leave that there in the event that in the next few years some one else is looking around for the right font,to telnet into BBSs.
Notice how there are a ton of boxes,in the image below that is because those characters do not exist for that particular font, the hyperansi font contains them though, and as a result you get a much better image as is the case for the pictures above.
![[Wrong Font]](pics/wfont.png)
Oh - sweet - Nostaligia! I remember before we had an ISP within local range, how I would spend hours playing around on BBSs, playing the doors, posting in the boards, I even purchased my own phone line so I would not use up my parents or be disconnected. I remember dreaming about having a high speed ISDN running into our house, and even spent time looking up the pricing.
I remember being utterly fascinated with being able to dial into a BBS, and then using that BBS's other phone lines to dial into even more BBSs that were outside of my local phone charge radius. It was great times!
For a little while, I even was a sysop of my own BBS running on Renegade, it lasted for a few months until we had access to an ISP, and at that point I switched over to the Internet. There was no competition, slowly, over time one of the two phone lines I had going into my BBS became devoted toward the Internet, and shortly thereafter I closed it down. Unfortunate for the four or five members I had, but they were logging in less and less as well.
Around the time that ripscript started to become popular, almost all of the BBSs in our area disappeared with the exception of a few die hard sysops. Some of them still exist to this day, up in Maine.
Oh them memberberries..