betsy <betsy@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> bbses are a fabulous thing. i <3 them.
I used to run some way back in the day, and I met a lot of neat people
through them. :) The first one that I ran was actually a bunch of
programs I made in Pascal with no communications capabilities at all, a
whole bunch of DOS batch files that heavily used the "prompt" command to
make it look like you were interacting with a menu system, and a remote
access program that just let you at my DOS prompt directly. For the
duration of its run, nobody ever figured that out.
The next one ran on Pyroto Mountain, heavily hacked to add a lot more
social functionality. (Pyroto Mountain was primarily a multiplayer
trivia game.) It was an elitist system of the first order, I'm afraid.
We seeded all the trivia with "in crowd" questions, obscure trivia about
our favourite bands, etc., and then had message boards set up at various
levels up the mountain so that in order to participate in the more elite
message boards you had to know all the right tidbits.
The last one I ran operated on WWIV and eventualy became the first
Canadian WWIVNet node, called "Southern Reaches," because we lived in
the southernmost city in Canada. When we joined, we started a SIG
called The Anti-American SIG, just to, um, cause trouble. My friend
made an animated ANSI ad for it, which was a guy labelled Joe Canuck
with a Canadian maple leaf jersey on holding an American flag in the
air, which was in (animated) flames. Apparently there was something
wrong with the file, so when it propagated around, it crashed a whole
bunch of other BBSes in such a way that people would turn their computer
on to find out what had happened and they's see that image on their
screens. Bearing in mind that I think I was 13 at the time, this was
pretty much the most hilarious thing that had ever happened to me.
|
