I didn’t realize until the other day that I’ve been running a Bulletin Board System for the past 6 months! To be fair, this particular “version” of the board didn’t start until June 6th of 2020 – the previous few weeks the system was running on a Raspberry Pi as a “test” board, but in whatever form the BBS has been running since May 17th, 2020! Pretty cool.
In those few months, I’ve gone from it just being a project setting there to being a somewhat active (for BBS terms) place for old tech and gaming chat. It’s begun to spread among some circles and has some regular callers who really like it. Discussion is there, and there is plenty to read on DOVENet and the like.
That’s another thing – I’ve gotten a few FIDO style connections set up and those too have expanded the chat, file, and mail options on the board. While I don’t have the file system set up correctly quite yet everything else is working so, I’ll take it as a win – setting up FTN connections isn’t the easiest thing, sometimes.
I’ve been trying to expand the board a few different ways, like adding in a text mode web browser, but that project has been a bit of trouble — I’ll get back to messing with it another time as it’s not important, but I do want to board to be the best it can be.
Right now I really think of it more as a service than anything else — it provides a meaningful way for old computers to really be usable on the modern internet, and offers quite a useful options to the clever user. From the multiple ways to access and post on the board to the actual functions available, I feel it really offers far more than most people may realize. Hell, I’ve even got dial up access working. It’s limited at the moment to just my personal number, but soon I plan on getting a setup for everyone to be able to use to call in, which would be awesome. That’s still down the line though, but it doesn’t get much more authentic than that.
Right, I just wanted to ramble a bit about this milestone in my crazy projects. More to come, as always.
finalzone.ddns.net
telnet, ssh, nntp, web, etc.