I have always loved BBSing, and have been doing it almost continuously since the early 1990s.

I have also always loved Atari computers. When I was a kid, we had several Atari 800s, a 130XE, a 520ST, and eventually I bought my own 1040STe.

Around the time I was in college, I sold all my Atari equipment. Many years later, I wished I had it back!

I eventually bought an Atari Mega STe, so I'm back in the retrocomputing game. The two main peripherals I use with are a Lantronix (for telnetting to BBSes), and a CosmosEx, which lets files on my Mac show up as a hard drive on the Atari. It also lets me use SD cards, and other fun stuff.

How about you? What retro computing/gaming stuff do you like?

--Josh

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

Re: Retro
By: Kirkman to All on Fri Oct 30 2015 12:28 pm

You probably know me from Twitter. I started in the STL bbs scene in the mid 80s. When I started, 300 baud was the norm..1200 wasn't really a thing yet. It seemed like most BBSs were TRS-80 based in the beginning. I remember being on a board called Gateway Keyboard, another called the Grapevine, and a few others.

Oddly enough, I just ran across an old C64 disk image from the mid 80s with a bunch of buffer captures on it.

I still have my original C64, which I use with an ESP8266 module set up as a wifi modem. I also have a MIST FPGA that I configure as a bunch of different retro machines. I use it as an Amiga 1200 sometimes (as I am tonight) and sometimes as a Mega STe. I'm fairly new to the ST, so I'm still kind of figuring that out.

I also have a real accelerated Amiga 1200, an Amiga 2000, a 600 (the 600 is in storage at the moment. I also have an Atari 800XL that I just bought a couple of months ago that I recently got set up with an 850 interface, connected to a Raspberry Pi running tcpser for calling ATASCII BBSs. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be a tone of those right now. I mostly use it to call YYZ BBS. This is my first real Atari 8 bit and I'm having a lot of fun with it. It's a lot like the C64 in some ways, but different enough to be interesting in it's own ways.

I also recently (in the last two weeks) acquired a TRS80 Model 4. I just happened to go into Gateway Electronics just off Page Ave a couple of weeks ago, and they had the model 4 sitting on the counter with $40 marked on it. I picked it up, and I've started expanding it. It's my first TRS-80. Really interesting machine. I've already spent more than 10x what I paid for it adding modern upgrades to it. It can actually do ANSI pretty well itself (for a monochrome machine) I bought a M3SE for it right after getting it, and I just ordered a HiRes Graphyx (that's the model name) board for it. That should be here next week.

I have a few other machines too, but I don't BBS with them. At least not yet.

I'd better end this here. i'm getting paranoid that I'm going to lose "carrier" or something and lose what I have here so far. I'll make sure I keep this board in the rotation.

You probably know me from Twitter. I started in the STL bbs scene in the mid 80s. When I started, 300 baud was the norm..1200 wasn't really a thing yet. It seemed like most BBSs were TRS-80 based in the beginning. I remember being on a board called Gateway Keyboard, another called the Grapevine, and a few others.

I started way after you did, but I definitely called the "Junk Drawer," "Rolla Link in Exile" and "Donna's Zoo," which were all MTABBS (TRS-80) BBSes.

By the time I was BBSing in the early 1990s, WWIV PC had pretty much taken over the scene.

Oddly enough, I just ran across an old C64 disk image from the mid 80s with a bunch of buffer captures on it.

That's cool! I'd love to know what kind of stuff you've got in there.

I also have an Atari 800XL that I just bought a couple of months ago that I recently got set up with an 850 interface, connected to a Raspberry Pi running tcpser for calling ATASCII BBSs. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be a tone of those right now.

Besides YYZ, there is also the Boot Factory at bfbbs.no-ip.com. I had a bunch of others in my SyncTerm list, but it seems they are all offline now.

If you're looking for Atari ST BBSes, you should try:

The Grove (bbs.skeleton.org)
Dark Force (darkforce-bbs.dyndns.org)

There was also Starfleet HQ, but it has been sporadic over the last year.

--Josh


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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

Re: Retro
By: Kirkman to Paradroyd on Sat Nov 26 2016 01:59 pm

I'm actually on Dark Force. I know about Boot Factory and I've tried to call it a couple of times, but I've never had luck getting through yet. I'll keep trying...

I'll have to go through that disk I found and see what's in there.

As far as the WWWIV boards.. I remember being bummed out about that trend. i was never a PC person in those days and it seemed like that's all anyone on those boards talked about. Also while the Fidonet-like networking was interesting, the boards kind of seemed to lose their individuality when that happened. I tended to stick to the boards that weren't part of the bigger networks. Unfortunately, most people didn't though, and the smaller boards seened to be the first to go away.

Anyway.. glad to see that you're running your own synchronet board. I've always thought that Synchro had a lot of potential. I kind of played around with setting it up myself on a Raspberry Pi. It's interesting to fool with, but I'm not likely to take it much beyond the fooling around stage.

So, good news on the Atari ST front:

SFHQ is back at its original address.

Dark Force is still out there, but has changed to port 520.

Also, there's a Swedish guy who has created a board called Bad Taste at bbs.retrohack.se on port 23.

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

Re: Retro
By: Kirkman to Paradroyd on Fri Dec 09 2016 10:18 am

Also, there's a Swedish guy who has created a board called Bad Taste at bbs.retrohack.se on port 23.

FWIW, he has switched his Atari ST board to port 9001. It doesn't have much content as far as I can tell, but hopefully he'll add some stuff soon.

Great to have a NEW Atari BBS!

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

Re: Retro
By: Kirkman to All on Fri Oct 30 2015 12:28 pm

How about you? What retro computing/gaming stuff do you like?

I was a Tandy guy. Started out with a Tandy 1000HX, then went to the EX, then went to the RL, RL-HD. Tandy was ahead of their time in so many ways, especially with graphics and sound. Deskmate was a pretty cool GUI back before anyone know what a GUI was.

I wish I still had my Tandy PC's -- would be cool to try and write some "new" programs for Deskmate nowadays!


■dmxrob■ BBSing from St. Louis, MO since 1988

Re: Retro
By: Dmxrob to Kirkman on Thu Apr 12 2018 03:28 pm

I was a Tandy guy. Started out with a Tandy 1000HX, then went to the EX, then went to the RL, RL-HD. Tandy was ahead of their time in so many ways, especially with graphics and sound. Deskmate was a pretty cool GUI back before anyone know what a GUI was.

I am not familiar with Deskmate. Those Tandys were PC-compatible, right? Did Deskmate run on other systems?

--Josh

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

Re: Retro
By: Kirkman to Dmxrob on Thu Apr 12 2018 09:25 pm

I am not familiar with Deskmate. Those Tandys were PC-compatible, right? Did Deskmate run on other systems?

Deskmate was Tandy's GUI for 8088/8086 based systems, and before the era of Windows it ruled the IBM/compatible market scene for GUI. The original version of AOL (called PC-LINK in those days) was written using Deskmate.

Excel 1-2-3 was in Deskmate; Wordperfect was in Deskmate; you name a software package that pioneered the early days of computing and chances are it had a Deskmate version.

It did run on machines other than Tandy - though Tandy machines usually had built-in ROM support for Deskmate that would make it fly. Literally 3 seconds from hitting the power key on a 16mhz Tandy 1000RL and Deskmate was up and running and ready for action.


■dmxrob■ BBSing from St. Louis, MO since 1988

Re: Retro
By: Dmxrob to Kirkman on Fri Apr 13 2018 08:15 am

Excel 1-2-3 was in Deskmate; Wordperfect was in Deskmate; you name a

I'm getting old... :-) That should read "Lotus 1-2-3".


■dmxrob■ BBSing from St. Louis, MO since 1988

Re: Retro
By: Dmxrob to Kirkman on Fri Apr 13 2018 08:15 am

It did run on machines other than Tandy - though Tandy machines usually had built-in ROM support for Deskmate that would make it fly. Literally 3 seconds from hitting the power key on a 16mhz Tandy 1000RL and Deskmate was up and running and ready for action.

Was Deskmate actually contained in ROM? I know TOS/GEM for the Atari ST line of computers was stored in ROM.

--Josh

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

Re: Retro
By: Dmxrob to Kirkman on Fri Apr 13 2018 08:16 am

Excel 1-2-3 was in Deskmate; Wordperfect was in Deskmate; you name a

I'm getting old... :-) That should read "Lotus 1-2-3".

I am passingly familiar with Lotus... Back in the day, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's website (postnet.com, later stltoday.com) was powered by Lotus. It was a very strange (to me) type of CMS.

--Josh

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

Re: Retro
By: Kirkman to Dmxrob on Fri Apr 13 2018 10:54 am

Was Deskmate actually contained in ROM? I know TOS/GEM for the Atari ST line of computers was stored in ROM.

All Tandy 1000/2000 series computers had it contained in ROM. This was + and a - at the same time. ON the plus side, it loaded lightning fast. On the minus side, upgrades were horrid. Basically, you had order a new EEPROM chip from Tandy which wasn't cheap.

You could also get the stand-alone install disks and run it from floppy (it ran off 2 floppies as I recall), or if you were filthy rich back then, run it from your hard drive.

If you had it in ROM you were lucky because say you wanted to run Lotus 1-2-3 for Deskmate. You'd just boot up and all you would need to do is insert your Lotus 1-2-3 disk into your floppy drive. It was in some sense a quasi-hard drive solution for people who couldn't afford to shell out $1000 for a hard drive.


■dmxrob■ BBSing from St. Louis, MO since 1988

Re: Retro
By: Kirkman to Dmxrob on Fri Apr 13 2018 10:55 am

I am passingly familiar with Lotus... Back in the day, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's website (postnet.com, later stltoday.com) was powered by Lotus. It was a very strange (to me) type of CMS.

Lotus 1-2-3 was "the" application of the IBM PC/XT era. It was the first spreadsheet program. Later competitors were Quattro Pro, and then Excel. When I was in the St. Louis Public high schools from 1988-1992, in business class you learned Lotus 1-2-3.


■dmxrob■ BBSing from St. Louis, MO since 1988

Re: Retro
By: Dmxrob to Kirkman on Fri Apr 13 2018 04:32 pm

All Tandy 1000/2000 series computers had it contained in ROM. This was + and a - at the same time. ON the plus side, it loaded lightning fast. On the minus side, upgrades were horrid. Basically, you had order a new EEPROM chip from Tandy which wasn't cheap.

Atari STs were sort of like that. They had TOS in ROM, but over the years Atari did sell TOS upgrade kits. Probably the biggest one was the jump to TOS 2.06. But, as you say, such an upgrade was probably expensive and delicate work replacing the ROM chips.

I had an Atari 520 ST and a 1040 STe, but never upgraded their TOSes. I did experiment with some desktop replacement programs, though. There were plenty, with names like NeoDesk, TeraDesk, etc.

--Josh

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

Re: Retro
By: Kirkman to Dmxrob on Sat Apr 14 2018 01:40 pm

experiment with some desktop replacement programs, though. There were plenty, with names like NeoDesk, TeraDesk, etc.

From about 1988-1993 or so the desktop replacement market exploded on the IBM/PC side of things. Even Norton had a replacement desktop product out.
Then Windows 3.11 slowly morphed into Win95 and that entire era came to an end as well.

■dmxrob■ BBSing from St. Louis, MO since 1988

Re: Retro
By: Kirkman to All on Fri Oct 30 2015 12:28 pm

How about you? What retro computing/gaming stuff do you like?

Wow, it seems like my definition of "Retro" is way newer than the one used here... I'm used to generic Wintel boxes from the 90s being called "Retro". Though my particular interest is old Suns and UNIX stuff in general. I have an old Ultra Enterprise 250 (Heavily upgraded, including a couple one terabyte drives and a full compliment of RAM) running as a server for connecting all my boxes and sharing stuff between them. Besides that I have a couple other rackmount Suns, some ppc Macs and the PC/XT I'm typing this from.
I got into the whole retro scene as a kid because well... Old hardware was cheap, or even free if you knew where to look!

Re: Retro
By: Ittfami to All on Tue Apr 24 2018 06:24 pm

Wow, it seems like my definition of "Retro" is way newer than the one used here... I'm used to generic Wintel boxes from the 90s being called "Retro". Though my particular interest is old Suns and UNIX stuff in general. I have an old Ultra Enterprise 250 (Heavily upgraded, including a couple one terabyte drives and a full compliment of RAM) running as a server for connecting all my boxes and sharing stuff between them. Besides that I have a couple other rackmount Suns, some ppc Macs and the PC/XT I'm typing this from.

Well, personal computers were born long enough ago that we've had many "eras". As a kid growing up in the 1980s, I gravitate toward the 8-bit and 16-bit machines as "retro computers".

But then again, here in my town (Ferguson, Mo.) there is a telegraph club that meets weekly on Saturdays at the old train depot. It doesn't get more retro than that! The youngest guy in the group (I believe he's in his 50s) owns a very large telegraph collection, and many of his pieces were used in the most recent Lincoln movie (the one with Daniel Day Lewis).

--Josh

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

Re: Retro
By: Kirkman to Ittfami on Wed Apr 25 2018 09:24 am

But then again, here in my town (Ferguson, Mo.) there is a telegraph club that meets weekly on Saturdays at the old train depot. It doesn't get more retro than that!

That's awesome! And it's in a train depot nonetheless!
Are there old telegraph lines still up? Or do they tunnel the signal through something else?

Re: Retro
By: Ittfami to Kirkman on Wed Apr 25 2018 01:03 pm

That's awesome! And it's in a train depot nonetheless!
Are there old telegraph lines still up? Or do they tunnel the signal through something else?

No, I don't believe there remain any old telegraph lines. It's a lot like retrocomputing: they connect the telegraph equipment to a PC, and run a special program which transmits the pulses over the internet to fellow telegraphy enthusiasts elsewhere around the U.S./world. This program also does its best to "translate" the morse code into characters on the screen so you can see the message as it is tapped out.

It's interesting to watch the telegraphy guys. They understand it just by listening. But it's really like a language. If you watch the characters appearing on the PC, you can make out some of the message, but not all. The telegraph uses a TON of abbreviations to keep the transmissions short. Most people are not familiar with these, so they can't understand those bits. Also, context matters a lot.

--Josh

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

That's awesome! And it's in a train depot nonetheless!
Are there old telegraph lines still up? Or do they tunnel the signal through something else?

I didn't realize it would be this week, but the telegraph club celebrated Samuel Morse Day today. They had a really big spread of equipment and ephemera.

I posted a couple photos on Twitter here, in case you're curious: https://twitter.com/Kirkman/status/990403661099687936

--Josh

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

Re: Retro
By: Kirkman to All on Fri Oct 30 2015 12:28 pm

I have a very similar story. Started with a Commodore Vic 20 on loan from my dad's work. It went back. Then got an Atari 400 for Christmas. Later, I saved my money and bought an 800xl at Service Merchandise for $229.00 plus tax. Went from a Cassette Recorder to a 1050 Diskdrive which was an amazing upgrade. Then bought a 520St, added a double sided external floppy drive. Then bought a Mega ST2 from a friend on a payment schedule. Love it. Got me through most of college (Oklahoma Baptist University). Finally went Mac and haven't looked back... until that Vintage Retro/vibe set in. So then I bought a used 800xl off craigslist that needed some tinkering. Then bought a SD-Max. Between the 800xl and the emulators on Mac, I'm pretty happy.

Re: Retro
By: Dmxrob to Kirkman on Thu Apr 12 2018 03:28 pm

I sold Deskmate and Tandy's while in college and working for Radio Shack. I thought the idea of the family message center was revolutionary. Sold a lot of systems on that concept. Of course, back then, each family member couldn't afford their own system. So it was a multiple account machine.

Re: Retro
By: Obuing to Kirkman on Sun May 14 2023 09:32 pm

Re: Retro
By: Kirkman to All on Fri Oct 30 2015 12:28 pm

I have a very similar story. Started with a Commodore Vic 20 on loan from my dad's work. It went back. Then got an Atari 400 for Christmas. Later, I save my money and bought an 800xl at Service Merchandise for $229.00 plus tax. We from a Cassette Recorder to a 1050 Diskdrive which was an amazing upgrade. T bought a 520St, added a double sided external floppy drive. Then bought a Me ST2 from a friend on a payment schedule. Love it. Got me through most of college (Oklahoma Baptist University). Finally went Mac and haven't looked back... until that Vintage Retro/vibe set in. So then I bought a used 800xl craigslist that needed some tinkering. Then bought a SD-Max. Between the 800 and the emulators on Mac, I'm pretty happy.

Yeah the state of retrocomputing and emulation today is pretty amazing compared with 20 years ago. Back in the day I used NoSTalgia and PowerST on my Mac to emulate the Atari ST ... but modern Hatari is light years better, especially its support for RS232 or translating a folder on your host computer into a hard drive on the emulated ST.

And there are so many cool devices. I still swear by my CosmosEx, which is a swiss army knife of addons. My favorite unusual features are that it can screencast your physical Atari's screen to a web browser (at the cost of making the frames a bit choppy), and it has a fake STiNG driver to enable the internet.

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog