On Wed, 2008-02-06 at 12:42 -0600, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: > Ric Moore wrote: > > > > Yeah, Digiboards. Expensive for the budget I had. I could get a cast-off > > 486 far cheaper and let it handle 4 modems. Linux used to work decently > > with a 486 and 32 megs of memory, strictly command line. :) Ric > > We could not go the multi-machine route for the main BBS. We didn't > have the right license for the software to network machines, That was another reason I jumped into Linux. No license crapola. So, I just gave everyone telnet access logins. We had chats using Ychat before chats were cool. Everyone loved it. If someone wanted to compile "Hello World" they could do it without paying Borland a fortune. THEN we got a real MUDos mud and the users started making their own domains. Then we'd have a online party when someone had a working domain, and I opened a portal from the mud into their spaces. All of this cost me nothing for the software. > and > some of the multi-player games didn't work with networked machines, > if I remember right. (16 user Major BBS license.) I am not sure what > got the most use - Mutants, Galactic Empire, or chat. Our mud got used the most, as using the chat features was a ball. Everyone running around in the machine virtually. Users creating objects to populate the world with nifty stuff. It was very imaginative. Beats the heck outa Warcraft when the images come from your own mind! > I think we had > 14 lines going at one time. We had a total of 18 serial ports. We > also had SCSI drive, and a SCSI controller with a hardware disk > buffer. (4 - 1 Mb SIMs.) All on a 486 machine - this was before the > Pentium and the PCI bus. The funny part was that it ran on top of > DOS, and would support 16 users without problems. I had two Dickens terminal servers donated (9600 as about as fast as they would serve). Each had 8 serial ports. So, with two machines running RedHat (and later Caldera) for 8 modems, then 16 terminals plugged into the terminal servers, we had 24 users in that 486 at once (all in text mode) with nary a burp in the barrel. > I played with the Linux version years later, but the BBS was gone by > then. (I could not get the phone lines at my place, and Bob's wife > said the BBS had to go...) I had a great deal, 2 voice and 8 data phone lines for $80 a month. I miss those days, too. Ric -- ================================================ My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say: "There are two Great Sins in the world... ..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity. Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad. Linux user# 44256 Sign up at: http://counter.li.org/ http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/oar http://www.wayward4now.net <---down4now too ================================================
