I used to go to geek dinners. Back in the day. When BBS’s were the blogs of the time.

I’ve never thought of them (BBS’s) like that before… It probably doesn’t fit too well now, but when blogs were kicking off, there were some similarities to BBS’s – built by geeks, used primarily for geek-to-geek communication, and Real Life meet-ups were curious events that meant you got to put faces to FidoNet nodes. 😀

Yes, I ran my own BBS for a while. It was known my me, and by about the same number of people subscribed to my blog now (3) as “Destinations Unknown” (FidoNet Node 3:54/459). I was inordinatly proud of it; primarily because I wrote my own DOS serial driver (crap, I can’t recall what they were called … F-something?) in assembly to correctly provide the “ring-back” functionality I needed because I only had one phone line that had to be shared between BBS and voice. “Ring-Back” was where you rang the BBS number, let it ring once or twice, hung up and dialled again. The BBS would then answer, and you could keep the line until your time limit expired or you voluntarily left.

My details for the system have been archived in the nodelists/nodediffs at FOTI (hosted by TextFiles.com). I’m in the 1994.364 nodelist at least, but it’s not worth the bandwidth to completely delineate my BBS hosting days. It’s just occurred to me that I still have my archives on DDS2 tape somewhere. But I have no DDS2 drive anymore. 🙄

But I dissemble.

There’s a geek meet-up happening in Melbourne this Friday, courtesy of Tejas Patel. If you’re interested in podcasting, Cameron Reilly may be there – bring brick-bats or bouquets as is your wont. 😉