Online, 1989 style: Dialing into BBSes with a vintage Tandy 1000 modem
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- Опубликовано: 24 июл 2024
- Many old PCs come with an internal modem. They're useless, right? No! There are still Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) which you can dial into and relive the online experience from 30+ years ago. Here I try out the internal 2400 bps modem in my Tandy 1000SX.
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Thanks for calling my BBS! I appreciate it and keeping BBSing alive! :)
Diamond Dave?? Wassuup!!!
I had a strong hunch that Diamond Dave would reply to this!!
👏
This man has his own internet
I can't wait to get my tandy and modem up and running! I'll be calling in 4 sure!
so wonderful to hear a modem handshake again after all these years
and post covid too!
I get momentarily jealous seeing people still owning this old tech, even though I have my own now-vintage PCs and micros and would have no use whatever for machines like the Tandy in a million years.
It's weird. I ran The Rebel's Roost BBS for many years. I can still tell the modem connect speed by ear, by hearing the "handshake" alone. Even after all these years.
Along with "You've got mail!" :D
Imagine getting asked personal questions on your Tandy by a BBS
Would still trust it over Zuckerberg
@@tarstarkusz damn I didn’t actually know they did that
Like it's 1990 all over again
Yeah, it’s pretty weird seeing how much information they wanted and would show other people as a curiosity. Didn’t seem like anything back then but times have changed!
@@tarstarkusz Until then there was also very little online commerce or internet banking. I got on the internet back in 1996 with a 14K4 dial up modem, and my first online purchase was a CD which had never been released here in the U.K. from CDNow in the USA paid for with my credit card. The only problem with the transaction was getting stung with import duty when it arrived doubling the cost.
I remember using the internet on dialup back when it first became accessible in my small home town.
Got a blistering 3kbs download on my mp3 downloads using IRC
DCC send ;-)
This brought back a lot of early computing memories. My first system in 1993 was a Compaq 25MHz 486SX with a 2400 modem. Don't ask how long it took to download the three 1.4Mb zip files of the original Doom. I still remember getting a 14.4K then a 56K modem.....that was bragging rights back in the day.
Speaking of BBS: the brazilian pioneer of the “commercial Internet” (the Internet as we know and use today, after the first academic / military links) just passed away few months ago. He was caught so many times by phone companies bc he built hundreds of BBS boxes on his own house, back in the day, but who would imagine in that age that he was aiming at something way bigger than that.
Aleksandar Mandic, great man with a great story. Worth checking out!
Surname Mandic triggered me, since i have friends with same surname (it is actually Mandić probably) and indeed, he has Serbian roots. Thanks for sharing this ☺️.
@@vlatkokaplanovic997 Agreed. Fantastic information.
Oh god remember the format war of the two mutually incompatible 56K modem systems? Sigh
Thanks for the shout! And now I know how to log into Diamond Mine! Amazing what you can do when you RTFM 🤦♀️
LOL! And thank you for your video as well. I appreciate both you and VWestlife for calling BBSes :)
Just realised how honest the Internet was on groups in the later 90s and early 00s. You could meet engineers, professors, programmers etc. None of the cynicism of today.
"Do you want to play a game?" Kevin being Mathew Broderick in the movie War Games!!! LOVE IT!
Florianópolis is a city from Santa Catarina State, Brazil!
Brazilians are everywhere.
Sometimes that new user account validation would happen over the phone. Like the sysop would literally call you and make sure you were who you said you were, and they'd go over the rules and everything. "No warez!!!"
Never had that, but I did like the ones that would activate your account automatically if you let the board call your modem back to verify the number.
When I have to enter an email address and I don't want to use my real account I use something like someone@somewhere.invalid. Since the .invalid TLD (among others) is reserved as per RFC 2606, it can never be assigned to a real domain. It may be overkill, but I find this funny to do lol
I heard modem noises after a long-long time. I don't know if it's just nostalgia, but I think people were really communicating via BBS back then, despite the limitations of the hardware.
People in today's "social" media don't seem to communicate at all, despite the fact they are almost always connected, and they get bells and whistles unthinkable back then. Today people talk more, sure, but I am not sure they are communicating.
Hanging up was probably them being selective. Back in the day there were some BBSes I remember that would hang up on slower modems. One I remember was very rude and berated me for using a 300bps modem when 2400 was common and their BBS supported 14400.
This is true, many BBS systems actually had the option to automatically refuse to connect slower modems during certain times.
Some would configure them so that if you tried calling with a 2400 or slower during the peak time in the evenings they would refuse to connect, but if you called at 2am, no problems at all. If you wanted to be a heel about it, you could just set 00:00-23:59 as the option, or something similar, depending on what package you were running.
I was using Proboard and Remote Access for an NZ based BBS back in the 90s, those two definitely had those options.
The older-school version of autobanning "@aol.com"
The common message was “ No Courier, no carrier” This was when US Robotics Courier modems ruled the BBS world.
And the USR Robotics had their own 14k4 protocol. Later they adopted the standard 14k4 protocol as well. US Robotics modems were quite expensive, compared to other modem brands, except Hayes maybe.
Just to be pedantic, the UK is currently in BST which is GMT+1.
I love me some pedants!
UK is always GMT +0, because that's its time zone. GMT is currently at UTC +1.
Since we want to be pedantic 🙂
@@themeantuber Nope, GMT always follows UTC but they do differ in leap seconds. When we switch to daylight saving it is BST or British Summer Time. So during daylight saving it would 12:28 BST but when not in daylight saving time it would be 12:28 GMT.
@@dingo596 you're right. My bad. I just knew that GMT was the time zone. We have CET and CEST in the summer. The time zone remains the same...
I feel old watching this even though I'm too young to remember these.
Everything old is new again. I can remember picking up Computer Shopper magazine in the 90's and looking for cheap components to build a PC. In the back of the magazine was a extensive list of BBS. Your video brought back a lot of memories. Thanks!
The choppy text is likely from using MNP-5 compression. A lot of the 2400 modems with the 9600bps terminal speed would compress the data and decompress it in chunks.
At one point some enterprising person wrote an MNP-5 emulator. It was a very basic terminal package that would respond to MNP-5 protocol and allow you to get the compression without a modem that supported it. I tried it with a 300BPS modem and it worked. The data was very choppy where you'd sit for several seconds, then get a line or two of text, then sit for several seconds and then a line or two of text.
This definitely brings back some memories. I was a Sysop myself long ago. I ran renegade BBS for the software. dos would have been my OS back then.
Renegade was the best.
I was working for telephone company at public digital telephone switching exchange as system operator. Got in touch with Dutch Amiga warez/gamez BBS. Used work (=no fees for calls to anywhere from that line) phone for redirecting incoming calls to that Dutch BBS. International calls, for free. So you just dialed local phone number of that work line and you got redirected internationally to that Dutch BBS, for free, because i configured that local line for toll-free for every incoming call also. That's how simply i become a "trader" for our local "rogue" BBS without even realizing it :D That was in early 90's. Today i wouldn't find the balls do the same thing.
I was a Telegard sysop for a couple of years. I also ran Searchlight and Wildcat. I started with DOS, but in the early 90's ran the board from OS/2 Warp, which was the best! Overall, I think I enjoyed BBSes more than the Internet. =)
Renegade and later ran Iniquity which was a feature clone with extended functionality and much better IMHO. I still have it backed up on a floppy somewhere - if I had a drive to read it.
I ran a Wildcat BBS here in the Tacoma area for a while back in the day. Really liked Wildcat.
I remember that dal tone when I was a kid and my dad used the internet in the 80s and the 90s and I miss that sound
Well, time to bust out my old 90s modem and pop it into my windows XP computer!
As a fifty-something young guy in the software industry, this is class nostalgia. Thank you!
Computers used to be technology meant to serve people, not the other way around. Back then, there didn't seem to be any programs designed to be addictive (smartphone apps are the biggest example); trackers, privacy-violating cookies, system-level spyware, etc.
Although it was all much more rudimentary and limited back then, these principles of simplicity, reliability, respect of privacy, etc., should make a comeback in today's computers.
I didn't realize BBS's were still a thing! I used to run a C-64 BBS back in the 80's. I was big time when I went 1200 baud and 24 hours. Fun times!
Love it! At 63, this retro is a real pleasure to me. BBS's, modems, cassettes, vinyl, reel-to-reel, 8-track, muscle cars, HP9100, HP35, IBM1401 ... I grew up with this stuff and it's a part of my life.
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to all!
Wow, this really takes me back. I dialed into BBS systems from 1985 all the way up to the advent of the WWW. Met many people, enjoyed the whole concept. Started out with a 1200 baud modem and upgraded all the way up to a 56k modem. I had no idea that BBSes still existed.
A Tandy 1000 SX and a dial up modem? This is the perfect video!
I’m amazed that in 2021 when everyone is trying to get rid of old technology for no reason, bbs still exists! I’m so happy that it does☺️
Diamond Dave replied, ""This must be just like livin' in paradise (just like paradise), And I don't wanna go home (and I never wanna go), This must be just like livin' in paradise, And I don't wanna go home".
LOL! And yes, my BBS handle came from David Lee Roth. Good guess.
i think the last BBS i visited was to get clues to beat Sierra's: Conquest of Camelot. back in 1994.
Thanks for making this video!
Just to hear the dial sound of an old modem warns my heart. The Tandy Keyboard typing sound really sounds nice!
Have a great day, thanks man!!!
Well, that brings memories back big time! Back in the 80's i had a first gen Tandy 1000 with 2 5.25 floppies, an RGB colour monitor and internal "half card" 300bps modem. I spent hours and hours BBSing. That modem was junk, commands were not even hayes AT compatible. I upgraded it to an external 2400bps modem a year later, a 9600 later, then a 14.4 and finally a 56k.
Man, it has been SO LONG since I've been "BBSing" as my friends and I called it back in the day. I used to run a BBS on a Commodore 64 back in the mid to late '80s. Nice to see that some folks are keeping it alive. :-)
there are quite a bit of bbss still alive . lots of directorys online and many are using the internet as a portal. been a fan of yours for years . :)
I can’t believe that I’m watching a video of someone dialling into BBS’ in 2023. Love this. I didn’t think these things still existed. I do know there are some that are available via amateur radio modems too.
This is AMAZING! You still have a WORKING phone line!
My brother used to go on BBS's in the 90's on his Amiga A1200. :)
My brain had a “wait, how come these services are still there” moment
Some are there out of novelty, but others are there as a service of last resort for critical infrastructure, I assume.
The same reason people are still keeping Model T cars on the road. In the timescale of home computing Dial Up is the equivalent and equally historic.
I am the Diagnostuck in New Jersey you saw on the Diamond Mine user list. Glad you appreciated the pun! 😂
Prefix your phone numbers with *70, to disable call waiting. That might be where the noise is coming from. This is really cool seeing this since I used to run a BBS back in the day.
I had that same modem in my TX. It stops and starts with the size of packets, then the modem has to respond back, "ok for more." Fun times.
I remember the BBS days when members talked and played word/text games in the days when Internet access was CompuServe if you were patient and were willing to pay for access. The big thing back then was Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashing into Jupiter, .WAV sound files created from TV and movie sound bites, and .GIFs from TV shows such as "Lois and Clark." In time, I signed on to AOL and did my Internet surfing from that "walled garden." I had to imagine what the other users looked like and what their interests were. Those were the days when "high end video" was Ye Analog Laserdisc or VHS.
ATenntion Dial Tone ... Ah yes. Hayes compatable commands. How I miss those simplier times. I ran a BBS for like 10 yrs. Tons of work, but was fun til basically they were killed off by the interwebs. Its funny, I still remember my BBS's phone number. But I cant remember my cel number half the time.
I always realized that I would never hear that dialing and handshaking sounds. Those remind me the 90s and the early 2000s when I was using dial up here in Mexico
Depends on what kind of modem you had. ATM1 command normally would do a trick to every "silenced" modem.
@@bujablaster in the era when I used dial up internet the modem I used (it was an internal one) always did that sounds. For my age (I was a child) it was very frightening.
@@hectormiguelperezgomez6612 frightening! Huh! When I was a child I found them kinda musical 😅 sometimes I’d even pick up the phone and listen while it was loading the page and while it wasn’t doing anything and stuff.
There use to be a BBS server in Windham CT I use to connect to, I think its still online. This video brought me back.
The keyboard sound of that keyboard brings me right back to childhood playing Space Quest II on it.
Bennifer are back together, and BBSs live. The 90s never left! Thank you for keeping the Tandy flame burning!!
I first had an Apple II+ with a 300 baud modem for FORTRAN in 1984. I then had a 1000TX with a screaming 2400 baud modem. Oh the days of BBS's and chat rooms.
My first PC was ordered from a builder from the Computer Shopper magazine back in 1994. It was an AMD 486DX2 100 based PC that came with a 2400bps modem free that the guy was getting rid of. I used it to connect to CompuServe and some BBSes. I upgraded the modem to a Cardinal 14,400 modem as soon as I could afford it. Those days were kind of fun.
I’m sure most of you folks have already seen BBS: The Documentary, but just in case you haven’t… it’s extraordinary.
We used the Usenet (newsgroups) in the 1980s. It still exists, & is a very busy place.
My mind would have been blown as a kid if I knew about this. Good thing for my parents I was to young to figure out how to make expensive phone calls with my computer.
This brought back some memories. I used to call BBSes all the time in the late 80s/early 90s, and even tried running one on the family computer for a few months.
I love these Tandy's - our first family computer. Great video. I spent a lot of summers on BBS'.
I contemplated dialing into BBS's with my old Thinkpad, and then realized I don't have a phone line. :-(
Wow reminds me of my old 1000ex and going on our local BBS service!! Good times! :)
Serial to WiFi Modems make for a pretty cool way to get online as well. I have a few from The Old Net that I've used in a few videos. Have tried them on my Tandy 1000 HX as well as some Pentium class machines I have.
BBSes are my favorite thing about retro-computing. I start BBSing in about 1990-91 in the third and fourth grade, and grew into it throughout the 90s, even running my own board for a while.
I was a bbs'er with my C 64 from the mid 80 s till about 1992. Your video reminded me how much fun it was. Thanks.
OH does that sound bring back memories!! Many days of high school were skipped while trying to find BBSs all over the area on my PS/2 and C-64. Wow. I’m immediately transported back to 1982.
Wow, you are lucky having still dial-up BBS in your country. Here in Czech Republic we don't have one :(. Only few survived and they are all on internet so no dial-up. I believe that's the only way how to preserve them without dedicated PC and modem and dial-up line. Anyways just seeing this video title brought my memories. Who wasn't SysOp then? :) My first modem was 300 baud from Commodore, connected to my Amiga 500. What a times! Thanks for reminding it.
The UK is on British Summer Time at the moment so we are UTC+1... Not sure where it's on UTC right now.
I still visit BBS from time to time, I even got mine but telnet only.
(Damn you voip tech)
Im soon considering hosting my own BBS, under the MAGITRONIC name, in the near future once I figure everything out.
There's loads of modern bbs software thesedays many can run on the raspberry pi for cheap hosting
If you need help, go visit the BBS Corner and the Telnet BBS Guide. I run both sites.
@@diamonddave45 telnet bbs guide is awesome. I was using the site for reference while dialing in with both my Sportster 33600 and USR Courier modems. I'm waiting on a Hayes Optima Smartmodem 28800 (the one with mic and headphone jacks on it). Hope that one will work.
@@rommix0 USR modems were the best back in the day. Hayes should be good, too. I had various cards with Rockwell chipsets over the years and I don't remember having too many problems with them.
Love the serial port switch on the back of the card. Ought to try Level 29 sometime as well.
EDIT: My name is on that list :)
I really enjoyed taking a trip back in time and experiencing working BBS sites!
Great video, Mr Mcdaid! Just the keyboard clicky sounds made it worthwhile 😁
Totally did this on my Tandy 1000TL growing up. My father used to teach Amiga 'toasters' with video editing and computers were always a part of my household growing up in rural Maine.
That was the first place "Trolls" were noticed! Spreading misinformation!
Also it was important to use a local number.. Long distance charges were a killer,,
Now THAT was a real blast from the past! I got such a kick from this. Now I miss River City Network with it's four phone lines... and my old Tandy 1000. *sigh*
It was fun hanging out with you and the Maritime Girl a week ago dialing into BBSes glad you made a proper video about it!
BBS's were before my time, but I do have some old PCI modem cards lying around. Really tempted to try getting a windows xp machine connected to one of these
You might have been hung up immediately on that one BBS because they have a minimum modem speed requirement, or couldn't handle your old modem for some reason. Some BBSs back in mid 1990s had minimum modem requirements.
Some still do.
Back in the ‘80s & ‘90s on my Tandy 1000SX the terminal program of choice was Telix. I still have the “download finished” jingle stuck in my head.
Telix was a classic. Rock solid!
For 1989,this was ahead for it’s time,especially with those ascill graphics.
Fantastic content! Keep up the good work. You're giving kids an education.
Brings me back to the C64 BBS days. New Orleans had a good c64 scene back then.
I've never got into BBSes but I used to download map files for games and the text files they came with had BBS numbers.
I started out in the mid 90s with AOL dial-up and I remember having to wait 20 minutes to download an MP3 file at 33.6k from my email. I would go in the chat rooms and swap songs with people. I used one of those file sharing programs and it took me 4 hours to download a music video in MPEG 1 VCD format.
I started with a home-build 1200/75 Baud modem on a Tandy TRS80
At the same time, I was working at IBM. I could mail everyone in the whole (enormous) IBM network from my 3270 terminal, send files, and so on.
But connecting to the Gaasperdam BBS in Amsterdam with 1200/75 Baud was magic.
I cannot believe there are not more comments about the, to me, utterly insane existence of the ACTS server to this day. That is precisely the kind of thing I would have assumed the government quietly discontinued in 2003 but here it is
Gosh! Didn't we all have so much patience back then...
Gimme the 1995-2010 internet though with todays fibre speeds and I'd be in heaven!
Great vid mate and thanks for the reminder of how far we've come (or not) depending on how you view todays internet
Congratulations on 128K subscribers!
I ran a Wildcat BBS for exchanging data with my clients in the early 90s. I had one dedicated phone line, and if that was busy I had a switch on my fax line that recognised data, fax or voice calls. People who telework from home today probably wouldn't believe that teleworking was even possible in the days before the Internet and cell phones, but it worked well for me, and I never went back to having a "proper" job!
Remember Norton PC anywhere? That was the first "remote desktop" besides X windows. Also LanLink...
@@equid0x I remember PC Anywhere before it was purchased by Norton (Symantec) in the 80's!
I thought this was an old video i haven't seen yet, didn't noticed its new
It's funny how many people, me included, thought the internet started around the time Internet Explorer came around. Oh how wrong we were...
Yep, IE is around the time the World Wide Web started, but the Internet existed long before that...
I first logged into it back in 1985 on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K, using a phone coupling style modem and the Prestel BBS service in England, UK. It belonged to my uncle and he visibly used to sweat, whenever I tried downloading games! It was VERY expensive to be online in those days.
@HermanTR Netscape was based on Mosaic. Of course if you want pure ASCII there's always LYNX. 🙂
@@kevin12567 IE is around the time the World Wide Web went mainstream(and e-mail!). Which is different than when it started.
That sound though... I almost miss it
Also, very cool to see it working. I remember using dial up back in the mid 2000s but with a Windows XP machine... oh boy I'm getting old
The modem dial-up is not so out dated but going to it with a very old OS is as well as the free message board dial in host is unique. Some areas even in USA people still have to use dial-up to get the Internet connection. I still have a dial-up AOL account that I can use, If I have to work on a computer for someone that still uses dial-up Internet, or if my high speed Internet goes down. Over the years I used dial-up I was fortunate to often get 26 kbps to 42 kbps.
I used to run a BBS back in the day. I got it up to two lines before the web came to be.
I love the text from NIST about MJD. I remember learning about that system a bit over 20 years ago as I ran a bunch of AlphaServers with OpenVMS which uses that as its epoch.
Haha... I had a Vaxstation 3100 m76 with OpenVMS on it... Sadly went in the trash around year 2000
I remember doing this in the late 80's in high school on my Laser128. I would get BBS numbers from a local newspaper or something. It was so exciting when it would actually connect. Of course, only called local ones as long distance wasn't free back then. Not sure what I did on them, I think I downloaded shareware every once in a while.
for those who think that dial up tec is obsolete , no it is not. for many people in some remote rural areas , this is the only means for them to get onto the net.
Nice to see videos of landline phone technology!
That was interesting. And your Tandy is a beaut! Bill Bixby would be proud.
I was online with a TRS-80 Model II in 1983.
Forum-80 BBS.
I usually use telnet, it's nice on linux because it's included by default with most distros so just a few keystrokes and I'm back on bbses through my normal terminal. Seeing that Thunderbolt BBS ad got me to head over again for the first time in a while. It's fun but it makes me miss the old days a bit too much. I love that some of these boards still have code and graphics up from when they were actively running.
4:05 - 2400baud is 300 bytes, or less than four lines on an 80 column display. Cut that in half because you have to send and receive, and you get that lag every two lines.
BTW, feel free to give it a call. The phone number is listed on the Telnet BBS Guide
I had a 2400 baud modem back in the late 80s and can remember using it access various local BBS as well several “Online Services” (CompuServe and Genie specifically). At the time CompuServe cost $12 a minute during non-peak evening hours. Genie was the cheaper alternative at $6 a minute. Both provided access to chat, online encyclopedia and other digital references sources, and online support from various software/hardware companies (back before support web sites existed). It was also a great way to access shareware and freeware though local BBS’s were better for this due to the fact they didn’t charge per minute, though they did enforce maximum per day access limits. Some of the better BBS’s participated in a type of network for BBS’s called Fidonet that allowed messages to be passed back and forth between other Fidonet BBS’s users, a sort of alternative to proper email access, which was hard to get back then. I remember accessing a BBS for the BMUG, a Macintosh users groups, in the early 90s that offered access software that provided a graphical front end to their BBS. CompuServe also offered a similar piece of software called CompuServe Information Manager, a GUI front end to the normal CompuServe text only access model. It wasn’t as advanced compared with what AOL was starting to offer at the time in terms of its GUI but it was an improvement over the text only interface, at least on Windows 3 and Mac computers. CompuServe later renamed their text only interface as CompuServe Classic when they where bought by AOL and started offering a modern GUI product with full internet access under the CompuServe name running alongside the classic interface.
Something interesting anyone wishing to explore BBS’s without the need for modem and landline, you can access virtual BBS’s via the internet. There used to be BBS’s that you can access via TELNET terminal though I haven’t looked into that recently. They give you the full experience of accessing a BBS without the hassle of dial-up or the slow speed or the limited number of users any BBS could handle at one time (often only one at a ti eon the hobbyist BBS’s). There are also devices people have made for old microcomputers and old PC cop tables that allow them to access BBS/telnet/SSH and certain other services like email via a wireless or wired Ethernet connection. They simulate a modem without the need for an actual modem or phone line usually over your computer serial connection.
For a very short time I ran a BBS on a software called Excalibur that had a full graphical frontend. I thought it was the next big thing then the WWW came along. At the time, it was significantly more advanced than HTML, and as I recall, had a program you used to point and click your way to creating new "pages" on the board.
Brings back memories
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. You really jogged my aging brain cells. I saw Fidonet on one of those you logged. Wonder if it is still in existence?