thomble

We are about the same age. Some of my earliest, fondest memories were of BBSes in the late 80s and early 90s. I remember downloading pirated games before there was any sort of crackdown on that sort of thing. I remember when ZIP took over ARC for archiving, and later reading about the drama about that whole change. I remember the single player (or turn based) games, Legend of the Red Dragon, Trade Wars and the like. I remember the early multi-node BBSes and the early MUDs.

In my mind, all of this sort of vanished in the mid-90s when we got our first dial-up internet service. At that point, do you think that BBSes became the domain of hobbyists, or were there features and communities that continued to thrive and grow in the BBS scene?

As an aside, I grew up outside of Youngstown Ohio, in the same area code as Rusty & Edie's BBS which was, coincidentally, one of the largest BBSes in the world at the time, and is still associated with relevant intellectual property court cases in the US. I didn't realize how good I had it until my family moved away and only had access to hobbyist BBSes. Do you remember Rusty & Edie's BBS? Do you have any funny or interesting stories about the early Wild West of online networks?

Yes! My dad was a sort of early adopter of PC technology in the 80s, but he never really upgraded, so i was stuck with a 1200 baud modem through the early 90s. I remember SysOPs interrupting my session with a chat, trying to convince me that my terminal software was misconfigured. If anything, it taught me patience, which the internet has since destroyed.

Edit: I also recall that Telix was my terminal of choice. It was such an adventure as a kid, dialing into BBSes and finding new content and games.

what was the drama all about?

Sorry, I missed that part earlier. First, I remember logging into a BBS and perusing files, and seeing that the ZIP file extension had replaced the regular ARC extension. I was like 8 or 9 at the time, so I thought there was some error. My dad ended up downloading the PKUNZIP software that we needed to extract those files.

The drama - which I read about much later in life - was that Phil Katz, of PKWARE fame, had used copyrighted ARC source code in his PKARC software. This isn't debated. He was sued and lost, and then developed PKZIP. Thom Henderson, the developer of ARC, was vilified by Katz and eventually left the industry. Katz had a series of personal and professional problems and died from causes related to alcoholism over a decade ago. The story is worth a read here, here and here

who dis?

Here's where it's at, an interview with Thom Henderson, for the BBS Documentary:

http://youtu.be/YiaM5MT1Ok8?t=14m26s