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  • "I'm glad I found this file..." nice! wish I had also some captures of old BBS sessions safed like this one - thanks Oscar!
    by gforce_de
  • It's a rather weird combination of year, CPU and memory.

    Z80 is (still) an 8-bit CPU with 16-bit addressing. It cannot access more than 64kiB at a time. The hardware and the software needed to overcome that limit was worth more than an 8088/8086 (or compatible CPU) with MS-DOS and Telix.

    In 1993,the age of 80286 and 80386, 8088/8086 were considered low-low-end CPUs, let alone the Z80, even in Mexico.

    Not pointing my finger, just stating some facts.

    by notorandit
  • You may also like https://github.com/l3nz/pangea-2023/blob/main/Storia_en.md - it tells the story of a Worldgroup BBS system that was run as a “Civic network” between the 1996 and 1999
    by kamma4434
  • Thanks, this takes me right back to middle school. I was on a 80386 back then. You had to dial in, and the phone line was tied up the whole time. An hour online cost me a whole month's allowance. Worth it, though.
    by Sunny_Fung
  • Anyone from Argentina? I was cosysop of Century XXI BBS. Good times! :-)
    by pibefision
  • La Cueva!!! I was an assiduous Nopal BBS user, then sysopped Coyoacan BBS for a few years. All these being local, the community was very tight-knit, both among users and operators of these and other Mexico City BBS like laberinto, Tierras Extrañas and others. This was before internet access became ubiquitous and wiped all these BBSes out.
    by loloquwowndueo
  • I definitely feel the nostalgia here. I remember the first time I got a modem in the early '90s and dialed out to a few local BBSes as a teenager. I didn't quite know what they were or what they were for.

    It was the most amazing experience to see this text and ASCII/ANSI art appear on my screen that was running off somebody else's computer. It's hard to describe the feeling I got when I realized I was connected to somebody else's computer somewhere within my city. It felt futuristic. At first I felt like I was being watched (possibly) by whoever owned the computer, seeing what I was doing on the system.

    Also neat was I was using an IBM PC and some of the BBSes I connected to were using Apple computers or something else. It blew my young mind.

    Eventually I ran my own BBS and made my own BBS door games that I made a little bit of money with. I released them as shareware and people would send checks in the mail to me to register the software.

    I still have the data from my BBS that I could probably run in DOSBox to log into for old time's sake.

    by allenu
  • Absolutely wonderful article and find! I was a RBBS-PC guy myself, and ran a one-line bbs for a while on it, but it never got popular with anybody. I interrupted one guy looking around one time and brought him in to chat mode, and we ended up good friends; the whole reason I kept the bbs up was so he could beep me and call me into long chats a couple nights a week.

    It was a IBM-PC or XT, with two Seagate half-height 20MB ST-225 hard disks laying to the side of each other in the two bays--don't stack them, they will fry each other even with added fans installed!

    It made such a ozone smell in my bedroom I ran a dryer vent hose from the exhaust fan out my bedroom window.

    That's about all I remember, but I do have a copy of the software if anybody needs it.

    by BubbleRings

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