BBS and terminal programs for the Amiga

[Sean Cunningham]

I wish I could remember the name of the BBS software I set up for the CCAUG (Corpus Christi Amiga Users Group) back in like 1990 or 1991 or so.  It let you embed IFF images for menus and image posting if you were using a companion terminal program to access it.  Slow as hell at what was, at the time, fast modem speeds.  A lot of us suffered through it just to say we had something "better" than ANSI graphics or at least more unique.

A local programmer who had developed the most amazing Commodore C64/C128 BBS software, which the name also escapes me other than his handle, The Dragonmaster (*), was supposed to do up his magic for an Amiga board, and I was anxiously awaiting that to swap our Amiga board over to, but I'm pretty sure I went away to school before that happened.  His board and companion terminal program were fast by comparison because his used sprites client side rather than transferring over loads of bitmap data.  

Musicterm, that was his terminal software, because he was a musician and his BBS software let you embed music code into messages that would be interpreted client side.  Genius guy.  I always wanted to see what he'd come up with once he got his teeth sunk into the Amiga.


edit:(*) found it, Darrel Spice Jr., Spiceware and the C64/128 software was indeed MusicTerm.

[Sean Cunningham]

I miss the BBS.  If you haven't seen it, and you were into "the scene" during the '80s, you owe it to yourself to watch the independent documentary series, BBS: The Documentary.  Better yet, buy it because it was obviously a labor of love for the filmmaker:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A85RJMhB8_s


...it's the kind of thing that if you weren't there, you likely won't get it or understand why any of it or any of these people are interesting at all.  But if you were there, it's one of the most satisfying films you'll ever see about real people that doesn't involve mass murder or people behaving badly.

[Sean Cunningham]

What is "telnet age"?

Post internet ubiquity there was a proliferation of BBS that were accessible through telnet instead of dialing in.  Still the classic text menu formats just faster (unless you used dial-up to get to your ISP).  I'm sure there's still some around.

I kinda like the idea of that more than clicky-gui message boards like this one but web-based just took over.