Yet another Hacker News

48 points bityard 1 day ago 13 comments

altairprime 23 hours ago | parent

Gosh. I had forgotten what the QWK reader was called. Blue Wave’s UI is burned into my childhood memories. Thanks for the nostalgia :)

I at one point had {COMMO} custom auto-scripts set up to dial scan all 300 local BBSes each night, auto-login and grab their QWKmail packets, and then drop into Blue Wave so I could read through all the forums whenever I eventually woke up with key imprints on my forehead while waiting for the dialer. Best forums experience ever, lifetime to date.

QWK mail was what RSS could have become if phpBB had implemented two-way messaging over RSS rather than one-way: you download the RSS forums packet and then you upload your RSS replies packet, and use a reader app to track all your forums so that you can work through your reading and writing queue while offline and it all just worked, no drama and only 1 GET and 1 POST necessary per site per day to stay connected to all of them :)

flir 21 hours ago | parent

I wrote a program in C that took two Blue Wave packets and compacted them into one. Probably my first "in anger" C program. I was very proud of it.

glimshe 23 hours ago | parent

Blue Wave? I'll reply with: BlueBEEP.

If you know what it is, you know what it is.

afx303 13 hours ago | parent

Scavenger’s Dialer fan here

hotelsacher 23 hours ago | parent

Did you see those windowlings hovering over the background and casting a shadow? Later user interfaces may have had more pixels, but they never had that coolness.

EvanAnderson 22 hours ago | parent

I loved QWK! I was a Silly Little Mail Reader person.

qgin 21 hours ago | parent

Thank you for this!

I grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere and there were zero BBSes or AOL access points or anything that wasn’t a long distance number and there was no practical way for me to pay for that at that age. Bark was the first time I communicated with another person using my computer.

I found an old Bark Music cassette tape at my parents house recently and went looking online for any mention of Bark and couldn’t find anything at all, as if the entire thing had been a fever dream.

https://imgur.com/gallery/bark-daADin6

bityard 21 hours ago | parent

Yeah, I was in the same boat. Lived in the middle of nowhere and long distance was expensive, so regular BBSes might as well have been on a different planet for me.

I heard there was a BARK magazine, and a BARK T-shirt but this is the first time I've heard about a cassette! Thanks for sharing that.

jandrese 20 hours ago | parent

I found a "BBS on a CD" as a kid in the 90s. It was intended for people setting up a new BBS but it came with a good chunk of content to seed the system with.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of BBSes a lot of the stuff wasn't terribly useful for just one person. Emailing yourself isn't terribly useful. Door games were usually multiplayer, although LoRD was playable solo, and was in retrospect a precursor to games like Farmville.

The part where the BBS admin would call your number to verify your identity was real as well. It was always fun to explain to mom why some totally random guy was calling and asking for me.

kylemaxwell 20 hours ago | parent

Pretty sure writing PROCOMM scripts (Aspect?) was, like, my second or third programming language after BASIC and MS-DOS batch files. I was that nerd in 4th grade 40 years ago reading "Advanced MS-DOS Batch Programming".

Thanks for taking me back on this; fortunately, I grew up in a large city and I didn't need to rack up long-distance phone bills to have a huge population of local BBSs to play door games and suck down text files.

kamma4434 18 hours ago | parent

BlueWave - so many memories. I totally forgot about it.

Pangea chose WorldGroup over FirstClass because it had QWK. https://github.com/l3nz/pangea-2023/blob/main/Storia_en.md

StanislavPetrov 14 hours ago | parent

Friend of mine ran a dial-up BBS in the early 90s when we were in our late teens. We had been to a few 2600 meetings (in the lobby, near the payphones) and were obviously into tech, though not as heavily as others. The BBS was comprised of a bunch of the usual doors (Tradewars 2002, ect) and a few message boards. The BBS has been up for a couple of years and, being a single line, accounts were limited to 20 or 30 minutes a day. It was rather popular and when someone logged off there would usually be someone calling and logging in right after.

Moderation was lax (at best) as we spent more time playing Tradewars than we did reading the message boards. Eventually one of the message boards became popular among serious hackers, and they would regular post back and forth there, which we found amusing. Soon after, one of our mutual friends, who was a serious hacker (albeit not connected with our BBS) was arrested for some illegal hacking activities. When he was released, he called my friend and told him that he had been questioned specifically about his BBS. Needless to say that was the last day the BBS was online as my friend rushed downstairs to turn it off and format his 40 MB hard drive!

Scottn1 4 hours ago | parent

Thanks for this.

Brings back memories of me being about 11 years old in early 80s when I got my first IBM PC, eventually a modem and that turned into me hosting a small BBS that got sort of semi-busy. But I only was able to have it active during the day and overnight so my dad would not know. I remember having to walk the long telephone wire across a room and down a hallway to reach the phone jack several times a day and then so excited hearing those connections coming in. What great times!

Then the $300 phone bill came in and my father blew his top and took my whole computer with him to work after that for a few months. Back then, a land-line phone call was charged by the minute, even if calling a neighbor.