Before social media brought the Internet to the masses, and before even Napster, ICQ, and AIM gave those with a phone line a reason to connect online at all, those who went online often went to a BBS messageboard. By modern standards these text-only environments would have been extremely limited, with only weather updates, stock information, limited news, some email and messaging, and perhaps some classifieds or other miscellaneous information. This was an important time for the early Internet though, and [Nicola] recently discovered a time capsule of sorts from this era.
He first got a tip about a piece of vintage hardware, a DEC VAXstation II which was missing from his collection. But after painstakingly preserving the data on the hard drive he found it had been hosting one of these BBS servers and had plenty of gems from the era to show off. Not only does this build restore the DEC hardware but [Nicola] was able to virtualize the server using the data he recovered on a SIMH emulator, granting insights into how the Internet of this era was used.
[Nicola] also brought the BBS messaging system back online, although he notes that running it on the original hardware wouldn’t be feasible so for now it runs in the cloud. It’s a fascinating look into the Internet of the past, far beyond when many of us first went online as well. For a deep dive on how these systems worked, as well as an introduction to some of the Internet culture of the day, we saw this guide to the BBS a little while ago.
Door games were the best part once yakking with mates online got old. Blobs, operation overkill II.
There’s something otherworldly about running a BBS in the cloud. A cloud upgrade for the original cloud service.
He’s got a vax emulator? Wow! Or, maybe “just” running the old? Basic code? (Bliss was native on vax?)
The software of this videotel bbs is sophisticated and closed source, nothing that you can port to other systems other than the one for which it was designed.
fortunately there is this open source project for the emulation of old glories of Dec |D|i|g|i|t|a|l|.
https://github.com/simh/simh
Reverse engineering it wouldn’t be terrible, but at this point emulation is more than enough.
This is a fantastic preservation project! Bringing a vintage BBS back to life—both on original hardware and through emulation—offers a rare glimpse into the early Internet era. Huge respect to [Nicola] for not just restoring history, but making it accessible again.