[ynac]

You're inspiring me to attempt a rescue of my last BBS (MajorBBS system) from 1991-1993. It had some great ANSI room and section screens. It was run from a single 1GB(!!) drive that cost us $1000. We had email, a couple stores (one of the first online book stores) and store-n-forward mail systems, maybe finger and telnet(?). Unfortunately, a neighbor got stoned, had a cigarette in bed and burned up his house and ours. Nobody hurt, but the BBS wasn't backed up offsite.

[lardissone]

Beautiful! No backups at all of something? Sorry for your house burnt.

[mike_d]

In the BBS days persistent storage was expensive. Backups were at best saving something to two different floppy disks. If you got lucky you could rebuild most stuff from files you had shared with friends.

[ynac]

It was a weird time frame. My partner was living in the house, and I was moving to Seattle. The backup was pretty much inches from the system itself. Not the last time I learned that lesson. But, the original SCSI drive did survive, even if the machines and desk and couches, etc. were all ruined. With HTML coming along we didn't rebuild. It's still seems like such a huge loss not having entities like BBSs on the internet. Just like the loss of IRC and other basic systems / plumbing of the capital I Internet. Yeah, they needed upgrades, but that's what IETF, RFC, and scrappy hackers are for. <sigh> Loving on the ANSI!

[gwbas1c]

There were telnet BBSes on the internet in the 1990s. I even used some in 2005. Haven't gone looking, but I'm sure if you look, you'll find one. (But it might be better to use ssh today.)