*** TOMB OF THE UNKNOWN MODEM ***
Back in the late 1980s I coded my own BBS in Turbo Pascal. I had been a professional programmer for about 8 years and did much more complicated things at work, but the BBS was the biggest, most elaborate project I had ever done on my home computer. The machine was a 30-pound portable, or "luggable", with a 7-inch monochrome screen and two 360k floppy drives. That's right, no hard drive, total storage capacity well under one megabyte. I was proud of what I managed to fit on that thing. The A drive contained DOS, Turbo Pascal, the BBS code and some utilities. The B drive was the data disk with all the messages.
The BBS was divided into ten message boards, each for a preassigned topic. I designed it so a user could be the administrator of a board. That way I didn't have to run the whole thing myself. They could accept or kick users, delete messages, even transfer their admin privs to another user without my involvement. Anarchy! A couple boards were run by my friends, and a few by users I didn't know personally. I forget what all the areas were, but there was a general discussion board and three for play-by-mail type roleplaying games - Dungeons and Dragons, Traveler and RoboTech (run by my friend Rick). One board was run by some weird high school kid who was preoccupied with what he called "wafers" - the crunchy little rectangular cookies with the waffle-like surface and the filling. Don't ask me.
The Tomb even had an adults-only board called The Hot Tub, run by a user named Ramona or Roxanne or something. This was in the simple days of the 80s and there was no form of age verification, but Ramona said she was serious about keeping out non-adults and claimed she could spot them through conversation. She may have said she was a teacher, I forget. Anyway she convinced me and I let her run it. I know she politely refused a number of applicants. My memory of the Hot Tub content is a blank, but I think it was mostly along the lines of suggestive flirting.
My BBS, like most, was a single-user system. It didn't have a dot-com or any type of web address, because there was no World-Wide-Web yet. Basically somebody else's computer made a phone call to my computer using a modem. The common modem speed was 300 or 600 baud (bits per second). My 1200-baud modem was pretty uptown, but there were people who had 2400. BBSs typically ran on people's home computers, consequently most of them only ran overnight or while the owner was at work, because it tied up the phone line. Being a wild and crazy single guy with more than adequate income, I could afford a second phone line for my computer, so the Tomb was online (so to speak) 24/7.
Some BBSs had a chat-like feature that allowed the current user and the system operator to type live messages back and forth (the Tomb did), but in general there was no direct interaction. You posted messages and then came back later to see what was new. Unlike modern web forums such as reddit, my BBS was not threaded. You couldn't reply to a specific message. Your post just got added at the bottom. And yet somehow people managed to carry on conversations.
In addition to the message boards, The Tomb had a built-in adventure game called Toddler Terror. In it you had the role of a babysitter, watching over twins named Bertie and Gertie while their parents were out. A psycho killer was loose in town. During the evening people came to the door, including the children's annoying aunt, and you had to decide who to let in or not. You could also arrange for your "sweetie" to come over (it was non-gender-specific!) for sexy time. The idea was to survive the evening, keep the kids alive, and achieve a few other goals.
The whole point of Toddler Terror was to write an adventure game engine. At work a few of the guys and I had been secretly working on a game command parser like the one in Zork. Throw rock at troll, etc. We disguised our test vocabulary with words like Get, Save, Delete, File, Record... so we could discuss it out loud with managers around.
For the BBS game I used a different approach and made it like a choose-your-own-adventure book. It would describe a scene and then give you several choices of what to do next. The engine included conditional branching between scenes and could put different fragments of text together based on variables that changed depending on what you did. It had a lot of potential, but Toddler Terror ended up being the only game I ever created with it. But like I said, the point was the engine not the games.
I was actually going to create a completely different game called WaferQuest, specifically for that one kid who was so fascinated by wafers. But right around then I got married and moved to a new town, so after 2 years and with a whopping 200-ish users, the Tomb was closed forever.
Until now!
It's 2021 and I've been retired for several years. From time to time I've had a nagging desire to resurrect the old BBS. Maybe now's the time. At the moment I'm not sure what form it will take. I still have the floppies and the original computer (a Televideo TPC II), which hasn't been turned on in 30 years. It would be great to get it running on the actual machine. Might have to do some emulation - hell, an Arduino is faster and more powerful than the Televideo. I doubt that the disks are readable, but I might still have the printed source somewhere. At the moment this is just a very nebulous, nostalgic idea, but I figured getting the domain and putting even a minimal site online might create the momentum to figure everything out. Plus I kinda miss coding. So here goes.
1/18/2021
Update 3/7/2021 - No success yet getting the Televideo to boot off a floppy, and I haven't been able to find a hard copy of the BBS after searching through old boxes. So I'm kind of stalled right now, and this might end up just being a one-page reminiscence. But I haven't totally given up yet. No idea if the problem is my floppy drives or if the disks just aren't readable anymore. Covid is kind of in the way but I am asking around for someone with a working floppy drive I can check them on.