This worked pretty well for quiet some time: My user- and filebase grew, I joined FidoNet, connected with more SysOps and became close friends with some of the users. I even organized several "user-meetings" with 30+ attendees.
...But I grew older and decided to "be cool now", so... ;)
At the age of 16, a BBS called "Kuehlbox" just wasn't krewel enough anymore. The layout looked way to clean and I knew: The real cool people
had to use "PCBoard" for their BBS.
Also my boss started recognizing that this BBS could do absolutely nothing for his business and so he gave me all the hardware, including the modem
and I set up my third and last BBS and the one with the most embarrissing name: dA CyberDawg!
And since we're being so honest, right now, here's my second confession: I renamed myself from "Gandalf" (which was an okay nick, back then, I think..)
into "Rave!" (mind the exclamation mark! ;) ) - no - even worse: "R/┤\/e!" :D /o\
Main focus of the BBS was set on demo and music scene stuff and on general coolness.. ;D
But besides all this teenage angst, I set up a pretty decent system with everything, I good BBS needed back then: I had
BBStros, general .nfo-files, always the latest files and up to 30 different callers a day.
After almost 2 years, I had to close the BBS in end of 1996 and soon later go offline for the next 7 years due to personal reasons...
This is the BBS, I loosely recreated here. But with the name of the previous one.. ;)
After having spent the last 12 years on the internet, designing websites and coding applications for a living, I watched the awesome documentary
"BBS" and suddenly, I remembered all the fun I had and how much I learned
about coding and about people, back then and I started searching for any traces of this on the internet.
Besides some old fido mail, I didn't find a single trace of my BBSs. I also didn't find any backup of anything from that time. But I did find an active,
good looking BBS software for linux: "Mystic BBS" and
quiet a lot
BBSs still being online.
So I decided to set up my old BBS again, too. Looking they way, I remember my last design, minus the name and uber-leet behaviour. We all grew up somehow, after all - didn't we? ;)
Meanwhile, only weeks later, I'm in contact with several other SysOps, joined FidoNet and some other FTN-Networks, redesigned the complete BBS and added quiet some files: The complete Radical Rhythms Archive and most of the Eye-D-Alistic Releases, but also some new files, like all the Party-Releases of 2013 & 2014 from Assembly, Evoke and Demodays. Also: Everything from every Underground Conference that ever was and will be, since UC1 was the only party, I attended myself. ;)
While Kuehlbox is great fun and will always stay my main focus, it is a modern BBS using modern software on a
modern operating system.
This was fine for a while, but just like every junkie, I soon needed a stronger fix. ;)
So I started experimenting with emulation, several embedded systems and what felt like every single microsoft os, starting with
DOS 6.22, back in 2016 already... ;)
Long story short: Nothing worked completely and I gave up several times, until I found out what was way to easy to think of: Every Windows version
can still run 16bit DOS software, as long as windows is a 32bit version!
So in spring of 2019, I finally set up and relaunched my 1995 PCBoard BBS, called "Da CyberDawg" and while Kuehlbox is what a BBS looks like in 2021, run by a (somewhat) grown-up, Da CyberDawg is what a BBS (my BBS!) looked like back in 1995, run by a teenager! Loaded with over-lengthy ansi quilts, modded to the max with selfwritten PPEs with main focus on kewlness. ;)
Check out the dedicated page for Da CyberDawg for more info or log in directly.
| BBS Software: | Mystic BBS |
|---|---|
| Mailer Software: | BinkD |
| Tosser & co: | Husky |
| Operating System: | Debian GNU/Linux |
| Hardware: | LXC: 1 CPU, 2GB RAM Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz |
| Line: | 1GBit |
Since we are living in 2015 2021, not 1995, this BBS does not run on a local PC next to my bed, but on my server at a real data-center...
It has its own lxc container with 2GB RAM and 1 of 8 CPUs with 3.6GHz, so it should run just fine..