Comments on: When the BBS Broke Free

By: roberto

roberto — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 06:16:48 +0000

I used to run a BBS too. I remember the name of the system that made it possible was called “Renegade”. I was surprised to find a description of it on WikiPedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renegade_%28BBS%29

By: Andy Connock

Andy Connock — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:26:22 +0000

i also was a user of The Mars Hotel in 1990/1991. i remember borrowing a VT100 terminal and 1200 baud modem, bringing it home, dialing in and spending hours on it. i also spent time on ISCA BBS (university of Iowa?? can’t remember). great article.

By: marcie

marcie — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:13:23 +0000

This is a great article… it really brings me back. I was never on the Mars Hotel — I think it was shut down by the time I started BBSing (spring 1992). However, I was one of the original users on Eagle’s Nest BBS (and Auggie BBS, also based on the EBBS software). Eagle’s Nest is still around and has a small core group of users, although it’s largely inactive. The server is located on the Mississippi gulf coast and was down for a month after Katrina; the community has never fully recovered. Many of us still keep in touch via Facebook and other modern Internet mechanisms. Eagle’s Nest BBS was and is one of the defining experiences of my entire life. Thanks for this recognition of Mars Hotel in revolutionizing BBSes.

By: Doug

Doug — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 05:09:26 +0000

As one of the users of the Mars Hotel, I must say that it was an awesome BBS. It was much better than dialup. Its chat functionality became the main focus of it after a while. If I remember right, Ed Luke called the underlying software the Waffle House BBS system. He wrote the initial ideas while eating at Waffle House. Also, it was called the Mars Hotel because it was hosted on the Unix server mars.msstate.edu. MSU based its initial Unix box names on gods (Mars, Venus, Ra). It seemed that approximately 50% of the users of the Mars Hotel were related to MSU, but there was a decent contingent of folks from outside of MSU.

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 03:33:21 +0000

Ah, the Cleveland Freenet. I was a frequent user in the early and mid 90′s. Cleveland gave me my first exposure to the ‘World Wide Web’ through the Lynx browser (text only, until I got my hands on a copy of Netscape!)