The retro computing site Break Into Chat has researched the provenance of ANSI art logon screens used by St. Louis-area bulletin board systems, tracing many back to prolific artists like Michael C. Ling, Lora Ruffner and Violet Stymacks. The site documents how sysop Fire Escape adapted dozens of these public-domain images for her own popular board, and notes Stymacks alone produced work used by over 1,500 boards by 1993, with more than 1,100 of her pieces now catalogued.
games.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-31
The writer recounts joining SDF as an ARPA member, a non-profit public-access UNIX system that traces back to a 1987 bulletin board system called SDF-1, started by Ted Uhlemann on an Apple IIe with a 300-baud modem. SDF has since grown into a member-funded 501(c)(7) nonprofit multi-user NetBSD system with tens of thousands of accounts, named after the anime Super Dimension Fortress Macross.
brennan.day
· 2026-10-24
Between 1994 and March 1997, a Tampa, Florida father and his ten-year-old son ran a telephone-only bulletin board called Sanity's Edge from a dedicated 286 PC, using a BigMouth voice card found in an old box. The son handled menus and the asylum theme while his father, the sysop known as Dr. Null, built the database backend; callers paid about five dollars a month to join.
sanitys-edge.shouden.us
· 2026-10-19
The post recounts the author's early dial-up computing experiences on a Packard Bell 386DX, running MS-DOS before the broader internet was widely accessible outside cities and universities. It introduces Bark, a bulletin board system (BBS) from the early 1980s era that offered toll-free access for teenage users, as the focus of the retrocomputing retrospective. The piece situates BBSes as an early alternative to internet access, including email, message boards, file exchange, and IRC-style chat.
blog.bityard.net
· 2026-10-16
Óscar Toledo G. has published a session replay of La Cueva BBS, a Mexican bulletin board system he accessed in 1993 using a homebrew Zilog Z280 computer and a discarded 2400-baud Hayes modem. He wrote his own serial terminal program from scratch, implementing RS-232C communication, AT dial commands, and ANSI escape sequences based on information from books rather than the internet, which did not yet exist for him. To handle discrepancies between documented standards and real-world BBS behavior, he built a capture buffer using the Z280's MMU to record raw byte sequences as they arrived.
nanochess.org
· 2026-10-07
GoKawiil