Private Boards

You might notice a tendency on the posts and screenshots, it’s not really on purpose, it’s just the files I found on the floppy’s… I honestly wish I had more of these, especially because after compiling all the data I can’t help to feel that these do not – at all – reflect the boards I was a regular at, or the people I related with. But there you go…

99% of underground boards used pcboard from clark development. The easy costumization, language files and especially it’s interperted language (PPE) a framework for custom made apps, made it the prefered weapon of choice for the undersound SysOp’s. Below is the example of a custom logon screen for the pcboard, using such a PPE:

Pcboard created the .diz extension (bet you didn’t know that!). DIZ’s made it easy to keep file areas neat and tidy, since once a user uploaded a file it would be uncompressed, checked for viruses, the nfo parsed and used to create the file’s description on the board. Below is an example of such a file list from Nuclear Assault BBS, heavily using the DIZ feature. DIZ’s were also a prime spot for group branding and publicity. ascii art was also a big part of this.

Branding was important. It made your group or BBS stand out. NFO’s were little files with ads to the BBS where the file passed through, each time the file was uploaded another .NFO file was added to the compressed file. An “I was here” statement with a hidden agenda.

Portugal was fruitful when it came to underground BBS’s especially if you compare the ratio of standard BBS’s to Underground BBS’s. There were good ansi artists and dedicated SysOps, serious groups with serious projects.

Interestingly NFO’s were also used as a means of communication, often having private jokes or messages to other group members of members from other groups. Also a list the the member boards (what these days on the internet we’d call “mirrors”) or echoing nodes:

It wasn’t also usual to add a demo, yet another way to advertise. I found 3 of them. +351 home brew.

kewl.com nukehq.exe dogpound.exe

(I’ll work on the hosting for these… nykta hates me and refuses to give me an account. Every other free host out there refuses to post anything other then php and html files. seems I’ll have to cough up the dough.)

There is sooooo much missing from this post. Nuclear Assault, Reckless Life, Inferno and a few more BBS’s that kept me up late at night. I kept no records of those ones…

BBS’s

I was about 13 years old when my mother bought me my first modem. It was a SmartLink 2400 external modem. How I loved it. Loading Procomm Plus for the first time and going through the new user registration process at Visus BBS. Visus was one of those big boards, with lots of users and never ending file areas, but 2400 BPS’s was hardly enough to take any advantage of the huge 2 Gb’s (?) Visus had to offer at the time. This was pre-wolfenstein 3D, this was more of a CD-MAN era. So one would hop from board to board looking for files and friendly people, people with more skills then us, people who sometimes would nurture and mentor us throughout our stay at a given board, mail network or whatever. I remember the shyness when approaching a SysOp. It wasn’t anything like today, when we just send emails to people we have no connection with but happened to catch a common interest on some newsgroup. This was the 15 years of fame of FidoNet (people are advertising a comeback…I’d really enjoy that.).

Yesterday I discovered an old paper bag with floppy disks, among a few of those disks there was a backup of bluewave and within that ARJ file was a few packs of mail from Paradise City BBS. (funny thing, couldn’t use key-binds like CTRL-O on bwave running straight from XP’s the command prompt, on the plus side: I discovered DOSbox)

(right-click + view image, the wordpress template is cropping it!)

Paradise City was really the shit. It was public, but somewhat private. There was this strange message board called Kotonet where people would offend each other in mutual insane laughter. It was quite something compared to the proper sense-and-sensibility of Portuguese FidoNet. The screenshot above was the second version (I think) of the “ad” one would be presented with before the “news bulletin” when opening a mail packet with BlueWave. The neon-aspiring color shading and cyber-ish fonts were strange and alluring for the unsuspecting geek.

Paradise City was the place to be when it came to programming. It was really one of the pillars of mid-90’s Portuguese demoscene and the official Portuguese Support board for Telegard’s BBS software. Pluz everything waz written with Z’z instead of Z’z.

One of the coolest things about BBS’s was the sense of community (long gone in today’s internet), there was no myspace, hi5, twitter crap, just people exchanging information, hard-bitted information and gaining for some reason this sense of belonging. Fidonet was huge for it’s time and as broad as desired for the 4000/5000 users (I imagine) it encompassed. The sense of community was much more obvious in Paradise City and Kotonet, maybe because we were all kids and geeks and all we wanted was a Gravis Ultra Sound soundcard. There was no one watching over kotonet, the chaos and havoc was all that ruled and to teens that is of course the perfect sandbox. I laughed out loud holding my stomach from hurting…that’s how much I laughed with these guys. There was no one looking over Kotonet, except for a silent crowd of people… but I’ll keep that in store for another post.

I’m going through all the floppys as days go by…it’s not a straigh forward process, since the only computer I now own with a floppy drive is an old Toshiba laptop that is running debian just for kicks.

As data resurfaces I’ll post more about it.

I’ve promised Sardaukar a post about portuguese diskmags, I’ve seen the files around, but I want to give it a bit more background. This first post about Paradise City is perfect because for me it really was the gateway for the underground BBS scene happening at the time.