Date   : Wed, 12 Jul 2006 07:13:48 +0100
From   : Joel Rowbottom <joel@...>
Subject: The Beeb BBs Project

Hi chaps --

A brief overview of what I'm up to, since a few people have asked:

Way back in the late 80s and early 90s, I was involved in the 
Viewdata BBs scene: in common with my peers I used my Beeb to run a 
bulletin board (The Rabbit Run) and it had a couple of hundred users. 
Other boards around the time included Chipboard (which ran on EBBS in 
Leeds), CARBBS-based bulletin boards such as Odyssey, Optix and 
Cyclone, and FBBS-originated boards such as CCl4.

Having rediscovered the original disks for my BBs numerous times and 
archiving off portions of the board to more resilient media than the 
5.25" floppies they're on, the data's nice and intact.

Now comes the fun bit. One of "those" nights in the pub set me 
thinking about how the BBs could be put on the Internet, in a similar 
way to CCl4 (http://fish.ccl4.org/java/) and Haven 
(http://haven.jml.net). However, I'd want to keep a nice clean 
delineation and not "taint" the system with modern technologies or 
developments such as GoMMC. Thus the idea of using VoIP and modems came along.

We'd take a BBC Micro running the BBs software using a Dataphone 
"Designer" modem to answer (no Hayes modems around this time, 
remember?), and connect the modem via a house phone exchange to 
another machine which would actually dial the line when an incoming 
telnet connection was made. The Beeb setup would remain on faithful 
pre-1990 hardware, and it'd be a solid recreation of an original 
Viewdata setup. The Java Viewdata applet could be used or we could 
write a new one with proper aspect ratio, etc.

Last week, that led to another thought - if we could get one BBs up, 
why not get others going? There are archives of pages and messages 
hidden in lofts (there are a couple which I've got copies of in any 
case); so the idea of using an Econet to have a stack of Beebs with 
modems came about. Believe it or not, I think the hardest bits to 
source will be the non-Hayes modems (Dataphone Demon-2, Designer, 
Telemod, Pace Nightingale, etc.).

The idea's still work-in-progress until I get the stuff running, but 
it seems that we could end up with a live "Acorn BBs museum" using 
original hardware and files.

Cheers


jx

--
Joel Rowbottom, was-kid, geek, coder, bad penny, 'Net addict since 1991
Personal: http://www.joel.co.uk | Pics: http://photos.jml.net