Date : Wed, 12 Jul 2006 08:46:34 +0100
From : Littlefield Aaron <CALITTLEFIEL@...>
Subject: Re: The Beeb BBs Project
Sounds great to me!
I have a bit of a fetish to see just how many Beebs you can connect together
via Econet (was it 250 of there abouts?). We could do a Guinness World
record for the largest Econet ever done...
Blimey I'm sad.
Good luck with the BB, I remember these in the 80's but my school boy budget
wouldn't stretch to a modem and phone bills :(
Aaron
P.S. Apologies if this message has all junk at the bottom of it from the
office server.
-----Original Message-----
From: Majordomo List Manager [mailto:majordomo@...] On Behalf Of
Joel Rowbottom
Sent: 12 July 2006 07:14
To: bbc-micro@...
Subject: [BBC-Micro] 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
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