Jolt Country

I don't know exactly what's going on here. There's a BBS in Portal now? You can find the number and - if you have a landline - call the number? You can call BBSs now? For Portal?

GOD I want to start a dial-up BBS again. None of you understand. NONE OF YOU. Except for Flack. And Pinback. And Cmdr Tdarcos. And Aardvark. And Straw. And Bugs. And Bruce. I think I've run off everyone else. NONE OF YOU UNDERSTAND, EXCEPT FOR THOSE PEOPLE I LISTED. Dial-up BBSs were sooooooo much fucking better than this (waves hands) ALL OF THIS.

God. GOD. As alluring as running a BBS was, can you imagine the appeal of exchanging information... off the Internet? To call someone's house? The house of someone you might never meet, and that was mostly a "hopefully"?

I'd really love to just run one again.

Do ANY of you have landlines at home? God. GOD!!

It's like $16 for a landline out here now. It used to be $30. I bet it IS closer to thirty with all the taxes and fees and shit, but still. But still!

It's a dumb idea, but man, I want to call that Portal Valve BBS. And then run a real BBS again.

I still have a land line. I have the cable package so for cable TV and a cable modem it's like $107 and for cable TV, cable modem and a phone line it's like $99.

Obviously the most hardcore thing to do would be to run a real BBS on a real computer using a real phone line, but there are alternatives.

First off, you can virtualize the hardware (damn you, Chrome -- "virtualize" is too a word). I'm pretty sure WinVice supports emulating a C64 modem through a real PC modem. Not quite the same for the SysOp, but the same end result for your users.

Then if you want to really update things, you can set up a telnet BBS. There are multiple BBS packages that work with telnet right out of the box -- or, if you like, there are things that let you simulate a modem on COM5 (I think) so that the BBS (running virtually) "thinks" it has a real modem when in fact people are connecting to it via telnet. There are a ton of these around. Well, not a ton, but a couple hundred at least. (http://www.telnetbbsguide.com/)

I've "called" a few of those and like many retro things it's cool for a few times and then it gets old. It's like the end of my book where you have this problem because on one hand you talk about how great BBSes were compared to now, but on the other hand I wouldn't want to go back to 2400 baud or floppy disks or only 1 connection at a time.

So just have the login screen popup with a text only menu. maybe just the 'feel' of a dial-up will be good enough.