Relatedly, http://telehack.com/ is, to quote itself: a full multi-user simulation, including 25,000 hosts and BBS's from the early net, thousands of files from the era, a collection of adventure and IF games, a working BASIC interpreter with a library of programs to run, simulated historical users, and more.

Pretty fun to play around with for a bit.

Can you give me a script of things to try?

This brings back some nice memories. I was into the Toronto BBS scene pretty heavily back before public internet access became affordable and readily available.

As much as I love modern games, I have to admit I sort of miss some of the classics like TradeWars 2002 and L.O.R.D.

They never really went away. A web remake of LORD, Legend of the Green Dragon (LoGD), has at least 4000 monthly active users currently: https://github.com/lotgd/census

That census also contains some of the more popular servers you might play LoGD on. However, even LoGD is getting a bit old and development stopped a few years ago. There are two modern forks being worked on that I am aware of. The first gets rid of backward compatibility and is more ambitious: https://github.com/lotgd/core

The second is backwards compatible and allows all the many modules developed for LoGD to be used: https://github.com/stephenKise/Legend-of-the-Green-Dragon

If I can drop a tiny plug for a project I'm working on: I grew up on LORD and MUDs and have been trying to recreate the feeling in a game I've been developing in my spare time for a couple years. It's still in dev/testing, but I'd love any feedback or bug reports anyone may come across: http://www.chatandslash.com

It sure does! Does anyone remember MUDs? Some of those boggled the mind with how creative some folks can be with text and symbols. Good times, great memories from back before being a nerd was en vogue.

Certainly do! Some of the oldest and most creative of the MUDs are still in operation, and still being continually updated. One still-running DIKUmud that is still in operation and is absolutely amazing in regards to the ~25 years of constant evolution is Duris Mud. If you have any interest in MUDs or MUD programming its definitely worth checking out.

http://www.durismud.com/ or telnet to mud.durismud.com 7777

MajorMUD! Also, for anyone interested in MUME (Multi-Users in Middle Earth), a Tolkein-based MUD running since 1992, albeit via telnet and not as a BBS door game... It is still running, all these years later [0].

[0] http://mume.org

MajorMUD was a huge part of my youth and an introduction to programming via scripting it.

I'm working on websocket MUD based on MajorMUD in Elixir. There are quite a few people actively building new mud engines in modern languages in 2018. There's even a community with a slack org / newsletter etc at https://mudcoders.com/

> There are quite a few people actively building new mud engines in modern languages in 2018.

Sometimes the Internet is a wonderful place! Not always, but there's still a lot of good stuff around.

post dat github

I think the games I played most in addition to those two is T.E.O.S. (The exploration of space) :) I ran my own on MBBS (Mike's BBS, Norwegian specific software) and later PCBoard. I still have images of the MS-DOS 6.22 floppies and PCBoard 15.3.. Maybe I'll have a go at them again on my old pentium pro.

I'd like to have Desqview though for more than one node and that is one piece of software I have not been able to keep.

Don't forget that there are many active BBS's still around - and even new software being developed for nostalgic fun. Many include hook ups to BBSLink, DoorParty!, and a few other game servers that serve up tons of doors with large player bases.

See http://telnetbbsguide.com/ (seems to be being funky right now) or self plug! https://xibalba.l33t.codes/

And it is possible to connect old hardware:

The Wonderful WiFi232: BBSing Has Never Been Easier | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14481296 (June 2017)

Well this is serendipity! I've been crafting a BBS as a newly re-discovered hobby. The owner of CNet Amiga BBS software is preparing a new release, and I've been running my Amiga BBS in WinUAE on my Windows 10 computer.

Just the day before yesterday, I discovered that CNet could send a user out on a Telnet, which opened up the world of DOS Doors through Gamesvr.

I ran CNet BBS for C64 for many years as a kid. It's biggest draw was they supplied the source code, so we could modify it however we liked.

Cool idea, too bad it seems to be abandoned (no git commits since May 2016 and the latest binaries on the website are from Aug 2014). Anyone interested in picking this up and maintaining it, or at least releasing a new "stable" build (other than just downloading the zip in the bin folder on github and hoping for the best)?

I remember "Doorway" which would hook up any old ANSI text game to a board. I wonder if that would still work.

I'm currently using DoorWay in DOSEMU under Linux native, so I'm sure it would work in this case

cool!!!

This article brings back some great memories from the glory days of dial-up BBSs in the 80s and early 90s. It also brings back some not-so-great memories of insanely high phone bills when you got massively surcharged for dialing outside of your immediate area, let alone your county or state.

And getting my board back online just became tomorrows project, yay fidonet