That telephone cord is impressive.

Pretty standard option for any home with a teenager, to be honest. Long enough to drag the handset into the nearest coat closet when needed.

Mom’s listening along on the other phone with her hand covering the receiver.

We have them at work on our voip phones so we can roll around to each other's cubes while talking to a client without putting that client on speaker. We have headsets and the like too but you're not always wearing it when the phone decides to ring.

Glorious. This must be what is like when old people long for the hot car they lusted for in their youth.

I recall old people being glad that air conditioning was invented.

Life with air conditioning is nice, but life without it wasn't as bad as it is now when the a/c fails.

Cars had vents that would blow outside air right were it was needed without using the heater/fan system, or wing windows that you could direct "relatively quiet" air at you.

Now if your car's a/c fails, you get to roll the window down and that's about it.

> Glorious. This must be what is like when old people long for the hot car they lusted for in their youth.

Absolutely. The blog post goes to great lengths about why it's stupid to run a cluster, and I run a NAS in my house that has more horsepower than anything from the 90s, but there's a part of me that's still a teenager who wants to run a monster multi-node BBS

I get it... FWIW, you can run a telnet/ssh based BBS today over relatively modest hardware, though self-hosting at home given common blocking of regular server ports is a pain.

I've got a nas and a relatively powerful mini-pc for most of my home lab server stuff... but all the same, juggling about 6 BBS related projects I'm hoping I can bring all together later in the year.

Or maybe this is like fondly remembering the busted economy car that you drove around with your friends? I have my first 386DX sitting on my desk right now and it looks exactly like the top left of that photo.

The hot car that we all lusted after was maybe something like a SGI Indy or an O2.

In this picture it seems that all machines have a 3.5" floppy disk inserted. Maybe they had no hard drive and only booted from floppy and then ran software over the network?

A lot of network interface cards had a socket for an option ROM that would allow network boot, but you could definitely fit a client on a floppy and boot that way, too. Novell Netware server would be the mostly likely server for that vintage of rig and a Netware client fit easily on a floppy.

Oh that's a breaker box (or a box of wiring of some sort), not a mirror!

A mirror? I first saw it as a common (US-centric) exterior metal door, with a window -- and with a shelf blocking the opening.

The blur does interesting things.

yeah the shine in the top left of the rectangle was what led me to think it was a mirror, which from my experience would have been really strange for the types of nerds that would work in windowless rooms back in those days.

The black cable underneath looked like the shadow of an oval frame

wait, are you OP? or did you happen to find a high res version of the same paper-copy picture that OP supposedly was given 30 years ago and then scanned and then threw out. or did OP make it up? or is OP just a bot?

maybe i'm a bot.

anyway i used to call into BBSs back in the early 90s and the thing I'm remembering is that they survived mostly on donations, and now that I am seeing the infrastructure that supported those systems and recalling the price of hardware back then I'm starting to second guess everything I thought I knew.

Click on the HN “past” link for this submission near the top of this page, then you’ll get to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096565 (see the top comment there) from when the original image link was still working.

Many sites including Google offer reverse image search. You give it an image and it gives you a list of places it appears, sometimes in higher resolution or with more context (or different context, which can be interesting).

Rachel says she had the photo as a postcard. It's likely that more postcards were printed, and that other people had owned those copies, rather than people being bots.

postcard-sized photo

Apparently "Software Creations" BBS, which ran PCBoard BBS software and was operated in cooperation with Apogee games.

https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896

Thank you!

In the alcove on the right, I think I'm seeing 66-blocks, breaking out the phone lines that must be routed to each machine. Two blocks stacked, each with a fanout of wire on the right side.

Hmm, that is interesting, why was that version originaly hosted on 3drealms site? Probably nothing, somebody there just wanted to share a cool picture. But what if that were an early apogee shareware distribution bbs?

it was 3D Realms official BBS

https://nitter.privacyredirect.com/ScottApogee/status/159372... Scott Miller - Apogee/3D Realms Founder :

>BBS's (bulletin board systems) were the backbone of the online world before the Internet came along in 1995. Apogee teamed up with Dan Linton's BBS, called Software Creations, and we poured $200k+ into it to grow it to nearly 140 call-in nodes with a T3 (high bandwidth) line.

I seem to recall that the release of DooM caused BBSs around the world to be backed up for ages.

I was lucky enough to have a T1 in 1995 and still think to this day that 1.544 Mbps is enough to do real work.

That's not a real BBS. A real BBS is one where you dial in at 20:50 and the sysop's mum answers and says it's not 21:00 yet and you need to call back a bit later when the phone line is switched across to the modem.

That brings back memories. When I was aged 9-12, I made enough money mowing lawns during the summer to afford to have multiple phone lines to support my BBS. I made a bit of money during the fall raking leaves as well. But when winter time came, I had to always disconnect all of the additional lines because I could not afford them.

But I also kept one extra line just for my PC because it was always a pain to dial out to another BBS or chat room when my mother wanted to use the phone to talk to her long distance boyfriend.

Interesting. I thought that looked like a frisbee between the 3 disk packs (?) just below the ceiling next to the cupboard with the brown slatted doors. But then the original picture was so small I thought it must be a desk fan, but in the larger picture I'm going back to my original guess of a frisbee!