BBS Preservation Archive

[nickb@primenet.com (Nick S Bensema)]

Reading a discussion of Atari BBSes on comp.sys.atari.8bit, I remembered
my friend, Banzai, who ran the Abattoir Flats BBS over here on his
Commodore 128.  He claims to have, on disk, the last moments of many
defunct Commodore BBSes in the Valley, such as the Forum, Midnight
Drifter, and several others you may not have heard of.  By that I mean,
after the sysops took their boards down, they took out the disks and put
them in a box for a while so they could play Last Ninja 5, then they gave
the disks to Banzai.

He also has saved messages from across the life of many of these BBSes,
which is much better because those were more likely to be taken during the
prime of the board's life.

I thought it might be a good idea to make use of these old BBSes in
some way.... either puting up the BBS on my own phone line for a little
while, or putting as much of its "essence" as I could on the Web, i.e.
logon screens, the contents of the message bases, the lists of online
games and such.

This would probably be a good idea for BBSes of any platform.  It would be
an interesting read for passers-by and former users.  Former sysops
stretching for something substantial to put on their web pages could put
up the contents of their old BBS.  It would be a cultural archive, to
examine a pre-Internet on-line society.  What were the platform wars like
when it was Atari vs. Commodore, and then Amiga vs. Atari?  You get the
idea.

Since most old IBM or Apple boards ran plain ASCII as far as I can tell,
archiving their contents is easy.  Might even rake up a few buried
treasures for the local ASCII Art archive.  But most C64 and Atari 8-bit
boards, and I'm told CoCo boards as well, had graphics and/or color that
could be typed into messages.  To archive these message bases would
require either stripping the graphics out, converting them to GIFs
(un-economical for an entire message base I think), or programming
PETSCII and ATASCII plug-ins for Netscape and IE.  Welcome screens and
such, perhaps even menus, would work great as GIFs, but you can't GIF a
whole message base, I don't think.  Well, it might work in ATASCII which
was monochrome, but probably not PETSCII so much.

There is also the issue of porting everything to the PC or Mac.  Some
people don't have the systems anymore, so they couldn't null-modem or
1200-baud it over even if they wanted to.  Furthermore, what with
converting character sets and all, it just might end up being more
economical to post a bunch of .D64/.ATR/.IMG/.ZIP's up for FTP and tell
everyone to get an emulator.  That, too, would work, but not reach as
wide an audience.

Most of the BBSes my friend has died around 1992-93, so what we'd pretty
much be witnessing is the death of the C64 scene in Phoenix, which would
be sad for the most part.  The Forum, however, went down slightly earlier
and was quite a busy board; it only died because the BBS was unstable and
kept crashing.  Perhaps another of his BBSes died due to CPU failure.
Perhaps one of you has the contents of a BBS that died of crashing or CPU
failure from the 1980's; these would be even better.  Perhaps some of you
have disks and disks full of capture logs, even.  This is probably the
most abundant resource a BBS archeologist would have, since users are
typically more plentiful than sysops, and as I stated earlier, logs are
more likely to represent the prime of a BBS, because at the end half the
posts were like "no new messages again!  come on, someone post something
man!"  I'm sure lots of people have message bases on disk somewhere,
or printed out and stuffed in a drawer somewhere.

Who else has stuff like this?  Who just thinks it's a neat idea?
--
N i c k  B e n s e m a  < n i c k b @ p r i m e n e t . c o m >
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