Macintosh BBS Software

[Hardcore SysOp]

Like I stated, there are BBSes out there that do work on TCP-IP like First Class for the Mac and PC, ad they do allow email sensing/receiving. But that number of BBSes that do this is very limited.

Elfen, I am not sure where you acquired that idea, but to my knowledge, all BBS packages on the Mac side have been able to use the TCP/IP protocol -- and thus be telnet-accessible -- since the late 1990s. I have used both

Hermes II and Public Address since that time, and both packages have that functionality. FirstClass is by no means the only one.

If you visit the The BBS Corner's Telnet & Dial-Up BBS Guide at http://www.telnetbbsguide.com/, you will see that they currently list under 400 telnet-accessible BBSes. That doesn't necessarily mean that that is all there are, but those are the only ones who are apparently known to them.

HotLine is not secure as it was a hacker created software which other hackers decided to try to break it and they did on every occasion. It was created for storing Warez and other Hacker VooDoo; but all BBSes can be used for that.

Elfen, to be honest, nothing is secure these days. As you no doubt already know, some of the biggest names in computing and on the web have been hacked. Millions of credit cards and piles of personal data have been compromised, stolen, used and abused. It has happened to me twice in recent years; not due to any fault of my own, but because a lot of big web-based companies have not taken security serious enough. My gosh, even the U.S. government has been repeatedly breached and is vulnerable to attack.

Oh yes; let's talk about big bad Hotline. And why don't we throw in BitTorrent while we are at it, as well as every other peer-to-peer technology? 

In my view, it isn't the software that is bad or evil; it is the people who abuse it for their own purposes. One bad apple spoils the whole bunch, and gives everyone a bad reputation.

The truth is -- and this point has been made before -- peer-to-peer technology does in fact serve some good and legitimate purposes; but it isn't often that we hear about that, because all of the big conglomerates have led us to believe otherwise.

For the record, I ran my Hotline server for over eight years straight; and I have run it a few times since then. During all that time, I never offered warez, porn, serials, kracks, movies, or any of that stuff that you worry about. I ran -- and still run -- a very clean server, and I am very conscientious about it.

If you are doing a BBS on a Mac, heh..., it is easier now to use the internet as  connection. Firstclass is the only way to do it as is.

Again, it has been easy to use the TCP/IP protocol with most -- and probably all -- Macintosh BBS packages since the late 1990s. It is nothing new. And to reiterate, FirstClass is by no means the only BBS package that has this capability.

You can try with Pancake, if you can find it . . .

I offer Pancake -- as well as quite a few other Mac BBS packages -- on both my Hermes II BBS, as well as on my Hotline server. There are a number of very old BBS titles I have scoured the web for, but I have been unable to find them.

I think First Class is still being updated but I can't be too sure on that. Most BBS Software ended their support around 2002 or so.

You are correct. The FirstClass client currently stands at version 12.110.

The BBS software that I use -- Hermes II -- was last updated in 2013 and stands at version 3.5.11, but you need to compile it from source. There is no binary installer package or DMG image, because it is only a Mac Classic app and won't run on Mac OS X. That is why you need to install the Classic environment via Basilisk II or SheepShaver.

 

[olePigeon]

In my opinion, if it doesn't have board games, it's not a BBS.  There were quite a few ANSI graphics games for BBSes.  Wheel of Fortune was pretty crazy, and there was another that was a very respectable Bard's Tale clone.  Simpler games like Global Thermal Nuclear Warfare, as well.  Quite a few BBSes had NetHack... if you consider that graphics.

 

[Hardcore SysOp]

Oh well, olePigeon, then I guess that my Hermes II BBS is not really a BBS after all, because I don't have any games or any doors/externals installed of any kind.

However, it is not that I don't want to.

If one uses Hermes II 3.5.9 or earlier, there are piles of externals/doors available which can enhance the core BBS package.

However, with Hermes II 3.5.10, Michael Alyn Miller -- the current owner of the  Hermes II software, and its most recent developer -- deprecated THINK Pascal-based externals, and switched to Python-based externals inside. Sadly, with the next release of Hermes II, he only included one external which he had converted to the new Python external development environment. That was a Python version of the old BBS standby LEECH game.

By carefully studying the structure of LEECH, I was able to write a new external called "Get-to-Know-You", which was an ice-breaker external which gave each BBS member the opportunity to answer 35 different questions. The  user could answer the questions at his leisure, and was not even required to answer them all. By so doing, he created his own unique profile on the BBS, which other BBS members could view. Thus, the name "Get-to-Know-You". As hard as I worked on that thing years ago, I no longer have it anywhere. I must have trashed it at some point when I thought that I was done with BBSing years ago.

But then, with Hermes II 3.5.11 -- which was released two years ago -- Michael again changed the external development environment to the Forth language. He did not include any Forth-based externals with Hermes II 3.5.11. Neither did he ever release his new Forth-based external development environment, so that Hermes II SysOps could learn to write their own externals for the BBS. Thus, if one is using the current version of Hermes II, there are zero externals/doors for it.

Despite Michael making the Hermes II BBS code open source two years ago, no one has taken up the challenge to keep Hermes II alive; and to date, it still has not been ported to Mac OS X. Thus, as I do, one must run either Basilisk II or SheepShaver in order to operate a Hermes II BBS on a modern Mac OS X machine. Older Macs which still have the Classic environment can run Hermes II just fine . . . and they get to use all of those old externals.

Of course, doing so comes at a price. The newest versions of Hermes have some bug fixes and other worthy improvements, including with a few stability issues.