bbs or crude facsimile of such

[jim stephens]

When I got my first system running, S100, I had an Imsai 8080 with a 
Hayes 103 modem.  I used it to log into multics and some BBS's at the 
time and record sessions and files and the like.  I only had the usual 
8" floppies, with eventually 1mb x 2 for storage.

However, reason for mentioning was that there was a simple program which 
would auto answer on the Hayes modem and allow you to run things.

One evening when my roommates and I had gone to dinner, a friend who was 
going to call at a certain time did so.  However we had forgotten he was 
to call, and I had left the system up and connected to the phone.

He called a couple of times and realized that we weren't around to pull 
the line, or call back, so he got his terminal up and running and left 
us a message on the screen for later.

I sort of count it as the first sort of BBS type I ran.  There was a 
program you could leave running which would challenge for a password, 
and then re-run when the modem lost signal, so you could have a low 
grade login that way.  (password only).

And one could take ones choice of files and xmodem them (which he did in 
future sessions).

I logged into many BBS systems which weren't much more than this or a 
restricted menu program after you logged in.  Some were nice with some 
presentation, and some were just (enter 1 to do ... 2 to do ... etc).

Not much else really required if you want to get to very basics.

With any BBS having more than just the floppies, login and messaging and 
more download options were the next level up.

And after that there were various BBS software packages that had 
networks of like users that one could obtain.

thanks
Jim