bbs or crude facsimile of such

[John Labovitz]

Another BBS obscurity —

I ran a BBS in the early 80s called The Bethesda RCP/M. Those of us who couldn’t afford dedicated lines often used a method called ‘ringback.’ This was a clever way to share a regular home phone with a modem.

The idea was that if you wanted to dial up to the BBS, you’d call my number, but hang up after one ring, then call back. The software (BYE, as someone else here mentioned) would be monitoring the ring-detect line on the modem’s serial port, and watch for ring patterns. If it saw a second ring within ~4 seconds, it would ignore the call, assuming it was a voice call; otherwise, it would send the Hayes code to answer the line (ATA). It’s weird how I still remember all that logic, 35 years later...

I used ringback for my BBS for a few weeks until my parents got so annoyed at late-night telephone rings (with those loud clapper bells) that they paid up for a dedicated line.

—John


> On May 19, 2017, at 6:13 AM, jim stephens via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> 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
>