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Man launches C64 BBS
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 22nd August 2008
The C64 runs all the important parts of the bulletin board system - but relies on a Windows PC for 'net connectivity.
According to Hack a Day, that's exactly what Lief Bloomquist has done in what he calls a “moment of nostalgic geekiness.”
Lief was responsible for running a popular bulletin board system on a Commodore 64 back in the halcyon days of 8-bit computing, but hasn't touched such things in fifteen years. According to Lief, getting the software running on the aging microcomputer was the easy part – but getting the system connected to the Internet so visitors wouldn't have to dial-in on a modem wasn't so simple. In the end, he decided to use a VIC-1011A terminal adaptor to connect the C64 to a modern PC running Windows, which acts as a Telnet bridge between the C64 and the Internet.
The system is available for anyone to play with, at bbs.jammingsignal.com port 23 – although, at the time of writing, the server was down for maintenance.
It's a project dear to my heart, as if I glance over my shoulder I can see my precious Commodore 128 sat gathering dust, awaiting the day when I'm bored and/or crazy enough to attempt something like this myself. Until such a day, my hat is doffed to Lief in gratitude for allowing me to experience the glory days of 8-bit BBS once again.
Do you have any ageing hardware hanging about that could be repurposed, or should people stick to hacking the latest and greatest? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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What (usefull) can be done with old hardware.
Upto 8086 (5 Mhz?)
Upto 486 (100 Mhz)
Upto P3 (500 Mhz?)
Upto P4 / Athlon (1 Ghz?)
I for one have a C16, an 8086 (3 Mhz) a Celeron 266 and an Athlon 600 standing about Idle gathering dust. (yes, complete machines)
fileservers
folding?
Well, just as well as Hugo said. Sheesh, I wish all of the overloaded Wordpress blogs would time out that quickly.
The cake may be a lie, but the usefulness of old hardware certainly isn't.
still works, I just fired it up after reading this post :b
Back in the day of my high school years I built several 486's that were web worthy, its amazing what an sx25 can do! I remember running 3D Studio MAX on that thing.. had to export my 3d's to another computer if I wanted them rendered tho.. currently my moms finance computer is a pII 233 with 256mb of ram and w2k. Its a bit slow loading fancy web pages, but it gets there!
My 600 Athlon was my DivX Box for 2 years, then the Codec appearently became too complex and it started stuttering on newer movies.
Router...yes! I've used a Fli4l*-Router on an underclocked 33mhz computer for a few years...could cool it passively, no harddisk so absolutely silent. Even the PSU was silenced...by taking off the top and removing the fan (the top stayed off...bigtower)
Apart from the floppy that only ran when connecting new there was no motor in this baby ;-)
Xir
* Fli4L stands for "floppy isdn for linux" works with DSL though
I have a 1.5ghz original p4 with 512mb of rumbas and raid 1 with 2x 80gb drives and a geforce 3 and a 5.1 creative labs sound card that I use to play music in my room and browse the internet. It also acts as a secure place to work on papers when not in my office. I have has that computer since 2001 and I will still have it for years to come.
I am getting ready to build a media center computer out of an old 2.4ghz northwood and 512-1024mb of ram. I have a geforce 6 series with component out so I plan to hook it up that way. I only need it to play videos hosted on my file server that the crappy ps3 refuses to load. I have an old infrared keyboard with joystick that I will sue to control it.
My current file server is an old rackmount system with an old 2.5ghz p4 and 1gb of ram with only 300gb of storage between 3hard drives all ATA. I had the drives lying around and the computer so I figured I would put it to some good use.
When I build a new main computer this winter my current system will be converted into the file server. At that point I plan to invest in some big drives and give it a few TB of storage on a RAID 5. You can see the current stats for this system in my sig. ;)
News writer for the last year or so...you do read the about page, right? ;)