Welcome to 1994

We just turned 18. What you see above is the Bulletin Board System of Coma, my besti. We recreated the mailbox from old backups. Just clück "Connect" and you are back in the good old days, where computing was neuland and actual fun.

What is a BBS / Mailbox ?

Think about it as facebook, just without the internet and text based. Back in the glory mailboxing days, remote computers were reachable by modems / landlines. A direct connection between two computers.
On the host system there was running a software giving the caller menus for up- and downloading files (+pr0n), playing games, chatting, and a discussion area.

History

Back in the year 1993 my friend COMA set up a mailbox running the Renegade BBS system. It was called Hackerforce BBS.
Here is the entry in the 06er Liste ( a huge list with all available mailboxes, ordered by telephone number):

06081 12129    |*Hackerforce BBS   |   |VVFFFF |V|FID<2:2461/356> OS2 HIC|05/95

There was a huge userbase, regular usermeetings, and COMA was managing everything. It was online until 1996 or seven. The upcomming internet killed all BBSes. From then on we had ICQ, IRC, email & websites with pr0n.

A new world opened up and the old one got forgotten. What followed in the next two decades was the complete commercialisation and greeve. Users turned from 'customers' to 'products'.

But why?

I am sick of this; I kept my blog to rant about anything, and showing my personal interests to anybody that was interested. But the system was rotten. FB, X, Insta, searchengines: killed by greeve.

COMA is as pissed as I am. 'They' stole us our space, our virtual home. You can just stand at the edge of the playing field and have to watch your team loosing against Paris Saint Germain. chanceless.

So I found some old backup disks in my room and we made a plan to set up the old mailbox again. It was easier than I thought. There is a fairly good instruction to set up the Renegade BBS under DOSbox. And it worked ootb. All you need to do is customize the menus and wait for callers. Not landline/modem anymore, TELNET nowadays. All running on a Raspberry Pi 4.

So here we are, having the Hackerforce BBS up again.

How to reach us?  

The BBS system runs under DOSbox on a Raspberry Pi. To reach us, we suggest downloading an ANSI terminal program, such as syncterm or netrunner (syncroterms filetransfer is broken), under iOS use muffinterm.
If you just want to sneak in, you can also use PuTTy with the option "Window->Appearance->CP850"
The internet address is bbs.hackerforce.de Port 2323 or 2324

   Yours,  
 COMA & MASTERHIT