Welcome to part 3 of my mini-series “Trip Back on Memory Lane“. This segment will talk about the 32bit operating system OS2 Warp by IBM, but also about the history of my bulleting board system “Closed Society”. ?? Backup Link to Video on Vimeo.com Download Video in AVI format at Mediafire.com Note: Correction to one of the statements that I made in the video. It was a Pentium 100MHz and not a 486/100 where I ran the BBS with OS/2 on. Sorry for that. Part 3 – IBM OS/3 Warp 32Bit Operating System After I had my BBS running on individual PC’s that were connected with each other and a “file server” via Novel Lite and then Lantastic for a long while, I got around buying a single “power PC” (=new) that was capable to run all nodes of the BBS all by itself.?? But let me take you a bit further back in time to when I first got started with my BBS that eventually lead me to the use of OS2 as the operating system of choice to run my multi-node bulletin board system.?? A Brief “Technical” History of my BBS I had not much money when I started my BBS. I was co-sysop at some other boards and also played around with local installations of Bulletin Board Software. I did not want to start a 1 node BBS (I had a U.S. Robotics 14.4 HST Courier with an “after market upgrade” to a full Dual Standard), which[…]
Welcome to part 2 of my mini-series “Trip Back on Memory Lane“. This part is about the famous bulletin board?? software called “PCBoard” by Clark Development Company, Inc. Backup Link to Video on Vimeo Download this video in AVI format from Mediafire.com Part 2 – PCBoard Bulletin Board System by Clark Development I am a former Sysop of the BBS called “Closed Society” in Berlin, Germany. You can learn more about my BBS in great details (including a video of a captured login session) at my regular web site here. I had a pirate board running, but I ran it on licensed software, including licenses for the BBS software PCBoard and the OS were it ran on (IBM OS/2 Warp). The cops where surprised about that when I got busted, but more to that at the page about my BBS. I recently recovered the original installation/setup discs of PCBoard and decided to make them available publicly. It’s not like a clean warez/crack installation, because there are also some update steps required to get the version of the BBS to V15.22, capable to run on a 32bit OS like OS/2 or Win32 and to increase the number of node licenses from 3 to either 5 or 10. Here are my notes as well as some comments to how this affected my own BBS etc. Floppy Discs 1-3 PCBoard V15.2/2 & V15.2 Setup Disks 1 – 3?? = PCBoard Professional Bulletin Board Software V15.2/2 Install Disks (3x HD 1.44 MB). Serial Number:[…]
Welcome to my mini-series “Trip Back on Memory Lane“. Make sure to keep tissues handy and enjoy a trip back to times when the computer world was still “intact” and a lot of fun. I hope to bring back some enjoyable memories back for one or the other of you. I will go beyond the simple nostalgic parts, which are clearly an important part of this and try to make clear and suggestive cross-references to things, mostly problems, that we did or did not have back then, but sill/again have today, in this advanced day and age. I created a video where I show some buried treasures of mine and talk about them a little bit. You can watch the combined video, which includes all of them, the Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) sound card, the PCBoard BBS Software, the IBM OS/2 operating system and my ACE Demos Collection CD-ROMs below. Backup link to video on Vimeo.com Download this video?? in AVI format (140 MB) Note: Correction to one of the statements that I made in the video. It was a Pentium 100MHz and not a 486/100 where I ran the BBS with OS/2 on. Sorry for that. The video is a bit less than 13 minutes long and provides visual images that will bring back memories for many of you, if you shared some of my own personal history of course. I have actually a bit more to say to each of the treasures and started writing content. What I have[…]
I remember the days when there was no such thing as “file_id.diz” and users had to enter a description for every single file that you uploaded manually. A pain in the ass and often causing poor descriptions of your file directory, because most users (especially in the “Warez Scene” or “Software Pirates Scene“) did not have the time to enter very long and descriptive details to every file. Remember, there was no copy-and-paste nor multi-tasking at that time either. I know that the AMIGA guys had tools that worked similar to the Windows Clipboard. For that reason was the Amiga scene also the first that introduced the mini ASCII logos of release groups that AMIGA couriers used for the BBS file descriptions to make the files more prominent. Oldskool (AMIGA style) file_id.diz ASCII design for the Elite Warez PC release group Razor 1911 . . Quake III (c)Id???Software final CD???Rip __________ . /________ \ ???============??? : ???[01/99]??? : | _\ )__/|______ ____|\ __ _/????????? | /___/ _____ / __ \ \/ \ ??????\_ \????????? | . \ < |/ /____\ | .\_/ ??????/ ??? ??? | |\______|___________/ | ????????? ??? ??? | / .:.nineteeneleven.:.\ | roy ???== |/ ===================== \| ====??? . Logos were adapted by the PC scene after file_id.diz was introduced by Clark Development Corporation (I believe that was with PC Board V14.5, but I am not 100% sure, it could also been V15.0). The first ASCII (file_id) logos for PC releases were Amiga style designs, often even[…]
I was browsing in the Defacto2.net document archive of the PC scene and found a reference to an interesting article written by Stephen Granade titled “Warez, Abandonware, and the Software Industry“.The article discusses in detail the subjects software piracy, copyright with a few on it from a perspective of a new type of software piracy called “Abandonware”.Abandonware provides access to games that are old, out of print and not supported anymore by the software company who created it or owns the copyright. It provides multiple functions; one of which is to provide support for rightful owners of the software to get a replacement, if their copy was damaged or the disk where it was stored on is not readable anymore. It also provides people access to historic games that cannot be acquired legally anymore, since they are not being sold anymore. The third function is to provide current game designers with an archive to study how other game designers in the past worked and how they did things that worked or not.Abandonwares sites often provide also the means to play the old games, especially if they are for hardware platforms that are also unavailable today, such as Apple II, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Super NES and other old Nintendo consoles, Sega consoles, old Sony Playstations, Atari game consoles and home computers. This means are emulator programs for modern computers (mostly Windows PC) that emulate the old hardware platform and load old game code to run on your computer. Even old[…]
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