this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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I'd have given my left nut to have desqview in the late 80s/early 90s. I was just a kid with a homegrown BBS but the concept was out-of-this-world cool.
hey there, friend! still running a wildcat BBS on DOS and Desqview here. 5 wildcat instances on a Pentium 133MHz box with 32MiB of RAM and a NETBIOS connection to a fileserver, access to the nodes via a rocketport sio board and a serial server for telnet. gotta admit desqview, when properly tweaked up, really is an amazing bit of magic.
currently trying to get things moved over to freeDOS and virtualize the whole thing on qemu with virtualized serial I/f for the BBS. still gonna use desqview if I can get everything to play nice.
oh, the memories!
Wow it's amazing you've still got one going. Are you still letting users connect to the system? Over IP I'd imagine. Recently I went down the rabbit hole and found that MajorBBS is now available for free. I installed it in a virtual dos environment and got tcp/ip connections to it up and running. That system, at least in it's heyday, was one of the few that could run multiple lines simultaneously in DOS and I always wanted to see the backend.
My BBS back in the day was running Wildcat! As well and then eventually moved to RoboBOARD which had the first mouse gui system. For the front end I used BinkleyTerm to get FIDOnet working. For a lot of the time it was up and running on OS/2 as well, so I could get multiple lines working.
Such great stuff that led me directly into an IT/entrepreneur career.
I ran a FidoNet BBS back then on a 386-16 and 2400 baud modem. Woot! It would run WordPerfect 5.1 while people were logged on to the board but compiling brought it to its knees.