Can you still Dial-Up to Bulletin Boards today? Commander X16 BBS fun!

I still remember the first time I dialed into a BBS. It was 1988 on a C64c with a 300 baud modem and a local BBS called Cob's Corner. This BBS had two lines and I remember the excitement I felt the first time another user chatted with me realtime. They used the handle "Vampyre" and after chatting online for a year we met in person and I understood why she never wanted to go to the local C64 user's group meetings. She weighed 450 lbs and had a lot of difficulty getting around and was terrified of being mocked if she went to a public place. I managed to convince her to go to the Xmas M.I.C.E gathering and she had a great time, the C64 group had very kind people in its ranks and they made her feel very welcome. I hope life has been great for you Vampyre, I miss playing MUDs with you on Freenet.

Everyone who lived those times will get goosebumps hearing the modem handshake.

Dissapointed I can't find the lawyer guy in the comments. 🤣

I ran a BBS and loved the BBS community. It was 1000x better than the internet as it is now. The best way to connect to a BBS these days is telnet, so BBSs will still be around for many years yet. The BBS I use to use had amazing ANSi artwork, plenty of underground boards still about.

56k? I used to connect to my local BBS on my C64 at a whopping 300 baud! We'd (me and a friend of mine) download some game to try (ahem!) that would take AGES to download and then half the time it wouldn't work. Still lots of fond memories, though. I was in heaven when my parents bought me a 1200 baud modem the following Christmas. I miss those PETSCII animated BBS pages. Some were very clever.

Cool! The one thing I miss the most about those days was that many people online were computer savvy and we didn't have as many stupid annoying people with all their false info and constant scammers. Great video. Thanks for sharing ❤

Takes me back to the time when I bought my first (and actually only) analog modem back in 1992. I was doing an internship and when that was nearly done they decided that we should get paid for it, retroactively. So I unexpectedly got quite some money which I spend on a SCSI II Controller for my A500, a 240MB SCSI II harddisk and a 14.400 baud ZyXEL. This led to me getting into software development because my friend had taken over development of some BBS software that had been written in GFA Basic. So first I had to learn that and it also got me into C programming because I started work on a support library written in C. The BASIC compiler could no longer handle the amount of code needed for the BBS so I ported some of the low-level routines over to C to make room for new features added to the BBS in BASIC. Of course it also made stuff faster. Good times :)

Love the US Robotics modems in the 1980s. I still have my Courier HST dual standard modem with a special daugherboard that lets me via software upgrade to 56K. So it went from 14.4k dual standard to V.Everything / 56K via firmware upgrade. Awesome stuff. I've also ran BBS over the years from the Commodore 64 in 1983, Amiga late 1980s and finally OS/2 Warp on PC in 1990s. 300 baud weren't too bad till you started to download / upload programs. Then 1200, 2400, 14.4K, 16.8K, 28.8K and finally 56K. My first time connecting to a BBS on my Commodore 64 at 300 baud was magical. It really opened the doors for me in terms of communicating with other people and exchanging programs. Great times!

@retrorecipes Hi, thank you muchly for bringing back fond memorys or when I ran a BBS I ran "Andy's BBS" in Melbourne Australia from 1981 to 1996 - Was one of the primary BBS/Fidonet echomail/netmail hubs for Australia with other BBS's from Melbourne Perth Sydney Adelaide and Tasmania connecting to my system for daily mail collections. It was a very sad day when I finally shutdown (was about to get married and could not afford to keep three line BBS running) p.s I half expected "Joshua" voice on your video after connecting : "Greetings RetroRecipes. Would you like to play a game?" Anyone out there ever log onto my BBS (had users from all over the world back then - maybe few still remember my system) was one of a handful of long running BBS's at the time I shutdown

WOW! This was great and nostalgic at the same time. Made me realize how much things have changed. I remember the days of 300 baud fondly :).

Thanks for bringing back a bunch of memories I wished to suppress. Been using modem since 1200 BBS. I still remember the day I got my DSL line working, I loved it. 640 KBPs, and I couldn't have been happier

Oh, man. As soon as you said "ATDT" that brought a whole flood of memories back. Great video!

In the netherlands mobile phone numbers start with 06 well, in the 1990s the 06 numbers were sex lines, and at a flea market, I found a phone number sheet for pretty much all of them!!!! and I decided to call them all! to see who would pick up the phone and then explain the reason for calling the hilarity was on!!! the first one was a 90-year-old lady who laughed out loud when I told her that her 06 used to be a sex line in the 1990s what was even funnier is that she told me that she got the phone from her grandson and it had a sticker of a topless woman on the back very fitting! and so funny. another highlight was a man with a very female-type voice and after hearing the history of his 06 he told us he used to work in that industry because of his sexy female voice! another one was a bank manager who hung up on me after learning his 06 history in my mind I see him throwing his phone in the trash! a strange one was an 80-year-old catholic priest after the 06 history lesson he said god works in mysterious ways. a funny one was a man who after his 06 history lesson said I know! I used to call that number at least 5 times a day and nearly bankrupted my parents!!! I can't tell you the story of every 06 there were soo many of them!

I find it amusing. You have new wifi on an old C64. And old dial up on your new x16. I absolutely love this.

One day we need to convince Ladyfractic to do the intro to one of these videos, but lip syncing to Perifractic's voiceover 😆

I sold those USRs new. Creme de la Creme at the time. Expensive too. But being out in the country with old copper lines it could make the difference to your internet dial up connection.

Bravo! I remember running All American BBS... C64 with 1200 baud modem and two 1541 drives! Was a flash back on this video for me! gawt damn. Even the hand shake audio! miss it...

We are a similar age, and I find myself more and more often overwhelmed by feelings of nostalgia. Nice episode 😊

I think that MBnet BBS in Finland was the biggest BBS system in the world. It uses 250 nodes (phone lines).

You should have seen my eyes light up when the modem became audible and the BBS answered. Wow... That brought back memories of my first BBS connection in 1987. I'd gotten a C64C for my 16th birthday. Keep up the great content. I can't wait to see what happens next.