When I got my first system running, S100, I had an Imsai 8080 with a
Hayes 103 modem. I used it to log into multics and some BBS's at the
time and record sessions and files and the like. I only had the usual
8" floppies, with eventually 1mb x 2 for storage.
However, reason for mentioning was that there was a simple program which
would auto answer on the Hayes modem and allow you to run things.
One evening when my roommates and I had gone to dinner, a friend who was
going to call at a certain time did so. However we had forgotten he was
to call, and I had left the system up and connected to the phone.
He called a couple of times and realized that we weren't around to pull
the line, or call back, so he got his terminal up and running and left
us a message on the screen for later.
I sort of count it as the first sort of BBS type I ran. There was a
program you could leave running which would challenge for a password,
and then re-run when the modem lost signal, so you could have a low
grade login that way. (password only).
And one could take ones choice of files and xmodem them (which he did in
future sessions).
I logged into many BBS systems which weren't much more than this or a
restricted menu program after you logged in. Some were nice with some
presentation, and some were just (enter 1 to do ... 2 to do ... etc).
Not much else really required if you want to get to very basics.
With any BBS having more than just the floppies, login and messaging and
more download options were the next level up.
And after that there were various BBS software packages that had
networks of like users that one could obtain.
thanks
Jim
