La Cueva BBS in Mexico in 1993 (session replay)

RBBS-PC. I used to call one of those sometimes -- but it was in the next town over, and in-state long-distance charges were more costly than calling across the country was. It was a nice board: Two lines, lots of software (IIRC 1.2 gigabytes), with 19.2k Telebit Trailblazers at a time when 9600 was still considered fast.

I was more into WWIV. It ran OK on the whitebox DTK Computer clone build from the very local computer shop that the guy was running in what had been the garage behind his house.

But the 16450 serial port UART in that 10MHz 8088 barely kept up with the 14.4k SupraFAXModem that came a bit later; keeping that stable was tricky.

I miss the grunts from the ST-225 at startup.

At one point someone donated an ST-419. That was a full-height disk that, when formatted MFM, held only 15 megabytes. But 35 total megabytes was a lot more than the 20 that the ST-225 offered.

It didn't fit inside of the desktop case at all so the lid was always off and things were just kind of stacked up, including the extra power supply that I used for staging power turn-on.

Because, you see: That ST-419 was so slow at spinning up and becoming usable that the controller would completely give up on it from a cold start. So I'd fire that up first, and give it a moment, and then power up the rest of the system.

Other fun hacks included a 2-megabyte EMS memory card. That thing had 72 socketed DIP chips on it and it did not arrive populated. Half of the memory served as a disk cache for Stacker and the other half as a RAM disk that got populated at every boot with some often-read, never-automatically-written BBS stuff that callers previously had to wait around for.

Anyway, I made a number of great friends back then with the BBS. I talked to one on of them on the phone just tonight, and a bunch of others of us still hang out together like we started doing 35 years ago.

Way back then, they named that first computer "The XT from Hell".

Somewhere around the age of 12, I got a 57.6 modem and my parents got a fax line. I realized that what I wanted was warez, specifically anything related to 3d modeling which I was obsessed with. All I had to trade was porn gifs I'd been downloading from other BBSs since I was about 9. The first board I ran was Hermes on a Mac IIsi. Local Los Angeles 213 area code, only after hours when I'd turn off my parents fax machine. The porn for warez trade was surprisingly effective, and I ended up with copies of Strata, Renderman, Playmation, Infini-D and actually a working copy of ElectricImage, which was a coup even though it was basically unusable.

Cool! I was also registered in Tierras Extrañas. I just have added a link to a FB group for Mexican BBS people.

here... sysop of Sudaka's BBS :-)

The last part is incomplete but it reads like a report from an alien civilization.

I'm pretty sure I wrote Z280 checking yep, the Zilog Z280 can address 16 MB of memory. It has separated MMU mapping for code and data (64K + 64K mapped anywhere) ideal for operating systems, but if you never enter this mode, then you can access at the same time 64K at the lowest memory address using the normal instructions, 64K using LDUP, and 64K using LDUD. Of course, you can update the MMU registers as required to access other memory spaces, I used the 8K page size. Besides the CPU has a small cache, so it was faster by a magnitude than a Z80.

Just as some perspective: in Uruguay in ‘93 things were still all over the place. I was still running an XT until about the end of the year, where we jumped straight to a 486 (alas… SX). And as late as ‘95 I had a classmate (who went on to graduate as both electrical and computer engineer) who was doing high school papers on a Spectrum.

It was a Z280, not a Z80. And apparently, the person's father's, who also bought and programmed some transputers. See the other posts in the series.

You're welcome. I was just commenting with a friend that I should have captured a lot more of my BBS sessions. There was some amazing ANSI art I never saw again. People really put effort in making their BBS look original and attractive.