linguist & software engineer in Lenapehoking; jewish ancom trans woman.
since twitter's burning gonna try bringing my posts about language stuff and losing my shit over star wars and such here - hi!
Hey BBS knowers of cohost: question that’ll help me with research for something I'm writing.
Have you ever seen an offline BBS archive? I don't mean the files, but an actual way to browse a snapshot of a BBS at a point in time, with the original interface and content all preserved?
The problem would be the files, though. These likely all died on sysops' personal hard drives in the late 1990's, or live in private backups.
That being said, if you have the files, you could probably just run the original software in DOSBox1 and do a local login without a modem, but I suspect that's as far as you're going to get.
Are there specific files in mind?
Telegard, if nothing else, has an honest-to-god Y2K bug, though, and may not boot without rolling the system clock waaaay back.
I'm actually not asking about a specific BBS, but curious if there had been examples out there. I'm writing something to do with BBS archives, so I'm gauging what's out there and what people may have done.
I suspect you probably already came up with this idea, but Jason Scott is probably the best bet for either direct info or pointing you to someone who has something.
In case you haven't tried him already, here's contact info: https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1585877048035520512
