Between the years 1984 and 1992 I ran a Bulletin Board system in Montreal Quebec, Canada, with a unoriginal Name of " The paladin's Castle BBS" had a whopping 19200Bps dial up numerous North American Forum Networks (WWIVnet, ICEnet and a few more such a FidoNet), this was of course like a lot of you know (or perhaps dont for the ones born with a cell phone in their hands) BBS where the pre cursor to the open Internet and High speed digital news....
My @Wife told me " Find a hobby" and at 52, and over worked this can be challenging, I do love to play Ping pong but the closest table with good players on them is 27 Miles away.... a Pain truly.
so I flexed my mind to what else? and slipped into a flash back to the 80's and BBS'es.
Of course it all runs off TELNET or SSH no0w, (who in their right mind want to communicated at 19,200 Bits per seconds when you have 100 MB/sec connectivity at your finger.
So the project begins, and this is the tribulations of a reminiscing pre-internet era minded person trying to recapture a past age...
comments welcomed and will be answered; this of it as a Vlog without the videos, yes I am low tech and doubt anyone wants to listen to me ramble anyways more than I already do on here.
11/5/18 - mission in hand, I scoured local shop, Craig's list, and even visit some "garage sales.." yet seemingly as much hardware there is out there, nothing is older than 5-6 years. Rest they remain in a Museum? so I chase lead son eBay, and find a local shop that has likely system,. its a desktop the kind that lays on your table and you slap a monitor on it, aluminum case, not plastic, the kind that has screws at the back to open the flip open case to see the guts. ah.. finally found it, selling 29.99 pick up or delivery... excited, the shop is 5 miles away... and the Pentium II 400 128MB ram, with video card etc. was solde under VTECH brand... which I looked up curious, a company that did and does close circuit systems.. so not a standard desktop a secretary would of boringly use a spreadsheet on it. SOLD!....
11/8/18 - drive in greet the man, get my desktop at first glance it lookes like it was not used much , screwdriver in hand I pop the cover open in my car and grin... immaculate.. little dusting on the fan blades is all to be found. quickly I pull all cables that are lingering inside it, as no Hard drives was provided, the 1998 power supply is yanks out and trashed, some no name brand 235w 20 years old PSU is not going to be used, I replace it the used parts I have on hand, this replacement comes in the form of a Corsair CX750 PSU, overkill I agree but its what I have. the first boot up comes right up, floppy error 0, so the drive is dead, I strip it out I had no intentions of keeping it anyways, the bezel pulled from the floppy drive is glues in place at the front to keep the old timer look of the case. I mount a 2.5" 160GB HDD in a Bracket and into the floppy bracket fits like a glove once mounted with IDE/SATA adaptor, and a cdrw/dvdrw drive added in a similar fashion we are making headway. Cable management is difficult flat cabling can be complicated to hide away but I manage as well as the other 9 cables remaining to be use of the PSU, slipped and tied together as a bundle under the space of the cdrom drive bracket, tucked away safely.
Specs of the system turned out to be better than what was promised;
CPU - Pentium III-600e 256 KB L2 100 MHz FSB TDP 19.5 W!!
RAM : 128MB DDR.
Video : ATI Rage pro 128MB
Sound: Sound Blaster 16
Added by me
Network : Netgear 100T Wired.
HDD: WD Scorpio Blue 160GB Laptop Drive
CDROM: LG DVDRW/DCRW
More to come as I ordered 1GB of Ram, got a Fresh copy of Windows 7 x32 for it and WWIV BBS waiting to be installed.
now some pictures....
My @Wife told me " Find a hobby" and at 52, and over worked this can be challenging, I do love to play Ping pong but the closest table with good players on them is 27 Miles away.... a Pain truly.
so I flexed my mind to what else? and slipped into a flash back to the 80's and BBS'es.
Of course it all runs off TELNET or SSH no0w, (who in their right mind want to communicated at 19,200 Bits per seconds when you have 100 MB/sec connectivity at your finger.
So the project begins, and this is the tribulations of a reminiscing pre-internet era minded person trying to recapture a past age...
comments welcomed and will be answered; this of it as a Vlog without the videos, yes I am low tech and doubt anyone wants to listen to me ramble anyways more than I already do on here.
11/5/18 - mission in hand, I scoured local shop, Craig's list, and even visit some "garage sales.." yet seemingly as much hardware there is out there, nothing is older than 5-6 years. Rest they remain in a Museum? so I chase lead son eBay, and find a local shop that has likely system,. its a desktop the kind that lays on your table and you slap a monitor on it, aluminum case, not plastic, the kind that has screws at the back to open the flip open case to see the guts. ah.. finally found it, selling 29.99 pick up or delivery... excited, the shop is 5 miles away... and the Pentium II 400 128MB ram, with video card etc. was solde under VTECH brand... which I looked up curious, a company that did and does close circuit systems.. so not a standard desktop a secretary would of boringly use a spreadsheet on it. SOLD!....
11/8/18 - drive in greet the man, get my desktop at first glance it lookes like it was not used much , screwdriver in hand I pop the cover open in my car and grin... immaculate.. little dusting on the fan blades is all to be found. quickly I pull all cables that are lingering inside it, as no Hard drives was provided, the 1998 power supply is yanks out and trashed, some no name brand 235w 20 years old PSU is not going to be used, I replace it the used parts I have on hand, this replacement comes in the form of a Corsair CX750 PSU, overkill I agree but its what I have. the first boot up comes right up, floppy error 0, so the drive is dead, I strip it out I had no intentions of keeping it anyways, the bezel pulled from the floppy drive is glues in place at the front to keep the old timer look of the case. I mount a 2.5" 160GB HDD in a Bracket and into the floppy bracket fits like a glove once mounted with IDE/SATA adaptor, and a cdrw/dvdrw drive added in a similar fashion we are making headway. Cable management is difficult flat cabling can be complicated to hide away but I manage as well as the other 9 cables remaining to be use of the PSU, slipped and tied together as a bundle under the space of the cdrom drive bracket, tucked away safely.
Specs of the system turned out to be better than what was promised;
CPU - Pentium III-600e 256 KB L2 100 MHz FSB TDP 19.5 W!!
RAM : 128MB DDR.
Video : ATI Rage pro 128MB
Sound: Sound Blaster 16
Added by me
Network : Netgear 100T Wired.
HDD: WD Scorpio Blue 160GB Laptop Drive
CDROM: LG DVDRW/DCRW
More to come as I ordered 1GB of Ram, got a Fresh copy of Windows 7 x32 for it and WWIV BBS waiting to be installed.
now some pictures....
So I backed-up the WWIV from the other system unto the NAS, (10GB approx.) and ready to be slapped onto the vintage PC once the updating is over.... 
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