Well... that is good to know. I do wish Webcit had a caller log. I feel like I found one once in the command line, but I could never find it again, so I may have just imagined it. 

Thu May 06 2021 18:12:01 MST from Otto Roboto <otto_roboto@wallofhate.com>

But I do call in regularly.  I just have not been very vocal lately...

Thu May 06 2021 08:19:49 AM MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

But I honestly thought no one would notice, traffic has been so light here the last couple of weeks. 

So I'm a little touched that someone noticed. 

Now if we could get TheDave and Wangiss and Otto Roboto to start calling back in on a regular basis... 

We would have a pretty decent user base. 

 

Thu May 06 2021 06:44:50 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

Yeah. I did some pretty aggressive repairs on the Citadel yesterday - and I was down for an extended period with a lot of bouncing as I did reboots and made checkpoints and snapshots. 

But the BBS is humming now. Only one lingering issue I haven't been able to nail down. The redirect to the bulletin/hello page at login. I'll probably test and try to fix that on Monday. 

 

 

 

I just leave my browser tab open to it and check in when I remember to.

I've noticed that - but also noticed you have not just been lurking in a single room in the Online User log for the past few days. :) 

I've got to figure out how to give as strong of an endorphin rush reward for visiting here as people get for visiting Facebook.

I should send my users special Sanitarium keyboards that ooze heroin that you absorb through your finger tips. That would get you going, "I should log into The Sanitarium again soon!" 

Fri May 07 2021 01:12:41 MST from TheDave

I just leave my browser tab open to it and check in when I remember to.

Just got back from a weekend in the woods. 

An interesting cross section of posts, with some troubling exceptions. 

I'm too tired to hit all the rooms tonight. Maybe tomorrow. 

Glad to see it did OK on autopilot while I was gone. One test down. 

One of the advantages of just leaving it open is that I don't feel obligated to read all the new posts before I wander off to do something else :D

For me, it is a tradition thing. You log into a Citadel, you try and make a complete loop. It is kind of like a race - in the old days, if you didn't keep up you got lapped. Fall too far behind, and you might as well retire from the race, and just "goto" every room and start over new. :) 

These days, there really isn't enough traffic - but sometimes I fall behind. I just "S"kip rooms I don't want to read or don't have time to respond to, and when I get back to the lobby, then I log out. That way, I'm more selective about what I have time to post about, and what I WANT to post about, but can't respond at the moment. 

Tue May 11 2021 03:22:43 MST from TheDave

One of the advantages of just leaving it open is that I don't feel obligated to read all the new posts before I wander off to do something else :D

Tue May 04 2021 06:47:05 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

Citadel was a very regional BBS. It was so radically different than the typical menu-driven, file transfer oriented BBS - that most people didn't "get" it. I hear a lot of people claim that the Bay Area online community, "The Well" was the precursor to the modern online forum. If that is so, Citadel was the precursor to The Well... and to Usenet. Really - the similarity between Citadel and Usenet is the strongest - because Citadel rooms are just "alt." subs. 

I was a big Usenet user when it first came out - because of the similarity. The difference is that Usenet was so big and you had to opt into rooms, and go to them specifically - where Citadel is the reverse, small and you have to opt OUT of topics/rooms if you aren't interested. It ends up exposing you to more rooms and causing more conversation. 

I've always felt that Menu driven BBSes primarily attract content consumers - while Citadel attracts content creators. It has to - because one person just writing to themselves hardly works on a traditional Citadel (though it could probably work with webcit). 

Tue May 04 2021 00:01:06 MST from ASCII Express

I've enjoyed reading these old Citadel stories. Oddly I ran a number of different BBS software packages, but only discovered Citadel towards the end. It had pockets of popularity.
Yes, people feel scared to speak. Bring back the BBS!

 

Maybe not so regional- Al and Bea Brough ran a BBS called Bit Bucket on the cp/m incarnation of (Jeff) Cynbe Ru Taren's citadel on the east coast in Ewing NJ for years. It was quite popular (lots of busy signals) but the message flow made sense. From what I remember, it ran on a commodore 128 booted in cp/m mode, and the storage was limited to 2 drives that held what would be equivalent to the bible and quran letter to letter by todays standards, so there were no wArEz. It was only messages, only the exchange of original content. 

I never really got into the world of Dragonfire or WWIV or PCBBS and all the doors, it seemed to me all those PC BBS solutions were born of the same teenagers that were eternally lost in a J.R.R. Tolkien book and if not that, they were perpetually immersed in Dungeons and Dragons and took it to a large scale. 

I DO REALIZE that D&D and AD&D gave us the MMORPG, I just hope that people don't forget the playnet system that became quantumlink then became america online with draws such as rabbit jack's casino and club caribe.

I host many interactive platforms, citadel and otherwise. The only way to stop the fecesbook is to spread the feeling of caveat emptor, buyer beware. As bbs operators we need to recruit as many foolish as we are other people to contribute content on our platforms. We as sysops need to a sort of access to a sort of therapy.

that made sense almost to the end. We as sysops need to provide access to a pseudo-therapy to those who would benefit from the results we pseudo-provide.

Oh no - that is exactly what I mean by that Citadel was very regional. We were all aware and of in contact with the other regional clusters of Citadel - and the developers all shared and helped distribute the software between the different Citadel development clusters. 

In fact, my FIRST Citadel BBS was running Cit-80 on a C-128 with two 1571s. It was very, very unreliable - C128 CP/M wasn't a very stable version and the drives were prone to generating BDOS errors. I quickly upgraded to a MIC-504 with an Adds Viewpoint terminal - and ran for quite a while on that machine before upgrading to a V10 with ESDI drive and controller running 1st Citadel-86, then Novucivitus and finally Asgard-86.  Or maybe it was the other way around. 

But we were very regional. It was more than just long distance - it was that the cultures were very different. Somewhat along the lines of how Uncensored has a very different feel than my BBS - which still have a very West Coast culture. 

I think the difference was more stark back then, though - the world *has* become a smaller place in the last 35 years. 

You're absolutely right about the door games - I was a teenager eternally lost in J.R.R. Tolkien books and Stephen King novels and Ultima games back then. 
And a free 1602 300BPS moden and Q-Link is how I got *started* in telecommunications. After a few month of those bills, I found a local computer magazine that had a list of BBSes in the back, figured out how to get dialed in and connected, found a BIGGER BBS list on the BBS itself, and eventually found BBSes I could call home. It was rough back in those days, just figuring out how to get started. 

Thu May 13 2021 21:33:29 MST from smashbot64

 

 

Maybe not so regional- Al and Bea Brough ran a BBS called Bit Bucket on the cp/m incarnation of (Jeff) Cynbe Ru Taren's citadel on the east coast in Ewing NJ for years. It was quite popular (lots of busy signals) but the message flow made sense. From what I remember, it ran on a commodore 128 booted in cp/m mode, and the storage was limited to 2 drives that held what would be equivalent to the bible and quran letter to letter by todays standards, so there were no wArEz. It was only messages, only the exchange of original content. 

I never really got into the world of Dragonfire or WWIV or PCBBS and all the doors, it seemed to me all those PC BBS solutions were born of the same teenagers that were eternally lost in a J.R.R. Tolkien book and if not that, they were perpetually immersed in Dungeons and Dragons and took it to a large scale. 

I DO REALIZE that D&D and AD&D gave us the MMORPG, I just hope that people don't forget the playnet system that became quantumlink then became america online with draws such as rabbit jack's casino and club caribe.

I host many interactive platforms, citadel and otherwise. The only way to stop the fecesbook is to spread the feeling of caveat emptor, buyer beware. As bbs operators we need to recruit as many foolish as we are other people to contribute content on our platforms. We as sysops need to a sort of access to a sort of therapy.

 

 

Yeah, thank goodness for CCN's BBS list.  Would never have found half the places I lurked back then without it.

CCN! Yes! 

What was the name? California Computer Network? 

Something like that. 

I can't remember.  So many decades ago. 

Sat May 15 2021 10:14:20 MST from TheDave

Yeah, thank goodness for CCN's BBS list.  Would never have found half the places I lurked back then without it.

I feel like Philadelphia or Pennsylvania was one of the Citadel development hubs. 

Which is where the "Citadelphia" idea originated from, or was inspired by. Whatever. 

Maybe it was there the whole time, under your nose - and you just didn't know. 

Otto Roboto or Jerry Moore might be able to better tell you if I'm right or not. Sometimes I just imagine shit and it becomes reality for me. 

Sat May 15 2021 19:41:44 MST from ASCII Express

Yes it did take some effort to get started. I only knew of one BBS at first, then met a guy at a computer store and he gave me a whole list and it went from there.
We didn't have Citadels in Philadelphia (I think I remember one at one point). More Telegard, Renegade, WWIV, PCBoard, etc.
We'll have to help people get started again....

Sat May 15 2021 18:52:01 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

CCN! Yes! 

What was the name? California Computer Network? 

Something like that. 

I can't remember.  So many decades ago. 

California Computer News.  It was like Wired but local and had lots of ads, and it was free, so I'd pick them up all the time which is how I was hyper aware or computer component prices long before I had an income :D

Rik and Erin Magers did a high gloss alternative to CCN for a while - but I can't remember the name of it, either. 

Sun May 16 2021 08:46:43 MST from TheDave

 

Sat May 15 2021 18:52:01 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

CCN! Yes! 

What was the name? California Computer Network? 

Something like that. 

I can't remember.  So many decades ago. 

California Computer News.  It was like Wired but local and had lots of ads, and it was free, so I'd pick them up all the time which is how I was hyper aware or computer component prices long before I had an income :D

Sat May 15 2021 19:49:54 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

I feel like Philadelphia or Pennsylvania was one of the Citadel development hubs. 

Which is where the "Citadelphia" idea originated from, or was inspired by. Whatever. 

Maybe it was there the whole time, under your nose - and you just didn't know. 

Otto Roboto or Jerry Moore might be able to better tell you if I'm right or not. Sometimes I just imagine shit and it becomes reality for me. 

 

Sat May 15 2021 19:41:44 MST from ASCII Express

Yes it did take some effort to get started. I only knew of one BBS at first, then met a guy at a computer store and he gave me a whole list and it went from there.
We didn't have Citadels in Philadelphia (I think I remember one at one point). More Telegard, Renegade, WWIV, PCBoard, etc.
We'll have to help people get started again....

 

One of Cynbe (Prothero)'s close contacts and collaborators lived in Conshohoken, PA. Maybe a college buddy, who knows. I wasn't paying enough attention when I heard about it 30+ years ago. Who would know it would be of substance today? Also--  There was a connection to a student that was a comp sci major at Trenton State College  (now The College of New Jersey). I don't remember who that was. Huge citadel contributor, but remember this was in the early days when code was reviewed haphazardly. Anyhoe, that college ran a big VAX/vms server at the time and forced its students to learn the horrible navigations of vax/vms as a server infrastructure, I was not a student of TSC but I had access in agreement from my school and i remember it being ungodly painful to look for changes to citadel code. Open source was an oxymoron. At that time there was nothing like subversion, github. It was just a matter of logging into different systems and reading usenet "email". So this may explain the East Coast connection, or maybe it is just another poorly remembered story.

I've heard negative things about both Cy and Hue Jr. 

I think I've also heard that Cynbe really just designed an online mud type application - it was intended to be an online D&D solution - that is why the ROOMS concept happened - and that he didn't get very far, before Hue Jr. picked it up and made it into what we would recognize as Citadel. But like you - these are 30 year old, word-of-mouth things - so I may have this wrong. 

Sun May 16 2021 22:55:53 MST from smashbot64

 

Sat May 15 2021 19:49:54 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

I feel like Philadelphia or Pennsylvania was one of the Citadel development hubs. 

Which is where the "Citadelphia" idea originated from, or was inspired by. Whatever. 

Maybe it was there the whole time, under your nose - and you just didn't know. 

Otto Roboto or Jerry Moore might be able to better tell you if I'm right or not. Sometimes I just imagine shit and it becomes reality for me. 

 

Sat May 15 2021 19:41:44 MST from ASCII Express

Yes it did take some effort to get started. I only knew of one BBS at first, then met a guy at a computer store and he gave me a whole list and it went from there.
We didn't have Citadels in Philadelphia (I think I remember one at one point). More Telegard, Renegade, WWIV, PCBoard, etc.
We'll have to help people get started again....

 

One of Cynbe (Prothero)'s close contacts and collaborators lived in Conshohoken, PA. Maybe a college buddy, who knows. I wasn't paying enough attention when I heard about it 30+ years ago. Who would know it would be of substance today? Also--  There was a connection to a student that was a comp sci major at Trenton State College  (now The College of New Jersey). I don't remember who that was. Huge citadel contributor, but remember this was in the early days when code was reviewed haphazardly. Anyhoe, that college ran a big VAX/vms server at the time and forced its students to learn the horrible navigations of vax/vms as a server infrastructure, I was not a student of TSC but I had access in agreement from my school and i remember it being ungodly painful to look for changes to citadel code. Open source was an oxymoron. At that time there was nothing like subversion, github. It was just a matter of logging into different systems and reading usenet "email". So this may explain the East Coast connection, or maybe it is just another poorly remembered story.

CCN is where I found the ad for my first computer. $920 for a full setup. Pentium system, monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc. 1996? It was at Advanced City Computers on Freeport. Such an epic and memorable moment!