So... Today I organized all of my 5.25" floppies that are a backup of the original Sanitarium/Amiga archives. My goal is to get it up and running on an old PC, so that I can extract all the files and figure all the rooms that were active, and start to recreate the format of what it was the last time I backed it up here. Bitrot and a number of other obstacles may derail this - but if not... in 1989 I had drives C through G... and I believe 33mb was the biggest a partition could be back then. It is a wealth of old school DOS, Amiga, AtariST and Commodore 64 public domain and pirate warez, including C-64, Amiga and ST pr0n. Pretty exciting stuff. 

I bought a USB 3.5" floppy today - and I'm researching 5.25" floppies. I think I've got an old Dell with a floppy controller and a 3.5" drive, and a 5.25" drive lying around somewhere. This *may* be plausible. MOSTLY because the disks are sequentially labeled, and I verified I have all of them in order, plus a disk labeled "DOS boot disk and Fastback.exe" which is probably - if they will still read - all I need to do the restore. 

Keep your fingers crossed. 

Jason Scott, the chief techie at archive.org (and also the producer of The BBS Documentary) was a big Citadel user here in the northeast back in the dialup days.  If you head over to archive.org you might be able to learn some of his techniques for recovering old systems and making their content available for consumption.

That is a great lead. I'll check it out. I got myself a 3.5" usb drive and started trying to recover my old Amiga, ST and PC disks - but almost all of them seem to have bitrot. This makes me suspect it is unlikely I'll be able to recover these 5.25" disks that are even older and have been stored in the same conditions. But I won't know until I try. 

It also occurs to me that The Sanitarium/Amiga Archives was ran by a 17 year old on a 150MB ESDI hard drive that had a retail value of more than $1000 that he paid only $150 for, wrapped in a brown paper bag and sold out of the back of a VW van from a guy who looked like Shaggy from Scooby Doo (after a few bumps of coke). 

The content of the data on that drive was also of dubious origin, in many cases. Not sure if someone involved with Archive.org wants to be involved in preserving that kind of part of the proto-Internet for posterity. :) 

Resuscitating entire BBS images "as is" would, as you correctly point out, expose a lot of warez/pr0n/etc.   There's probably some technique to be learned there, though.  Much of what you'll find on textfiles.com (which was started by the same guy before the Archive hired him) was preserved from hardware and software images from old BBSs.

Ignatius, I just got the impression that I've seen your name before. It would have been around 1992-96, I guess, on a Sacramento BBS. Were you using the name back then?

Oh, you just verified in WhoAmI that you were indeed using it then. Well, I frequented Bantoom, DeepThought, and I can't remember what others, lol. I guess this is part of being old. Suddenly things happened a quarter-century ago, heh.

Ignatus is familiar to me, too. I think he is like CrT and Hue Jr. - if you've been involved in Citadel BBSing for any length of time, his is a name that is going to come up. 

I've been BBSing since 1982, and I've been IGnatius T Foobar since 1990.  My BBS has been online since 1988.  So you've probably seen me before :)

Tue Jul 09 2019 07:31:45 MST from IGnatius T Foobar

I've been BBSing since 1982, and I've been IGnatius T Foobar since 1990.  My BBS has been online since 1988.  So you've probably seen me before :)

And you had some part in CitUX, or actually wrote it, right? 

Because I ran CitUX on a Sparc 5 for a while. 

Yes.  I wrote the original version of Citadel/UX beginning in October 1987, using some of the same data models (and of course the same user interface) from the 1981 CP/M implementation, but all new code.

Tue Jul 09 2019 07:31:45 MST from IGnatius T Foobar

I've been BBSing since 1982, and I've been IGnatius T Foobar since 1990.  My BBS has been online since 1988.  So you've probably seen me before :)

Do you remember IGnatius from the 1990s?  Your jaw will drop seeing him now!

Wed Jul 10 2019 09:01:25 MST from IGnatius T Foobar

Yes.  I wrote the original version of Citadel/UX beginning in October 1987, using some of the same data models (and of course the same user interface) from the 1981 CP/M implementation, but all new code.

When I first started using a BBS there was one system that was text based, the Sysop switched to Citadel86, but his original BBS was a CP/M Kaypro machine.  
I do see him now and again I will have to ask him what the original software was.  I tried looking it up but there is no information on it.

Wed Jul 10 2019 16:28:19 MST from New User

 

Wed Jul 10 2019 09:01:25 MST from IGnatius T Foobar

Yes.  I wrote the original version of Citadel/UX beginning in October 1987, using some of the same data models (and of course the same user interface) from the 1981 CP/M implementation, but all new code.

 

When I first started using a BBS there was one system that was text based, the Sysop switched to Citadel86, but his original BBS was a CP/M Kaypro machine.  
I do see him now and again I will have to ask him what the original software was.  I tried looking it up but there is no information on it.

 

 

The original was Cy's Cit80 which ran on Z80 CP/M systems. I ran it on a MIC-504 dual floppy with an ADDS Viewpoint terminal for a while. 
Then Hue Jr. released Cit86... and Gary Meadows and his brother heavily modified it in the 916 area... and Brent K Barrett wrote Novu86 and Novu68k... 

I think that is the timeline. I know that Cy was originally trying to make a room based FRP - not a message board community. I've always wished someone would revisit that idea... dynamic adventures generated on the fly with persistent characters that gain experience and items - each room a description... like the ultimate Create Your Own Adventure novel. 

Do you remember IGnatius from the 1990s?  Your jaw will drop seeing him now!

Well, I am middle aged now, so I have less hair and more belly.  It happens.

The original was Cy's Cit80 which ran on Z80 CP/M systems. I ran it on a MIC-504 dual floppy with an ADDS Viewpoint terminal for a while.

Oh, man ... I loved the Viewpoint. I had one too. It was attached to the Altos 586 on which I developed Citadel/UX and ran Uncensored for the first couple of years.

Then Hue Jr. released Cit86... and Gary Meadows and his brother heavily modified it in the 916 area... and Brent K Barrett wrote Novu86 and Novu68k...

Hue Jr. and his friends were referred to as the "Minnesota Mafia" by some other Citadel communities. Vince Quaresima used to tell stories about how he got into a trademark war over the word "CitaNet" with them. Then when some folks in Minnesota stood up a Citadel/UX system, everyone over there congratulated Hue for his successful effort in porting Citadel to unix. Hue didn't exactly go out of his way to point out that this didn't happen. Vince was pretty cool though, and we enjoyed hanging out with him here in the northeast. He stopped logging into Citadel systems rather abruptly though, because he died.

I think that is the timeline. I know that Cy was originally trying to make a room based FRP - not a message board community. I've always wished someone would revisit that idea... dynamic adventures generated on the fly with persistent characters that gain experience and items - each room a description... like the ultimate Create Your Own Adventure novel.

Jeff Prothero (Cynbe ru Taren) must be credited for the original Citadel UI but not much else. His data model was crap, and he himself was an arrogant pinko commie leftist and militant atheist who actually wasn't very much fun to be around. As for the idea of software that does what he originally intended it to do -- the reason he abandoned Citadel was because he discovered MUDs. And he went on to begin a years-long project to create "MUQ", a really elaborate mudserver. Development on MUQ also abruptly stopped because CrT also died.

Thu Jul 11 2019 15:18:28 MST from IGnatius T Foobar

The original was Cy's Cit80 which ran on Z80 CP/M systems. I ran it on a MIC-504 dual floppy with an ADDS Viewpoint terminal for a while.

Oh, man ... I loved the Viewpoint. I had one too. It was attached to the Altos 586 on which I developed Citadel/UX and ran Uncensored for the first couple of years.

Then Hue Jr. released Cit86... and Gary Meadows and his brother heavily modified it in the 916 area... and Brent K Barrett wrote Novu86 and Novu68k...

Hue Jr. and his friends were referred to as the "Minnesota Mafia" by some other Citadel communities. Vince Quaresima used to tell stories about how he got into a trademark war over the word "CitaNet" with them. Then when some folks in Minnesota stood up a Citadel/UX system, everyone over there congratulated Hue for his successful effort in porting Citadel to unix. Hue didn't exactly go out of his way to point out that this didn't happen. Vince was pretty cool though, and we enjoyed hanging out with him here in the northeast. He stopped logging into Citadel systems rather abruptly though, because he died.

I think that is the timeline. I know that Cy was originally trying to make a room based FRP - not a message board community. I've always wished someone would revisit that idea... dynamic adventures generated on the fly with persistent characters that gain experience and items - each room a description... like the ultimate Create Your Own Adventure novel.

Jeff Prothero (Cynbe ru Taren) must be credited for the original Citadel UI but not much else. His data model was crap, and he himself was an arrogant pinko commie leftist and militant atheist who actually wasn't very much fun to be around. As for the idea of software that does what he originally intended it to do -- the reason he abandoned Citadel was because he discovered MUDs. And he went on to begin a years-long project to create "MUQ", a really elaborate mudserver. Development on MUQ also abruptly stopped because CrT also died.

I'm bad with details... but good with 30,000 foot views. :) 

I do recall hearing that Citadelphia in Minnesota was a little bare knuckles. I'm not sure the Sacramento Citadel folks really interacted much with them - we knew they also had a strong community... maybe the "other" strong community - and eventually I think we had node-transfer of rooms between their nodes and ours - but it never caught on. 

KC... 

More history about Citadel here, in the above messages. 

Citadel in Sacramento started from CrT's original 2.1 cp/m source code.  We got it up on running on Dragon's Den BBS on a Heath system first.  Had to do a few revisions to the code to get it to compile.  Then we got our hands on the 2.4 version of the source code and went crazy.  We quickly found that 64K memory was a problem and developed overlay code to swap BBS feature modules in and out to expand the size.  By the time we started calling it SacCit80, our runtime was up to about 85-90k.  The last Asgard80 version was about 128k with 4 memory swap areas, if my memory serves me.

The DOS version was a port of Hue, Jr's code with all of the features from our SacCit-80 implemented into it and called SacCit-86 before the Sacramento developer community split apart.  The main developer - Gary Meadows with great assistance from his Brother Charles Meadows created the Asgard product line for both CP/M and IBM (Asgard80 and Asgard86).  They then expanded on it and added door code to run games, color coding for messages, floors and a greater permission control for users.  All these code features were offered back to Hue, Jr.  He implemented many of them into his distribution code.  He did modify the door code control database, which was then ported back to Asgard86, to attempt to make it easier to maintain changes between Hue's code and Asgard86 code.

A little more history for review.

Oh, and the last version of Asgard86 was 1.49q released sometime in 1996.