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I interviewed Rob Sherman the gent behind Southernamis and other Atari BBS's on my podcast a few months ago. He's running emulated Atari 8-bit systems in AWS for these BBS's. Rob also has written some articles on telnet-access retro BBS's in the newly revived Compute's Gazette magazine.

Visiting BBS's that run on actual or emulated hardware can be a nice trip down memory lane for those who were part of the 8-bit BBS community in times past.

This story triggered my recollection of purchasing and reading Boardwatch magazine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwatch https://archive.org/details/boardwatchmagazine

For those who still have original hardware, FujiNet is a great way to get it online. Just plugs right into the SIO port and it doesn’t need any external power.

I forget which Atari BBS it was that I used to dial in a lot to, but a buddy of mine ran one and I got to look at the BASIC source code.

IIRC, a large number of single digit constants were stored as variables to save memory since each use of one took up more memory than referencing the variable, and further it used something along the lines of Peano numbers and the fact booleans were represented as numbers to create them. Something like:

10 LET D0 = 0

20 LET D1 = (D0 = D0) <== some boolean that evaluated to true/1. I may have this backwards

30 LET D2 = D1 + D1

40 ...

I forget the details, but when all was said and done, when you ran the BBS there was zero free memory; not a single byte.

BTW, this is about the 8-bit Atari machines, not the more advanced 16-bit Atari ST computers that came later.

I had an Atari 800XL as a kid but had absolutely no access to a dial-up data line. BBS for Atari 8-bits sounds like a nice future-retro to me. The guys who had access to this were very lucky.

I bought an MPP1000C 300 Baud rate modem for my Atari 800 which connects via joystick port, as a teen, after saving up for months. Some amazing BBSing memories were had.

ATASCII animations FTW!

If Amiga is more your style, there is a wonderfully maintained Amiga-hosted BBS at absinthebbs.net.