I remember that well. We used DESQView to run our BBS as well. It was only a single line system, but DESQView let us do other things on the computer without taking down the board.

Has anyone played with TriDOS? https://github.com/prokushev/tridos - it doesn’t look nearly as featured, but has the advantage of being open-source and I thought might be interesting for a project I have in mind.

Yeah it makes sense - and even now that isn’t an issue, I feel like the ability to “program” your edits is still a great interface for productivity.

Managed to get it archived. Enjoy!

https://archive.org/details/stardate

This is a great question with no definitive answer 🙂 There are a number of ways of looking at it, though the ultimate answer is whatever each person considers retro. A few general ways to look at it include:

1. whatever was around when you were a kid. Of course, this depends wildly on who you are asking - for me this would include the Tandy Color Computer / Commodore 64 era through 486 PCs (or so.) For other people this could be a little older or much newer of course.

2. Some fixed definition like (anything before the year 2000 or no PCs etc.) I’m not a huge fan of this personally as it leaves some people out.

3. Any computer old enough that a single person could fully understand it’s workings and diagnose/repair problems etc. This generally includes 8 and some 16 bit systems. I’ve increasingly come to prefer this view because beyond nostalgia it also helps define something that I believe is a significant benefit to these systems.

It’s a lot easier to get into then it used to be! Most BBS systems support connecting over the internet using the telnet protocol. Some of them you can connect to right off their web page.

You can find everything you need over at the telnet bbs guide:

https://www.telnetbbsguide.com

There are BBS listings there, as well as a handy guide:

https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/faqs/how-to-telnet/