welp board is back up until it dies again, ssh to [email protected] to connect 🫡

godess bless the eternal travelstar, i have yet to kill one and i'm taking it as a challenge

if this one dies i have a 20gb travelstar that sounds like a jet engine but hasn't lost a byte

#retrocomputing #Citadel #Citadel86 #BBS

the federal government murdering my neighbors becomes a bit more of a pressing issue, so the board remains down for a few weeks...

...i've known a few people who liked to crash boards back in the day...

(the ones who didn't OD or end up in jail probably keynoted a defcon or tech conference you've seen)

...so lets pull the drive, get it on a USB adapter on a modern system, get a backup and do a virus scan

Linux kernel throws some IO errors but it doesn't make it to dd, two backup reads are slow and error free, and byte identical

virus scan clean, SMART info shows a mere 13 re-allocated sectors

welp lets zero it a few times and see if it clears up, that forces re-allocation on modern drives

SMART info doesn't change, not much to do but restore the backup and put the drive back in...

...two intensive FIVE HOUR runs of spinrite come up clean, you can definitely hear a section where it madly seeks to reallocated sectors but the total slowdown seems gone

is there a good tool to read the SMART info in Win98 or do i have to find a linux to boot on this thing lol

#retrocomputing #Citadel #Citadel86 #BBS

OR IS IT?

just when i think its stable enough to advertise, one of my login checks from my phone crashes out while i'm at work, rip ☠️

what happen?

it totally cacked itself, database and most of the board wiped out

scandisk takes MANY HOURS to run (not nice) so definitely a HD failure here

but it comes up clean

#retrocomputing #Citadel #Citadel86 #BBS

the cable goes to tcpser running on the first gen raspi, and broken telnet implementations continues to be the bane of my existence

...after an upgrade to 128mb of RAM for less swappy half life

Citadel-86 Test System 2 is now reliably hosted on real hardware! 🫡

#retrocomputing #Citadel #Citadel86 #BBS

not bad at all, would not mind burning this to run the board

a quick test 'dialing' out with Telix over my wifi modem confirms hosting Citadel-86 may be feasible

but Cit86 demands carrier detect handshaking which my wimodem does not provide so lets hardwire a custom job

#retrocomputing #Citadel #Citadel86 #BBS

ah yes, before we posted pictures of food we had to simply describe it

i absolutely remember that room

Citadels attracted a mature literate crowd, a clear forerunner to modern twitter-like micro-blogging, that none the less reveled in irrelevant shitposting 😆

from a eulogy for three citadels by Michael Finley of the St. Paul Pioneer Press circa 1996?? now there's something to track down a scan of

https://lwr.wtf/citadel/Newsletters/news9604.html

so there you go, from top of the world in the early 90s, to rapid death around '96 along with the rest of the BBS scene...

as the large for-profit multi-line boards pivoted to full ISP service, the amateur sysops looked at their phone bills and began eyeballing DSL connections instead of second phone lines...

#BBS #Citadel #Citadel86 #Minneapolis #retrocomputing #bbsing #dialup #dialupdays

A few big names even ran Citadels

hometown hero PC Tech Inc ran a Citadel-86 before being absorbed into Zeos/Micron (and still has a Minneapolis office!)

Atari Corp ran a STadel circa 1988!

Bad Sector became Visi.com, a pivotal early Twin Cities ISP, and long since absorbed into god knows what...

#BBS #Citadel #Citadel86 #Minneapolis #retrocomputing #bbsing #dialup #dialupdays

@orc (hi!) famously implemented a UUCP gateway for STadel, bringing usenet groups (and email?) into CitaNet for a time, but got in to a bit of a row with Hue Jr and had left the 612 scene by the time i got online in 1994

a CitaNet overview, from December 1992

the original Test System, run by Hue Jr in Minneapolis was the beating heart of the CitaNet

i often called it as it was a good place to pick up most of the networked rooms 😀

a good ~25 nodes in MN alone

maybe half were still running in `94 and memories are shaking loose of a number of them...

#BBS #Citadel #Citadel86 #Minneapolis #retrocomputing #bbsing #dialup #dialupdays

Citadel-86 v3.49-hax deployed live 🫡

has Y2K fix, removed some pauses waiting for old modems which are not necessary in emulation, and i've got it idling using HLT, which keeps it from burning CPU in VMs new and old, such as a Win95 dos window 😀

connect via ssh to [email protected]

#BBS #Citadel #Citadel86 #Minneapolis #retrocomputing #bbsing #dialup #dialupdays