Mastodawn

there's a stash of CitaNews at https://lwr.wtf/wiki/Newsletters

Citadel history thread LETS GO!

been racking my brain trying to remember what all the networked rooms were, here's a list from an amiga board in August 1991

Citadel style BBSs may not have been that popular overall, but they maintained pockets of rabid popularity in a variety of major cities

Citadel-86 gained its own federated networking as early as 1986, (a mere few years after FidoNet began!) quickly becoming a mainstay of many Citadel BBSs

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

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GEM is truly truly outrageous

@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

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GEM is truly truly outrageous Nov 17

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

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GEM is truly truly outrageous Nov 17

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

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steve ulrich Nov 17

@Seg wow! this thread is a blast from the past. i used to hang out on bad sector and chez spaz before visi was founded.

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Nick Melnick Nov 17

@sulrich @Seg Just a bundle of memories all at once! That's awesome, I was just young enough to not connect Bad Sector and Visi. Big fan of Visi, the ISP I worked for at the time used them as their upstream.

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Jima

Nov 20

@Seg Looks like VISI got acquired by TDS in 2010. I was still in Minnesota at the time, but apparently either missed or forgot that.

https://www.tdsinc.com/news/news-details/2010/Telephone-and-Data-Systems-Inc-acquires-VISI-Incorporated/default.aspx

Telephone and Data Systems, Inc. acquires VISI Incorporated

Established communications companies will combine forces to provide enhanced portfolio of managed services For more information: Andrew S. Petersen Director-External Affairs and Corporate Communications TDS Telecommunications Corp. 608.664.4155 / andrew.petersen@tdstelecom.com Telephone and Data Systems, Inc., parent company to TDS Telecommunications Corp. (TDS®) today announced it has acquired VISI Incorporated (VISI), Minnesota’s largest locally-owned data center services and managed hosting provider. TDS, headquartered in Madison, Wis. will have oversight and management responsibility for the acquisition. VISI, headquartered in the Twin Cities, provides a wide range of information technology solutions, including: managed hosting, co-location and cloud-computing services to businesses of all sizes, from technology start-ups to large enterprises. TDS markets communications services to business and residential customers in 30 states, including Minnesota. Dave Wittwer, President

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