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10 Years BlackICE BBS Picturegallery published!
2023-08-15 06:15:02The Picturegallery 10 Years BlackICE BBS with 63 Pictures can now be found at the Menuepoint Pictures.
Social Media Posts, Screenshots and Pictures from the 10 Year BlackICE BBS Journey!
Quelle: BBSindex
Evoke Demoparty 2023 Picturegallery published!
2023-07-29 18:30:01The Picturegallery Evoke Demoparty 2023 with 27 Pictures can now be found at the Menuepoint Pictures.
Pictures from the Evoke Demoparty in Cologne from 2023
Quelle: BBSindex
BINP Picturegallery published!
2023-07-13 12:30:01The Picturegallery BINP with 86 Pictures can now be found at the Menuepoint Pictures.
BINP - BlackIceNewsPaper all issues of the ANSI-Newsletter from the BlackICE BBS (German)
Quelle: BBSindex
Maintenance 04.July 2023 11:00
2023-07-03 12:10:18BBSindex will be offline on 04 of July 2023 at 11 O'Clock (Local Website Time)
The reason behind the offtime is maintenance that will conclude the optimization works on the website and to lay ground for new features in the future.
It is expected to be offline for about 4 hours. That can be more or less. IT, you know.
Quelle: bbsindex
Well that was handled poorly from the Amiga Community
2023-06-13 20:20:11You may or may not be aware of the fact that David John Pleasance is a well known name in the Commodore and Amiga Community. He wrote more than one book on this topic, was in a leading positions at the Commodore company and inspired thousand of people to get a job around the computer based information technology, today called mostly IT.
After Commodore was poorly managed and driven with nearly full speed into a brick wall at it's peak of success, David walked away for decades from Commodore. As the first plannings for Events around the upcoming 30th birthday of the Amiga startet he got a call and was invited to such an event.
Long story short he got the Commodore Bug again and startet writing his first book and was seen on Commodore and Amiga Events around the globe.
He helped creating the thing where a community formed itself around and is now part of this very same community.
Ok what's all about the chattering about this guy? It was to help to shine the right light on a person that was recently a target from that very community.
As a member of the community he had of course inside of the community itself and he observed that there is a lack of a central point for all the commodore and amiga fans.
He isn't wrong. And i tell you why i think that. I don't own an Amiga or a Commodore Computer. That last time i used one of those machines on a daily bases was in the mid 90s. As i found out that there was an amiga event in the city where i was born it caugth of course my attention. I contacted the event manager Markus Tillmann and offerd him to film the event. The goal was a documentary about the event and we achived that goal in the mean time twice and it's even put on a physical media (DVD).
If you're new to the amiga scene, like i am was in 2019, you have no starting point where you should began your research journey. The germans have at least two well running amiga forums and even more for commodore in general. Looking above the german language you will find much more and it's getting complicated to track all the different sites very quickly.
From an outside perspective as i had back when i was starting my journey with the amiga community i wished there was a central point where i could have found all the informations to get a good overview about the commodore and amiga world.
So a central information pool is at least nice to have for starters. You don't need it if you're already a couple of years down the commodore and amiga retro rabbithole.
David wanted a website that was more than just a directory. He was planning to raise funds to support very small developer and much more. Hardware or software alike. Sometimes there is a very good idea inside of a basement but the idea will never see the light of day because there is not enough money to run even a small batch of prototyps or to produce a small run of physical media that people still like to put on shelves.
What a certain part of the community saw was a moneygrab. And that's wrong. But it is extremly unusual that a website need a payed subscription for today, right?. Netflix does. OnlyFans does (as you wouldn't know...). Twitch, Amazon and Youtube also can be a subscription website. But is it ok just for written content? I mean the fraggin' New York Times does it. So yes it is of course a viable option to do so.
But i think there where two major problems. First one beeing that the website should be called AGA.DIRECTORY. AGA was a chipset. And a directory well it's a directory. The assumption that a payed subscription website with a kickstarter attached to launch the website is just a phonebook of hyperlinks to navigate the web was made.
Oh wait there was also a kickstarter campagne? Yes there was. past sense. because the way the community treated a person that brought the commodore to europe was flatout bad and the campagne was subsequently canceled
Videos and Threads on different socialmedia plattform didn't only critic the idea. They also got personal and hurtful. That's so far away from any behaviour i have seen ever in the commodore and amiga community. It's everybodies right to speak there mind. But you have to fact check first and aim what you're shooting for. You can rant 30 minutes about a project that someone try to create. You also could invest the time to think it through and frame your oppinion in a way where nobody gets hurt. The best way to do it would be to freakin call the guy and ask him about all your points you would like to rant about. Or even better write a mail so you can show it in your video.
The backlash that was created since the kickstarter was launched was all of a sudden big. But the idea and the start of the project wasn't startet with the campagne. In a time where David was in bad shape of health he worked out the idea. (This information was given to me in a -private- konversation before i interviewed David and i will not go into details here.) At the Amiga 37 show in october 2022 he introduced the project to the world. I guess the kickstarter was set up to draw more attention to the project since there wasn't enough at the shows where he presented the project and offerd early adopter subscriptions.
The kickstarter was the last attempt. Everybody who was tracking the progess of the funds raised could forsee that not enough backers where present to make it in time. That would be ultimate a failure and the end of the project. But the community had to attack the idea, the person so that David canceled the project by himself. It wasn't necessary. It could have been a more natural end in the way that the bigger part of the community just didn't want the website. But instead of speaking a language that David well knows: "supply and demand" the end was forced on him. And that is the point where i think the amiga community handled it poorly.
But there is always another side to the coin - isn't there. Well yeah there is. I know the scale of webprojects very well. Even if the kickstarter would have succeeded and the initial fundungs for the first year where secured what would happend after that? David isn't a webdeveloper. That leads to potential costs for a webdev to develop a website. The ideas are not very enjoyable if you just slap an opensource content managment system on a webserver. You have to tailer the needs to spec especially for a website where you want a subsciption fee for. Who would moderate the community? If the scale would be big enough you would also need a community manager. And from time to time to roll out a new feature on the website what would inject more webdev hours to the project that had to be paid.
As a developer for new Commodore / Amiga hardware or software you would never count just only on one website to gain attention, tracktion and in the end fundings to make your product for real or to get it started so that people could buy it. You would have presented your project in all the existing forums and newsoutlets around the retro computing scene you could find. So the idea to fetch some money from the aga.directory would be very nice but not the only horse you would bet on. And that's a point where the details have more lags in it as informations. Who would decide at the end where the money would go to? That is a key information missing.
I'm not saying that the aga.directory project was doomed at launch. if so, i would have told him that staight into his face. because it's the right way to do it. But it would have been a steep climb. But i don't think personaly about David that he would run from a fight or is shy of hard work. He wanted the project to succeed. He wanted that legacy. Even so he don't need more legacy as he already gave to the world of computers.
In a perfect world the website would have funded otherwise and finished before the world would see it. With a 30 day trial access to make up your mind if it is any good. And in a perfect world the community would have treated one of there own with more respect.
Well i guess nobody got it's way in this case.
I know the tempreature is hot right now. And in this environment posting a text like this can be fuel right in the fires core. All i wanted is to make a little call to see both sides of the coin. I met David twice in my entire life. He isn't a very close friend of mine. But the story needed another angle. And i just tried to provide exactly this.
We all will meet in person at the next event in a peaceful matter. Because that's the way the commodore community alway was and will be.
Have a good one.
Quelle: bbsindex
Statistics Archive is back online
2023-06-11 20:29:14Since the big Website update at the start of the year 2023 bbsindex.de was missing the bbs statistics features.
It's back! You can now discover how active the BBS scene is. You can lookup the current month and the archive will allow you to take a deeper dive and read numbers nearly 10 years back.
Note that we have only participating boards to show the stats we gather here at BBSindex.
You will see how long the BBS is sharing the anonymous data with us once you look the board up in the archive. The text is located at the bottom of the table.
In a future update there will be an easy way to enter the Project with your own BBS. In the meantime please feel free to contact us via the submit news form.
Quelle: bbsindex
BBSing with your Mobil Device - MuffinTerm and ConnectBot
2023-03-21 14:08:41If you don't want miss out on your BBS experience on the go you will eventualy search on your mobile device for a Terminal App.
Apple user didn't find anything for a long time. There wasn't a App in the store for it.
But with Android on the other hand you've at least Connect Bot. This App wasn't coded with BBSes in mind as a top tier priority. And you can tell that by simply using the App. But you can make it work with the right settings to call a BBS.
The right settings for calling a BBS with ConnectBot
ConnectBot is a very handy App if you aproach modern shells for webserver or other Unix like systems. SSH and a bunch of codepages included.
If you create a BBS as a host you should switch the Encoding to CP437. Another setting that have to be tweaked is DEL Key: Backspace. Any compression should turned off also.
If you use the settings explained above you should at least get a good guess of what the screen of a BBS should look like on the first screen of your BBS call. But things doesn't line up correctly.
The solution is, yes you guessed it already, another setting! Open the menue at the right top corner in your active connection screen and force the size to 80x25. Twice. Because the App will refuse it at the first try. That might be a unnoticed bug in the software.
After you set the size you should see a good Ansi appearance at the next screen that will be drawn. That will left you at least with a usable App to surf your favorite BBS on the go. A major drawback is that ConnectBot misses out on any filetransferprotocol like ZModem or XModem. No Up/Downloads on Android.
ConnectBot received in the last weeks like MuffinTerm an Update.
The Apple Software is written on purpose for BBSes. It's native language is Ansi and you can tell by using the App.
MuffinTerm offers you not only just Ansi it also has a bunch of other terminal emulations under the hood. That results in a terminal look as if you would use an Atari, PET or any other screen emulator there is in the software. It dosen't stop there. Wouldn't it be boring if you couldn't tweak your Videomode? Well you can. And to top it all of you even can emulate the Speed of your connection. Try to read as fast as the characters showing up on your screen and measure your eyes and brain readings BPS.
Now to the more Apple-isch side of things. You can change the App icon and via iCloud you can export your Phonebook or syncronise it between your iPhone, iPad and even macOS. Another major point where iCloud will come in place is the ability to Up/Download files from the AppleCloud to the BBS. Yeah, that's right! You have ZModem in MuffinTerm.
For a long time Android users had the advantage over Apple users that they could reach a BBS. But now it seems that Apple users gained the superior connection tool for the BBS online livestyle.
On the Web ConnectBot is here to find: https://connectbot.org. Of Course MuffinTerm has it's own Web presents: https://muffinterm.app.
They are no more excuses you didn't check your PMs and Netmails frequently ;) If you want more BBS in your pocket you should take a look on HotDogED a Fido Point App.
Quelle: bbsindex / android&apple store / muffinterm.app / connectbot.org
Amiga 38 in October 2023
2023-03-12 22:46:03After the Amiga 30,32 and 34 Events in Neuss, Germany everyone from the Commodore Community was looking forward to the Amiga 36.
But... the Universe had other plans in mind. For health related safety reasons Markus Tillmann, eventcoordinator of the Amiga Events, decided not to launch the Amiga 36 Event.
One year later he surprised Amigafans with the Amiga 37. Not only shifted the event period from two to three years it was also a change made to the location where the event would held. Alongside with some other tweaks like the new afterparty concept or the catering.
The next big event around the Commodore culture and community should fall into the year 2025 with the 40th anniversary of the Amiga. Except this time not the Universe had other plans but Markus Tillmann. On March 5th 2023 he announced the Amiga 38 at the a1k forum. Small hints inside the Amigauniverse could be spotted early. There was the booklet information in the official DVD of the Amiga 34/37 and in Switzerland spilled a Sponsor a little bit of techtea at the Mountainbytes demo party.
What we know so far:
Eventday is October, 7th 2023 (There are plans for a friday afternoon ticket but no details on that are concrete as of writing the article)
Eventlocation is the Kunsterwerk, Mönchengladbach Germany
Tickets will be available someday in April.
There is, at least on the time of writing this article, no word about the Amiga 38 on the offical amigaevent.de website.
BBSindex will meet the Eventcoordinator in April to gather more information about the Amiga 38.
Quelle: Amiga 38 Coordinationteam / a1k forum
Mountainbytes Coverage
2023-02-25 10:23:30Short info for all demoscene fans out there. Alisha is covering the Mountainbytes from Zug in Switzerland today.
There is also a LiveStream about the Mountainbytes!
You can follow some early content on our bandnew Mastadon account.
It's @BlackICEBBS@Oldbytes.Spaces
There will be a bigger content-piece in the future. It's planned for season 05 of the BBSindexLIVE Stream.
Quelle: bbsindex
The BBS turns 46 today! #BBSday
2023-02-16 10:39:13Today, 46 Years ago the first BBS goes online.
On February 16th 1977 in Chicago (IL,USA) Ward Christensen and Randy Suess are about to finishing the last steps before switching the CBBS online.
The CBBS was the first Computerized Bulletin Board System and would not only mark the Milestone for the Onlineage. It also allowed to invent and grow subcultures like the DemoScene. If your computer had a modem attached to it you could explore the world though it, since you're no longer physical bound to a location to do so.
In the upcoming years of BBSing the ANSI char set would spark a whole ArtScene that is still present and activ today. The ANSIart Scene. Even the exchange of text messages and files would break out of the local BBS. Tom Jennings created the FidoNet which was no less than a network that spans the world and allows the communication beyond all borders.
But there is much more to it as old terminal screens and weird sounds from a Modem. Many things that originates from the BBS Scene is still in use today. Emotes. E-Mail, Newsletter. Trolling, BBS Wars, MMORPGs all those possibilities aren't new for BBS veterans. The Internet just wanted you to belive that it was new ;)
The Website BBSday.org focuses more on the Topic around the BBSday and how to explore or even join the BBS Scene today.
Quelle: bbsindex / The BBS Documentary