Break Into Chat
Josh Renaud’s blog about BBS history, retro computing and technology reminiscences.
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Unearthed: My Atari 8-bit cassette tape
Last weekend, I was rummaging through my old Atari ST disks when I came across something I hadn’t noticed in 30 years: A cassette tape for my Atari 8-bit. As I have recounted before, I used hand-me-down Atari 800s, a 130XE, a 410 program recorder, and lots of other equipment and disks from family members…
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Slack API documentation mentions BBS door games
I discovered tonight that Slack’s API documentation has a page which uses a list of BBS door games as an example of how to create option fields. Pretty wild. I would love to know who was responsible for that. Whoever you are, my hat’s off to you!
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Fidonet archive update
A couple updates with regard to the 300,000 FidoNet messages I archived. First, I have added my FidoNet message cache as a new Break Into Chat “Special Collection” (similar to the existing AtasciiTube, Door World Magazine, and BBS podcasts collections). I have included a lot supplemental material that adds context; as well as a Python…
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Gary Martin, creator of “TradeWars 2002”
Gary Martin created TradeWars 2002, “the granddaddy of all BBS games” which has been played by tens of thousands of enthusiasts around the world. In this interview, Martin discusses rocking the University of Kansas campus as a DJ, founding Martech Software, and running one of the biggest bulletin board systems. He also describes two tantalizing…
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Archiving 300,000 Fidonet messages
In 2015, I began looking for archives of networked BBS messageboards, hoping to find contemporary discussions of BBS door games from the 1990s. The best source I found was the fidonet.ozzmosis.com archive. The Ozzmosis archive is awesome — and it’s still active, archiving any new messages posted to Fidonet. (yes, Fidonet still exists!) But I…
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Using high res on my Atari ST with the CosmosEx and a wire
Throughout my Atari ST-owning life, I have only ever owned Atari’s color monitor, the SC1224. It can display two of the ST’s video modes: low resolution (320×200, 16 colors) and medium resolution (640×200, 4 colors). The Atari also had a 640×400 high resolution mode, but it required a different monochrome monitor. I never had a…
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