In 1992, Joe Reiss began the Spoiler-Free Opinion Summary, an effort to collect ratings for each week’s episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” from fans on Usenet.
The “S.O.S.” caught on and remained popular for years, moving to the web in 1995. Ultimately, Reiss collected nearly 300,000 individual ratings.
When I was on the Bobby Blackwolf Show in February, we discussed TradeWars 2002 and Legend of the Red Dragon. Early in our back and forth on LoRD, I said: “It became… you know, depending on who you talk to, probably the number one or number two game out of BBSes.” Blackwolf followed up by saying: “TradeWars is usually number one, LoRD is number two.”
I don’t think anyone would dispute that TradeWars 2002 and Legend of the Red Dragon were the two most popular BBS games. But which was the most popular? Is it even possible to know?
This is the final part of a three-part series.
In this post I’m going to discuss Fire Escape’s BBS directory formats, the directory parser and the dataset; I’ll also give some caveats about this data.
This is the second part of a three-part series.
It’s chart time! In this post you can explore several graphs that show facets of the St. Louis BBS scene.
Users who wanted to chat with Fire Escape when she wasn’t online would be greeted with this ANSI screen on her BBS.
This is the first part of a three-part series.
If there was a superstar of St. Louis BBSes during the 1990s, it had to be Fire Escape.
