One of my interests from 1990s BBSing is MajorBBS. One of my first online connections was through Nando.net, a newspaper-created online enterprise which consisted of an ISP and Major-BBS powered BBS. Nando’s BBS was impressive at the time, it would regularly have 100+ simultaneous users logged in and an active Teleconference (chat).
I did install MajorBBS and did a little bit of tinkering, but I would like to explore it more. MajorBBS was in a league of its own compared to other BBS softwares — it had a purely commercial/industrial feel to it and was used for powering much larger BBSes than typical hobbyist-driven boards. One of the products that went hand-in-hand with MajorBBS was the BocaBoards made by Boca Research. These were key to supporting lots of simultaneous users (modems) with DOS-based systems.
In the 1990s I found an inexpensive 16-port BocaBoard BB2016, and got it working in Linux to run 16 serial ports. I kept the BocaBoard and serial cables, however I recently realized that I seem to have lost the internal ISA card that goes in a PC for the BocaBoard to attach to. Still wanting to scratch a MajorBBS itch, I recently found an inexpensive 8-port BocaBoard and couldn’t resist adding it to my collection. Now the only conundrum is that my new 8-port BB1008 is new-in-box, still in original shrinkwrap, so I’m not about to cut it open just yet 🙂
Here are some photos of the BB1008. More MajorBBS content to come later.
