Am 03.01.2018 um 21:42 schrieb Harald Welte laforge@gnumonks.org:

I think there's a lot of stories to be told about the good old days of BBSs and BBS networks. I would like to see if a group of people can get together to revive some of the related technology, and

a) document it in a way, soemthing like an "online museum", and

A lot of documentation is in Russian. Google Translate might help sometimes, but a good and up-to-date documentation in English would be great for a start.

Philipp Giebel did also a great job in documentation for the Husky suite and how to setup. At least that (and he personally) helped me a lot. Of course, it’s far from complete, I think. Philipp will most likely welcome help to improve his docs.

b) create running setups (preferably as ready-made VM images, containers, etc.) that one can use to operate BBS software X, Y or Z - or even multiple of them as part of a FTN, or ZConnect network.

Hmmm, I’m not so sure about this. ;) I can see the benefits, but on the other hand Fido nodes are not that fond of people joining Fidonet that do not have any clue what they are doing. Providing ready-to-use containers may lead to lots of noise and many newbies that just want to try out this „weird thing of the past, called Fidonet“. For this they can become points for sure and there is even a mobile point software (HotDogEd on Android) that helps here.

I've also started to collect some hardware to create a physical setup, like a set of analog modems and ISDN TAs, connected to a PBX of some sort. That physical setup could be operated at vintage computing festivals (VCFB in Berlin e.g.) and particularly at the 35C3 conference in December 2018.

I like that idea! :-)

As I already wrote, I got some cheap modems from Ebay, ranging in price from 1.- to 30.-. With some time and effort, it should be possible to get a dozen of modems for a reasonable amount of money.

I was also thinking of connecting a Raspi via USB<->serial dongle to a modem and use that Raspi with FS-UAE to run my Amiga software on it, as it doesn’t draw so much power as my A3000 (100W). (And doesn’t make so much noise, too.)

The point there would be to be able to show (primarily) the interested parts of the younger generation how this all worked.

And you can do some fun games with that or provide a section for Hacker Jeopardy: guess the modem connect rate! ;-)

I'm quite unorthodox in terms of the hardware. To me, the "experience" part is the important part. So if we can run the old software on modern hardware using emulation, and/or even emulate the modem connection using a bit-rate limited TCP/telnet connection, then that's already pretty sufficient for most purposes. Such a "virtualized" approach of course means that people can try this at their home, without any access to hardware such as analog modems or even a telephone line.

Still, of course, for the demo at festivals, the physical setup is much better to have.

I agree here.

For the future of Fidonet we need good software that is supported today. Especially in Germany there are lots of OS/2 nodes up & running. I don’t want to know how many security issues are with those old installations.

For my pet arch Amiga, I’m glad that most of my hardware is still working, but it is foreseeable that capacitors and other electrical parts will start to fail at some time. SCSI disks are already aging and failing. For the classic Amigas I think the end will be the end of unixtime in 2038.

So, going virtual (doesn’t help with unixtime of course) is the way to go.

As part of the research, I've also stumbled on the fact that for some reaso, no FOSS implementation of a softmodem exists. I'm not referring to the Winmodems (sound card with phone attachment), but an even more "modern" implenetation: A SIP softphone that uses SIP + RTP with G.711 aLaw/uLaw to run a modem to a SIP operator. I guess with telephony systems switching to all-IP / all-VoIP this is the only way how we can contonue to use modem technology in the mid to long term. Fabrice Bellard's old "linmodem" is the best next thing to what I have in mind, so I'd love to spend some of my non-existing time on bringing that forward, e.g. adding the SIP/RTP support to it - see http://projects.osmocom.org/projects/linmodem/issues for details

There is also ser2net or similar, where you can connect your local serial connection via the net to a remote computer. But then again you’ll need more hardware for implementation.

Going with a SIP-modem would be nice as it would allow to use local phone numbers for dial-in, eg. from a Fritzbox, and have the FTN mailer in the datacenter answering that call. I don’t know how well this would work and how the latency affect the connection, but at least I can tell that Fax via VSAT connections is not a good idea and most likely to fail with 600-800 ms latency. ;)

In case anyone wants to help on any of the related topics, feel free to reach out. I'm happy to give write/editing permissions on the redmine project[s] I've created at (and underneath) of https://projects.osmocom.org/projects/retro-bbs

What I can do: - testing - provide some infrastructure - maybe do some documentation - spread the word

What I can’t do: - coding/programming ;)