Once upon a time (1994 or so) there was this idiot that had a dream: he would create a nice, well visited, popular well known bulletin board system.

(Yes, the old days, when BBS'es still ruled the world, and not everybody was willing to wait 2 minutes for every single picture to download over his 64/128 kilobit ISDN link on his 64 megabyte RAM Pentium 666 MMX-II 3D sound graphical enhanced virtual memorized multi-media computer...)

NightLive was my attempt.

I tried to create a BBS that lacked some of the shortcomings I saw on other 'amateur' BBS'es. (To clarify the matter: I viewed my own attempt as an amateur BBS as well. Yes, I do have a big ego, but not that big.)

I used some old hardware, and standard software, plus a few tools of my own making. All graphics were ANSI (the blocky stuff). Some pictures / screendumps you can find on this page.

As you can see, it is quite possible to create some acceptable images, a decent menu structure and a clean layout in ASCII / ANSI.

But, sigh, NightLive BBS is gone now. This website and these pictures are all that is left...

Update. I'm playing around with something called Synchronet BBS, as a hommage to the old days. We'll see how far I can get....
 

The specifications:

Motherboard: M601
Chipset: SARC (UMB) 486VLB
CPU: 486SX33
RAM: 5 Mb
Harddisks: Seagate ST1024 100MB / Western Digital Caviar 2200 200 MB
Modem: Best 1440 14k4 fax/modem
Networkcard: ProLan 200CJ
Operating system: MSdos 5
Memory manager: Qemm 7.0x
Network software: Lantastic v6.0
Fossil: BNU v1.82b
Mailer: Frontdoor 2.02nc
Tosser: Fmail 0.98b
BBS: Remote Access 2.02+nc
Fax program: Bfax
ANSI drawing package: TheDraw
Miscellaneous: Straks, XL, Faxwarn

Now that's quite a bit different from the hardware you're using now to view this page, isn't it?
 

Revisit.

Although I have *somewhere* a QIC40 tape with the whole BBS setup, I don't think I will ever try it out again... To keep the memory alive I have put up some screenshots of the old days. Move your mouse over the image to view the comments.

(If someone could borrow me a tapedrive I could still give it a go though...)