Tales from a BBS Junkie 267
Jason Scott writes "As someone who is bathed in Bulletin Board System (BBS) history nearly every waking hour, I can sometimes feel like I'm the only one going completely out of his way to find narratives. It's easy enough to copy together a bunch of floppy disks or scan a bunch of printouts but that's not really the glue of what put the online world together and why it still holds a strong meaning for people who were there. As a result, I'm always seeking out people to tell their stories from a personal perspective, or at least take a good shot at putting together the human side of the whole BBS era for the sake of those who missed it. If I'm lucky, I stumble upon a few sites where people do a great job of cobbling together what they didn't throw out from their teenage years. I might even find an extended story out on a website, spanning multiple pages." Read the rest of Jason's review.
| COMMODORK: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie | |
| author | Rob O'Hara |
| pages | 167 |
| publisher | Lulu.com |
| rating | 8 |
| reviewer | Jason Scott |
| ISBN | 978-1-84728-582-9 |
| summary | A memoir of one young teenager's life in the BBS world in the 1980s |
With Rob O'Hara's book Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie, I believe we have the world's first BBS Memoir. Weighing in at around 160 pages, O'Hara covers his life from 1977 through to 2002, tracing the effect that Bulletin Boards, videogames, and computers have had on his life. Just 33 years old, it might seem strange for someone to write an autobiographical narrative so soon, but like a lot of youth who've grown up in the age of the home computer, O'Hara's gotten a lot of living done in that short time.
This is a self-published book, or more accurately, an author-controlled book. It is currently distributed by Lulu.com, an on-demand printer that provides you with a very "book"-looking book that you would be hard-pressed to think didn't come right off the shelves of the local chain bookstore. The only difference is there's no professional editor jamming through the work before it gets to you. It's easy to find flaws in a lack of slickness and flow in a self-published book, but also no real filtering out of "the good stuff", either. So I think of this book as a real sweet homebrew creation, rough-hewn but full of heart, not unlike the boards it talks about.
Because of this, the first few dozen pages are choppy. O'Hara works his way around his memories to find his voice: He tries to explain what it is that drives a person to still keep a pile of Commodore 64s in his garage, or build a 20-machine arcade in his back yard (the author includes a picture of this great-looking playroom), or even to want to talk about this history in the first place. He covers it from different angles: the urge to be a collector, the nostalgic dad remembering his carefree days, and the computer guy with the cred built up from now-decades of experience with the machines. He also struggles, initially, with who the book is for: folks completely unaware of the history of the BBS and home computers of the 1980s, or other 30 and up computer geeks who want to take a joyride through a shared childhood? In doing so, he actually touches on some great thoughts on what attracts people to old pieces of plastic and microchips, and why things were so different for him.
A sixth of the way in, O'Hara dispenses with the helping hand, cracks his knuckles, and goes in whole hog. Instead of asking if anyone gets it, he assumes you've gotten this far because you want to know it, jams the wayback machine into full throttle, and plunges into the world of BBSing for a teenager in Oklahoma. Except, of course, it's really every BBS kid's childhood: The little bargains, the quiet victories, the betrayals, the triumphs.
The heart and soul of the book actually are warez. Warez in the old sense, of newly-acquired one-off floppies of games, painstaking bargained for, traded, and spread out to gain fame and reputation. Throughout the book, it comes back to the warez, and O'Hara does an absolutely fantastic job of capturing the sense of power and expression that engulfs a teenager who has been able to use his skills or his patience to get his hand on a program that nobody else has and then turn around and use that slight lead to his advantage. The methods he uses are laid out in brilliant detail; one involves registering with bulletin boards in a city his family will be vacationing in shortly, allowing his far away "exotic" location to be verified by the system operator, and then traveling to that city and leeching them dry for a free local call.
O'Hara never lets it get dry and technical; it's about people he met while trading software, the kind of people who he partied with, got into fights with, or loved. He's not always nice and he's not always the hero; what really rings true is how none of it feels pumped up or faked, dressed up as some inherently soul-searching activity where every moment in bristling with poignant meaning. That said, some of it rings very close to the heart indeed.
In fact, this book's greatest effect may be the touchstone it provides for one's own experiences. Even as Rob's younger self is getting drunk at a BBS party and stumbling in panic from a perceived bust into the flatbed of a parked truck to sleep it off, I'm harkening back in my own mind to events that accompanied my BBSing that I'd forgotten wholly and totally. But I was there again, saving my own warez for the right moment, meeting my own soon-to-be-lifelong friends, making my own grievous mistakes. Anyone who used BBSes for any period of time will want to run to their keyboards and tell their own story; I see a lot of long e-mails in Mr. O'Hara's future.
One small disclaimer: On page 14 of the edition of the book I have, Rob mentions my BBS Documentary, but just to say it's not what he was aiming for with his book. And he's right; we don't step in each other's territory and his book does what my film couldn't; go front to end on one boy's story to turning into a man online. And for that, I thank him, and I think a lot of others will too.
Is it for everyone? No way, but a book that takes on its subject so intensely shouldn't be. If you or an older sibling or parent touched a plastic-and-metal home computer, sipped your bandwidth through a modem, or held a 5 1/4" floppy disk in your bag to give to someone else, this book is your book. It might even be your memories, too.
It's a good book and can be ordered through Lulu or directly from the author, who sells autographed copies.
Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Favorite slashdot post of all times (Score:5, Funny)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=159051&cid=13
As an ex-sysop, I wonder occasionally how a modern chatter would do on an old style BBS....
Re:Favorite slashdot post of all times (Score:5, Funny)
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I have this urge to share my favorite (or, at least top 3) Slashdot post of all times:
Cor! I remember reading it the first time.
I dunno which is funnier, the post or me actually having met the kind of personality which would have been the user. A few times. One now owns and runs his father's chain of pharmacies. That was 25 years ago. Come to think of it... I wonder if he's behind any of the spam I get these days.
I AM SCUDER. I WANT PRIVILEDGE ACESS
Why do you need a privileged account?
BECAUSE
Broderbunds BBS.... (Score:4, Insightful)
It got to the point where Broderbund came to us to find beta testers for their software products. I dont think I ever once saw anyone use that system for its intended purpose.
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I accidentally stumbled on to a BBC run by "The World's Biggest Bookstore" in Toronto when I was a teenager. I have no idea why they had a BBS, and it only lasted for about three years, but in that three years a pretty big community sprouted up there who basically used it as a chat room and file trading site. I met up with the people from it a couple of times, and it was great for a socially awkward teenager like me to suddenly feel like I had a bunch of friends.
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Upgraded to a Aprotek Minimodem C (1200 baud) and found the online world of BBS'ing. Got into some of the more nefarious sides of it (i dont know what the author did in warez, but I was a courier), not paying for LD calls and whatnot.
I upgraded to a PC, and the fun got mor
I feel like a troglodyte (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I feel like a troglodyte (Score:4, Informative)
I'm pretty sure there are Internet versions of it out now... you might do some websearches...
Adman
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And, of course, as a sysop messing with friends' tradewars characters to mess with their heads.
We were the FidoNet hub for our area, which of course made our QuickBBS bbs system have to live on top of Front Door for the FidoNet stuff. Couldn't tell you why we did it of course, since it was a huge outlay of time, but nevertheless.
It was our only computer too - if someone was on the board (most of the time really, we were moderately popular considering we only had one line) when I needed
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Depending on the year, OS/2 2.x and above were your friend. It would handle multiple modems, and still allow you to do your ow
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The true test of multitasking, can you format a floppy while a user is on the BBS. No more Desqview video bleedthrough from background apps. Tweaking the memory settings on a DOS box so that the doors will run. SIO to keep the high speed (14.4+) modem happy, and then later VModem to get the BBS on the net. I still have my v.Everything Courier, despite not using it for a deca
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No way. DesqView and QEMM all the way!
Re:Lost, but NEVER forgotten (Score:4, Funny)
The ridiculous thing here is that I'm getting this advice something like 18 years too late for it to do me any good whatsoever.
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Ahhh.... FidoNet!!
Lemonade Stand (Score:2)
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At the risk of dating myself.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Modems hooked up the handset on your rotary phone...
We thought we were big time with a 9600 baud internal modem...
Whistling into pay phones for free calls was legal...
I can recall an internet before the BBS's came...
2 cents,
QueenB
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Whistling into pay phones for free calls was legal...
Could you do a good 2600 Hz?
For what it's worth, it was never legal, as nebulous "theft of service" or "misuse of network" laws would have gotten you. But you wouldn't have gotten caught, which is close enough.
Re:At the risk of dating myself.... (Score:4, Informative)
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Nobody "whistled into pay phones". You could use a tone generator to make the same sound as a quarter dropping, and get a free call. 2600Hz was from home phones, to 800 numbers. Typical how people misremember things that they never did in the first place.
2600 was to get trunk access from any line. This was typically done with a blue box. The quarter tones were done with a red box by replacing the crystal in a standard dialer with (I believe) about a 6.5 MHz crystal (can't remember the exact frequency).
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Remember how Compuserve charged more per minute for such "high speed access"? Man, those were different days...
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At the time I had moved from the Commodore stuff to the
Re:At the risk of dating myself.... (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_Online#Begin
AOL started as a Commodore 64 service, Quantum Link (1985). In 1988 they and Apple released AppleLink. After Apple and Quantum parted in 1989, they changed the name to AOL. In 1988, they and Tandy released PC-Link for the PC.
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Fuck, man, I remember feeling 1337 because I got a 1200 baud half/duplex Apple-cat modem.
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We called it !200 baud
Hacker zines (Score:2)
Ah, cDc. Good times. (Score:2)
I can remember... (Score:2)
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One of my favorite parts of BITNET was doing recursive commands.
I remember once asking our mainframe in Oxford, Ohio to ask a machine at MIT to ask a machine in the UK to ask a machine in Israel who was logged in to the VAX across the quad. It took about a minute, but it worked.
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Warez! (Score:2)
...I'm kidding! It'd be funny, though.
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LORD (Score:5, Funny)
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Ah... LORD was a kick ass game. I miss thee.
The joy of battling a hord of a thousand squirels.
Door Games (Score:2, Funny)
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Legend of the Red Dragon (Score:2, Insightful)
Was a fun read... (Score:3, Informative)
Warez nothing (Score:2)
Cheesy animation formats. (Score:2)
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the good ole days (Score:5, Insightful)
Also....
Ever notice how if you try explaining the BBS days to someone that never experienced it, you somehow end up looking like that stereotypical "wild eyed old coot" who raves about "back in my day, we walked 100 miles to school in the snow, with one shoe! AND WE LIKED IT!"
I am not a wild eyed old coot. I'm 28 damnit!
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I've had trouble even figuring out how to explain it. I tried with my cousin once. He doesn't even remember dial-up connections to the internet, so the idea of something like the internet, except no web pages, and only local people would connect, and sometimes only one person could connect at a time, and..... I lost him back at "except no web pages". He doesn't have a concept of what the internet is except for web pages. Even the Usenet is incomprehensible to him.
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Ever notice how if you try explaining the BBS days to someone that never experienced it, you somehow end up looking like that stereotypical "wild eyed old coot" who raves about "back in my day, we walked 100 miles to school in the snow, with one shoe! AND WE LIKED IT!"
ssh -l mono muon.mono.org
or
telnet muon.mono.org
The web site is dead at the moment, the bbs is alive and kicking... :)
Cheers,
-- Pete.
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-matthew
obligatory (Score:3, Funny)
Anyone else read that as "every wanking hour"?
BBS (Score:2, Interesting)
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I still cringe when I see the color "yellow".. you know what I mean.
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I remember calling one board, and right as I got the Login prompt, the SysOp dropped in and addressed me by name. (This was just before Caller ID was common, and this BBS didn't have it anyway.)
I asked how he knew it wasw me, and that's when I learned that I was the only one in the area that got MNP5 at 4800 b
Missed out on the "golden age" (Score:5, Interesting)
Two or three years after I got my Mac Classic in '91, I discovered the joys of using a modem to chat with that same friend, who lived two miles away. It's a shame he was in a pay phone code from my house (yes, things are that messed up here that you have to pay to call two miles, thanks regulations) otherwise I'd have experimented more - at least I found the control-G trick and used it to freak him out at will.
I'd been to a few BBSes, but they were all pay calls from where I was, and my parents didn't take too kindly to that. My friend's parents took even less kindly to his $500 phone bill one month. That was pretty much the end of that.
I used to watch C-NET and yearn for internet access... after watching that horrible Sandra Bullock movie, The Net, with my parents, I thought it'd be impossible to talk them into it, but I woke up on my 14th birthday to get what was, perhaps, the best birthday present I got since my 0th - a real, live, 2400kbps AOL connection. Two weeks of that convinced my parents to upgrade to a 14.4 modem, of course, but I digress.
I really missed out on the BBS culture, and on newsgroups (only occasionally posted for tech support, which I'm probably happy about now that anyone can go back and read my inane teenage programming discussions). I missed out on something that people on slashdot look back at with nostalgia, and I realize I'll never really understand those experiences. The "MMO" tradewars (or corewars if you had shell access), the novelty of the online discussion format itself, the sharing of interesting and new software (I had a mac though, probably couldn't run any of it). I guess my question is - am I missing that much? Ever since the day I started using the internet, I've been addicted to it and have really gotten a lot out of it - heck my girlfriend went to my high school but we were in different grades and never talked until facebook came along. It's a part of me and a part of my culture. Did I miss something in there, by not having been absorbed in BBS culture? There was nothing to do where I grew up anyways, and I actually spent most of my time engaged in self-educational activities rather than just playing video games.
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Yes and no. I think us former BBS-ers have more appreciation of the current internet experience having lived with 2400bps modems, single line BBSes, all text based games and so on. We used FIDOnet to send mail around the world without internet or long distance phone calls - sometimes it'd take a day or two for your message to propagate to the other side of the world. ANSI art
Along the way, BBSes, games, etc gave us the motiv
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*cringe*
Don't remind me. I can't count how many times I managed to set the modem all screwy whilst trying to install a new piece of hardware. (Or get an old one working right.) Invariably, it meant that the computer would dial the wrong number. Which would leave me sheepishly picking up the phone and trying to explain to the person on the other end why I just screeched in their ear.
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I had gotten an IBM PS1 in 90 something. Played around with AOL (good lord!) and Prodigy, but my highschool friends got me hoked on BBS when I was a Freshman in Highschool.
Played LORD to death and even got in a real world fight over that game (kind of).
Then the internet came in 95/96. I thought that was awesome playing Quake I with people in sweeden and chatting with people, but I missed those old systems mostly because you knew everyone.
Even if not in persons you felt you shared a secret club or
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Yes the joy of the Commodore 64. Getting my elite account because I actually broke the copy protection on a game myself. Life was a lot more innocent back then I think. No phishing, spam, or worms to worry about.
The Internet really is much better in many ways but really not as much fun. Back in the day at least one of the local BBSs through a bbq each year.
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And how! Those hospital blankets were mad trendy!
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But BBSing is not dead, and you can still experience it
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Ha! CTRL-G was an accidental discovery for me. Who would have thought that a beep would be enco
The Good Old Days... (Score:2)
Back before the BBS (Score:2)
Before the advent of the BBS there were the precursors in the way of Message Systems back where I once lived. In the late 70's and early 80's, at the college there was Message System and at a local school district was something called NOOZ. Different styles, but ultimately the same result. Places users signed up for accounts, posted and read notices. Flamewars errupted, on such meaningful topics as Gun Control, what bands constituted Heavy Metal proper and whether music was better during republican or d
Ahh BBS's (Score:2)
Trying to fit your entire OS on a floppy (amiga days)
Downloading Demos and mods.
Holy Hyperbole, Batman! (Score:4, Funny)
First of all, we're talking about 25 years! That's hardly a short time.
Secondly, since it's a memoir of BBSing in the days of dialup access, I doubt there was "a lot of living done", either.
Soul vs soul less (Score:2)
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And I think the difference is largely that with telnet, you get a random sample of users from everywhere, whereas with dialup, you got mainly folks in the local calling distance, plus
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This is the deal breaker for me. A telnet BBS could never recreate the feel of a one/two-line local BBS. Also, it seems contrived. There was a certain charm to using a modem
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Also, there is something very appealing about knowing that you are dialed into a computer in some local guy's basement. I always felt so priviged to chat with the sysop. I actually visited a couple of my favorite sysops just to see the
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Agree 100%. There's not much that compares to the feeling of "woo!" when a single or two-line BBS finally answered after an hour of busy signals, or the joy of stumbling across The Wanderer in Trade Wars. Also, for me there was a certain intimacy that I felt with a simple character-based interface that just isn't there with all the flashy graphics and bitmapped font
What made the "modem world" special (Score:2)
Ran QuickBBS & RA 88-92 (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone remember DCBBmmyy.ZIP? (Score:3, Interesting)
The unique aspect of my list was that it contained only phone numbers and data that were verified every month. Now remember many of these boards had one phone line so you had to wait in line to verify that the board was still operating. I could get 90% the first week of the month, 97% by the end of the second week, and then it was a struggle to get the last 3%. Sysops liked the list because it contained a short summary of what the focus of the board was so they weren't spending time verifying one time callers.
Just to focus on the DC area IBM boards, at the beginning there were perhaps 50 which over time grew to 750 that I could dial locally (and boy did I hear from the SysOp who was just outside my range, how I was discriminating by not listing him. Some even got one local-to-me number so they could be listed.). There was about a 5% drop out rate per month, even at the height. Mostly kiddie boards when mom and pop found out they couldn't use their phones. As the Internet became the new thing, boards started dying so that the drop over a year must have been 70%. It was quite sudden, you could hear the whoosh. At the end, there were perhaps 70 boards still up but no one was using them. I could verify them all in about 2 hours.
My kids got status in school for a while because their dad was the BBS list guy. All I got is a lot of lost sleep. Though oddly enough, perhaps 10 years after the boards died, I ended up hiring one of the SysOps. I still bump into someone occasionally who remembers my name from those days. I have no idea how many are still operating in the DC area.
Every once in a while I get a querry from one of the BBS historians asking if I have data on how many lasted through the entire period etc. Strangely enough, I still have a few of those old ZIP files lying around. None of the files I produced for the Atari community though.
Apple-net (Score:3, Interesting)
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I ran a bbs using GBBS on my apple
I think pirates bay was the one that got busted.
I am from New Orleans. We had the NOPG, the new orleans pirates guild.
Cracker from California who I got to talk on the phone, the gonif, jewish kid who could break copywrite protection on anything.
You brought me back bro.
puto
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QuickBBS on ISA Hardcard (Score:2)
Three words (Score:2, Interesting)
Before Civ
Before Doom
Looong before WoW
This was our crack:
http://www.operationoverkill.com/ [operationoverkill.com]
For those that don't know, this is "The original wastelands game." In a lot of ways, there are many "modern" games that could learn from the gameplay and user interface design. It was an excellent combination of nethack-style map navigation, narration, and turn-based combat. The funny thing is, one could say the same thing about the Fallout games, which are of course also "wastelands" games
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Hrm, Terminal.app isn't totally ANSI-friendly, have to find another app...
[entry@OWHQ] login: Zaren
Searching recruit list
You must enter both your first and last names!
Oh yeah, gotta do both...
Recruit Name: Zaren En- crap, damn typos...
Hrmm, Delete key doesn't work... ctrl-H? Woo, still works! 15 year old muscle memory comes back...
Ah, the kids need to get to bed, I'll have to lok at this later...
-- : *
Return to REALITY? Y
Back to Reality...
Just etching my number in the post... (Score:5, Interesting)
After it connected (my first recollection of the 2400 baud modem connection sound), it asked "What is your name: ". My friend and I looked at eachother with fright. What is this?? We put in "Beavis" (yes, that Beavis.)
Then it asked, "What is your LAST name: " We again looked at eachother, with more fear. Could it be we just hacked something? What dorks we were. =p We typed in "Smith".
Then it displayed it's user agreement, a page long with disclaimers and verification. We were so scared that we were connected to something that we weren't supposed to be, that we hung up, turned off the computer, and unplugged it (including the monitor). We spent the next hour talking about it.
That's what turned me into a techie. =) Man, I wish everyone could feel the way I felt in the BBS days. Of course, I'm sure there is an equivelent in everyone's life.
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A big part of the fun... (Score:2)
was trying out new software and new ways of doing things. Freeware was everywhere, and you could find new programs all the time. I liked Telix for a terminal program, because of its C-like scripting language. You needed a mail reader like SLMR or Bluewave and software for file transfers: xmodem, ymodem, zmodem, and I had a nifty automator for that written by the Byte Brothers.
In addition to the various online games mentioned, I had a cool one called Modem Wars that you played against someone else with a
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I didn't go in for the chat thing much, but I do seem to remember grabbing a dozen different versions of the magik screen saver...
We mostly used it as a client to access various vendors sites to download drivers (scsi drivers, video drivers, hdd info (some disks didn't print the number of heads/cylinders etc. on them)...
Sure, things were
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-matthew
SysOp Connections (Score:2)
Maybe some sort of combo discussion and directory service?
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WWIV, lordy was that a miserable thing from the user's POV... totally linear and no way to read/reply offline... I'm a Wildcat fan myself.
I remember the name "Ethereal Realms", probably from one of the BBS lists that floated around back in the day. -- I maintained the list of BBSs local to Santa Clarita CA.
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Actually, WWIV did support offline messages if the sysop had the proper bits installed. I know my WWIV board did. The lack of threading was one of the reasons why I moved to DLG Pro. [Although, my system was almost heavily, heavily modified from stock. I published quite a few of my source mods and other bits, so that's probably where you saw it from.]
In the area where I brought up Ethereal Realms--Carbondale, IL--was surrounded by RBBS, Wildcat!, RA, and a ton of othe
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Yeah, let's all trade out stories... (Score:3, Informative)
I got my first computer in 1986, an Apple
Upgraded to an Apple
The Louisville, Kentucky BBS scene was fairly active. The BBSs became "homes away from home". As a geek in high school, it was a wonderful opportunity to find people like me, especially when they were all collected together in one place, and there were no embarrassing introductions needed.
The fact that you had a computer, a modem, and had found the BBS was proof you were worthy enough to be treated, at minimum, as "one of us."
I had my normal four or five that I would call every evening (and more often if I could). Watching discussions, checking my personal messages...
it was a whole other life. People were not judged on looks, on fashion, on anything like that. It was your typed word as who you were.
Louisville also had monthly gatherings, referred to as "The Meat". It was held the first Saturday of each month in the now defunct Galleria downtown. The first couple of times I went, I believe I had to have my parents drive me and pick me up. I have no idea what I told them I was going to be doing down there.
I slowly met some of the people I knew on the boards. Looking back now, I realize I was closer to those people in high school than my actual classmates. I even dated a girl for over a year that I met on a board.
In the fall of 1993 I started college, and got access to the Internet. As quickly as the BBS scene changed my life, it disappeared from my life. By the time I got nostalgic for those days, the boards I remembered were all gone.
-singularity (a.k.a. "Merlyn" around the Louisville scene back in the day)
Good, Nostalgic Book (Score:2)
If you lived through the BBS scene back in the early to mid 80's (and even later), then you owe it to yourself to read th
Tradewars -- help me find it online? (Score:2)
But, is there a place to play Tradewars online? I would LOVE to play this game again, but have been out of luck in finding anything via google.
Thanks!
Three life stages of a BBS (Score:2, Funny)
2. Teenager turns 16 and gets car
3. +++ATH0
--
You weren't a real BBS if your AC
wasn't one of the 35 reachable by
PC PURSUIT [phreak.org]
My memories (Score:2)
Atlanta Area BBS's (Score:2)
First time I ever got laid was from BBS'n (Score:2)
No shit.
Was 16/17sh in high school, met a woman who was 10 years older than me (25/26sh). (.. and yes, I know she had committed statutory rape but she was hot as hell, and I was the one that instigated it). I remember the huge parties we would have with a bunch of my friends , we would get together.. work on setting up a new BBS using one of our phone lines, or a old 80x86 that my grandma gave me from her small office after she had upgraded...).
I remember when I tried to get a MFM drive through the Secur
Land of Devestation not LORD! (Score:2)
I miss the BBS days hard. I think the world could benefit from a return to those days. That being said, I know everyone and their dog spooned LORD at night, but not I... I much preferred The Pit, and Land of Devestation. Multiplayer goodness. You could build forts, move around a big map (in real time even, sorta). Sysops could complete reconfigure the map, create new towns, scripts, etc. Its a shame it didn't catch on more. In all honesty i
FirstClass (Score:2)
www.firstclass.com
These days it is a groupware suite. Email, calendaring, conferencing and so-forth. It is a quite spiffy alternative to Outlook and Notes. Servers and clients are available for Linux, OS X, and Windows.
If it ever had that "BBS Feel", it hasn't since at least FirstClass 4 (up to 8.x now). It seems to be the most popular in education markets.