La Cueva BBS in Mexico in 1993 (session replay)

Absolutely wonderful article and find! I was a RBBS-PC guy myself, and ran a one-line bbs for a while on it, but it never got popular with anybody. I interrupted one guy looking around one time and brought him in to chat mode, and we ended up good friends; the whole reason I kept the bbs up was so he could beep me and call me into long chats a couple nights a week.

It was a IBM-PC or XT, with two Seagate half-height 20MB ST-225 hard disks laying to the side of each other in the two bays--don't stack them, they will fry each other even with added fans installed!

It made such a ozone smell in my bedroom I ran a dryer vent hose from the exhaust fan out my bedroom window.

That's about all I remember, but I do have a copy of the software if anybody needs it.

I definitely feel the nostalgia here. I remember the first time I got a modem in the early '90s and dialed out to a few local BBSes as a teenager. I didn't quite know what they were or what they were for.

It was the most amazing experience to see this text and ASCII/ANSI art appear on my screen that was running off somebody else's computer. It's hard to describe the feeling I got when I realized I was connected to somebody else's computer somewhere within my city. It felt futuristic. At first I felt like I was being watched (possibly) by whoever owned the computer, seeing what I was doing on the system.

Also neat was I was using an IBM PC and some of the BBSes I connected to were using Apple computers or something else. It blew my young mind.

Eventually I ran my own BBS and made my own BBS door games that I made a little bit of money with. I released them as shareware and people would send checks in the mail to me to register the software.

I still have the data from my BBS that I could probably run in DOSBox to log into for old time's sake.

It's a rather weird combination of year, CPU and memory.

Z80 is (still) an 8-bit CPU with 16-bit addressing. It cannot access more than 64kiB at a time. The hardware and the software needed to overcome that limit was worth more than an 8088/8086 (or compatible CPU) with MS-DOS and Telix.

In 1993,the age of 80286 and 80386, 8088/8086 were considered low-low-end CPUs, let alone the Z80, even in Mexico.

Not pointing my finger, just stating some facts.

"I'm glad I found this file..." nice! wish I had also some captures of old BBS sessions safed like this one - thanks Oscar!