A VIC-20 BBS

A BBS? On a VIC-20?

I visited a number of interesting BBS's in the Omaha area back in the day. I'm going to start with some of the systems that I first visited in Fall of 1984.

I visited a BBS whose operational hours were something like 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. each night. The board ran on a rather spartan hardware setup with a Commodore VIC-20 at the heart of the system with a VIC-1600 "VICModem".

The BBS was a little sluggish, but I was willing to cut it some slack because of the sheer coolness factor of running a BBS on minimal hardware. I ended up chatting with the Sysop ... who I will refer to as "MM" ... as did a mutual friend. The three of us soon met to talk about the board and other things. There are a couple of things that really stand out about the physical design of the BBS.

The first thing that stood out to me is that MM ran the BBS on a VICModem. That modem does not have auto-answer capability. When the phone rang, MM had to insert the phone cord from the handset into the VICModem. ( He might have left the handset cord in the modem and could have just used the handset as an answer/hangup switch ... I don't know for sure how MM handled the situation. ) Okay, that took some dedication. MM was part of the machine, so to speak.

The other part that was very interesting to me was the way that user profiles and messages were stored on the system. The BBS didn't have a disk drive! Each user profile and message was stored in memory by altering the running BASIC program! The Commodore VIC-20 and C-64 computers both had full-screen editors. If you wrote code to clear the screen, display a line of BASIC code, set the cursor to "home", and then issue a few POKE commands to stuff the keyboard buffer with carriage-returns, the displayed line of BASIC code would have become part of the existing BASIC program.

MM used this technique to embed DATA statements into the running program. Since the technique required the code to drop out of BASIC, he'd follow those lines up with a RUN or GOTO that would re-invigorate the BBS. It was a real "Rube Goldberg Device", but the payoff for a BBS with no disk drive was enormous. At the end of the night, Mike just had to SAVE the BASIC program to cassette... which could be checked with the VERIFY command to make sure that it saved correctly. That one SAVE would keep all of his message and user data.

The next night, he'd load up the BASIC program and take up where he'd left off before. He could perform any kind of maintenance that he needed on the user info or the messages right from the BASIC editor. I really don't know what he did as far as long-term maintenance of those DATA statements. At some point, he'd have to get rid of older messages and such to make room for new ones since memory was scarce. There were a lot of "renumber" and "BASIC aid" utilities for those machines that I suppose he could have used.

I don't think the VIC-20 Board stayed up for very long, but it was an interesting thing to stumble upon in this era. Many of the BBS's of this era were home-brewed in some way, but I think this board took that spirit to the extreme. It also employed one of the most creative technical approaches I've ever heard of.

A VIC-20 BBS

A BBS? On a VIC-20?

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