#citadel86 — Public Fediverse posts

ah yes, before we posted pictures of food we had to simply describe it

i absolutely remember that room

Citadels attracted a mature literate crowd, a clear forerunner to modern twitter-like micro-blogging, that none the less reveled in irrelevant shitposting 😆

from a eulogy for three citadels by Michael Finley of the St. Paul Pioneer Press circa 1996?? now there's something to track down a scan of

https://lwr.wtf/citadel/Newsletters/news9604.html

so there you go, from top of the world in the early 90s, to rapid death around '96 along with the rest of the BBS scene...

as the large for-profit multi-line boards pivoted to full ISP service, the amateur sysops looked at their phone bills and began eyeballing DSL connections instead of second phone lines...

#BBS #Citadel #Citadel86 #Minneapolis #retrocomputing #bbsing #dialup #dialupdays

A few big names even ran Citadels

hometown hero PC Tech Inc ran a Citadel-86 before being absorbed into Zeos/Micron (and still has a Minneapolis office!)

Atari Corp ran a STadel circa 1988!

Bad Sector became Visi.com, a pivotal early Twin Cities ISP, and long since absorbed into god knows what...

#BBS #Citadel #Citadel86 #Minneapolis #retrocomputing #bbsing #dialup #dialupdays

@orc (hi!) famously implemented a UUCP gateway for STadel, bringing usenet groups (and email?) into CitaNet for a time, but got in to a bit of a row with Hue Jr and had left the 612 scene by the time i got online in 1994

a CitaNet overview, from December 1992

the original Test System, run by Hue Jr in Minneapolis was the beating heart of the CitaNet

i often called it as it was a good place to pick up most of the networked rooms 😀

a good ~25 nodes in MN alone

maybe half were still running in `94 and memories are shaking loose of a number of them...

#BBS #Citadel #Citadel86 #Minneapolis #retrocomputing #bbsing #dialup #dialupdays

there's a stash of CitaNews at https://lwr.wtf/wiki/Newsletters

Citadel history thread LETS GO!

been racking my brain trying to remember what all the networked rooms were, here's a list from an amiga board in August 1991

Citadel style BBSs may not have been that popular overall, but they maintained pockets of rabid popularity in a variety of major cities

Citadel-86 gained its own federated networking as early as 1986, (a mere few years after FidoNet began!) quickly becoming a mainstay of many Citadel BBSs

#BBS #Citadel #Citadel86 #Minneapolis #retrocomputing #bbsing #dialup #dialupdays

Citadel-86 v3.49-hax deployed live 🫡

has Y2K fix, removed some pauses waiting for old modems which are not necessary in emulation, and i've got it idling using HLT, which keeps it from burning CPU in VMs new and old, such as a Win95 dos window 😀

connect via ssh to [email protected]

#BBS #Citadel #Citadel86 #Minneapolis #retrocomputing #bbsing #dialup #dialupdays

for how many retro BBSs are out there now, maybe two of them are Citadel?

doing my part, and attempting to resurrect Citadel-86, widely used in its (and my) hometown of the Minneapolis 612 and beyond, and root of many later Citadel forks

does anyone out there remember these?

tell me your stories because they are rapidly being lost to internet decay

did you notice bbsmates is gone?

Citadel-86 is now borderline lost media, the last version is MIA along with some extra tools for database resize and the Ease config tool

does anyone have them? check those dusty floppies

#BBS #Citadel #Citadel86 #Minneapolis #retrocomputing #bbsing #dialup #dialupdays