Nowhere near the setup this couple had, but in my indiscrete youth I ran a multiline BBS "back in the day," from 1982-ish to 1996, until finally retiring it due to switching countries for work. At the end it ran on an Amiga 2000 though the BBS was hosted ona few different machines over the years prior. A couple of modems (2400 baud, then Miracom 9600, then 14.4K and finally US Robotics 56K), with a couple of gigabytes of SCSI drives. The BBS also offered a "telnet portal" whereby during certain hours of the day I placed a call to the local Uni that gave me an Janet connection, which could then be reached from anybody else on Janet, or the Internet if they could gateway in, to the BBS itself over dial-up. With that Janet gateway the BBS could host a few dozen people before it became overloaded, though of course, file transfers for anybody coming in via the Internet/Janet gateway were slower than molasses in a Minnesota winter.<p>Interestingly I had two features on this BBS that were prescient in a way. People with two modems & phone lines, or access to the Janet/Internet portal, could trade bits of files via a modified Zmodem protocol, the BBS acting as a warehouse tracking who had what bits. I later used that same protocol to trade warez on the warez scene FTP I ran for several years. I did say my youth was somewhat indiscrete.<p><a href="https://justinlloyd.li/blog/multipass-protocol/" rel="nofollow">https://justinlloyd.li/blog/multipass-protocol/</a><p>And the BBS also offered a way where you could post short 128 character messages, what I called "quick chat", on the front page wall, and people could respond to your post with their own 128 character message, "follow you" (alerting) so they would see your messages at the top of the wall whenever they logged in, or just block you because you were annoying.<p><a href="https://justinlloyd.li/blog/thats-a-really-short-skirt/" rel="nofollow">https://justinlloyd.li/blog/thats-a-really-short-skirt/</a><p>I've read Rusty & Edie's write-up before, and my mind always returned to "why?" Not "why" did they do it but "why such a terrible h/w configuration?" They obviously had enough money to pour in to this for the A/C, the power bill, the hundred+ phone lines, computers, the storage, but rackmount equipment existed, small, reasonably affordable multi-user UNIX minicomputers existed, multi-line ISA cards existed, including multi-user BBS software for IBM PC. I am missing something about their setup and why it was that way that is blindingly obvious, but I cannot figure out what it is.