Old School Meets New School
One of the places you’ve been able to find me online consistently for the past decade is ISCABBS. Based out of the University of Iowa, this telnet-based BBS was once the largest in the world, with a thousand users logged in at any given time and waits of a couple of hours just to get into the queue.
Of course, times changed and the World Wide Web and Instant Messenging pretty much supplanted the telnet BBS as the method of choice for internet interaction. But there’s still a very loyal core of several hundred people who continue to frequent ISCABBS, and as a result a pretty tight-knit community has formed. People keep coming back for the knowledge in the nearly 200 forums and the retro interface.
However, the BBS development world isn’t dead. They found the source code to the BBS (which runs on an ancient HP-UX box) a few years back, so some bugs were fixed. And, recently, Tanj opened up a “developer’s interface” that people could use to access the BBS programatically. Though I’m not a coder by any stretch of the imagination, I took the opportunity to try to write a “real” Perl module and came out with Net::ISCABBS. It allowed me to get at most of the available developer’s functions from within Perl, my language of choice.
Over the past week or so, I built my first useful application using Net::ISCABBS – an RSS 1.0 interface. Now, you can subscribe to each forum in your feed reader of choice, and view the last 30 posts (updated every 5 minutes) that way. Some people are also taking the feeds and incorporating them into websites. I may add Atom feeds, too, as a way to play with the feed-generation parts of XML::Atom.
So stop on by ISCABBS, and interact with it in either an old way or a new one.
