Sysop’s Twisted Pair

Swoger describes the club’s BBS, which he wrote. It runs on a PDP 11 under RSX-11M.

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The BBS has been up since 1984 and was written by me at a time when I had never seen any other BBS. As a result it looks like no other board you’ve seen before. I wrote it from home on my T/S 2068 with MTERM II soft- ware. As a result it drives the screens of the computers call- ing in like none I have ever seen.

This Bulletin Board System is structured in a TREE fashion. Select 0 to back out of the BBS and 1 through 9 to head down the path you desire. CONTROL Z returns you to where you had just been. In the BROadcast mode, however, CONTROL Z will repeat the last message you sent.

Use Control S and Control Q to stop and start the computer sending to you. This is known as X-ON and X-OFF. Control O will let the computer run to the end of a file without showing anything on your Screen. Use this when you get tired of reading a long article that keeps scrolling at you.

There is a group of boards that is a mini-manual to operate the system if you select 4 on the MAIN board.

This group of boards is intend- ed to allow self-teaching of this Digital Equipment Corp. PDP 11 mini- Computer using the RSX-11M operating system. These boards give only the bare minimum to let you get by, but should be just complete enough to let you do everything you’ll need to do without the frills. < CONTROL Z > is the first most important thing to remember on this system, it almost always gets you out of trouble. The second most important thing to find on your machine is the RUBOUT key or sequence. This is key that will send ASCII 127 , not ASCII 08(Control H) which is usuallv vour delete kev. On the T/S 2068 it is the left arrow key (SHIFT — 5).

I hope that this will get you started. Getting around in the BBS is just as easy as typing a number from 0 to 9 and please don’t hang-up without logging out properly with a BYE or the system will crash.