Digital Candy BBS
 

Anyone still around that used to use my BBS in the 90's called Digital Candy? It was the UK's largest Amiga Scene BBS with 6 node ringdown running on an A4000. Was a busy place at the time but the .Net saw the end of the BBS scene and I sold the whole lot and moved on.

Would be great to hear from anyone that used to be a user.

Regards

Paul aka Hybrid

Heheh - I bought it :-)

Ade

Ahh yes, you and your pal (Ian was it) drove up and collected the whole lot except the DAT drive if I remember rightly.

Whatever happened to the BBS as you seemed to close it down soon after I sold it all to you. Where did my hardware end up? It would be so bizarre if I were able to buy my old Digital Candy machine back off whoever has it now! Those CD jukeboxes that I had on it were pretty neat too!

Regards

Hybrid

Well Paul, it's like you said. The internet was closing in rapidly, the number of callers fell over time, and our only hope was to get Scene Storm II out and some cash in. As uploads fell, it became more difficult to make SS II an essential purchase, and then the Amiga just got left behind. As far as I know, the hardware has been sold on to other people, although I still have an A600 I don't use it much. Even I just got on the pc bandwagon because the hardware became far superior than even the A4000 we had. I began designing/implimenting websites, interactive cd's and stuff like that alongside my main job, then the family came along...I'm sure we all know how hard that makes maintaining stuff!

That A4000 is still probably the most reliable bit of hardware I've ever owned, downtime was minimal, it never crashed, and was a great piece of kit. The whole BBS however cost me a freakin fortune to co-run with Ian, and eventually caused me nothing but grief :-(

Didnt use DC but did use Ultimate Dream and Stonehenge before that... but you were voted 2nd best UK BBS then to a certain Quartex BBS ;)

god damn BBS's I tell ya...

when I first brought my Amiga in 1986 I brought everything... then I was introduced to a modem... then the rest is history... at one point I was spending so much on overseas calls I had no money per month for anything else...

in some ways I really hate the BBS scene... if I'd stuck to my guns and just kept on buying original software I'd have a very nice HUGE collection by now...

in short I wasted thousands of dollars and I mean thousands of dollars on software/downloads I don't have a fraction of today...

I might have one hell of a collection of hardware and software today but it could have been so much better...

so yeah, bloody overseas bbs and my lack of discipline...

sucked into that world of collect collect collect... ya never got to use much of the software anyway... of course the other people in my circle benefited until I woke up and asked them to share in download costs...

not one of them wanted anything after that... shortly after that I ended all our cpu friendships...

anyway, nope, I don't recall calling this board :P

thanks Paul aka Hybrid for allowing me to vent... :lol:

now days I only download ... at least I have ALL of that... beautiful hardcore is timeless... heh

You have a good memory! Stonehenge was my first BBS and then I took over the running of Ultimate Dream from Dream Warrior. Ultimate Dream had been the first proper warez BBS I used and at the time DW had been running it off an A500 with a RAMDISK and several floppy disks! No hard drive so you had to ring him up if the floppy with the warp file you wanted was not in any of the drives!! hehe

The BBS that got me into it all though was AIX 386 which had the Share and Enjoy conference on it, run along with the guys from Energy Spreaders.

Once I had the reigns of Ultimate Dream I invested in an A590 (20meg) that seemed MASSIVE at the time! It was about 400 quid for 20 meg in those days! eek!

Quartex BBS's, hmmm well I remember Absolute Zero run by (?) in Teeside somewhere, then there was Undertaker's Graveyard BBS in Sunderland, Scott's Dulcet Tones in Glasgow I think and Jester and ? ran the main QTX board down on the south coast somewhere (cant remember the name of it). Trying also to remember if Oasis (Dan) was ever a QTX board.

Regards

Hybrid

Scott's board (Dulcet Tones) was in Dundee, and I think the other main QTX board at that time was run by Beast, but the name escapes me :(

Slayer, at that time you never heard of blueboxes?:D

Ahh yes, Beast ran a BBS called Arcadia. 4 nodes i think.

I only done that once to try it out...

can't remember what type it was but it involved ringing one of a few numbers of the exchange listening for a few subtle tones on the line then immediately activating some auto dialer on the Amiga... which sent some tones and also the number you wanted to call then activating the Auto Answer command in your comms prog...

the call was never charged for... but I was and still am a great believer in don't think if think when...

so, doesn't matter how many years you benefit, eventually somewhere down the line your time will be up...

I don't mind paying for anything it just annoyed me in grand hindsight (even though I had the freaking foresight in the first place) that I paid for the wrong thing...

thanks for noticing though ThEcRoW :D

A 6 node ringdown bbs?

How did those work, I always saw those advertised and was interested?

Was it some Serial port multiadaptor that had 6 USR (200 quid) modems connected to it??

It consisted of two things.

Firstly from telecoms side, what you had to ask for in the UK was an Auxilliary Line. This meant that you only had one phonenumber but if the first line was engaged, the exchange would automatically connect you to the next available line and so on, up to the maximum number of lines I had installed. You had to pay the normal line rental on each line so that added up for the 7 data and 1 voice lines that I had installed.

I remember the BT engineer was kinda puzzled why I would have so many lines in a 1 bedroom flat!!

Secondly the hardware from the Amiga side consisted of an A4000 that had two ASDG multiserial cards installed. These were Zorro cards that had 4 high speed serial ports on each, to which I connected my 7 US Robotics Courier V.34s (6 for the BBS, one for me to dial out).

It worked very well and could really pack the callers in but cost a packet to run!!

Regards

Hybrid

Yeah, when we transferred it over to our place, we had a really puzzled BT engineer come calling...He even wanted to watch it in action :-)
Luckily, we only had to wait 5 mins for a caller, and then it all made sense to him...

Ahhhh those were the days..... Here in Spain was difficult to achieve a succesfull boxing, but sometimes with luck was possible to reach those sanctuarys in the other part of the globe!!!.
By the way, anyone of you remember the name of a popular bluebox program for amiga?, on these days i still had my amstrad, so the tones i played were played through a shitty basic program, but worked. When i got my amiga, there wasn't possible to box anymore.

hmmm, I'm sure one or the one I was using had the word digital in it...

and glad to see ya got something out of your endevours :D

amiga boxing tools lots man.

here is just a small list.

ADW Arrested Development Workshop (QTX/ Arrested Development BBS Holland)
I only have version 004b. (adw004b.dms)

Chicken Dialer by Xray/Masque (Germany, Kick 2+,) I only have version 2.5

Roxbox Dialer by Scsi and Mr Rox (Germany, Kick 1.0?? + (I know 1.3+)) I only have versions 5.72, 6.68, and the Destructive Jungle Hack 6.70

Unlimited Access Dialer (Germany, Kick1.3+)

Dial-O-Mat (Germany, Kick3+)

WhiteBox by Quasar/Liberty (Australia, Kick1.3+ (if you use libs)). Don't use this, it sux.

There are lots more, some by Swedish, Some by Yanks... None by New Zealanders (well I don't have any, I guess they were just BASIC scripts if there were any).

--
Hybrid: did you charge users for your BBS? because it would of cost a lot each month.

5 mate.. 5 ;) at least it was when the law came to call :D

I did have subscribers and also produced the Scene Storm CDROM to fund the running of Digital Candy. The rest came from my own pocket! Ouch :bash

The law give you back your Amiga afterwards ??