Pricing Mojo, Integrating PGP, TAZ, and D.C. Cypherpunks

Declan McCullagh declan at well.com
Tue Nov 20 21:12:09 PST 2001


On Tue, Nov 20, 2001 at 11:45:57PM -0500, dmolnar wrote:
> BBSes seem special in that the resources available are so *drastically*
> limited. A BBS with one phone line could serve one user at a time. When
> one person is on, nobody else has a shot. So a BBS without upload/download
> ratios runs the risk of collapsing pretty quick under the weight of
[...]
> (On the other hand, I also gave everyone a 90 minute time quota; way more
> than most people ever used. So perhaps this "quotas or die" doesn't hold
> true universally. Anyone else have anecdotal evidence from BBSing? )

Hmm. In the 1980s, I ran a BBS using GBBS on an Apple IIe and later an
Apple IIgs with first a Sider ][ 20 MB and then some SCSI 40 MB HDs.

GBBS just supported one user at a time, of course (I recall the
DiversiDial or somesuch software on the Apple II allowed as many users
as you had Super Serial cards or AppleCats), so I had the leech
problem. Another way around it was to limit access to the download
area to pre-approved users or folks who came with recommendations or
folks, as you say, who contributed something first. Some BBSs took
this to a bit of an extreme and asked pretty pointed questions, like
"what are your latest/best warez?" before assigning an account.

-Declan





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