Apple II Bits

Twenty years ago this past Presidents’ Day, I launched a dial-up bulletin board system. The Playground was powered by an Apple IIGS running the Warp Six BBS software by Jim Ferr. As was often the case among the many brands of computers back then, pledging allegiance to a particular piece of hardware or software placed you into its community, connecting you with like-minded individuals. I became a frequent caller of another Warp Six BBS, the Apple Hide-A-Away (AHAW), run in Iowa by Scott Johnson. We traded many tips and tricks on how to make the most of the software. Whereas I stopped tinkering with Warp Six 16 years ago, Scott has been working on-and-off for years to update the software to v3.0, with an updater package currently in beta.

In tandem, Lon Seidman, star of last week’s Apple II Bits post, is making Warp Six more accessible than ever. Using a Raspberry Pi — the same computer that was featured on the cover of Juiced.GS — Lon has made it possible to connect to his Warp Six BBS via telnet. Check out his video demonstration, which was featured on episode #1400 of The Giz Wiz:

I’m hopeful that, once Scott and Lon get Warp Six v3.0 stable, they’ll be able to connect it with the BBS door game I wrote for an earlier version. Space Ship of Death (SSOD) stands as the most complex piece of programming I ever produced, at a whopping 624 lines of Applesoft BASIC and zero documentation. To see it running again would boost my already massive ego to intolerable heights.

Interested in trying Warp Six yourself? Point your Telnet client to matrixreturns.dyndns.org, port 6401. Just like the original Warp Six software, Lon’s BBS accepts only one caller at a time, so for the first time in decades, be prepared to get a busy signal!