What is tHe sHacK bBS?

A homebrew Bulletin Board System that ran from 1998 to 2006 — in its later years under the velvet.ath.cx hostname: message bases, file areas (g-files), doors and multi-user chat. It was reconstructed from the 2006-10-26 filesystem dump and now runs again in the browser.

Is the BBS really running, or is it a mockup?

Really running: the message bases, file areas, chat and presence operate live in the browser against the recovered system data. ANSI terminal sessions from the era are preserved as captures on the sister archive, sdelic.org.

How do I get an account?

Connect to the BBS terminal and apply at login the way dial-up users did, and the sysop provisions new accounts. The old etiquette still applies.

Is this a recreation or the real thing?

The real thing, to the extent twenty years allows: the message bases, mail, accounts, g-files and ANSI screens are the original recovered data, unedited. The runtime around them — the web terminal, chat transport, authentication — is new code, built to run the old board faithfully rather than imitate it.

The sysop. The board was homebrew software written by its sysop in the 1998–2006 era, and the 2026 reconstruction was done by the same hands. It stands on its own — no network, no agency, no banner ads, then or now.

How do I contact the sysop?

The 2003 way: connect to the terminal, apply for an account, and leave a note. There is no contact form and no press inbox; the board is the channel.

About

tHe sHacK bBS is a real homebrew Bulletin Board System that ran from 1998 to October 2006 — in its later years under velvet.ath.cx on OpenBSD. It was reconstructed from the filesystem dump taken on its last day and reopened in the browser in 2026. It is not a museum piece; it takes new members and the boards are live.

What this site is

Two things, deliberately braided. The BBS is the artifact: a working terminal board — message bases, mail, g-files, doors, chat — running against the recovered data, continuing where 2006 left off. Everything else — history, the archive, the guides — is the museum built around the artifact, so that people who will never dial anything can still understand what this was and why it mattered.

Who rebuilt it

The sysop. The original board was homebrew software, written and maintained by its sysop through the velvet.ath.cx years; the 2026 reconstruction was done by the same hands, from the dump that survived. The sister archive sdelic.org preserves the era's web presence and ANSI session captures.

Privacy

The rules, plainly:

Real names, e-mail addresses and passwords from the 2006 data are never published. Passwords were hashed on import and sealed.
Message and mail contents stay on the board, readable by its community — the public pages publish catalogs and screens, not letters.
What was public then is public now: room names, owners, sysop handles, the board's screens and files.
New accounts belong to their holders; nothing is sold, shared or tracked, because there is nothing to sell, share or track it with.

Colophon

The board runs as a server-rendered terminal application with a Postgres store. The statistics on the museum pages are generated by script from the preserved extraction — a test suite holds the committed data to the recorded recovery totals, and the few dump-level facts the working copy cannot re-derive are cited from the provenance record. The original C source is preserved unmodified as the authoritative reference. This site keeps no analytics.

One rule of the house

It should feel like some weird old corner of the Internet that somehow survived — because that is what it is.