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.

The 2006 archive

Everything in this wing comes from one artifact: the level-0 dump(8) image taken on the board's last day, October 26, 2006. Nothing here is a recreation.

1,005

messages recovered across 23 bases, 2001-12-19 → 2006-10-26

701

mail messages between users

295

user accounts (298 directories in the dump)

176

g-files cataloged across 7 areas — the members' personal journals are withheld for privacy

98,776

files restored from the 1.53 GB dump image

The wings

Message bases — all 23 recovered bases with their real room names, owners, and date ranges.
G-files — the board's file areas, cataloged: the textfile culture of the era, from Phrack to sysop humor.
ANSI screens — the original screens with their colors intact: login, menus across generations, help, art.
Doors — StarFlight, Hunt the Wumpus, and the door games that were the board's arcade.

What you will not find here

The archive holds private data, and the line between historical and personal is drawn deliberately. Message contents live behind the live board where they always lived — the public pages catalog the bases, not the letters inside them. Real names, e-mail addresses and passwords never leave the archive at all. Rooms, their names and their owners are published the way every caller saw them at the time; the conversations themselves belong to the people who had them.

Provenance

The preserved extraction — 1,842 files, 24.4 MB of recovered BBS tree — is sealed under a manifest hash (SHA-256 over every file's own hash): a02d848773f1fc3ed1222d8426a9a0dd95196810541d88a3b15d230af6749e5b. The chain from disk image to web page, including the earlier September 2006 dump that contained no BBS data, is documented in the archaeology pages.