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 history of tHe sHacK bBS

A homebrew Bulletin Board System, written in C by its sysop, that ran from 1998 until October 2006 — in its later years under the hostname velvet.ath.cx on an OpenBSD machine. This page is what the surviving record can prove. Where the record is silent, we say so.

The short version

tHe sHacK was a small, private, homebrew board: message bases instead of forums, file areas (g-files) instead of download sites, a door game instead of web apps, and a sysop who knew every caller by handle. It was not commercial software — the sysop wrote the board itself in C, compiled it for OpenBSD, and ran it out of a home directory (/home/bbs) under a Unix account whose comment field simply read tHeSHacK.

The board went dark in October 2006. But on 2006-10-26 — the last day, with final posts still being written — a level-0 dump(8) image of the machine's disk was taken. That 1.53 GB image survived for twenty years. Everything the modern site can show you came out of it: 1,005 messages across 23 message bases, 701 mail messages, 295 user accounts, the g-file tree, and the original ANSI screens.

What the record proves — and what it doesn't

History pages usually smooth over their gaps. This one keeps them visible, because the gaps are part of the archaeology:

The founding years are memory, not record. The board's span is 1998–2006 — but the surviving filesystem only goes back to 2001-12-19, the date of the earliest recovered message. No BBS content from before December 2001 exists in the dump. What the 1998–2001 board looked like, what hardware it first ran on, what modem answered the line — the record is silent, and we won't invent it.
The velvet.ath.cx era is fully documented. From December 2001 the board ran on an OpenBSD i386 host as the velvet.ath.cx system, and that is the machine whose disk was dumped in 2006.
There was an earlier hostname. The July 2003 login screen still carries the words “at Toga.cx” in its artwork — the board had answered under toga.cx before (or alongside) velvet.ath.cx. The keycode e-mail flow of the era is remembered on both hostnames.

The chapters

The timeline — every dated fact we can trace to a file, from the earliest surviving message to the reopening.
velvet.ath.cx — the hostname, the host, and the world of home systems on free dynamic-DNS realms.
The reconstruction — how a 2006 filesystem dump became a living board again twenty years later.

The one-sentence epitaph

tHe sHacK bBS — the homebrew BBS of velvet.ath.cx, 1998–2006, dumped on its last day and back on the air in 2026.