This morning I was thinking about the old Bullettin Board Systems, or BBS in short. They were popular ways of communicating between computers during all the eighties and the early years of the nineties; then with the raise in popularity of the internet they were swept away.

In particular here in Italy we also got the "Videotel", a service that was similar to the much popular French "Minitel", that allowed to get informations about trains, planes and weather forecasts from home... it was limited but back in the eighties it was really an amazing thing
I can even remember that Philips has sold (at least here in Italy) a special MSX1 machine that was build exactly for connecting to the "Videotel"

It was called the NMS-801, and some websites claims that it was the last MSX machine created by Philips. Here's a photo:



( http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=1084 )

And this is an old paper advertisement for that computer:



So I'm wondering if somewhere in the world there are still some BBS working, maybe still open to let people share MSX games and apps...

While not a BBS of the classic modem type, there's the HispaMSX BBS you can telnet to. Just type telnet://bbs.hispamsx.org on your command prompt for some good old phun...

Thanks, I'll try it

Looks like a toy, if you ask me..

OMG That telnet session to hispamsx brings back memories Those good old times, running my BBS on my Sony Hitbit 500 and 700 :-) *sigh*

Im a newbie with bbs. if i want to use BBS. i need rs 232c interface, which interface can i use or buy it, 2nd hands or new.

or i can use a msx modem, which one or models is still useful for today

There are still some "real" BBS in Spain and Europe ( Fidonet) that you can connect to. I have point in BeholderBBS wich can be acceced by TCP/IP ( no need for calling) or Web interface. I think that it is implementing dial-up conexions (so you could use RS232 and modem in MSX). Also in Spain RafaBBS o Zruspa's ( if I remember right) have dial-up.