I don't remember every BBS system I used but I do remember Maximus. The manual for Max was insanely huge.

What were some of the other popular packages?

the first computer i ever used was an IBM pc/xt with ond 5 1/4 Inch floppy and a hard drive (probably the 5161 expansion with a 10MB hard drive)
i remember having to run 'park' before shutting off the unit to park the hard drive, hehe, in fact i remember being amazed by self parking hard drives.
though i myself never used punch cards, a friend of our family ran a warehouse that used punch cards for their inventory, and also i remember exploring an abandoned factory in my home town many, many years ago and finding piles of punch cards in the office (though the computer itself was long gone unfortunately).

Spitfire was very popular in my part of the world (Upper Delaware USA), I think because it had a shareware option. My favorite boards, though, ran PCBoard. The PCBoard manual was about three inches thick.

My favorite local board was called the No*NameBBS, where the "King of the Board" trivia game was a titanic struggle every week. We actually got together for face-to-face events. The member who arranged a visit to the local minor league baseball team told me that arranging a group sale for the a group with "No Name" was--er--rather difficult.

I had a traveling job at the time. Whenever I was headed for a new city, I'd dig up a list of local boards and call them up from the hotels just to see what the local BBS scene was like.

I remember, when AOL opened up its internet gateway, the BBS scene just died. It was fun while it lasted.

I kind of remember Spitfire.

Like you I was curious about BBS sites in other places, except I didn't travel much. I just racked up a lot of long distance charges instead.
One of my favourites happened to be in NYC and I lived in Western Canada.

I remember punch-cards ... the first encounter being a punched-card tabultor (not a computer ...) which was used in a Lowe's hardware store when Lowe's was just a regional hardware-store. I'm a proud member of a "dropped an entire box" club, still have my card-saw, and remember office parties where confetti was plentiful. (And those parties were boring until somebody spiked the punch.)

However, I certainly don't miss those days. Except the spiked punch ...

Hello I built my first computer, a Heathkit H89. It was late in the game as I started with 32k ram and a 100k 5 1/4" disk drive. That thought makes me feel old. Was a member of the HUG user group in Houston when it was the biggest user group. My portable was a desk top case with a suit case handle on top. Retired now and getting back to using Linux again. Used Red Hat 7 them days. Hope to find a linux friend close to home a bit south of Fort Smith arkansas to talk with.
Some of the work I did was to maintain a 16 bit PDP11 in a gas plant. Every time it stopped it took 35 min to fat finger in the boot loader and the tape load sequence. The tape took another 20 min to load. cross fingers and hit start. Had 4k magnet wire memory.
Don

I am an old field Service/Customer Engineer, retired in 1998 from CSC contracted to NASA. I actually started in electronics with the NAVY in 1974 and landed my first civilian job in the Computer Field Engineer in 1978.

All the talk about card readers and card punches got me thinking about the old days. I made a living on repairing card reader/punches & card readers, teletypes and printers, disc drives,and a few different types of data-tape machines. (not the kind you can pickup with one hand but mechanical monsters with RCA's name plate.)

Things like bootloading a Digital PDP11-70 at 3am which required a switch entered 25 command boot routine configured in hexidecimal to be loaded by fingers toogling its front panal levers which required a good strong pot of coffee to clear my head.

The most impressive machine I can remember was a CDC multi disc drive. The read/write heads were actuated by a hydrolic system the moved its' heads over about a 36inch radius platter. When I first worked at this site the drives were being dismantled (thank God!) Because there was a distinct odor of hydrolic fluid in the air, I was extremely happy these 10 foot behemoths were going out the door.

Well, I'm not going to bore anyone who happened to stumble on this old has-been's squawks. I just wanted to make my first post as an introduction.

I'm glad to see LINUX remains strong.

Nice to have you here lookingwolf !

Lookingwolf, you just described my life back in 1979-84, when I was working on that PDP-11/70 in building 23 (also for CSC) often at 3 am, toggling those switches and minding the washing-machine size hard drives, desperately trying to not drop one of those platters as I swapped them out.

The good news is that when the air-conditioning would go out (which it did, often enough), it was time to go home.

My first personal contact with computers was with an IBM machine that read the programs and the data on a
perforated paper strip (punched tape was the technical name).