I want to start a BBS

![img_0.261091685506667.jpg](

next year, one of the projects i want to do is find a old system from the late '90s early '00s and host a old-school public BBS on it and maybe a little website pertaining to this group and the BBS

i was originally toying with the idea about using a old copy of windows server of i found a windows machine, because its more authentic and i have no windows server experience so it would be a learning experiance, but a friend from discord who ill be on-boarding for this project reminded me that its very easy to hack winserver, especially the older versions so thats not a risk i want.

I was considering finding older apple workstation hardware, eg the power mac g3 " blue and white" and upgrading the ram and running linux on it. it looks that its designed for PC100 ram but can use PC133 and and can support up to 1Gb

at the moment, i have a old 2003 emachines desktop parts in a box in my closet, i feel like i will use this hardware, maybe with a custom case...

based on my research i feel like we wont need anything fancy for it. people where running early BBS software on their IBM/IBM compatable PCs and on the C64 which had only a few MBs of ram it looks like most BBSs, even the ones using telnet are very lightweight. preferably id like to use ssh for log-in so we will see how that works

https://www.howtogeek.com/686600/remember-bbses-heres-how-you-can-visit-one-today/

https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/bulletin-board-system-BBS