this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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In the Silicon Valley / San Jose / Bay area, there was a BBS that had a hierarchical message board, Replies were ordered under posts or other replies. In the 80's this was an unusual feature of a bulletin system. The BBS was named for a character from some story. It was a hard to pronounce word/name starting with the letter 'P', and we mostly referred to the BBS as 'Pretzel' as that was a close approximation to the original word. Anyone know which BBS I am talking about?

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[–] wisemanzero@lemm.ee 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Was it Pyrzqxgl, by chance? Even if not, it's probably on the list I got it from.

[–] waspentalive@lemmy.one 3 points 5 months ago

Yep! Thanks! You get the prize for the quickest answer and Steven gets the prize for Most complete. No, there are no actual prizes except getting to claim the title "Sleuth Extraordinaire"

[–] waspentalive@lemmy.one 2 points 5 months ago

By the way, does anyone remember "Abort Retry Ignore BBS" a Fidonet node in the 408 area code? That was me!

[–] steventhedev@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Plover-net perhaps?

Do you remember the area code?

[–] waspentalive@lemmy.one 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

408 or 415 I think (Being San Jose / Sunnyvale / Santa Clara and San Francisco and Peninsula) it was not a toll call from my home in the 408 area code.

[–] steventhedev@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Got it. From this list: http://bbslist.textfiles.com/408/oldschool.html

408-336-3134 Ben Lomond, CA Pyrzqxgl (1986-1987) Tané Tachyon Pyrzqxgl tree-structured discussion BBS software

I can see why you called it pretzel

[–] waspentalive@lemmy.one 2 points 5 months ago

WOW Thank You sooo much!! I tried all kinds of searches and even tried to employ chatgpt to try to guess the word.

[–] Crackhappy@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

Oh god, I remember running my BBS. Thousands of lines of batch code I wrote, several doors I wrote in Turbo Pascal, just spent so much damned time on that crap. Ended up running four lines, connected to FIDONet and then UseNet before I finally got too busy with my IT outsourcing business to spend any more time on it and retired it.

[–] cloudless@lemmy.cafe 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] waspentalive@lemmy.one 2 points 5 months ago

That was not it, but I think I was there too.