bytenet.com is back online, sort of.
I was the sysop of ByteNet Online in San Francisco from 1994 to 2005. It grew out of Love Bytes, a Gay/Bi/Lesbian BBS I started in the early 90s - a safe place to talk when there weren't many of those. It ran on Major BBS and then Worldgroup by Galacticomm, multiple lines, dedicated phone drops, the whole expensive mess. We rode it all the way from 2400 baud through the web era before finally shutting down.
The site is a memorial to that: the timeline, the tech stack, what it actually took to keep a multi-line board alive 24/7 when "uptime" meant somebody physically being there.
But an archive nobody can touch is just a gravestone, so:
The Graffiti Wall. Old ByteNet feature, resurrected. Leave a message. Doesn't matter if you ever called my board - if you called a board, you're welcome on it. I'd genuinely like to see what other sysops and users write there.
ByteNet Dungeon. I missed door games, so I wrote one. It's in the LORD tradition: modem handshake on the way in, create a character (Warrior, Rogue, or Mystic), then a town hub with a healer, weapon smith, armory, a tavern with rumors and a dice game, and a bank - because banked gold survives death and carried gold doesn't. Ten floors down, an Ancient Dragon at the bottom, and a Hall of Heroes recording both the winners and the people who got flattened on floor 3. Character persists between calls. Runs in a browser, phone included, and there's a toggle for pixel graphics or pure ASCII if you're a purist.
It's a single HTML file with no tracking, no accounts, and nothing to buy. Mostly I built it because I wanted to play it.
If you ran a board, or called one, I'd love to hear which one in the comments. Half the fun of this project has been remembering names I hadn't thought about in twenty years.
https://bytenet.com submitted by /u/curbsideSF [link] [comments]