Why would I want to do this??

Sounds like a lot of fun and very educational.

I’ve created a few projects for various employers over the years using Ruby, mostly Rails or glue scripts. Occasionally I’ve written medium complexity projects to accomplish a single goal in plain Ruby. I can’t share any of those projects owing to the fact that it was work for my day job. I’d like to do a project in a more open way.

But why a telnet BBS? What’s wrong with you?

I’m currently going down a Commodore 64 retro nostalgia kick, putting together my computer from school age. I’ve recently gotten a WiFi modem for my c64 and noticed there was quite a telnet BBS scene out there. Most of them are running on retro hardware with the limitations of the time. It’s fun but limited. I would like to see a way to access modern services using telnet as a front-end that could be utilized from a 30+ year old machine. Could be fun to create middleware like modules to allow anyone to use an old machine as their main boxes in this century. Combine that weird thought with the fact that I cannot stop thinking about the challenges at my skill level to accomplish such a goal.

You mentioned challenges?

First off, how in the heck can I support different encodings such as PETSCII?? Anything modern most likely use UTF8 internally to store strings and text. Can we re-encode on the fly?

How about supporting streaming modules? That one seems easier but still beyond my current skill level.

Where would I even start? I’m starting by doing this blog to collect my thoughts before I even put keyboard to code. I don’t have free time right now to just explore with code, but I am still thinking about this project and needed some place to put my thoughts for later.