Falcon BBS

For the best experience use SyncTERM (free, Mac/Win/Linux) — proper 80x25, CP437, ANSI art, and full-screen DOS programs.

The Story

In 1983, the movie WarGames came out. Watching David Lightman use his IMSAI 8080 to dial into the WOPR supercomputer made a generation of kids want a modem. I was one of them — bought a modem, started dialing BBSes, and eventually decided to start my own.

Falcon BBS was born in the late 1980s, originally themed around the F-16 Fighting Falcon (hence the name). These days the name feels more like a nod to Professor Falken from WarGames (Falken being German for falcons). What began as a hobby eventually led to the founding of Internet Service Provider BIT, one of the oldest and 100% Dutch datacenters in the Netherlands. Running an ISP left no time for a BBS — Falcon went offline.

Fast forward to today — I never lost my love for retro computing. I now have a large collection of vintage computers including Commodore, Atari, Apple, Sinclair, and Philips machines, as well as an original IMSAI 8080 and an original DEC PDP-8. Falcon BBS has been revived as a retro computing museum you can actually use.

100 Doors — 10 Sections

Single Board Computers (3)

Apple I (1976), MOS KIM-1 (1976), Sinclair MK14 (1977)

Retro Computers (11)

MITS Altair 8800 (1975), IMSAI 8080 (1975)
Commodore PET (1977), Apple ][ (1977), TRS-80 (1977)
Commodore VIC-20 (1980), Sinclair ZX81 (1981), BBC Micro (1981)
Commodore 64 (1982), Atari 800XL (1983), Commodore 128 (1985)

Operating Systems (10)

DEC PDP-8 / OS/8 (1965), DEC PDP-10 / TOPS-10 (1967), DEC PDP-11 / 2.11BSD (1970)
Unix Fifth Edition (1974), Unix Sixth Edition (1975), CP/M 2.2 (1977), 2.9BSD Unix (1983)
AmigaOS 3.1 (1985), Microsoft MS-DOS 6.22 (1994), FreeDOS (1994)

Programming Languages (21 — all on CP/M)

FORTRAN (1957), ALGOL-M (1958), LISP (1958), COBOL (1959), ALGOL-60 (1960)
BASIC-80 (1964), APL (1966), MUMPS (1966), BCPL (1967)
FORTH (1970), Pascal (1970), PL/I-80 (1973), PL/M-80 (1973)
8080 Assembly (1975), Tiny-C (1977), Z80 Assembly (1977)
CBASIC-80 (1978), Nevada BASIC (1978), Modula-2 (1978), BDS C (1979), Ada (1979)

Programming Applications — IDE (7)

Turbo BASIC 1.0 (1987), GW-BASIC 3.23 (1988), QuickBASIC 4.5 (1988)
Turbo Prolog 2.0 (1988), Turbo C 2.0 (1989), Turbo Pascal 5.5 (1989)
Visual Basic for DOS (1992)

User Applications (4)

WordStar 3.30 (1983), dBASE III Plus (1986)
WordPerfect 5.1 (1989), Lotus 1-2-3 v2.2 (1989)

WarGames & More

WOPR Simulator, Telehack (ARPANET simulation), Zork I/II/III

Door Games (34+)

Legend of the Red Dragon, Trade Wars, Global War, Star Trek, and many more

Message Networks

FidoNet (2:280/1043), Usenet (60+ newsgroups), DOVE-Net

A Retro Computing Museum on a Bulletin Board System

📟 Telnet

🌐 Web Access

The Story

100 Doors — 10 Sections

Single Board Computers (3)

Retro Computers (11)

Operating Systems (10)

Programming Languages (21 — all on CP/M)

Programming Applications — IDE (7)

User Applications (4)

WarGames & More

Door Games (34+)

Message Networks