For those of you into the nostalgic feel of the old Apple II BBS era, Michael Heilemann has brought back his entire BBS from the 1980’s and put it online, accessible through the Internet. According to his Facebook posting:
After 40 years, The Norse Wanderer BBS is back online. I know I haven’t posted much here, but wanted to share a project I have been working on. It’s live again at: www.norsewanderer.com
In the early 1980s, when I was in high school, I ran an underground Apple II+ BBS called The Norse Wanderer. It was a big part of my life back then — before the web, before social media, and before being online meant anything like what it does today.
Before the Palisades fire, I went through the old Apple II disks I had saved all those years and was able to rip them and save the disk images in the cloud. I found the images after the fire and started wondering if I could actually resurrect it. What started as a nostalgia project turned into a four-month quest. I began on April 8, and somehow I’ve ended up bringing the actual BBS back online.
Even crazier, I was able to piece together the old user data from different versions of the BBS and recover 230 of the original user accounts and even some of the original message posts. So if you were one of the people who used it back then, your old account is still sitting there waiting for you. Just ping me and I’ll help you get back into your old account.
If you remember The Norse Wanderer, I’d love for you to stop by. And if you don’t, you can still take a look at a little piece of what being online was like when I was a teenager. I made this for the people who were there, but honestly, bringing it back has been a pretty amazing trip down memory lane for me too. I hope you enjoy it, and that it takes you back to those early personal computing days.
