The Dungeon BBS - Canberra Australia
The Dungeon BBS, Canberra Australia began life on 1985-02-15 after I had spent several years through the early 80’s as an assistant SYSOP on the 64BUG BBS (Blacktown Commodore User Group) and also Graham lee’s BBS in the eastern suburbs of Sydney.
After heading to Canberra for my first real job, I moved into a tiny little bedsitter under a house and set up my first personally owned public BBS system on a single phone line. It ran on a HEAVILY Modified Commodore C64 with 2 floppy drives, an internal IEEE interface, and 2 CBM D9090 7MB Hard drives.
You can imagine the noise! It that tiny bed sitter 24x7. 8-).
Single Phone Line with initially a 1200baud modem, later upgraded many times as new modem standards were developed.
The Software I chose to run was called KBBS, developed by brilliant programmer Kris Hatelid. It had lots of standard BBS features for the time, and saw a great amount of use, however FIDO Netmail and EchoMail was handled offline for quite a while until Fido tossing tools were developed for the commodore systems. I don’t think I ever managed to use that phone line for actual voice! it was on the go 24x7. 
We varied between 30-60 regular users early in the life of the BBS, mostly from the local ACT Commodore User Group. I still have a Floppy backups of the User database as well as some of the message bases 8-). Eventually The Dungeon became the official BBS of the CUGACT.
I remember some unique members of the BBS, ranging from local Mainframe Operator and computer guru “DAC” to, Famous Australian Hacking group members such as “The ShadowLord” and a very shady character called “The Gremlin” who was my assistant SySOP. One users dad was a high ranking Embassy (I won’t say which one) as a result, The FBI were even on their trying, to trap several of the hacker fraternity that frequented “The Dungeon BBS”. Let’s just say a significant amount of cracked commodore software may have originated in Canberra!
Into the BBS Dark ages and following the closure of the CUGACT group, the BBS remained running on my C128D in a reduced form and became a private BBS, for myself and several “special friends”, Still on Fidonet and UseNet, but relatively low activity. Late in 90’s I migrated the BBS over to one of my Amiga’s trying out various different Amiga BBS environments, until the late 2000’s at which point I moved the BBS over to the IBM PC based Citadel Software. In the late 2010’s as the BBS world came out of the BBS Dark ages and more and more interest grew around a re-invigirated BBS Scene, I blew the whole citadel system away and started from scratch using Syncronet BBS Software by Rob Swindell and team, which has remained brilliant ever since.
These days “The Dungeon BBS” runs as 8 nodes on a virtual box instance, and is a member of MANY of the growing FTN (Fido Technology (Store and Fwd) Networks) as well as the Usenet (Yes it still exists) and DoveNet.
I would like to, at this point shout out to Scott Little, whom has maintained the Zone 3 Fidonet HUB on his BBS for soooooo many years. One of the silent rock starts.
We have many connectivity options including Telnet, ssh, http, https and ftp. We even have PETSCII specific service available on telnet ports 64000 (40col) and 12800 (80col)
We have IRC, as well as realtime InterBBS chats, and several Door Games, although I am not big on Door games because they are ALWAYS high maintenance. Time is not something I have a in spades, so the BBS runs brilliantly with relatively minimal interaction from me. I usually check for new user applications every week or so, and we commonly get 3-5 new users per month from all across the planet!.
We have separate areas for many different topics, uploads and downloads, Including the Local Canberra Retro weirdo’s group and many Commodore related and FTN based Files. There is also an expanding TEXTFILES section.
I could write so many stories about the 80’s and BBS’ing. it was a heady time and technology moved so fast. The FTN and UUCP days were amazing, I suspect if the “big one” ever happens we may have to fall back to these technologies for communications Hehehehe
Details
Name The Dungeon est 1985-02-15 Synchronet Operator Geo Geo@dungeon.barnabasmusic.com
Location Canberra, ACT, Australia
Web-site dungeon.barnabasmusic.com
8 nodes
20 doors
485 subs
129 dirs
87476 msgs
4372 files
Protocols
telnet dungeon.barnabasmusic.com, ssh, ftp, smtp, binkp, irc, 40Col PETSCII:64000, 80Col PETSCII:12800
Networks DOVE-Net[DUNGEON], FidoNet[3:712/620], FSXNet[21:4/124], RetroNet[80:774/36], SpookNet[700:100/28], AmigaNet[39:901/620]
Feel free to visit, if you would like to see what the FTN and Usenet networks have become!