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The electronic chicken bbs - 16K edition can be reached at bbs.electronicchicken.com at port 2000. Upon connection you will be prompted for a password so that the serial port server will let you in. The password is bbs.

The 16K edition is a single node board. If your telnet connection gets refused, consider it a busy signal and try again later.

This BBS runs on an unmodified, stock base configuration NEC PC-8201A. This means that the system that the board runs on has 16K of memory for execution and storage, has no external disk drives connected, no additional ROMS to add programs or functionality. In the amount of space that we have to work with, we can only store the ten most recent messages left by visitors, and can only provide so many features. You'll see once you get there that the BBS is fairly bare-bones. I don't consider this a major issue as this is only going to be a novelty these days anyhow. Most users will probably only visit once, check things out, leave a message, then return to the 21st century - which is sensible. Storing entire long message threads on this type of board seems unnecessary at the moment, and with the hardware that I have seems impossible to boot.

For the sake of clarity, I should say that the NEC itself is not directly connected to the internet. The NEC itself does not have a TCP/IP stack, does not have an IP address. The NEC is connected via RS-232C and a null-modem cable at 19,200bps to a TCP/IP serial port server. The server takes connections from the internet and passes them on to the NEC via RS-232C serial, and output from the NEC is echoed back by the server to the user. Networking isn't just about the internet, and the reach of the internet isn't limited to the internet protocol alone. Many different types of networks are bridged together, and many different types of devices are, ultimately, accessible via the internet. While this BBS isn't direct as such, I think it's the patchwork of it all that makes it interesting. This twenty-five year old 2.5MHz computer, is in its way a part of the internet: from RS-232C at 19,200bps over a null-modem cable to IP and RJ-45 to DSL and a copper pair to whatever else may carry it, from fibre to radio and all the way back down to a serial terminal somewhere else out there. That we're able to get all of this shit to work together always amazes me.