Interesting. I thought that looked like a frisbee between the 3 disk packs (?) just below the ceiling next to the cupboard with the brown slatted doors. But then the original picture was so small I thought it must be a desk fan, but in the larger picture I'm going back to my original guess of a frisbee!

Thank you!

In the alcove on the right, I think I'm seeing 66-blocks, breaking out the phone lines that must be routed to each machine. Two blocks stacked, each with a fanout of wire on the right side.

That's not a real BBS. A real BBS is one where you dial in at 20:50 and the sysop's mum answers and says it's not 21:00 yet and you need to call back a bit later when the phone line is switched across to the modem.

Oh that's a breaker box (or a box of wiring of some sort), not a mirror!

Glorious. This must be what is like when old people long for the hot car they lusted for in their youth.

That telephone cord is impressive.

Apparently "Software Creations" BBS, which ran PCBoard BBS software and was operated in cooperation with Apogee games.

https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896

Hmm, that is interesting, why was that version originaly hosted on 3drealms site? Probably nothing, somebody there just wanted to share a cool picture. But what if that were an early apogee shareware distribution bbs?

wait, are you OP? or did you happen to find a high res version of the same paper-copy picture that OP supposedly was given 30 years ago and then scanned and then threw out. or did OP make it up? or is OP just a bot?

maybe i'm a bot.

anyway i used to call into BBSs back in the early 90s and the thing I'm remembering is that they survived mostly on donations, and now that I am seeing the infrastructure that supported those systems and recalling the price of hardware back then I'm starting to second guess everything I thought I knew.

In this picture it seems that all machines have a 3.5" floppy disk inserted. Maybe they had no hard drive and only booted from floppy and then ran software over the network?

[dead]