For some reason, telnet BBS are still used in Taiwan. One of the largest online discussion fora in Taiwan is PTT or 批踢踢, a classic telnet BBS.
Rather than using cmd.exe, the more popular way of accessing it is to use a dedicated BBS client, like PCMan[1], which also has an X11 version and exists as a Firefox extension.
I’ve been having a look at it, and it’s pretty intriguing. Mainly because it’s a damn telnet BBS in 2012, and it thrives. Rather than trying a BBS-specific client like the aforementioned PCMan, I just used vanilla telnet in a VTE terminal. Just had to make sure the terminal was using BIG5 encoding rather than UTF8.
Of course, PTT has a lot of text art banners, like here in the main menu:
Here is the movie board as an example of a board index:
And here’s a post from above board:
There’s also an 《ALLPOST》 board, which is an index of all posts on the board. Sitting there is kind of interesting to feel the speed of the place, every few seconds there’s new posts.
Pretty interesting stuff. It’s remarkable that the place not only managed to stay up, but also grow over years well into the web era.
2012-11-19 17:50 update: this is the number of online users at 17:50 (CET, 0:50 in Taiwan) today: 線上102145人.
[1] — This is from 洪任諭 Hong Jen Yee, the same guy who wrote the file manager PCManFM
cont’d here