The screens that answered
The BBS List is a phone book. It has 108,078 listings and it cannot show you what a single one of them looked like. This can, for 198 of them.
They come off a 1993 utility CD-ROM that carried 1,530 ANSI screens. Boards advertised themselves this way — a sysop commissioned artwork, the artist signed it, and it circulated from board to board as a file like any other. Each screen below is that file, the bytes themselves, painting at 2400 baud because that is the speed it arrived at.
A trap worth recording. On the first pass 1,506 of the 1,530 screens appeared to carry a telephone number. That would have been a wonderful result and it was wrong: 1,499 carried the same number, (304) 744-2253, stamped onto nearly every file by whoever assembled the collection. Discounting the distributor's mark leaves 202 screens and 198 real board numbers.
The join to the BBS List is by telephone number, which is an exact key — a number in 1990s North America identified one line. Matching these by name instead would have been worthless; name-matching across this list once produced seven crossings and a pile of false positives. By number, 147 of the 198 are in the phone book.
These are front doors. One of them you can walk through — Telegard 3.09.g2, the real software, running.
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