What's a BBS and how do I connect?        

Welcome to the Sanctum II BBS Homepage. Now, the first thing that comes to most people's mind when they first arrive here is "Sanctum II? I've never even heard of Sanctum I!" ... Well ... Sanctum II BBS is an unofficial offshoot of the original Sanctum BBS. The Sanctum BBS ran from the mid 80's thru the mid 90's, using PRIME BBS software running on an Apple //e. It was based in Palm Springs, CA, and had a whopping one (1) 28.8k modem. It had no telnet. It had no ANSI. It had no "warez". But it was good. (And when I was your age, I walked 15 miles to school in the snow uphill both ways)


Sanctum II BBS doesn't really have anything directly to do with the original Sanctum - except that it is operated and frequented by a number of the Sanctum I's former user base. It bears the same name only in tribute to a concept made obsolete by the Internet - The 'community' feel that users used to get when they called their local BBS. That's not to say that we don't want you here... Far from it! New users are welcome to come on in and have a look at everything we have to offer. But if you happen to run into a tight-knit group of friendly but somewhat odd people while you're online - Don't worry. It's just us old Sanctum I users gathering together and talking about the "good 'ole days".


Sanctum II BBS is privileged to be running DoorMUD Professional, a fantastic multiplayer RPG adventure game written by Evan Elias. If you're new to MUDing, this is a great place to start! The only drawback is it tends to get rather addictive. Sanctum II BBS does not accept responsibility for the loss of jobs or spouses as a result of overuse of Door MUD.   Additionally we offer a new version of an old favorite that any of you who have been BBSing for any length of time will remember - TradeWars.  The current version is called TradeWars 2002 Gold, and it allows for custom alien races and custom spacecraft, among many other new additions.  Also, Sanctum II BBS runs the ever-popular Barren Realms Elite, and with many of the games reaching the maximum of 26 players, we have one of the most popular BRE games on the Internet today!


Sanctum II uses telnet for its clients to connect. If you have a decent ANSI telnet terminal set as your default to connect to Telnet links (Even HyperTerminal is OK) all you need to do is click the "Telnet to Sanctum II" link on the left of this page. That's the easy way, but it won't work well for everyone...  Windows XP and Windows 2000 have an ANSI capable Telnet client built into their operating system, but Windows 98 and 95 do not, and Windows Vista, Seven, and Eight don't have a telnet client installed by default.   If that method gives you problems, just click on the "Download SyncTerm" link at the left of the page and install it. If your operating system complains at you about the installer, just tell it to allow it. It will place a shortcut on your desktop, place an INI file in your AppData path, and place the SyncTerm application folder on the root of your C:\ drive. As of right now, we don't have any Macintosh or Linux telnet clients in the download area, but once we find a nice Freeware application we'll make it available.  If you know of one, please drop us a line and let us know! If all else fails, feel free to drop the SysOp an email and we'll get you up and running in no time. Hope to see you soon!

Sanctum II BBS FAQ: Updated 12-17-03 by Kailef:

Back in the early 1980's, there wasn't an Internet.  Not a publicly accessible one, anyhow.  It was there, but was mainly a link between large college campuses and the like.  No instant email, no giant chat rooms, none of it.  So, what did we have?

The closest you could come to Internet-like access were online services like The Source, GEnie, Delphi, and CompuServe.  A while later, America Online and Prodigy arrived, as well.  Now, at this point, these online services didn't give you Internet access like they do today.  But they did provide you with a local number your modem could dial to connect to their service, which was usually somewhat graphical in nature and allowed you do do some of the things you could do with the internet today - Send email (to other subscribers of the service you were calling), order plane tickets, check the local weather, chat, download files, play games, that sort of thing.  It was all on a smaller scale than what the Internet provides today, though, and each online service was an island - No contact or interaction with the other online services.  All of them, though, charged a per-minute fee while you were connected.  Most people couldn't afford to pay the online fees for these services.  (I myself racked up several hundred dollars a month with Prodigy back in 'the day')

So what was the average person who didn't have hundreds of dollars to throw away on a commercial online service to do?  Well, the alternative to the large pay services at that time was to call a BBS.  A BBS, which stands for "Bulletin Board Service", was in most cases a single computer at someone's home.  That computer had one or more modems connected to the phone lines, and was running BBS software of some sort.  That BBS software had the modems answer all incoming calls and attempt to make a connection with whoever was calling.  Generally of course, it would be a person like you or me calling with our computers.  Once a connection was made, we could enter our User Name and Password, (or create a new account if we hadn't used this particular BBS before) and connect!

Once we dialed and connected to the BBS, we could use whatever features that particular BBS had to offer.  Some BBS's were very simple or dedicated to a particular subject - For example there used to be a lot of BBS's out there which were specifically for people who were photographers.  Some other BBS's were corporate BBS's offering technical support and driver downloads.  Most BBS's however, were entertainment BBS's run from someone's residence much like I mentioned in the last paragraph.  They offered things like Email, games, downloads, discussion forums (Often called message bases), and if the BBS had multiple lines, inter-node chatting.  There was even a number of systems developed to move Email messages between different BBS's.  The most popular of which was FIDOnet, which is actually still in use today, although definitely in decline compared to it's prime.

A BBS tended to have a more 'homey' feeling than the larger online services did.  In some cases, a lot of the people on a BBS knew each other.  This occurred because generally the BBS you were calling had to be within your local calling area in order for you to be able to call it for free; therefore most callers were from the same general area.

Today, there is a mere fraction of the number of BBS's there used to be.  Once the Internet became accessible for a flat monthly rate, BBS's began to drop like flies.  This also put the squeeze on many of the large online services as well - A lot of them either folded or were bought out.  So... If BBS's are dead, what is this page all about?

Much like the major online services, BBS's are still here.  In order to survive, America Online (pretty much the last remaining online service...  CompuServe is still there, but America Online owns it, Prodigy is there but failing badly, and Delphi was converted to web-based message board) had to integrate itself into the Internet - And so have BBS's.  These days, you first connect to your internet provider, and then you can Telnet into a BBS.  Rather than a BBS being directly dialed by your modem, the BBS is already connected to the internet and you use a Telnet program to communicate with it.  The nice thing about this is it allows you to connect to any BBS in the world with no long distance charges like in the 'old days'.

Nowadays, just about all telnet BBS's have multiple nodes, so they are able to offer chat and multiplayer gaming.  Since they are on the Internet, they offer internet email as well.  Virtually all BBS's are still free!

Remember, if you try and click the link to connect to Sanctum II BBS and you see a lot of 'messy' looking text that doesn't make a lot of sense, (Most likely means you are running Windows 95 or 98) try downloading one of the telnet client programs we have available.  They are already pre configured and have the telnet addresses for Sanctum II BBS in their directories.