Night Owl BBS

The Night Owl BBS operates in the evenings (GMT 7.30pm-11pm), running over a little out-with these times quite frequently. As it is a 38 year old Host computer it cannot run 24/7 without risk of disaster at some point.

A Viewdata / Videotex BBS from the UK which runs on original Acorn hardware. The Host is a BBC Master 128 with a 512Mb SCSI hard drive for storage. It operates via TCPser and a Raspberry Pi4 as
an emulated modem.

The board offers 3 Message Boards; Sysop Chat & Blog; a Viewdata Art Portrait Gallery , RSS Newsfeed,
a Retro YouTube channel section; Interview section; a profile and history section of the most popular 1980’s
8 bit machines, a fun adventure game and Visitor Wall. There are nearly 2000 pages of info
on the BBS.

A Viewdata / Videotex client is needed to access the graphic capabilities of the BBS. Vintage home computer systems will need a suitable client program that was capable of accessing services like Prestel and Compunet in the 1980’s. There are many client programs still around for these machines. Apple 2, C64, ZX Spectrum, Sinclair QL , Amiga and all Acorn systems all have their own still available.

Apple II download here

Antelope & Gazelle

Modern client programs are also available on Github, for example

SyncTerm  https://sourceforge.net/projects/syncterm/

IcyTerm https://github.com/mkrueger/icy_term

Vidtext  https://github.com/simonlaszcz/vidtex
Other clients for PC/ Mac / Linux are available here.

Telstar Viewdata Client – GlassTTY https://glasstty.com/telstar-viewdata-client/

Web Browser Access:  

http://fish.ccl4.org/js-nightowl/

https://vd-view.azurewebsites.net/

Dial-up Access:  –  V23 1200 baud, 7E1
+ 44 1756 66 44 33 ( via Telstar Gateway, choose option 6,  from Main Menu)

+ 44 020 3422 8439 (via Cutel Gateway , option 3)

Please note the HTML Term link below will not display correctly as it is not Viewdata Client compatible.

The aforementioned Web Access links will take you instantly to the Login screen..

There is a guest login that anyone can use to browse the board.
Name         GUEST
Surname    GUEST
Password   NIGHTOWL