Welcome to the R3TR0/X BBS on the web!

You can access some basic BBS functions if you login with your valid R3TR0/X account.

About the BBS

R3TR0/X is operated by me, j0hnny a1pha. Located in the US Bay Area, it's a labor of love around my time in the strange and wonderful BBS community in the 1990's -- and beyond.

It's a place where old school meets new.

While the decades have given us better, faster and cheaper communications technologies -- as well as a whole host of new ways to engage online -- I beleive we lost something special when BBSs fell out of fashion as the Internet took off and corporations and billionaires proceeded to take it over.

Under the hood

R3TR0/X runs on Talisman BBS software. It's a pretty solid, modern and mod-able system. Oh, and there are no ads, no algorithms, no creepy tracking or monetization schemes. Just old school message networks, a few cranky old-timers -- and more than a few awesome fellow sysops and users keeping the networks alive.

The system resides under my desk in the home office (no cloud here) running on Ubuntu 23.10 with an Asus Z97 motherboard, Intel® Core™ i7-4790K × 8 processor, 16.0 GiB memory, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 video card and a combined 750 GB in hard drives. In short -- it's total overkill for a BBS. I could run this on a salvaged PC from twenty years ago and it'd hum along just fine. It was my son's old gaming rig, just collecting dust in the basement when he went off to college, so I put it to use!

Visit the BBS

You can access the BBS with a terminal program at retrox.us port 1992 (telnet), or port 1993 (SSH - once you have an account).

You can also connect directly from the web here, but it's recommended that you use a BBS Terminal program like Syncterm, MagiTerm, Netrunner or IcyTerm. It's just a better, more authentic experience all around.

So let's party like it's 1992 -- and maybe I'll see you in L.O.R.D. -- or at the DEVO afterparty!

++ j0hnny a1pha, December 2023