The Vortex is a telnet BBS. Not a museum piece and not a recreation - a running board with door games, message areas, file areas, oneliners and chat, taking calls tonight. It has been up, down, and up again since the middle of the 1990s, through Wildcat!, Iniquity, Synchronet, Mystic and ENiGMA½.
In August 2026 a complete backup of the board as it ran under Synchronet turned up. 81 MB, sealed in October 2013, and until it was opened, the only copy.
What was in it
- 1,579 daily call logs, running from 15 December 2003 to 15 May 2009. In 2005 the board was up and logging on 360 of the year's 365 days.
- Six telnet nodes, exactly as remembered.
- Four separate Usurper installations sitting side by side - 175 MB of them.
- Twelve message areas, from Abandonware to BBS/Artscene.
- Its own entry in its own BBS list, answering on
vortexbbs.com- the same address it answers on today.
And, unexpectedly, the Turbo Pascal source of two doors Plan 9 wrote for the board: the Plan 9 BBS List and the Plan 9 Voting Booth. The readme describes a screen with a column for reviews, a column for votes, and a mark against every board you had rated yourself. Both are running on the board again now, rewritten in a different language, still carrying the name.
That is 12,625 files out of one sbbs-backup.zip, read on
31 August 2026.
The part that turned out to matter
The instinct with an archive like this is to go looking for the content - the ANSI, the doors, the message bases. Those were all there. But the thing that actually reads as the board, thirteen years later, is the call logs.
A BBS is not really its software. Iniquity to Synchronet to Mystic is a sequence of migrations, and none of them are the board. The board is who called, from where, and how often. "Up and logging on 360 of the year's 365 days" is not a statistic about a server's uptime - somebody was keeping it running on 360 days, and other people kept dialling it.
That is also the part that nothing else preserves. Source code gets mirrored, ANSI art gets collected into packs, door games survive because someone kept a floppy. Nobody archives a call log. If that zip had not been sealed in 2013 by somebody who was not thinking about 2026, those six years would be gone, and no amount of care afterwards would bring them back.
How the board got there in the first place
The short version, from the long version:
In late 1995 Haakon found the Stone Dagger BBS, and met Arelas there. They worked out they went to the same high school. Before that, Haakon had been calling a board called Nightcrawlers on a 2400 baud modem and a black and white screen - no ANSI at all. Arelas first saw the Pigg Sty over the shoulders of friends fighting to be in front of the monitor, and went and got a modem.
The first actual contact between them was in a door game. Usurper, as Lord Nemesis and Heartbreak Kid, where Haakon won by exploiting a bug and then explained exactly how he had done it. That is the whole culture in one exchange, and a friendship started there.
Then the wars, which is the part that sounds invented. They infiltrated
each other's boards for months. runra.bat - the batch file that ran an
entire BBS - was stolen with nothing left in its place, a charge that is
still denied. It culminated in a backdoor into new BBS software on the
night of the prom, with sysop access acquired while its owner was out.
The truce came from the obvious realisation that the two of them were better pointed at the same thing. Both ended up contributing to Graven Images, then Plan 9 - ANSI, XMs, BBS modding, and eventually the 864 Revival Project. Plan 9 helped produce The Vortex, which became Plan 9 World Headquarters. The board went telnet in the Synchronet years, the first website went up, and at its peak - during a project called Ultimate Usurper - six telnet nodes were in use at once.
The Astral Plane crashed with no survivors. Graduations, jobs, college. The board went down a time or two.
It is back up, and there is a modem-shaped hole in most people's week
that it fills nicely. vortexbbs.com.