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Connecting to a BBS using a dial-up connection

Introduction

After reviewing how to connect and use a modem on Windows 98 we will now use a known-working connection to access a BBS (bulletin board system) via Telnet.

mTelnet

We will use the mTelnet Telnet client to access any BBS, as this client works with Windows 98 which is the OS we will be using for this lab.

This is the link to the installer: https://mt32.bbses.info/mt32installer.exe

The client is installed at C:\Program Files\mTelnet and the client itself is the mt32.exe file. To access the client, open an MS-DOS windows, cd to that folder and just enter mt32 and hit Enter.

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mTelnet main screen

When opening it, you will be see the above menu. Use the Up/Down keys to navigate the default BBS entries. On the screenshot, you can see I went down to entry #13 where I had previously configured an Spanish BBS called Hispanix.

To configure a new BBS, move to an empty entry and hit Enter. Then hit F1 to enter the entry parameters screen. To modify any parameter, hit Enter, write the new value, and then hit Enter again. When you are done modifying all the parameters, hit Esc and you will return to the previous screen:


Connecting to a BBS

To connect to a BBS, simply go to the desired entry and hit Enter. I will connect to an Spanish BBS called Hispanix, with the following parameters:

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When hitting Enter to connect, it will ask for a dial-up Internet access connection as seen below:

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You can see the full process of establishing a dial-up connection and then connecting to the Hispanix BBS) here:


Sources:

BBSes – Telnet BBS Guide
https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/bbs/list/brief/

[mt32] MTELNET Windows and OS2 Telnet client
https://mt32.bbses.info/

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