The 2600 Voice BBS is a time capsule of the hacker world in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the tradition of the renowned hacker bulletin board systems of years past, we thought it would be fun to set up a BBS with a slight difference: posts would be in audio format rather than text! We recently uncovered thousands of audio files, chock full of relics from the past. After extensive reconstruction and conversion, we are making this archive available to the public on a flash drive.

You will hear messages posted by various hackers and wannabes either sharing or asking for information about the technology of the time. You may hear your own voice or that of someone you know. It’s a fascinating trip down Memory Lane or an eye-opener for anyone interested in what things used to be like before the days of social media.

In addition, we’re including all of the system prompts that were recorded by the people of 2600, as we finally lived a dream: to run our own voicemail system. It ran software known as Bigmouth from a company called Talking Technologies, and it was used by various companies. But nobody had ever converted it to do what we did: run a five-line 24 hour audio BBS system.

We almost lost the files forever, as they were saved in a format long forgotten. Thanks to some listeners of “Off The Hook,” we were able to convert and recover the files. They are presented here on a 1GB flash drive. We hope people enjoy the various treasures contained in this collection.

Both audio clips open in a new window.