Old-skool BBS e-zines

Is there any way of setting one of these up now, or is the technology totally redundant?

Oh ta. To answer your question, not personally, but I knew someone who did one around '96, which was mostly about underground indie stuff, Yummy Fur and that Scottish scene, I think I saw one of them once. I wasn't really interested in the Internet at the time, but the BBS designs do look quite neat now.

i made one very bad translation of a hakim bey text in 1994! hopefully it's not online.

My earliest memory of this kind of thing was a guy in my class at college (by which I mean secondary school) in '93 who would bring in print outs of stuff he'd grabbed off some BBS or another. He talked about it like I should understand it, but I had no idea how it worked or what the fuck the internet was.

From 95 I mucked about on one BBS in NZ quite extensively, I'm sad to say. It was run by students at my university. I was even a moderator and eventually, when I started working at the same uni, became an admin because the thing needed to become "official" or it was going to be turned off. Kinda bizarre, making terminal connections, kicking about with telnet clients and so on. These protocols still exist, and applications still support them, so I guess you could still set up a BBS, but I don't really know why you would? It'd be very secret, I suppose.

Edit: One thing I did find interesting about this particular BBS is that now all of its functions have been replicated by web based apps. You could post points for discussion that could be read and commented on by other people (like a forum), you could send personal messages to each other (again, like a forum or any number of Web 2.0 type apps), you could have a text conversation in real time to one other person (like a messaging client) or to a whole group (a chat room).