La Cueva BBS in Mexico in 1993 (session replay)

Óscar Toledo G. reconstructs a 1993 dial‑up session with La Cueva BBS from a rare 64K capture saved from his homebrew Zilog Z280 computer (512 KB RAM, VGA, floppy) and a discarded 2400‑baud Hayes modem. He explains building a serial terminal that implemented RS‑232C, AT commands (dial tones vs. pulse dialing used in Mexico), and ANSI escape sequences (examples: Esc[2J to erase screen, Esc[0;35m for magenta). To cope with vendor deviations he used the Z280 MMU to log every received byte and debugged escape handling. The preserved file CUEVA.TXT records a session dated Feb 11, 1993 from 9:30-9:47 pm, shows a downloaded file whose raw transfer wasn’t captured, phone‑line corruption and buffer overrun artifacts, and rapid onscreen changes because keystroke timing was not preserved.

The capture was turned into a browser replay by adapting jsTerm and feeding it the saved data at 2400 baud; playback required .htaccess/CORS tweaks because a font security policy tainted the canvas. The site now offers this replay plus another Nopal BBS capture and a redacted 1993 list of BBS phone numbers and hours. The writeup situates La Cueva among contemporaneous Mexican BBSes, notes their disappearance by the mid‑1990s, and frames the reconstruction as a technical salvage and personal piece of retrocomputing nostalgia.