And these days, the magic distance is perhaps a quarter mile.

And you call that progress? ;)

If you want 80s old school, you could do something akin to the WELL. I had something similar in my old building complex (one computer on my floor where people would just post crap for everyone else to see) but it turned into a sort of an internal craigslist. That's not a bad thing, though, and the landlord bought it from me for one month's rent. In the new building I wired up a half-dozen neighbors on my network, installed ICQ, and showed them how to post to a tiny news server I had setup. They're more keen on surfing the web, though, so I just limit their bandwidth to 1 mbps. As for a BBS, well, that was a little before my time, but not so much before that I don't remember feeling ripped off after waiting an hour to download what I thought would be hot pr0n. Turned out to be a girl in a bikini. In a bikini fercrissakes!

Of course if you wanted to be more old-school you could set up a public-access *NIX login, or even run an old-school BBS type deal via telnet. It would still be a good idea to route people to a website explaining how to get in. For that check out here [dmoz.com] and here [gnu.org], and here [freshmeat.net]

But while it is not strictly connected to the internet, there is nothing stopping an individual connecting a rooftop access point to a router and then to a home DSL connection. You then create a VPN to the internet via community mesh. This allows you to log on to your own home DSL connection from any location that can access the wifi mesh.

In Australia there is a country-wide IP assignment mechanism to eventually get continent-wide community wifi.

Here's an idea -- set your system up as you normally would for acccessing the Internet, but simply setup your site such that posting and other interactive services are only accessable from within the local subnet.

That is, if you have a (for example) /. like website, limit posting only to those people with IPs in your local subnet (ie: 10.x.x.x). People in the outside world will be able to read the posts, but you need to be inside the wireless range in order to be able to post.

The big benifit of doing this is that frequent users will be able to keep up with discussions and such from home -- but if they want to contribute, they'll need to be within wireless range.

Yaz.

This software provides an "Active Portal" which basically means any web traffic is redirected from wherever it was supposed to go to some specified machine.

Its not a difficult thing to do manually either with iptables. (from memory its something like: iptables -T nat -I prerouting -P tcp -dport 80 -d ! localnet -j DNAT --dest localbox). Just make sure you have a DNS server running that sends all requests back to your IP or else their browser will give them an error.

From there, you just set up and run apache on 'localbox' and you're off!

Basically, what they are doing is getting coffee shops to pay a small fee to host the access points (running a custom Linux configuration), networking those, and offering both the internet connection on the coffee house's dime and building out their own BBS-like intranet service.

Maybe the idea would be harder to get off the ground in other parts of the world, but if you can swing it, I think internet access is a big draw for people who otherwise may not bother.

Oh, and if you want any of that old BBS software, it's still out there! A company named Metropolis now (unfortunately) owns the licenses for the classic game "Legend of the Red Dragon", so you'll have to buy it from them and not Seth Able. Most of the other ones have gone the way of abandonware... I tried to contact the authors of Usurper, Exitilus and so on... and none of them seem to have internet presence anymore. And if you were a Tradewars fan, it not only still exists but at one point they were going to make a new age MMORPG out of it!

Someone set up something similar in South Station in Boston. It's described as a WiFi Bubble, and supplies information about South Station, vendors in the station, and gives you the opportunity to win a magic fortune fish!

Any requests to web pages outside the bubble only result in being served the bubble index page. It's a nice demonstration of what you can do with an old iMac and an Airport [apple.com]. The administrator gives some information on how it was set up, but the page is only available inside the bubble.

Nonetheless, it can be done! And if you're lucky, maybe you'll get a magic fortune fish! (Ooo! Curls up on both ends- I'm passionate! Woo! Hoo!)