Visitors
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008Nostalgia knocked on the door today, and I invited her in. Taking me to remote corners of the Internet we read about the Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) of the old days. The journey was limited to PCBoard, but years ago the experience stretched from Renegade, to VBBS to Wildcat! software.
Network 23 BBS was popular for the live chat - up to five could spend 59 minutes per day messaging in real time, then you were disconnected opening the phone line to the next computer calling in. Castle BBS had a lot of popular door games, Sound and Sight BBS a lot of files. Above the Rim was a warez community with Sysops a couple years older than most callers, thus a very cool place to hang out with the older kids - those with relationship and ‘real life’ problems we’d have traded our modems for.
Leaving home for the lake was more difficult the first year after joining the BBS world. The week long adventure came only a couple months after I had connected my first modem (US-Robotics, 14.4 Baud, 16550 UART) to my first PC.
Eventually, calling in turned to receiving calls with the start of my own BBS, Ghost in the Machine (GITM). The phone technician looked puzzled when asked to put in three phone lines, side-by-side, all with a unique number and a sole outlet in the basement. I met and stayed virtual friends with Jan-Ice, Dennis, Katherine, Kubes, Sue, Xavier, Brad, and others, none of which are around today but for that space where memories are kept. GITM BBS received over 54 thousand phone calls, with the daily reaching 111.
These early stages of computering led me eventually behind the scenes of the young Web and the Internet. And while I miss the days of searching for a better init string, adding new files for download, being Sysop paged, and making a new Main Menu… I think the PCBoard disks and manual will stay in the box on the top bookshelf, where they’ve been since the mid 90s.