I was introduced to bbsing by my friend Sean. My friend Kevin & I used to go to Sean's house & hang out, eat pizza, and look at naked chicks on his computer. Sean used to call all these bulletin boards (I'm assuming if you're reading this you know what a bulletin board (bbs) is) and lie about his age so that you could get access to the adult file & message areas of the bbs. The funny thing about that was Sean had a CGA monitor which I think displayed in 4 colors, so the pictures never really looked right. But we were getting the stuff for free, and we thought that was cool as hell.

There came a time when my family finally bought a computer, so soon we started doing it at my house. I had a better system. Modem speed 2400 but I had a VGA monitor and a slighty bigger hard drive (80 megs over his 20) so we could store more naked chicks to look at later. We'd setup a batch download using the Zmodem protocol. We'd have 5 pictures in the batch totalling in at 100k, we'd go play some video games, go pick up a pizza come back, eat, and the download would be just finishing up. Then 2 of the 5 .GIF files were corrupt and couldn't be read by C-Show.

So my Dad gets this IBM PS/2 80 I think it was. IBM had this cool thing called microchannel I think which made the system a bit quicker than other systems of the time. The bad thing was that it didn't catch on and upgrades for the machine were quite pricey even for the time. A 2 meg memory upgrade (putting me at 4 megs RAM) set me somewhere around 200 dollars This upset my Dad as he was venturing off into the realm of freelance programming. He needed a bigger and better computer so that he could write programs in Pascal, & C++. This meant the old IBM PS/2 (the PS stood for piece of shit btw) now mine for the taking. So I took the time while the new machine was being built to download and install the wonderful TAG software on the PS/2. I spent a good month & a half making message bases, installing online games, grabbing what I thought were the cool files from other boards so that people would want to call mine. By the time I was ready to go live, I had a decent BBS with quite a bit of fun for all.

I don't know what it was I guess you just wanted people to see the effort you put forth. The first day I went officially live I had maybe 7 calls. 2 of them were from Dan, two were from Sean, and the last was the one new user I got that day. I watched him logon. I stared at my computer screen for probably 3 straight days looking to see what the people were doing on my computer. Which games they played, which message bases they posted in, which files they downloaded, etc. I have no idea what it was about the whole experience.

I actually had a ritual which I think most of the other SysOps probably followed as well. I'd get home from school, grab a snack and then proceed to call out to my favorite bbs'. Planet Earth, Castle Aaugh, Planet of Sound, and a few others in my area. All were local calls so this cost absolutely nothing. It ruled. After I made the rounds (probably about 10 or so boards, I'd go through, do a new message search and reply to the ones I wanted to reply to. I'd then do the same for files and see if there was anything new that I wanted to snag. I had a few games that I played at different boards. Solar Realms Elite on Planet Earth, bowling on Aaugh. Then I would load up TAG and the rest of the night was for people to call my computer and basically do the same.

I ended up meeting alot of people that I still hang out with today back then. I put my board up sophomore year of high-school. By senior year I didn't hang out but 6 people from my school. All my other friends were from surrounding areas. We all enjoyed doing the same thing. We talked in the message boards before we ever heard their voice. We would hang out & go bowling, eat at Denny's, all night movie parties. These were my people. The only thing that we had to argue about was TAG over Telegard, and I don't care what Mark G. & Mike say, TAG was far better.

We all watched the bbs eventually fade out and the internet move in. We thought it was cool at the time, and it is. I love being able to download complete concerts via ftp & www sites. I love being able to keep in touch with my friends basically for free via e-mail & instant messages. I love being able to find more porn that I ever thought could exist.

The bbs was a simpler time though. Definitely simpler technology. I miss it sometimes. Later

Tyrone