<OT> Re: 1/2 dozenth request over 3-years

[Ric Moore]

On Fri, 2011-05-13 at 08:40 +0200, J wrote: 
> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 20:59, Ric Moore <wayward4now at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Heh, I had 9 modems running full time, on an 8 line BBS, back in the
> > day. Pure Linux command line login, too. The extra modem was on a
> > dedicated WideArea Line to Charleston WV from Beckley WV. That got me,
> > and my users, a connection to the Internet. Imagine all of them
> > squawking, answering the phone lines at once. I had rollover installed
> > to take the callers on the same number rolling over to the next
> > available one and it's modem. A 14.4 connection, using only text, was
> > fast. And, I ran that on a 486 with 32 megs of memory. Then someone came
> > up with PPP and it all got weird. Nothing was easy, nor cheap, after
> > that! :) Ric
> 
> Oh, Ric, how you are singing my song...  The BBS days were the best,
> weren't they?  That and dialing into the campus modem pool so I could
> telnet into the CS lab to compile/run some programs on the lab system,
> surf the alt.binaries.* groups (what else was USENet for when you were
> 18 and in college?) heh...
> 
> I used to have a friend who had one of the biggest BBSs in my area
> (around Roanoke) and I was always amazed at the amount of time and
> money he invested in actually having 4 - 6 dedicated phone lines and a
> fairly beefy (for the time) PC running WWIV...

I rented what had been a bank building, with a bank walk-in style vault
and huge commercial air conditioning and electrical service. Then I
moved into the 2nd floor to "loft live". It was one huge friggin' room.
God, such a blessing to have been single! Downstairs I had all the room
in the world for computers, terminals, you name it. The secret was to
use "grandma" phonelines. They were for emergency type service, for the
shut-in elderly. with outgoing calls at 25 cents, incoming calls free,
for $8 a line. So, I got eight of those, one wide area, and two regular
voice lines. My phone bill was around $125 a month for all those lines.
Cheap when you consider my phone listing in the phone book was about 1/6
of one side of a page. 

> Oh the countless hours I wasted playing Legend of the Red Dragon and
> Drug Wars... heh...

Oh yeah! I ran Caldera Linux, and everyone just had command line access
via telnet. Y-talk was the rage. And, we ran MUDos, so everyone wrote
their own mud code to make up a huge map. Funny, the guys all built
killing stuff areas and the ladies built up dream homes to walk though
and examine all the details they put to it. It was great. We had mostly
college students who were learning computers and did some whiz bang
things with it. They sure picked up on command line quickly. Then they
went to school to beat up their MicroSoft sucking-up professors. We got
two 8 serial port Dickens terminal servers donated, so we hooked up an
assortment of 16 terminals and old XT's to hook those in. So, with 16
users on the terminals, and 8 coming in through the phone lines, my old
486 held in there. The other local BBS's, running maybe 2 lines at best,
were green with envy. 

But, running text mode only, it took imagination to make that MUD come
alive. One kid couldn't spell for beans, but had a gift for creating
workable code and elaborate areas. So, after he logged off, I went back
in to correct his spelling. If he noticed, he never said a word. I
didn't either. Nope, the Internet of today can't hold a candle to the
old BBS days for the imagination it took. <sighs> Ric

-- 
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
Linux user# 44256