Okay the BBS talk got me going. I loved BBSing and to be honest, what is cf-community but a email based bbs without door games? =)
I got my first 300 baud modem in 1985 from my Uncle, a VIC Modem that I hooked up to my Commodore 64. I lived in Saline, a small town just south of Ann Arbor. The only local calls I could make were Saline and Ann Arbor. The only BBS in Saline was a CoCo3 specialist BBS that my friend Brian ran, and I didn't much care for the Ann Arbor BBSes. All the good ones (being a C64 guy, "good ones" meant they ran CNET or Image) were in Ypsi, Plymouth, Canton, etc. So I called them. I even called a BBS in South Bend called the Michiana Online Messenger. Well, a month later, my mom got the phone bill, and my bill was like $300. that's when I got my modem taken away. $300 was a lot of money for a 13 year old kid in 1985. It's still a lot of money for a kid that age but it was even more then. About a year later, I got my modem back and learned to stay local. that's when I discovered M-Net (aka "America's oldest public access UNIX system). The year was 1986, and M-Net was a 12 line UNIX conferencing system running an Altos 68020. It had message boards and an interactive chat room called "party". Coolest thing ever. In addition to the online fun, they got together for weekly happy hour gatherings every Friday night at an all ages place, and monthly parties called Picofests took place (in honor of the BBS software Picospan, which was originally written for M-Net but more popularly known by users of The Well). In addition to that ran various BBSes of my own in the late 80s, nighttime only at first since I couldn't really afford my own phone line, but then I got a job and got a phone line. I ran a BBS devoted to Commodore 64 SID music files, and for a while I was a beta tester for an Amiga BBS software called Paragon (which was renamed Starnet at some point). The name of my Amiga BBS was always "Alternate Reality" and at some point I was a UUCP node named "areality". to this day, I still use M-Net - pretty much daily, I'm currently an elected board member. www.arbornet.org It's still a public access unix system offering free shell accounts and picospan-like conferencing, though there is a web interface now to the conferencing system. I don't use the web interface though, I still just SSH in and do it all text-based. -- Rick Root New Brian Vander Ark Album, songs in the music player and cool behind the scenes video at www.myspace.com/brianvanderark ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 software 8 is the most important and dramatic release to date Get the Free Trial http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;192386516;25150098;k Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/message.cfm/messageid:259542 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.5
