Was your modem the standard 300 baud acoustic coupler? I had a friend who could whistle the connect string into those.
There were a lot of local boards, but my 2 national favorites were the Well from SF, and Pirates Cove (from somewhere up north, either maine, nh, or canada. And later a SF-based Apple Macintosh board whose name I cannot remember. Pirates Cove was mainly for hacks and cracks, but boy, was it fun. The need to alleviate long distance charges (which were _not_ an option) forced us to learn a bit about electronics, and cobble together a blue box, which saved us until Timenet came along, and we shifted our sneakiness to purely software-level round-a-bouts. Compuserve and Prodigy, and later AOL served me pretty well, too. On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 2:14 PM, Rick Root <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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:259553 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.5
