Damn thats bringing back some damn memories. Jerry Johnson wrote: > 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 >> >> >> > >
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