Columns

[Here we are at the second meeting of BBS Anonymous. Those of you who have been paying attention might recall that we were listening to the sad story of Pete S., presently at the depths of despair - a hopeless BBSoholic - shunned by former friends, maxxed out on his plastic for faster modems and quicker cpu's (hah! - 386/33 with 2 megs running bink/squish/max), shadowed everywhere by his local telco so he won't try to leave town. As the scene fades into focus, Pete S. continues his tale of woe:]

.................well, this Long Distance chippin' was getting me down - I explained it to the wife as like a trip to the drugstore to pick up a magazine - and I was really wishing somebody would bring Fido to our town - or at least, our calling area. And it finally happened! I was so happy! Now, I could get my fixes on a local call! Somebody wanted to set up a BBS in our town, (I didn't at that time understand how or why) and I would get to use it! A Marriage Made In Heaven!

And that's what it seemed to be - for a little while. But then I began to see that there were Fidoboards, and there were fidoboards. This one used crummy software - a lot of options that I had become used to weren't offered with this one. At first, it didn't carry my favorite echoes, then he got a PC dish, and tried to carry them _all_! The whole backbone! You can imagine what it was like to find your way around _that_ menu structure! But worst of all, he turned out to be a game freak! So it was well-nigh impossible to find a time that you could get in there and get a .qwk packet. Every little gamoholic in town had his autodialer going to find that window in between the other gamers. When the BBS went to two lines - he was charging money for using the games, so he could afford it - it got even worse. Now, the kids were playing games in real-time, online, with each other! 23 hours a day! Just imagine; an info-freak locked into a town with only an online video arcade! The Marriage was in trouble!

To make things worse, I had up till then been turning some of my friends on to the wonders of Fido, and had been selling and installing modems for them so that they could enjoy this marvelous thing, too. And they would see me on the street, and I would ask them how they were enjoying the BBS. And they would tell me, "I don't know, I gave up trying, I can never get in, it's always busy, what's so hot about this thing, anyway?"

I began to get lightheaded. The sound of busy signals started to get to my very inner psyche. That's all I can imagine to explain my next move. A young friend of mine got ahold of a distribution copy of a well-known but inferior "instant BBS" and ran the install program one evening when he had a half-hour to spare, and phoned me and asked me to call it and play around a bit.

Whoa! My first taste of Overproof! This thing looked like a BBS! We went into chat mode, and I asked him what had been involved in setting it up. He told me he'd unzipped the distribution copy about an hour before that, and bingo! I'd had no idea that these things could be put together so fast! My brain started calculating the cost of an extra computer to run this thing full time, and the price of a phone line, and I was HOOKED! I was going to the city the next week anyway, and I returned with a beat-up Zenith 286 with 640K, and ST251, and a 2400 baud modem. I would make the world safe for serious computer conferencers, info-freaks, and netmailers! No more being stuck on busy waiting for your chance to download racy gifs and play stupid games! Nossir; our town was going to move into the Future!

Fortunately, I called my friend in Burnaby before I started anything serious. He straightened me up well; dissuaded me from the instant BBS software to Max/Bink/Squish. Sent me copies, and then even made a trip up (it was Spring - time for head-cleaning roadtrips), bringing along a 2 meg 386 MB, and we gutted the Zenith. We cobbled together a box which I'm still using lo these 5 or 6 years later, consulted the nodelist, and netmailed off a node number application. Last week I cudn't spell sisop, and now I _are_ one! The beginning of my descent into hell.

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