Quote:
Originally Posted by K7FED
Gee, another BBS head.. I was sysop of "The Nut House BBS" since 1983 in one form or another until the internet killed my caller count... Ran on everything from a TRS80 Model I to a CoCo to a Atari 800 and then Entered the PC world with Wildcat BBS which I beta tested for many years.
I was FidoNet 1:309/13.
Ahh the good old days! "We will NEVER fill up this 10MB hard drive"....
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lol.. "Nut house BBS" Nice name there..
Yup.. Before the WWW there were actually us BBS heads using US Robotics HST modems and fossil drivers to control our comports running the computer scene.
Ahhh..yes.. DOS, Windows 3.0 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11...
I actually remember Wildcat BBS software. I think I tried installing it a few times but couldn't quite get a hang of the message bases so I stuck with running Remote Access BBS software, Front Door and GEcho for the longest time. Had a nice warez file and games section going too. ...Didn't we all?
Had the "Conners" 40 meg harddrive "unlimited" file space installed, and a whole two nodes and some pretty nice ANSI graphics on the BBS too! This was some impressive computer technology at the time.
I actually remember when QRZ first came on line on the internet in 1993. I used to sign in on the site with a non amateur radio user name although I don't remember what it was exactly. It was something lame like SWL_USER or something like that... I also remember the first callsign databases Fred started creating before the internet because I would read about them on FidoNet in the "Ham Radio" message section. I recall the FidoNet ham radio section was huge in terms of file message space compared to other message sections. because it would take forever for GEcho to process and index the message base on my BBS.
Although I was an SWL at the time, I sure wanted one of them QRZ databases for my collection. These were far better to have than old fashioned callbooks because you could actually look up stuff using a computer instead! That was way too cool at the time...and I wanted one.
I think he started by selling tapes and later sold CD's. I remember thinking how expensive it must have been to own a CD rom that could write to create that database.... I know, I couldn't have owned one back then. It was like buying an Icom 7800 and was too far out of reach for most computer geeks like me at the time! (...College days - living on Ramen Noodles and Kraft Dinner
)
My BBS used an external 300 MB Tallgrass Technologies tape backup system. (Thank god for PKZIP and .ARJ ! ) Seems computer CD technology was very expensive so it wasn't an option for my IBM 286 BBS system.
When the 386 DX-33 came out, I remember thinking we had reached our plateau limit for computing speed at the time because that's what earlier versions of PC mag. was saying at the time! The headlines were something like "Have we reached our limit.."? How far can we go? etc.."
So I bought one of those state of the art 386 DX-33's with a whopping 16 megs of memory and felt I had the latest and greatest high speed computer to run my BBS. ...It sure seemed to be very fast at the time.
Ahh.. yes.. the good old DOS days.. C:/dir /w cd..
Your Sysop - Latenight BBS!
My Best.
Internet Explorer 8 - Now Supported at QRZ
Linear Mode
