Quote:
Originally Posted by moffattm
I used to run a BBS on my Atari ST back in the late 80's and I remember making toll calls from New Zealand to other boards in the US in order to download games for my users to play, at NZ$3 a minute. I ran up a bill of about $1200 over a couple of months, fortunately I was single and care-free at the time and so a lot of my income went into my hobby.
|
I started my BBS on a CP/M S-100 bus machine with a PMMI modem in 1980 -- 600 bps, moved it to a clone of the Big Board from JLS computers with an added SASI interface for a 10MB hard drive and finally to a series of IBM clones running OS/2. The software went from CBBS to Maximus/2 with a few detours in between. In the detours, I learned more than I actually wanted to know about programming in BDS C for CP/M and Pascal for DOS. I got involved in Fidonet which cut down my LD phone bills but added to my stress -- herding cats at its finest. I finally shut the BBS down in 2002 as the tech support side which paid the bills for the BBS was being less and less used and the public side was down to 1-3 callers per day -- the 604 BBS list was down to less than 15 systems listed from it's peak of over 2000 systems when it was last published.
Very fond memories of people such as Ward Christensen, Randy Seuss, Steve Vinokuroff, Scott Dudley, Joe Frankiewicz. I'd better stop here as the list keeps getting longer.
Regards,
David