There's too much to list here, so I'll recount my early days discovering BBSes and computers.

In 1983 when I was six years old, my dad got the family a shiny new Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer. Used a CRT monitor (an old TV we had), keyboard built in, games and programming modules were plugged in à la cartridges. Even had a speech synthesizer (which also plugged into the side). Saved and loaded programs written in BASIC via attached tape deck. Spent many hours learning BASIC and playing video games. Wanted a modem as well to call BBSes, but they were much too expensive. I think the options were 110 and 300 baud. Wow.

Fast foward to 1994. A friend had an old IBM 8086 clone that his grandfather had given him. Man. 2400 baud internal modem, two 10MB MFM hard drives, a 5 1/4 floppy, keyboard that clacked like nobody's business. And a registered copy of Telix. I hadn't touched a computer with earnest since the TI-99/4A, so I had to relearn my way around a DOS command prompt again. When I found Telix and poked around, I was so excited! I had only ever seen BBSes mostly in War Games with Matthew Broderick back in the day, and occasionally at someone's house when they dialed into one. And it had local BBSes in the dialing directory! I called every one of them and was hooked.

A couple years later I had upgraded to a brand new Pentium running at a blazing 75 MHz and was working on running my own BBS. I tried all the available BBS software. Iniquity, Telegard, Renegade, Maximus, Oblivion/2, Illusion, Mystic, Synchronet. Any time there was new BBS software out there, I tried it.

And after spending the better part of a year configging, modding, installing, tweaking and drawing for my BBS, I was so excited that when a friend of mine (who shall remain nameless) asked if he could get a copy of my board to play around with, I didn't think anything of it. "Hell, he's my friend, I think it'd be awesome for him to poke around and maybe get some inspiration!"

The bastard changed a few lines for his new BBS name and promptly put it online. Advertised all over the place for it. So when I finally put mine up a couple weeks later and people started calling in saying, "Hey, this BBS looks just like <his BBS>! Have you seen it? It's awesome!" I was like, "huh"? That, and the rising popularity of the Internet, killed it for me.

So now, here we are. I haven't touched a BBS in about 15 years, but I *really* needed a hobby again. And here's the end result.

I hope you all enjoy the BBS as much as I do. Any feedback or suggestions can be sent to my email address.

Thanks for visiting!

- maskreet