Good ol days.

“WWIV, Wildcat, Celerity — these hallowed names represent the best of a golden era of communication, back when “getting online” meant tying up the family phone line, remembering arcane Hayes AT codes to maximize performance out of the 9600 baud modem your dad borrowed from work, and TradeWars was the best multiplayer game available. Yes, I’m talking about Bulletin Board Systems, originally text based and later augmented with ANSI graphics. The first public BBS celebrated its birthday yesterday, and I think it’s a fair bet that few of us would be engaging in discussion today if it weren’t for that simple little computer bulletin board in 1978. Why even our esteemed leader John Biggs ran a bulletin board system for a brief while!”

I wanted to run my own board but due to no extra phone line, I had to be content to have a setup that my friends could dial in when they called. It was called Demosis Erima, which is hebrew for public desert. Or at least I thought it was? The software I ran was JetBBS and I ran it because it was totally free and didn’t come crippled unless you paid money. I had LORD and Tradewars attached to it. Adam and I both pitched in for a license of Tradewars but LORD was the free limited version. I made the intro graphics in The Draw. I ran it on a 2600 modem which was pretty fast for the time. Later on I upgraded to a 14.4. I never owned a 56k in the BBS days. That was later when dial up internet was the rage.