Intro (Or, How I Learned to Stop Lurking and Love to Post)
From
Josh Ramsey@VERT/DIGDIST to
All on Sunday, October 11, 2015 19:45:57
Hello, all! I just wanted to give a quick introduction, since I've never posted to DOVE-net: despite having been a "lurker" for the past year. Beyond that, I've been back in the "BBS scene" for several years, after a treatable case of nostalgia developed into full-blown I'm-back-baby! syndrome.
Why am I only introducing myself now to the network, despite having been messing around with Synchronet for the last year? It's surely not just because I'm about to start asking about a Synchronet problem I have at the moment, and felt it would be tacky to jump right in and ask without having even posted before. (Please note the word "just" in the phrase "it's surely not JUST.")
BBS bona fides seem to be the norm in introductions on BBSes and their nets, so here goes. I started "modeming" in early 1993, and had started my first BBS by the end of that year. With a couple of short hiatuses and confuse-the-user name and software changes, I ran the BBS fairly consistently until I graduated high school in 1997. It started on Spitfire, then went to Wildcat (I know, not very "leet," blah, blah, blah), never having more than a single node. But, it was popular, and a small local-calling area of fewer than 100,000 people still kept it busy most of the time (when I wasn't keeping it busy myself by "working on the BBS," aka what I'd tell angry users who missed their LoRD turns for the day because I'd been on the Internet or finishing off Doom 2).
The only time I can remember calling a BBS between taking my board down in 97 and checking out my first telnet BBS in 2012 was when I heard in 2003 that one of the old local boards was mysteriously still online. I'd long been on broadband Internet by then, so it was a struggle even finding a phone cable long enough to reach from the nearest jack to my modem. But, I got everything figured out, and gave it a go.
Sure enough, the BBS was still online. It was an ancient one, too, having existed back to 1980s. In fact, they had switched to an IBM setup running RemoteAccess right before I started calling BBSes, and when I called in 2003, it was still a RemoteAccess board. Now, I remember it having had some of the same ANSI screens from when I'd first called it, but that could just be my memory messing with me. I'd hoped the SysOp had turned off the message pruning settings long before, but no dice: empty forums all around. The last caller listed in a generated bulletin had either called years before, or the bulletin generator had bugged out years before, the SysOp never noticing (or caring) to fix it.
All in all, quite a bittersweet trip into nostalgia-land, there.
So, there's a bit about me. I know I should go edit my first paragraph up there, which I wrote when I was fully intending to make it a short intro, but... I'm a lover of irony, when used for good. I'm sorry I've lurked so long, but most of my reading of DOVE-net happens from the feed to the Synchronet install on my computer (I hesitate to call that a BBS), and I've never quite been sure of the accepted DOVE-net etiquette concerning sending mail from nodes that don't accept any users.
Whatever the case, it's good to step out of the shadows. Hello, world!
-J
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