Many moons ago, I found that our Compaq Portable had a 2400 baud modem in the back of it. I didn't have a phone cord long enough to reach the nearest outlet, so I took a shorter one, cut it in half, and extended it using a spool of 22awg wire from the model train workbench. Dialed a number I got from a friend at school - The Gas Passer BBS in Pittsburgh, PA. Not long after that, my parents gave approval to ringing up the local BBSs within our calling area, and I was hooked.
It took less than a year for me to follow more Fidonet echoes than I could read within my 60 minute time limit. The one and only Bob Hoffman, great soul that he was, set me up as a private node on FamilyNet 8:7200/something and soon I was pulling FamilyNet and FidoNet echoes through the gateway at 1:129/34. After Bob moved away, he put in a good word for me with the local Fido NC, Paul Kelly, and soon I was a private node 1:129/146@fidonet. 5 lovely years of too many echoes and staying up to ZMH to watch netmail get sent across the country.
Politics and finances drove me out of Fido when I started college in 1993. I tried being a point in net 2613 for a while, but doing mail runs on a dorm phone line wasn't the best way to keep the roommates happy.
20 years later I'm still hooked on the shit like it's crack or something. I have gigabytes of BBS software in a folder on my Mac. Emulated DOS 6.22 + rlfossil works well enough to pass netmail around a simulated FTN in VMware fusion. I put binkd on a VPS, and got crashmail working well enough to use it as a hub for a local net consisting of all my home machines + a bunch of machines at work. No more emailing things home, or using a USB key, just file attach it to one of the home nodes and it'll be there waiting for me when I get home!
squish in out squash
qm TOSS SCAN PACK
fdnc
bnu/L1:57600/S
opus -k
I can still write a working nodelist from scratch. Zone,156,Sapphyre,Planet_Earth,Greg_Nesbitt,1-412-279-4822,9600,CM,XA
Any of you geekheads want to build a FTN from scratch? I'll hub it on the VPS.
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Many moons ago, I found that our Compaq Portable had a 2400 baud modem in the back of it. I didn't have a phone cord long enough to reach the nearest outlet, so I took a shorter one, cut it in half, and extended it using a spool of 22awg wire from the model train workbench. Dialed a number I got from a friend at school - The Gas Passer BBS in Pittsburgh, PA. Not long after that, my parents gave approval to ringing up the local BBSs within our calling area, and I was hooked. It took less than a year for me to follow more Fidonet echoes than I could read within my 60 minute time limit. The one and only Bob Hoffman, great soul that he was, set me up as a private node on FamilyNet 8:7200/something and soon I was pulling FamilyNet and FidoNet echoes through the gateway at 1:129/34. After Bob moved away, he put in a good word for me with the local Fido NC, Paul Kelly, and soon I was a private node 1:129/146@fidonet. 5 lovely years of too many echoes and staying up to ZMH to watch netmail get sent across the country. Politics and finances drove me out of Fido when I started college in 1993. I tried being a point in net 2613 for a while, but doing mail runs on a dorm phone line wasn't the best way to keep the roommates happy. 20 years later I'm still hooked on the shit like it's crack or something. I have gigabytes of BBS software in a folder on my Mac. Emulated DOS 6.22 + rlfossil works well enough to pass netmail around a simulated FTN in VMware fusion. I put binkd on a VPS, and got crashmail working well enough to use it as a hub for a local net consisting of all my home machines + a bunch of machines at work. No more emailing things home, or using a USB key, just file attach it to one of the home nodes and it'll be there waiting for me when I get home! squish in out squash qm TOSS SCAN PACK fdnc bnu /L1:57600 /S
opus -k
I can still write a working nodelist from scratch. Zone,156,Sapphyre,Planet_Earth,Greg_Nesbitt,1-412-279-4822,9600,CM,XA
Any of you geekheads want to build a FTN from scratch? I'll hub it on the VPS.