Back in the early 90's I helped run a BBS that eventually morphed into a 128 line ISP, and there was a local news story about it at the time.

I've been going through old VHS tapes and transferring meaningful stuff to digital format, and came across this old tape in one of my closets. Thought you guys might enjoy some nostalgic footage :)

Unfortunately we didn't run Synchronet at the time... what were we thinking?!?!
Man, I can remember the headaches of MBBS/Worldgroup at the time...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHc_bM6JiSg

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þ Synchronet þ t0kerZ hUt

Re: The FIX BBS - News Clip from 1994
By: Crushed to All on Thu Oct 20 2022 09:12 am

Back in the early 90's I helped run a BBS that eventually morphed into a 128 line ISP, and there was a local news
story about it at the time.

I've been going through old VHS tapes and transferring meaningful stuff to digital format, and came across this
old tape in one of my closets. Thought you guys might enjoy some nostalgic footage :)

As a younger person (under 40), this is incredible. Thanks for finding this, definitely the coolest thing I've seen all week.

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þ Synchronet þ Palantir BBS * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL

Hello Crushed!

** On Thursday 20.10.22 - 09:12, Crushed wrote to All:

Back in the early 90's I helped run a BBS that eventually
morphed into a 128 line ISP, and there was a local news
story about it at the time.

[...]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHc_bM6JiSg

That was exellent. Thanks for sharing that. Are YOU in the
news story?

"1:229/412 Mark Steffen from Wingham ON 2006.04.14 - 2008.03.28"

So, he popped back the inter-BBS scene briefly after all the
fame and fortune.


--- OpenXP 5.0.51
* Origin: Ogg's Dovenet Point (723:320/1.9)
þ Synchronet þ CAPCITY2 * capcity2.synchro.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/Rlogin/HTTP

Re: The FIX BBS - News Clip from 1994
By: Crushed to All on Thu Oct 20 2022 09:12:13

Back in the early 90's I helped run a BBS that eventually morphed into a 128 line ISP, and there was a local news story
about it at the time.

dayum

I've been going through old VHS tapes and transferring meaningful stuff to digital format, and came across this old tape in
one of my closets. Thought you guys might enjoy some nostalgic footage :)

watching it now.. appreciate the history. maybe throw it up on archive dot org or something like that ?

regards
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Charles Blackburn
The F.B.O BBS 21:1/221 618:250/36
bbs.thefbo.us IPV4/V6
DOVE-Net FSX-Net MicroNET USENET




... Reality is for people who can't cope with their drugs.
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þ Synchronet þ The FBO BBS - bbs.thefbo.us - A place for aviation fun....

Re: The FIX BBS - News Clip from 1994
By: Ogg to Crushed on Thu Oct 20 2022 08:38 pm

That was exellent. Thanks for sharing that. Are YOU in the
news story?

Glad you guys enjoyed it :) Yes, I made a brief appearance near the end... I was the "Vice President" (William Scott).

They sure were fun times... one of my fondest memories is being creative in expanding our local calling area. In the beginning, "call forwarding" allowed multiple calls to pass through - so you could have a call forwarding node between the BBS and a large town/city that would make a normally long-distance call, a local one.

A year or two later, Bell got smart and put an end to that - so once one call went through, you would just receive a busy signal. Well a bit of testing discovered that if you disabled call forwarding (*70 or something like that) then re-enabled it (*71), another call could pass through. So we installed dumb terminals that would watch for a RING signal, then disable/renable call forwarding to allow another call to go through.

Well that hole was eventually closed also - but these were the early days of cell phones (well, BAG phones at the time), so once again we discovered that if you had a CELL number, unlimited calls could forward through it. I remember one month dialing into one of the cell nodes to check usage, and hearing the robot voice report "You have used 22, THOUSAND, minutes this month. Your bill is, $37 dollars". And yes, that hole was eventually closed too which forced us to pay for a legit number of PSTN connections.

But for the few years we "gamed" the system, we saved thousands :)

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þ Synchronet þ t0kerZ hUt

Crushed wrote to Ogg <=-

They sure were fun times... one of my fondest memories is being
creative in expanding our local calling area. In the beginning, "call forwarding" allowed multiple calls to pass through - so you could have
a call forwarding node between the BBS and a large town/city that would make a normally long-distance call, a local one.

Sounds like one of my stories. I worked at a company where the engineering people set up a FirstClass server and set it to poll a remote site (a local toll number at something like 6c/min) every 15 minutes, whether there was
mail or not.

I tried convincing him to set up their equivalent of crashmail, but he
didn't want the other side to make calls.

We set up remote call forward. Set up the remote call forward number to be
the local toll call. Told my FirstClass server to call itself. It call forwarded the call to the remote end as programmed, but it cost fractions of
a penny instead of 6c/minute. Hundreds saved per month, and no accolades given. Just another day in the life.

A year or two later, Bell got smart and put an end to that - so once
one call went through, you would just receive a busy signal. Well a
bit of testing discovered that if you disabled call forwarding (*70 or something like that) then re-enabled it (*71), another call could pass through. So we installed dumb terminals that would watch for a RING signal, then disable/renable call forwarding to allow another call to
go through.

Well that hole was eventually closed also - but these were the early
days of cell phones (well, BAG phones at the time), so once again we discovered that if you had a CELL number, unlimited calls could forward through it. I remember one month dialing into one of the cell nodes to check usage, and hearing the robot voice report "You have used 22, THOUSAND, minutes this month. Your bill is, $37 dollars". And yes,
that hole was eventually closed too which forced us to pay for a legit number of PSTN connections.

But for the few years we "gamed" the system, we saved thousands :)

---
Synchronet t0kerZ hUt

... At the end of the day, it gets dark.
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