1st Stop BBS 1992-1995 Sysop Thomas Kanara Auckland, New Zealand Running Renegade How it all begain... It was 1992, and a I visited a friend, he was doing something on his computer and I asked what it was. This is when he showed me his BBS. This friend was Baldman (Nigel Howe) and his BBS was called "The Hairless BBS" running MAXBoard. Needless to say I was fascinated, so much so that I picked up the trade and exchange, found the necessary things over the next feew weeks and started exploring Auckland's BBS land, at the time I was armed with an IBM compatible "Commodore 486sx/25 complete with Telix and my external 2400 baud modem. After a short period of time, I wanted to set up my own BBS, and so "The Bastard BBS" was born. A less than flattering name I know, but I was 18 at the time.. what did you expect? My alias as sysop was "A Bastard" a name that came about due to friends telling me that at times... I could be a real bastard Later my alias changed to Estranged, the title of my favourite Guns N' Roses song. At some stage I tried to join a BBS but the name was taken, I couldn't remember if it was mine or not so I just decided to write my alias backwards resulting in degnartse or d3gnarts3, an alias I still use today. After a while I had a fairly good grasp on how everything worked, my BBS was getting busier, I was enjoying watching people dial in and chat, play door games and post messages. At one stage some friends and I all merged together under the banner of Sexy MF, thus giving the illusion of a much bigger BBS, I think we ended up with 5 or 6 entries all up in the BBS list from The Edge BBS. We each specialised in different areas of BBS's, i.e message networks, files, doors etc... This was an interesting time, but not without it's politics, after a brief period we disbanded and went our own ways again. The next incarnation of my BBS was "1st Stop BBS", a name chosen for the sole purpose of being at the top of the Edge BBS' dialing list. it was a gimmick that resulted in a huge increase in the activity to my board. I was a node for Fidonet, Demi-Monde and also the RC for SGAnet, until my interest, SGAnet was exclusivley US based and supported by the two Patel brother's behind the popular SRE game and also the inter-BBS game of BRE. I recall a lot of late night calls to exchange the packets, and in doing this expanded the range of the BBS and the people I was able to communicate with. eventually other Sysop's around NEw Zealand became interested in SGAnet and so it grew slowly. I was running Renegade, but tinkered with almost every IBM compatible BBS application I could get my hands on at times experimenting with trial versions of other systems and taking feedback from my users, overall the clincher for me was the flexibility of Renegade so thats the system that won out, I ran fully customised ansi and ascii menus and I had started on creating RIP graphics with a program called RIPaint that I brought from Telegraphics (I still have the original program on floppy disk) Before I could complete this however, something new came along... yep... Internet. I'm proud to be able to say I was part of the BBS community, given the opportunity to chat and in many cases meet at various gatherings. If you remember me then stop by and say hello. People and boards that spring to mind that I've not mentioned thus far are (and I'm sorry if I havn't included you) Powerslave of Heavy Artillery... \m/ Up the Irons \m/ Jean-Claude Van Damme of Explosive Suicide MaYhEm of EXILE BBS Wolf359 Portunus' Little CBCS The Edge Knoddy's House 3000AD Alex Clark from MAXBoard Central State of Chaos The Crypt Maxi Board Brian Wrigley... actually Brian was a character and a legend! It was Brian, Nigel and myself behind The Hairless Girls BBS... OMG.. confession time... As you will all probably recall. it was the early 90's.. many of us in our late teens.. and we'll let's face it, there were not that many girls into BBS'ing... so we decided to create a girls hang out, you know, to encourage them to partake and feel at home, and thus "The Hairless Girls BBS" was born, with each of the 3 of us sysops but roleplaying as girls... my alias there was Joanne, haha soo many guillable people out there, but again. another gimmick that seemed to work. Kudos to Brian for keeping that BBS running as long as he did, that was dedication folks! Sadly Brian passed away a number of years ago. (R.I.P) Now 18 years later it's 2011, sad to admit it but I've got the bug again (sadly I've lost the original archives of the 'old' BBS so I'm currently in the process of configuring a new Telnet and www accessable BBS running Synchronet 3.15a for win32. I'm calling it "The Phoenix BBS" (kinda symbolic don't you think?) my alias is now Ardalista. If you want to take a peek (while being careful around the constriction site that it is) then feel free. telnet://phoenixbbs.dyndns.org or http://phoenixbbs.dyndns.org Ahh so there are my memories... aka the "Good ol' days" -Thomas K