EDCUG Bulletin Board System
In February 1990, at the request of the membership,
Tony Carter started an investigation into the feasibility of a club sponsored Bulletin
Board System. Using hardware donated and on loan from the members a BBS was built.
Consisting of an original IBM PC XT motherboard with 256K memory, two 360K floppy drives,
a 10M hard drive, a monochrome monitor, keyboard, and a 2400 baud modem; club funds were
used to purchase a hard drive controller, a multi-port clock/calendar and a 384K memory
expansion card. Using WWIV software, EDCUG BBS was put "on the air" on April
Fools Day 1990.
It should be noted that prior to this point a Radio Shack model 3 based BBS operated by
member Frank Miller had been used by some members for this activity. Frank's decision to
retire his Somerset BBS after six years of operation, inspired the club to pursue its own.
At the December 1992 meeting, non-member usage of the BBS was reduced to 30 minutes per
day (members received 90 minutes) in hopes of producing an incentive to join and
monetarily support maintenance and upgrades.
The club grew to nearly 60 members during the "BBS years" as many users joined
just to show their support for a well run connection. The machine also evolved into a 486
DX2-80, 16MB RAM, 28.8K modem, SVGA color monitor, nearly 600MB of hard drive space, and a
CD-ROM drive. The OS/2 operating system was used to improve the multitasking between the
dial-up and local nodes and provide the stability required for continuous operation.
For the writing of this history, I reread all of the clubs newsletters; at least those
that I have. It was very entertaining to uncover remarks made in them by EDBBS sys-op,
Tony. Remarks concerning the trials and tribulations he went through to overcome hardware
component incompatibilities, mis-matched modems, phone line noise, hard drive failures,
missing or bad system backups, constant incremental upgrades, and on and on. I could say
that Tony deserves a large amount of praise for his efforts during its 6 3/4 year history
.... but I won't!
At midnight December 31, 1996 the
plug was pulled and the EDBBS ceased to exist. |
