Dec 072011
 

When I first started my BBS in 1985, the goal was pretty simple, setup a computer to answer the phone and see who was on the other end! There was something very interesting about hosting a platform that allowed anonymous folks from around the world to post their thoughts. My first BBS as called The Monolith, after the famous object in 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. It was a simple BBS that allowed folks to login and post a message or two. At the time, it hosted a pretty lively political debate, as well as other interesting conversations, some of which I will share in future posts.

In the next few years, I along with my friend Drue Kennon wrote our own BBS software, PcConnect, that was built from the ground up to support multiple simultaneous callers. This system allowed callers to not only read messages and download files, but also to chat to each other in real-time. Remember, this was in the late 80’s, 10 years before AIM was a hit.

Along the way, the BBS morphed from The Monolith to The Programmer’s Corner, a meeting place for software developers who were just starting to really take advantage of these cool PC’s. By the end, TPC hosted over 25,000 files that totaled 12.5G’s in space (A crazy amount of space 20 years ago). You can now access many of these files here.

 December 7, 2011  Add comments

  One Response to “From the beginning…”

  1. Wow, can’t believe I found this. David Herndon here of the old WWIV BBS in Cockeysville, Dark Side of the Moon. 1990-92 or so. Programmer’s Corner was awesome….and I just found several releases of my old offline reader I had uploaded….Gary, you preserved it here for all to enjoy! 😉 Brings back great memories. Thanks for providing this archive!

 Leave a Reply

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)