Bart n Homer’s

Most blog readers don’t go far enough back with me to have any idea what this is. Back around 91 or 92 I started up Bart N Homer’s BBS on my Amiga 500. A BBS is a Bulletin Board System. I basically had a modem hooked to it that people would dial into, connect to my bbs software which in turn let them do stuff like post messages, play games and download files. Back then the Amiga had a huge advantage over PC’s with their ability to multitask which made them much better platforms to run multi-line BBS’s on. It was the start of my online persona. I really got into it and at the height of my craze I had 4 modems and 4 phone lines active at my house! I had a 6 cd changer that housed thousands of files. I remember the thrill of upgrading my 2400 baud modems to USR HST modems through the USR sysop program. Having an HST modem was a badge of honor back then. 14400 was cooking with gas!! Late in the BBS’s life I did advanced things like get connected to FidoNet which was very similar to the internet newsgroups of today. I managed to find an old message that I originally posted off my Amiga in fidonet. (look at the signature line) Back then I made very little money and tried to supplement my income by building and selling computers. The online games by today’s standards seemed ridiculous but they somehow were still addicting. It was a bit of a power trip being the SYSOP, having the power to create, destroy, grant and deny as you see fit. On the board I was Homer, Bart was a friend of mine from when I worked at Weis. He was basically a figurehead that was only there once or twice and never showed up again. However since I didn’t want to change the name I kept things as is even though in reality it was just Homer’s BBS. The BBS moved with me from Brecknock to Flying Hills to Wernersville where it died quietly in 1998.

The reason this came up was a kid that I helped with the BBS scene years ago found my old BBS in a historical listing of BBS’s. He now has a real high tech job and is going for his master’s. Talk about making me feel old. He was 13 when I met him. For some reason I also gave him my old video game systems like my intellivision and colecovision. I guess I was trying to make some room. Funny how paths cross. He just threw in my name to Google.