Tarkblog

In reference to http://dooley.benmaxson.com/index.php?entry=entry050913-210630 I thought I’d share my old school internet stories.

When I was young, perhaps 8 or 9, my uncle talked me into buying a modem for my computer. My dad drove me to sam’s club and I paid $199 for a 2400 baud modem. My uncle gave me some numbers for BBSes (as explained above) and I become an addict. Games, stories, whatnot. None of it was adult, however. Or at least, nothing that I had access to.

Around 10-11 I started experimenting with the national BBSes. GEnie was the first, but I also tried out Compuserve (EXPENSIVE), Delphi, BIX (Byte Information eXchange) and Prodigy. Prodigy was the bestest as it was graphical. GEnie had the first “online chat” with “chat games”, which was pretty innovative for the time. It also cost 10 cents a minute, after 7pm (was like 40 cents a minute before then).

I remember one day getting the credit card bill (my parents let me use the credit card as long as I paid for whatever I bought) and itw as like 200 bucks. YIKES! I paid it, but that was about al lof the money I had in life.

I did a lot of various things online. I was an official staff member of Delphi Online Services, which was the first online service to offer the internet (before AOL ever did). I was a Chat Games moderator, running games at certain times and whatnot. I was on the modem so much my parents ended up buying a second phone line.

I also wrote my first computer game and sold it to Delphi for $10. I still have the contract, Annie and I found it a few weeks ago when digging through papers.

I was COSYSOP (SYSOP = SystemsOperator) of a local BBS for a long time. It was originally called Insomnia, but the name changed to Blarty Toot. My name was Coffin Man (I have noidea where that came from). The people who actually ran it were gUs and Calvin, who were married to each other (gUs was a woman). They were in their 30s, and I wasn’t 10 years old yet. I remember going to their house once to collaborate on a BBS related project- it was a little interesting trying to explain to my mom that story:

Me: Mom, I need a ride to blah blah blah street
Mom: Who lives there?
Me: Some friends
Mom: Who are they?
Me: Mike and Nancy Lerch
Mom: ??
Me: They’re married in their 30s
Mom: What do they want you to come over for? How do you know these people? Are they child molestors?

…

One time, a BBS ran by a guy named Ryan Athey somehow picked up a smut related feed that had explicit stories in it (this wasn’t a newsgroup, but a place where people could post stories). Before email and the rest of this stuff, what would happen is you would call up a BBS and post a message or what not, then in the middle of the night the various BBSes would call each other and transfer information, so you had an ability to communicate over the nation.

Anyway, I remembered printing out one of those stories and taking it to junior high school. Some dude gave me a dollar for it. As you can probably guess, I printed out a lot more stories after that. I made a lot of money that year.

My parents still don’t know much about computers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 13th, 2005 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.