Artoo's BBS and Artoo's Space now one!

I have been playing with a personal web site or some version of an online space where people can read some of my ramblings since 1991... yeah, you read correctly... When i lived at my parents in my late teen, I player and dabbled into the wonderful world of the BBS (Bulletin Board System).

This was before the Internet. I used to use my dad's 286 and a 2400 baud modem and used my phone line. For those unaware of how this worked, a person would have a computer set up with a special BBS software on their computer and would leave the computer open with a modem connected to it. People would then call in and log onto your BBS and navigate onto your BBS. They could do numerous things: download or upload files, play online games (such as Trade Wars 2002), read messages and reply to them, etc.

Once they were done, they would hang up and the next person who called would log on. A few times a day, the BBS computer would call what was called a HUB computer and exchange old mail messages for new ones (I was a node on FidoNet's Message System). The HUB would then send it along to another HUB and the mail would go around the world like that. A reply could come back to you within a few days or a week depending on the location of the sender (e.g.: someone from Australia that would reply to your message would transmit that reply one computer at a time across the world).

This was pre-Internet days and considered an underground way of communicating.

My first BBS was called R2d2's BBS. Yes, Even back then I used a droid-inspired nick. R2d2's BBS evolved into Artoo's BBS. I used a few different software programs to run my BBS but the main one I fell back to over the few years my BBS was open was "Maximus". I loved Max because it was quite customizable. I was able to create ASCII art and animation amd give the visotor a cool Star Wars inspired visit.

A few year later when the WWW was available to everyone, my online presence became Artoo's Space on the Web.

This past week-end I excided it would be cool to try to go back and introduce the content from my old BBS days and old website days into a blog format. This will of course take time but should make for an interesting archive of thoughts over the last 15 years.

Update 1: I just input the text data from last year's "Artoo's Space on the Web" which was hosted on Rogers.com. There wasn't that much stuff on that site but since I had to create the Blog template as well, I am quite happy with the result. It's a step on a long process but i'm not putting any deadline on this... I'm just doing this for fun. Next up a way to get the old photos up.