FIDONET NET124
My first BBS came up in the summer of 1987. I had become fascinated with watching Sabol run his mailer at work, and was equally fascinated with DoubleDOS that he was using to keep the boss away. :-) It was Binkley 1.50 I think, and was run with a 2400 baud Hayes on a Compaq 286 portable.
Jon came to work at AirBorn (where I still work, BTW, 15 years now) as a programming consultant. I remember looking at his system thinking "what is that thing doing??", and it was all over for me after that. This was early 1987, and I went out and bought an Everex 1200b internal for my XT portable that night. I pestered Jon day after day about BBSing in general. That whole exercise began my interest in computers that later turned into my career. I've always been glad Jon came along when he did.
He finally agreed to help me set up my system. So, one evening I dragged by luggable over to his place. David Finster was there, who I later found out was the original alpha tester for Opus, and was named so in the Opus docs, along with Jon and a few others. There's a bit of history in those old docs, if you can find them.
I think Finster was tripping the night he set up my Opus 1.03b. I had installed this TSR that made your speaker click each time a key was pressed, and Dave was scrolling through opus.ctl with the down arrow... tick, tick, tick, tick... I remember him saying he felt like he was running a tiny jackhammer... it cracked me up because he was so serious.
I remember him yelling to Jon upstairs "what's his node number gonna be?" Jon yelled back down "Uh, we just assigned 124, so make it 125. That of course was later converted to 124/4125, and then converted to 5125 later on when I took the new Hub5000 slot. The "124" number he mentioned (124/124) he had previously assigned had just gone to John Gresham, who later became 124/2124 when Hub2000 was formed.
I must admit I was surprised to see the BBS work when I got home. I promptly put runbbs.bat at the bottom of my autoexec.bat and the BBS was on.
Meanwhile, Jon was feeding some local nodes (including me) from his work machine, processing mail with ConfMail. His BBS at home was doing the heavy stuff, cooking away with the PEP Trailblazer at what, 19,200? I went over there one night and Jon, Dave and I sat and watched PEP transfers for about 15 minutes. We just went "wow..." as the files rolled off and what seemed like incredible speed.
I remember Jon getting TONS of dupes. I remember him saying "all dupes" after processing a 200-300k bundle after an LD poll (but I had no idea what he was talking about). Jon spend many phone calls and much time planning getting the dupe loops ironed out. He was considered the first ZEC, the first person who planned the echomail routing on a national level.
Josh... it's all so fuzzy these days....
- Clay
