A Trip Down Memory Lane… BBS

My wife is out of town this week and so I’ve taken the time to at least get started on a long-overdue project. As I have mentioned before, I’ve got a huge tub of old CD ROMs and similar junk that needed going through, which is how I spent many hours the past few days.

What an incredible load of junk! The commercial stuff was easy to deal with – if it’s older than a version I’m currently using, it’s gone. If I’ve never used it, it’s gone. If I can’t even figure out what it is, it’s gone.

The CDs I made myself are a bit more problematic. I’ve backed up important stuff at various times over the years, as well as a ridiculous amount of drivel. Rather than just tossing all those discs, I loaded them all onto my hard drive so that I can sort through them. Probably only a freak like me would actually look forward to reviewing and cleaning out 40,000 files. I have a feeling when the project is done there will be only a thousand or so files left – which will probably all fit on a single DVD.

As I started the sort project, one of the first things I ran across was this advertisement for my old Bulletin Board System…

3500 files! 3.8 Gigabytes of storage! That was a huge amount back then, but now for $30 you can get a microSD card with more capacity and which could easily be swallowed. My BBS was never a raging success with individual users – I was a bit late to the game for that. It was however a very active file distribution hub, often moving 100 megabytes a day, which was no small thing in the days of dial-up modems.

Sometimes I miss the title of SysOp.