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  • The "Wonder" Years

    From Mortar M.@21:2/101 to poindexter FORTRAN on Thu Jan 1 22:54:58 2026
    Re: Re: C64 Reborn
    By: poindexter FORTRAN to niter3 on Thu Jan 01 2026 09:39:26

    My first solo apartment was a studio in downtown San Francisco. Old, art deco building with a huge walk-in closet. I took one of my parent's
    cast-off end-tables, a cast-off IBM AT clone from work, and set up my
    BBS in that closet.

    Parallel occurance: My first apartment was on the West side of Detroit. A non-descript, three-story building. It was here I got my first PC clone which came with an internal, 1200 baud modem, hence, my first foray in BBSes. Even ran one for a short time called "Get Serious". Since the phone jack was (stupidly) in the dining area, for a time, my setup made its home on the dining table, which was fine as I didn't use it much; I liked to eat watching TV. Eventually, it ended up on in my bedroom on an old sewing desk that my Ma game me.

    My green monochrome monitor ended up getting burned in with the FrontDoor WFC screen.

    Why didn't you shut off the monitor when not needed?
    --- SBBSecho 3.31-Linux
    * Origin: End Of The Line BBS - endofthelinebbs.com (21:2/101)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Mortar M. on Fri Jan 2 12:18:12 2026
    Mortar M. wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

    My green monochrome monitor ended up getting burned in with the FrontDoor WFC screen.

    Why didn't you shut off the monitor when not needed?

    I liked the green glow at night. :)



    --- MultiMail/Win v0.52
    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Adept on Fri Jan 2 12:18:12 2026
    Adept wrote to Mortar M. <=-

    (I kid, but only slightly. I think active sysops wanted to know what
    was going on with their BBS, and that includes knowing that the system
    is down because something odd was on the screen. And during the night, clearly the screen was functioning as a nightlight.)

    In 1991, I went to SCO for a 5-day UNIX class. I rebooted the BBS,
    figured all would be OK. A day or so into it, the BBS rang no answer.
    Not much I could do about it.

    I got back into my apartment, and saw the problem. FrontDoor couldn't
    initialize the modem, and so it gave up and the batch file looped back
    to restart it. repeated over and over, about once every 45 seconds.

    The problem was that each time it exited, it let out a little SOS in
    morse code through the PC speaker. Every 45 seconds. 24 hours a day.
    For 4 days straight. I'm glad I didn't run into my next door neighbor
    after that!



    --- MultiMail/Win v0.52
    * Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)