Thumper's Tech History

In the sixth grade, I started working with my TAG teacher who had gotten involved with using the 300 baud modem on his Mac classic to try to connect to other computers of other teachers around the country. He had developed some theories about the educational use of communication electronically between teachers and students around the country and world. As part of one of those projects, he led a session at a conference for NYCENET (New York City Educational Network) in New York. As part of his demonstration, I called in with the computer from our middle school in Eugene, Oregon and carried on a conversation with him and asked and responded to questions of these teachers on the other side of the country in real time. It doesn’t seem like a lot now, but in 1987, it was a big enough deal to earn me an award from NYCENET for my participation in the project.

Also in the sixth grade I had set up my own 300 baud modem on my C64 at home and joined up on several of the local BBS’s. For a few months I learned my way around message boards and online games and met several other local BBSers and quickly learned that the only local BBS list had pretty much gone defunct and was way out of date. I decided to start my own list and as a place to keep it and publish it, I set up my own BBS. I worked with a gentleman who’s name I don’t recall anymore but damn was he the most patient guy in the world. He worked for a car dealership in Junction City just north of Eugene, and I must have called him a dozen times a day for nearly two weeks while I worked to set up my first BBS on my C64. He sold me the All American BBS (AABBS) software I was using for my first board and had set it up in the past, so he was basically my only resource in setting it up. It took some convincing to get my parents to foot the bill for the extra phone line but I was able to buy most of the software and hardware I needed from money I was making over the summer mowing neighbors’ lawns.

I named my BBS after the handle I was using on local BBS’s, the Alien BBS. My new BBS list I was publishing was of course called the Alien BBS list. I found early on that someone had used my normal nickname on all the local boards, so when I was stuck to make a new name, I just happen to have a copy of one of my favorite video games, Aliens, next to me. Over the next 2 years I added other drives to store games and files and networked message boards with other systems around the northwest. I also upgraded to the Image BBS software to add more capabilities to network with other systems. I learned I as I expanded my contact with other BBS' around the country that I was the youngest Sysop at the time that anyone knew of at barely 11 years old.

The board grew in size, users, complexity and functionality until I ‘loaned’ the entire system to some friends over the summer while my family was on vacation for a few weeks traveling around the country. When I returned I found they had pretty much run the system into the ground, pissed off all the users. The somehow had broken most of the hardware and I didn’t have the resources to rebuild it at that point. Thus was the end of the Alien BBS, but not of my presence on local BBS' or of my BBS list which I kept going for a couple more years.

During high school I moved up to the PC world with my first 8086 then 386 and eventually 486 with a blazing fast 14.4 modem that I used to connect to the various local systems. I met several new friends and got involved in various message boards and online games that kept me entertained. I started to learn the basics of programming writing scripts and cheats for various online games, particularly Tele-Arena. There are times when I miss playing with the old dos comm. programs and slow modems and chatting with locals, but the Internet opened a whole new world of opportunities and suddenly I saw the technology my Tag teacher in 6th grade needed for his global learning ideas finally coming into existence.