Subj : Back from the dead
To   : All
From : hyjinx
Date : Fri May 16 2025 16:52:38

Heya everyone,

It is I, Al, hyjinx the 3rd of the New Zealand kind.

I wanted to drop by and say hello. It has been too long my dear friends. 

Trouble is, I'm always working these days, my business demands so much of me,
and then the remaining time I'm either making the odd little video here and
there, or I'm with the missus or the kid doing family gubbins.
Now, one of the things I really wanted to do was combine my passion for
working on my old PCs and being able to practically call up BBSes at the
same time. This involved a bunch of things to be a reality. However, today,
I write this from my IBM 5160/XT, now with upgraded Intel InBoard/386
goodness. Yes, my XT (which originally had a sucky 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU and an
8-bit bus), is now running in 32 bits with a 386-16MHz CPU. This is all
courtesy of a rare beast of a card from Intel, which I spent faaaar too much
money on on Ebay. I will be uploading the video to my Patreon supporters very
soon. YouTubes sometime later.

Naturally, I am chuffed about the performance this gives, but it opens up
doors to multi-tasking in a way that the 8088 or 80286 could not. So now, I
can launch the microweb web browser in a separate DesqView window, or write a
doc in word, and the BBS will still stay connected. This may sound like 'so
what, I have an Amiga pal, I've been doing that shit since 1985', but for the
IBM PC under plain-jane DOS, it wasn't a thing. You had to quit an app,
launch another and then do a dance. Then there was networking. If you wanted
TCP/IP, you could only ever have one app access the packet driver at once.
Anything else, and the app would crash. No longer! I have figured out
something called PKTMUX, which is a packet driver multiplexer, essentially
you can load up multiple packet drivers that pull from the main packet driver
and they just have different driver interrupts (i.e. 0x60 for the main
driver, 0x65 for mux1 and, say 0x70 for mux2). Works like a charm!

Some other weirdo out there will find this fascinating.... or is it just me?!
I have Ltning on my Discord channel to thank for this (he runs a BBS
somewhere), and I also have Michael Brutman for pointing me in the right
direction. 

Now, will I say "I'm back, baby".. .Back to the BBS scene? Not totally. I
have quite a bit of busyness that won't go away any time soon. What I will be
doing, is coming along more.

Anyways I've prattled on long enough now. 

Yours in cyberspace,
Mr "Back to the BBS".

Al / hyjinx


hyjinx // Alistair Ross
Author of 'Back to the BBS' Documentary: https://bit.ly/3tRINeL (YouTube)
alsgeeklab.com

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