Infinity ACI BBS ================ "Hello! My BBS number was 914-228-4321. The only mention I have found of my BBS here in the Google/internet age was in an archive of FidoNet boards here: http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/reference/net-directory/host-tables/FIDONet-Hosts.txt. There is also an entry into the FidoNet History Project here: http://ambrosia60.dd-dns.de/fidonet/nlarchive2.php?e=Infinity+ACI. Here is my history below: "I was the SysOp of the Infinity ACI BBS in roughly the 1988-ish to 1992 timeframe. It was an Amiga BBS and it felt like I changed BBS software every few months, given the fact that Amiga BBS software was, in general, the product of mostly amateur efforts of middling stability and almost no support. I absolutely adored BBS'ing, especially growing up as a teenager in an obscure rural area (Putnam County), with obscure teenage interests (Sci-Fi, history, politics, science), using an obscure computer system (the Amiga). So the universe of BBS'ing was for me a proxy way to explore both the world and myself. The power of computers to connect people and communities that we take for granted today was new and intoxicating during that era, especially for teens, and it had the additional allure of feeling very forbidden and "underground." Enjoying BBS's as I did, starting one became a no-brainer in high school once I convinced my parents to purchase some additional phone lines. I can't praise my parents enough. They poured time, money, and effort into helping me start what almost became a round-the-clock enterprise despite their occasional concern and their incomplete understanding of what I was doing. How perplexed (and patient) they must have been to see my Amiga running 24 hours a day, the CPU fan audible around the house, as modem connect tones punctuated the quiet at all hours of the day and night! In the middle of dinner, a connect tone would ring out and I would jump down and run to my room to see who was on my BBS and what they were doing. I don't remember why I named the BBS what I did. I vaguely remember that the Infiniti car brand was about to soon launch in the US (which they later did in 1990) and remember feeling that the name did indeed sound somewhat upscale but I disliked Nissan.s silly, deliberate misspelling with the .i. at the end. So I thought I would beat them to the use of the name and spell it correctly. The infinity symbol was great fodder for a logo as well. The ACI? I have no idea. Acronyms seemed very adult and official. I don't know if the "A" was a play on my last name or Amiga. The "C" and "I" are lost to the dark recesses of my memory. The most fun I had was in doing animated and elborate ANSI menus for the BBS, a feature most users viewed once, praised, and then promptly turned off in favor of simplified text menus. I had some active forums on my site, especially relating to the Amiga, Star Trek, and some regional issues. I tried emulating the America Online thing in vogue at the time by joining FidoNet and, I think, ICN (see The Brewster BBS). In fact, I joined what felt like every available message network and it often felt like my BBS spent as much time doing timed dialing out to exchange messages as it was available for people to dial in. In fact, I have vague memories of one phone line being exclusively used for networking and another being used for dial-in. In short order, my BBS rapidly developed a reputation for being *the* place to go in my zone of the 914 area code for networked message forums, something that was helped by the fact that Amiga BBS software at the time seemed far ahead of its PC counterparts in forum organization and management. I even tried doing updated local weather, a local visitors guide (something I started long before when I had a Commodore 128), something resembling journalism for my local community, and opinion pieces. At the BBS's peak, I probably had 2 or 3 phone lines and several users per hour and a few even paid me for "upgraded" access. I, for about 5 minutes, tried to establish an Amiga "warez" scene on the BBS which immediately failed due to my lack of cred in that community and due to a general lack of Amiga users in my area code. I got to know several of my online users very well and even met one or two in the real world. My experience keeping the BBS cobbled together, attractive, and operating became increasingly difficult as the technology, boardering the proto-internet age, started to zoom ahead. I rapidly hit the ceiling of my self-taught technical knowledge at the end of high school and was keeping things going by trial and error, the advice of generous experts on help forums, and by sheer will. It was increasingly apparent that computer-based connectivity was professionalizing, separating the truly knowledgeable from us mere tinkering hobbyists. The best BBS operators started to become people who did IT for a living or were purposefully taking computer networking or graphics design courses to keep themselves relevant as BBS.s became websites. Like many, I shut everything down before leaving home for college, which was less an event than I had imagined it would be, as my user base began to dwindle as the overall Amiga and BBS communities both entered their twilights. At the end, I ha d maybe 3 or 4 daily users. While I'm still amazed that the average American lives in a society that is drenched in a style of 24/7 connectivity far outstripping anything of my BBS youth, I can't help but feel sad that something from that BBS age has been lost." - Bret Ancowitz Phone : 914-228-4321 Place : Carmel, NY Years : 1988 - 1992 Sysop : Bret Ancowitz Listed by telephone number, as they all were. A few of these boards did reach the web: see recoveries-002.txt. Source : bbslist.textfiles.com, compiled by Jason Scott ------------------------------------------------------------------ gopher://hp84.com/ | https://ge97.com/ .