The T.A.R.D.I.S BBS =================== "I ran this BBS for many years, it started out in Terre Haute, Indiana and then moved to Indianapolis. The main point of this BBS was the wonderful message system and it's e-mail. In those days the BBS community was primarily a place where IBM files were exchanged, not much interest was made on community and comversation. This BBS was outside the norm in that there were very few downloads and literally millions of messages. It ran on a single phone line with a sysop screen where I could see what was going on. At the end the system had passed over 11 million e-mail messages between the users and there were over 40,000 messages on the active system. The end came when a few BAD users found a weakness in the error correcting modem technology and began war dialing the system to lock up the modem and shut down the system, this always required the sysop to manually reset the system, the software was never upgraded to allow for the error correcting modems to work right. In the end, the system was too hard to maintain after months of the war dialing and was shut down. The children who were responsible for the shut down, in the end, were found out and did pay the penalty, but a good and fun community BBS never recovered and soon the Internet came and BBS times were over. It was fun while it lasted." - Thomas O'Nan "I'd like to add something about the TARDIS bbs. I was one of it's users and think it's a shame what happened to it, we all loved this bbs for many years as it was a community. But more than that Doc provided something different, a ladies only section that was really for the ladies only, I mean he let us run that part of his board, even he stayed out of it, he had a couple of other ladies who were cosysops who ran the ladies board. During the BBS years when a female got on a BBS it was usually a nightmare with all sorts of people hitting on you, Doc didn't allow that, he kept the peace, he also didn't allow flame wars like you'd see on many other boards. I know that you also didn't want to get on his bad side, if you did, you would loose your privileges, one user got way out of hand at one time and Doc didn't kick him off, he just restricted him to the Red Button and Logoff commands. The bbs itself was pretty neat, it was based on the Doctor Who TV show and had many references to the show placed in it, but if you didn't know anything about Doctor Who, you could still get around, there was a general bbs room, a science room, a teen room, the ladies room, an adult room and a few more. There was a little download area for those would couldn't live without one and there were a few games. He also had a strange sense of humor, like a command button called THE RED BUTTON (never push), and warnings all over the place about not pushing the red button, of course you HAD to push it, and guess what, you were instantly logged off and disconnected, no damage though. He also had an Eliza program that many thought really was The Doctor, a couple of simple games and if he was there, you could page him to chat. Because some people would monopolize the board playing games there were time limits, this helped because it was only a single line BBS, if you participated a lot in the conversations, you would be given more time. It was neat, I'd sometimes take much of my time reading everything that people had to say, then I'd have to come back again to say what I wanted to say, Doc ended up giving me two more hours of time because I was a good girl :) I don't know where Doc is now, but I've always wanted to thank him for doing what he did and putting up with us. Thanks." - Tilly M Phone : 317-271-5059 Place : Indianapolis, IN Years : 1985 - 1992 Sysop : The Doctor, Thomas O'Nan Handles : Doc or Tom O'Nan Software: Prime for Apple //e 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/ .