The Master Computer
===================

"Chris (Master Com) had already been running his BBS out of his
basement bedroom for several months when I first met him in 1991
or so. The circumstances around meeting him were a bit odd. A
mutual acquaintance had given me the BBS number, but at the time I
was only running a cheap 1200, so I was actually too embarrassed
to call. Instead I gave the number to my friend John (Sojourner),
who called up right away, became friends with Chris, and soon
after became co-sysop. It wasn't until several months later that I
managed to upgrade my modem and got on the board. By that time,
Chris knew who I was, and it wasn't long before I was co-sysop as
well. At first the board wasn't affiliated with anyone, we just
soaked up as many pirated games from other local boards as we
could. I joined GRiM in 1992, and then GRiM merged with iCE, so
the board became an unofficial distribution site, by virtue of me
putting up iCE releases in the Files section. Chris also worked on
an early version of what would eventually become iCEView. Several
years later, the board became an official distribution site for a
local demo group Renaissance, though Chris never programmed
anything for them, preferring to work on his own projects with no
deadlines. Chris was notorious for ignoring chat requests, even
from his co-sysops. One thing we took advantage of was the fact
that at the time, his PC was running with a very noisy 65MB
Seagate hard drive, so John wrote a batch file that ran 'dir /s'
from the root directory, and we would login to the board, drop to
a DOS prompt and run the file, and the noise was enough to wake
Chris up at 3am to chat. When he finally replaced the drive with a
new (and quiet) 150MB Western Digital, we edited the batch file to
echo a bunch of ^Gs to the screen, and the continuous beeping
would do the trick. Chris started out running Telegard, and used
that for most of the time the board was up. Later on, he
experimented briefly with Renegade, but was thoroughly unimpressed
with it (his opinion was that it was basically just Telegard 'with
a few things tacked on'). We tried Oblivion/2 for several months
before Chris got it into his head that he could write a better BBS
program than what was already out there. The result was OpticNet,
which if I recall correctly he actually got up and running for a
few months before getting bored with the whole project, and with
BBSs in general. By this time, the internet was gaining
popularity, so the board didn't stay active for too much longer."
- Ben Morgan

Phone   : 516-437-6749
Place   : Bellerose, NY
Years   : 1991 - 1994
Sysop   : Master Com, The Necromancer, Sojourner
Software: Oblivion/2, OpticNet, Renegade, Telegard

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/
.