Warning: This blog entry is highly geeky and non-computer nerds will find it boring.

I check on my bbs a few times a week to make sure it's still up and running. I'm surprised that it has regular callers. I checked a telnet bbs list (which says it verifies that each bbs is still running every 30 and 60 days). There are 457 active telnet bbs's listed on their list. There are other lists out there. Amazing! I remember when the monthly bbs lists for your local area would become available. I was always so eager to try out a new local bbs.

This reminds me a bit of my first days using the Internet and websites back in 1994. There weren't that many search engines out there and the ones that did exist weren't that great. Back then I didn't fully understand everything anyway (I was 12). We had a thick "phone book" but for websites. There seemed to be so few they could be listed in a 2" thick book! Before we got that book, I thought the only sites on the intenet were the handful that I had visited. Any time I heard about a new website to check out it was an exciting thing, like finding out about a new local bbs. My first browser was Spry Mosaic 1.0. At the time I didn't realize how cool it was to be using the first graphical web browser. Well technically it was NCSA Mosaic before they licensed it to Spry.

Shortly after version 2.0 came out and we bought it in a kit called Internet In A Box. That kit came with a web browser, email client, ftp client, gopher client, archie client, etc... I don't remember how long after, but one Halloween I was looking for Halloween sites and found one that Microsoft made. It wouldn't let me in unless I used IE. I think IE 1.0 or 2.0 was pre-installed with Windows 95 so I tried it there. It supported background pictures, background music, and seemed so much richer. All the sites I used to visit looked different in IE. I didn't realize there was more to them, and that Mosaic didn't support the newer HTML stuff.

This entry seems like a trip down memory lane. Well I'll get it all out :) About a year later I was in grade 8 and we had to make a brochure for something. I decided to do one on Central Park. I did all my research on the Internet using IE and sumbled upon centralpark.com. It wouldn't let me in unless I was using Netscape 3.0. I installed it, then went back to the site. I was shocked... now there were frames, and popup windows that controlled navigation of windows below it. This was just fantastic. It supported all the other things IE did too, so I stuck with Netscape for a couple years until I realized how bad Netscape 4 was at rendering things. That's when I switched back to IE for a couple years. Then onto Netscape 6, back to IE, then to Mozilla... where I am today.

Ok just one last thing to talk about. Remember I talked about the first time I ever used IE for a Halloween site? I discovered that all the websites I was visiting before had more to them what I knew about when viewing them with Mosaic. I had the same experience with BBSing. I was using the Windows 3.1 terminal program to call my first few BBS's. There was no colour and it didn't support high ASCII so you had to use your imagination to make out the pictures someone drew. I thought it was pretty neat. I spent most of my time on a BBS called Floppies; the first BBS I ever called. On there I frequently used FidoNet and file areas. Anyway.. one day I was at a friend's house and his dad used to use the same BBS. He was using Procomm Plus, a program I had never heard of. I watched him log in and saw colour, high ascii, and real pictures!! I had no idea that bbs's were colour and the crappy pictures shown in low-ascii on my PC actually looked like pictures with a terminal capable of high-ascii. Procomm Plus also had an auto-dialer that would cycle through the BBS list in the phone book until it could connect to one that didn't have a busy signal. I could watch tv for 30 mins and when it finally connected to a BBS it would play a sound in the speakers letting me know. Ahh the good'ol days of BBSing :) For some reason I later switched to Telix and used that for the rest of my dialup BBS days. Now for telnet BBSing I use Hyperterminal on Windows because it renders ANSI flawlessly, and supports ZModem.

On google search for "gamesrv". That's a popular program for bridging DOS dial-up BBS software to Telnet. My HOW-TO shows up as the second hit. Now search for "runtime error 200 bbs". My HOW-TO shows up as the #1 link! Runtime error 200 happens on BBS door games written in Pascal. Something to do with the Y2K problem. I put links to some programs that can either patch your EXEs or that run a TSR that patches them in memory. I wrote both of these myself, of course. Hah I wish..