My BBS started out on an XT (Turbo, at that) with a 30-meg hard drive. I started it as soon as the 30-meg became affordable. At like $500. Later I ran two nodes under DesqView on a 286/10 (a real trick involving a ton of knowledge I'll never use again), and later went through routes like a pair of 40-meg MFM drives on a Perstor controller (making them hold 80 meg each), and later a single 486/66 running 4 nodes, but slowly and with every slot occupied, then the switch to Netware with each node of the BBS running on its own 386/40. Quickly ran up to 10 nodes on that setup (had a wall full of computers and a big whiteboard on which I kept the configuration figured out) and rolled out another 2-node BBS on the side and had a couple of CD jukeboxes for a total of 24 CD's online all accessible in realtime, a couple of 1+ gig IDE hard drives and a pair of Micropolis 9-gig SCSI drives (at $1995 each). And 16 meg of ram in the fileserver. <g>
The phone company put a commercial box on the side of my house and buried a bundle of wire in my back yard and ran it to their switching office. Neighbors buried coax running to my house so they could use my server for storage.
At the peak, we had a ton of machines in the house:
BBS nodes: 12
File Server: 1
CD Server: 1
Maintenance/workhorse machines: 2
Personal family machines: 4
D'Bridge machine (for pulling down file and message echos)
Looks like I had a total of 21 machines there. And 15 phone lines. In a house. Punch-down blocks in a closet for phone lines and network connections. Computers, network wiring, and phone wiring all over the place. About 36 gig of combined optical and magnetic storage (largest in the country at the time), at a time when personal hard drives were at about 170 meg. Carried the entire Fido backbone and moderated a number of echos (threads) on it.
No matter how many phones lines I had (once I had a couple of them), subscription income seemed to always run about double my total phone bill. Problem was the hardware and software kept me in the red. An unusually profitable BBS if hardware were free.
When usage started tapering off and I saw what the internet variety of message boards was going to do to BBSes like mine, I looked into making mine internet-friendly, and even bought the latest version of WildCat, which was supposed to do that, but when I found I'd have to write programs to import the thousands of users, and hundreds of thousands of messages and tens of thousands of files, and the authors of WildCat were not forthcoming with the necessary file structures, I ditched that software. Thinking further on it, I got the feeling that the internet variety would evolve into something that wouldn't leave room for the old style BBS simply attached to the internet, so I shut it down.
To get an idea of "deafening silence", spend a few years in a basement room FULL of computers, then suddenly shut them all off. Pretty unique auditory experience.
Actually, it sounds a bit like the BBS in my office right now.
I've got my machine, the internet connection server, and two new machines (to be colocated at the ISP Wednesday for various purposes) all running in here right now. A bit noisy. |
