Entirely possible. There were a number of folks who subscribed to the system who weren't local to it, many of whom would F'Req (pronounced "Freak", short for "File Request" for those onlookers who didn't know) files from me via the D'Bridge machine to save on long-distance.
The name of the board was PC-Help BBS. It didn't have the line count of some of the larger ones, but man did it have files and messages.
I don't remember why I stopped at 10 lines (I know the version of RemoteAccess I used was only licensed for 10, but I *think* there was a 250-line version available), as it was a common occurrence to see all 10 lines tied up, but I'm glad now that I didn't go past that number. Would've been a bigger financial hurt to get out of it.
One lesson (of many) I took from running the BBSes was that "lifetime" subscriptions is a big no-no. Even mentioned that in one of my articles. I offered them for a little while but did away with them about a year before I shut it down (www was looming on the horizon). During the entire life of the BBS, the monthly subscriptions were the bread and butter. I liked seeing the occasional 6-month or 12-month subscription, but knew I'd never see another dime from those folks for that amount of time.
There were many folks who subscribed to that board a month at a time for years. I don't remember the exact figure, but it was along the lines of 80% of my income being from monthly subscriptions.
Monthly subscriptions initially were a pain ($5.95 per month, if I remember right) because I'd have to manually fill out a ticket for each transaction then submit them to the bank in batches, having 20% consistently come back declined or an invalid credit card number or disputed down the road because a kid had used Dad's card without his permission.
It was such a pain I ended up writing software to handle it and, long story short, it would process the credit card while the user was online and reduced chargebacks to about 5%. Back in the early 90's. When electronic credit card terminals were still pretty new, I had one of the few PC-based ones. The guy at MAPP who ran through the certification testing with me told me it was the first he was aware of. But I never marketed it. It solved an immediate problem of mine and I left it at that. In additon to running BBSes, I was way overbooked doing programming for other companies. Although when I mentioned it years later to another company who was developing a similar system for themselves, I ended up with that task on my too-full plate. If you're a corporate employee, you never let them know you've got expertise to handle another project -- if you're a consultant, you *always* do so. <g>
For a while, I ran another board on the same phone lines (user-selectable upon connection) called "Xanadu", and it was a very elegant exercise in creative use of BAT files and environment variables, but it was prone to bugs that John and I never could quite nail down. One of the few times either of us admitted defeat in the face of a problem on a computer. After all these years, I still occasionally ponder what on earth was causing the problems; namely people signing on to one board and occasionally being redirected to the other mid-session.
The 2-line board I started on the side ran on TBBS (The Bread Board System) which was an extremely cool environment that you could run on xBase code. I fell in love with TBBS when I was hired to write an online xBase system for a used-computer reseller.
My TBBS board was called Compu-Home, and it was a very aggressive effort. I wrote it all from scratch. People would log onto it and use it to look for homes for sale based on certain criteria, then browse the results, including pictures (painful in the days of 14.4k modems), and if they saw one they were interested in, they could click a button, which would create a semaphore file (I've always loved using semaphore files and still use them to this day) which one of my workhorse machines would see show up on the network, parse info from it (agent name, pager number, house address, user name and phone number), and call the agent's pager (come to think of it -- there's another phone line I forgot to count) and send them the relevant text.
There were users who told me they couldn't believe how well it worked because they'd sometimes get a call from the realtor while they were still browsing home listings.
I bought a laptop, rented an overhead display, and put on dog and pony shows all over town showing it off to realtors. The users showed up in droves. Since I managed the KC BBS list, I made sure Compu-Home appeared in it and also advertised it on PC-Help. Two phone lines wasn't anywhere near enough for that one, but I was developing it on limited funds, and buying a version of TBBS that'd handle more lines, along with the hardware cost, was just not in the budget.
I gave every interested realtor a month of free listings on the system (and had all of the JD Reese listings quickly), then billed them after the free time was expired.
Of the dozens of invoices I sent out, only one got paid. So rather than deal with also having to be into collections, I shut it down in disgust.
I thought it was a terribly elegant solution and I was really proud of it, but I was underfunded and had underestimated the percentage of deadbeat realtors (I'd called for 20% in the business plan).
Today, JD Reese's website, who I showed Compu-Home to the most, looks amazingly like Compu-Home. <g>
Over the course of 10 years, PC-Help taught me a lot which I consider very relevant to internet message boards (which only Brad, Jeff, Jill, and Shannon agreed with me on in all of GNET/INSP), but it was with Compu-Home that I really got "taken to school". |
