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Pastimes : The Death of Silicon Investor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: (Bob) Zumbrunnen who wrote (578)	4/10/2002 1:13:05 AM
From: EL KABONG!!!	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1003

Never a SysOp myself, but I knew a couple of guys that were. One I worked with at the colleges, and the other was just some guy I had met at the airport and saw in Las Vegas a few times. The guy I worked with often shared information about his board, mainly the costs. <g> He must of spent something like $40K of his own money on equipment and software and telephone bills. We used to chip in something like $10 a month to help defray the costs of the telephone lines (he had something like 10 or so). We played Trade Wars on his board. The other guy also ran a Trade Wars game, but he was more into setting up a site for young women to talk on. As SysOp, he could "listen" in on the conversation (which was nothing more than a small database of stored text presented sequentially so it appeared to be a conversation). His idea was to be able to meet young ladies whose style he liked from their conversations. Funny thing is that both of them ended up divorced. The guy I worked with spent too much time and money on his board, neglecting his wife, and the other guy got caught dating the fruits of his labor. <g> As for me, that particular point in time was not particularly prosperous for my wife and me, so I never got into the SysOp thing, though I probably would have loved it. Maybe having less wealth at the time saved my marriage. Who knows? <g> Trade Wars was a great, great game. I played on about 5 different boards. The expensive one was named something like The Raven's Nest and was in Washington or Oregon. I used to write down all of my moves in advance on 3x5 cards. To dial into them was long distance for me, but they had the best players in the country on their board. The long distance charges were too much to handle financially, so I had to drop off of their board and just play locally. The problem with the game was that there were too many non-serious players on the boards, and they would tie up the telephone lines. They'd all eventually get killed every night, fattening up better players. I'd love to play again. Too bad that no one ever re-wrote the game to be played on the Internet. The graphics offered by Internet games are fine, but there's nothing like the older games where you had to use your imagination to "visualize" enemies and planets and stars and stuff. I miss playing Trade Wars... KJC