BBS Name: USS Enterprise BBS Number: (810) 775-0018 (please note that 810 was split from 313 - feel free to list as a 313 along with other "Detroit & Suburbs" BBSes) Sysop: Fdisk (that's me) CoSysops: Lord Ith (John Brenda), Andy LaPorte Software Run: T.A.G. - latest version run was 2.6c Years of Operation: 1993-1997 The USS Enterprise started out as a fairly meager operation. In 1991, I was only a freshman in high school and I bought the best computer I could afford: an IBM PS/1. It was a 286 10MHz system with 1MB of RAM, a 30MB hard drive and 2400 bps modem. That was quite a step forward from my first computer, which was a Laser 128 (Apple II clone). In the spring of 1992, I persuaded my parents to order a second phone line and I activated my 3-months-free Prodigy membership that I got for buying the computer. I enjoyed using Prodigy, but some of my other geek friends had mentioned that there were other methods of communication out there: BBSes. Rite Way Computers, a computer store near me (that has since gone out of business), gave me their BBS phone number. At the time, I only had Microsoft Works for DOS, which had a very rudimentary terminal program in it. It was good enough for me to get onto Rite Way. I poked around the BBS, being new to the community. I wanted to learn as much as I could about how they worked, what was available and who was on them. Since I was a kid, I always tore things apart to see what made them tick. BBSes were no different. I was a computer geek in training and I wanted to know it all. I found an interesting BBS on Rite Way's BBS list: the Patch Line. Patch, the sysop there, took me under his wing, so to speak. He helped me to understand the concepts of uploading, downloading and using the message systems. Being young, I made a couple breeches of etiquette...Patch helped me to understand what I had done and really helped me to become a much better member of the BBS community. In addition, he pointed me to a fantastic application called Telix. Whoa...the BBS world got a lot prettier once I could see all the ANSI graphics! As I grew in the BBS community, I took a permanent identity: Fdisk. I liked the name because it was the name of the program that could quickly and easily screw up your entire hard drive with minimal effort. I was an active member on over a dozen boards, primarily in the files and message areas. I wasn't heavy into the games, although I enjoyed the games BRE (Barren Realms Elite), SRE (Solar Realms Elite) and Drug Lord. It didn't take me long to realize that 2400 baud was dreadfully slow. It took over 1¼ hours to download a 1MB file! (With today's cable modems, I don't think twice about downloading a 134MB Windows service pack from Microsoft.) I launched the USS Enterprise BBS in 1993 after I garnered enough information that I felt I could launch a BBS. Being in high school, my parents (especially my mother) didn't like the idea of me leaving a computer running 24 hours a day, so the first year or two of the BBS was kind of shaky, running only 12-15 hours each day. It was good enough for most of my users, though...but I still would've much preferred to run 24 hours for nighttime users and also to participate in networked messaging such as FidoNet and D*A*R*E Net, which had agents that ran at night--times when my BBS was offline. Running a BBS chewed through my 30MB hard drive really fast, even running DoubleSpace. In 1995, I bought myself a high school graduation present, a Pentium 100MHz Acer computer with 16MB of RAM and a 1GB hard drive. In addition, it had a 28.8 modem. At last, I was up to speed with the BBSes in my area. In addition, the USS Enterprise went to 24-hour operation, despite my mother fretting that I was going to "burn the house down" running so much equipment. I continued to live at home as I started college. I went to Wayne State University on a 4-year scholarship to pursue a degree in Computer Science. The USS Enterprise continued to run. The year 1996 rolled around, and I saw my user base was slowly drifting away. The World Wide Web and other features of the Internet such as FTP started taking their foothold. More and more, students in the computer labs weren't just there to type up reports, but they were there to surf the Web. My message bases started to starve. Calls dwindled to just a couple per day...then a couple per week. I upgraded to a 33.6 modem, but it did no good. Even adding a new 2GB drive, boosting the OS to 3GB in storage. In 1997, I made a difficult decision. I was running Windows 98 beta, and with that (as well as Windows 95), I could run the BBS and still do my own work on the PC. However, it seemed pointless to continue the operation when hardly anyone was using it. I decided that if it went one full month without any calls, I would shut it down. In August of 1997, that fateful day came. I deleted the batch file that invoked the BBS when Windows booted up and archived the entire system to backup tape. It was a sad day; I very much enjoyed the days of dialing up to a BBS to "surf" -- browsing files and reading/writing messages. It was a hobby that I loved. But the Internet had gotten just about everyone's undivided attention. Around the same time, most of the BBSes in my area had discontinued operations. I can remember the days when Sysops would host "BBS parties" at the park for sysops and users to get together to meet each other in person. They were all good, fun people...and die-hard computer geeks! They were definitely a tight-knit community. It was good to know them, although I have not spoken with many of them in years. I wasn't about to give up being a sysop, though. I latched on to Web development and took to learning HTML, JavaScript, Java and any other technology I could get my hands on. I started to develop personal web pages. It was, and still is, a lot of fun to do. I was hired by EDS in May, 1998 to do Lotus Notes/Domino and Web development as a student co-op. In December of 1999, I graduated with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science, cum laude. I was promoted at EDS from Student Co-Op to Information Analyst and continued my work. I am still there today, performing a wide variety of tasks. Many of them still involve working with Notes and Domino, but also with Microsoft technologies such as SharePoint Portal Server and .NET. I'm also pursuing my Masters degree, which will enable me to teach computer classes part time at Macomb Community College near my house. I've always enjoyed teaching (I used to tutor at Macomb). One of the first sessions I would like to teach is a lot of what I'm telling you here. A lot of the students will be fresh out of high school and, sadly, many will have no idea what a BBS is, or was. They deserve to know about them....they are a part of our history. Just like Dr. Václav Rajlich, one of my favorite professors at Wayne State, likes to refer to the days of punch cards as the "good old days" of computers...to me, BBSes and 5¼ floppy disks are the "good old days" of computers. Heck, when I worked at Macomb Community College as a computer lab technician, I was exposed to 8" floppy disks, huge removable disk packs and 14" hard drives that hold less than 1% of today's new hard drives (the DEC RA-81 hard drive). And I'll never forget the old-fashioned reel-to-reel DEC TU-80 tape drives...and the good old 6250 bpi tapes that ran in them. Recently I dug out the backup tapes containing the USS Enterprise and did a full restore of the system and brought it back online. The T.A.G. software behaves a little goofy because it is not Y2K compliant, but it's still functional. I have three computers now...the Acer Pentium is in the basement, although it is up to 166MHz and 80MB of RAM. It has 2 x 10K Ultra3 SCSI drives, one that's 9GB, the other, 18GB. There's also a small RAID-5 array, which houses the BBS, attached to it. It runs the BBS software on Windows 2000 Advanced Server...and it does quite a fine job of it too, even with IIS running! My main computer has Windows XP Professional running on an AMD Duron 1.0GHz processor with 512MB of RAM and almost 80GB of disk space.. That runs a Lotus Domino Server. Both the basement computer and my main computer have DLT 2000 (15/30GB) drives attached. And then there's my EDS-issued laptop, which also runs XP Pro. It's a P3 1.13GHz with 512MB of RAM and a 30GB hard drive. It's running all sorts of development software, including Domino and Visual Studio .NET. As you can see, I'm a full-blown computer geek who has no plans of slowing down. But even with all the great technology that we have and all the powerful hardware I have at my ready disposal for what I do, there are days when I miss the good ol' BBS days. How nice it would be if I could call the Patch Line just one more time... Best regards, Matthew Sawyer msawyer91@comcast.net