Changing jobs makes you reflect. It's an interesting effect. Since I'm now working for a Cloud Computing company now I randomly remembered that I had run a hosting service once before. I ran a BBS in 1991 for about a year from my living room. Yes, yes, it was fine and upstanding to be sure. I ran a trade wars server and did some friendly file swapping here and there. I had the occasional online chat from the console since I ran the thing. You could actually be "paged" by the people logged on if you can imagine that. Of course, the internet had been around for a while and it was even available in various ways to commercial interests at this time. But, the real news was that the world wide web was announced this same year in August. That was the revolution I suppose and it sure did kill BBS's fast!

For today's reflection I give you... The Final BBS by Kent Langley *laughs*

Thanks to http://bbslist.textfiles.com/502/ for hanging on to a little piece of my history like that.

Please don't call that number. It probably belongs to humans now who won't appreciate a phone call looking for a BBS that has been gone for *gasp* 17 years.

A little later I never looked back when I got my first SLIP dial-up account and searched all 10-12 web sites I could find with Mosaic. Fun. Geeky. But still fun! I think that modem was 28,800 if I recall correctly. Much faster than the first 300 baud modem I ever used with my Commodore 128 a few years earlier to run up a monster phone bill my friend Brian's parents did not find funny at all. Ah the memories.

For Next week? Memoirs of Fortran and Pascal on a VAX.

We aplogize for this interuption and now return you your regularly scheduled programs. Cloud Computing, Scalability, and IT.