image 91 The Goldfish BBS welcome screen.

Goldfish BBS was going to be an interesting last hurrah of the community BBS.  So prior to my senior year of high school, I had run what is potentially considered the same BBS under a slew of names. The original one Sarlacc BBS was in junior high. As we know that turned into another BBS, then another, and then finally leading up to senior year of High School we left off with Deathrow, the logical renewed Sarlacc BBS modified from Imperial City.

By late 1994, logging onto Purgatory and TCR weren’t regular occurrences. Our friend Graham kept his BBS titled Black Horizons going for years was and was an occasional check in. But with the inclusion of the internet and not as much pirating going on the BBS stuff slowed down drastically post Deathrow. A lot of the older girls I met during the summer of 1993 graduated in 94. Tom moved out and I believe got a job with Apple, leaving just Alyssa and Cy from those initial summer of 1993 friends. So, we turned to Karl’s truck and faking drive bys and falling through skylights.

Thinking that era closed, the fall of 1995 comes around and one of the computer kids I knew through Graham, Justin K., got to talking to me about the state of My Game, Ryan’s Game, which at the beginning of senior was dead media. Somehow though he convinced me he could program the code for it if I just invested in making the graphics, which I was fine with. Now I don’t know if we just rode the Sarlacc Software moniker at this point, this was a weird time, Marty was somehow on the outs but still in the sphere of friends with everyone at the time and Sarlacc being his original handle tied things back to him. And of course this was Marty when Marty was Duncan.

  That was a hard sentence to write. Okay much like I did with Chris M. and explaining what his Video Game Swappers thing was I’ll try my best at this. Marty has an ego, after a few years into our computer scene and high school Marty started having a harder time riding that ego into stable friendships. Now I am fuzzy on the details since a lot of this tale didn’t take place anywhere near me but somehow one of the groups of kids, that Justin K, Joe, John, Graham, and others were part of gave him the nickname Duncan. And then called him that all the time, even though he didn’t want them too.

  So, for a good long time Marty to some people he was called Duncan. This senior year is that time. I really wish I could explain how that came about but I don’t know. In fact, later on during this time I won’t remember the name Duncan and say, “Nelson or whatever you guys are calling him.” Thus, also attaching that name too him during the Duncan era. It’s a weird thing to explain someone who is technically in the friend group, but a lot of the kids didn’t want to hang out with him and instead would just ridicule him, but he was still involved with things, strange. Either way MGRG moved forward with Justin K. behind the new code and my graphics in a new SVGA version of the world. And I will always have a gap as to why Marty was Duncan, but know that during these days he was Duncan.

I think Marty actually missed the holidays in 1995, which is the only gap he will have until I move when I am older. So I really just have compartmentalized this time as him being a separate person named Duncan as weird as that seems. But since it was Marty he was still there just no one invited him to many things and the younger crowed spent a lot of time mocking him. So the story of how he got the name change must have been intense, because there was a lot of residual anger.

image 92 Character animation sheet for My Game, Ryan's Game (1996)

  As time pressed forward Justin K. and I got a lot more plans. From this relaunching the L street house BBS became one of them. This time under the name Goldfish. As I said this BBS was sort of a push back from the “edgier” warez scene BBS styles that had been prevalent. Thus, I think the benign name was part of that. No more zero-day warez, just more of a hang out BBS.

  Along with my two phone lines, we linked up my old 386 with my newer Pentium machine, allowing both machines to have a local node on the BBS. Thus, giving us four total users possible online at a time. Once you got past the super BBSs like TCR and Purgatory, four was a lot running on our Renegade software. This gave birth to the BBS being almost completely focused on the social aspects of the BBS. A chat room and message boards, the BBS would be used to arrange a lot of “real life” events.

 One such event was Saturday afternoon football. We started doing Saturday football games with friends. Chris M. and I would roll over to whatever field we designated for playing that day and play some tackle football with no pads with whoever we dug up that week, eventually using the BBS to announce the date and times.

  This was a natural progression, since the big football season of 1994, Chris M., Marty and J.F. would spend a lot of time with me outside of the L street house throwing the football around. In an activity I don’t really see much of anymore, we stood on either side of L street, which mind you isn’t a cul-de-sac or regular quiet suburban street but one of the cut throughs downtown and throw the football to one another. No joke since writing that the L street house has been given a speed bump to attempt to slow down traffic right where we used to toss the old pigskin. We would try and play a little bit, using the street markings as out of bounds, but then we’d have to play around the oncoming traffic. So that’s what led to eventually trying to play solid games on fields from time to time by 1995/96.

  Saturday afternoon football itself started pretty mundanely, Chris M., Kim, Karl and one other soul I have forgotten one Saturday went out and played football on the senior high school field. It was after the high school football season, so they had the center of the field roped off due to wear and tear, so we just played on one side of the field. We had a lot of fun, so I started promoting on the BBS the next week. That week when we got out there, we had something around an 8v8 game. This trend would grow and eventually we’d have a repaired field and full teams to play with.

  We would play with full rules, so kids had to block, or as happened a few times, the quarterback would get creamed. Thankfully through all of it no one got hurt, even though eventually we had some pretty big hitters out there and not just BBS nerds, including the likes of Nate who was fresh off the football season with the high school team. I fib a little, I took a pretty good groin shot one game that was unneeded and then repaid the hit the next week on the same quarterback. That quarterback did complain later of dizziness and might have been a little concussed, but what is the concussion? This was the rub some dirt on it, era. So, we moved on.

  The football games turn Saturdays into an event day, I would roust people awake, make calls get everyone out to play and then afterwards we would lick our wounds and do other stuff. If not for Saturday afternoon football, we wouldn’t have group watched the video rentals. One friend one week got both Mallrats and Friday for the same afternoon. My mother probably thought us all crazy for laughing at all those filthy jokes, but what a double feature. Both movies are synonymous with the time as far as humor goes.

 It was an interesting mix of kids too, every week someone new would show up, beyond just the core of kids that would be around the house, as I said we got Nate to show up, which was nice, and then even kids I didn’t know until they came to play some Saturday afternoon football. We even got some of the woodland kids from the BBS.

Yeah, we had neighboring town kids now logging in. So, after a football game one weekend we decided we needed more money to throw a soiree back in Davis. Not a full-on party, probably just food and movies. A plan was hatched and we returned to the L street house, printed out all our teen users that lived in woodland. Then we packed ourselves in Justin K’s car, Kable’s Sable, drove to Woodland and collected BBS fees.

It seemed like for a while between football and other weekend events, Goldfish BBS was scheduling life. Which brings me to a subsection of its own that I am excited to cover, which were the LAN parties. LAN parties weren’t new, as early as the summer of 1993 I had gone over to Mav’s (we referred to him by his BBS handle) house, the SysOp for the local board called BBB, for those college/Doom parties. But the Goldfish hosted ones were the first ones at the L street house and they started with a game and genre of games that is near and dear to me that I haven’t covered yet, the Real Time Strategy (RTS).

  Let’s start with the game, sometime in either late 1995 or early 1996 the game Command and Conquer came to be. Much like years prior when Street Fighter II sort of invigorated play with a multiplayer focus, Command and Conquer with its ability to play tiny army men with other living people was very revolutionary at the time. This was small scale war, against your friends, machine guns, nukes, and all. On a playground that one could easily reset decisions to make the game have no end, in the garage when I was little there was cleanup time to end the war. Now there is no egos and no more sadness when it was time to clean up the garage.

  Now honestly Command and Conquer (C&C) was not the first game of its type, that I think technically can be argued a couple places, but to me the real farther of the RTS was Dune II which we were aware of oddly enough. Chris M. through some means had managed to play a bit of Dune II before this and was familiar with this first valid attempt at a RTS game. But Dune II didn’t have the LAN aspect and another year or so of better hardware to run it on. So, C&C for all purposes here was the first real RTS game. Since an RTS game without a local advisory board of friends to talk down too isn’t really an RTS. We would quickly latch onto playing either over modem, or on occasion picking a location, usually the L street house and playing on the dining table over a direct network connection.

  Now technically I guess it wasn’t really over a LAN the way we used the term now, the direct connection cable was a fat serial cable we had to connect both computers too, which is why the dining room table was used. The table was big enough to setup two mid 90s PCs back-to-back so an operator could sit on each end of the table and command their troops. This was a game changer. It wasn’t like we didn’t play multiplayer strategy PC games before, but CivNet, while fun never got the multiplayer Civilization experience just right. I had another game called Ultimate Domain, which was multiplayer through hot seat play that we tried to get into for a while. But it wasn’t until C&C that we finally got what felt like a true multiplayer game where we could build armies and bases and then destroy each other the way humans really want too.

  The direct cable connection which allowed for two competitors to go head-to-head in the same space. While everyone else looked and made for a social situation much like the SFII experience in the arcades, but with more intense gameplay. Not having to be at a seedy video arcade and with a much bigger scope than two mildly anime looking men fighting probably helped. It was that social situation that made for the success of the Goldfish LANs. Even though the two armies were maintained and command by an operator per side, whoever was waiting for their turn as master chief could instead participate by walking back and forth and seeing people’s strategies, or directly sitting next to one of the players and just become an adviser. The latter of the two being the more popular option. It gave the onlooker some amount of control over the game, a good suggestion would be used and might lead to victory. This was a lot of fun.

I’m pretty sure these new RTS games on the computer are why as I look down SNES games released post this time, we just didn’t get, well, any of them. Finally, the PC was cracking into the multiplayer market properly. C&C, then its “sequel” Command and Conquer: Red Alert, which was similar graphics, same game engine but with real world factions, like Germany and Russia, would become the go to when possible, for multiplayer, especially during designed events like the LANs and even during the holidays with the family. During the holidays we had three PCs in the house that could run the games, so we could get three player games going, if need be, everyone with their own screens. No split screen like on the consoles.

FPS games like Doom could also still be played this way.  But the newer titles like Quake and others were so twitch heavy that any latency made for a bad experience. Beyond that online multiplayer, especially with Quake, was full of nothing but bad chat and spawn camping with latency issues and a lot of just watching incoherence on the screen. It wasn’t as good TV as watching the little army men A.I. try to path their way to victory.

The genre then spawned two nontraditional army games. We got Starcraft from Blizzard Entertainment, which was a Sci-Fi setting stolen idea from Game Workshop’s Warhammer 40k, which itself has a Fantasy setting Warhammer which the same company stole to use for Warcraft, a Fantasy styled RTS game. Starcraft was more fun. Of course, Warcraft would eventually level up to an online multiplayer role playing game and find better footing. And then the giant of computer software in the 90s, Microsoft, decided they wanted in on the RTS trend and gave us Age of Empires (AoE), an historical armies RTS game. AoE had this nice local connection feature where one registered copy of the game could allow up to four computers to play together. Along with not featuring some sort of super weapon, like a nuclear bomb or a space laser that people would rush sometimes in the C&C games, AoE became the Christmas Break Lan party game after the days of Goldfish BBS waned.

image 93 Dad and Steve playing multiplayer network games of AoE during Christmas of 1998.

But once we get to holiday LAN play we’ve left the world of the BBS behind. So I will get to that later.

Back in the Goldfish era and the original C&C. None of those nights held any violence, although I have a feeling people hiding their stealth tanks to avoid defeat drove some people close. Instead, the most memorable C&C Lan night for me was before the games even started.

One night we had a large gathering planned. A good dozen or more kids getting setup for some gaming and VCR Friday night fun. At this time Goldfish BBS was setup in the living room at the L street house. The main PC, my mammoth Pentium tower that ran the BBS was on my computer desk, next to it my old 386 keep chugging along hooked up to the BBS. This as I said gave us those magic four lines.

As people would log on, we’d pull them into chat, tell them the plan for the night and then tell them to get their behinds over to the house. Kim, a source of far too much drama when all is said and done, for a time came back to being involved in the group. That coupled with the history with Marty and Marty currently being Duncan, somehow made it all the stranger. I was a dopey teenager though, so I was just happy to have her back.

That evening as we were compiling dummies she logged on. We pulled her into chat, told her the plan and then Justin K. and I, or Aubrey and I, I don’t remember which of the chauffeurs it was, hopped in a vehicle and drug ourselves all the way out to her house at the edge of town to collect her and bring her back. Aubrey, who I don’t think I have mentioned yet was intertangle to this time period, a year older, she had large black van we could all pile in to move about the city. It didn’t totally replace Karl’s monster truck, but it was a strong Alpha automobile.

As time would go on that night, most of the Davis kids that would be logging into Goldfish had collected themselves for C&C. Graham was setting up shop in the Dining room, some were watching TV on the couch and others were using the local lines on the BBS. Kim had nestled into the big computer chair and was on my account, which was the SysOp account for the entire BBS. Even with the Davis kids mostly present at the house we still had other users and occasionally someone else would log on we needed to invite.

So of course, eventually Marty found his way online, with that much Duncan energy in the house somehow, I got logged on locally under Kim’s account and then the shenanigans began. I don’t remember what exactly the angle was, but Marty, being Duncan, whispered, i.e. sent a private chat message, to Kim’s account, which was logged into LOCALLY, which is something any user could tell. Let’s break that last part down for a second, the four lines each had a number in the chat room. If you were on line 1, you had a 1 before your BBS handle, on the second phone line, you had a 2. The main BBS computer was 3, and then the secondary local connection was 4. Everyone who logged on daily knew that, so it wasn’t some mystery. So why Duncan would try to send a teenager a private message on a Friday night to a house where he could see she was logged which in theory, at the very least, I was present at, is kind of a mystery in common sense.

The obvious would happen, the message would get read out loud. And responses from both of us would be concocted to drive him the most insane. Now I don’t remember all the details, but I think one comment was that we had Kim’s account protest some sort of undying love for Chris M. Let me take this point to make it perfectly clear Chris M. knowing this was a trigger point for Duncan had gone off to involve himself with the television and possibly some SNES game that was being played. This angle was made without his actual consent or knowledge.

Duncan lost his cool. He would essentially rage quit the chat. A couple minutes later the house phone line would ring. My mother would answer it and then give the phone to Chris M. So here is what happened. Duncan, what I call Marty at this time for this bad behavior, tried to deep dive into Kim’s BBS handle, messed up in an obvious situation where that was the only option, got angry, went to his mother and blamed Chris M. for it. Chris M.’s mother for some reason didn’t take the word of everyone at the house and made Chris M. go back home and grounded him from that weekend’s festivities for upsetting his brother.

This is why the Duncan era is a weird one to cover. He was a different person for six months or so there. I really wish I knew the story of what caused the issue that turned him into that and made the other kids so hellbent on mocking him. It might make this time make more sense. In the end I just compartmentalize and still feel bad Chris M. didn’t et to stick around for C&C that night.

Aubrey’s van got us around a lot. Y.S.S. had a rebirth during the reign of Goldfish, so Jake got involved with all of the stuff not called football. My avid camera use was dying down a bit but one day we did go out with Chris M. and Aubrey and take pictures. Most famously this day involved a taco bell burrito, Jake trying to be crude for a picture with Aubrey in it and Chris M. having to show her up with the proper way to “gulp” a burrito.

 

I don’t know what actually ended Goldfish BBS. When I remember it I just remember it going strong for a long time. On a lot of fronts. Door games, still popular with some had Justin K trying to program his own game like Doug had prior. I was still making graphics on the MGRG idea all the time at school and it seemed like everyone was hanging out all the time. It seemed like everything was just going along at a good pace.

Then somewhere in the mixture of graduating it all ended. Without ceremony or anything in the spring of 1996 the time of the BBS would die. Those UseNet groups and such were about to take over and turn into a new online way of communicating that will make those fun, local, text based systems obsolete. For Four years or more we lived with modems, slow downloads, grainy porn and heated message boards all hosted in our living rooms or bedrooms. While gone this time will never be forgotten for the fun times and still somehow can outshine some of the more modern equivalents

Addendum #1

Okay, here is a find for Goldfish that I like a lot. This is the BBS map I made. This maps what menu goes to what menu, and then what flags did what when made active. If you never worked with Renegade BBS, or Telegard, this maybe seems weird. Maybe looks a little like a website map which were big in the late 90s.

What I find interesting is that we have a flag for local messages, meaning if we didn’t verify and give you the flag, you couldn’t see the messages. This also gave the ability for a sysOp to essentially ban users from the forums if they got out of line. Something that makes a lot of sense in a world with tons of online forums.

The separate flags for DOS and Windows files has me a little stumped though. I don’t know why we felt the need to distinguish the two, but we did. Then obviously the C for CypherNet, which was just another series of forums that we could flag you on or off of.

Then there is flag K. Maybe it’s the order I have been scanning things in, but holy cow the amount of stuff that was used to separate Marty with things. There of course is the pre-deathrow, IC update that specifically says Chris has to have a complex password because of Marty, then here on Goldfish, which was Duncan time, we have a whole flag for Marty’s little base.

I’m guessing this was a forum specifically for him to go nuts in. However, remembering some kids sentiment at the time, I wonder if the flag didn’t make him active in some of the local forums but block him from others. In fact as I ponder on that, I think some of the more vindictive children on the BBS might have even had a forum where they want to post without him being able to see the posts.

Then its pretty mundane. The three themes for the site, which were flags users could set on and off depending on how they wanted to navigate the BBS. Y for the system announcements I think was a Renegade default. Then X for secret stuffies. I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think we carried any “warez” on this BBS, so it might have been for adult content, but I am not even sure we did that on Goldfish either so I don’t know for certain what was being kept secret.

All in all its kind of cool to see a physical representation of the work for the BBS, especially since all the files and such for the board are long gone to the digital heavens.

More Goldfish stuff:

I will have a whole section about ANSI art somewhere on the site, sadly a lot of it is lost. But I do have some select backups that have lasted through the ages. This becomes important for Goldfish BBS in the manner that, like back with TiT0rS, there was a custom door game being programmed. Also like then this game never made it to the playable stage, but unlike Doug’s game, some of the ANSIs survive and they have their stories.

By the time of Goldfish of course I had a lot more hard drive space than back when the whole BBS life started. The SCSI hard drive I got for my birthday, the one grand gigabyte drive was no longer than only storage. But somehow that drive became the drive we stored funny stuff on. This included the ANSIs we were making for Justin(BooBoo not my nephew)’s door game for Goldfish BBS.

For the most part the ANSIs were made by me, however our friend Joe helped out, and for a lot of the in game options, everyone had input that happened to be hanging out at the house that day. Let me show this off.

Here was the image we had for Booboo himself. Everything had to fit in a normal screen which was like 24 lines back then. I know times have changed. So we get simplified exaugurated characters. At the time I had developed the cartoon version of Justin to always be holding some mysterious items in his puffy checks. So here he is in all his puffy check glory on a computer typing away trying his hardest to not breath out of his mouth. There is some mysterious green flame next to him, I don’t know what that is all about.

So here though you see the basics, it’s a text based door game, there is one’s characters line up at the top of the screen, Justin’s reply and then a series of adventure game like questions. The first option is clearly a joke, the second though I think was intended to be something you could do with every character. There is a whole cat house theme to the game, and flirting was important in some way I don’t remember.

Then we get to the tie in, I have mentioned I think in this section and the section about the year Goldfish was up about how Marty was being called Duncan by all the BBS kids. I even refer to it as his Duncan era, or something to that effect. Here are more tie ins with that. This is around the same time as the C&C party night that Marty got so mad at Kim and got his brother punished. This is that prime time. And the game was going to reflect it. Don’t believe me.

Even though oddly on the outs with the BBS kids, he was getting included in the game, twice actually there is an Officer Nelson character too. Here we had Duncan, manager of Duncan Donuts, a complete comedy NPC where everyone inputted a joke that got lined up in the text area. Now what the Box thing was all about I don’t know. That must have been the actual in game mechanic that both him and Justin’s character were needed for. Because this was going to be a real game for the BBS based on cartoon versions of people on the BBS

Actually functionally. There we see another reference to Booboo and being flakey on the town square entrance to their section. I don’t of course remember the details but it is still funny to me that as kids we had already considered those two to be living a life of flimsy excuses to skirt around social responsibility. (Interesting find to add here, going through old papers I found a ink drawn plot of the town square and what I supposed was used to come up with the ANSI image next to it.) Now I didn’t make all the images, Joe added a couple:

I don’t remember why we had close ups, but I think the Cat House run by Aubrey, who I think went by the handle Pandora, thus the Goldfish Cat House was run by Panda. But there are a few close ups. The of course there was just messing around on the ANSI editor, which was called THE DRAW.

So we get gems like this from Chris M. Santa being shot in the head holding a bag of cocaine.  There was also a Ninja Turtle losing a leg, drawn by someone I can’t remember. Then of course the night that Marty got Chris sent home, as a group we made probably the most immature of all ANSIs ever which involved Marty and Doug, and some flashing pink squares to animate a lewd act. That ANSI is so memorable that it did get lost when the SCSI drive died, but I can remember a fair amount of what was going on in the image.

For a never finished game it’s nice to have some record of it left behind. Unfortunately all that is left behind of the other one is Doug’s mention of it on the new BBS business plan. It is hard to convey how much of a social thing these little pieces of art and coding were back in the day. I don’t know what the modern equivalent would be of a community coming together to make a silly in house, inside joke riddled game but this must still be going on somewhere. Anyway, this was another addendum to the Goldish BBS story.

 

April 2023, 27 years later I found this story written in 1996 about Goldfish BBS. Much as Marty had written about Deathrow BBS at some point in our High School history, I found that I pulled the same subject matter for a report.

It opens up a lot more details that would have otherwise been forgotten. First, the vacation in 1994 ended Imperial City. The second that Sarlacc BBS never got off the ground. I had to be reminded about Sarlacc BBS decades later by Marty himself. The fact it was there I didn’t remember it, he did, I wrote that it never got off the ground, tends to make me think a lot of my Sarlacc BBS memories are TiT0rs memories. However, I do remember downloading things at 1200 baud, so it is a little murky.

The other major item is that the second phone line was for Goldfish BBS, I always thought it got it with Deathrow. In fact, I would have taken that as truth to my grave, but seems we ran Goldfish for a while on a one line system.

It also seems Goldfish was spawned from a system crash. I don’t remember this detail at all. However, I do recall having a system issue after using Doublespace. Doublespace was disk compression software I used on my 368 to squeeze more space out of my hard drive. I even remember that being the birth of funny drive letters like Z:. I know somewhere a long the line that crashed the hard drive.

I figured this event for 1994, which later evolved into the number computer I got. According to the Goldfish paper, I got the number computer in 1995. I also refer to it as state of the art, which if I got it in late 1995, I would not have been, so that statement is a little odd. I am also pretty sure I see it in some pictures from 1995 that would seem earlier than the Goldfish paper lets on, so that is a little confusing in general. But this does seem to point to the idea that the 386 ran everything up to Goldfish.

Then the p100 machine ran goldfish and was the machine I did all my web discovery on. In fact it seems that it’s only by odd chance that the Wayback machine seems to have archived most of the updated post the replacement of the p100.

Goldfish being on the p100 was an interesting change too, because of Windows 95. I don’t remember the whole rig unfortunately and also unfortunately the write up doesn’t explain it completely either. But I do remember having to run Dos windows in 95 to manage the nodes. Although we had it setup in a way one could login from either computer onto its node on the BBS. And I imagine the 386 was running DOS only. The serial cable network was then managed by something, and thus the multinode BBS was born!

Which then makes one of the focuses of the paper interesting. We were working on getting the internet onto the BBS. I don’t remember that. Which means it probably never got there. Considering I wrote that we were still working on it as of April 1996, it never happened. I don’t remember how the plan was supposed to go, my guess is we were going to hookup with anonymous logins via FTP and maybe some UseNet groups. Since files and message boards were the thing.

I think that is a clear example of Netscape Navigator coming into the living room and straight booting Goldfish BBS off the phone lines. There is this non-silly amount of plans I have written up for putting Goldfish BBS on a website. So, I think the end of Goldfish was this weird perfect storm of things.

One, the Booboo and Graham excuses shop. Two thirds of technically support was becoming unreliable near the end of the 1996 school year. While the ANSI is a joke, one can notice that the internet never got added to Goldfish, the story about making My Game never has an ending, and the BBS door game from above is just a bunch of graphics. Justin I think started gravitating away from the computer and into other realms, which then made me somewhat frustrated, Marty and Joe and the others that logged on all the time weren’t going to be making the updates the two missing gentlemen were. Which as a 18 year old, probably just made me want to not care.

Then of course the internet would completely transform the use of the phone line and modem by years end. Which of course started happening right as the above issue was going, which also was met with me graduating from High School and getting a PSX and new games to distract myself with instead. Too be going into May of 1996 full steam with Goldfish BBS and then looking at web design by October of 1996 shows how quick and absolute the transition was over a few months. Couple that with the change from high school to college, it seemed like a million years at the time, but Netscape came and in a matter of months the BBS scene was almost 100 percent dead.

That being said, let me try and edit and spell check my write up from 1996:

Goldfish BBS:

The Making of Goldfish BBS. To understand the development and creation of Goldfish BBS one must first have a knowledge of my personal history with the running and managing of BBS(s). To begin with, I first started using a modem around five and a half years ago on 386dx 33Mhz PC with a 1200 baud modem. At this time, it was local BBS(s) like Purgatory, The Compass Rose (TCR) and Black Horizons. After a few months of logging onto these bulletin boards one of my friends, Marty, brought up the idea of running a BBS to support the newly formed software company of the same name. This BBS would run on the same software as Black Horizons called RENEGADE.

Sadly, Sarlacc BBS was never more than a concept. The low speeds associated with a 1200 baud modem were never really good enough to get the idea off the ground. Thus, I ended the idea of hosting the software companies BBS and instead went back to being a user instead of a system operator (SysOp).

Six to eight months later I was able to purchase a much faster 14400 bits per second modem, the fastest available at that time, from Oak Tree computers. With this I began to dabble in the SysOp end of the BBS world again. Once again using the Renegade software, I setup a BBS called The Inbreed Temple of Rough Sex, or TiT0rs for short. Yes, the name is exactly how it looks. TiT0rs, although setup had no phone line, so after around a month of setup work, I purchased a phone line with the number 756-7559. Once the line got installed properly TiT0rs took off. Even though the BBS never had more than 50 users, the board managed to stay active and online for a year. In fact, it didn’t ever go offline until forced too by a family vacation during the summer.

The next fall after that summer vacation I chose to put TiT0rs back online. I upgraded the software version of Renegade and made new ANSI graphics for the entire system. A couple months into this version, Marty brought the world of art groups and warez into the fray. I was reluctant to make the BBS become one hundred percent focused on pirating, so I made a separate section for the board under a pseudonym. This name was Imperial City. Once the warez aspects of the board started to take control, I switched the name officially from TiT0rs to Imperial City BBS. Imperial City then stood firm until the next summer vacation caused me to shut it down.

On the return from this vacation, I didn’t feel I had the energy to once again operate an entire BBS on my own. I thought of Marty’s affinity towards the BBS(s) I had made and asked him if he wanted to go half and half on operation of a new BBS, which I would allow him to create. He agreed to the idea and thus, Deathrow BBS was born. It started out under its own pseudonym of G’Funk Era. Sometime during that process, I wrote up a small report on the fine tuning of that board (Possibly alongside or referencing the death row report of Marty’s I have posted in that section). Deathrow would feature a multiple sysop structure, there would be three of us, myself, Kurupt (Marty) and Smozy (Kim).

This board would survive around a year as well until it suffered a severe system crash. Even though this crash was restored the board was starting to develop some shortcomings in my eyes. Kurupt began neglecting his duties as a sysop and I felt I was doing too much of the work on a BBS that was his brainchild.  Thus, I shut the Deathrow BBS project down.

For a while I would give up on the modem/BBS scene. Then around August (1995 presumably), I felt the computer was a waste of space in my room. It was too slow to do what I wanted anymore (presumably the 386). So, I thought that if I could find a couple of people to go in on a project where they basically run their own board off my system. (I might be happy(?), I don’t totally know what I am saying in that sentence to be honest) I first asked the ex-sysop of Black Horizons and Kurupt. The both of them bickered about ideas and were lazy. I eventually dropped them from the project. A co-sysop from Black Horizons named Booboo though helped me with restoring the computer from its current crashed state and we began doing major setup on a new BBS. Now without my two original candidates gone, I instead, with two of their underlings, Booboo and another cosysop name Inferno, moved forward on a new BBS.

Booboo assumed the position of Plumber Boy, or supreme sysop of fixing. (So I don’t think this line was anything but a joke I snuck into the report for school, I haven’t changed the sentence for clarity at all, that is exactly what I wrote and I think I was making fun of Justin/Booboo with what I think was a inside joke we had on the BBS) Inferno, later to be known as Supervillain and then Super Joe, assumed the position of ANSI specialist. (This makes sense and has no snuck in jokes) Then me, whom did not want any acknowledgment of authority, assumed the position of Some Guy. (Which of course was the most obvious way to draw attention to being in charge) After the initial setup of the BBS, which included a light bar shuttle login menu. (I actually don’t know what this means anymore) files bases, voting booth, access levels and the couple ANSI menu sets Super Joe and I made for the BBS, the board was ready to go. The only problem was that there was no name. Goldfish was picked for lack of anything better at the time of construction and just managed to stick through to launch and beyond.

One important issue we had to deal with early on in the life of the BBS was the message bases. These would become one of the more popular sections on Goldfish, whoever at launch they were not setup. The Tick (I don’t know who that was IRL) was designated as the official Message Board Operator. But, when he failed to do his job correctly, the duty was passed onto the old standby Kurupt. With that problem tackled, the BBS began to get a regular group of callers. The first remote account was made by Pandora(Aubrey), she preceded a streak of about 25 new users in the first month. The BBS’s regular callers are mainly all in those first 35 registered users. The BBS’s new message boards would spring to action and ended up with over a thousand posts in the first month of activity.

But it wasn’t all roses for Goldfish. The SCSI controller for the gigabyte hard drive broke and the file bases went offline, causing some users to no longer logon. (A year and a half in on that SCSI controller and it blew up, I do kind of remember that) To generate new callers I came up with the idea of offering internet access online. (which sounds like a double negative in todays world, but online at this time meant on the BBS, and the internet was another location to go) After consulting with Booboo and seeing how this would be possible, we purchased a new phone line for the BBS. This created a new problem for us though. The two modems we would need to run this multi-node system. So, the phoneline sat useless for a couple of months. Then we purchased a new state-of-the-art PC. With this new computer we were able to connect the two systems together via a serial cable network.

With the two computers networked together we were able to up the count of nodes on the BBS to four. This allowed us to add a teleconference option to the BBS. This increased the popularity of Goldfish considerably. So much so that we got to the point where people started paying us money for more time online.

To increase the amount of income then we setup a LORD game [(Online Door Game) that is a () note I added in the original document not now] with over 38 IGM’s. (I don’t know what that means anymore) this caused a lot of people to want even more time. The first week in April with this new income we were able to purchase a new SCSI card and fix the file bases of the BBS.

Now that all the basics of Goldifsh are running, it is time to expand.  The internet idea has surfaced again and is under construction at this time. We’ve started a new ANSI art/warez group by the name of RiSE. There are new menus, more message bases, and a much more in tune group of people. (not sure what I was implying there. Posts on the message bases are up along with file uploads and downloads. Now the only thing stopping the mighty Goldish from expanding is more money.

 

That is the end of the report. There is a valid question asking what the rest of the future plans for the BBS are on the rough draft I found. I also find it humorous how I seem to have written the paper with no attention to explaining any of the jargon or terminology other than LORD was a door game, and it doesn’t even explain that. But it does give some insight into the BBS at that time.

I think after trying to clean up some of the structures I tend to believe my memories a little more than this report. Neither is lying, I just think I left a lot of details out in order to paint a specific picture for the report. In other words, I didn’t mention a lot of the personal conflicts and so on that I remember happening. As in I think Marty and I got in a fight, and that led to his laziness as I stated it. But I can’t write that I thought Marty was a poopoo head for a school report.

The only weird thing is the first vacation that I said put TiT0rs temporarily down. For one, if that was the case it would have to be 1992, meaning the second life was from fall 1992 through spring 1994, which seems very long for a BBS I don’t remember that well. This means that one, I lied about there being a vacation in 93 to avoid taking about personal conflict, or this is accurate and a lot of my “Sarlacc” time was actually under the TiT0rs BBS name, which I think I mentioned could be the case now thanks to this revelation.

But anyway there you have it, a decades old report on the subject.

Addendum (Rise and Beyond)

Rise [WHQ]. I don’t remember Rise. I remember Deathrow’s DGz group that Marty tried to make a thing, but I don’t remember the circumstances surrounding Rise. That being said it definitely was an idea and advertised. I see it mentioned in the Yoda Goldfish ANSI, it was talked about in the Goldfish BBS report I made for school. And now I found the first image above, which is plans for some sort of Rise menu system, complete with ways to apply for membership and its own file and message bases, seemingly through RENEGADE and probably the Goldfish BBS itself.

So, I did my normal thing and tried to imagine what the blueprints plan would have looked like if whatever teenage courses didn’t take place and I continued on with the plans. As I got through the future plans of Goldfish BBS, it would have been interesting.

This, what I am getting was an ANSI design to advertise the Internet shows we had some belief we were attaining access to a T3 line to attach internet to the BBS. I don’t remember the logistics behind this idea to be honest. I don’t think we had nearly enough money raised to just pay for something like this at the time. I know it was still like a year of dial up internet after high school until we installed DSL at the L street house.

No, this scheme had to involve piggybacking off either whatever we had access to at the high school, or something thinking we could do something sneaky on the back of a UC Davis server. This might be easier to figure out if I remembered how we were logging onto the internet for anything at this point. There is a possibility that my mother had started using Davis Community Network (DCN) by this time, and I think another local ISP, Mother.com might have also been an option in early 1996.

Mother.com is another interesting angle we might have been working. That ISP was in some ways just Purgatory BBS. A lot of the administration of that BBS seemed to all be managing the ISP. I don’t remember the exact details of why, but it was a thing, and Marty was working there, I think, alongside Alyssa. So, there might have been some belief we could use their line as well to add some sort of internet portal through the BBS.

Of course, it never happened. I know it didn’t and all I seem to be left with is a lot of the design plans on what to get up once this was all setup. I have a feeling reading through and vaguely remembering there being some animosity between that perhaps the delays were on Justin (BB). Being older and realizing what he was probably promising, which was software he was probably promising to make to add to the Renegade software to backend internet features, was probably more technical than he thought. Leading to him stalling and letting the animosity turn into shutting the whole plan down. It makes sense, kids are weird and that seems like the easier way for teenagers to say something can’t be done with their current resources versus telling the truth.

However, we were not by any stretch not way down that path either. It is interesting to see a lot of the pre-visualized ANSI images. At least I assume they were supposed to be ANSI’s and I’ll show why in a second here. But the menus themselves are interesting. This one, which seems to be the information menu, which I think was a thing in Renegade references New Features and System Upgrades and had one heck of a design idea for a menu that usually no one would look at.

My guess is that the plan with the internet was to integrate probably UseNet and FTP sites via some sort of door game like portal, and so getting people to go lookup how to use all the new commands was probably really imperative. This whole thing seems interesting, of course with the next two years and the dominance of Netscape and web sites that was going to sort of replace the BBS, we didn’t seem to have a plan for that. Jpegs and animated GIFs would have probably kicked ANSI and File Transfer Protocols butts.

And this is why I assume we were still doing it all ANSI based with line commands through probably the same features that we used for door games. I had started a lot of work on a rather large Welcome ANSI for the upgraded BBS. The above jpeg had to be sewn together from what I had. Because to get things larger than the standard 80 lines back then we had to use some weird screen wrapping.

I don’t know if the whole redesign was supposed to be wrapping and therefore higher resolution. But that for one was going to be. Probably to match up with an attempt to use RIP graphics for it as well. Which if I were to guess Joe was going to work on. This all makes sense with the slightly more detailed menu designs I put on paper, maybe the Rise menus would have made more sense if I made them at 160 lines instead of 80. It also makes sense as to why Justin (BB) might have just quietly decided it was too hard to program the modifications needed to the Renegade code to make it all work flawlessly.

Obviously, the BBS died, but I think the reason a lot of early web design ideas I had on the DCN websites had the Goldfish feature on them was because of how close in idea a web page for the BBS and the BBS integrated with the internet was at the time. I don’t think this plan would have saved the BBS, but it might have been interesting to see where it went from there.

The biggest issue still seems to be having to dial into the BBS and the limited number of connections. Once Netscape becomes a thing, having to figure out a better way to integrate would have been paramount. While the BBS would have access to some things that were somewhat rare in the early days of the web, such as file databases and message forums, those would get matched, by well CGI script forums and the beautiful world Napster showed us of peer to peer downloading. I don’t think Rise could have kept up offering pirated software as a feature while trying to get the BBS on a static IP to interact with Netscape, it just all seemed destined to die to newer shinier things. But it is interesting to see the final push to keep the dying technology afloat, and to see that we knew that having to integrate online access was the only way to move forward by 1996.