Eventually the name of Sarlacc died off.  Which was probably good since if we ever did complete something having that name, that is most certainly a Star Wars trademark, it may have caused issues. In theory that is.

It wasn’t like we ever called it quits with Sarlacc either, things just changed. Sarlacc would still get monikered for years, it was just with the changing winds I changed the BBS and I think Marty stopped using Sarlacc as his BBS handle (nickname) as well.

In that respect then, think of all the BBSs being from the L street house as Sarlacc BBS and its offspring. As we’d get better modems, 14.4, 33.3k, 56k, hard drives and computers and some infights would occur. Sarlacc BBS got a name change during one of these phases, where the modem speed improved, and I couldn’t work with Marty. This was just a thing from time to time, Marty and Chris M. got like family in the house, and sometimes you can’t look a brother in the eye without getting angry. Chris M. and Marty fought, I would fight with Marty, I even had the issue with Chris M. early on with FF4. It happens, part of growing up.

This first name change then was The Inbred Temple of Rough Sex. The name met my humor at the time, and TiT0RS as it would be shorthanded was just my little BBS to play around with. In many ways The Temple and the next name coming are the same BBS. There was no upgrade to the BBS in any substantial way. I just outgrew the name in my mind and I just kept veering more and more into thinking Star Wars was this underground cool thing, this is like 1992, we don’t even know the special editions are going to be a thing.

By Imperial City phase whatever fights had been occurring had subsided. And as I said by high school Marty and I would coop with the new Deathrow BBS, named after Marty’s current fandom with all things gangster rap. But I cant distinctly see the beginnings of that BBS’s path in the Imperial City ANSi files I still have.

That was another huge change as the BBS matured, Sarlacc was slow and run by our younger selves. TiT0rS was just loud and the ANSi’s I made for the menu’s and such were purposefully loud and obnoxious, I don’t remember why, maybe it seemed edgy. But one thing changing the name to Imperial City did is give me art direction. It was named after the Empire’s mysterious capital that I think was only pictured in one of my Star Wars RPG sourcebooks at the time. I don’t think I started on the Timothy Zahn books that introduced Coruscant City, which is the same place, until tenth grade, so I think I based a whole name on a picture and caption.

Since it was so obscure though it allowed me to use a lot of dark tones as a color theme, along with Star Wars always making the Empire wear mainly blacks, grays and whites. Renaming myself at the time from my normal Trouz handle to Senator Palpatine. Which was also the name we had for the Emperor from Star Wars that we got, I think from the Marvel comics. Since his visual was a blue cloak from the films, I did a lot of monochrome blue.

This would make the Imperial City BBS be the first incarnation that looked, well not terrible. This was phase 3 after all and now I had had time to learn from mistakes, learn how to change settings better and got more time with the ANSi creation tool TheDraw. This probably why some ANSi’s from this BBS have survived. Obviously the BBS itself didn’t but having some remnants is pretty neat.

The nicer look and faster speeds finally paid off with more time being used. This was probably the point where things like message board usage would become more than just a couple of us and I would be able to show off a BBS to other ones around that looked like something legitimate.

Which meant more file sharing. Marty had a need to be in the “warez” scene, which would included having file bases for art packs and the more “hardcore warez” scene, but mainly later with Deathrow. This all seems silly to explain now that I’m older. But this did start with Imperial City to a smaller extent. Warez were just pirated copies of any software, were essentially the guys pirating the software put a strong emphasis was on how close to or before the official release of software was. Reveling how hard it was to get access to the files.

Which then made for an interesting hustle with the BBS system operators of saying you had the files up for a big software release. But then they were locked with a password unless you appeased the systems operator of the whichever BBS. Allowing legends to grow, but sometimes the passwords, for these extremely cool early pirated zero day before release wares, were not accessible to anyone, probably in some cases for lack of existence of the actual files. I can’t tell you how many copies of Chicago windows we had from around late 93 through 95 that either weren’t anything or just windows 3.1 with the version number changed to 4.0. Chicago windows of course being the working title for Windows 95.

There was a fair amount of showmanship with it. Art packs, were instead the other big addition, and they were to some extent just marketing for the websites to add to the showmanship. I loved doing the art and was impressed with some of the stuff in the art packs, still am for some of it. But for as much underground cool BBS stuff they were shilling, some of it was just images someone took the time to make out of popular comic book images and ads to websites that would make you go through loops to get on, just to find out they were offering nothing different than the one down the street from your buddy. And I think that is important to mention because so much credit is still given to the stuff that did get done in this subculture back then, but we sort of pass over the amount of flim-flam that was going on too.

But this upgrade to Imperial City would move us forward. Although I don’t know if the next two items were Deathrow exclusive upgrades or if Deathrow was the beneficiary of. Well okay the Hard Drive was during Deathrow but it goes here for now because, the increase in wanting these “hard to get” files was a need for an increase in storage.

Hard Drive space was limited back then. The first computer I had came with a whopping 100 megabytes of internal storage. Sarlacc ran on that, I have scans in my work folder for this project of one image that are larger than that, by a lot. So for a while I ran disk compression software designed to give one more space. Doublespace was the name if I recall. This birthed me making drive letters from the alphabet backwards. My new expanded hard drive was drive Z:. More than likely this was TiT0rS’s home. But then somewhere in the mess here two major things happened, first doublespace failed at one point and the files on the drive were in shambles and I got a new computer.

The next hard drive I got that would run IC and Deathrow was presumably larger than 100 megs. But still at only a few years of advancement I was probably sitting at like 200 megs or a little more. And I had to run all my software and games on. Then for file storage I was probably left with like 100 megs. Well investigating my own information has given me a better idea at all of this.

I was probably working with nearly 300 megabytes on IC at the start. Leaving realistically probably 200 megs for files to be stored. With a decent game taking say 5 or 6 floppies at the time, and things like WinWord taking it felt like 10 or so. That adds up quickly.

So in the ninth grade for my birthday, I pleaded for a one gigabyte hard drive for the BBS, which had a steep asking price back in 1993, around a thousand dollars US. (I have for years thought this was for my 16^th birthday in leu of a car, but a little research has shown the memory to be off by one year.) When I finally got the birthday wish I also moved the name of the BBS to something more nerdy and less little kid edgy, which morphed Sarlacc and TiT0RS into the Imperial City BBS. This name along with the floating around Sarlacc software name made a lot more sense, since it was the early 90s and all these Star Wars references had the right feel for the community that was using this form of telecommunications.

So, it seemed there was an upgrade to go with the name change. Although that last statement made years ago might not be accurate either. As most things I think it wasn’t as well defined as that, and I think I had moved to the cooler dark website and wanted to get a better hard drive to accommodate it.

The hard drive was expensive, it was SCSi which was a cooler format than regular internal IDE drives, and required a whole new serial card to be installed to manage it. Now IC really was big time for the age with an advertised 1 and a quarter gigabytes of storage space. Trust me that did seem like a lot back then.

Before I move to the second addition, I want to go on about the hard drive. It seems like an odd birthday present in some respects.  But somehow I got enough use out of it over the years to semi-validate the extreme price. That drive would last all the BBSs in the house and the start of the internet. Only to crash out sometime in the late 90s. I then desperately tried to find some way to get the files off that drive. Several years of teen silliness meant we had so many backups saved to that drive since it was the monster drive for years. When it went so did a lot of memories, that now are only left in my head.

That drives death is probably the spark point for why I like multiple copies in multiple places of anything deemed important, because you never know when you’re going to turn on the computer and the hard drive isn’t going to boot.

Two, another phone line. Now when I added this line is also an unsure thing. If it was in response to having a larger drive or making a “new” BBS. It’s a really hard call because I might have been using my main line as my phone number during the summer of 1993 and the new line as my “data” number, for the short period where there was no BBS in my room.

The second line though would be strongly used with Deathrow if not with IC already and then a staple of Goldfish down the road. I was a teenage boy with 2 person phone lines. I can remember both numbers by heart, and yeah that possible summer 1993 setup, once we switched to the world wide web that was the standard. The second line was essentially a hard line to the internet until DSL came into our lives.

Once we got DSL though the need for two lines during my childhood return (after Sand Diego) was unnecessary. I don’t know how long we hung onto that line. With little fan fare it was cancelled. But it’s use as line 2 for the BBS and then the dedicated modem line cannot be understated.

When the internet required a modem to connect to in the late 90s, that second line could just stay connected all day, with no one picking up the other end or needing to use the phone. This allowed me to transfer into the web site creation that would replace the BBS. But it was possible because of the BBS.

Now I have a lot of stories, kind of, a few I can remember in detail about the lifespan of the BBSs pre-Goldfish. But I don’t always know which BBS had which story. The Bulletin Boards and the SysOp chat all look like DOS text. The screen one sees on the hosting end of things, well its always the same.

So I think I will clump all the stories together, and it seems like for whatever reason I put those in the section on Deathrow BBS. At the end of the day though I am always a fan of the direction IC had, Deathrow was a lot of compromise to keep Marty happy and the predecessors were not as polished. Goldfish will also be a social based BBS where IC was largely just for me, and thus I got to use all the silly Star Wars stuff I liked. It’s legacy is the hours I spent making ANSi’s of Star Wars stuff and really ushering in the era of my 386dx, which was my first computer that I didn’t know much of, to my Dual modemed, gigabyte pls storage Pentium beast that guided our PC lives into the future.