I run a BBS called Burning Point 1742. This BBS started out as a Fido point running on a GRiD GRiDCase II laptop computer. This was a rather boring laptop computer, as it was only an 8MHZ 8086 with 640K and a 20 megabyte hard drive. What was interesting about the computer is that the case was a lightweight alloy of magnesium. I found out that magnesium burns at around 1742 degrees Fahrenheit. I am a former employee of GRiD, and we always had this running joke that if we ever built a new GRiD Computer Center, we'd have to have these earthen pits with yet more earth to shower down into the pit in case one of our laptops caught on fire. We had to do some research to prove to a client that our cases were not that flammable.
I really liked Fahrenheit 1742, but decided to go with Burning Point 1742, as the shortened name would then be bp1742, which would also stand for my initials. I used Frontdoor 2.02 NC as my front end and mailer. After being a Fido point for some time, I also hooked up with Grant Delorean and had a Usenet UUCP feed started. I used Waffle to handle that feed, primarily because Grant had Waffle running on the machine I was dialing in on, and I was used to it.
I bought a desktop, the current system, which is a Tandy 4000 (16MHZ 386DX, 8 megs memory, and 70 meg HD) and a Boca 14.4K modem. The HD decides to flake out every 18 months, in which case, a low level fixes everything until it flakes out again. The next time it flakes out, I'm replacing it with a 120meg IDE.
I then scraped up enough cash to get a second phone line installed, and got Waffle for DOS registered. Things were going fine, and I was about ready to announce the BBS to the world when Grant started having problems with his feed. Well, that sucked the message base dry after a time and I did not have an easy way of converting Fido packets to Waffle, as Fido was really only available to me. I decided that Waffle wasn't the way to go, especially for Fido stuff. So I saved up some more pennies and bought PCBoard 15.2. Currently upgraded to 15.21.
I also own a "play" system, a build your own 133MHZ Pentium with 32MB RAM and 4 Gig of hard disk space, with a SoundBlaster AWE32 and a Chinon 535 SCSI2 CD-ROM drive. I'm using two 3Com EtherLink 3 cards to link the two machines together. As of this writing, the network is UP now, but I haven't made all of the modifications to get everything working exactly right. Once I get a peer-to-peer working on the Windows 95 play machine and the DOS BBS system, I'll be in good shape.
