Well, Woodstock did it, so I suppose it is now my turn.  I have
no clue how large this file is going to end up being, and considering I
like to babble...  :)  Anyway, here goes.

        At this time, I consider myself a veteran.  I was once known as
"The Apprentice Adept", because I knew very little about the scene.  I
am still known as "The Apprentice Adept" because Blackie's Hell went up
around that time, and I've never bothered to ask Woodstock to change my
alias, and I don't mind, because it reminds me of all the history of the
Chippewa Valley's BBS'ing community.  It also reminds me from where I
have come from.  I am now known primarily as "Adept", and I think it
fits me pretty well.  If you don't believe me, try asking Shadow
Master...  :)  It's nice having cool friends...  :)

        In early 1992, my brother suckered*ahem*, persuaded me into
paying for half the cost of subscribing to Prodigy.  I was pretty happy
with this, and I spent most of my simple life posting in the message
areas.  In the middle of 1993, Prodigy announced that they would be
going to hourly charges, and my brother and I decided that we couldn't
afford it, and it didn't make much sense anyway.  After we spent our
last month on Prodigy(then spent three months trying to get off), my
brother showed me a way to fill in the gap with free local stuff that
did basically the same thing as Prodigy.

        I wish my brother had introduced me a bit earlier.  I think the
reason why he even bothered to show me at all was because I kept on
bugging him, when he was logging into "The Stable" or "The Rat's Hole"
or "Eau Claire PC User's Group", to show me how to get on, and why these
things were so cool.

        In July of 1993, I began surfing around on the local boards.  My
first favorite was Hunters and Gatherers'(How you spell it, I do have
not a clue).  It was a simple WWIV board, with a single line running a
2400 baud modem.  Of course, at this time I was only running a 2400, so
it fit well.  I immediatly latched on to the games, especially
Tradewars, and I believe this is where I became "Dale Planet's
right-hand man"-Ask Mike/Mike Bresina.  I went around happily, not
having a clue what the heck I was doing, found a planet, claimed it, and
then sat there until the next day.

        I logged in the next day to find out I had been blown up.
Evidentaly I had claimed a planet owned by the Dutton corporation.
Whoops.  Back then, if you ran into a player with "Dutton" in their
name, becoming their enemies was not the best thing to do.  Oh well.  I
don't remember much posting on H&G, though that wasn't the main reason
why I was calling at the time, so who cares?  :)

        H&G went down later that year, and I had to find a new favorite
board.  I immediatly latched onto The Wizard's Tower.

The above was completed June 28th, 1996.
I begin again on January 24th, 1997.

     I called The Wizard's Tower, and saw almost everything that I loved
about H&G.  It had a Tradewars game, as well as a decent file base.
The one thing that I missed about H&G was the atmosphere.  I really don't
know what made the difference for me.  Anyway, I got used to TWT, and
became more and more involved.  Eventually I donated a modem for use on
a second line.  It never got used, and I got it back, but it's the thought
that counts.  :)  I believe I was also the first user to donate money to
the BBS.  $5 or something.  Nothing huge, but doing it as a donation was
a strange event in BBS Land.  I did something similar on The Threshold,
but I always figured that it was fair return.  The joy that I had enjoyed
from being on the BBS was worth more than $5 to me.

     The Wizard's Tower went down for some strange reason after I had been
calling for about a year.  I never really did understand why, but it did.
A while later, he attempted to bring the BBS back up, but there was nothing
there.  I posted as much as I could, in the hopes of bringing the BBS back
up, but the second(and third) time around there wasn't as much sysop support.

     Since it seems as though this document won't be as much history as it
is my views, it's time to get sidetracked.  People are still the most
important thing.  The computer is a tool.  The computer allows people to
do things faster and in different ways than before.  BBS's allow people that
would normally be recluses to become more socially extroverted.  Sometimes
this is good, sometimes this is bad.  I got sucked into it, and it became
a sort of addiction.  I spent as much time on BBS's as I could, because it
was a heck of a lot more fun than most everything else.  I got the dream of
setting up a BBS sometime around December of 1993.  I opened Storm BBS to
the public May 6th, 1995.  Someplace in there BBS's became a tool again,
and became something to do.  It was no longer something that I needed, it
was something that was a heck of a lot of fun.  BBS's helped me break out
of my shell in certain ways, and gave me a unique outlook on life.  I
wouldn't trade the memories and knowledge for anything.

     After The Wizard's Tower went down, I was again looking for someplace
to go, and something to do.  I still had a dream of setting up a BBS, but
I knew that that dream was a couple of years away.  I needed to get my own
computer, and I needed to get a job to support the BBS.  In the meantime,
I had to find another BBS to latch on to.

     Someplace in here, I latched onto Decker's BBS.  Almost none of you
reading this will have any clue what Decker's BBS was.  It was the file
BBS of the time.  At one time, it had three CD-ROM's online.  Back in 1994,
this was unheard of.  I sent my money in for a year's membership, and
began to leach.  I also played PIT, but the door games and messages on
Decker's were lacking.  Messages?  It was a Remote Access BBS.  If you can
get an active message base on an RA BBS, you're a darn good sysop.

     Decker's went down sometime soon after I subscribed(roughly six months),
and I asked questions to everyone about why the BBS went down.  It took me
nearly a year to find out a couple of answers.  The best answer that I got
was that his girlfriend told him to decide between the computer and her.  Of
course, being a young male, you can just guess what he chose.  :)  I never
heard from the sysop again after he went down.

     Okay, another side story...  First of all, people should notice that
BBS's and the I-net have very short lifetimes.  You look at it, and you see
huge amounts of information, huge amounts of people, and people that are
famous from the Internet.  Looking back upon it, how many of you can name
a major person in the development of the Internet, from a time before 1994,
or even 1995.  1995 through 1997?  Well, I'm sure a lot of you know
Pretty Good Privacy by Chris Zimmerman.  You've heard of him.  He has become
a hero in a short amount of time.  People will forget him just about as
quickly.  Also, for the future of the Internet, it has become mainstream,
and we might just see some people becoming cultural icons.  Steve Jobs?
Bill Gates?  Those guys that created Yahoo?

     On the other hand, you look again at BBS's.  You have many sysops that
come and go.  You have people that are amazing in their ability to pull in
callers and make people believe that their BBS will thrive and survive.
But then that sysop burns out from the constant pressure of the BBS.  If
you've ever been a full-fledged sysop(hardware, software, and user support),
you understand what I'm talking about.  If you haven't been a complete
sysop, you can only imagine what the job entails.  There are a lot of
pressures.  If you are a kid that isn't ready for it, and doesn't plan
ahead, you can expect to get the *bleep* flamed out of you within a few
days.  If that's not discouraging, I don't know what is.  Very few sysops
are prepared to enter the BBS'ing community, and very few try to prepare.
Most just set their BBS up on the excitement of getting the software, play
with it, set some basic stuff up, and either get toasted an go down within
a week, or survive for awhile longer.  The best just survived and thrived
the longest.

     Anyway..  My original point.  Once the sysop leaves the BBS, as the
sysop from Decker's did, they are rarely seen again.  Whereas a user just
seems to fade out slowly, and remove themselves from the scene, a sysop
is a sysop, and then isn't.  Then that sysop isn't around, what-so-ever.
People ask, "What happened to so and so?"

     "We don't know" is the standard reply.

     Back to the timeline.  The Threshold and The Gates of Babylon went up
sometime in here.  The Gates of Babylon was set up by an older sysop that
knew what she was getting into.  Or so it seemed.  :)

     Midnight, the sysop of The Gates of Babylon, was the one great sysop
that established a message base that lasted.  I hold her responsible for
making messages a major part of a Chippewa Valley BBS.  She also could
make ANSI's with the best of them.

     DrowNet was formed, while The Wizard's Tower was still up.  It became
Uglinet(Something about Upper Great Lakes...)  Soon afterwards, TWT, and
it's sysop, Scimitar(Michael Gerrits) evidently lost complete touch with
reality.  The Gates of Babylon, along with a the young sysop of Blackie's
Hell, who agreed to host a net, formed ChiaNet.  Blackie's Hell?  Everyone
knows Blackie's Hell.  Headed by Black Leather.  Blackie's Hell.  The place
that became The Threshold.  Black Leather.  The sysop that became known as
Woodstock.  ChiaNet.  The net that became a large part of StarGate.

     TWT went down, and The Gates of Babylon went down a few months later.
Melanie just couldn't handle the constant responsibility that a good BBS
gave her.  She left, and we never heard from her again.  Blackie's Hell
assumed the mantel of being the best BBS of the area.  Blackie's Hell became
my place to go, and I began to establish a friendship with the sysop.  He's
one heck of a cool guy, and I feel lucky that I got to meet him and come to
know him.

     After that, The Byte Shop came up.  The Byte Shop was something new.
It arrived from Kansas, with the idea of making money.  Since I was one that
believed in actually paying for what he got in the BBS'ing realm, I signed
on.  I ended up being a paying member there for nearly a year and a half.
The Byte Shop became one of the more dependable BBS's.  It was never very
popular, but it was there.

     Hmm...  What else shall we touch on before the Storm arrives?  Let's
talk about the evil side of BBS's.  The one name that we wish we could
forget is Shawn Boetcher.  Lord of Kashmir.  LoK.  Christell.  Countless
other names.  He ran Kashmir, Nature BBS, and countless other BBS's that
changed names but were equally crappy.  The biggest problem with LoK was
that he was gay.  Not in the fact that he was gay, but in the fact that he
hit on nearly every guy that logged into his BBS.  Change that, LoK's
biggest problem was his stupidity.  I do not believe that he ever set up
a majority of a BBS on his own.  He harrassed people that were nice to him
until they gave in and decided to help him.  He was a constant thorn in
the side of sysops and users.  He's one of the few people that I wonder
why the heck they were born.

     Well, to make a long story short, he was convicted of stalking a guy
from North High School, and of having child pornography.  Sheesh.  I can't
say that he didn't deserve it.

     Second story.  Uurlock Ygmeov.  I really thought he was a cool person.
I bought my 14.4k USR Sporster from him, which I used faithfully for my
BBS for it's life in Chippewa Falls.  Unfortunatly, Uurlock got caught
stealing computers, and had to serve jail time.  This was a loss, but it
does illustrate more of the darker side of BBS's.

     Third story.  The sysop of the Freedom Country BBS, I believe.  Don't
know him?  Does Steve Oliver ring a bell?  Yeah, that guy that went down to
Texas with a fourteen year old?  I got an e-mail back from him about the
BBS going down about two weeks before he skipped town.  It came as a huge
suprise to me, though I was rather enjoying the idea that I had had
communications with a person that go onto America's Most Wanted.

     I don't want to beat any more dead horses with those stories, but I
tell you of these things because it shows the typical image of BBS's, as
well as the Internet, up until recently.  People hear about these stories,
and assume that they are the standard thing that goes on.  Perhaps one day
everyone will understand this sort of thing, but with the Steven Oliver
issue, I really couldn't tell people that BBS's are without a dark side.

     Well, now to let the Storm begin.  I had been preparing since December
of 1993.  I had registered the software(KBBS) roughly half a year before
I opened.(November 1994)  I had a few registered games by the time I opened,
and a few more soon afterwards.  In March of 1995 I opened up to sysops and people that found
out through the grapevine that I was up.  Roughly a call or two a day, I
was checking to see if things were working.  I planned to open up on July
4th.  My plans got changed.  My dad was constantly yelling at me about how
I couldn't have my computer on all the time.  About how I'm crazy to want
to use a computer for this BBS thing.  Why would I want to waste all this
money and not get any of it directly back?

     My dad didn't understand BBS's.  He did understand that I really wanted
to run the BBS.  I got constant threats from him that he was going to pull
the plug, etc.  Every time I left the house for more than the afternoon, he
shut my computer off.  I couldn't do much about it.  I did do one thing,
though.  I figured that if I could get enough callers into the BBS, I would
be able to leave the phone connected to the line, and annoy the heck out of
my dad until he realized that I actually had people on the other end.

     I opened up on May 6th, 1995, to the public.  It wasn't that big of a
day, but I began gaining users, and I ended up with 10 or so calls.  After
that, I just had to keep my dad away from my computer, and my dream.

     I had a dream.  I had a dream since December of 1993.  I would open up
a BBS that would be the best that I could offer, and I would try my hardest
to make it the best BBS in the area.  I fell short in certain areas, like
the amount of phone lines, which I lost to The Rendezvous(Which I never
really understood.  It went against BBS's, yet it tried to get help from
them.  It was like a big corporation that was trying to take over.  They
tried to take over, and failed.  They lost money.  They lost the support
of the intelligent people.  No one but the new users really cared about
them.  I think that when The Rendezvous went up a few months before I did,
was when the BBS'ing community of the Chippewa Valley began to die.  Big
was coming, and no one realized that small was still around.) as well
as The Byte Shop.  I couldn't win on File, because The Byte Shop had me
beat, hands down.  I could beat them in certain areas, and I did, in the
demos and module field.  I could beat them in doors.  I beat everyone,
in my humble opinion, in atmosphere.  Of course, we could debate a lot of
these forever.  I do think that The Threshold and Storm BBS were a decent
amount alike, and if you enjoyed The Threshold, you would enjoy Storm BBS,
and vice versa.

     I had a dream.  My dad could not stop me, short of crushing me.  I
have always been a kid that didn't ask for much.  My brother asked for
everything.  I was generally satisfied.  I wanted to have a BBS, though.
My dad tried his hardest to stop me, but it didn't work.  It was my dream,
and I fulfilled it as much as possible.  6000+ calls, three columns in
The Computer Shopper, a year in business, roughly ten paying callers,
200 hundred users, 35 active users, and 15-20 daily callers.  I also had
a lot of headaches.  Those stories could fill another 30k, and if you
really want to hear more of them, feel free to contact me.  Above all, I
had fun.  I didn't want to have to let the BBS go when I moved.  I was
relatively happy moving, but having to shut the BBS down did not make me
happy.

     I have not left.  The mere fact that this document has reached the
Chippewa Valley is evidence of that fact.  Many sysops have come and gone,
and many have done it without telling anyone when or why.  Many sysops
have been there, then not, just as quickly.  Some were there in the
beginning, but lost interest, and just let the BBS sit there.  ECPCUG
was up for a good part of a decade, but it spent at least three years
without a sysop.

     It's an interesting history, and one that should be at least partially
documented.  If anyone out there is reading this, and feels like they could
add something to this story, I ask them to write me, and tell me about
what they've gone through, or what they know about.

     There are many BBS's that I skipped completely.  Even some good ones,
like Phantom BBS.  It's too much of a story to tell from one person's
fragmented memory.  But it does need to be told.

     I have been around BBS's for roughly four years.  Looking at that
in BBS generations, I would have to say that I have been around for two or
three generations.  Woodstock has been around for longer.  Gallan Dracos
has been around for longer, though he faded many times.  Mike has been
around longer, and has remained.  Scimitar left a long time ago.  Midnight
left long ago.  Many have come, many have gone.  More will come, and
eventually all of us will leave.  You become a veteran in 6 months, and
a legend in a couple of years.

     Here's a salute to you, Bud.  A salute to Scimitar.  A salute to
Lithium, with Natas, Pyro, and other members in particular.  A salute to
Phantom, and all the Shadows he has brought.  A salute to my friends, and
ones that love me as I love them.  Eponine/Friction, Temujin, Shadow Master,
Woodstock/Black Leather, Dyanna.  A salute to those that we admire or
honor for different reasons.  Cherry Cocaine.  The woman who's name mean's
Cherry.  Midnight.  Gallan Dracos.  All those that brought culture into the
BBS's.  All those that brought me trouble on my BBS.  Darkmoon.  Even though
who annoyed the heck out of me.  Mike Pickerign.  I also send out a tall
salute to those that I skipped.  I'm thinking, Mike, your lessons in
intelligence have been invaluable.  Xanadu, you're a neat young woman, don't
give up on yourself.  The names keep piling.  It's a story that is my life.

     And finally, a salute to The Threshold BBS.  When Black Leather started
Blackie's Hell, he could not have known that he was on the threshold of
changing and leading a BBS'ing community that has affected many people in
many ways.  This document was written on the day that Woodstock decided that
the time for The Threshold was done.

R.I.P. January 24th, 1997.

     The story is not done, but for the time being I am done writing.


Adept



Formerly known as The Apprentice Adept

Now known on the I-net as Paradoks

Sysop of Storm BBS - (414)748-7088 - moving to Madison in late 1997

Founder and leader of Blueprint, a beginners demogroup

A believer

clay@fdldotnet.com - address until Fall '97

cbusker@juno.com - static address that I will keep for as long as possible.

Clay Busker
17 Wa Wa Ave.
Ripon, WI  54971-1056