Quoted from Pinball_Postal:I never had an Amiga, but still have a Commodore 128, 64 and SX64. I haven't tried to power one on in ages. I ran a Commodore BBS in the middle 80's and it was a blast. The BBS had a screaming 10 meg hard drive, literally it made a lot of noise, and cost more than the computer, monitor, and floppy disk drives combined. Anyone still remember BBS's ?
My first computer was in 1985, I bought a used Atari 800 that came with 20-30 cartridge games and had an external floppy disk drive. That computer introduced me to the world of BBS's and "warez". I amassed a giant collection of Atari 800 games. Here is a classic review of the Atari 800:
"Kilobaud Microcomputing wrote in September 1980 that the Atari 800 "looks deceptively like a video game machine, [but had] the strongest and tightest chassis I have seen since Raquel Welch."
As for BBS games, played a ton of Trade Wars, Space Empire, and Pimp Wars.
Then in 1989 when I was 15 years old, I had my uncle take me to the bank and I withdrew $600 out of my savings account (only had a balance of like $750) and had him take me to the mall where I bought an Amiga 500 from Electronics Boutique. The money I had saved up was to be used towards my first car. My mom was beyond PISSED! Again, I used my Amiga to connect to Warez BBS's mostly and traded warez 24/7. I swear I had every Amiga game ever made at one point. In 1990 my computer buddy launched Arkham Assylum BBS and I was a co-sysop. We dabbled in making red/blue boxes but didn't have much success. However my computer buddy's dad worked for DuPont at the time and his Dad used to work from home at times routing cargo across the US by dialing into a mainframe at the DuPont HQ, and then from there dialing out HQ into the different cities to route cargo. Well somehow my computer figured out access to that connection and it allowed us to connect "locally" into the DuPont HQ's mainframe and the dial long distance for free and connect to any BBS in the world, all at the expense of DuPont. The only sucky part about it was that our transfer speeds were downgraded from 14.4 down to 2400. Fun times back then! LOTS of weekends where I got barely any sleep.
Magnolia, DE
