### A Brief History of a Computer Bulletin Board System I Called - Nostromo

#### I started on my career as a SysOp fairly early on in computer terms. My first experience with electronic communications via microcomputer started with an Apple //e and a Hayes SmartModem 300. I found a few BBSes and slowly got in to the hang of posting and communicating in cyberspace. The community was small and close knit and most of us became non-virtual friends through meetings we called GT’s (Get Together for those of you unfamiliar with the ancient term).
I very briefly ran a BBS called NORAD. Its theme was based on my favorite geek (for lack of a more accurate term) movie at the time called “WarGames”. I loved that movie and SO wanted to be the lead chtten in BASIC so I made a lot of customizations including a few simple games and a clever backdoor. If you’ll recall from the movie, when the designer of W.O.P.R. (War Operations and Planned Response (as I said, it was my favorite movie)) wanted to get back in to his system, he used a password he planted long ago – “Joshua”. Well, my backdoor was that if you entered “Professor Falken” as the username and “Joshua” as the password, I let you in with full Sysop privileges. Amazingly, I don’t think anybody ever tried it.
From there I went straight to a theme based on my new favorite move (and one more deserving) called Alien. The BBS was Nostromo and I was :Mother: (the computer that ran the ship… there’s irony in there somewhere). Being a SysOp is great… everybody envies you and most kiss your ass. Of course, there were the immature jealous ones who due to jealousy attacked me or the system simply for fun. Fortunately, the software I used (known as WBBS (Wayne BBS)) was pretty strong and I always had the ear of the programmer so fixing things was a quick ordeal.
Part of my SysOping personality involved continual change and variety. I quite often renamed the sub-boards (where the callers did their actual posting) and usually tried to come up with comedic or word play type themes. I remember one of my favorite sub-boards was called “I Can Out Vague You Anytime”. The premise being to play with something somebody else said in a strange and intentionally hard to follow way. My poetry area (a staple – even nowadays) was called “Veiled Emotions”, pretty clever I thought. My Co-SysOp (or Remote) was .rs. He was (and remains) my best friend. He was most excellent at coming up with ANSI graphics and technical lingo which we used to dress up the place. Some of that, you’ll find in this place.
Anyway, Nostromo ran for years running with the majority of the time being from my bedroom in my Mom’s house. At that point, I had traded my Apple for an IBM clone. That’s all I’ll go in to at this time not so brief after all.
Thanks to Mark Firestone for creating a space (heh) for Nostromo to continue to live.
:Mother:

Nostromo New User Screen