|  | ### The BBS: A Brief History by Bryan Leaman
|  | Bits 'N Bytes went online on September 15, 1989. I was in high school at the time, and after I bought my first 2400bps modem, I was hooked. Soon after I started calling "the boards" at all hours of the night, I decided to start my own. I didn't know what I was getting into at the time... The system originally ran on an Epson Equity I (a 4.77Mhz 8-bit 8088 CPU) with 640K RAM and 20MB of hard disk. By the time I took the system offline in February 1997, it had grown to six dedicated networked PCs with more than 9 gigabytes of file storage (see picture below.) |  | 1996/97 Login Screen Main Menu

|  |  | ### The BBS: An Online Family
| BBS in May 1996 |  | Over the seven and a half years that the BBS was online, a very strong, friendly, and supportive online community was created. Many friendships were formed, and many laughs were shared (remember Dwayne and "Rollo"?). This was probably the most important aspect of Bits 'N Bytes, and it will surely be missed. Each summer I hosted the annual "BBS Picnic" at my house. Here we would gather, rain or shine (more rain than shine) with or without our computers and just eat, share stories, and talk about computers. Take a look at my BBS Picnic Photo Gallery! I recall many fun times, including running network cables through the rain so we could play Doom, the annual Amiga vs. IBM competition, and Randy Miller's unique systems.
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