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Nostalgia
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Strawberry Fields : Detroit
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| I was a late bloomer. The Strawberry
Fields BBS went online in early 1993. I had already been calling such established
boards as Castle Aaugh, …And Now For Something Completely Different, ENGLiSH
ACiD, Elysian Fields, The Morgue, The Crypt, Zhentil Keep, The Asylum,
Squire's Guild, The Strain, Liberal Antithesis, Immortal's Tomb, World
of Krynn, Battlefield:Earth, Planet Earth, Flying Circus, Wishing Well,
and numerous others I will never remember the witty names of.
Where does one find time to call this many boards? Well, before you run a BBS you can call as many as you want. You can be 3 out of the last 5 callers at any given moment. Which is what I was for the first few months. It was such a cool concept to be ONLINE. It didn’t matter that the graphics were the worst, I would have BBSed in an all text-environment if I had to. Today there are java applets to chat, there are all sorts of graphical interfaced tools to use online. Back in the day, we couldn’t transfer data that fast. Imagine if you will, the text you are reading displaying at a speed just barely fast enough to read. I used a 1200 bps modem. High tech! I loved it. The Graphics we saw were all text based, higher ASCII codes and ANSI. If you had a bad term program then you were stuck in black and white. What inspired me to run a BBS would probably have been Tyrone. And to think I only met him on a fluke. I saw the number to his BBS posted, a BBS that didn’t exist yet. I called it up. His BBS wasn’t set up to answer yet, but at this particular moment he was expecting a call from his soon to be CoSysOp, Sean. CONNECT 1200. That flipped him out, he thought something was broken and it wasn’t connecting at 14.4 like it should have been. Well I thought that if Mark Samp could run a BBS then I could too. Strawberry Fields went online and to this day I still meet people who "heard" of Detroit’s Strawberry Fields. Like Dave Valko at Digital Video Services, he was into the Grand Rapids BBSing scene but he heard of me long before I ever worked under him. Just running BBSes wasn’t good enough for Mark, Pat and I. We founded FloogieNet on the wake of the success of Mark Geralds’ SPAMnet. A Floogie was the word we used when you snuck up behind a girl and grabbed her boobies. It was an acceptable act only if you screamed "FLOOGIE!" We decided that this act deserved a network. We went International when I had a node in Canada for a month. Today I still hang out with BBSing buddies that I
met in the early 90s when I still couldn’t drive yet. Amazing, isn’t it?
/s |