Newcastle BBS History

Just came across an old notebook I kept when first using Bulletin Boards in Newcastle.  It contains some historical records I want to put down for later use and to get on to a Google Search for other people's reference in the future.

In January 1990 I noted these Bulletin Board Systems in the Newcastle region:

Communication 2000 run by Ian Mason.  Based in Toronto, this was probably my favourite system.  Ian started off using QuickBBS, then went to Remote Access.  He got sick of running a BBS for nearly a year, then returned with a vengeance with software called BBS-PC, which he paid big bikkies for and renamed the BBS to \/ector X BBS.  Unfortunately the user-friendliness of this system was not up to scratch, although it had a lot of power.  The problem was many commands required several letters to execute (almost a command line interface at times) and while I found this a brilliant facility, not many other users were into it, who preferred the usual one-key commands.  After suffering from diminishing call rates, Ian pulled down BBS-PC and returned to Remote Access.

Ian was a consummate sysop who setup his system with the users in mind, and was very attentive to detail.  His day job was as a school teacher.

Cybertron was run by Brett McKenzie on QuickBBS, then made the transition to Remote Access, like probably everyone else at the time.  Brett was located at Georgetown.  Brett, like me, had several problems paying his phone bill and was off the air for some months at a time.  The BBS disappeared after a few years of sporadic operation.

Mega Technology TBBS was the biggest and oldest system in Newcastle.  It was a three-line system, with the biggest hard drives, and offered that incredible facility of the day of multiline chat!  It used TBBS (or The Bread Board System) which didn't allow the operation of standard Remote Access BBS doors, and the ones available for the TBBS software were pretty lame, in my opinion, although they all had multiline capability.

The sysop was Stan White and the system operated out of Boolaroo.  Stan used to also run a computer shop at Boolaroo.  The system was probably the first to offer online CD rom access, which meant there ended up being a massive lot of files online.  I remember Stan saying at one point he could no longer add any more devices as he'd used up all the letters of the alphabet in drive names!

Bill's BBS was an interesting system at Broadmeadow, and run by Bill Mastrippolito (AKA Mastro).  This system ran on an Apple //e system on a 5 megabyte hard drive, and was quite basic, although it was normally up most of the time.  Naturally it didn't offer network messaging or all that much in the way of file downloads, but Bill persisted with running it for quite a few years mainly to prove a point that an Apple //e COULD actually run a Bulletin Board.

The Local BBS was located at Tighes Hill, sysop was Tony Dodds and ran Quick BBS (later Remote Access).  I didn't use this system very much and have precious little in the way of notes on it.

Small Business BBS must have been near Lambton somewhere (from the phone number I have) and I don't have any notes on it at all.  If I can recall correctly the sysop was Geoff Bilborough and the system was aimed at providing a network for small business owners in the local area.  It didn't get much action, and was frequently offline.  I think Geoff had a lot more to do than ensure his BBS hobby was well-maintained.

Newcastle Microcomputer Club (which was founded in October 1976) met twice a month (2nd & 4th Monday of each month in 1990) at the University.  NMC BBS was run by the clubp and the long-suffering Sysop was Tony Nicholson.  The system was on a phone line at the uni, and so used to operate outside business hours - ie 5pm to 9am Monday to Friday and 24hrs on Saturdays and Sundays.  I have an extract from Tony's section of the NMC newsletter (Jul/Aug 1990 issue):

"A hard disk failure put the system off the air from about 19:00 Friday 1st June until 17:00 on Tuesday 5th June.  Some files and messages entered in the system on 1 June have been lost. "

"We've had two hard disk drive problems lately.  Firstly, the old 20 Mb Miniscribe (which used to be in  the old CP/M BBS System) started giving lots of errors and making a whining noise.  It has been retired.  Then (just after doing a lot of work getting the network software going) the newer 32 Mb drive stopped with a "general failure on drive C:" message.  I could not do anything on the weekend (it happened on Friday night) so the system was down for four days while I did a low level format and ran drive diagnostics.  Luckily I had made a full backup only hours before the failure so only a few messages were lost".

Other Systems existant in Newcastle included the Hunter Schools BBS, Sysop name was Troy Harper which was a small system based in Newcastle West, operated by some local education establishment and run by students.  Also there was a BBS called the Novocastrian Computer Link (sysop was Matt).

On the Central Coast there were a couple of systems.  Coastal Opus at Kariong was run by Kevin Mann, which used the Opus-CBC BBS program, which wasn't really good for games and downloads, but Kevin was a dedicated mail mover who was later to become both network and region co-ordinator in Fidonet.

Another very interesting system was The Round Table BBS which was run on an Amiga out of Koolewong and used a Skypix system.  This wass software ahead of its time.  As well as being able to use ANSI graphics, both monochrome and colour (like almost all other systems at the time), Skypix also allowed users to download a set of what we would now call avatars - full graphical pictures that were displayed instead of ASCII characters.  This was well before the invention of HTML (hypertext markup language) and the invention of the world wide web, of course, but the system was before its time.  For a start, you needed an Amiga computer to be able to use it, so the 5% of computer users at the time with an Amiga would have been happy.  Unfortunately this BBS was at STD rates for me, and I didn't login all that often.

I suppose I need to add that Inquestor BBS started at some point in 1991, and operated for many years.  The sysop was Peter Deane, operated on an Amiga and concentrated on mail distribution.  We always had troubles paying the phone bill and finding hard drive space, but the hobby was extremely rewarding and introduced me to computers in no uncertain terms.  I used a number of software programs to get the system running (rather than an integrated package our IBM friends would have used) and ended up modifying the existing BBS code of Metro BBS (which I called OzMetro) and wrote an entire message section called Plutonic which was a powerful *.msg message editor with a number of utilities.

Three things killed Inquestor.  My move to Toukley from Newcastle, which meant my regular callers all became STD calls to the system; the rise and rise of the internet and world wide web; and (of course) the bankruptcy of Commodore Business Machines and the failure of the Amiga computer to remain with a viable user base.  As I have mentioned before, Inquestor still exists.  I will drag out the old A2000 it lives on in the next few days, and dump all the files from the hard drive via a serial cable to this machine.  With the Amiga Emulator, it might even be possible to get it running on the IBM PC, but at least if that is not possible, the message bases and text files will provide interesting memorabilia.