Multicomm

I don't know if I ever mentioned this in any of my prior blogs, so I thought I would do a whole post about it, kind of trace my internet roots so to speak. Many, many years ago, when the internet craze was still in its infancy, way back in the late 80s, I got introduced to the world of personal computers and bulletin boards through a local BBS (bulletin board service) that the local Apple Computer store ran for people who bought computers there. This was when an average computer sold for serveral thousand dollars, about a third of the price of a car. I logged on, created a handle, chatted with a couple of people, and that was it. It wasn't until a couple of years later that I had my second encounter with online services. This time it was during the summer and my younger brother had conned my father into buying him A brand new Mac to use at college (since he was going to be a computer engineer). My brother had discovered the wickedness of Compuserve and online game playing. I watched him play a couple of times, created my own handle, posted a couple of messages, and that was it...until the following summer. My brother came home for summer break after his freshman year and started logging on to online services again. After wasting big money on Compuserve games, he discovered a local BBS that was free, well alright there was a minimal charge, MultiComm. Once again I watched him while away his time, chatting with other computer geeks, but this time I was hooked. I created my own online identity -The Grey One- which soon morphed into -Davyd Grey- after a somewhat nasty flamming match with Grey Wolf as the BBS system only recognized the first 3 initials of handles and could not distinguish between the two of us. I was soon downloading a term program on the family Apple 2+ and began chatting away my summer. Pretty soon I had growing circle of cyber friends across the Las Vegas valley and we were making plans for a grand meeting where everyone could get to know everyone else face to face. Finally the first meeting happened at Shakeys pizza, which led to another get together the following week, followed by another and another, which quickly became a weekly must attend event attracting 40-50 people every Saturday night. We quickly outgrew the pizza parlour and started meeting at a local park with touch football games preceding the gathering. Needless to say this went on for several years, with new people showing up, and old people leaving. Finally after a decade of this, in the midst of a blossoming internet craze, MultiComm closed its doors. That was in the late 90s, and although I have managed to keep in touch with several of my MC friends, we all drifted away in seperate directions; that is until just recently. Last year I ran into an internet site called BBSmates, which is a database of all the old BBS's across the country and membership lists for each. In addition, it also had a forum for posting with messages from several of the old MC goons. Mass conversation quickly ensued and as of two weeks ago, Dragon - MultiComm's old sysop was finally persuaded to reopen the BBS as an internet site found here. Go visit it and tell me what you think. Relive the glory days of old style BBSs and see what us computer crazy geeks had to deal with using our 300 baud connections.