The Definitive History of Backwood Realm SystemsTimeline:19961996
| 1997 | 1998
|
This sick little creation of
mine, Backwood Realm Systems, has been perhaps my sole personal venture since
December 27, 1996, with the original inception of "The Backwood
Realm BBS". (Sidenote: A BBS (Bulletin Board
System) was software that an individual could use to accept calls from
other individuals using terminal software and their modem. It would
display a series of DOS-looking menus to navigate around the other
person's PC. Usually, a BBS's system operator (known as a
"Sysop") would have BBS software such as Wildcat! that had a
built-in mail system (just like internet email) which callers could use
to communicate w/each other, a system that supported the downloading of
files between the bbs and it's callers, and the support of
"Doors", which were programs a Sysop could install into
his/her BBS. They most often were online games that could be played
against other players. Some examples are Legend of the Red Dragon,
DogWorld, and Planets: TEOS, just to name a few.) I have a couple of screen shots of
the BWR BBS from several years ago. (See Figure 1 and 2.) Just after my family got our first computer in
August 1996, I began to play w/the terminal software (Windows 95's
HyperTerminal), and was trying to figure out how to get online. A friend
of mine, Matt Abel, showed me the way. I was able to log on to Brian
Mathis' "Hotseat BBS", which was the most popular BBS in
Bedford between 1989-1997. It was a subscription-based BBS, and w/the
rise of the Internet coming upon us w/the advancement of Kiva
Networking's internet access coming on strong, Mathis was not able to
get enough subscriptions to keep his BBS paid for, to say the least. The
Hotseat's two nodes went offline sometime in 1997, much to my
disappointment. One BBS stayed online here in town for some
time, known as "Night-Trail online", being ran out of Bob
Jones' Edgewood home. He was running some BBS software that I liked the
look of. It was called "Wildcat!". He was running version 4 of
the software for MS-DOS. Played many a good L.O.R.D. game there. Well, it seemed that one day Landon Key, a good
friend, stumbled upon a copy of Wildcat! 5 BBS for Windows 95 and NT. I
jumped at the chance to bring my own BBS to life. Granted, I didn't have
a dedicated phone line, or the money to run it, I still managed to
create a decent BBS that ran several door games, including the very
popular Legend of The Red Dragon (LORD) by Seth Able Robinson. Thus, on
December 27, 1996, at 2:00am, w/myself and Landon Key at the keyboard of
my IBM Aptiva pent.133, The Backwood Realm BBS, and Backwood Realm
Systems, was born into the electronic world as we know it. |
