Back in 1980, the summer I graduated high school I came across a Compucenter outlet in a shopping mall. It was displaying a few computers which caught my attention.  At the time hardly anyone had computers or even knew what to do with them. The computer that caught my eye was the Texas Instrument TI99-4A.

It had a cartridge port so you were able to buy games. The computer needed to be hooked up to a TV much like game consoles today. Anyway I bought a few games like Asteroids, Space Invaders, Pacman, I can’t remember what else but when I wasn’t playing games I was learning to program in TI Basic. It was similar to other versions of basic but the strong point was that the book was written in such a way that a child could understand. I’m surprised that they didn’t invent the book series for dummies. 

So anyhow, I learned some basic computer programming skills. A few years later my curiosity was sparked once again by modems going from 300 bps to 1200 bps, but also new computers were coming out.  I ended up buying an Atari XE computer.

I later got an Atari 520ST but I was thinking of getting an Amiga since they were getting very popular at the time.

Somewhere along the way I got myself a modem and then another.

from 1200 baud to 2400 baud ( bits per second). That was the beginning of a whole new world for me. The ability to exchange information from one computer to another over telephone lines was amazing in those days.  That also brought me to start my own BBS (bulletin Board System).  I had setup a dedicated phone line just for that. I had configured it to work on something called Fidonet which allowed computers to update their forums and game data from one BBS to another.  I wasn’t the only one doing this. There was a list called Juxtaposition which had the list of all the Montreal area BBS’s. Liste-BBS-Montreal-1995

     My interest in computers and technology kept growing. At that time the internet was only available to universities. Eventually the internet started to be available to the public, and that made things change for those SyOps running BBS’s and users who started going on the internet rather than calling BBS’s. Eventually I decided to shut down Probe BBS which was the name of my BBS.

 

To be continued,,,