Welp, about time I got to using this thing

A bunch of you know me from in-game or IRC (and 1-2 from even before IRC was a thing). Been around since "before" Xon, and playing since about 0.5.

I work odd hours (2 hrs here, 3 hours there, etc), so I tend to show up on the US servers a lot during my daytime (I'm in Australia), just to give them some high-ping trouble.

Dunno if I'll be around a lot on the forum. Tend to find web forums a bit a chore to keep up to date on, but hey, I'll give it another shot, just for Xon.

FWIW: Yes, I'm old. I pre-date the start of the personal computer era. Get over it kiddies.

FWIW: Yes, I'm old. I pre-date the start of the personal computer era. Get over it kiddies.

Bah! That's not old. 40 is the new 20.

get off my lawn though.

To me, "old" has always been an age some 15 years above my own age.

Welcome to the forums!

btw the start of the personal computer era isn't over yet... I'm still holding out for the Amiga to win over PC!

Ogger73: Well I'm older than you (as we established in-game), so you get off my lawn!

Halogene: Just cos I'm old doesn't mean I don't expect to be around for a while. Got a bit more fragging left in me.

Huh? I didn't imply you'd be here only for half a year or so? I was just trying to point out that "old" is a relative term that even if others apply it to you, you don't necessarily have to apply it to yourself. That definition "15 years above my own age" is so practical since you can use it for decades, it basically grows with you.

Halogene: I think you took that the wrong way..

I meant as in: I'm old, but I'm not that old that I'll be shuffling off this mortal coil yet.

There was a BBS in Rochester NY called "The Hat's Place" back in the late eighties, and one day a longtime member (can't remember his name, just that he was a narcoleptic taxi driver on disability) tied up one of the phone lines for more than 24 hours, blocking access to some door game, so when he wouldn't respond to chat pages, and we couldn't call him, we sent the police to his house for a welfare check. Poor guy died online. In his honor under the ascii art for "The Hat's Place" was placed the line "Frags: 1"

I have stats tracking disabled, but when I die I think I want my stats banner to read "Frags: 1"

Until then I'll keep mortar spamming!

I remember the BBS days well. I ran a multi-line BBS from 1988 to 1996, where over half the lines were 2400bps (the BBS was mainly for chat).

There was a BBS in Rochester NY called "The Hat's Place" back in the late eighties, and one day a longtime member (can't remember his name, just that he was a narcoleptic taxi driver on disability) tied up one of the phone lines for more than 24 hours, blocking access to some door game, so when he wouldn't respond to chat pages, and we couldn't call him, we sent the police to his house for a welfare check. Poor guy died online. In his honor under the ascii art for "The Hat's Place" was placed the line "Frags: 1"

I have stats tracking disabled, but when I die I think I want my stats banner to read "Frags: 1"

Until then I'll keep mortar spamming!

Glad somebody still knows what "door game" or "outdoor" means!

Legend says somebody could pass the handshaking (I'm guessing 300 bps) with his vocal cord over the phone. I've always wanted to meet this person.

300bps or 1200/75 aren't THAT hard if you can keep your pitch steady. The question is just how long can you keep a note for.

A few of the cheaper touch-tone phones produced such bad harmonics that a modem could latch on to that, if they produced a suitable constant tone when a button was held down.

I used to have a number of door games on my BBS. Virtual Sysop was a favourite, though everyone accused me of cheating (not that I did - What can I say, I was a good Sysop!). LORD was always popular too.

I still have much of the gear I used to run the BBS on. Modems, multi-port serial card, 486dx4-133 in a "cache" motherboard that had 8M of 15ns RAM (no extra RAM in the machine), bunch of caching VESA IDE boards with 16M each (more than the BBS itself had). Sadly the hard drives didn't survive, and neither did any of the backups. Still got the original software (licensed, on 5.25" disk) somewhere.