Chapter 40

On Thursday I got back a confirmation that the cult indeed wanted the 32 line BBS with a toll-free number. And to have me host it. I had Blake take one of the racks outside, and this we painted sky blue before bolting it to the floor. We mounted the UPS in the bottom, and then we announced to all nodes we were shutting down for about 15 minutes for maintenance.

Blake and Rob were standing by as we were waiting for the countdowns to finish, as Sue and I explained the procedure. And once all nodes were shut down (a first since we had opened earlier in the year), we quickly went to work. The first rack was now designated to hold my BBS, as well as a few others that I considered “friends”. This included Becky’s new one, and a few others. In the next rack went all of the porn ones. That actually took a rack and a half now. The one at the end before the porn ones got all those of religions and non-profit organizations, and the rest went into the middle. Sue or I would disconnect a server as Rob or Blake disconnected the external part of the DigiBoard. We would move to the new rack, where they would move the modems and shelf, then we would repeat the process.

It took about 20 minutes, but finally, we were done. We were all sweating, and I called Bunny into the back. I handed her $40, and asked her to get us all pizzas. She smiled, kissed her sweating husband, and told him he had the baby as she left.

I went out to the side patio and pulled out a cigar, as Rob sat at the picnic table. Sue looked at me, and I smiled and nodded. She grinned back and climbed into his lap before pulling out a cigarette. I lit it for her, then lit my cigar as Rob asked why we had done that.

“Well, the short answer is that we have grown too big, too fast in the last nine months. When we started, we just threw servers in the racks where there was room. But we really can’t do that anymore. I already have Sue there working out the new rack system, and probably in late September we will be shutting everything down for a night and doing it all right. This was a quick and dirty patch, but at least they are arranged a bit better. But the first racks will remain for me and those I call friends. Becky, Pavel, and a few that run BBS systems as a hobby, but have me physically host them.”

I took a drag, and sighed as I let it out. “After that, it’s regular businesses. The car lots, pawnshops, things like that. Then religious and non-profit in the last before the porn. That is not a major growth area, most only host one line, two servers right now host that entire segment. And I still have lines available and space in the rack, even after this cult with their 32 lines and two servers. Then at the end, all the porn ones. Like three-quarters of our in-use lines at this time are all dedicated to porn companies. That is actually my bread and butter, they have huge amounts of money to throw around, and have always been some of the first to jump on new technology. We are moving those all to two racks, but I am setting aside three more for that. That will make it easier to find the right rack right away, then the right server in the rack. I already have Norm coming in tonight. So you can finally meet him. He’s a bit, strange, and he sometimes stinks. But don’t be fooled, he is probably the best computer guy I have ever met in my life. He has some software updates he wants to put in, and something he said he needs to show me. You all are free to stick around, or head home.”

They both said they wanted to be here, so I smiled and when Sue finished her smoke I snuffed out my cigar and put it in the rube and we headed back in just as Bunny got there with the pizza. And after lunch I went into my office and pulled out the newest Computer Currents and MicroTimes. Those were the two biggest local computer magazines and I started going through them. One thing that made me sit up and take notice is that a company in the Bay area was about to release a new modem that operated at 14.4 kbps with multiple standards. This was almost 50% faster than the modems I was using now! I whistled at the price, it would be over $24,000 to upgrade just my own systems to these. But I did some calculations, and I figured that without expansion if I added $5 to the cost for subscribers I could pay them off in six months. I could then once again roll down the 9600 to other systems I hosted, then roll the 2400 modems to the store. I already had a booth soon at the big LA Fairgrounds computer show. This was a weekly event that moved locations each weekend, with hundreds of vendors like me selling computers and parts. Abe sorting out systems and parts he thought were excess, and we had been doing the same thing here. But the biggest lot was over 150 modems, I figured we would sell them at $50 each. Along with several sorted boxes of miscellaneous cards at $5 and $10 each.

And other stuff. RAM, floppy drives, CPUs, cases, keyboards, and more. The pallet had actually held over two hundred of them, and we were still going through them. Most of them were 286 systems, but a few dozen were 386. We got about thirty of the 286 systems running, and those were all going with us. As well as the empty cases. We literally had pallets of stuff, including EGA monitors and printers. Which I found ironic, as a year ago I was starving for the Alps printers. Now I was almost choking on them. I hoped to make a killing that weekend, and get rid of a lot of stuff that was starting to clutter up the shop and data center.

The last thing I wanted to become was a “collector”. My earliest days made me a ton of money because so many shops just collected old and obsolete technology. I would rather dump it and make a small profit. Or at least not lose much and open up the space for new items. And prices were falling fast. The $150 per meg of DRAM that was in each of the Zenith 286 had now dropped to around $75. And I had a ton of that, thanks to the junked systems. I figured $50 a meg, $45 if they bought 2 megs or more. New floppy drives were still almost $100, I would take $50, just to get rid of them. When I left Japan, an EGA monitor was selling for $300. I would take $50, and it would also work as a CGA monitor. And I had almost a hundred EGA cards for $10 each. Why hold the damned things? VGA was now even cheaper than EGA was two years ago.

When Norm got there, we shook hands and he said he would be right back. He came in with what looked like a rack mount server box and set it on the table in the back. “Here man, got this in last week from a buddy and thought you’d wanna see it right away. Check it out man, check it out.”

He opened it up, and it was, different. The motherboard looked amazingly sparse, and I saw almost nothing I was looking for. No CPU, only about a megabyte of memory, the BIOS was not identifiable, other than an EPROM with a disk write-protect tab over it. But I counted, and it had 24 16 bit ISA slots for computer cards. And a port in the back that looked strange but familiar.

“OK Norm, what is this exactly?”

“Oh man, a guy I know makes these in a shop he owns in Hawaiian Gardens. See this port? It’s a DigiBoard port, Pete. A DigiBoard port.” I gasped, and it all fell into place.

“OK, with this we can switch to internal modems, right? Hook the DigiBoard into this, then put all the modems in here, and other cards we might need?

“Yep! He is still tweaking the BIOS, so no other cards. But it can handle 24 modems, and rumor is that Digi already might have a 24 port version coming next year. But man, like he wants testers. He told me, and I knew you were the dude to give this to. But no other cards, just modems.”

I told him immediately I wanted it, and as many as I could get. I asked him the price, and gasped when he told me $500. “That’s it?”

“Well, you are also a tester. He wants these first ones to go out at-cost, so he can get them working right before he actually sells them. He wants to come up and help install them, then come up to check them out, and have you tell him if you have any problems. He said he will help fix any problems, and replace the BIOS as needed. So you want it?”

“Hell yes! I’m about to upgrade my modems again, and if I can move to internal modems, that will make things so much easier and cheaper! No more power bricks, I can bundle the phone cables and remove those shelves I have bolted to the back of the racks. Things are starting to get to be a mess back there, with all those external modems behind the racks on wood shelves. Got any idea how to improve things a bit more?”

“Call Jack, he might know a way.” So I called Jack, and he said he would be there shortly. And I knew that I would need more racks soon. This would ease management a lot, but would almost double the amount of rack space needed. But a trade-off well worth it.

Jack got there and I told him what I needed, but did not know how to do it. He simply grinned and went to his truck. He then pulled out a cable with a long elbow connector at the end and a patch panel with a receptacle for it. “Here, we transition you to this. Each of these connectors handles 50 wires, so you can use one for 24 lines, and have 2 wires left over. I can then make breakout cables, one of the cables runs to 24 RJ11 phone jacks that plug into the modems, and you just plug it into the panel and are done. No more 24 wires from the rack to the wall, for each server, just this one cable.” That would make two cables for three boxes, a big help. We arranged to do the swap next weekend. Norm said he did not know how many boxes he could get in by then, but he would try.

“No hurry for that Norm, I still gotta order the modems, I do not have that many internal modems. But we can get the wiring done, and have it ready to go. I was already going to shut down in a week or so overnight to do a better job in moving around the servers, I will just combine this with that project. Then when we get back up, things will be a lot better organized.”

We sat around and talked as Norm put in some updates to his software, and now the top of the desk was almost creaking under four 20 inch monitors, all monitoring the status of lines running. Norm added some more colors to the display, including the text and box flashing red if there was a problem with the line. I asked him how much I owed him, and he said we could settle up when it was done.

“Man, as far as I am concerned you still have credit my man. I have yet to do enough to pay you back for the stuff you gave me already.”

I said we had the LA Fairgrounds show in three weeks, so the next weekend would be best. “That gives me over a week to get some new modems, and some more racks. I think I’m going to just go ahead and fill that entire back area with racks, and start running them in a horseshoe back this way. That way I can go ahead and separate them now, so it should not get that messy again.”

Norm then asked if I had Usenet. I explained I did not, but I had Echo Mail, which worked on a similar principle. “Here man, give this dude a call. He runs a system like this, but he’s tied into the Internet. That means Usenet, POP-3 email, Internet Relay Chat, and access to search services like WAIS to access computers from all over. Now most are already shutting down public access, but what is there is impressive.”

I called, and Charles was indeed running a similar service. He said he could be over shortly, and even though I said everybody was free to leave, they all remained. Charles arrived in a shirt and tie, and after shaking hands he looked through my setup.

“Yes, Norm here told me about you, but now I see he was telling the truth. I run something similar, but near UCLA. But I do not host BBS systems, I do the Internet. Here, let me show you.”

He logged into his service and showed me what it could do. It was all text, but he said that with some programs he could sell me, it could do a lot more. He connected to a file server he ran, and I did notice it was more akin to being connected to a large network than calling a BBS. He grabbed a few programs and soon had them installed.

The Relay Chat was impressive. There were about forty chat rooms, everything from #StarTrek to #Sex, #Beer to #COBOL. We went into several, and from two to sixty people were in each room. He then fired up a mail program, and after putting in a dummy account he was showing me Usenet, and it was much larger than FIDO. But similarly, broken down into topics. The WAIS let him do a search and find the information he was wanting. He shut down the connection, and I asked him what all was involved.

“Here is the beauty of it. The National Science Foundation is taking over from the military to run this. This was ARPANET, a big DoD program they started in the 60’s. But now the NSF is running it. And they want to open it up to everybody and then turn it over to the Department of Commerce. You get the phone company to install a T-1 line, that is like a phone line on steroids and handles 1.5 megabits per second. You tie into that, then you do pretty much what you do here. People dial in, then go on the Internet instead of a BBS. I even have a door program you can install that will let them access it through your BBS.”

“Why are you telling me this? You don’t want to do it?”

“Not up here. I’m already getting stretched supporting USC, UCLA, and those down in my area as it is. I would need to seriously upgrade my capabilities. My credit is already stretched thin, and I got people screaming for access up here that I can’t support. But I think you and I can do a swap.”

“What do you have in mind Charles?”

“Well, right now I am doing all of this mostly on Digi 8 boards. And Norm said you have Digi 16 boards. Give me ten of them, and I will help you do everything you need to get tapped in.”

Well, I had the boards to spare, I will still using the first box, and had not even tapped into the other ones yet. But this was essentially my giving him the equivalent of $50,000, even if my cost was only a few hundred. I had sold some of those, but it was also what I could use if I ran into a money crunch myself and needed to expand fast. I asked Jack if he could work with a T-1, and he nodded. “I just install it though, I don’t know how to take it from there.” He then said my phone line cap was around 600 lines. “More than that, and you will need to get Pac-Bell to put in a new service box on the street.”

Charles and I reached an agreement, and he said he would spend a few weeks getting things set up, and gave me a list of things I would need at my end. He left, and I sighed. “OK, we are still a go the weekend after next. But a change in how we set things up. I will head back to the Bay area, and fill the back with racks, rack cases, modems, and anything else I think I will need. I am going to get the contractor in here and we are partitioning this area up a bit. That side wall where we have pallets stacked? We are going to put the new systems into racks along that wall. Jack, what all do you need for the T-1?”

“Oh, the beauty of that is that it is basically a single cable. Just that, then the lines as we discussed for those to call in.”

I sighed. “Well, I need to call the family for approval, I am dipping into the company funds again for this. Norm, can you do any programming I need?”

“Easy-peasy Pete. I actually already have most of the code, it’s free access stuff. Charles there is who I use, so I can pop on over to some universities and grab what I need from their software libraries and make any changes you need. What do you want?”

“Well, if you notice that was mostly UNIX code. I will need software for DOS. Charles sounds like he mostly works with college kids, most of my users know nothing about XENIX, let alone UNIX. So I need DOS programs to do all of that stuff. That means if they are not available, I need them written.”

“OK, no problem, I just have to compile some. How are you thinking of doing this?”

“Well, go big or go home. I figure I start with 32 lines, and go from there. Oh hell, account management. How will I do that?”

“I got ya man, I can tweak a program that Charles has, make it work for you. He did say we would have complete access to his software, I can customize any of it I need. And trust me, I think that deal is a smart investment for both of you. He can expand another 160 lines, you get everything you need on the software side and how to set it all up from him. He wants to expand, but he knows it would take him over half a million to expand to reach up here. Now, he can expand where he is, and have somebody he can work with up here in the Valley. I told him about Cliff, he knew him also. Charles told me that if you and Cliff could work side by side and not compete, he could do that with you.”

“Well, yeah. I will never move into his area, no need to. I can start here, and push north. OK, great. Start a bill on any code you make, and keep it running. Sue, you and I are going north on Tuesday morning. Jack, keep a bill running also, go ahead and do any of the early prep whenever you have the time, But the T-1 and 32 lines on that wall over there, and figure we are putting in an additional four offices along the front wall. So pick good evenly spaced places in that wall for three cables. two data, one voice. And dump another data cable in each of the existing offices. I’m gonna have to hire new staff if this goes as I think it will. Oh, Norm. Can I tie my BBS into this, so people can call my board through it?”

“Sure, man. TELNET. You hook up your BBS to that, and like literally anybody on the Internet can access your BBS. All a BBS really does is use the teletype protocols, ya know? TELNET was part of ARPANET from early on, you do the exact same thing.”

I grinned and looked around the room. “And any other BBS I host too! Oh man, imagine that! Somebody calling a local service like this in New York, then connects to me here with no long-distance! I can use this to try and really push my echo groups, find somebody that does this anywhere, we exchange packets like this, it’s the future I think. OK, it’s late, but after we get Rob’s system installed, this is our next big project people.”

On Friday, I called Dee, and said that I had a new business plan and I needed a lot more money. She asked how much, and I said $100k. We talked a bit, and I said I was sure I could have it back within a year. “Well, you did promise that last time, and it was back in nine months. Go ahead, is this going to affect your plans up here?” I asked her about the phone line along the 86, and she said that was indeed the main trunk through the region.

“Oh yes, will it! I need to do some work here first, to make sure it all works before I copy it up there though. I need you to do a few things first.” I told her to check if I could get a T-1 line there, and if I could cut off the western part of the Lowery property, and sign it over to Or’bit Communications. “And I will make up a quick drawing for a building. It will need to be brick, with a super HVAC system. But with this, I can administer the system up there as if I was right here in front of it. And literally provide for any system I connect National and International service without long-distance charges.” I gave her a rundown, and she said it sounded like a great idea. And she would call me back when she had the information I wanted.

I then called the company from the article in MicroTimes. They did confirm they were sending out the first shipments of their new modems now. I asked if I could pick some up on Tuesday, and when they asked how many I said at least a hundred of them. She passed me through to somebody on their tech team, and we talked for about 20 minutes. He told me he had a few hundred early versions of them he could send me. “Now these were the first production run. We discovered some issues after they were finished, and they have all been fixed. But they have jumper wires all over the front and back of the boards. We can’t sell them like that, and some we gave out as demo units and to employees. But we have around four hundred of them left. I can guarantee they are perfectly fine, they are just ugly as hell with wires soldered all over them.” He offered me all of them of them for $40,000. I told him I would take them all, and when he asked where to ship them I said to just hold them. “I’m driving up on Tuesday, I can just give you the check and pick them up myself. There are some other places I need to see up there anyways.”

I yelled at Sue, and when she came in I told her the good news. She jumped up and down and asked how I was going to do this. “Well, of course all my lines are going to 14.4, as all of those for the new service. After that and we are sure they work, we start offering it from our biggest customers on down. Video X, Lovely Angels, once we know these are working fine we offer them upgrades. Now these are normally $500 each. The ones I am getting are all early models and not sellable to customers. Engineering wires all over, but we don’t care about looks. We offer the upgrades for $500, but we will give a $75 credit for the old 9600 modems we remove. We then push the same deal to the other systems, $75 to upgrade from 2400 to 9600. Hopefully, we can get most of those 2400 ones out and send them to the fairgrounds. Oh, and you all are getting one also along with anybody else. We are all going to have to test the hell out of these before we start offering these to the public.”

When we closed up for the day, I went through the echo groups. There were now well over a hundred people who said they were going skating on Saturday. And the messages on PornNET had picked up. MissNemo wrote another hot story, about her when she was in High School, parking next to a cliff with her first serious boyfriend. But this time he went no further than sucking on her nipples, and how she had an orgasm just from that. Then how she went home afterwards with the crotch of her panties and shorts wet, and had to masturbate two more times before she could go to sleep. And if her description was correct, she liked her middle and index fingers of her right hand inside of herself, as she rubbed her clit with the same two fingers on her left hand.

I went into the bisexual erotica area and wrote another story as ChaosGirl. This time I told how I had gone to see my friend, and did as I always had done and knock on her window so she could let me in the back door. When I got there it was open a few inches, and I could hear her. I peeked in the curtain, and saw her and her boyfriend on the bed making out. I hid there and watched and listened as they got more and more involved. Until finally I was masturbating with the bottom of my shirt in my mouth to muffle my sounds as she was jacking him off on her bed. And how I came a minute after watching her hand bring him to a climax, his cum spraying all the way up to their faces, and seeming to cover his chest. And how I quickly headed home, and ran myself a nice bath and climbed in, using my hairbrush to masturbate again and again until I was satisfied.

I saw MissNemo was there, and she asked where I was. I told her in the shop, and she logged off. Less than a minute later she was calling, and I leaned back in my chair and we chatted for about an hour. I said that since the skating started at 1, I would pick her up at 11 and we could have lunch first. Heather said that sounded great, and she looked forward to seeing me.

I headed on home and went to bed. I was not tired, I just wanted to do some thinking. I was now well past the one hundred paid line point, and even I was blown away at the success of this. But if I could let people access the system over this new network, that could change everything. I could administer computers in Idaho from here.

Even better, I could administer computers here from Idaho. Hmm, too bad I still had to be here for a lot of the normal operation though, nice dream though.

The next day I pulled up in front of the trailer park, and Heather was already waiting for me there. I gave her a kiss and we decided on Chinese on the way down, so we stopped at a place I knew in Canoga Park. And when I paid for our admission I was stunned at the number of people already inside. There must have been almost two hundred there, from kids to grandparents. A few I knew came up and shook my hand, and started to call others over to meet me. Heather faded to the side as I was meeting so many people. Then the DJ got on and thanked everybody from the BBS community for being there.

Sue and Rob pulled me to the DJ booth and pushed me in front of the microphone I thanked everybody for being there, and I said we would be doing this every month, for as long as people showed up. I finally got to skate, and during a break Sue came up to me and left Rob on the floor. “Dang dude, she’s young. 16? 17?”

“18, and it’s nothing serious. So far we have been to Magic Mountain, and this is our second time skating. We are taking it slow, but thank you for your concern, mom.” Sue laughed and headed back to Rob. When Heather returned from the bathroom we headed back out again.

I saw Darlene wave me over a bit later, so I went to talk with her. She was amazed so many were here, she was never this packed on a Saturday afternoon. “Well, this is all BBS people. I put the word out we would do this once a month, and you see the turnout. Many are people who have talked for months or even years, and are meeting each other for the first time.” She then asked what would be required for her to do this, and I threw her my normal cost for a simple one line BBS. I also told her how it could be used to promote things like what she sold, or include coupons like we had today.

“OK Pete, I will send over a check on Monday, go ahead and set it up.” I smiled and said there would be a contract waiting, and she could drop off the check when she signed it. Dang, another one. A bit later I told Sue that she could knock that out on Monday. She smiled and said not a problem. We now had a series of pre-made BBS templates, that we could drop in and modify. This let us do a complete BBS in an hour. It was actually taking longer for the phone company to do their part than it was for us to do ours.

When it was all done, I said goodbye to so many people. After a lot of handshakes and a few hugs, we decided to head out. We went to the call center, and I let her play around on the various boards I ran as I wrote out the contract for Darlene and put it in a folder on Bunny’s desk. I then tacked it on the end of another server and got it configured and a basic menu setup installed. I then wrote a message for Sue on our internal BBS and gave her the basics and where it was currently located. Instructing her to activate the phone line as soon as we got the check, and then to start promoting it.

I was thinking we might go see a movie when I heard thunder. And looking outside, it had started raining. Well, at least we were not on the bike. Finally, at 6 we headed off to get some dinner. After dinner it had stopped raining, so she suggested one of the parks. We got in my truck and drove to Balboa, and hand in hand walked around it a few times until it started to drizzle again.

We got back to the truck, and Heather curled over into my lap and started kissing me. I returned her kisses, and in the growing darkness we kissed each other. But hands never leaving backs or arms. But sometime later we both jumped as a light was shown in our faces and somebody knocked on the door. Heather freaked out a bit, but I had her scoot over to the other side as I rolled down the window.

Hmm, I did not know these cops, but I knew the drill. They asked what we were doing, and I said we had just been kissing. The one by me looked at his partner, then asked me to step out of the vehicle. He walked me in front of my car and asked for my ID. I saw Heather being taken to the back of the truck, and I assume the same thing was happening to her. He asked how I knew her, and what were we doing. I told him I was sure he had seen us, both my hands had been visible on her back, and her arms had been around my neck so we were not even touching inappropriately.

He left me at the front, and I saw that Heather was looking rather upset at the back. Then two cops both talked with her, and I saw her shake her head several times. Finally, he came back and told me we were free to go, but he had better not catch me like that again or he would take me in. I looked at him in puzzlement, as when was it illegal to kiss? “She says you do not know, so I will just give you that warning.” At that, they went to a cop car about 20 feet away and waited until I started my truck and pulled away.

I saw Heather was still crying, and as I pulled onto Burbank Boulevard I asked her what was wrong. And oh boy, did I find out! Heather had lied to me, she was not 18. She was 17. I asked her why she had lied to me, and she said she was afraid of what I would do if I knew she was 17. I sighed and kept going until I hit the 405 and headed to Castaic.

“Well, for one, I could have gotten in a lot of trouble. Thank goodness we were only kissing, or I might have been put in jail, Heather. Now it makes a lot more sense why Stacy was so angry at me. When do you turn 18?” She told me in February. Six months away, I sighed. “Well, I am not killing your accounts, but I am knocking your access back to a minor. I will not say anything in the group, but I suggest you not post in PornNET anymore.”