Open Computing History Project

This month's featured interview revisits the early days of dial-up bulletin board systems through the recollections of a sysop who ran a two-line BBS out of a spare bedroom in Ohio from 1986 to 1991. The system, built around an IBM PC XT clone and a pair of 1200-baud modems, hosted a small but devoted local community of callers trading files, playing door games, and arguing about hardware on public message boards.

We have finished transcribing a set of ARPANET host tables covering the decade from 1973 to the NCP-to-TCP/IP transition in January 1983. The tables were printed out at regular intervals by a site that kept them for reference, and they were donated to the project last spring along with a box of RFC printouts.