Letter from Scott Haynes March 2014 Cool website, brings back a lot of memories. I was a SysOp of a couple Atari based BBS's back around 1984 until probably the mid 90s sometime. They are listed on your site in the 513 (Cincinnati) area code, "The Round Table BBS" was my personal website, my handle was KA (short for King Arthur) and I also took over the local Atari club (Cin'Tari) website at some point. I was the last Cin'Tari president as far as I know (I killed it off so to speak). I was also what would be considered a hacker back then, The Round Table BBS was very much into the pirating and hacking scene with a hidden area behind the boring public domain site. The BBS started on an Atari 800xl computer with an Atari 1030 modem. The modem was quickly replaced with an MPP-100c modem that was this blue box like those project boxes you would get at Radio Shack with a ribbon cable coming out of it with a 9 pin d-sub connector. The significance of the modem change was that on the Atari 1030 it was 297 baud (not 300 and you could notice the difference) and if someone would hang up on the BBS software without logging off on that modem the BBS would not reset, you would wake up in the morning to a screen full of 9's or something like that. I bought the MPP 100C from another SysOp (found him on Facebook a few years back) who was taking his BBS down because it crashed one too many times and he was fed up. Typically only people with BBS's back then had the 1000c modem, it was really rare. There was a more refined 1000e that most people had, but as far as I remember that one had the reset bug as well. I still have the 513-528-5833 phone number that the Round Table was always at. Today it serves as a fax line for my business and has been ported over to a VOIP provider. I always thought there should be some computer at the other end of that number because of all the years of enjoyment I got out of being a SysOp. Like some of the other articles I have read on your site I was into the phreaking (as we called it back then) scene using allnet and later sprint codes obtained from other hacking websites (Skull Island BBS somewhere in NJ if I remember correctly was a big one with their Elite Skull area). In the early days we would run war dialers overnight and while at school all day to get 4-5 working allnet codes (4-6 digit codes I think back then, what security, you could almost just pick a number at random and get a working code). The funniest (scarriest at the time) moment I remember, keep in mind I was in high school back then, was when I taught an older neighbor kid (not a computer nerd like me) how to call from a payphone for "free". I thought it was too complicated for him and he would forget, but to my shock he apparently taught everyone in my high school how to do it in a matter of a few days. I will never forget sitting in the Gym with the entire student body while the Principle explained how someone had been doing illegal things with the payphones and when they found out who it was they were going to be in a lot of trouble. I was sweating bullets (as I bet a lot of others were). It didn't dawn on me at the time that the guy I taught was just as worried as I was and was never going to say anything. They took the pay phone bank out shortly after that, probably for lack of payment or something. That 4 digit code must have worked for months before they turned it off, amazing. Those of us in the inner circle of pirating would get together on weekends for marathon software piracy parties at someones parents house. We would sometimes for days on end without sleep copy disc's as fast as we could. 5-1/4" floppies in the early days of 8-bit software and then later on the 16 bit Atari ST software on 3-1/2" discs. I still have hundreds of those rotting in my parents basement along with all the hardware I ran the BBS's on. I have a million stories I could tell, but just a few highlights; My best friend to this day is someone I met through my BBS, I called to yell at him and "voice verify" him because he signed up on my BBS like 4 times in a row. He quickly explained that he had two brothers and a sister that all used the computer and all had signed up. We still reminice about that (our wives have no idea what we are talking about). My first hard drive was for the 8-bit Atari, I can't recall the name of the brand, but it was 10mb and it was $1000 cash used. A buddy of mine (who is now a professional software coder that just released a huge product in the online gaming world) drove out in the country in the dark with me to pick it up, mind you we were like 15-16 years old at the time. This guy's online handle was Bill Bear or something and he actually owned a black bear! We all thought it was just a myth, but we get to this guys house finally (no GPS back then), it is pitch dark out in the middle of nowhere. We go up to the house, the lights are all off (or so it seemed), the hard drive was laying in a chair on the porch. We are looking at each other like what the heck and around the corner comes this really hairy dude covered from head to toe in mud. It was Bill and he proceeded to tell us that his Bear had gotten loose. We quickly handed over the cash and got out of there. We spent the next 3 days working night and day to back up all the free software that was on the drive. The Atari's standard disc drive was a single density single sided 5-1/4". It seemed like it took around a hundred disks to fit everything on. That was a turning point for the BBS, it was big time after that. Up to that point I had like 4 floppy drives daisy chained for the total storage of like 720k or something. I remember thinking that 10mb was more storage than a person would ever need. Later on there was a huge computer convention up in Dayton Ohio put on by the Dayton Microcomputer Association called Computerfest. There use to be this guy up there we called the buck a meg guy because he sold used drives for a buck a megabyte which was dirt cheap in those days, by that point the 40-80mb drives were out. I can't remember the software I ran initially, there was probably only one program out in the mid 80s, then BBS Express came out and it was great. At some point I moved the BBS over to a 1040ST computer running the 16 bit version of Express ST. We would network message bases in the later years to other boards around the country in a wheel type fashion. At night one BBS would call another and then that would call another and so on, they would transfer packets of messages for those message bases you would carry that were networked. We had local networks and national networks. I wrote some software on the 8-bit (in a language called Action) I called NetPaq that would use compression similar to ZIP to compress those packets down, everyone saw huge decreases in their phone bills after that and it quickly became a standard module everyone would run. I dabbled in the credit card stuff a little as well as a lot of others back then, I am not proud of that, I was one of the few that didn't get caught because I didn't get too greedy and I was always afraid of getting caught. It is amazing what we got away with back then. There was no online ordering so you had to call on the phone and act like an adult to order the computer stuff with the stolen credit cards. I can't believe I ever had the nerve to do it. Another memory I had was a BBS user, I can't remember his name, but it was rumored that he was a quadriplegic (you never really met many people in real life back then). He was thought to type with a pencil in his mouth using the eraser. He typed painfully slow. The BBS's had the option to let the users know if the SysOp was around and if so they could select an option to "Go Chat". That guy always caught me when I was around and my concious wouldn't let me ignore him. I would sit and talk to him for an hour or so, I always felt bad if I ignored one of his chat requests so I rarely did. I remember when I got my first modem, BBS's were only legend to me and my other computer nerd friends and I was the first to get a modem. I burned that $10 free Compuserve trial membership up in like 5 minutes and then proceeded to run up like a $200 bill on my parents credit card just trying to get phone number lists like the one you published here on your site of other BBS's to call. I was immediately hooked and knew I wanted to become a SysOp myself. I really loved running a BBS. Thanks for bringing back some old memories tonight.