HI Ed,

On Sat 2038-Jun-05 14:55, Ed Hulett (1:123/789) wrote to Richard Webb:



 EH>> You're a dinosaur...

 RW> Been accused of bein' one o' them myself, with my straight
 RW> key on the bench over here on the keyboard tray, and my old Hamarlund
 RW> receiver behind me.

EH> Heh heh heh... I have an old Nye straight key somewhere around here.
EH> I also have a Bencher Iambic. I haven't touched either for a long
EH> time.

Had an old key with the navy knob too until the after
Katrina fire.

EH> No old receivers, though. :-)

I just acquired this old Hamarlund recently.  I"m going to
eventually recap the whole thing, and find a vintage tx to
go with it.

.
 RW> AS do most, we enable so that we can participate, helps us
 RW> justify it ya know .

EH> The anonymity of sitting in front of a keyboard and slinging insults
EH> long distance is an intoxicating concept that few have been able to
EH> resist. 

NOt so much for that, but so that I can enjoy the
participation in the echoes.  I provide access for a couple
of points, and one other listed FIdonet system.  NOt like
the old days for sure >



 RW> YEp, he's still in the nodelist, still has dial up too.
 RW> Crashed him netmail a few months ago.

EH> Wow! I'm amazed he's still at it. I wonder if he still has the 2400
EH> baud modem on his system. :-)

I"d have to look through last year's logs, but think I at
least got a 14.4 connect when I crash mailed him.  I don't
think I've seen "connect 2400" in my logs since i came back
up back in '08 or whenever it was .

 RW> BAck in my fairly busy hub days we had those who did that
 RW> too, just got the board configured, plugged in fidonet or
 RW> their favorite qwk network and let it run. But, usually
 RW> their disinterest meant they didn't share the costs of
 RW> bringing in fidonet echoes reliably, so they had to seek
 RW> their feed elsewhere paying their own long distance charges. THeir users
 RW> soon went elsewhere too, because when things
 RW> didn't work that the users expected then they got
 RW> disappointed.

EH> I know what you mean. Back in my days of dialing up to local BBSes,
EH> there were only a few that I used regularly. One of those was a guy
EH> in Tacoma (Amocat BBS) who compiled a BBS list on a monthly basis
EH> and was apparently one of the major nodes locally for FIDO. Oh, the
EH> halcyon days of dialup BBSes and offline readers.

I had a lot of fun with it.  I was the real info junkies'
and tech heads' bbs in southeastern Iowa.  wHen in Central
Iowa I was a mail only, but a lot of the sysops up there
used to sic their wanna be point ops onto me, because i was
mail only, and the point ops wanted to become points to not
have to battle getting in around the door gamers, etc.  I
actually started the bbs to induce some other boards to
start pulling fIdo when I moved to southeastern IOwa so that I could afford
to bring it in .  I was on the road doing
sound stuff a lot too back in those days, so my co-sysop did a lot of the
tidying up around.

 RW> THese days you can't get folks interested in something like
 RW> that. NO instant gratification available.

EH> Yep.
I really do sound like an old fart I guess .

73

           Richard
--- timEd 1.10.y2k+