On 06/05/2010 07:11 PM, Richard Webb -> Ed Hulett wrote:
 RW> HI Ed,

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

 RW> 

 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.

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

A friend of mine has a collection of old military keys, mostly with leg
straps on them. He handled traffic while in the military.

 EH>> No old receivers, though. :-)

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

Cool. I had a chance on an old Halicrafters receiver for free a couple
years ago. I didn't have any room for it at the time.

 RW> .
 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.

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

That's for sure. Now it's just us old farts.

 RW> 

 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. :-)

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

Heh heh... I used to give him a hard time about running a 2400 when
everyone else was running at least a 14.4. In fact, he was still at 2400
the last time I dialed into his system and I had a 56k by then. That was
several years ago. I don't have a phone line hooked up to any of my boxes
now.

 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
 RW> 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.

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

I had a board up for a short time, but never really did anything with it. A
friend and I set up a box with 7 CDROMS connected to it with CDs full of
shareware and freeware. We never did do FIDO.

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

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

I did a "Hit Record on your Birthday" app on facebook tonight and
the hit record was Tony Bennett "Rags to Riches." I'm old. ;-)

73

Ed

-- 
"The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the
ambitious call, and ignorant believe to be liberty." --Fisher Ames,
speech in the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, 1788

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