Who Says You Can't Go Home Again?

 


Seconds acts... trying to figure out what to do in "Act II" after a long and successful career of over 4 decades as an Electrical Engineer comes to a careening halt after a serious auto accident. I'm still too young to retire, but I'm not quite able to move on to anything else while I'm still facing up to 1/2 dozen surgeries in the new year. One thing that has been both cathartic as well as helped me heal from my TBI (traumatic brain injury) is writing. To that end, I've put metaphoric pen to paper of late, and have started not only blogging again, but now have had several articles I've written published in the last 6 months. I've also gone back to working on my book I was working on before the accident, albeit with a different direction.

Which brings me to the point of this missive. In my quest for research on one of my latest "gems" I've bumped yet into into my online origins. Long before Facebook and Twitter, long before I was an admin on other forums, long before there was AOL or CompuServe, I (wrote and) ran my own BBS (bulletin board system). That in of itself is not remarkable. What is interesting is that I've never fully explained the origins of the name I chose for it (the why), or how many times in the decades since I have found references in other publications to either my BBS or to myself, unbeknownst to me.

The name of my BBS was The Voice of Peace. Seemed harmless enough, and unless you knew anything about pirate radio and middle east politics, or you were steeped in the hacker world you would never know that below the covers of a seemingly benign BBS lay so much more. The Voice of Peace was the name of a ship that broadcast music "from somewhere in the Mediterranean" out of reach of any government (or licensing requirements or censorship of opinion). I was fascinated as a teenager by the idea of a pirate radio ship, and the 80s movie "Pump up the Volume" about pirate broadcasting only heightened that. Having already been actively part of the hacker scene, it seemed a perfect marriage, and such BBSs sprang up all over the country. The name seemed like a natural fit, a double entendre if you will.


Better still, the software was based on original public domain software, rewritten by a friend I met in Kentucky (I was living in Chicago at the time), with parts rewritten again by another friend and myself in Chicago all on a TRS80. Who could ask for more? It ran on a Frankenstein of overclocked hardware on massive 80-track double sided floppies (that's what we had in the 80s) on a 1200 baud modem (state of the art, baby!) in my parents basement. Whether they didn't know, or just didn't care is a secret they took to the grave.

Fast forward to 2020... we are now deep into the pandemic, and inside activities are the order of the day. By chance as I start Googling, I find a Washington Post article on BBSs that mentions my BBS. Really? 

Computers Becoming Nations Bulletin Board 

I then discover my BBS was mention in a documentary that was recently released and I think ran on NatGeo channel. But the reference that really got my attention was the direct mention of myself (and my friend) as well as my BBS (two full pages) in a book, The Essential Guide to Bulletin Board Systems by Patrick Dewey also published in the 80s. I had no idea about any of this, and might never have were it not for the pandemic and lots or "inside time".


Like so many online social interactions, I made many friends from that time through my BBS and the people I met both directly and indirectly because of it. I lost touch with most of them, but a few still remain. In a strange twist of fate, I find myself back where I started, in that I am now writing (albeit in brief at the moment) about where I began.

In deference to Thomas Wolf (and John Bon Jovi couldn't have said it better), who says you can't go home again? 

 


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