After you have been using your modem for awhile, you notice one thing most, it can be an enjoyable use of your computer. Sending and receiving electronic mail, uploading and downloading programs, and all of the different SIGS (special interest groups) that allow one to share common interests and hobbies with others are just a few of the opportunities available. The second thing you will notice (particularly if you do not live in a major city with ample electronic bulletin boards) is that your phone bill can grow in leaps and bounds. The good old long distance phone bill!
There are several ways around this. One is to set your modem aside forever (not me!) and try to forget about the fun you had using it. Another is to go on a tight budget about how often and for how long you use it. This is as distasteful to most folks as sticking to a diet to lose weight. A third way is to open up your own BBS and allow others to call you. It can be done on a part time basis during only set hours if you have only one phone line. It would probably still be cheaper for most of us to have a second basic phone line ran into the house and dedicate it to the BBS.
What has been lacking has been the software for the TS2068 to allow us to have a local BBS of our own that ran on our own computers. It always irked me just a tiny bit when I would hear of a Timex board being ran on a Radio Shack or an Atari. Some definite progress was made toward giving us our own local boards a while back when Randy and Lucy Gordon of the Ohio group in Cincinnati developed Tiny Board. This gave many of us a place to start from. I thank them for their pioneering work in this area.
Now we have some good software starting to hit the market that will allow us to have BBS’s that will run on an unexpanded TS2068. You do not need a disc drive or an A&J Microdrive to run this. The software I am referring to is called the I.S.T.U.G. TS2068 BBS. It was developed and is being marketed by Paul Holmgren and Willie Jones of Indianapolis, Indiana. They are offering it on cassette, with all documentation, for only $16.00 postage paid. That is a bargain in itself and leaves no room to justify pirating a copy by claiming the price is too high.
The program loads from cassette in under 50 seconds and uses approximately 8.5K of your memory. It is almost all basic, with a small amount of code hidden in one line. The program is SYSOP Friendly. It gives him complete control over the program, yet protects the program from being broken into by the users of the system. I cannot say it is hacker proof, but I know of a couple of people who considered breaking into it …but so far have failed. The program has so far been crashproof, and a few of the boards running it have been up constantly for over 6 months. Both of these are plus points for the program.
The program has a real time clock that keeps the time and date (it even advances the day at midnight). This feature allows the SYSOP to know exactly when someone called in and when they logged off the system.
When you log onto the system you are queried for information in order to log on, and informed you of the parameters. A menu is displayed giving the caller the choice of the following: check to see a list of regular users; quick scan the message base; read messages; leave a message; check time you’ve been on the board; leave a message to the SYSOP; page the SYSOP for a chat; read Bulletins; exit the system. The message base as set up is for 40 messages of 535 characters each. You may adjust this within the SYSOP menu. Each message is stamped with the time and date of when it was left and who it is from and who it is for. All of this data is printed out to a TS2040 printer, along with the following: the name of the caller; what messages were read; messages left; any paging of the SYSOP; time they left the system.
The program as sent does not come set up to use a disc drive or an A&J Microdrive, but it is not too hard to figure out. Doing this will enable the SYSOP to add more messages bases. You could extend the program to add bulletins, or possibly even an upload/download section. Figure this step out yourself or contact the program developers for some assistance.
The program is a great value for your money and should rank as one of the must programs for the TS2068 telecommunicator. To buy this program contact Willie Jones, 10126 E. 33rd ST., Indianapolis, IN 46236. Or, if you want to check the board out before buying it, then fire up your modem and call the I.S.T.U.G. board at 317-898-3903.