The History of Spatula City BBS

Spatula City BBS was born as the result of many hours of hard work and dedication. In 1992, I was working two minimum-wage jobs just to make ends meet. During one period in October, I found myself with 90 hours of pay and no imminent bills to cover. It was at that time that the prospect of buying my first IBM-compatible PC presented itself.

Some background: I had been online for about 3 years, logging into various services. I started with an old Apple II-compatible box, a 300-baud acoustic modem and not much else. The first online entity I ever called was an electronic rag operated by what is now Star-Telegram.com, called StarText. In reading StarText, I happened upon the online Forum, which was made up of a motley crew of participants, mostly moderate-liberal, who participated in an ongoing, daily, online argument. I quickly became a regular, and participated intensely and well in that venue until the StarText management arbitrarily & capriciously decided that I could be slandered, but not defend myself. It didn't take me long to yank my money from their filthy clutches.

During those latter days, though, I had latched onto a new concept - other online portals. These were home computers operated by amateurs {some of them pretty rank {grin}}, simply for the love of what came to be known as the practice of "BBSing" {calling BBSes, or Bulletin Board Systems, or the operation of said systems}. These systems were for the back-and-forth swapping of messages and files; on many of them, you could play a game against the computer, another player, or the sysop {SYStem OPerator} himself if he had time. You could also page the sysop for a real-time chat every so often, although sysops generally had better things to do - like sleep. {Mind you, these "pages" usually came at 3 a.m. Hell hath no fury like an awakened sysop.} I began to call several of these systems and become involved in the day-to-day life.

As I was a twenty-something who simply didn't know any better {grin}, I began to - gasp! - speak my mind. Naturally, this didn't set well with other users, who usually were good friends of the sysop. As a result, I've been thrown off quite a few boards in my day.

It was with that in mind that I decided that I wanted a place where I could say what I wanted, when I wanted, and not be looking over my shoulder for some angry sysop. I began to look at the possibility of purchasing my own PC for that purpose. Thus, when the 90-hour workweek kicked in, I was ready.

I plunked down about $450 for what, to me, wes a dream machine, but was actually, even by 1992 standards, an obsolete dinosaur - an 8mHz XT with a 30-meg {with an M, not a G} Seagate RLL hard drive, 640K of RAM soldered onto the main board {along with the chip}, a 2400 Everex modem and an old monochrome monitor that already had a ton of burn-in. The keyboard port was a plug-in external port. I could fit my current machine, case included, into the XT case.

The thing was, to put it bluntly, a piece of crap. But - and this is a big "but" [grin} - it was mine.

I quickly went to work. A good friend {liberal though he may be}, Aaron Goldblatt, helped me set up the system and get it operational. Spatula City went online on October 31, 1992.

The first few days were spent as an independent BBS, but there was already a plan in place to network me. Shortly after the board's opening, I joined the largest amateur BBS network in the world, a ragtag outfit called Fidonet. My network address was 1:130/103 {1 - North America; 130 - Ft Worth, TX, unit number 103}.

Several of the fellow sysops in the network were people with whom I'd had arguments leading to my banishment from other boards and conferences - so, upon my arrival, the arguments began anew. This time, I was a little more protected by my status as a Fidonet sysop. I was no longer just a "user", upon which many sysops look down their noses - although that status didn't protect me all the time.

Two months later, I suffered my first ever major computer crash. {Note to you newbies: Don't touch a piece of metal to the circuitry under a hard drive while the computer is still on. Trust me - this is not a good thing.}

About six months in, I began to hunger for a faster machine. The XT was okay - for just a plain-Jane computer. For what I wanted to do, though, I needed something faster. Through the aforementioned Mr. Goldblatt, I was able to secure a 286 motherboard with 1 meg of memory onboard. Tall cotton, that.

Eventually, that gave way to a more sophisticated 286, then a 386 with the memory self-contained in RAM chips - first 1 meg, then 2, then 8 and 16. The mono monitor was set down for a CGA, then a used VGA, which served the board until 1996. The Everex modem game way to a 14.4 Practical Peripherals, then downgraded to a 14.4 Zoom modem {which poisoned my mind against Zoom modems forever}, then back up to a 28.8 Practical Peripherals, finally to a USRobotics 33.6, which is still in use somewhere today. The 30-megger {after the crash} gave way to a 25-megger, then to a 40-meg Quantum drive {both MFM types}, then to the first of what have been several Western Digital IDE drives {by which I swear today; nobody makes better drives than WD. Nobody.}.

During this time, I began to get quite involved in some of the national mail conferences within Fidonet - most notably, the Fans Of Rush Limbaugh Echomail {FORLE} conference. {Echomail, by the way, is a weird concept. Think Usenet newsgroups without all the technical snobbery.} The moderator was a guy by the name of Jeff Duke, a fantastic gentleman and someone who's turned out to be one hellacious friend. He let me in and allowed me {within reason} to say what I wanted to say, and to gig a liberal or two along the way.

Eventually, a small group of us formed a "posse" of sorts, weeding out those miscreants and malcontents who were unwilling to stick to the topic of the conference - namely, the topics discussed by Rush on his radio & television shows. We became known as LENS {Limbaugh Echo Nuke'm Squad} and LESS {Limbaugh Echo Sanitation Squad}. Each of us had a talent to make the liberal scum look as ridiculous as we could. Mine was "quote enhancement" - a tactic which had been used on me in the local Fido sysop echoes to get my dander up. It was quite effective, both as victim and perpetrator. {grin} The trick was to take the quotes of the person whose goat you were trying to get - and modify them so as to make that person say something completely different {and in most cases, hysterically funny} then what he/she had actually said in the first place. A wonderful tool, and almost indefensible. {I, of course, know the defense, but don't come asking me for it - I have to have some secrets, y'know. :-) }

Out of that little band of merry men {and women} came LENSNET - a private network of the "elite" of the Limbaugh echo. It continues as a loose-knit band of a-mailers to this day.

As Spatula City grew as a political board, I began to make somewhat of a mark in the BBS world. I moderated a Dallas/Fort Worth political conference called {oddly enough} DFW_POLITICS, where users from all across D/FW came to air their views on the political topics of the day. I also became the Zone Coordinator {equivalent of president and CEO} of a little Fido-style network called US-PolNet.

Sad to say, though, all good things had to come to an end. Finances and a case of burnout brought me to the point where I was asking myself, "Why am I knocking myself out doing this?". After some three-and-a-half years of the most fun I'd ever had on a computer, Spatula City BBS ceased operations in March of 1996.

That is, until May 1 of this year. {wicked grin} In due time, this Web site will become as close of a copy of the original Spatula City as I can make it. Watch this space!