Blast from the past

We are all connected especially if you are on social media platforms. Now it is easy for our former classmates and family to search for us by name or any other key word that you can think of. If you think that you are all alone in the cosmos think again. Our online identity was established the first time we logged on to the Internet.

My first connection to the Interwebs was through BBS’s or Bulletin Board Systems. That was after my wife Katy and I were married May 12th 1990 in a small Baptist Church in Houston Texas. Katy was a teachers assistant in Fort Bend County school district and I was a security officer. At some point I got interested in computers. I remember going to a shopping mall and looking at the AOL start up kit. It came with the software and a modem. I had to call a friend of mine to come over to change the IRQ setting on the motherboard so I could install the modem and get a connection to the phone line. Do you remember the squall of the modem as it would connect to the other end?

So, anyway, I learned how to install and configure several BBS software packages. I ran the BBS software on a 8086 processor, then an 8088 and then a 286 processor. The computer had a pitiful amount of ram and a tiny hard drive compared to today's standards. Now our smart phones have more capacity than computers did back then. The cool thing is that people could log on to my BBS and read and reply to message boards. I could even chat with them if I wanted to by having a sysop conversation with them while they were online.