Little Green Men BBS
Posted on January 07, 2009 - No comments
Many years ago I used to run a small BBS called “Little Green Men”. With the advent of the internet the idea of dialing-up individual computers running in the bedrooms of like minded sysops seems rather quaint.
The Little Green Men BBS hosted a large amount of Amiga shareware (mainly from Aminet), demos and tracker modules. There was also an obligatory celebrity pictures areas, but the main focus of the BBS, hence it’s name, were a large archive of UFO related material.
The X-Files was at it’s peak and interest in UFOs was very high and the UFO archive proved to be very popular especially the UFO news clipping. (It was the UFO news clippings that led me to the UK UFO Network.)
Originally the BBS ran on an Amiga 500 with 1 megabyte of RAM and a whopping 20 meg of hard disk space! I was using Max’s BBS which was a very simple system, and if I remember correctly rather limited when it came to the way it handled FidoNet mail. Still, it gave me something to try!
Upgrades
In the end I upgraded to Xenolink and swiftly upgraded to a more powerful Amiga 1500 (a UK only variant of the Amiga 2000 without the hard drive.) I even splashed out and got myself a second phone line! My dad was a little bit annoyed that there were lots of modems trying to connect to the main house number!
Ultimately the BBS was running on an Amiga 4000 with over 7 gigabytes of storage and around 16 megabytes of memory. the Amiga 4000 could quite comfortably multi-task whatever I was doing locally and running a BBS session. It did mean that the 4000 didn’t get used as much for playing games but that was ok as the 68060 processor upgrade along with the Picasso graphics card prevented most games from running.
The more powerful machine meant I could have an additional line running, but the number of callers were already starting to fall.
The internet and the end of the BBS
To counter the rise of the internet a number of BBS systems started to provide internet email to their users. I always felt that if someone wanted an email address they were more than likely to get it directly from an ISP than a small BBS.
Of course, as the popularity of the internet increased the number of calls to the BBS gardually dwindled. Amiga users could now get everything directly from the Aminet archive. I kept running the BBS, but around 1999 the BBS spent more time offline than it did actually running. In 2000 the Amiga was boxed up and the Little Green Men BBS was officially retired.