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170 lines
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HTML
170 lines
12 KiB
HTML
<html>
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<title>T E X T F I L E S</title>
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<BODY BGCOLOR="#000000" TEXT="#00FF00" LINK="#00FF00" ALINK="#00FF00" VLINK="#00FF00">
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<CENTER>
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<TABLE WIDTH=80%>
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<TR><TD VALIGN=TOP ALIGN=RIGHT>
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<FONT FACE="Courier New" COLOR="#33FF33">
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<nobr><A style="text-decoration: none" HREF="index.html">INTRODUCTION</A> </nobr><BR>
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<nobr><A style="text-decoration: none" HREF="jason.html">><B>THE BBS YEARS</B><</A> </nobr><BR>
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<nobr><A style="text-decoration: none" HREF="internet.html">THE INTERNET</A> </nobr><BR>
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<nobr><A style="text-decoration: none" HREF="textfiles.html">TEXTFILES</A> </nobr><BR>
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<nobr><A style="text-decoration: none" HREF="today.html">10 YEARS</A> </nobr><BR>
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</FONT>
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<TD BGCOLOR="#00FF00">
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<TD>
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<blockquote>
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<FONT FACE="Courier New" COLOR="#00FF00" size=+2>
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<b>THE BBS YEARS</b>
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</font>
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<br>
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<font face="Courier New" COLOR="#00FF00">
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<small><i>In which a kid is handed the world, and holds it for safekeeping</small></i>
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<p>
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My name is Jason Scott Sadofsky. I was born in 1970 in Hopewell Junction, NY, a very small suburb
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located near the not-so-small town of Fishkill and next to the not-at-all-small city of Poughkeepsie.
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My parents lived in a subdivision very near an <a href="http://www.fishkillfarm.com/">apple orchard</a> and surrounded by hills, some distance
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from the IBM Fabrication plant my father was employed at, first as an engineer and later as a manager.
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I'm the oldest of three children, and found myself in a pretty idyllic life in a beautiful location,
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surrounded by friends, family and all the time in the world. I had it good.
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<p>
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<a href="http://album.cow.net/0000.SADOFSKY/.lowres/Jason%20Scott%20Sadofsky,%204%20and%20a%20Half%20Months.jpg"><img align=right src="images/4months.jpg" vspace=5 hspace=5 border=0></a>
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To be born in 1970 means I am younger than Woodstock, UNIX, moon landings, multi-track recording,
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radio, and jukeboxes. I am older, however, than Saturday Night Live, Cell Phones, MTV,
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VHS Videotape, the FOX television network, and compact discs. And what I was born at just the right
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time for was what is now thought of as the Home Computer Revolution. Now ubiquitous, the idea of the
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computer in the home, as an appliance or tool in the hands of anyone who wanted them, was an idea
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that had a lot of people throwing their best efforts into making a reality. But it wasn't a reality yet.
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Computers of any sizeable processing power were massive, expensive, specialized, and primarily the
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realm of the forces most powerful and/or armed. It was not in the realm of families living in
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pleasant suburbs, even if a member of the household worked at the world's largest semiconductor plant.
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<p>
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Somewhere in the late 1970s, however, life changed both outside and inside my home; my parents divorced
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and I became one of those kids shuttled between two homes and with no single place to call my
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own. Because of this I began a process of attending multiple schools and living in various places in
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the New York Hudson Valley, depending on finances and opportunities out of my control. Outside my
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now-changed home life was the reality of the home computer coming to life. Companies like Commodore,
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Apple, Atari and dozens of others began producing electronic machines that could do all sorts of tasks
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and produce all sorts of interest and entertainment to the type of people that would find such things
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interesting and entertaining. I became the member of the family who connected with them, and my father,
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eager to nourish any such interest, began bringing home computers from work for me to try.
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<p>
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My first home computer was a <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20120331155921/http://www.commodorepet.org/">Commodore PET</a>, a machine with 8 kilobytes of memory, less than the size of
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this document. It had a small, attached screen, black and white, providing 40 columns of fixed text
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and the ability to program it in the BASIC computer language. I was absolutely fascinated with it, a
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love that has continued to the present day. My siblings were not quite as interested but for me this
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was a true connection, something I really enjoyed playing with and learning on. And in what perhaps
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indicates where my own history would take me, I still have this Commodore PET.
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<p>
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As the Commodore PET gained new friends over the years (my Atari 800 and IBM PC, Commodore Amiga,
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and others), I gained a real interesting perspective on these machines. I saw them as they were when
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they were new, young, hungry and fighting for market share, promising the universe for a few hundred
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dollars and using all the marketing muscle they could to prove it. The <a href="http://digitize.textfiles.com">advertisements</a> they printed
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were amazing, the magazine articles were fascinating, and I soaked it all in. This was a wondrous
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time to be so young, a pre-teen learning about machines that would, with a few typed characters
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(OK, a TON of typed characters) sing, dance, play games, and do amazing stuff for me. Having seen what
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was before, I was always up for what was next.
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<p>
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<hr width=100 color="#00FF00">
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<p>
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On one of my visits to my father, he had to go into work for part of the day at his new position in the
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<a href="http://www.watson.ibm.com/overview.shtml">Thomas J. Watson Research Center</a> in Yorktown Heights, and took me along. To keep his son occupied, he
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set me up in front of a terminal called the 3279x, a powerful and amazing machine that connected deep
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into the IBM network and computing facilities. In comparison to what the home computers I owned had, this
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was like taking someone who'd only ever ridden a bicycle and handing them the keys to a supersonic jet.
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Naturally, I played games on it, games I couldn't ever hope to see on my machines at home, <a href="http://www.getlamp.com">text adventures</a> that challenged me intellectually, and even the engineering in-jokes of the programmers
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at IBM, always looking for the next best place to eat or writing hilarious essays about life at IBM
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or the engineering life. It was heavenly, but I knew when we logged out I'd never see anything like
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that outside of my occasional visit to this amazing building.
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<p>
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Luckily, I was wrong.
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<p>
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<hr width=100 color="#00FF00">
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<p>
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I still remember the day, when I was visiting my friend <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/pub/5/a52/605">Chris Boufford</a> at the house he shared with his
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grandparents, that he told me I had to check out what his grandfather had brought home.
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<p>
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It was a 300 baud <a href="http://www.imsai.net/images/war_image/coupler.jpg">acoustic modem</a>, a strange little device with a couple strange pads on the top
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and a wire going to the home computer his grandfather owned. Chris called a number he had written
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down, placed the screaming telephone handset into the pads, and on the screen, text started to appear.
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Text, I realized, that was coming from somewhere else. Text that was <i>coming from another machine
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to this one over the phone</i>. I was 12. Nothing would be the same.
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<p>
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We were connecting to another person's home computer via this modem and phone line, and using software
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that provided you with the ability to leave messages, read up on information, even acquire programs
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you could run on your own computer without having to go to someone's house and copy their floppy disk
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collection. It was a Computer Bulletin Board System, or BBS. There weren't many, but there were enough
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that we could call into a bunch of places and get hooked. Naturally, I went home with visions of having
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one of these modems and all this access into these computers from my own house.
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<p>
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Dad was accomodating, as he's always been. Through his connections I became the owner of a 2400 baud
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Hayes Modem, a card that sat inside our IBM PC and let me call all over the county, state, and the
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world and connect to all these BBSes. I was in heaven...
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<p>
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...for about a month, and then the $300 phone bill came in. Dad invented new ways to scream, and I
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learned that I was going to have to do something about this if I wanted to continue to use these
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bulletin board systems, so I started reading up and asking the right questions and found myself able
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to get around the whole problem of paying large phone bills by stealing phone codes. I became what
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I thought of as a <a href="http://www.textfiles.com/phreak/">"Phone Phreak"</a>, although the years hence have taught me that I was barely more than
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a bottom-feeding leech, tracking down and gaining free telephone calls just to avoid paying money.
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Learning and exploration was the last thing on my mind.
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<p>
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Or was it? As I started calling dozens and then hundreds of bulletin board systems, I found myself
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constantly drawn to the strange conversations, the ability to download software, and the information
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that was being presented in various menus. While the phone system (and these codes) were a tool to
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get to the bulletin boards, on the boards themselves I began finding myself capturing, collecting
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and saving on floppy disks all the information I could. Eventually, I had a lot of them indeed.
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<p>
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<hr width=100 color="#00FF00">
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<p>
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I've been asked at various times over the years why I started collecting these information files,
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and I've hazed over various answers depending on the audience or the reason I was being asked. To be
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honest, I'm still not sure, but perhaps the splitting of the family home, the lack of control as a
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teenager in general, and the ability I was developing to read and sort information quickly all
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combined into this instinct to collect, collect, collect. I would save everything I could to floppy
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disks. If I didn't have a spare floppy disk, I'd turn on the printer and print out sheet after
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form-fed sheet of the messages and writings of people. I would save up my money and buy more floppy
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disks and trick cheaper single-sided floppy disks into using both sides, and off I'd go. I'd do it
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for so long, that my father would wake up early in the morning and find his son hunched over the
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computer, dawn light breaking into the computer room, and start screaming. (Luckily, his phone bill
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didn't increase for all this use.)
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<p>
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The life I lived on the bulletin boards was full, rich, intellectual, and amazing. I met lifelong
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friends, learned amazing things, and learned more about the world at large than the average teenager
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of my time. I could recite area codes and where they were with ease. I'd hang out at the local mall
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with people I'd met online. And when the time came, when I was ready, I started helping out with
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a BBS in New Jersey as a co-sysop, an assistant administrator. This just whetted my appetite for the
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ultimate goal - to run my own BBS. I knew what I'd call it: The Works. I even started labelling my
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floppy disks with the name "The Works" to indicate where they'd one day end up.
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<p>
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<img src="images/works87.jpg" align=right vspace=5 hspace=10>
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This dream happened in 1986, when The Works BBS joined the online world. I needed to make my mark
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and show how I was different from the now thousands-strong collection of BBSes out in the world,
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so I declared myself a "textfile BBS", a place where programs wouldn't be allowed, only pure text
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and writings. I used my collection of files from my years-saved floppies and offered my now-massive
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archive to the world.
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<p>
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It was 5 megabytes.
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<p>
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<hr width=100 color="#00FF00">
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<p>
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<img src="images/theworks.jpg" align=right vspace=15 hspace=15>
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My adventures of this time were many, and I wouldn't have traded my time with The Works for anything.
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To talk about my own history with BBSes would fill a book - but the theme is clear: I had a
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spectacular time, like a carnival and party everlasting, a sense of power and of happiness I've known
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since then as one knows an old song. I'd do it all again, the delight, the tears, the discoveries,
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the depressions. It was a part of what makes me what I am. It was who I was. It was my time with the
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BBSes.
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<p>
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Naturally, it couldn't last forever.
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<p>
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<i>See how the <a href="internet.html">Internet</a> changed me and everything else....</i>
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<P>
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</FONT>
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</blockquote>
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</TD></TR>
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</TABLE>
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</CENTER>
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</BODY>
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</HTML>
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