mirror-textfiles.com/history/lipkovits.txt

Came across a reference to my old ansi art group in the BBS comments page and
realised that I had already written pages of similar comments on bbsmates.com
-- I don't know if they have any sort of exclusivity policy (or like to pretend
that they own what I've put into them) but you're more than welcome to
incorporate into yr records there the following comments I left describing
BBSes from the 604 area code at bbsmates.com

Cheers.

...

Al's House of Meats (AHOM)

A grand BBS experiment, where nearly every user was granted op access - which
was, of course, in a roundabout manner its ultimate downfall.  This is where I
mention that I was the only regular user eternally denied op access, for
reasons unclear to anyone - presumably an oversight, though one I've been
resenting for almost a decade now 8)

Evil's Voracity

Really a bit before my time, this board was a buzzing hub for the generation of
604 ansi art groups prior to mine (Mistigris) - DaX, PAiN, POiSON, etc.
Visionary (well, the V was actually a "root of" symbol) always marched the beat
of his own drummer, in later years an aloof neutral party in semiretirement,
affiliated with CiA, chuckling to himself at the epic ansiscene shenanigans
going on in his area code. Last seen headed in the direction of UVic, if I'm
not mistaken, but that was back in the mid-'90s.

The Shadow Lands

How exciting. NOT ONLY did the op make Interstellar Annihilation (a meritorious
Solar Realms clone) but he operated out of the same phone exchange my parents
lived in. Only looking back now do I realise how many of the BBSes I called
were running from distant and outlying suburbs...

Digital Holocaust / Holocaust: The Armaggeddon

Onetime WHQ of NWA (New Wave Artists) and, after the merger with GRiP/AD,
iMPERiAL (roughly late '92-mid '94) prior to the latter's dissolution and
absorption by NATiON (or was it TRiBE?), this was an interesting place where
Things Got Done (ostensibly - strict new user admission standards kept gawkers
out.) One of the only artscene boards of its time to draw in long-distance
callers, it was an eye-opening experience for a green lit-boy such as myself to
be rubbing shoulders with the immortal Maestro and Shihear Kallizad - and find
that they had not attained their esteemed positions through charisma or
diplomacy.

Arkham Asylum

Though I have all the resources of the InterWeb at my fingertips today, none of
it comes close to the availability of classic warez this esteemed underground
fixture provided... unless anyone else out there knows where I can find a
registered copy of Operation: Overkill ][ 8) Give co-Op Midnight Ninja some
credit here.

Wizard Online

Home base of AmiNet techno-.MOD pioneers EuphoniX, this BBS later evolved into
Planet-D - a MUD that never really got off the ground - and always featured a
special relationship with Wimsey (Vancouver's earliest Internet provider) whose
precise nature was unclear at best.

Neo-Graceland

Welcome to Mona Loa systems, Vancouver's premiere source of adult online
entertainment! This fallacious claim, compounded with the joking suggestion
that the sysOp was one Bob Eden (otherwise the op of K9 COPS) resulted in
actual confiscation of BBS equipment (or was it disconnection of phone
services?) as part of that grand hyperbolic response to "cybercrime" that
seemed somehow so legitimate in the early '90s.

The Pelvis of Elvis

Run by DJ Moses, this board wasn't only the home to Happy Fetus Records and
RADiANCE but a main instagator of DJNet and home to some of the most surreal,
obscene ansi and ansimations you could ever hope to see.

Atlantis

This board provided a very interesting forum and set of circumstances for me...
a neutral ground among the most turbulent months (mid '94-'95) of the 604's
onerous underground ansi art group politics. Site of all, WHQ of none. This was
the place to keep your eyes on for upcoming and unaffiliated computer arts
enthusiasts.

The Screaming Tomato

Tragic victim of the "the adjective noun" BBS-name syndrome of 1994, this was
the board I was both co-SysOp of and locked out from - on numerous occasions.
>From an early start of adolescent silliness (great, a message base called
"World Wildlife Wrestling Federation" - now what are we going to put in it?)
this provided the base from which MiSTiGRiS was almost accidentally founded.
Also WHQ of Cenobite, a lit group run by Schtroumpf gleaning from the creme of
Mist's writers, it is bizarre that this BBS didn't amass more surreal artwork
than it did, but when all is said and done this board probably represented the
604 to more artscene LD callers than any other.

Total Eclipse II

A bizarre collection of Atari enthusiasts and .MOD composers, the core of this
BBS ended up on the web at http://www.trideja.com/

Crimson Helm

Longterm and (if I recall correctly) final hub of activity for game venture
Delphic Oracle and demo/music group Sonic Equinox. The Op, one Onyx, can be
found at http://www3.telus.net/onyx and among his obscenely prolific musical
output, has oodles of anime-influenced pics up at deviantart.

InterZone

Never knew what you were going to get - down to the name of the board!
Sometimes you'd log in to find it Purple Peace Online, days later the Magical
Mystery Tour, Casa del Sol, the fIFTH mOON oF sPORKLENOC ... a work in
progress, probably up to and including the present.

Entrance to Obscurity

Ahh, ETO: the man, the board, the Legend. (that's a little pun for those in the
know - for those not, what are you doing here anyhow?) Spiritual home of SONiC
EQUiNOX following the collapse of Darkforce's House of Style, no amount of
wheedling could persuade the sysop to take down his stylistically unorthodox
ANSI screens in favor of something a little less disturbing 8)

A Product of a Deranged Society / APOADS

My first regular TABNet hangout - the bloody ANSI handprint welcome after login
is second in my memory only to the bogus DYNIX login screen, giving a new user
the impression the system ran under similar software to the library's dial-up
database.

Milky Way

At the fullest extent to which I observed it, this board was 5 nodes featuring
pretty much every door game you could imagine, registered, along with a
thriving community (circa '98) almost exclusively composed of 14-year-old
wrestling fans whose parents wouldn't allow them internet access. Now of course
the entire internet functions at the level of a 14-year-old, but that's grist
for another mill.

Mindlink BBS

Another case (see Discovery, CARDZ) of a BBS primarily known for the
"authoritative" BBS lists originating from them... how was mindlink itself?
There was some connection to an ISP, and given the merger frenzy of the '90s,
who knows now who owns what owns who owns who absorbed it.

Chaos Domain

Vague memories. I was impressed that this board was one of the only
distribution sites for ReaLITy (emphasis mine) - one of the only literary
groups active in the otherwise eye-fixated ANSI art scene. Chat with the sysop
was enacted through a brilliant split-screen setup where one party's words were
being spake through the lips of Lucasarts' Purple Tentacle. Ahh. Random
nostalgia garbage.

Michaelangelo BBS

Fascinating manifestation of the ill-fated ROBO/FX graphical terminal software.
Looked promising, but Windows kind of blindsided it 8)

Basic'ly Computers

I must claim mild surprise that this BBS is no longer running - for years it
remained as a solitary beacon after the remainder of the 604's (unusually
long-lived in itself) BBS community had migrated to the Internet.

Underground Subway

It was an oldschool institution before I appeared on the local cyber-scape -
and that was over half of my lifetime ago. It would not be until years later
(perhaps sometime in '98) that I would encounter the hand-me-down SysOp, a
fourty-something bus driver, at a 2600 meet. The board itself was (and remains)
a lovingly hand-crafted ensemble of scripts, password prompts and the elitest
of hardcore text-files, pre-dating ease-of-use bbs softwares like Telegard or
Renegade - it was all cobbled together manually, and it worked. I never got too
far into it - as a twelve-year-old, I was too impatient to work my way through
the riddles and logic puzzles of the automated access-accruing scheme, peeling
back board beneath board in an attempt to find the real elites.

Rhombohedral System

Did anyone ever log into this board? To the best of my knowledge it was a
private mail point for the SysOp's (recollecting his handle as: Sorcerer)
private use. Still, a Clockwork Orange reference is always classy. He brought
Bob Eden's book on dog training to my first-ever TABMeet. Elite.

Discovery BBS

Though I was never much in terms of an active member here, it's worth noting
that after MindLink! tanked (er, was bought) they became the distribution point
for the 604's primary PD BBS reference source, the notorious ROXANNE SPEAR BBS
LIST. Was the board otherwise meritorious? My lack of otherwise memories
suggests not 8)

The Jade Monkey

In the end, a much better BBS name than Canopic Jars or Salopard!, my prior
suggestions. (However did I end up dictating to the op the name of their BBS?
Or was I to take over operations at some point? Hazy memories...) It might be
worthy of some mention that this was a second venture after the Aquarium and
its legendary "angry fruit salad" colour schemes. Was it also the Hallucigenia
WHQ?

ED-NET

Ahh... a proto-chatroom for high-schoolers to speak frankly (with language
filters, of course.) Can you say pedophile's playground? Bizarrely, chatting
with someone here was indirectly responsible for her taking a lifestyle change
resultant in becoming an internationally-renowned drum 'n bass star. Is that
what they had in mind when the Vancouver School Board put this up? Probably
not, but we can always hope.

The Heart of Gold II

Only vague memories, primarily to do with the SysOp not infrequently taking the
board down so they could play X-Wing at full speed. That and that he was among
the very few SysOps of the 604 supportive of my onetime efforts to mount a BBS
"treasure hunt" going from board to board in search of clues, going so far to
suggest masking his board's name as "secondary cardiac auric" ... sheesh, the
things one remembers.

Double Exposure BBS

Massive, multi-node BBS hosting NeuralNet, this board hosted a party chez Lance
that was my first large-scale modemer "meet" ever - and nearly my last. Even an
overloud set by the infamous DJ Moses Risin' couldn't keep me there.

Alpha Centauri

Beyond being the 604's sole classic Celerity board, I'd give my left eyeteeth
to have access to its archive of classic ANSImations. That and co-sysop Innate
Malice's unreleased Trade Wars Elite: TW with ACiD-calibre ansi art.

Neosporin

Picking up where Atlantis left off, this board was instrumental in injecting
new blood into the 604 ansi art scene circa 1996. It also spawned VOiDNet, if I
recall correctly, which took off in a big way in Europe.

Stonehenge BBS

A tremendous crossroads - my first exposure to TABNet, compounded with Pendulum
and PresenceNet nodes, beyond which anarchy and occult files up the wazoo AND
appearance on the regular, "PD" BBS lists. This is where the waters mingled.
Without this BBS I might not be online right now.  Co-ops Wolfen and Big Time,
who as it turned out grew up across the street from me.

Daemon's Gate

Though I don't remember much about the board itself beyond its initial position
as KiTSCHNet hub, for years Mavrik was perhaps the closest thing I had to a
best friend, seemingly a rock of stability in an ever-turbulent moray of what
seem in retrospect tremendously juvenile cliqueishness. Had I known how
completely his presence was to diminish when it began to, I would have reached
out for some way of maintaining contact with him, but doubtless I mistakenly
thought I had more important things to do at the time. I guess we don't really
learn what we need until we find ourselves deprived of it -- FOREVER.

Virtual Delusions

Somehow making a transition from quasi-effective WareZ board to hotbed of
conversation among an intellectual group of friends based in and around North
Vancouver, we would joke to each other (regarding our compulsion to continue
calling frequently) that we had "caught V.D." Never before had a poetry duel
felt as though so much was hanging in the balance.

Exhausted Primal Watermelon / EPW

Why the partial abbreviation? For the better part of a year, EPW (or, better
put, the Exhausted Primal Watermelon) was my home away from home. The flying
Middleton brothers employed every trick at their availability to make this BBS
unlike any you'd ever experienced before, to the length of coding a language
file for a hitherto unknown language -- Tummy Grumblies -- which would replace
English at all system prompts. I wasn't terribly quick on the uptake, but I
will never forget being asked if I wanted to continue on the the next page with
(heep / Jerry) in place of the typical (yes / No) prompt.  It is worthwhile to
mention SHAMTA, the Sheep Are Mammals, Too Association.

Axiom BBS/Realm of Absurdity

Likely my first regular BBS (I must have been about 11 or 12 at the time) I
have very vague memories of its activity (during the ROA era - the board
selected for the absurdity in its name) -- the grandest recollection was
collective antagonism of a user by the name of Boopsie and some politics that
eventually spun off onto Double Exposure BBS' NeuralNet, headed by Lord Doctor Who.