About

This is the fountain of knowledge on the old BBS here, glad you're interested

A little history

MMN started way back when in 1996 in a basement on Brunswick Avenue in Toronto, sharing a phone line and running on some version of some BBS software long forgotten in the mist of time.

        ___________                ___________        _____    _____
       /           \              /           \      |\    \   \    \
      /    _   _    \            /    _   _    \      \\    \   |    |
     /    //   \\    \          /    //   \\    \      \\    \  |    |
    /    //     \\    \        /    //     \\    \      \|    \ |    |
   /     \\_____//     \      /     \\_____//     \      |     \|    |
  /       \ ___ /       \    /       \ ___ /       \    /     /\      \
 /________/|   |\________\  /________/|   |\________\  /_____/ /______/|
|        | |   | |        ||        | |   | |        ||      | |     | |
|________|/     \|________||________|/     \|________||______|/|_____|/

The BBS itself ran on that hardware and software until about 2002 when it went off line for a bit as I travelled over to the UK. In 2007(ish maybe earlier) I bought a copy of Wildcat! v6 from Santronics and ran it off my cable connection on a bulky blade server.

Around 2010 or so that blade server’s power supply went pop and I had to order a new set of machines, two recycled machines from Student Computers got delivered and the BBS moved after a little downtime.

When I moved to France the board was sent into the cloud, having a life using various VPSes in France and Google Cloud in Montréal.

When my google credit ran out and I received my two original PCs from Bristol in my tiny Parisien flat, I moved the board back here. It’s now on a frankenserver built from both the machines in Bristol as various things in each failed, so one had to improvise.

Keeping the board online

This is mainly a hobby and to be fair since I’ve done it for so long I’d feel a bit bad about not doing it. God knows I’ve had my domain mmn.on.ca for so long that I couldn’t let that lapse either. Kind of digital hoarding.

But it does mean that it’s taken me a very long time to get around to housekeeping on the BBS, the menus are still Wildcat! out of the box and I’m not going to lie, this has been a very long « I must change this » situation.

Gopher

This file is also available at gopher://gopher.is/0/text/about.md