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The Legend of VanCo. BBS |
 So you want to know about the legend of
VanCo.? VanCo. BBS, that is.
Mooohaaaahaaahaaahaaaaaaaa. Scary, huh? The following passage has lots of technical terms from bulletin boards. If you ever used VanCo., or bulletin boards in general, you should like this. If you were never fortunate enough to participate in these online services, which dominated before the Internet spread to so many residential areas, then you might not understand why this is so weird, impressive, sad, and funny. |
VanCo. BBS ran for 3 1/2 years in a time when the average BBS life was 6 months. For most of its life, it occupied a 386/33DX computer with 8 megs ram and a 245 meg hard drive. Eventually, it was upgraded to a cutting-edge Pentium 75 and a 1 gig SCSI-2 hard drive to give it lightning speed. In addition, VanCo. boasted a single-speed 6-disc CD changer which gave users access to over 30,000 ratio-free shareware programs for download, just in case you got tired of playing the 50 online door games. Using a top-of-the-line external USRobotics Courier 28.8 (big step from its first Cardinal 2400), VanCo. could match protocols with the big boys and still have plenty of processing power to spare since it used the low-overhead DESQview DOS multitasker.
VanCo. BBS was excessively secure, especially considering the small user base and docile community it existed in. First of all, it created logs out the wazoo. Every week, VanCo. produced 10 megs of plain ASCII text just in logs of everything that went on. It maintained simultaneous dual copies of all databases, and automatically backed up all databases to a secondary hard drive every 24 hours. All logs were kept in triplicate on three different drives, and primary activity logs were also kept in hard copy. VanCo. BBS performed two simultaneous virus sweeps every night of ALL files, in addition to decompressing and scanning all uploaded files upon receipt. An automated army of message readers scanned all public messages on the board and reported any excessive use of bad language to the SysOp. However, VanCo. had more than just a good defense against crashing and hacking attempts. It had offensive capabilities.
Offenses on a bulletin board? Hehehehehe.... yep. Upon definite detection of a hacking attempt, VanCo. could actually respond with a small regiment of weapons. First, it could send little self-extracting ZIP files that, while only a few kilobytes zipped, were in excess of 500 megs when uncompressed. That would get your attention, especially in a time when the average hard drive wasn't even that big. It also maintained a little library of about 10 virus infected files that it would auto-download to the caller.
During VanCo.'s life, it was not once infected with a virus, was not once hacked, not once send a single piece of material that was not "family-oriented" (PG-13 or less), not once sent a piece of software that was not public domain, and never, ever, ever had a down period of more than a few hours (and that was only because the motherboard, memory, and hard drive were all being replaced). Now where's my gold star, damnit? :-)
All 134 megs of VanCo. BBS currently resides on a CD, and I hope to keep it forever. The original Wildcat! software license 92-4673M was transferred to James LaCombe to run his own bulletin board, which stays open to date. Long live the spirit. I still use the USRobotics Courier modem, but it has been upgraded so that it STILL competes with the big boys. The legendary 6-disc changer (which resembles a piece of industrial machinery more than a CD-ROM drive) was given to James LaCombe to add to his bulletin board. The original Cardinal 2400 modem is still in my possession, as a reminder of where I came from. The FIRST hard drive VanCo. BBS ran on during its "beta testing" stage, which had a whopping 42 megs of space, is now framed in a shadow box, just below the original I/O card (which had to be replaced with one that had a 16550 UART chip). The original full-tower case which housed VanCo. is also still in my possession, as I have been unable to part with it.... it's the kind that has the solid steel removable walls and the BIG RED SWITCH. They don't make them like that anymore. All other parts of VanCo. BBS were either sold or given away.
Side-note: Years later, I restored VanCo. from the CD and started it up for myself just for old time's sake. The first thing it did after it initializing the Courier was notice that it had over a year of maintenance to make up, and immediately started on the job.
Last content update 1999-01-10 at 04:36 GMT Formatting revision 2002-07-02 at 15:33 GMT Copyright © Van Goodwin, 1998-2002 Contact Van