Back in the early 90’s I used to run a Bulletin Board System (BBS) called Spanky’s SportsNet. It began with Hermes software on a Mac SE with four megs of RAM and a 20 MB hard disk, and transitioned to First Class software on a Mac IIsi.

Recently while fishing around some old DAT tapes I came across a backup of the SportsNet that was made just before the transition to First Class. On a lark I decided to restore it to a hard disk and see if it would launch. Amazingly enough, Hermes opened up just dandy, complaining only that it didn’t see a modem on the serial port. That’s not surprising since modern day Macs don’t even have serial ports.

Hermes was a text-based bulletin board system, but even on the Mac SE it was snappy and responsive – as long as you connected with a 14.4 modem. First Class was a graphical system that offered colorful icons and folder organization not unlike the Macintosh interface. Below are login screens for Spanky’s during both incarnations. The SportsNet went offline when the internet became ubiquitous and I didn’t want to pay Southwestern Bell for an additional phone line anymore.

When I used Hermes it was owned by Frank Price. The software is now in development as Hermes II and available for download as charity-ware.

Spanky’s SportsNet First Class login sound (87k MP3)

First Class was owned by SoftArc, and now is marketed by Open Text Communications. Not sure if that was just a name change or more.

Though the differences between the two BBS products were extreme, they had one thing in common: an achilles heel that was guaranteed to provide hours of frustration, agony, and expletives trying to get your BBS back online.

For Hermes it was a file called “Hermes Shared” that would get corrupted, frequently during version upgrades. It stored the vital information about your BBS, including user information, message pointers, and more. When it was toast you better have a backup because repairs were futile. With First Class the corresponding file was something called the “Post Office.” Same level of importance, same proclivity to self-destruct from time to time, turning your BBS into absolute gibberish.

I had a fun time setting up Mini vMac on my G4 PowerBook running OS X. Mini vMac enabled me to emulate my old Mac SE running Mac OS 6.0.8. I was surprised how quickly the text commands of Hermes came back to me.

Being a sysop really taught me a lot about the world of Macs and networks. We had a tight knit group of sysops in Austin that looked out for each other. Whether it was a disk that crashed or a modem that died or software that needed troubleshooting, we worked through the issues and pioneered the concept of online communities powered by Macs. I learned a lot and made some lifelong friends.

Thanks again to the guys who really helped launch my career into the crazy world of high-tech: Wras of Zen Wedgie, RA of Akbar and Jeff’s BBS Hut, Driver 8 of the SEC, Sting of Outlandos d’Amour, Big Boy of The Diner, and The Atom of MTC will always be some of the smartest people I have ever been fortunate to know.