Ancient BBS Receipt for our Atari 1040ST. Canada Remote Systems.

A nostalgic view from history (I call 1988 history).

Know how everyone pays for internet access? Back in the day, we used to pay for BBS access.

What’s a BBS? It’s another computer that you dial up to in order to download files, post messages (kind of like email between users of the same system).

The ATARI 1040ST was not exactly our first computer, but it was our first computer with a MOUSE! It was kicking the shit out of any machine any school-chum we knew had? Why?

1. PC’s were clunky, iron, and only in monochrome. We had 256 SCREAMIN’ COLOURS!
2. It wasn’t a video game system, it was a shit-kicking GUI OS (looking similar to the modern Macintoshes and Amiga’s owinng to the the Motorola 68000 chips that were used in Macs until the late 90’s)
3. 3.25″ FLOPPY!!!!! MEGA STORAGE (DoubleDensity)
4. It had F1-F12 keys that were angular !!!! F12 baby!
5. We had an AWESOME 300 baud cup-modem. Downloading a file? SHHHHHH…. quietly walk out of the room, and gently close the door behind you. For a few hours.
6. It had a kick-ass serial port that my DAD made a home-made serial cable for to retrieve his old word-star files from his Kaypro IV.
7. It worked with the daisy-wheel printer we had leftover from the Kaypro.

Our favourite games were “NeoPaint”, “Mercenary (with the X-rated credit, so dad would send us out of the room while the game loading credits were off-screen) and some kind of game , I think called “Mud Pies” where you used to run around throwing pies at everyone.

I think CRS was great, because it was the first time we got to communicate to the outside world with our computer! WOW! computers could use the phone lines. Amazing. They had all kinds of files (we kept our membership even when we moved over to a portable 286 laptop a little later on). They had local numbers in our region too.

Anyways, thanks dad for giving us a jump start.

It’s amazing what $65.00 in 1988 money would buy for a year.