About Swizzle Stick BBS

Where we come from....

We started the old Swizzle Stick way back on October 5, 1986 in Washington, DC. You may remember that our original name was "Construction Site," but thankfully that name didn't last through the end of the year. I started the board because there were only a couple of Mac boards in town back then, all of them very busy! From Paul Heller's Twilight Clone (which was only one line back then, not the twenty that it is now), to Terry Monks' MonksBoa, which is the oldest Mac BBS in the country, to Ron Wartow's Overflow Valve (now Ellen Caswell's CasBoa), they were all popular and very difficult to get on to. It was an excellent environment to set up my little Swizzle Stick.

Our first system ran on a MacPlus with Red Ryder Host and one floppy drive and we kept that for over a year before we bought our first hard drive, a terribly expensive CMS 60 megger and added a couple of files. There was never a need for us to do files back then. Paul did that very well at the Clone.

In January of 1988, Fidonet caught our eye, and we switched over to the Mansion BBS along with the Tabby mailer so that we could support it. That really made the board take off (well, such as it was.... We usually maintained a loyal following of core users that kept the place running). From those days, our regulars were Richard Grant, Charles Redmond, Gray Shockley & Garner Miller. Richard & Charles have given up BBSing, but you'll still see Gray lurking around here, and Garner still BBSes, though from his schooling in Florida. It was this core group of people who invented Emilio, designed the bar, and came up with the idea of Swizzle Bashes; parties for the members of this board.

Somewhere in here I became moderator of Echomac, Fidonet's largest Macintosh related conference. It was an interesting task because it made me learn more about how Fidonet works. I thankfully gave up those duties in 1991.

November of 1989 brought around a major change. My employer moved me to Atlanta to be involved in the acquisition of a new subsidiary. I boxed Swizzle up and carried the Mac down to Atlanta on the plane with me, which meant the board was down for only five hours! It was a lot longer than that before I got my membership back up, though. This slack time gave me an opportunity to learn even more about Fidonet, and I took the opportunity to take on the local network's echomail distribution responsibility.

Echomail distribution was fun, but it was a pretty political position, and it seemed that one could do no right while in it. Much like being moderator of Echomac. It was also very difficult to do with my Mac. Tabby, the only mailer software available for my computer was very slow, and didn't handle the job well. This, combined with my realizing the limitations of my BBS software made me decide to make the switch to an MS-DOS machine using RemoteAccess BBS and FrontDoor mailer. Wow! What a difference; the callers had a better BBS, and I had one that was easier to maintain. Excellent!

After six months or so, the board really found a following. If you were to have called back then, Vic Lambert & Mike Murray would have been the most recognizable faces, but perhaps in a bit of foreshadowing, William Sommers, a San Francisco boy, was also very prominent. These days saw the continuation of Swizzle Bashes, only at Manuel's Tavern in Little Five Points, not at Ireland's Four Provinces, on Connecticut Avenue, in DC. This was also the time that nhrn (not her real name) and the cellar were added to the public house as well as the games room, which featured some heated Scrabble tournaments.

It seems like I'm not meant to stay anywhere very long, and in November 1992, I was moved again, this time, to San Francisco. I set up a clone of the board and really had two Swizzle Sticks running at the same time, one in Atlanta, and one in San Francisco. It meant that I wouldn't have any downtime at all! We were much busier than I thought we would be, and we overwhelmed our single phone line; it seemed that there just weren't any major Mac BBSes in San Francisco.

I decided to fill this niche and made over a thousand dollars in upgrades to my system to allow me to offer a quality files base. I had to go to a subscription system to allow me to afford to add the additional hard disk space and telephone lines, but I hoped that I would provide a service that San Francisco hadn't seen since Patricia O'Connor's MacCircles left to go to Denver.

At our peak in San Francisco, we had six phone lines that ran on a rotary, including an ISDN line, 600Mb of files and over 100 Fidonet message areas. Swizzle was a subscription BBS at the time, so it wasn't expensive for me to provide such service.

Then it happened again: I moved. Continuing my lap around America, I moved to Grapevine, TX. I was too busy to continue Swizzle as a commercial venture, so I set it up as a free BBS, with only two phone lines. Also, at the time, the WWW was getting really popular, so I focused less on things that I couldn't be the best at, like the files area, and more on things we could do well, like the online games and email.

It really does seem like the Internet is taking over. Even I haven't been on Swizzle Stick in the past fourteen months. We still have lots of callers and they still enjoy playing our on-line games but some time in the near future I really can't imagine Swizzle as existing anywhere except for on this web page.

I finally took Swizzle down in 1999, but it was still getting a handful of callers a day.  I've saved the hard drives and sometimes I think about setting it up on the internet as something one could telnet in to.