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About

penum -i, n. provisions, victuals.

hardware history
hardware current

1989

Spring Break trip to disneyland with the family seemed like a great oppurtunity to start a BBS on the family phone line with an Atari 1040ST a Supra 2400 baud modem and 2x720k floppy drives. One for the BBST software and one of a glorious 720k of downloads. By the time I came back from vacation the bbs had to be taken down but I think it did receive a few calls that week after advertising on the local boards under the handle of drdoom.

1992

Armed with a Magnavox 386SX20, 80MB of storage, USR 14400 baud sportster modem and my own phone line I start Penumbra Elite bbs with tGS. The focus was on PC software and releases could only be stored for a month before they had to be backed up or deleted. I was running an unregistered version of OBLiVioN/2 bbs software which offered less functionality and was harder to configure than Teleguard. Oblivion had the distinction of having the story surrounding it that if the author found out that you were running an unregistered copy he'd call up and log in with a backdoor and delete the contents of your hard drive. I figured that if I stayed under the radar that this wasn't going to happen and even if it did I backed up my userlist enuff that it didn't matter. In conjunction with the board launch I changed my handle to Kid Eternity and used tKE on IRC because three letter names were cool and mine was two initials so I added a T to stand for THE or something. I had seen an issue of DC Comics "Kid Eternity" in a mall in northern washington and figured it was such an obscure reference that I'd have a unique handle.

you can still see the old nfo thanks to nfoworld
nfo

1993

Space was getting tight on my 80MB hard drive at this point and I had to switch from PC to console which meant SNeS roms. Somehow I actually had couriers keeping the site up to date and since I was one of the few console only boards it was a niche market. Too bad I didn't have an SNES but tGS did and he had a UFO too which was a good combination. The board got more popular than I expected and I was receiving international calls daily. I had to make a rule that I'd accept no Japanese RPGs and we had a huge collection of Development tools for the snes that no one else had. I think if you were to find some of those old console utils online there'd be a good chance that it would have passed through the board. In addition the board was down the street from "The Brains Nest BBS" and had hosted the first SNES emulator VSMC which I'll talk about later

1994

Space was really right on my 80MB hard drive when I convinced a friend at school that I'd give him an account (I think he heard Sysop account) on my bbs if he leant me his computer. That brought the storage space up to a huge 180MB, Damn I was giddy that was huge, what could I possibly do with all that space after all SNES roms weren't getting any bigger at the time and they weren't coming out any faster. I opened up an Atari ST section and started advertising on international boards like the ROCK.

1995

The internet hit big that year with cheap dial-up ISPs and suddenly the internet was something more than IRC. Suddenly my attention was divided between the internet and the bbs even with a 440MB drive and a p60 in addition to the 386. So I took the board down.

1997

I had a Broadband cable connection installed and picked up a 1 GB hard drive to bring my storage to 1.44 GB that was huge. What could I do with all that space and bandwidth? Well I started a private FTP site and Penumbra FTP was born. Around this time I dropped the Kid from my Handle making it Eternity since it could fit in games like quake a lot better at lan parties.

1999

Penumbra makes a breif apperance online with stunning testimonials from the likes of Surfwarrior who was quoted as saying "Hey either update your site or take it down"

2001

Penumbra BBS reborn using newsbin at first then graymatter. The entries still live in the site archives today and you can scour them thoroughly and read interesting posts that may involve comments like "Hey I'm still alive I just haven't posted for the last month" and "Sorry I forgot that I had a web site again". The prime was when my second host sold my contract to another host and all my news scripts stopped working and I couldn't post for a period of 6 months

2002

Registered penum.org and moved to a new host in August. The real reason why I hadn't registered a domain in such a long time was because I was on besthost1 and they had this crazy scam called stacking fees where they wanted $50 to stack your domain now I had the domain for at least 3 months before I made the switch but it was a big deal when I was flat broke.

2003

Migrated from greymatter to b2 to b2 evolution and a new host

....the saga continues

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