Shadowscope BBS began in 1991 as Shadowland BBS. Originally it was run on a
Tandy Personal Computer using TriBBS software. After a couple of months I
switched to Renegade. Being located in West GA everwhere except the immediate
area was long distance including Atlanta, even though it was the same area
code. After a few months of that I switched to the “Atlanta Line” which
allowed me to dial into numbers in the metro Atlanta area and have them dial
in to my BBS. At that time the board was only online at night. My handle
online was Deathknight, except of course I used ansi codes to change the
“t’s” to crosses lol.
Shortly thereafter I added multi-ring support to my phone line. Don’t
remember what it was called but you got a different number for each person in
the house. I also had a small piece of equipment that would distinguish
between the rings and route incoming BBS calls to the computer, which allowed
for 24/7 uptime. I also had to get a new computer as my brother
had left the military and needed his back. For a brief while one of my users
had let me borrow an extra desktop until I could get a PC. I finally ended up
renting one from one of those pay by the week furniture places. I also joined
Fidonet at that time.
My original Fido node number was 1:133/3. It changed to 1:133/1003 about a
year later after a new NC took over. Around ’92 a friend and I set up our own
FTN network, WeirdNet. At it’s heyday I think we had about 25 nodes. I also
joined a few other networks as well including RGNet and a few I can’t
remember now.
I was very much into modding Renegade at that time, frequenting Digital
Playground (Cott Lang’s BBS) and a few other “l33t” boards in order to get
ideas. I hex edited RG to change the hardcoded prompts and added in animated
ansi in their places. I even had a few mods out on the net that I can no
longer find.
Around ’95 or ’96 changed jobs and actually started making a little money. I
also changed BBS software. I started using Intermail as my front end and
Proboard for the BBS. I also started getting involved in a couple of other
international and national networks, which unfortunately due to my being
irresponsible also jacked up my phone bill to a very large amount and the
wife, rightly so, made me take it down. I did end up keeping the board up
but was no longer involved in anything except local stuff.
As things go I ended up taking my BBS down in 98. I pre-registered for the
forthcoming version of Proboard (both the DOS and Win32 versions.) Proboard
was then sold to Pat Clawson of Telegrafix who ran it into the ground and
basically never honored the money we had spent. I also had a new job at
that point and didn’t have much time for BBSing.
I moved in 1999 to a new area and along with that came BROADBAND. I upgraded
my new PC to Windows 2000 and relaunched the BBS as Shadowscope, running
EleBBS as telnet only. My handle also slightly changed to dethnite. I used
IRC a lot at that point and Deathknight was just too long so I shortened it.
I also launched the Shadowscope web site in November. At that point the
address was shadowscope.darktech.org and everything was hand coded. In
December I launched my first domain, shadowscope.com, which is still up and
running along with a few others that are currently forwarding to Shadowscope.
I really wasn’t all that interested in BBSing and just had it up for
nostalgia at that point so it was only online for about nine months.
From 2000 to 2012 I mainly blogged on Shadowscope. Originally the site was
run on Movabletype and then around 2009 I moved to WordPress which is what I
am running now. I blog about whatever currently interests me. For a few years
it was all about crime and around 2010 I pretty much stopped that. After my
dad died I lost all interest and while I still write a crime post here and
there it doesn’t drive me as much as before. I also did quite a bit of
Pay-per-post stuff around that time as well. Hell, brought in 10k one year
just from sponsored posts. Not enough to make a living but it certainly paid
for my toys and a few bills to boot.
Anyway, when I stopped blogging about crime I decided the time was right to
get back into BBSing. In January 2012 Shadowscope BBS went back online.
Originally I was going to go with EleBBS again but as development had stopped
I switched over to Synchronet, which I ran until a couple of weeks ago. The
old laptop that I hosted on died and I have changed to the current software,
Mystic. I am running it on a Windows 10 64-bit machine. I looked into
using one of my Raspberry Pi’s but decided I wanted to use them for some IOT
stuff which you can read about on my web site.
Shadowscope is currently not finished. I am moving over my Ansi menus and
still have a lot of back-end work to do. I plan on adding a couple of RSS
feeds as well as being able to telnet out to other BBSes and Weather
Underground.
I will also be tying it into my home automation system using MQTT, I just
haven’t decided to what extent. Most likely just pulling information out of
the BBS for my use.
As of August 2016 that’s where I’m at. I go through periods where I will all
but ignore my board while I am working, playing Ingress, or fiddling with HA
but I always come back. If there are any issues or suggestions you can always
reach me at rmiles7721@gmail.com