Headed to The Tower Thearter last night with my cousin Henry for a night with Phil & Friends. Nether of us have seen P&F in over 3 years. We have either missed when he was close by. This was a new set of Friends since the last time we saw him. The only ones left from the Quintent was Rob Borraco and Phil himself. Phil has added Joan Osborn, Larry Campbell (guitar+more) Jeff Sipe (drums), and Barry Sless (guitar, pedal steel) . It was a good show the crowd was great. We weren’t even in our seats for more then 3 min when a guy 3 rows back ralphed on the floor and it moved down hill to row L..so Henry and I headed down to the front and were there for the whole show. On an aside..why do the ushers even bother to get the standing crowd back to there seat? As a crowed Deadheads are the most laid back group of concert goers…just let us be and let us enjoy the show. I think it’s a Philly thing..when I see a show in NYC I never get hassled for being down front or off to the side. last night I saw more people getting hassled for being up front…but anyway the show was great..it did dragged in a few spots but the band kicked it right back up.

Joan is deffinently a great improvement to the band. She stayed right out there danced during the jams and had a great voice and did great justice to the music…..

Here is the set list:

Set 1:
Spacey Jam (Joan harmonizing)>
Crazy Fingers> Jam>
Alligator> Jam>
Easy Plateau> Jam (Joan harmonizing)>
No More Do I> Althea
Cosmic Charlie

Set 2:
Jam> New Speedway Boogie>
Jam> Bartering Lines> Jam>
Death Don’t Have No Mercy> Jam>
Lady With A Fan> The Wheel>
Terrapin Station> Space> Rosemary
Turn On Your Lovelight>
Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms>
Turn On Your Lovelight

Encore:
Donor Rap/Intros
Mason’s Children

Which I was able to go to all 3 nights because tonights and tomorrows should really rock….

Last night I went to the new Princeton Library to see bits of “BBS: The Documentary” and meet the director with Ed and another member of LUG/IP. It made me think of how things were back in the days before the internet became a big thing.

I remember the day I talked to my wife about starting my own bulletin board. We were living in Princeton in an apartment over my godparents kitchen. We had a living room, bed room, bath room and a room in the attic. We shared the kitchen with my godparents, Our main food was take out pizza. We didn’t have a lot of money and we were expecting our daughter. I had checked out a lot of software and other BBSes in the area and had decided to use the Wildcat! product from Mustang. It was a well thought out program and a had a lot of good sysop tools. The problem was it was a a good amount of money for a guy making $13hr and had a baby on the way. The first computer for the BBS was a 386sx with a 40 meg hard drive and a 2400 baud modem….can you say slow. I purchased the Single Line version of Wildcat! and turned on the “It’s All Rock ‘N Roll BBS” at 609-252-0260 in the fall of 1993. We offered all the popular door games as well as message boards. The BBS was a member of Fidonet (node 1:107/370 ), Wildnet,CollNet, Tekkernet, and Throbnet. I tried to offer a lot of files for D/l and I also offered adult material but the person had to send me proof of age in the mail. The big upgrade for the BBS in Princeton was taking the winnings I got from Atlantic City when my wife and I went on our honeymoon and buying a Zoom 9600 baud modem….a little faster..

I ran the BBS for a year in Princeton and then we moved to Trenton and the board’s number changed to 609-695-9319 and my Fidonet number changed to node: 1:266/155. I also changed to the multi node version of Wildcat and added a Novell server and 2-1 GB scsi drives. I ran the wildcat software off of a 486 machine with 16 megs of ram and a used 14.4K baud modem and OS/2 as the operating system. With the multi line version of Wildcat! I was able to interact with the BBS from my desk in the living room instead of having to go to the basement where the server and main node of the bbs were. On August 9th 1994 (2 days before my wedding anniversary…my wife was so proud..not) I started offering Internet E-mail with the Domain Name rocknroll.com, I was one of the first BBS in the central NJ area to offer internet E-mail and access to UseNet news groups as well as owning a domain name. The board stayed up till late 2000 when I decided that cost of the phone line was draining my pocket of much needed fun money and I was just tired of the work that went into it or I just grew up. Also the World Wide Web came along and there was more to see and more to do, call volume dropped and the world moved on. I had a lot of fun doing it and I met a lot of people online, it was a community when you were on a good board. Today the internet is more one sided not as much a community more of little fish in a big pond. I actually have the whole BBS ziped into one big file….some day I will unzip and fire up a machine and take a tour down memory lane. :)

The movie last night hit a few spots of nastalga. I recomend downloading it (it was released under the creative commons license so it’s legal to down load :) ) and enjoying the interviews with sysops and users of the BBSes around the world.

More to come on this subject at a later date I am sure……If you were a user of It’s All Rock ‘N Roll send me a message. Also check out bbsmates for other BBS you might have visited.