Sometime in 1993 I went to a Bulletin Board conference (OneBBSCon) in Colorado Springs CO. At that time I was running a small export consultancy out o

The Story Of CFwhisperer - by Mike Brunt - Mike’s Substack

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2024-11-23 04:00:03

Sometime in 1993 I went to a Bulletin Board conference (OneBBSCon) in Colorado Springs CO. At that time I was running a small export consultancy out of LA sourcing gas turbine parts from a company in Albany NY and also large diesel engine parts (for really large engines). Both were going via a middle-man in Hamburg, Germany to the Electricity Utility in Saudi Arabia. The first 25 years of my career were spent in the capital equipment parts world, parts for everything bigger than trucks and buses.

During my previous travels I had met with a senior engineer at Cummins Diesel and he had shared with me their plethora of excess parts and how difficult it had been to sell them on. We talked around Cummins creating faxable lists to send out but that they were always out of date after a couple of days. “If only we could get the excess parts stock database in a bulletin board of some kind like Compuserve” he had bemoaned. This article gives a good insight into the emergence of Bulletin Boards.

This lit a fire in me, as computing was already an avid hobby of mine. So I went to OneBBSCon in this case in Colorado Springs CO - USA, looking for database interfacing software. The Online Networking Exposition and Bulletin Board System Convention (ONE BBSCON) was a significant annual event in the early 1990s, bringing together enthusiasts, developers, and industry leaders of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). There was one called Breadboard, if I recall that correctly. The Bread Board System (TBBS) was a prominent bulletin board system (BBS) software developed in 1983 by Philip L. Becker. Designed for MS-DOS.