-*> Control-S to Pause/Space to Quit <*-



                    MM     MM        WW   W   WW
Eat At . . . . . . MM.M. .M.MM . . . WW. .W. .WW . . . . . . . .
          _________MM__M_M__MM_______WW__W_W__WW______________
         /         MM  M M  MM       WW  W W  WW             /|
        /          MM   M   MM       WW W   W WW            / |
       /           MM   M   MM        WW     WW            /  |
      /                                                   /   |
     /__ |\/| i l l i w a y s   i i n ___________________/    |_____
     |                                                   |   /     /|
     |  Incense and innocence and nonsense.              |  /     //|
     |  Picking flowers, picket signs and picture shows. | /_____// |
     |  Caring souls and carousels and common sense.     | |=====|  |
     |  Paranoia, paradise, impassioned prose.           | |.|/  |  |
     |  Green leaves and golden rules and governments.   | | /   |
     |                                                   | |/    |
     |  So it goes...                                    | /
     |___________________________________________________|/

       (from Incense Innocence and Nonsense (Sojourn's End), by Windows to Sky)




                                          milliways iin
                                          po box 641442
                                          la  ca  90064


     Hi.

     This is a system that has gone through many stages,
phases, and shapes since its first day out, June 6, 1987.
In the beginning, there was the Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy. But then, not too long afterward, there was "The
Drawing Board KSBBS etc." running at 300/1200 baud with
millions of bugs and two users. Soon after; that is, in a
day or so, "Milliways KSBBS etc." became the name, but the
bugs and, for a while, lack of baud remained. Over the next
three months, MW was debugged and gained just under 100 users...
but most users never called back and most bugs went unfixable
and unfixed.

So, inevitably it is said, MW went down.

I now quote from the file "/bbs/log":

KSBBS reset and ready to recieve on 11/15/87 at 10:02:29 PM.

     Those were the last words that MW KSBBS etc. ever uttered.
Between that entry and the next caller, Disk 2 was somehow
destroyed.  Erased.  And the weird and the werid vanished into
the black hole of dumbfounded despair, the only trace of which
remained was the message "I/O ERROR", half of the disk's
catalog, and a single word carved on a tree: "ROANOKE".

     But the Spirit of MW would not rest. The line was kept
busy for a month, with the slight hope that any user who
happened to call it would try again some other time.  And then,
in December of 1987, Milliways SUBBS et al went up.  It was a
sector-edited ProTERM Unattended Mode, answering the phone,
displaying a simple welcome, half-empty of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.

     That just would not do.

     So on Thursday, 1/7/88, I began modifying GBBS Pro v1.3i
and on Friday, 1/8/88, the line (then-213) 559-8723 ended its
short-lived stint as a spare line for David's Amazing BBS,
and Milliways GBBS etc. went up.

     And I wiped its userfile clean, got its disk drives
fixed, dolled it up a bit, and got reopened as Milliways I on
July 4th, 1988.

     And then, on September 1st, 1989, just as its Humble
SysOp was about to go off to UC Santa Cruz, it was rereborn as
Milliways IIN, named after "Incense, Innocence and Nonsense",
a song performed by Windows to Sky, which is the band of which
I am the leader.

     And the modem suffered a fate equal to death, after three
years of faithful service, in November 1990, and a glorious
new modem was purchased to replace it, returning MW to full-time
service in time for the new year.

     And a Hard-Drive was donated to us by a faraway Raven from a
land called BR's BBS, to which 3-in-1 oil was regularly applied in
order to keep MW running happily and speedily ever after.

     And then the SysOp moved from Santa Cruz to LA through the
post-1992 indefinite future, and all was peaceful and happy and
merry and all that stuff.

     Then the hard-drive died.  A shame, surely, but it is said that
part of MW's appeal is its floppy-disk quirkiness.  as of 1993, MW
began running on two 5.25's and two 3.5's.  for the first time, a
full 800K was reserved for mail.

     MW survived 1994's Northridge earthquake.  I had to make a couple
of minor adjustments, but the system only went down until dark that
night.

     Many new features graced Milliways' eighth and ninth years, and
just in time for its ninth birthday picnic, both 1990's modem and
1989 (?)'s power supply died more or less simultaneously in what can
only be assumed was a murder-suicide pact the intentions of which
remain enigmatic at present.  Replaced with a vintage 1984 US Robotics
Courier 2400 modem picked up from a thrift shop and a spare power
supply kept on hand for such occasions, MW suffered less than three
hours of downtime through the whole process.