How Eskimo North Got Started

by

Robert Dinse

Eskimo acquired its' name semi-accidentally. It started life as "STIX" which stands for soft-touch-information-exchange (only because the phone number the telephone company gave me was 527-soft and I was trying to figure something to do with it. Coincidentally, the voice number they gave to me was 527-hard. If that isn't bizarre, I don't know what is. Credit for noticing that one goes to Glenn Gorman.

Frank Zappa does, for lack of better words, off-the-wall music. It's kind of a mix of Jazz and Rock with strange stories. Don't Eat the Yellow Snow revolves around an Eskimo boy named Nanook. He attacks a commercial fur trader who is in the process of whaling on a favorite baby seal.

Now before Nanook and before Eskimo North was multi-user, it used to run a lowly Z-80 machine on a single line. I had written an assembly language driver and modified BASIC. I called it COMBASIC because it had a number of extra keywords and functions that were really geared toward a BBS. Glenn Gorman had written a BBS program called Minibin which was restricted to working with a Micro-Peripherals BUS Decoding Modem. He couldn't sell this program because it required their driver.

Glenn was interested in selling Minibin software. I was interested in selling COMBASIC. We worked out an arrangement where I'd port the two products to each other. We'd sell the package and split the returns. Well, it didn't work out that way. Glenn sold the package and I didn't see anything. So the deal changed to Glenn selling the small system and I the large system. I had added many features that no longer made the system fit on a machine with minimal disk storage. But then I lost interest in s elling it altogether and got more interested in just running the board.

Now at that time, there were about 20 BBS's in the greater Seattle area and having to minibin's confused the hell out of people. We wanted to name them so that people wouldn't confuse them. First we tried "Minibin South" for Glenn's system and "Minibin North for mine. People still got confused. They didn't understand why if they logged into one, they couldn't log in to the other. So, we got more extreme and Glenn called his "Jamaica South." I thought, "what's up north?" Eskimo's live up North. Hence "Eskimo North" came into being.

Well, shortly there after Glenn changed his back to just "Minibin", and Eskimo North very much diverged from stock Minibin. This was during the early 80's. I also acquired 4 double-sided 80K drives really cheap. 3 MB ain't doddly now, but in 1982-83 time frame, it was BIG for a BBS. One of the users of my system modified and infocom driver so it would use a UID number which I stuffed in memory to create a different save file for every user. We had about 13 infocom games and a lot of other stuff on-line. Eskimo North became quite popular.

Now, a book was written by a fellow up in Alaska and in the book he mentioned Eskimo North. "Eskimo North - a strange system. You must call at least once even if it's long distance." And with an endorsement like that, the name stuck.

It continued to gain in popularity and towards the end of 84, I could unplug the modem at 4 AM, plug it back in and someone would instantly connect. Going multi-user seemed like a natural step. I knew nothing of Unix, a little about CP/M and OS/9, but eventually opted for Unix as the former two were two limited. I did not want to be stuck with one hardware architecture and 640K address space.

By this time, I also obtained a trial account with CompuServe. I was fascinated by some of the things you could do in a multi-user environment. CompuServe was too expensive for me to use substantially and I was restricted on what I could do. But this provided a lot of additional motivation. Other influencing factors were the P.P.S. systems which had multi-player adventure games implemented by typing Apple computers together with multi super-serial cards and custom drivers. Yet another influence was a CP/M system called Mu-Mon that was operated by Heath in the early 80's. It was kind of neat in that you had access to editors and programming languages on-line.

For those who weren't familiar with it, P.P.S. was Pirates of Puget Sound run by Dan Cascioppo, Rich Williamson (glitch), Ron McCrae(Super Pirates), Tony Gorton(Victim)

A model 16B Tandy was selected which over time we outgrew. Next, we upgraded to a Tandy 6000 and outgrew that one. Then in the fall of 1991, we moved to a Sun 3/180 and later upgraded to a 3/280. After this, we upgraded to a 3/280 and then to a 4/280. Next we split-off news into a separate 4/330, added a second 4/330. After this, we split off news into a separate 4/330, replaced it with a Power-uP equipped IPX(80mhz) which is basically where we are today.

When we moved to a Unix platform, I needed a login. The ONLY Eskimo name I knew was "Nanook" from Frank Zappa's "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow" and that is what I used. Well, here we are today. Eskimo North is still Eskimo North and I'm still using Nanook as a login.

So this is where both the system name and my login came about.