A long, long time ago a box of parts arrived at the home of the soon
to be first sysop of the first gay oriented BBS. This was a marvelous
machine equipped with a new Z-80 cpu operating at 4mhz, a flopply disk
drive that would store 35 tracks of 10 sectors each with 256 bytes of
data (that's 89K for you new folks), and two RAM memory boards providing
a full 16K. [A Northstar Horizon, S-100 bus]
After many months of hardware assembly and basic software work, the
soon to be sysop thought that there has to be a better way to cycle RAM
and wear out the floppy disk drive than playing games and writing menus
for dinner. Behold, from Georgia comes a bulletin board system written
in basic and set to operate with an internal modem with automatic
switching of the baud rate between 110 and 300.
**** May 1980, The Original Kinky Kumputer is born.****
Chase bugs....CRASH.....Bugs....Need another drive...More memory..
Must keep the drives running between accesses... Click click all day...
Ah, a night light timer will keep this thing quiet and save some power.!
'Pull the plug' midnight to 7am. Good thing these drives unload the
heads on power failure.
'Sysop 2' joins the operation, bringing a spare computer.
Now 56K static RAM, two double density drives, what more ??
How about N*DOS 5.0, new rev. of basic, oh why not just go all the
way to a double sided drive.
Sysop 2 (a Basic whiz) clears out the last bugs and now the BBS is
--Crash proof-- !, rejecting power failures, hackers, etc.
Now it is clone season...
In late 1983, Kinky East begins as a sub-section of a multi-user
system in the Washington D.C. area.
In August 1984, This system, first known as The Kinky Alternative,
starts in San Francisco as a 'Look and Feel' clone of the Original.
September 1985, Kinky Alternative drops 110 baud and goes 300/1200.
November 1985, The Original Kinky Kumputer goes 300/1200/vadic1200.
July 1986, The Orginal Kinky Kumputer suspends operation.
January 1987, The Kinky Alternative (Kinky #3) is updated to permit
private messages, file transfers, and renamed 'THE NEW KINKY KUMPUTER'.
August 1990, After 6 years of service in San Francisco, and now the
only Kinky Kumputer in operation, this Kinky system packs up and moves
to the great NorthWest to become KINKY KUMPUTER NW.