History of RBBS-PC of Chicago

                        By Loren D. Jones

    My board came to life in July, 1983 as the Fargo IBM PC Users
Group RBBS in Fargo, North Dakota.  I was an attorney in private
practice at the time and was also the founder and president of the
Fargo IBM PC Users, one of the older PC users groups.  I was
perusing Larry Jordan's RBBS at 2 a.m. on a Saturday night when I
ran across the RBBS-PC software, then at level 7.x or something. 
I immediately began downloading the two 60K files at 300 baud,
which translates to about 45 minutes per files, as I recall!  By
4 p.m. the following afternoon, my RBBS system was on-line with a
whopping 720K of storage (two 360K floppies) and 300 baud service. 
It received its own telephone line later that week.

    As the board grew I instituted the "Rotating Download Disk"
system whereby I would have a different download diskette available
each day to allow our software library to grow.  Later that year
Jim Grettum, one of my most active users, offered the first $100
contribution towards a hard disk for the system.  Soon other users
began pitching in on the project and within a month I installed our
first 10mb hard disk.  The thought of a whopping 10 megabytes of
storage was almost overwhelming!

    As the board grew, so did its' popularity, assisted by some
nice comments in PC Magazine and some books on bulletin boards. 
Soon it was impossible to get through.  In response to users' pleas
for easier access, I did a survey to see how many users would be
willing to support the system with an annual subscription in
exchange for easier access.  The response was sufficient to justify
the second machine and a local area network, so a few weeks later
the first subscription board went on-line.  With the increased
number of calls the 10mb hard disk filled up, so we quickly added
a second 10mb, then substituted one 10M for a 32M, then the other
10M for another 32M, then an 80M, then a second 80M, then upped
those to 290M, then 435M and ultimately to 1.2 gigabytes (twelve
hundred megabytes)!  I also added a third system, then a fourth,
then systems five through nine to make room for more of our BBS
friends! The board has continued to grow to over 7,000 registered
users (public and private) from as far away as Brazil, South Africa,
Australia and all parts of Europe, with 5 to 10 new users added
every day.

     In August of '87 I accepted a faculty position with IIT
Chicago-Kent College of Law in their Center for Law and Computers,
allowing me to combine my interest in computers with my legal
education at an institution known world-wide for its computer
expertise in the legal field.  With me came the bulletin board
system and Jim Grettum, our original benefactor, and by then a
long-time friend and assistant sysop, took over my original phone
lines for the Fargo Board and continues to maintain a quality
system for the Fargo IBM PC Users Group while maintaining a close
relationship with RBBS-PC of Chicago.

      My wife, Gail, and I enjoy our new home here in Chicagoland
and the many, many friends we've made here.  And the board seems
to have made some friends for itself as well, fielding over to
180,000 calls since our arrival!  And we've tripled the number of
downloadable files available!  It is out of this effort that the
RBBS-in-a-Box system has evolved.  It is an encapsulation of almost
seven years of Sysop experience, thousands of hours of hard work and
a lot of telephone bills!  I hope you enjoy the fruits of this effort
and that you will find running RBBS-PC to be as enjoyable as I have
these past years!

                              Loren D. Jones, Sysop
                              RBBS-PC of Chicago
                              (708) 352-1035 (Modem)



Copyright (c) 1989,1990  Loren D. Jones & Associates, Ltd.

RBBS-PC of Chicago is a service of:

        Loren D. Jones & Associates, Ltd.
                P.O. Box 127
            LaGrange, IL  60525