The Sentry Bulletin Board System

History

The Sentry Bulletin Board System began life in December 1983 at a time when there were only three or four BBS systems in Sydney. The first Sentry BBS was a mixture of Apple BASIC which I ported to CBM BASIC together with some 6502 machine code to translate PetASCII to ASCII (PetASCII swapped upper and lowercase characters ). And what did such an advanced system run on?

• A humble Commodore Vic-20 computer: 3.5K RAM, 6502 Processor, Data Recorder (ie cassette deck), 22-column output to a B&W portable 12" TV. The whole system cost $440 including TV.
• A "dumb" (ie manual) 300 baud Avtek Multimodem II modem which I modified with the help of the circuit schematic kindly supplied by Avtek engineers. The modification allowed the modem to auto-answer on detecting the presence of RI (a ringing phone line). Cost: $350.
• A homemade RS232 interface plugged into the Vic's "user port" because the commercial version was "out of stock" in Australia at the time. The homemade RS232 interface had a subsequent addition made to it to handle the auto-answering which was christened the "verandah" by my girlfriend (wife) due to the fact that, as there was no room left on the circuit board, an additional level had to be added to accommodate a couple of line drivers.

The Sentry BBS operated on my voice phone line between the hours of 18:00 and 08:00 for several years. Over that time, the Vic was expanded with a homemade 3K RAM expander, a retail 8K RAM expander (I added an additional 8K to this expander by simply adding the missing RAM chips for a few dollars) and a 1541 170K single density, single-sided floppy diskette drive. Towards the end, the "serial" (and therefore rather slow) 1541 was replaced by an IEEE-448 (parallel) SFD-1001 1Mb floppy diskette drive. Commodore Australia provided the IEEE-448 cartridge for this to me for "free" because they had no instruction booklets for it and because they believed it would not work with a Vic-20 anyway - I managed to get it working by disassembling the 6502 machine code.

In early 1986 I purchased my first IBM PC clone - a Tava PC with two 360K floppy disk drives and 64K of RAM for a mere $4,000. A few weeks later I read an article by Steve Withers in the Australian "Your Computer" magazine which told of an amatuer BBS network in the USA called FidoNet which was using PCs running BBS software called Fido by Tom Jennings. Steve offered to supply this software to anyone who wanted it, so I duly wrote him a snailmail and within a couple of weeks had received a bunch of floppy disks containing the Fido software. I immediately set about running up the software on my new IBM clone.

The first major problem I encountered was that the Fido software required one of those Hayes "smartmodems" which responded to obscure strings of AT commands. How was my Avtek Multimodem going to cope with that? Easy ... the Vic-20 was pressed back into service as the "intelligent front-end" to my otherwise dumb modem. The PC sent AT commands to the Vic which, in turn, controlled the modem according to the AT command (it was a limited set of commands - answer the line, hang up the line, but it worked).

By June 1986 the Sentry BBS, now running Fido v10j on the IBM clone, was listed in the worldwide FidoNet nodelist. At that time, the nodelist totalled just under 1200 systems with the vast bulk of them being located in the USA. The big advantage of running a FidoNet networked system was that you could exchange email with other systems and, before the end of 1986 "echomail" which comprised public discussion areas for users (similar to Usenet newsgroups). The messages in these discussion areas were then exchanged with other FidoNet systems locally, interstate and around the world. Until the advent of echomail by Jeff Rush (Dallas, Texas), any messages between users were confined to the single BBS system and the biggest use of BBS systems was for the exchange of program files (usually keyed in by hand from various computer magazines).

FidoNet BBS systems flourished in Australia and overseas with the FidoNet nodelist comprising over 35,000 systems in its hey day. You need to realise that this was before the rise of the Internet and the advent of the World Wide Web. Even in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Internet was largely confined to those with access through universities and research institutions.

I started out in FidoNet as a mere sysop (system operator), then progressed to Network Coordinator for Net 711 (Sydney's North Shore), Regional Coordinator for Region 54 (NSW & PNG) and finally Zone 3 Coordinator (Australia, PNG, New Zealand) a post which I held for just over two years. I also worked on Wynn Wagner III's Opus BBS system, which became the main successor to Fido, as a beta tester from v1.10 onwards and additionally as the author of the Opus Sysop Operations Manual and Opus Technical Reference Manual for the v1.73 and v1.79 versions of the software. In addition, I wrote various utilities for the Opus BBS system.

However, with the advent of the WWW and the commercialisation of the Internet, the decline in FidoNet - both in terms of the number of systems and the number of users - started to become noticeable. The Sentry BBS had been operating on two dedicated phone lines until June 1997 when the number of users still using the system had fallen to the point that only one dedicated phone line was required. By November 1997 the number of users had fallen from its high of around 300 to about a dozen regulars and, so, after some 14 years of operation, the Sentry BBS was closed down ...

The present day

... to be reborn in early 1999 as www.sentry.org.

• The sentry.org domain was registered on 29 January 1999.
• On 10 February 1999 sentry.org became operational with a dedicated 33/33 Kbps permanent modem connection to the Telstra Internet backbone.
• In late 1999 the permanent modem 33/33 Kbps Telstra link was upgraded to 56/33 Kbps.
• In January 2003 a redundant 512/128 Kbps ADSL1 link provided by iGreen (later acquired by Flow Communications and then by iiNet) was also added.
• In June 2004 the redundant 512/128 Kbps link was replaced by a 1500/256 Kbps ADSL1 link provided by Exetel.
• In November 2005 the 56/33 Kbps Telstra link was replaced by a 512/512 Kbps ADSL1 link provided by .Netcall (not Exetel purely for redundancy).
• In January 2007 the 1500/256 Kbps ADSL1 link provided by Exetel was upgraded to an 8192/384 Kbps ADSL1 link.
• In July 2007 the 8192/384 Kbps ADSL1 link provided by Exetel was upgraded to a 20222/1021 Kbps ADSL2+ link.
• In September 2007 the 512/512 Kbps ADSL1 link provided by .Netcall was cross-graded to 1500/256 Kbps ADSL1 due to new pricing making the 512/512 link uneconomical.