Hello all

First of all, I would like to apologise for my bad English, unfortunately it
is not my mother tongue.

My name is Alisha I am transgender MtF (male to female) I was born on 13 December 1972 in Zurich, Switzerland. I worked for several years in the
carrier business at ISP's and Telcos until I got tired of the hire and fire mentality in the private sector and the non-stop shareholder value thinking. That's why I decided to apply for a job at the Swiss Federal Railways, where
I now work in the Rail IP Network division. I work there in a small team of specialists and we are responsible for the entire backbone of the Swiss
Federal Railways. In addition to office hours, I'm also on standby duty if something goes wrong or another anomaly occurs outside of office hours.

My hobbies include IT, Cypriot history and myths, and of course my model railway in H0 1:87 and G 1:22.5 scale. I am also a passionate DXer for satellite reception, but unfortunately, I never had enough time to get my amateur radio licence (HB9).

Why open a mailbox again in this day and age? I think the following words
under the motto Back to the roots explain it. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask at any time.

Back to the roots

CoVid-19 has brought a lot of negative things upon us, however in this
respect it has also brought something positive. As the title says, "back to
the roots". Very few people know that swissIRC started as a small mailbox system called "Only you" in the mid 1980s, so let m enlighten you.

It all started with a Commodore 64 (breadbox) with 2 floppy drives (1541) and
a Commodore Modem 1660 that could do 300 baud on the parental phone line.
Which I was only allowed to use from 21:00 to 06:00 in the early stages. The Commodore 64 became a Commodore 128D with 3 external floppy drives (1 x 1571 and 2 x 1581) and the Commodore Modem 1670 which could do 300 and 1200 baud. Sharing the phone line became more and more a problem. My parents were torpedoed with calls during the day, while the mailbox was not allowed to run.

So another solution was needed. My parents ordered a SwissNet (ISDN) line for me and I now had my own numbers (which would have been the best solution from the beginning). With the reboot, the name of the mailbox changed to MicroVax BBS. By working (newspaper distribution) in the spare time and working in the school vacations, I was then able to afford a Commodore Amiga 2000B. Slowly
the accessories grew. Second internal floppy drive, as well as external
floppy drive and an incredibly huge hard disk with 40 Megabyte. Of course,
this also included a Zyxel 1496E modem.

The next jump was then to a Compaq Deskpro 486 DX50 with 2 x 80 Mbyte hard disks, as well as an external SyQest 88 Mbyte removable disk. At the
beginning with the Zyxel 1496E later with two Zyxel Elite 2864i. The SyQest
was a bad buy. The part howled so loudly, it was impossible to sleep with it
in the same room. In the following years there were several updates to the system. More hard disk space and integration of external networks
(Proprietary no FidoNet or so) increased the costs for the maintenance of the mailbox. Because of my mailbox software, which I used in Amiga times and PC times, my hub was equipped to exchange messages in Cologne Germany. This
meant I had to call Cologne every 2 hours to exchange messages. In other
words I was investing a large part of my apprentice wages in telephone costs. Sometime in 1995 or 1996 the defect witch caught up with me. In the
beginning, I was still fixing things. However, at some point, the cost and benefit was no longer right. I pulled the plug from this chapter also because of professional dependencies.

At the end of 1999 a new chapter started. With a few friends I brought an IRC server into the internet, which was part of a network. As it is, friendships fall apart. So I decided to build up my own IRC network and swissIRC.net was born which still exists today. Currently it consists of 3 servers and a hub with services.

CoVid-19 is, or was, the trigger to go over the books again. A lot has
changed in the years. Modem connections are a thing of the past, today IP
rules the world. Therefore back to the roots with a mailbox BBS but IP based
to the existing IRC network as a supplement. With the connection to the
FidoNet and fsxNET to start in the past but under the name swissIRC BBS.

Best regards

Alisha
--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A46 2020/08/26 (Linux/64)
* Origin: swissIRC BBS (39:110/113)

Hello alisha!

09 May 21 23:16, you wrote to all:

First of all, I would like to apologise for my bad English,
unfortunately it is not my mother tongue.

[...]

A great read and it matches most of my bbs, except I started with my own lines and then two...

Then the internet hit, and then we migrated to being a small ISP. Then the big boys came to town and a small 21 line isp wasn't able to keep up with both the cost of
running the system, and ADSL starting to happen...

It was a great time though and more personal, unlike now. #0(




Stephen


--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5-b20180707
* Origin: Dragon's Lair BBS, Telnet: dragon.vk3heg.net (39:901/280)

Hello Stephen!

10 May 2021 12:30, Stephen Walsh wrote to alisha:

First of all, I would like to apologise for my bad English,
unfortunately it is not my mother tongue.

[...]

i should maybe apologise my bad danish humor ? :)

A great read and it matches most of my bbs, except I started with my
own lines and then two...

+1

Then the internet hit, and then we migrated to being a small ISP. Then the big boys came to town and a small 21 line isp wasn't able to keep
up with both the cost of running the system, and ADSL starting to happen...

yes same happend here in danmark, waited very long to get adsl, i had working isdn, now just fiberoptick kables, and cheaper to pay, but it kills the possible to run bbs, fidonet, amiganet at home, so all i now have is binkp in frankfurt germany thanks to linode.com

It was a great time though and more personal, unlike now. #0(

its also bad on personly, i miss all the old bbs to dial on isdn

if Roland Zbinden reads it, hello world :)


Regards Benny

... too late to die young :)

--- Msged/LNX 6.1.2 (Linux/5.11.21-gentoo-dist (x86_64))
* Origin: I will always keep a PC running CPM 3.0 (39:140/0)