Flash in the Pan BBS
Currently offline so no phone numbers.
Currently offline so no phone numbers.
Flash in the Pan started operations on March 4th 1993. It opened because there were no Amiga Bulletin boards in the Eastern Townships of Quebec (at least none that I could find). It was also opened because I wanted to run one, but that's another story.
It has since reopened here in Calgary, mainly because I've graduated from university and still want to run a BBS.
The BBS is running on Sycom Design Software's Excelsior! BBS system. It's pretty configurable, and very complicated. Excelsior was for quite some time the clear leader of the Amiga BBS software pack, but Sycom Software dropped out of the picture, taking development and support with it. While the software has now been taken over by another group who seem to be spending a decent amount of time and effort in updating and improving it, Zeus will probably superceed it on the BBS.
The hardware it's running off is a Commodore Amiga 2000. Originally it was using an Amiga 500 but that blew up due to me having done too much hacking around inside it. The 2000 has a GVP 105 meg Quantum harddrive of which the Bulletin Board has been allotted 105 megs. It also has an VXL/Motorola 68030 accelerator chip and 11 megabytes of memory.
For a while it was running off an Amiga 4000-030 with about 2 gigs of harddisk space but I wanted to use that one myself :-).
The BBS was originally run out of a residence room at Bishop's University in Lennoxville. It's now somewhere in Ottawa (albeit offline) -- you think I'm going to give out my personal address to you hackers...? Nah.....
The term "Flash in the Pan" refers to something that doesn't last long despite a lot of inital interest. In the case of, say, a Top 40 group, it would mean that they were popular for a very short time. In the case of this BBS, it means that it was't around in Quebec for long... It'll be around in Calgary for as long as I care to pay the phonebills (or until I leave :-)).
For what it's worth, the BBS will probably be revived on return to Calgary but with only one line and a name change to reflect its support of the Amiga in a time when BBSs are dying out and support is hard to come by. Of course, since I've currently blown the power supply on the 2000, who knows...