it took 25+ years of searches, but i finally struck paydirt this morning: a legit, retail copy of FirstClass BBS for the macintosh
the backstory: in 1995, my redneck farm school managed to get an entire lab of twenty Mac LC's, and one of the machines was tucked off in a corner to run "FirstClass" for the entire school using an external 14.4k Global Village Teleport modem.
i was already a bbs kid by this point, but i had never heard of FC. all of the boards i visited were PC/ANSI boards running software like Oblivion/2, Iniquity, PCBoard or Wildcat. i had never even *heard* of a macintosh bbs. our computer teacher managed to get a landline number for the modem, and encouraged me to call it from home.
when i connected from home, i was nonplussed - the board was black/white ASCII with some of the worst menus i had ever seen. i browsed a few of the conferences and logged out. a "lamer board" if i had ever seen one.
the next day, i made my opinion unswervingly clear to my computer teacher: "Your board sucks Mr. M!"
He chuckled, "What? First Class is great! It's you DOS guys that suck."
he motioned to a nearby LC and opened a program called FirstClass Client. it showed a login dialog; he hammered in his u/p and a few seconds later, he was logged in to the BBS over the LAN.
...... except, it was all graphical! the entire board was a rich mac OS gui. navigation between file areas and message conferences was by opening and closing windows, and clicking on buttons. no ascii/ANSI characters. downloading a file was just plain drag and drop from the server's folder to your desktop.
i had never seen anything like it: a bbs that functioned more like an operating system and windowing environment. it was a *decade* ahead of anything i had seen in ms-dos
that experience left a huge impression on me. i never found any bbs that felt as good as FC before or afterward, and spent years trying to find a legit copy of it. because it was insanely expensive ($800+) it was mostly sold to educational and corporate institutions, and very few copies ever showed up on ebay. until today. i can't wait to receive this in a few weeks, and begin documenting
and archiving the contents.
fwiw - i wrote a much longer version of this story, and many others about the 90s bbs era, in my book Mages & Modems: A Childhood Well-Wasted in the Golden Age of Personal Computers, Games, and Internet Piracy:
https://tomotama.com/books
![The rear cover of the book, showing a Carmen Sandiego-style letter from the ACME Detective agency. The letter has a picture of a spazzing out kid wearing a Just Do It sweater.
The letter reads:
ACME Detective Agency
Dear Detective #0294,
As discussed, I have enclosed a hardcopy of VGA256's journals discussed at the departmental briefing. The journal entries are chronological, and document the suspect's computing and gaming activities from the early 1980s to late 1990s - his childhood and adolescent years.
Each vignette is an introspection into the suspect's self-described obsessions, including but not limited to:
* IBM PC, Amiga, Apple ][, Macintosh, Tandy
* MS-DOS, MacOS, Windows 3.1 & 95, UNIX
* NES, GameBoy, Sega Genesis, TI-85
* Modems, BBSes, CompuServe, Prodigy, ISPs
* Warez, FTP, Usenet, IRC, Shell Accounts
* Origin Systems, LucasArts, and Sierra On-Line
... and so on. The stories are a treasure trove of immoral and illicit activities that made him the dysfunctional adult he is now. I hope these will be of value in building your dossier on this delinquent.
I expect a report on my desk by Friday.
Deputy Chief Conover
Brat & Punk Division](/proxy/post_attachment/201680/4c3f9d6273.png "The rear cover of the book, showing a Carmen Sandiego-style letter from the ACME Detective agency. The letter has a picture of a spazzing out kid wearing a Just Do It sweater.
The letter reads:
ACME Detective Agency
Dear Detective #0294,
As discussed, I have enclosed a hardcopy of VGA256's journals discussed at the departmental briefing. The journal entries are chronological, and document the suspect's computing and gaming activities from the early 1980s to late 1990s - his childhood and adolescent years.
Each vignette is an introspection into the suspect's self-described obsessions, including but not limited to:
* IBM PC, Amiga, Apple ][, Macintosh, Tandy
* MS-DOS, MacOS, Windows 3.1 & 95, UNIX
* NES, GameBoy, Sega Genesis, TI-85
* Modems, BBSes, CompuServe, Prodigy, ISPs
* Warez, FTP, Usenet, IRC, Shell Accounts
* Origin Systems, LucasArts, and Sierra On-Line
... and so on. The stories are a treasure trove of immoral and illicit activities that made him the dysfunctional adult he is now. I hope these will be of value in building your dossier on this delinquent.
I expect a report on my desk by Friday.
Deputy Chief Conover
Brat & Punk Division")