Electronic Bulletin Boards by Carolyn E. Cooper, a book report by Dan Sanderson, age 12. Six handwritten pages, in cursive, with a cover page and five printed pages of figures from a Boise BBS. I got an A+.

The book itself was a 66-page kiddie book, so not much to be proud of at age 12. I jokingly noted it as “(tough readin’)”, which apparently the teacher appreciated. Overall, the report was “very factual and well done!”

“The door swings open and you step through. Your house is exactly the way you left it, giving you a comforting feeling. You drop your stuff on the chair beside you and you head for the study. As you walk in, the automatic lights click on and Robbie greets you with his robotic smile. He leaves to recharge his batteries, and you sit down. You turn on your computer and your modem (everything else is automatic) and boot up your terminal emulator software. You are about to embark on your first adventure in… Electronic Bulletin Boards.”

(I assume that’s my prose and not a quote from the book.)

My description of binary data was noted as “great info.” I also describe how modem speed “used to be called the baud rate,” with “used to be” underlined. I explain this later. I write out ASCII in cursive capitals.

I have no idea how much of this is in the book and how much is just me showing off how much I know about BBSes. I wonder if I even read the book.

I included a printout from the HAL 9000 BBS to illustrate concepts. 1200 baud from a Commodore 128 running EBBS 128 v4.5. commodore.software/downloads/down…

According to the sysop Mad Scientist, there’s gonna be a BBS Halloween party at Roundtable Pizza Parlor on Monday the 29th at 7:30pm!

If you want to know more about electronic bulletin boards, visit your local library. Da-nunh duhn! amazon.com/Electronic-Bul…

Also in this folder, and illustrated Richter scale, a picture of a smiling computer in a field of flowers, and the invoice from when I had my Amiga 500 upgraded to Workbench/Kickstart 2.0 for $99.95.

(Originally posted to Twitter on January 10, 2022. It received 17 likes and 1 retweets.)