jaba_

Aah! The memories!

I used to be an Amiga FileOp and a chat sheriff in the MBnet back in the 1996-1999 or so. In the early 1999 Jouni did pick me to be one of the brave helpdesk frontline guys and from there began my long MBnet/Sanoma career which I only lately quit this spring.

There was a small detail in our daily helpdesk routine which I still remember. The helpdesk did not operate 24/7, but from 3pm to 9pm or so. We helpdesk guys did arrive about an hour earlier and did run a small custom PCBoard command RUTINA, which did return the not responding BBS nodes. We then walked to a server room near us and rebooted the dead nodes. Usually there were only couple of those per day.

Since 2001 I was very actively involved with the e-mail/ISP stuff we offered. Installed new Linux servers, updated software, did investigate the problems, did glue different systems together with Perl, all that usual sysadmin stuff.

I must say the atmosphere at work when Jouni was still around was GREAT. We truly did spend lot of time together even after work. One of the colleagues who had been working for MikroBitti for a long time already did tell me that the reason she did like her job so much was because you could be sure you got to laugh every day at work. Everyone was so passionate and motivated.

I believe one reason why MikroBitti + MBnet was so successful during its golden days was that we MBnet guys were located in the same office sector with the MikroBitti magazine staff. We understood each other and gave ideas to both sides. After MBnet staff got separated to a completely different location, the co-operation between the magazine and the website/ISP staff almost completely vanished, which lead to all kind of things. Of course, the magazine itself was not doing so well at that point anyway, so it's hard to say how much actual effect the separation had.

But golden, golden years and I'm truly thankful to Jouni (and all the other MBnetnauts, of course) for that.

Hello there! :D

I once actually even delivered a real-life reprimand by meeting a frequent offender somewhere (I have no recollection where this was). Some user, who recognized me, came to tell me that one certain 14-year old boy in the crowd was so-and-so, a name very familiar to me.

I recall observing this event back in the Assembly 1997. :)

16 or 32 megs, I would say. My original jaba.mbnet.fi was an abandoned BBS node and it had 16 MB at start, later expanded to 48 MB! :D

PCBoard required quite a little resources, but on the other hand, OS/2 with 4 MB and all the BBS stuff sounds like swapping ... :)