Why did you shut it down? Just curious.
The short summary is, the BBS eventually became a fairly large ISP. We ran it for several years as an ISP, but when that failed, I moved it to my house again. We eventually tried to use it as the basis of a web hosting service, but after years of that not taking off either, we just called it quits.
Now here's the Wikipedia-like summary.
I shut down AudioNet to run Dreamline. Dreamline had its origins in a BBS called The Light Source, which ran on one of the very first Falken BBS releases. It was decent software, but all of the hardware and software support was in Galacticomm and MajorBBS. We also considered TBBS, Oracomm, and even Coconet and DLX, but one of our friends already had experience in setting up MajorBBS, so we went with that.
We originally ran Dreamline from my friend's house on 4, then 8, then 16 lines. But I had more room so we eventually moved it to my house. We dedicated one line to Interlink teleconferencing, and at one point we had about 5 or 6 BBSes linked up. The problem was we disagreed on our "business" objectives. My friend wanted to run an adult site with adult downloads. Our other friend wanted to run an "online service" with Internet connectivity, online shopping, and lots of online games, etc (this was back in 1992), and I wanted to run an all-ages chat/social system with Internet services. Toward the end of 1993 we had a huge argument and decided to just forget it, and each of us planned to sell off our "share" of what each of us bought...it was purely a business decision and we've stayed friends.
In the end, I "bought out" all the hardware and software from my other two friends and in February 1994 started Afterimage BBS.
FYI, the names were intended double-entendres...Dreamline was a cool-sounding name for a BBS, which was taken from the title of a Rush song. Afterimage, also a Rush song, was an appropriate name for the "afterimage" of what used to be Dreamline BBS.
The system was back in my house and eventually got back up to 12 lines. I wasn't really making any money on it, but we'd have huge gatherings, parties, outings, etc, and it was a lot of fun...but with it came lots of drama between users and groups of users. I heard the BBS was responsible for precipitating at least one or two marriages over the years of its existence.
In 1995, a music recording studio owner I worked with saw the music thing as a major selling point. IUMA had already gotten pretty big on the net, but we wanted to improve on this. We became business partners and moved the system to a loft in the music studio and added a 56K dedicated line from UUNET which cost something like $1000/mo back then. A year later, the owner decided to sell the studio and do this full time, so we moved again and went on to become one of the first ISP's in our area, eventually running something like 42 phone lines all on 28.8 modems.
The Afterimage BBS kept running, and was basically a support BBS, and a social BBS as well. Some of our users were dedicated to us, but many others frequented other local chat boards - The Jungle, The Club, Cyberwarrior, Chat Chalet, and High Watermark were some of the others. MP3's were just starting to be popular and would have been perfect timing for the music side of the service, which we called Musiconnect.
Unfortunately, our expenses got out of hand, my business partner decided to get involved with a group of people building a brand new recording studio and left the day to day operations of the service. I was also holding a full-time job, which made it impossible to do any kind of support or maintenance and we couldn't afford to hire anyone full time. We had a few people volunteering to admin the various systems, but things just fell apart at the end of 1996. Our lease expired at the end of the year, and we just decided to close shop and move out.
In May 1997, I decided to put the BBS back up at home for fun and also re-connected 8 of the original phone lines and a 256K Internet line. I had some returning local customers who decided to come back. I offered the BBS, in addition to email and Linux shell access. About a year later, my cousin and I decided to split some office space where we could house a small hosting operation. Later, one of my friends originally involved in the Dreamline BBS also wanted to host some machines, so we started another small venture called Netspectations. We ended up moving this venture two or three times as well to different small office locations.
I ran Afterimage BBS on and off probably until about mid 2005. There'd be some of my original users checking in every so often, but the recent user list was mostly empty day in and day out, with the bulk of the callers (including myself) now using AOL Instant Messenger.
In 2006 I gave up the whole notion of trying to run a hosting or ISP operation although I still have some servers at home on the net, and I run
www.prog.fm (a prog rock radio station). I might still have the BBS hard drive around somewhere, but the bulk of everything else ended up boxed up and shipped to a self-storage facility where it sits today along with lots of other vintage gear waiting to be restored and returned to its former glory.
I'm actually considering another small office space to move the vintage computers into so I can actually set them up and run them without tripping over cables and boxes of stuff that my cats like to sleep on. So we'll see how that goes...
