As most of my readers know by now, this blog started out a very simple college assignment, one that I figured I could do during my regular browsing time, so when I created this blog it was simply named after the class I am in, Internet Essentials and the class designation IT130. So, I how and why did the blog get its current name?
I initially named the blog IT130, with a blog address of http://it130.blogspot.com. Simple, right? Only one post into the blog's life (about two days) I found that somewhere in the account creation process, the account did not get fully created, and I was only able to log in about halfway. When I tried to customize things, I was unable to do so (it took me back to finish the application). Instead of messing with this, I just started a new account, and named it IT103blog . Fortunately (or unfortunately, I have not yet really decided) I learned that I sort of liked playing the role of "blog creator" so I thought I should rename it to something more generic, but that still had personal meaning to me.
And that is where the current name comes in; General Pandemonium is personal to me not because of some Internet naming convention, or some cliche'; it is special because during the years 1988-1992 I was a bulletin board sysop in Hagerstown, MD. If you have been into computers for a long while (over 10 years) then you probably know where I am going, but if you are unclear as to what a "bbs" or a "sysop" is , then brush up on computer terminology and meet me back here.
Great to see you decided to come back! now that we are all on the same page again, I was the sysop of my own BBS ( at different times I ran two separate boards, first the The Black Hole and later , The Autocrash BBS), and the co-sysop of several boards that belonged to friends of mine throughout the Hagerstown, MD area; likewise, many of them were a co-sysop of my boards. For a good number of years, The Black Hole was run off of a Commodore 64 with a 20 meg hard drive and used Color 64 BBS software. Of course, "the 64" was never designed to use a mode of storage other than a cassette or 170K 5.25 inch floppy! Once I my computer retail store began selling the IBM-compatible hit the land of computing, I changed from a 64 to an IBM compatible, and that is when I changed the name to The Autocrash BBS, and began testing several different BBS software programs, and finally settling on TRIBBS. TRIBBS took all of the best features of the three top boards and integrated the best functionality of all three into one neat, little package. it was a joy using this software over Color 64.
Very similar the the different topics that forum have today on the Internet, all bulletin board systems had specific categories, and it was important to remain "on-topic." In fact, BBSing was the a very dominant form of communication in its heyday - companies had their own support BBS (especially the computer companies), people downloaded shareware, and just as they today today on the Internet, the BBS community was no less a place where files could be distributed; and I will leave it to your own imaginations on what kinds of files people might be interested in downloading :)
The GENERAL PANDEMONIUM category was one of my favorite categories, because as long as it was clean, people could talk about anything. this made for a pretty busy BBS, and the busier the BBS, the more people that would dial into my board. The more people dialing in, the busier the board became. Having a busy board was equal to having a really busy website --- it was all about bragging rights.
I hope that you better understand haw this board ended up with the name it now has, and at the address, http://generalpandemonium.blogspot.com.
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