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| Omega BBS:The Little BBS That Could |
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posted by phantom
on Wednesday April 06, @08:30PM
from the dept.
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There was a time when Omega BBS was last of the Chicago Amiga CNet BBSes. All alone, with only it's loyal users to keep it up and running on those cold Chicago nights. However, even when they weren't there, Rinaldo (Omega's Sysop) never gave up on his BBS and kept it online thru some of the worst years for BBSing. As of today Omega BBS is now running on a new Amiga One computer. Is there anything this BBS can't do?
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Omega was born in the City of Chicago, May 12, 1990. It began as a one-line board running Skyline BBS software, with an Amiga 2000 with a 2400-baud modem, and a 40mb hard drive. Rinaldo had been testing the BBS for a few days, and he was very eager to go online as soon as possible. He was so eager that he did not even have a name for it yet. Rinaldo went to his father to ask for a temporary name and he said, "Call it Omega... You know, like Alpha to Omega." Rinaldo says, “I fully intended to change the name because it didn't mean anything unique to my BBS. I became lazy and I have very little imagination, so time went on and the name never changed.”
After a while it was too late to change anyway because it became so well known as Omega BBS. To help explain the name, Rinaldo used the cute slogan saying, "From Amiga to Omega." At the time meaning they had anything a person could want for an Amiga computer. At that time, Omega was an Amiga only BBS. One of his goals was to help people get the most out of their Amiga so it all fit together.
Omega BBS became so popular Rinaldo wanted to try a 2nd line. Since Skyline BBS software only handled one line well. This is when he made the change over to CNet BBS software v3.05c and Omega's popularity continued to grow. It grew so fast that two lines could not handle all of the usage. Soon, Omega was upgraded to four lines, then to eight lines. Finally, as people were continuing to get busy signals, Omega maxed out at the 10 dial up lines when most Amiga CNet BBSes in Chicago only had 4 to 5 lines max.
The years went by and as loyal users moved away to college, they missed calling Omega and often did so long distance. On March 11, 1999, to satisfy the crave of his loyal users, Rinaldo hooked Omega up to the Internet, and offered live Internet all the time thru the help of subscribers. In an ironic twist the first Amiga computer purchased for Window of Illusion BBS in 1999 was won on an eBay auction thru the subscription I had to Omega. I used ALYNX on the BBS to get on the web to win the auction from my work. That is just how powerful this BBS was on an A4000 with 10 nodes and limited memory.
Over the years Rinaldo thought about shutting down Omega BBS several times… “It’s a love hate relationship with BBSes sometimes. My users would never let me give up though.” Says Rinaldo In 2002 the Omega user Hayes Hazen (Kard), helped Rinaldo cut his costs on phone lines by setting up a FreeBSD box with Network Address Translation and Firewall services so that he could use his cable modem connection for allowing telnet connections to the BBS over this high speed connection. Before this Internet access was done thru a 56k connection to an Internet service provider. The advantage to this is that Rinaldo could use his other computer and the BBS on the same Internet connection.
“I got the Amiga One because Drew (Black Phantom) and Ryan (Yogi) wouldn’t stop pumping it up. It was also clear that it worked real well and Omega would at times run at a slow crawl cus of spam coming in on CNet's SMTPd service. I dropped one of the email domains but that just wasn’t enough. I am really surprised at how fast the Amiga One boots and runs the BBS. I never thought Amiga would have done this well with a new product.”
Omega BBS has gone from Skyline to CNet 3, CNet 4, and CNet 5 BBS Software. It’s been on an Amiga 2000, 3000, 4000 Tower and now is running on a brand new Amiga One. On BBSmates.com Omega BBS is #2 on the active BBS top ten list. When I asked Rinaldo how he thinks Omega’s future looks. He said...
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