Pyrzqxgl life & times

The time has come, the walrus said, to take down my story of how Pyrzqxgl died, and replace it with a story of how Pyrzqxgl lived.

Back in 1995 when I first put this page up, Pyrzqxgl had been dead for only a matter of months, so the main concern of this half of the page was to let wandering members of the Santa Cruz BBS community know what had become of it.

But now that's it's 2002 (how time flies), well, I figure all Pyrzqxgl users already know Pyrzqxgl is down, so this space would be much better used for a history of Pyrzqxgl and the Santa Cruz BBS scene in general. I'm intending to start with a sketchy draft and then go back and add to it bit by bit whenever I'm in a mood to do so. If any Pyrzqxgl users would like to send me their own reminiscences, I may add them to this page as well.

The early '80's were a time of the first generally useful, widely available and more-or-less affordable home computers, like the Apple ][, TRS-80, Atari, Kaypro II, IBM PC and others. Some of these computers had 300 or even 1200-baud modems, and BBSs (computer "Bulletin Board Systems") began to proliferate for them to dial into. As any BBS enthusiast already had the computer and modem needed to run a BBS of their own, you can see why many computer hobbyists, would-be hackers, or just lonely people looking for lots of instant science fiction and computer-buff friends would find it appealing to join the ranks of BBS sysop (SYStem OPerator).

BBSs were best known as places to download files of all types -- pirated games, shareware utilities, software for running BBSs, you name it -- but most of them also had discussion areas, and some of them were

*** more coming soon ***

A few Pyrzqxgl facts

Here are some links and info that will be integrated into the main text of this side of the page after I get more of it written. :-)

The name "Pyrzqxgl" came from L. Frank Baum's book "The Magic of Oz." It also makes an appearance in Zenna Henderson's short story "The Believing Child".

Pyrzqxgl ran on a Victor 9000 computer I had gotten from the computer store I was doing repair and programming for. The original Pyrzqxgl modem was a 1200-baud U.S. Robotics OEM modem bare circuitboard hanging off the back of (and power wires spliced into) the Victor. Right now I'm drawing a blank on when exactly it moved to 2400 baud (Supra was offering them to BBS sysops at a substantial discount), but I can see it was sometime before this Summer 1990 Microtimes listing:

Pyrzqxgl. (408)476-4633, 3/12/24. Discussions, fiction, journals, articles and mail. Tree-structured. Sysop: Tane' Tachyon.

Pyrzqxgl's software was written in Turbo Pascal by yours truly while eating large amounts of chocolate. The message base made its debut on April 15, 1986, chat, mail and a few other features having appeared some weeks earlier. I just found a letter I had sent to Wizzard later that year noting that the Pyrzqxgl message base was "currently approaching message 10,000, after less than five months of tree operation". Pyrzqxgl went down for the last time at the end of 1994, a victim of (1) Usenet, (2) hardware problems, and (3) general moving/work/etc.-related chaos.

Originally Pyrzqxgl was in Ben Lomond, California, with a phone number of (408) 336-3134, but at the end of February 1987 it moved to Santa Cruz and the (408) 476-4633 number listed above. (This was back when the Santa Cruz area used to share the 408 area code with Silicon Valley -- now we have 831 instead.)

Back in May of 1989 when domain names didn't cost anything, Ulmo registered Pyrzqxgl.Santa-Cruz.CA.US, and for a while Pyrzqxgl had a rather roundabout email connection to the Internet -- users could send and receive mail to and from outside Pyrzqxgl via Ulmo's system Mist.Aptos.CA.US which he had programmed to call and log into Pyrzqxgl as a user.

"Wow, you're telling me that Wizzard/John Cowan put the final Stuart II archive on the web?"

Yes, he did! You can see it at http://stuartii.pyrzqxgl.com:6502/.

"But is there anything else about Pyrzqxgl on the web?"

Not much! For one thing, I think that the only existing Pyrzqxgl messages on the web right now are some ones I wrote about Sam when he was a baby and a Gossamer Axe book review.

You can see the occasional mention of Pyrzqxgl in the online Stuart II message base listed above.

Look Out now owns the Pyrzqxgl.com domain -- check it out to see a list of Pyrzqxgl user names, a Pyrzqxgl banner and some comments.

There are brief mentions of it on a few other former users' pages, such as Hermit & Enigma's How we Met.

Pyrzqxgl also gets a mention in Brett Glass's Slashdot piece on the Stuart II BBS -- "A community that really worked... for awhile" (you'll need to scroll down a while to get to where he appears on the page).

The BBSmates site has a listing for Pyrzqxgl.

"What about on Usenet?"

Not too much, but here are a few more or less notable mentions:

A short 1990 exchange between me and Keeper about Pyrzqxgl's (on again, off again, and usually misspelled) phone book listing.

Filbo talks about Pyrzqxgl and XBBS back in 1990 -- note that he also used to mention them in his sig, in fact the large majority of "hits" for Pyrzqxgl throughout Usenet history involve Filbo's sig.

Hermit's 1992 announcement for his BBS "The Hermitage" mentions Pyrzqxgl in some talk about tree-structured BBS history and interface.

"So, did Pyrzqxgl ever make it into any books?"

You know, I have vague memories of getting listed in one or more of the BBS-era equivalents of today's instantly-outdated web-guide books, but here are two more-noteworthy appearances:

Sandy Stone's book The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age mentions the Conference Trees, Pyrzqxgl, XBBS, The Temple of Zuul, PC-Tree, The Sea of Mists and Stuart II -- I will give more of a quote from and explanation about this later when I do some revamping of this page.

Daniel "DSA" Appleman's 1993 book Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to the Windows API includes thanks to "the Pyrzqxgl/XBBS crowd" in the dedication, and a picture of the Pyrzqxgl login screen in the "Serial Communications" chapter.

"How about some related links?"

Dave Winer's Outliners & Programming page tells how he wrote LBBS, the direct ancestor of Stuart II.

The TEXTFILES.COM Historical BBS List site wants to compile/provide a "historical record of all the Bulletin Board Systems that ever were". Look up or add your old favorites, and read some general information on BBSes and BBS history.

BBSmates is a site for looking up "old BBS buddies" you lost contact with "during the internet revolution".

Some of you may roll your eyes at this one, but I think that parts of LiveJournal definitely have a BBS feel to them, in terms of friendly community-based discussion where people are free to post about whatever they like and then other people comment, where people have fun with aliases and where conversations are preserved in threaded format. It's worth noting that one of the many uses people commonly put Pyrzqxgl, XBBS, Stuart II, etc. to was to create "so-and-so's journal" online diaries. So as you might imagine, a fair number of Pyrzqxgl users have set up shop on LiveJournal: Me, Keyboard Thrasher, Nightshade, The Keeper of the Pen, Rapunzel, Howeird, Enigma, Psychochick, Variegated Fritillary/The Wild Thang, Jon Shemitz, Iampax. (Apologies to anyone I'm forgetting, and looking forward to hearing about others I don't already know about!)

"So did you stick any humorous links down here at the bottom of the page?"

Uh, yeah, sure, why not? :-)

The "Society of Kabalarians of Canada" seem to think that Pyrzqxgl is a good baby name for a boy.

Where are they now?

Here are links to pages by or featuring (or even just mentioning) former Pyrzqxgl / Stuart II / XBBS / Zuul / etc. users (obviously I'll add more as I get them) by alias (test your memory :-)):

I tried to hunt up all the people I knew "real names" for, from the most well-known users to those who showed up only a few times, and was surprised at some of the people who didn't seem to have web pages yet.

Oh well, as I said, I'll list what I can, including finger files (almost as endangered as BBSs these days) and some pretty questionable ones that just mention a person's name or something, just for fun and for lack of anything better to list.

For a long time I was determined not to put in any 'mailto's, but now I've even stooped to doing that! I've also put in some multiple listings for people with more than one well-known user name.

The web being what it is, some of the above links are likely to be broken at any given time. I'll update them as I find out about them, but will also leave bad links in as placeholders -- I figure that anyone who had a web page or email address before is likely to have one again one of these days. So let me know if you find a bad link, but realize that it may stay around for a while anyway.

If you have contact info for any Pyrzqxgl / Stuart II / XBBS / Zuul users who aren't listed above (including perhaps yourself :-)), please send me mail about it -- I would love to find more of the people I've lost track of.