Welcome to the Web incarnation of Fifty Thousand Nuns And Orphans BBS. The Nunnery was born in May of 1987 on a Commodore 64 in Houston, Texas. I had originally purchased my 300 baud modem with the intention of playing those cool games hidden deep in the Defense Department's computer system, but instead I ended up dialing a local Bulletin Board System listed in the CHUG Newsletter (Commodore Houston User Group, not Carnivorous Humanoid). And I was enthralled by what I found.
Minds! Intelligent people and idiots alike, their minds laid out before me. I found a world where, no doubt about it, people were judged by the content of their text editor and not by the color of their skin. And I felt challenged and inspired to communicate with these people. In typical conversation I might shy away from a debate, but the extra time to think replies through and a dictionary within arm's reach gave me a confidence I really hadn't known before.
So I set up my own board, and soon met a whole bunch of likeminded and unlikeminded individuals who became my friends. And over the years the Nunnery chugged along like a train, picking up clauses and making them function, until April of 1995, when I lucked into a new job opportunity in Atlanta. I pulled the plug on the Houston Nunnery, and never really found a similar local BBS community in Atlanta to fill in that personal void. And I missed the old gang terribly.
Now I've got an opportunity to put something on the Web, and hey, everybody has a web browser nowadays, right? Am I right?
So here's hoping to rekindle some old friendships and make some new ones....
Oh yeah. Nuns. Nothing, really. It's just that waaay back in 1987 when I was setting up
a BBS for the first time, I was trying to think of a name for it, and I remembered an old
Saturday Night Live skit. Fluckers Jam. "With a name like 'Fluckers,' it's got to be
good." Following that logic, other jam makers plugged jams with progressively worse
names for their products. Fifty Thousand Nuns And Orphans was suggested.
"What's so bad about that?"
"They were all eaten by rats!"
Over the years, as the hardware and software changed, so did the name. In the last days of the Commodore era, as the BBS wheezed and sputtered on a couple of failing 360k floppy disk drives, it was down to Seven Nuns, Two Orphans, and a Stray Cat. But after about a 6-month down time, it rose again, like a mighty penix from the ashes, on a cutting-edge 286 PC, as Nuns II: This Time It's Personal.
The name changes, but the nuns remain.