Computer Castle BBS was a dial-up computer Bulletin Board System physically located in Newton, NH, USA. It was owned and operated by SysOp John McNally. Assistant SysOps and helpers-out included, at various times: Deb McNally (née Brailsford, now Mashapa), Scott Currier, Eric Winch, Rob Miller, Bruce Morse, Ben Scott, Jim Wilcox, Beth Hamel, Shirley Gigliotti, and others the author has no doubt forgotten.
For a time, Computer Castle was the largest BBS in New Hampshire. At its peak, Castle had 19 POTS dial-in lines, forwarding numbers in three states, and 3 telnet "lines". There was a full-screen, multi-line, real-time chat system (vaguely like IRC), along with the ability to send "pages" to individual users (today these would be called PMs). We carried most of the FidoNet echos (message areas) and FDNs (file areas), thanks to our Planet Connect satellite feed. We had 10 gigs of hard disk (huge back in 1995) plus a 6 CD changer. We had a 28 KBPS Internet feed, which we used to provide Internet email, an Internet access door (web/FTP/etc from the regular BBS), and a direct SLIP feed. We had dozens of online door games, including the popular Legend of the Red Dragon and Trade Wars 2002. Most of all, we had a vibrant user community, with around 1000 active callers, and two monthly "face-to-face" meetings.
Castle first went online in 1987. It ran more-or-less continuously until 1997, when NYNEX (the local phone company) trippled our phone rates without warning or explanation. We were unable to absorb the drastic increase in price. Computer Castle BBS shut down forever on Sunday, 6 July, 1997.
While Computer Castle BBS is no more, computercastle.net
exists to help prevent the memory from being lost.
There are communities for Castle members on other web sites:
Watch this page for more.
If you would like to contact the operators of this site, you can do so by clicking the following link:
Computer Castle BBS contact page