Joyce Divina  AKA  moderator.amiga.sex.kitten
The woman, the myth, the legend

Contrary to popular belief, as far as the brain implants have held up, as
well as extensive plastic surgery has provided, Joyce Divina has never been
a retired Department of Vehicle Registry officer.  In fact, we're not sure
she actually does exist; it is suspected she was surgically removed in 1983.

Truth of the matter is, she was surgically removed at birth in the early
1960s.  Understandably upset about being forced out of a cushy place, she
became a contrary child.  Notable teacher's quote:  "She has a 5 year old
face and a 30 year old mouth." 

As such, she was shuffled in and out of programs for the gifted, made 
teachers ecstatic and angry, was labelled both an under and over 
achiever (depending on who you asked) and made an art out of being 
non-conformist.  

Notable high school hijinks include her version of Julius Caesar that 
culminated in a cream pie fight (wherein a member of the cast accidently 
missed the "plant" in the audience and hit a genuine audience member), 
a version of "A Tale of Two Cities" that featured a fully working
guillotine and lots of ketchup, finishing #1 seed on the girls' tennis
team and #7 in a class of 457.  Somewhere in there was sandwiched a lone
class called, "Computer Math."  In the classroom were two whole computers,
a TRS-80 Model I with 16K and a TRS-80 Model III with 32K.  A whole new
world was opened...

College days began with real computer courses.  COBOL and FORTRAN were 
learned on a hard copy terminal; luxury was when one of the CRT-based
machines were available (there were three).  It was here I learned the
REAL-TIME CHAT flirting with the system operators in the next building.  
(Some things NEVER change... ;)  

It was also here I learned the joys of "hacking"...like running one program
to fool a system program into thinking I was actually running a program
I was allowed to run as opposed to the program I was running but not supposed
to...get it?  :)  It was here I wrote my infamous banner program whose 
datafile was so large that it took more than my allotted hard disk space on
the mainframe, which myself and another user took turns shuffling from
account to account until "Dirty Dave" locked it away from us...  ;)  

My second college year saw me working as a student assistant in the Computer
Lab.  It was here I learned, albeit naively, about "phreaking."  "When
you call [using an acoustic Radio Shack modem], use this dial string prefix
and suffix..."  Little did I know what those strings of numbers were, only
that I was supposed to use different ones as I was given them.  The light
bulb finally lit the day I got an anonymous phonecall, "Don't use any of the
numbers...the FBI is tracing them..."  So much for my days of calling 
California, Pennsylvania ("Drusila the Sexy Sysop"), Germany...

We had a lab of 30 TRS-Model III's, 15 TRS-Model II's and a lone CBM Pet.  
The Pet featured a green screen and a tape drive, but the games were fun.  
There was "Weather War" and "Capture", and several other cassettes full of games.
But alas, to my shame, I fell for the blocky graphics of the TRS-Model III
and the NewDOS operating system (as opposed to TRS-DOS).  I was almost on
the brink of buying one when...

Dirty Dave came into the lab with a new toy...it cost him nearly $500 bucks,
a VIC-20.  The sound and graphics blew anything existing out of the water.
I fell in love and resolved to start saving my pennies...

Then the C-64 came out.  I was floored by the amount of memory, the voices,
and the graphics.  I watched the price start at $800 and work its way down
the evolutionary scale.  It was hovering around $500 when I saw one mismarked
for $125 (it was supposed to be $521).  Yes, as an impoverished college
student, I did the inevitable...I bought it without a flinching of conscience.

It was two weeks before I was able to afford a tape drive, another 6 months
before I was able to get a disk drive.  I worshipped the thought of having
dual drives...but...

There were little articles appearing in INFO magazine about a collection of
breadboards on a powersupply...about a machine called Lorraine by a (of all
things) joystick company...  They spoke of mindnumbing graphics, of how
the company hoped to bring this new machine to the market...  They spoke of
CBM's interest...  They spoke of something called the 264, which might be
the successor to the C-64 mantle...  I decided it was time, again, to save
my pennies.  In the meantime, I was happily QuantumLinking away on my
C-64, flirting with the Q-Guides, running up my credit card again with all
night chat sessions with the Midnight to 4 crew...  I discovered local BBSs
at the time, too, but it would be a few more years before I found out about
Fidonet.

Then Dirty Dave, the trailblazer it seems in all my computing endeavors, 
drove a couple of hundred miles to bring back an Amiga 1000.  It was, indeed,
love at first sight.  When the Amiga 1000 finally hit the local Navy 
Exchange, I put one on layaway, a 512K machine and monitor for $1250.

The night I got my 1000 out of layaway, I spent all night playing with
Preferences, watching the Electronic Arts Demo Disk, running the Amiga
Tutorial.  I was in heaven.  I bought Rogue and Mindwalker and Marble
Madness and TextCraft and Flight Sim I and put a sizable dent in my very
first credit card...

Of course, as with all computers, you know you're buying into obsolescence
the moment you plop down your credit card (or cash or first born child). 
A month after I finally had my Amiga 1000, the 2000 came out, and with it,
CBM's "A1000 + $1000 = 2000" deal.  I took advantage of the deal plus
batted my eyelashes a lot and got the local dealer to give me the deal *and*
to buy back my 1000 for $250.  So another $1250 got me an Amiga 2000.

In 1987, I decided to do my own trailblazing.  I paid $375 for an Pacific
Peripherals Overboard controller, not to mention $425 for a MiniScribe 20
meg SCSI controller.  It didn't autoboot, but heck, what on earth was 
autobooting anyway?  ;)  Besides, they promised when CBM supported 
autobooting, so would they!  I also got my first 1200 baud modem, too, 
at the obscene price of $475.  

In 1988, I thought, what the heck, and got the WB 1.3 ROM and the autobooting
daughterboard.  Sometime in there I got 8 megs of RAM...  ;)  That was my
configuration until...1991!

In 1989, Mike Perkinson came home from college.  He had a 286 sitting in 
his room doing nothing.  In the meantime, I had practiced my usual 
brainwashing on all my friends and signficant others--I talked him into 
getting an Amiga...  The 286 gathered dust until one day we were talking
about long thought of projects...and found out we had both wanted to start
a BBS...

Well, I went through every existing Amiga and IBM BBS program at the time.
Witnesses still exist who saw the various configuration the BBS went through:
WWIV, Searchlight, BBS-PC, et cetera.
   
In the meantime, Mike discovered Fidonet.  I didn't know what the heck FIDO
was, but I used it as a way of winnowing out software.  Paragon was the only
Amiga BBS at the time supporting Fidonet, but I decided to pass.  Friends
running it complained about bugginess, but it was the only Amiga game in
town.

In December 1989, right in time for Christmas vacation, I came down with
the chicken pox.  Misery.  However, this turned out to be one of the most
productive periods in my life.  Using QuickBBS on the PC, I completed the
work on Forty-TWO! and built a 3 story Victorian dollhouse (which I am
still working on to this day).  January 3, 1990 was the official BBS opening
date, though as a mailer we had been up since October 1989.

Sometime in there, I discovered the joys of Fidonet.  At first I did nothing
but lurk in the SF and Mensa echoes.  I posted occasionally in SF, got thrilled
by being e-mailed by my favorite authors, but the traffic was too much for
me (huh?)...  

Then I discovered the Amiga echo.  What a disarray it was in!!!  Carol Lewis
was the sometime moderator, though she disapppeared for months at a time.
But there was real gold in this echo, wonderfully witty, knowledgable people.
Roy Clay and Skipper Smith and Asha Develder were already established
regulars, as well as Tom Krotchko, Steve Crippen and now gone (and missed)
Jim Karkanias and Mike Ward.  In those days, yes, Joseph Waldogel was still
dogging C-NET, Lyall Watson was still ragging on the Amiga, John Larkin was
still in sackcloth and ashes and toting his Amiga doomsday sign.  Al, Sr.,
however, was more cheerful then...  ;)  Alex Fogle went through a couple
of signatures (H.C.C. 'member?) and Roy Smith was still as helpful as ever.
Scott Thomas was in and out of the echo (and would visit BBS: Forty-TWO! 
bearing sound samples ;), as was Holly Sullivan (with her rose, even then).
Ivan Scanlon-Carling was around, as witty as ever, and it was literally only
recently I found out that Alan Mc was actually Alan McMindes...  ;)

Fluff threads?  Sure, we spent whole weeks on our proposed Amiga commercials,
the battles raged over CNET vs. any other BBS, how many colors the human eye
could perceive, the effectiveness of dongles, et cetera.  Amiga bashers came
and went, and still the echo survived.  Threads of removal from the E-LIST
came and went.

When Carol came back, stomping with heavy boots, we were in the midst of a
moderator election.  I offered her my services as an aide-de-camp and she
said she accepted my offer, as well as a few others.  Then she disappeared
from the echo for good.  

In June 1990 my telecommunicating life changed for good.  I plunked down 
$475 for my first HST.  (Funny how $475 is a seminal number for me, eh?)
It was, without doubt, a telecommunicating orgasm of first water to see
my first transfer rate of 1800 cps.  When I hit 2000 cps, I was frantically
running around for a witness.  Well, between the BBS and me, I've got 3
USR's, 2 HSTs and a single Dual Standard (hopefully soon to be upgraded).

1991...it was time for a change...  I entered the Nineties by getting a
GVP Series II hard drive controller, WB 2.04 and a Fat Agnes.  The 3000
came out and I thought, "Oh, that's nice, but it's too small!"  (Being the
powermongering type who wants to stuff her computer with all kinds of
goodies like tape drives and multiple hard drives and removable media...)
It was faster, had 32 bit buses, but it wasn't signficantly different
enough to woo me away from my Miggy 2000.

It's 1992, and Amy has served me well, but...it's time to look at Amy Mark
IV...  It's been both frustrating and fun to be an Amiga owner -- now it's
exciting all over again!  Echo Disk Vol. II may see an updated picture of
me and a...4000?  :)

Joyce