Circa 1994, Armed with a trusty 14.4k modem and a copy of Max's BBS software, Nothing But Static was my first venture into the online publishing world.

The name was a double reference, firstly to the B-52's song Channel Z, and secondly to the Amiga A1200 which was codenamed Channel Z, and has those words etched onto its motherboard.

Those early days of 'online' were unrecognisable when compared to what we have today. The internet was still un-common among the general population, and was both expensive and complex to setup. Communities were built using technology like Fidonet, where operators of computer bulletin boards would have their systems call each other to exchange mail. Many of the friendships made back then are still going strong to this day.

Nothing But Static BBS (Bulletin Board System) grew from small beginnings into a vibrant community. Going beyond the capabilities of Max's BBS I migrated to the more powerful Zeus BBS, a versatile scriptable BBS engine, and a company I would later become part owner of, but that's another story.

A Bulletin Board System (or BBS) was a computer connected to a modem and a usually dedicated phone line that other computer users could dial up, and access services the services hosted via special software. These were popular in the days before the internet becaue ubiquitous

The Bulletin Board System incarnation of Nothing But Static (or NBS) BBS lasted from 1994/5 (the actual first online date is lost to the mists of time) until 2001, when a catastrophic hardware failure hit the host computer which was by that time a PowerPC Based Amiga A4000 with SCSI3uw drives, accelerated graphics, and the best consumer modem money could buy (The mighty USR Courier), rendering it unusable. Commodore bad been bankrupt for some time, and replacement hardware was impossible to source. The remaining Amiga systems in my fleet were not up to the task, and the sun set on NBS.....

Until now in 2024 when, in name at least, it is resurrected as a blog.

Lots happened in between, including moving across the world, lots of interesting technology, running a large community web forum for 21 years, a brief period running a fediverse server before they became popular, taking lots and lots of photographs, and even a bootleg web comic that gets even less updates than this blog.

This blog was published for a long time on the blogger platform, and many of the old posts have been imported to this incarnation of my blog.

This website is built with Jekyll and the Mediumish template.