The first time I made a profit online was back in the years from 1994 to 1996.

I was a fan of some local bulletin board systems and decided to start my own.

I was now a SysOP.

My system was called All Sports.

I located a company down in the States who provided me with a satellite feed for real-time score updates and news articles.

I started with a stand alone 386 and graduated to two computers, the older 386 and a brand new Pentium.

I used DR-DOS rather than MS-DOS and as I recall, it was because it had built-in Novell networking.  I cannot quite remember what version I was using but Novell owned DR-DOS for a little while before selling it off.  It was buggy but it worked for my needs.

Trust me, networking and multi-user environments were tricky back then.

For the BBS software I tried a few but settled on Galacticomm’s MajorBBS.

So, in my basement I have two computers talking to each other using a DR-DOS version supplied by Novell running Major BBS with four phone lines hooked into some modems.  I think I may still have the card I used which actually allowed up to eight lines.  It looked like a card with octopus connections.

For most that would be the hard part to get everything working, but then my satellite receiver arrived, and boy was I excited.

Up to the roof I went, followed the instructions to obtain the signal, ran the special cable to the basement and somehow plugged it into the back of the 386.

They supplied some software so that I could read the news and scores on my computer which was great but I needed an automated way to feed it into my BBS.

By this time Galacticomm changed Major BBS to Worldgroup and somewhere within Worldgroup they could import the feeds into the BBS if I placed them in a certain file folder in a Novell standard format.  My memory is weak in this area but I managed to do it.

I figured out how to write a program either in Pascal or C to parse the feed and do what was necessary to get it all to work.  All the network had to do was allow the 386 to save files on the Pentium computer.

Did I mention that I rarely slept during the long startup phase.

I still remember the day I turned everything on and watched the live feeds being picked by the BBS software and automatically posted to the message boards.

I was in heaven.

I took some ads out in my local paper and actually convinced people to pay me more than my cost per month and I was in proft.

I had my first content automated membership site, albiet using a BBS platform that was also a social forum within the sports niche.

We had get-togethers in the real world, went to the Jays and Argo’s games as a  group and had a blast.  I even ran contests where I gave away Leaf’s tickets.  I got the Leaf’s tickets, which were a hot commodity, from a local business for games that they could not attend in return for advertising on the BBS.

At the height of All Sports I had over 200 members each paying me a whopping $5 per month.

Then the World Wide Web started to encroach on my business and my content provider was getting greedy.

Next, my foray into the maze of the internet where things got easier.