[gallery]

Happy birthday to The Screaming Tomato BBS, which opened to the public August 24th, 1994 – 21 years to the day. (Nitnatsnoc made a great “Odd Couple” foil to me: “TST birthday in August? That’s weird, because the way I remember it, I talked to you about my idea of starting up a BBS when we were in the caf at Kits.”) This marks the first of three posts I’ll be making here to celebrate all the great art that was made to promote a point in cyberspace that, well, was ephemeral but made its mark!

Around the turn of the century, acutely aware that my command over that exciting but rapidly-receeding time would fade over the years, I made an effort to document the salient points of all my top bulletin board services over at bbsmates.com (then mirrored them over at textfiles.com). Here’s what I said about TST:

Tragic victim of the “the adjective noun” BBS-name syndrome of 1994 [strongly influenced by Eerie’s “Sarcastic Toaster”], this was the board I was both co-SysOp of and locked out from - on numerous occasions. From an early start of adolescent silliness (great, a message base called “World Wildlife Wrestling Federation” - now what are we going to put in it?) this provided the base from which MiSTiGRiS was almost accidentally founded. Also WHQ of Cenobite, a lit group run by Schtroumpf gleaning from the creme of Mist’s writers, it is bizarre that this BBS didn’t amass more surreal artwork than it did [actually, you know, that was maybe enough of it], but when all is said and done this board probably represented the 604 to more long-distance artscene callers than any other.

We were just kids joking around at the cafeteria table (see, on that point we agree!) when we began plotting out our BBS, like other kids might obsessively design a customized sports car with dual cassette deck and an afterburner or doodle a luxury mansion with an alligator pit and a rooftop helipad on wrinkled foolscap. All of our friends had to be folded in somehow, even those who didn’t own modems or even computers. We would host all the online games, providing us something to chat about between classes, unique files (not much room for storage, so better make them text files reflecting our interests and serving to promote our cyberspace hideaway when they were invariably widely circulated)… and for a touch of class, a special focus on computer music, an art that was practiced widely in our area code.

Most importantly, it would be fully tricked out and customized, because we had personality in spades oozing out through every teenaged pore like a bad case of acne, and would have been incapable of reining it in even were we so inclined.

OK, ok. I had the oozing personality, and he had the spare phone line and hardware (but still no monkey fondulator drive!) Between the two of us, we knew that we had what we needed to bring to the table (well, the computer desk) to make this a BBS the likes of which no one had ever logged into before.

Nitnatsnoc came up, somehow, with the name. (“I remember you seemed initially unimpressed until you asked me what the name was going to be.”) Trying to contextualize it, I actually drew countless sketches of tomatoes in a variety of precarious, scream-inducing situations, manually tracing over them in jaggies (turning curves into straight lines alternating with corners) so as to suggest the ANSI blocks the pictures would need to be translated into over in BBS-land. (I didn’t have any particular aptitude for ANSI art, but despite having just learned about the underground flipside to the public domain BBS community, I knew that with my boundless creativity and limitless enthusiasm, I would surely have it well in hand in a matter of weeks. I applied to NWA (New Wave Artists that is, straight outta Richmond!) as an ANSI artist and computer musician – hey, how hard can it be? – and only grudgingly conceded to writing some poems, sorry, “lits” when I ran up against the crude state of PC tracking software (KingMod, never yet having heard the phrase “Scream Tracker” or the group name “Future Crew”.) Hm, writing rhyming couplets into a text editor results in no interface friction! Maybe this’ll go somewhere!

I had managed to parlay my way into NWA and from there, it merged with GRiP into iMPERiAL, and suddenly hosting a BBS with local .MOD music and a “Weird Al” Yankovic song lyric section wasn’t enough. We’d require elite affiliations for our board, for with them would come textmode ornamentation beyond anything either of us could produce! Nitty spent the summer tinkering with the BBS-to-be (using, I can’t remember, either Telegard or Renegade, one of the “Forum hacks” [EDITED: I was right, Nitty elaborates… and alludes to his poorly-timed period obsession with the band Queen – “TST originally ran on Telegard. Eventually, I felt a need to make the design more in-line with the art scene, but Telegard didn’t allow for much customization. So I shut it down (for a week or two? a month?) while I updated the board using Renegade and created new promo and menu art. That’s why that Batman ansi you posted has "revisited” written on it – it was used as part of the refresh. (Incidentally, I had totally forgotten about that pic and was surprised to see my sig on it. Also, “revisited” is a Queen reference; on their third album, the 7th track was called “In the Lap of the Gods” and their 13th and final track had the same name, with “revisited” tagged on.)“]), getting some hot tips from Access Denied of Field of Eggplants and Eerie of Sarcastic Toaster about how to get his own board off the ground, hooked up to echomail networks (ultimately plugged in to TABNet, Mistigris’ KiTSCHNet, SiHFNet, and ACiD’s AgoraNet), when catastrophe struck: shortly after releasing its August 1994 artpack, iMPERiAL dissolved. Our precious member board status! And from there, the frantic discussions resulting in the formation of Mistigris. It required a BBS to act as a WHQ and, fortunately, we just so happened to have one on the verge of being opened to the public. Before the end of the month, by August 24th, the "last callers” door was showing strange new nicknames beyond merely those of myself and Nitnatsnoc.

The first hurdle had been overcome: circumstances threw us in the water, and we swam. In June we were going to be faking it until we made it, and by the end of the summer… we were making… something! (Pictured: early welcome screen by Nitnatsnoc, early promotional art by myself, later promotional art by Nitnatsnoc – after Mist, after Integrity, in ACiD. Spoiler warning: he made it. And see below: my April Fool’s pack loader advertising the BBS; whether I ever “made it” was debatable, but faking it was never so fun.)

Next post – the salad days: other people also made promotional artwork for us! Lots of them!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucOb5UMQX6E&w=640&h=360]