Sysabend started life around 1982 as The GLOBB which stood for The Gloucester Bulletin Board. I think we operated for about 2 months with that name and an insanely large login screen before I ran across the poem The Sysabend Dump on Oxgate 007, a BBS operated in Yorktown Virginia for many years and one of the first I called. I just recently ( 10/06 ) found the original source of that poem! The Sysabend Dump appears in the April 1975 edition of Datamation Magazine. It is only credited to J.C.L Guest.

Sysabend continued to operate night only for several years until in the late 80s I finally moved the machines home and got it up 24x7. We operated 24x7 until early 1996 when I finally let the lines lapse and Sysabend became just another website.

The last files we had online are still here, and lots of memories still survive and thats what makes Sysabend what it is. Green phosphor screens and fighting incompatable modems, meeting interesting people, huge phone bills, FidoNet, GodNet, Commode-d-ore... All of this long before the Internet became a household addiction.

I still long for those days. I've even considered starting up a dialup BBS again, trying to recapture a bit of whats lost.

But as a friend once pointed out, you really can never go back. I think he's right. Perhaps however I can go forward a bit and recapture that feel that I've lost... that feeling you get when Something Works, or you discover something new, or realise something wonderful. To that end, Sysabend lives on partially in a frozen state but also with new users and new projects.

-Xyzzy