# Two Bulletin Board Systems and Door Development ## One-sentence description Beginning in the early personal-computing era, I operated two separate bulletin-board systems—one on a Commodore using Color 64 and another using Wildcat!—and developed my own Door programs, learning to treat text, commands, files, identity, permissions, remote interaction, and community operation as one programmable environment. During my Navy period in Hawaii, I also remember operating a BBS network with roughly 3,000 members. ## The two systems My early BBS history includes two distinct systems. ### Color 64 on Commodore One system ran on a Commodore using **Color 64** BBS software. I equipped the Commodore environment with a **five-megabyte hard drive** and a **ten-disc changer**. Those capacities and peripherals were substantial in the context of an early home bulletin-board system and expanded what could be stored, organized, and offered to remote callers. ### Wildcat! I also operated a separate bulletin board using **Wildcat!**. It was a second system, distinct from the Commodore board. ## Hawaii, the Navy period, and a 3,000-member network While I was stationed in Hawaii in the Navy, I was running a bulletin board there that grew to approximately **3,000 members**. I remember a substantial dispute with the telephone companies because they wanted to charge people dialing into my network a **business rate**. The dispute belongs to a moment when dial-in telecommunications communities were new enough to be startling and poorly described by existing service categories. From the telephone company's perspective, a line supporting a large network could look like business infrastructure. From the users' perspective, they were making calls into a community. The conflict therefore exposed a problem that would recur across later network history: old carriers and rate structures trying to classify a new form of social and informational activity. ## Door development I developed my own **Doors** for the BBS environment. Door programs extended a bulletin board with interactive features beyond the core host software. They made the board programmable at the level users actually encountered: commands, menus, prompts, games or utilities, files, user state, and session behavior. I was administering the boards and writing software that extended what their users could do. ## Natural-language and interface significance A bulletin board is a remote text environment. Its interface is language: - the user reads a prompt; - selects or types a command; - the system resolves that intention; - state changes; - text or another resource is returned; - and the session continues through a constrained vocabulary. Door development belongs at the beginning of my natural-language-processing and document-system lineage. It trained a systems disposition that stayed with me: make human intention legible to a machine through a small command language; preserve identity and state; organize text so it can be found; and create modular capabilities that can be entered from a larger host environment. The later line is recognizable: **BBS prompt and Door command → search and retrieval interfaces → symbolic language structures → named software capabilities → executable Markdown and DoLang → natural-language-to-constrained-plan systems** The same architecture reappeared in search and retrieval interfaces, symbolic language structures, named software capabilities, executable Markdown, DoLang, and natural-language systems that translate human intention into bounded operations.