Monday, June 30, 1986. The cursor blinked. The modem crackled. And then — it happened.
A phone line in Umina, NSW, rang in the dead of night, and a Commodore 64 answered it.
That was the moment everything changed. After six months of late nights, mountains of printouts, and more than a few near-disasters, Comm-Link BBS was alive — and the Gosford Commodore User Group, known as GOSCOM, had just joined a very small and very exclusive club: organisations running their own Bulletin Board System.
The first message ever posted read:
Message #1
From: Scott
Send To: Jeff
Subject: BBS
Date: 30/6/86
Hello there.
Goodbye....
It Started With a Wild Idea at a Committee Meeting
Wind the clock back to January 1986 — 38 years ago now, though reading through the original source code printouts (which I painstakingly scanned in 2020) feels like stepping into a time machine.
I was the club’s Software Librarian, responsible for managing our Public Domain software collection. At the January committee meeting, someone floated an idea that lit up the room: What if GOSCOM had its own BBS?
This was the era of STD calls — long-distance phone charges that could bleed your wallet dry in minutes. A local BBS? One that members could ring without racking up a massive phone bill? That was a dream worth chasing.
Jeff Campbell spoke up immediately. He had a spare C64 sitting at home. He’d throw in a disk drive and a modem if the club could help with costs. The room was buzzing. The vote was unanimous.
There was just one problem: Bulletin Board Software cost serious money, and GOSCOM had none to spare.
Then someone turned to me.
“Why doesn’t Scott give it a try?”
I’d written games. I’d fixed broken software from the library. I’d earned a reputation as the guy who figured things out. And so, without fully understanding what I was signing up for, I said yes.
Six Months of Madness, Magic, and Modems
What followed was one of the most intense creative experiences of my life.
Between January and June 1986, I threw myself into the problem. The biggest challenge — and it was a genuinely hardproblem — was getting the C64 to detect an incoming phone call and answer it automatically. There was no off-the-shelf solution for this. Another club member stepped up and modified an Australian modem called the First Nice Modem, jury-rigging it to work with the Commodore 64’s serial port and respond to incoming calls without a human picking up the receiver.
When I finally cracked that piece of the puzzle — when the C64 detected the ring signal and answered the call on its own— the feeling was electric. This was the gateway. Everything else could be built now.
The coding came fast after that. Feature decisions, though, took time. The committee debated endlessly about what a BBS should do, what members would actually want, what we could realistically build. Eventually, we landed on a command set that felt genuinely powerful for the era:
COMMANDS
B – Bulletin
E – Enter Message
G – GOSCOM
R – Reviews
P – Please read
T – Talk with Sysop
V – View Messages
I – System Infor
O – Output Magazine
M – Message to Sysop
L – Log off
Members could read club bulletins, browse reviews, message the sysop, and even output the club magazine — all through a phone line, from their own home, at any hour of the day or night. In 1986, this was nothing short of revolutionary.
The Night It All Came Together
And so, on June 30, 1986, we flicked the switch. The modem waited. The phone rang. The C64 answered. A user logged in, navigated the menus, and left a message.
Hundreds of hours of planning, designing, debugging, reprinting, and re-debugging — all of it had led to this single, perfect moment.
There’s another story tucked inside this one — the tale of how I managed to secretly install a telephone line in my bedroom without my parents finding out… right up until the fateful day they picked up the phone and heard something that sounded like two robots arguing underwater. But that story deserves its own post.
For now, just picture a Commodore 64 in Gosford, humming quietly in the dark, waiting for the phone to ring.
It was 1986. We had built something extraordinary. And we knew it.