Commodork book coverRob O'Hara's new book, Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie, has recently been restocked and is available again directly from his Website. The book is a collection of Rob's stories and memoirs that took place during the classic computer Bulletin Board era, which for those who haven't experienced BBS's directly, should be familiar with the concepts from past Armchair Arcade articles and discussions. These were the heady times in mainstream personal computing before the Internet became of public interest and there was nothing really resembling the World Wide Web, save for proprietary and closed online services that generally charged (gouged) by the hour, like CompuServe and GEnie. BBS's were bulletin board systems that users would host on their computers and others would dial directly into and were generally free (unless you were calling long distance), enabling file sharing, discussions and game playing, among other things. Comparitively primitive versus what we have today, but still amazingly robust, the best setups with multiple lines in and lots of members could still impress.