Award Winning Web Site Designs
Before we go on a more technical kick, there's another activist board well worth looking at. The Earth Art BBS has some of the most colorful ANSI graphics ever seen on a bulletin board. Coming out of South Carolina, this board also has the distinction of being the first one I've found with a satellite link.
Earth Art runs on a 40 Mhz 386 Magnum tower with 64K cache, 8Mb of RAM, and a Maxtor 660 Mb hard drive. It uses US Robotics Dual Standard modems, so it can talk real fast or as slow as 300 baud. (NOTE: Later used a 166 Mhz Pentium tower with 256K synch-burst cache, 32Mb of EDO RAM, and 12+ Gigabytes of storage.)
The most interesting part of the hardware is the satellite link. This consists of a Tee-Comm Star Trak Eight Plus computer synthesized satellite receiver/descrambler and a General Instruments 1500R Infocipher Data Receiver. It works through a Unimesh 10-foot C/Ku compatible satellite dish. The X*Press satellite data uplink can send E-mail throughout North America at 9,600 bps.
All this is the genesis of GreenNet, an international echo-mail conference about the environment. Conference areas run the full gamut of issues, such as acid rain, water and air pollution, recycling and rain forest conservation.
This is not simply a soft-hearted save-the-animals operation, however. Hunting and fishing are well represented, also. Members are really interested in drawing the attention of everyone concerned with conservation and wildlife issues. The board is also a clearing house for wildlife stamps and art work. Wildlife and nature images are available as GIFs for downloading.
In addition, The Earth Art BBS is home of the International Duck Stamp Art Exchange and is itself a division of Ambassador Graphics & Wildlife Gallery from North Charleston, S.C., which claims to be "The Southeast's Oldest, Largest and Foremost Wildlife Art Dealer for 21 years!"
Full access is free and easy to obtain. The board has an automated call-back verification system that even works for long distance calls. Although there are four questionnaires to fill out (NOTE: Later reduced to 1!), there's a leavening of humor to them that makes the task less arduous.
Running PC Board, the system has a nice look and feel to it, although the downside of the ANSI graphics is that the main menu becomes overloaded and a bit intimidating with all its commands, colors and flashing prompts. The BBS can be reached 24 hours a day, seven days a week at (803) 552-4DUX(4389). The usual 8-N-1 settings apply.
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