About me

I'm Roman, better known to most in the early-90s mailbox scene as "Gorbi." The nickname came about in 1989, from a school presentation on Mikhail Gorbachev. It stuck and became my name in the scene.

It all started in early 1987 with a C64. The kid became the sysop of Empire BBS (1991–1999), alongside training as an electrician and telephone technician, and finally, from October 2000, self-employed, with some of my very first customers still with me today.

Career

• Jan. 1987 C64 with datasette and 5.25″ floppy, first BASIC experiments
• 1990 Start of electrician apprenticeship
• from 1991 Sysop of Empire BBS
• 1994 Apprenticeship completed
• Oct. 1995 Move into dedicated telephony technology
• 1999 End of Empire BBS and of my time as a telephone technician
• 2000 Entry into the IT profession
• Oct. 2000 My own IT company, doing IT support and PBX installations

Why this site? It started with a search. I wanted to look something up about Xenolink, the software Empire BBS ran on, and noticed there are practically no screenshots of it left on the internet. The knowledge of that era is slowly disappearing.

The final push came, of all things, from an artificial intelligence. In a chat with the one with the black-and-white logo, the question came up, in so many words, of what I could possibly know about data transmission back then. That turned into a four-hour discussion. And the discussion turned into this site. Very much in the spirit of: hold my beer.

This isn't really about me. It's about what would otherwise be lost: an era that hardly anyone still knows from personal experience, and, to some extent, the quality of a community that still required real skill. I still miss that.