Misc

The Beavis-&-Butt-Head hotline

With ISDN and ten MSN numbers, one line was free for testing phone installations. On the job, as an electrician, I had to trace lines with the Teletester – a measuring device you patch into the line. Instead of the boring "speaking clock", I cut together a pointless sound mix from Beavis & Butt-Head for that number.

The result: several hundred calls a day. The number made the rounds — no internet, no social media, pure word of mouth across Switzerland and Liechtenstein. An early, unintentional viral hit of regional telecom history, years before "viral" was even a word.

The original sound mix still sits on a SCSI drive from the Amiga. For copyright reasons it's only described here, not played back — Beavis & Butt-Head are protected.

Empire's e-mail addresses

As early as 1992 — years before the public internet — Empire BBS had its own UUCP e-mail link. Over the years, mail traveled through various routes, and the address moved along with it. From the recovered original files, three stages can be documented:

• earlye-mail via the Ixgate gateway, which connected Fidonet and the internet — every node 2:301/xxx was reachable as name@xxx.chg.imp.com.
• from ~1993its own address, which even appeared in the login banner: RKUSER@helvetica.limmat.net.ch — mail ran through the machine "helvetica" in the Limmat-Net network, also my main uplink in AmiNet.
• later (documented 1996)its own domain via the provider Aare-News:roman@empire.aare.ch. The mail server identified itself as empire.aare.ch.

Documented from the login banner (late 1993, second ISDN line), the original UUCP configuration, and a genuine mail header from July 1996.