Break Into Chat

Jon Radoff’s BBS-related correspondence

Yesterday entrepreneur and tech pioneer Jon Radoff shared on Facebook a letter he found from a former player of his early internet game Legends of Future Past. I asked him if might have similar letters related to his earlier Atari ST BBS door games, Space Empire Elite and Final Frontier.

Today he found some and gave me permission to post them on Break Into Chat.

Here’s more explanation from Jon:

You can thank my mother Anna Radoff for keeping these things for me and then putting them in a scrapbook a few years back. I would have been about 14-15 at the time of these letters. Two are people ordering/requesting a copy of the games (yes kids, people used to send disks in the mail!) and another is the first page of a license agreement I did with someone to port the Atari ST version to the PC.

Side note — why were those two letters sent by mail instead of just leaving me a message on my BBS? I’m not exactly sure, but: a) the phone line was probably busy a lot and this was a single-user system [later I wrote a multiuser BBS for the Amiga and had two lines, but that postdated this tuff] and b) international phone calls were exorbitantly expensive at the time. One of the letters is from Germany, the other is from Australia.

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Josh Renaud

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Comments

4 responses to “Jon Radoff’s BBS-related correspondence”

  1. unwashedmass Avatar
    unwashedmass

    “why were those two letters sent by mail instead of just leaving me a message on my BBS?”

    If the content of the letters was contractual in nature, it may have been considered to be more binding if a hard copy was physically signed.

    Reply
    1. Josh Renaud Avatar
      Josh Renaud

      I think his comment was meant to provide context for folks today who might be surprised anyone would send a physical letter instead of an email — especially considering he did run a BBS at the time (for facilitating communication about and distribution of his software).

      Reply
  2. James Schofield Avatar
    James Schofield

    Paragon BBS software?? was this an ST bbs?? did Jon write an ST bbs we dont know about? I am guessing that this is not around anymore. Amazing what a kid of 14-15 could accomplish back in the 1980s .. now they just play video games so immersive that they have no drive to be creative on its own.

    Reply
    1. Josh Renaud Avatar
      Josh Renaud

      No, Radoff’s Paragon BBS was for the Commdore Amiga, alas. You can find plenty about Paragon around the internet, but for an Atari user, the perspective of the short story “CPU Systems Roundup III: Amiga Multiuser BBS Forthcoming” in the March 1989 issue of “ST Report” is pretty interesting. Here’s the ending:

      John Radoff, who previously made such Online BBS Games for the ST as Space Empire and Final Frontier, also said that he will not be doing any more ST programming, due to the present situation of the ST Market, and Atari’s unenviable Developer Support system….

      Quote: “It (the Atari ST) is a dead pool in my opinion, and not much will be happening with it in over a year from now”….

      Reply

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