User: Josh Renaud

I enjoyed playing BBS door games as a young teen from around 1992 until 1998.

Many years later, I helped create some Wikipedia articles about several games I loved and remembered. Unfortunately, these articles were later deleted by activist editors who had deemed the articles' subjects non-notable.

Creating Break Into Chat was my response to these deletions.

Break Into Chat consists of:

• A blog, where I find, preserve, and highlight lost and obscure computer software from the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the stories of the people who made it. There's an emphasis on BBSing and Atari, since those were my two loves. I also use the blog to showcase my own creations such ANSI art, IGS animations, etc.
• A wiki, about bulletin board systems, door games, and related topics.
• Special collections including:
  • 300,000+ FidoNet messages from the 1990s
  • AtasciiTube - ATASCII animations
  • ACE-St. Louis "NewsLine" newsletters
  • Door World Magazine
  • BBS-related podcast episodes

My goals for the wiki are to:

• preserve the BBS door game articles
• expand the articles, using high-quality sources
• in future, expand the wiki to cover all aspects of BBS history

Apart from Break Into Chat, I have several other little mini-pages about aspects of my own personal BBSing history. These can be found here:

• The SRE Text Series -- A series of textfile stories inspired by several games of Solar Realms Elite and Space Empire Elite I participated in.
• Politics Online Magazine -- A short-lived political mag I edited and distributed on St. Louis BBSes.
• My ANSI art -- A collection of some simple ANSI advertisments and signatures I created in the 1990s.

Josh Renaud (talk) 14:12, 30 November 2012 (CST)