COOLBBS line listening

Cape Town · South Africa · Early 1990s

A bedroom.
A phone line.
A whole world.

Cool BBS was a Cape Town dial-up bulletin board run by Gaven “Gadi” Cohen. It began as BBS ‘R’ US and became a small, noisy doorway into South Africa’s early online community.

Enter the archive Read the 1994 scan
HAYES COMPATIBLE

ATDT 0217618573

CONNECT 14400

SYSOP
GAVEN “GADI” COHEN
LOCATION
CAPE TOWN, ZA
DATA
(021) 761-8573
MAIL
COOLBBS@CT.SA ‡
USENET
COOL.ALT.ZA *

PRESS RETURN TO CONTINUE

† Published global nodelists; a recovered late-1993 profile instead records 5:7102/99, which remains uncorroborated. ‡ Exact mail system unknown. * Recovered 1994 Usenet headers.

021761·8573ONE LINE · CALLERS TOOK TURNS

THE ORIGIN STORY

Before social media, you dialled in.

The board began with a borrowed laptop, a discovered modem, and the particular confidence of an eight-year-old who thought Cape Town needed another place to meet online.

BBS ‘R’ US ran first. By 1992, CoolBBS appeared in a preserved South African list. Callers connected to leave messages, exchange files, and encounter the emerging culture of bulletin boards—one occupied phone line at a time.

In November 1994, PC Review visited Gaven’s bedroom and found dismantled PCs, banks of modems, telephone lines, and a machine running around the clock. The magazine called its thirteen-year-old subject South Africa’s youngest sysop.

PHONEDOCUMENTED

The number

Both the 1994 feature and the preserved BBS list give the data line as (021) 761-8573.

DOMAINDOCUMENTED

The domain

Seventeen Cool BBS-originated Usenet posts were sent as gaven.cohen@cool.alt.za between September and November 1994.

PC Review article headed The Boss: At age eight, Gaven Cohen started his own dial-in serviceOpen the original scan · PDF · 2 pages ↗

THE SURVIVING FEATURE · NOVEMBER 1994

“The Boss”

At age eight, Gaven Cohen started his own dial-in service.

Words · Leon PerlmanPhoto · Nick BothmaPC Review

The feature is the richest surviving record of Cool BBS. It traces the route from an Apple II+ and a password-protected Toshiba laptop to a 24-hour board run from a teenager’s room.

It also records the board’s former name, the data and voice numbers, its first paying subscriber, the first hard-drive crash, and the household network wired through the Cohen home.

Read the two-page scan

This working archive links the supplied scan while reproduction and photography rights are being clarified.

CARRIER HISTORY

A partial timeline

The early dates are reconstructed from ages given in the 1994 feature. They are clues, not timestamps.

  1. c. 1986
    Approximate

    First commands

    Gaven begins exploring the family Apple II+ at about five years old.

  2. 1989–91
    Conflicting records

    The first call

    A 1993 profile says September 1989; two 1994 first-person records instead give 1990 and 5 September 1991. They may describe the experiment, a relaunch, or a fresh user database.

  3. Nov. 1991–Jan. 1992
    Published nodelist

    BBS ‘R’ US joins FidoNet

    Global nodelists record BBS ‘R’ US at 5:7102/124. It was marked down on 3 January and removed on 24 January 1992.

  4. 1992
    Documented

    CoolBBS is listed

    A preserved South African BBS list records CoolBBS, Gaven Cohen, and the 761-8573 data line.

  5. c. Nov. 1993
    Uncorroborated address

    A second FidoNet address

    A recovered operating profile lists 5:7102/99, RsaNET, and CoolBBS@CT.SA. No matching /99entry has been found in the global nodelists.

  6. Mar.–Nov. 1994
    Documented

    Cool BBS reaches Usenet

    Thirty-seven recovered posts span eight newsgroups, from Wildcat! operations to Internet mail and OS/2.

  7. Nov. 1994
    Documented

    The country's youngest sysop

    PC Review visits the thirteen-year-old sysop and the always-on computer room behind Cool BBS.

USENET ARCHIVE · MARCH—NOVEMBER 1994

37 posts, preserved locally.

The recovered archive spans 8 newsgroups. It includes all 17 posts in the two surviving author indexes and 20 more found in the underlying Usenet corpora.

The posts cover Wildcat! setup and programming, BBS operations, UUCP and mail gateways, GameNET, door interoperability, and OS/2 troubleshooting.

Browse the complete post index ↗Author index 3389391 ↗Author index 3440709 ↗
Unique posts
37
Newsgroups
8
Profile indexed
17
Further recovered
20

Topics in the archive

  • Wildcat! & BBS operations
  • Mail, UUCP & gateways
  • BBS community
  • Games & BBS networks
  • OS/2 setup & troubleshooting

THE NATIONAL PHONE BOOK

We found it.

Rob Fisher’s list became the de facto directory of South African bulletin boards. It travelled as text exports and as ZIPs containing a 16-bit DOS program with its directory data. We now mirror nine source lists, index eleven snapshots, and preserve three original DOS releases plus one recovered directory backup.

Wolsink’s September 1992 African list is our earliest direct Cool BBS match; Roblist follows in April and May 1993. Neither BBS ‘R’ US nor Cool BBS appears in the recovered October 1995, February 1996, or final 1996 editions.

Browse all preserved lists ↗Read the Roblist history ↗Visit the HMVH archive ↗
RF9305 / RECORD 167 OF 187 / EXACT MATCH
NAME       CoolBBS
AREA       WSC · WESTERN CAPE
NUMBER     (021)  761-8573
MODEM      V.32BIS · 14.4
SOFTWARE   WILDCAT
MAIL       QWK
SYSOP      Gaven Cohen
HOURS      24 Hours

Original spacing and capitalization retained. Codes are expanded from Roblist’s own dictionaries.

PRESERVED DISTRIBUTIONS

Preserved DOS releases

Three original ZIPs and one reconstructed backup ZIP. Historical phone numbers may have been reassigned; please do not dial them.

February 1996Roblist 4.0 · backup

RF9602-BACKUP.ZIP

127.0 KB · 230 BBS records

Eight-file directory snapshot, reconstructed as a ZIP.
SHA-256d70436277c28…
Local ZIP
View preservation manifest ↗

WERE YOU THERE?

The best archive may still be in a cupboard.

If you called Cool BBS or BBS ‘R’ US—or still have an old disk, QWK packet, screenshot, ad, phone list, story, or handle—Gadi would like to hear from you.

Send a memory Nothing private will be published without review and permission.

SOURCE NOTES

What is fact, memory, and inference?

Documented

Contemporary records

The 761-8573 number, former BBS ‘R’ US name, Cool BBS operation, and 1994 profile details appear in the supplied article. A recovered 1993 operating profile adds the software, hardware, network names, an uncorroborated FidoNet address, and @CT.SA address. Global nodelists separately record BBS ‘R’ US at 5:7102/124. Independent BBS-list series and thirty-seven recovered Usenet posts provide further corroboration.

Recollection

Sysop’s memory

The possible earlier six-digit number and Gadi’s memory that the CT and SA labels likely denoted Cape Town and South Africa remain recollections. The recovered profile preserves CoolBBS@CT.SA exactly, but not the system behind it; RsaMAIL is plausible, not established.

Approximate

Reconstructed dates

The c. 1986 date is inferred from age. The board’s start is unresolved: recovered first-person records give September 1989, 1990, and 5 September 1991, possibly for different stages of the BBS and its predecessor.

LOCAL AMI PRO SOURCE ARCHIVE

The working documents, unchanged.

Two original SAM files are mirrored byte for byte from the recovered disk. They use Ami Pro’s mostly textual Windows-1252 format and may not open in modern office software.

  • cool.sam

    Cool BBS operating profile

    1 page · 9,696 bytes · c. November 1993
    1eeca1511c3b…Original ↓

  • bbs.sam

    ‘S.A. Computer’ cover mock-up

    2 page records · 8,229 bytes · 1993–94
    a5e9717d237a…Original ↓

Related hotline, patch-sheet, and publisher-pitch documents were reviewed but are not mirrored because they contain personal contact or street-address information. Their evidence and hashes are recorded in the manifest and research notebook.

View preservation manifest ↗