PC-OHIO PCBOARD METAWORLDS - THE BEST BBS IN AMERICA  216-381-3320
                             Norm Henke, Sysop

In September, 1985 Norm Henke started PC-OHIO with one telephone line on a
used TAVA XT clone in his bedroom. He began with RBBS but switched to
PCBoard within a few months. In 1986 he expanded to three nodes (three XTs,
two of them clones) and moved the operation into the dining room. Soon it
expanded to five nodes and six computers in the living room. In 1987 he
purchased an AT clone for a file server, ("Who could afford a real IBM
AT"). In 1988, with their first baby on the way, he moved most of the
computers to the basement. In 1991 Norm decided that since the BBS had
grown so large he needed to work full-time at home on the BBS. He is now a
"Professional" Sysop spending as much as 12 hours a day working on the
system. The work load has grown large enough that now his wife, Joyce, has
quit her job as a Registered Nurse and is helping Norm full-time with
PC-OHIO. Presently PC-OHIO operates on 60 computers at their new facilities
in Lyndhurst, Ohio. The computers are all linked together thru a 100 Mbps
Ethernet network. PC-OHIO is now a full featured Internet Service Provider
(ISP). With their own T1 digital leased line PC-OHIO is permanently
connected to the Internet as pcohio.com. They now have a World Wide Web
site at http://www.pcohio.com running Clark Technologies MetaWorlds.
Recently Norm upgraded the BBS to PCBoard 15.3 adding "a whole bunch of new
features." Almost one-third of the subscribers are from out of town, mostly
out of state. "They call because our selection of files is large and
up-to-date. We are now connected to the 5 largest email networks including
the Internet." PC-OHIO has over 50,000 ZIP files on-line. It contains over
25 gigabytes of actual files which could be uncompressed to over 50
gigabytes of real files. They also have a requestable library of 200 CD-ROM
discs that all subscribers can access. This adds over 100 Gigabytes of
files to PC-OHIO. PC-OHIO consists of three Novell file servers, a Windows
NT 4.0 Server and 50 486-33 Data Microsystems (DMI) brand PCs for the
workstations. "We have 30 Gigabytes of Micropolis hard drives in the file
servers and 14 CDROM drives. We use US Robotics Dual Standard V.everything
33600 bps modems. We will be upgrading all our computers to Pentium
machines this year." PC-OHIO has about 3,000 paid subscribers plus about
2000 visitors who have restricted privileges. It has contracts with two
local user groups to provide BBS services to their members. A resident of
Lyndhurst, Ohio, Norm has been married to his wife Joyce for 20 years. She
has restarted the whole network a number of times after power failures
outlasted the battery backup. She also handles the voice phone calls and
the credit card charges. They have two sons, eight year old Colin, and five
year old Ian. Norm's major non-computing interest is science fiction which
started in the seventh grade. He has a collection of 3,000 paperback books.
He is a big fan of Doctor Who and Star Trek. Science fiction lead to the
computer interest. He used to be interested in photography and tropical
fish but the computers have taken over all his available free time.

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  |_|_| PC-OHIO PCBoard MetaWorlds * www.pcohio.com * 216-381-3320
  |_|_| The Best BBS in America * Cleveland, OH * Go Tribe In '97
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