the story of Mr. Weather

In situations where I use a handle, I am known as Mr. Weather. The name Mr. Weather is a tribute to the crazy days and friends I had when I first discovered computers.

When I was in 4th grade some time in the early 80's, the school had several Apple computers in the the audio/visual room in the library. The computers were mysterious and untouchable and I wanted to learn to use them. I asked a teacher about it and I learned that there was also interest among some of the other students. The school soon organized an after-school class once a week of about 6 or 8 students, including myself. Some of the students learned just the basics, but some of us stayed on and learned more and more complex things. I was hooked and was fortunate enough that my parents got me my own Apple II+ for Christmas that year.

My only interest for the next 4 years was using and writing programs in Applesoft BASIC for my Apple ][+ and a Laser 128, which was an Apple //c clone. At one point I bought a third computer - a demonstrator Apple //e from Computer Craft for $400 which I had earned mowing lawns. I was totally hooked, and spent all my time pursuing this hobby.

My best friends were also into these same activities, so we spent a lot of our time together doing computer-related things. We were typical junior high kids in some ways, non-typical in others; staying up late goofing off, writing software, playing computer games, exploring electronics, and those kind of things. We were really into modems, BBS's, and chat systems and would stay up all night dialing and dialing and dialing in attempt to finally connect to various systems.

George, one of my friends since 2nd grade, at some point was an assistant-sysop of the Mines of Moria, a huge BBS at the time with 5 dialup lines and 10 or 20 megs of storage space. His handle was Mr Yuk; named after the black and green character printed on round adhesive stickers to warn kids that certain household products are poison and should not be touched. It was as good handle, although George was a lighthearted and friendly person.

For some reason, we got the odd idea that putting the term "Mr" in front of words was funny. The idea was that refering to a plain object with a proper name was humerous (at least to a bunch of junior high kids). For example, "Mr. computer", or "Mr. telephone".

Out of our love for computers and BBSs, we set out to write our own BBS in Applesoft BASIC. A couple of us had second phone lines, I had spare computers and spare disk drives, therefore we had the ability to host our own BBS. We had the technical ability to write a basic BBS, but we had to fake it when it came to what would be known 15 years later as dynamic content. One feature we wanted to provide the users was a weather report. We figured that would give the users the need to connect to the BBS each day. Rather than editing the weather report on the BBS each day to give the users accurate weather numbers, we decided to just write a weather section that used random number generators to provide the stats. We thought it was extremely funny, and we loved the challenge of getting the random numbers formattted properly to fit into a nice looking ASCII text table display on-screen.

After we spent so much time writing the weather section, the BBS came to be known as the Mr. Weather BBS because we thought it was funny not only to offer fake weather reports, but to also put "Mr." in front of the name. Also at the time I adopted the handle Mr. Weather, as I was the sysop of the board. These things were just incredibly funny to a bunch of junior high kids who have stayed up all night drinking Dr. Pepper and eating junk food.

The Mr. Weather BBS never went online for any length of time. Around this time I changed schools and drifted away from my friends, although I held onto my love of computers and continued my addiction by getting involved in the world of modem-based multi-user chat systems. That lasted for a two or three of years, however in high school I quickly discovered girls and my life was never the same. I didn't get back into computers until college in 1990 when I first discovered the Internet.