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Rexx has a long and colorful history, which to be properly told follows the efforts of three people. John Borowski, Raymond Wright, and Chris Gorman and their separate paths which collided to create Rexx...

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1987...In the Beginning

Sometime around 1986 three friends at Drew University (Tom Vogel, Neil Clarke, and Chris Gorman) created a BBS software package known as 2amBBS. In 1987, One member of 2am-Associates, Chris Gorman moved to California to attend Cal-Tec. In October of 1987 Wamblyville was brought online in the Cal-Tec Dorm using the 2amBBS software.

Flying high over what you thought was the Western United States, you hear your helicopter making grotesque noises. Soon, you begin to plunge. After a crash landing, you find yourself somewhere east of: Wamblyville
The original login screen that identified the system

John and Raymond were not idle during this time either, it was about this time that they were trying to create a BBS using a Tandy Color Computer. (We won't go into detail but suffice to say they learned not to try hot wiring a hair-dryer to use as a cooling fan...)

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1989

Jerel Crossland, a friend of Chris Gorman's bought and installed 2am-BBS at his home in Glendale. The BBS was called Rivendale. A user of Wamblyville named Glen Knowles (aka "STUPID") created and tested an online game called Crown and Country at Wamblyville. At the urging of Raymond Wright, John became a member of the Rivendell BBS. After finding a listing for Wamblyville on Rivendale, John Borowski joined Wamblyville as a user, under the name "ROKO" which was the name of a character in a short science fiction story he had written many years before. In and about this time John Borowski was programming a BBS software package which he called Djinn-BBS. Along with the planning aid of his long time friend Raymond Wright. The first version of Djinn to be brought online was in Hollywood during this year and failed horribly due to administrative and personal financial problems. The Board was shut down when John moved to Norwalk to work for Bechtel. (The BBS was online for a total of 2 months.)

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Chris Gorman announced that he was placing Wamblyville up for sale due to his pending college transfer. After considerable debate with his then Wife Lucy [Dark Star on Wamblyville] and his Roommate (Raymond Wright no less) Wamblyville was purchased by John
The Wamblyville Main Menu c.1992
Borowski and moved to Los
Angeles. At that time, Wamblyville was running on a Zenith 8088 with an 80mb Hard Drive. While the members wished the new sysops good luck, Sadly, many of the users who were regulars online stopped calling, as the board was now in the heart of Los Angeles instead of Pomona. To counteract this trend, a Newsletter was published which showed the new local calling area of the BBS, and a remote line was run from the Pasadena areas using the old bbs phone number. Many other changes were made, including a new look (and color) to the menus to spice up the failing board. From October 1991 through January of 1992, Raymond Wright played the role of "Doctor Zul" and hosted a message base on Wamblyville with a Dear-Abby theme. During that time it had 52 message posts and was one of the most active message areas of it's time. Also during this time, the users got a glimpse into the system operators home life during National Be kind to Quentin Week on Wamblyville...

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1992: Wamblyville did have a family of users who were very close, as shown by their message posts; including a multi-author story based on Star Wars. In the early part of 1992, Wamblyville was forced offline due to personal finances by John and Lucy Borowski. [Who made a forced move to San Francisco]
New ANSI GAP Login Greeting screen created by
Lucy Skywalker-Borowski [Dark Star]
When the board was brought back online more changes were made to attract more users and make the board more active, John made the decision to place Wamblyville on one of the Message Echo Networks. In June of 1993 R.I.M.E. was chosen as the network. But Because 2am-BBS did not then contain support for message networking, Wamblyville was changed to using the GAP-BBS software package. During this time, Raymond brought online his own BBS which he called "Wright Access" using the MBBS software package. In July of 1993, John and Lucy moved to Valley-Village (which is between Los Angeles and Glendale) and due to the volume of calls the board was for the first time made multi-user. (There were a total of 3 lines.) By September, John realized that he was spending far too much money operating the board free of charge. Up to this time, the board had been on a voluntary donation basis. Every user went away, and the board was taken offline when John and Lucy broke off their 10 year marriage. By November, John had brought Wamblyville back online using the original 2amBBS software and was now living in the same building where Wamblyville had been during it's first few months in Los Angeles. In order to re-network Wamblyville to RIME, he wrote UTI (Universal Text Interface) drivers for 2amBBS. A QWK-Packet message system for 2am-BBS was also written by John at this time.


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1994: In the early months of 1994, John and Raymond had strung a telephone wire down the side of the apartment building where they lived. (John was on the 1st floor, and Ray was on the 3rd floor...Luckily they were on the same side of the building!)
The Wamblyville Door Menu c.1994
To this they attached a pair of 19200 baud short-haul modems and John built a gateway program which allowed Wamblyville and Write-Access users to gate between the two systems. One advantage to the users was that door programs were able to be shared by the users of both systems, allowing for much more interesting online gaming. (Much to the sadness of both John and Ray, Crown and Country wouldn't run in network mode and the user of Wamblyville that had created the game had long since disappeared into the desert of long-lost BBS users...) During these months, John continued working on a newer version of Djinn, which for the first time was written to be run in a PC based Unix Emulator. Much of the software was designed to emulate InterNet functions for Unix. (There is a Djinn-TSS Command List and also the Djinn New User Manual for the curious...which shows the development trend in the direction of Unix.) On April 18th 1994 Djinn-4 was brought online. Within weeks, Dialup UUCP InterNet connections were established for the newly born Wamblyville. (As wambly.com) The shared BBS doors (which needed DOS) were transferred to a second computer running the MBBS program called G-host and were placed under the administration of William Richardson. (William is Roxanne's current husband...Roxanne was Raymond's Ex-Wife. We belong in Ripley's I think...) But once again, the money drain to operate all this was getting to be too much and once again Wamblyville was made a subscription system. And once again failed. After long periods without users, and much exasperation on John's part because people just couldn't get over what he called "BBS-Brain" (Users that couldn't make the transition from BBS Style commands to Unix Text commands.) he turned off Wamblyville's power; for the last time, in July of 1994.

John's boredom turned back to his first love, programming. Over the next few months he played with a new computer language he'd discovered, called Rexx. The initial programs didn't work well, but Djinn-5 was underway. By the close of 1994, John had entered into a support agreement with the then head of sales for Telcom, Richard McCary. (John had been employed by Telcom for the last several years as a Telephone operator, and of late as the computer engineer.) "RexxMail" was brought online with one phone line and was stuffed under a desk in the Telcom sales office.
RexxMail Terminal Mail Index
Access was obtained through a DOS terminal program called "RexxTerm" which used a suped-up x-modem to transfer queued files and contained a basic mail reader. The same UUCP-g drivers that had been built for Djinn were now used to send and receive InterNet Electronic mail under the registered domain name of tramrexx.com During this phase of development, the system accessed the network on a dialup UUCP line from Holonet networks.

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1995: During 1995, John wrote several versions of RexxMail and RexxTerm and included support for FTP and Usenet news through the terminal program.
During this time, it was discovered that Richard McCary had no real support for the RexxMail and in fact had been hiding financial support for RexxMail in the Telcom Operating Budget! New agreements were made with the Owner of Telcom (Dennis Petros) for supporting RexxMail and it was moved to it's new location...in the Telcom Computer Room. (Where it still is.) Now being in close proximity to Telcom's mainframe computers, John began cross linking the features and functions of the two computers. E-Mail to FAX service and Alpha Pager technology was added to Rexx.

In the late part of this year, John decided that the system needed it's own identity and it was renamed to Rexx, and that John's company would be called Rexx Electronic Communications. A new domain name [rexx.com] was registered with InterNic which finally completed the separation from Richard McCary's company, TRAM Telecommunications.

Work was begun on a custom computer system for Rexx which merged micro and mainframe technologies. The New Rexx hardware was based on a mainframe's passive backplane technology but used multiple 80486 microprocessors.

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1996: Very early in 1996, John completed yet another version of Rexx, this time much different from the previous versions of Djinn and RexxMail. It was intended for the new hardware and operated in Microsoft Windows. It was designed to use Winsock to maintain a full-time connection to the InterNet. In replacement of the RexxTerm hookup, it contained a Unix Shell Emulator which allowed users to login and use readers and editors and some very basic finger and whois programs. (The editor for this early version of Rexx was hi-jacked direct from Djinn...it was the RJL-E Editor which was originally based on the editing capabilities of the BASIC from the original TRS-80's...) It also contained a very primitive web server, DNS server, and FINGER server. Another change made was that Rexx had it's first full time connection, which was supplied by a camping dialup line to Earthlink Networks and used a very standard PPP connect.

One day, John was playing with the whois reader he was working on and just for fun entered the name of a friend (Dwight Cass) that he'd known many years before. (And was very surprised to find that the friend was running the InterNet connection for Northrop-Grummond!) A bit of E-Mail was exchanged and this lead to dinner and eventually to a tour of Mr Cass's home system [doghouse.la.ca.us] which was operating FreeBSD.

At Dwight Cass's suggestion, John began investigating the FreeBSD Unix operating system and late in 1996 Rexx was converted to FreeBSD. [Author's note: Yes, I know about Linux. That's what we were running Djinn-4 under, and I hated it then.]

The change to FreeBSD allowed Rexx for the first time to fully use the shared interrupt system which had been built into the Rexx hardware. In a very short time, John had built shared library routines into the FreeBSD Unix kernel which were taken from the original Djinn BBS system. The network connection continued to be through a dialup PPP connection, but compression technology was added.

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1997: Now operating under FreeBSD, Rexx began offering PPP dialup service and full Unix shell service. The original Rexx web server was replaced with Apache and most other services were brought online, including FTP service. The FTP server included a large percentage of the original Wamblyville files archive.

In February, the connection to the network was changed to the more traditional frame-relay and was peerd directly to CWIX, and a class "C" network block was obtained. This change placed Rexx ONE hop from the commercial InterNet backbone.

Raymond used Rexx about this time to locate his long-lost sister by tracing records and library entries. (They had been separated as small children when their parents divorced.)

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1999: In the later part of 1999 John finally decided that things weren't going the way they were supposed to and told Mr Petros of Telcom that he wanted a "divorce" so that he could properly expand the system.

Now free of his obligations, John Immediately started Rexx Expanding outward from Los Angeles, reaching out across the United States. By December of 1999 Rexx had several super-pop's with 390 local phone numbers.

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2000: With the new Millennium came more expansion for Rexx. John replaced the frame-relay lines that Rexx had been operating with CWIX with HI-CAP Fibex lines and Lucent Technologies equipment. New computers continue to populate the Rexx network, including a Unix server for the CSIT students of Los Angeles City College. The dialup network continues to expand with independently connected super-pops, now supporting over 2000 simultaneous users on over 700 local phone numbers.

It was also in 2000 that Netcom was sold to ICG/Mindspring (which ended up being bought by Earthlink Networks.) As Mindspring and Earthlink were not able to provide Unix service, a number of Netcom's users came to Rexx (via an un-official referral.)

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2006: During 2006, Rexx replaced it's older servers with new Nanotechnology CPU Core systems. To support the new server technology, FreeBSD was also upgraded to the latest edition. As the demand for dial-up access was in an accelerating decline, Rexx closed it's nationwide dialup service.