AHOM (Al's House of Meats) - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

Run by [tabber] James Joyce (aka djjj) of [the ilf], Al's House of Meats (or AHOM as it was often styled) was an explicitly anarchist BBS experiment firmly in the [TABNet] sphere that ran from 1993-1995. What made it different from other bulletin boards is that every user was extended SysOp powers and encouraged to manipulate and modify the system to suit their tastes. Its [Telegard] setup defaulted to a colour scheme that the Jargon File would describe as angry fruit salad, often [flashing], as an antagonist challenge to the user to begin their customization adventure with a custom colour scheme more to their liking, and then to keep the party rolling and make other changes once they'd found their groove.

This wasn't sustainable, of course, and its dissolution was the consequence of a couple of users who didn't get along trying to prevent, then require, each other to be exposed to each others' new messages. In the tug-of-war, the centre could not hold and the board went down for good.

Before its downfall, the SysOp would often host get-togethers from its userbase locally, and callers wouldn't be surprised when the SysOp dropped into chat and revealed that four or five visitors were sitting on his bed watching the user's activities in real-time. ([Dialup] connections being what they were, you could even make arrangements for both parties to pick up their respective phone receivers on the count of three and hijack the data connection into being a voice connection.) djjj also enjoyed randomly dropping into chat, typing "i love you", then leaving chat just to baffle callers with his lovebombs.

AHOM had physical business cards printed up at one point, and they were droplifted around the Vancouver Art Gallery in an attempt to drum up some creative new users. An allegorical version of the BBS is portrayed as an actual restaurant working dysfunctionally in Cthulu's first 3-Day-Novel. Cthulu hoped to share the AHOM story with Jason Scott when he was filming interviews for BBS: The Documentary, but his rental car broke down on its way to area code 604. It was also the subject of some promotional [loader]s made by Nuiwanda.

Due to its unique nature, AHOM had an extraordinary user culture that yielded a lot of creative writing. Much of the lit in early Mist Classic releases originated from AHOM message bases.