Doc’s Cyberspace Blog » Home

Greetings Y’all, welcome to my new 52FLC.ORG domain replacing the shadow-banned DocsPlace.org which was registered in 1998 for Doc’s Place Fidonet BBS Onlne. [The 52 is the year I was born. FL is for Florida. And the C stands for Cracker being I’m a lifelong Floridian.] Having a top-level domain was a perfect all-protocol access point to my BBS in the early days of the web. Sadly the BBS was retired in 06/23 due to my living arrangements when my latest love left me homeless. But all my life when I stumbled and fell, I got up running which is difficult in my old age. The BBS was down to 1-3 callers daily. It’s time had come and gone. At an amazing 32 years online it was probably the oldest system of its kind! 😥

This website and video archive is a good-sized collection of Doc’s adventures in cyberspace dating back to the dial-up computer BBS days. Fidonet is a global communications network operated by hobbyists on personal PCs computers transferring early ‘echomail and netmail‘ around the world on dial-up modems. Doc’s Place BBS was started in 1991 on an old IBM clone 286/12 with a 1200 baud modem. It was updated as new software was available. Its last update was in 1998 to Wildcat 5 with the internet connect pack. It has since been retired after 23 years online! 😥

I was fascinated by Webb’s City. It was founded by James Earl “Doc: Webb,” and what a place it was. Talking mermaids, and dancing chickens, There were 29 barbers’ haircuts were 29 cents with a free double header ice cream cone Mom, I need a haircut 😎 Doc sold dollar bills for 89 cents. Had girls in bathtubs demonstrating his bubble bath.

I remember Doc’s gasoline selling for 19.9 cents a gallon, drawing a line around the block. He had to hire guards to keep his customers from blocking other businesses. He had parking space spotters in crow’s nests, and parking attendants on the ground directing traffic to an available space. It was a sight to see and experience!

Webb was a good kind man. When my dad developed Emphysema and couldn’t work. Mom wrote Doc asking for a discount on our groceries. About a week later she received a letter back on Webb’s City stationary, instructing his cashiers to take 20 percent off our groceries. We were having tough times with Dad being sick. Then as if God was watching over us, the lady who held our mortgage removed the interest from the note. This is the America I loved. That sort of kindness is rarely seen today! 😥

Check out this video from Stingray Tom which has everything to know about Doc Webb and St Petersburg’s Webb’s City. Nicely laid out with old photos and postcards, so many memories from my childhood, and narrated by Stingray Tom himself. Dad drove a taxi cab and I also hung out at the cab garage learning how to fix cars. When the Internet was opened to the general public in the mid-’90s it took me back to my TV days and I started learning all there was to know about this new digital marketing frontier!

When most dial-up BBSes had folded after the Internet’s public release, Doc spammed the Fidonet backbone in 1998 with a single bbs advertisement. That ad and a dual-channel ISDN net connection while line camping on MSN Network breathed new life into Doc’s Place BBS, which received hundreds of calls from all over the world in 1998.

The BBS had been online for 32 years primarily for the old-time Fidonet Diehards who kept calling and calling! That’s a serious milestone for a BBS that started its life on a 1200 Baud modem! 😎 But most of all, it was a great learning experience. I had transitioned to the net and started following Google becoming a top-notch hobbyist webmaster. But many good memories remain. One was from another Sysop, Richard Webb, (1:116/901) who wrote this testimonial about Doc’s BBS in Fido News.

All my BBS adventures have been a fantastic learning experience. However, being a Republican, and a Trump Supporter, I’m big tech’s public enemy number one! I’ve been delisted in search indexes. Just closed my Facebook account because they have me shadowbanned. There is nothing distasteful or inappropriate on this website! 😡