Comments from the archivist: Well, this piece has sort of an interesting history. It was being written from late 1985 to mid 1986 on a BBS called "The Land of Oz," sysoped by a guy named Wizard Esq. First, though, let me give you a quick history of the BBS and the sysop. Actually, as an aside, I should explain that the name Wizard Esq. was really unrelated to the motif of the BBS, and in fact he had gone by the name since he was a boy, when he had been given this nickname, as I understand it, because he was such a smart fellow. Anyway, he had gone through three or four other BBS systems, each with a different motif, before he put up Oz. The first was simply called Colour80, and was running on a Radio Shack Color Computer. It was later replaced with a system called "The Hounted House," running on that same CoCo, (though he pretended it was a Kaypro, and that he was someone ELSE, going by the name of The Ghost. That's a long story.... Nevermind!) and then was replaced with a Kaypro-based BBS program written by another local sysop, (actually, it was the software Elsinore BBS was running, written by Joan Leclere, Elsinore's sysop) called "The Temporary System," while he wrote, from scratch, two new programs. One was to have the motif of The Wizard of Id, a comic strip, and the other was to have the motif of the Oz books. The one finished first would be the one he would go with. As it was, of course, the Oz one was finished first. It was a very innovative BBS. It had some wonderful features I haven't seen since. Among other things, it had the ability for each user to have several names he could post under, each one with a seperate email-box number. You could also post anonymously. In fact, you could email someone anonymously. You could also respond by email to any public message. And with anonymously posted messages, one could send email without even knowing who had posted the message, and never NEED to know. You could, in fact, carry on an entire, extended, email corrispondence with someone, neither ONE of you knowing who the other guy WAS! The idea behind the multiple names for each user, though, was related to something that was fairly common in those days, but has since fallen into disuse. Most boards, having one particular message base set up to be anonymous on all messages, had at this time a fad in which users developed a "soap-box" handle, which they used only to post on the anonymous subs, and nowhere else. They also tended to get a second account for use in playing role-playing games and which had the name of their RPG character, and then would post all their moves under it that name. Oz BBSs multi-name system was devised for that express purpose. Of course, ONE of the names HAD to be the user's real name. He was, incidentally, porting the Oz software over to an IBM PC about the time this story was being written, but the PC version, as far as I know, never saw the light of day: The BBS ubruptly went down in late 1986, and the sysop disappeared from BBSing altogether. I sincerely wish, though, that the BBS had remained up. It was the single most advanced system of its kind at that time. But I started this document to describe the history of this particular story. I had no part in writing the thing, all I did was watch it unfold. Mostly this was because I didn't have TIME to participate, much as I wanted to. I DID, however, capture-buffer it and preserve it to disk on my end. When the writers finished it, I then went to work on converting it all into a textfile that could be placed with many other BBS stories like it. I deleted anything unrelated to the story, and then converted everything to a common column-size. Fact is, this particular BBS was set up with a 132-column message editor, of all things. NO-one else uses that kind of system! And half the users tended to post in 40-columns, and in ALL CAPS! Grrrr... The sysop was, of course, tinkering with the software from time to time, changing things here and there. While the story was being written, it so happens, he changed things so that messages older than a certain date were automatically deleted. This was because most of the message bases were getting too full of old stuff. Well, the story sub wasn't that full, but the older messages there got deleted, too! Unfortunately, I missed recording part of the story because of this. I had barely enough time each call to keep up with the rest of the board, and not enough to participate in the story. And for reasons unrelated to the BBS, I could only call maybe once a week or so. This meant, of course, that I was just keeping up with preserving the story. When the first bunch of it got axed, I was madly skipping messages I had already captured in order to get to the new stuff before my time ran out. It just so happens, though, that the ONE bunch of messages I only THOUGHT I had captured were the ones that got deleted. And no one ELSE had gotten them, either! In fact, I had preserved MORE of the text than anyone ELSE had! Grrrrr... At that point, though, the sysop fixed things so that the story base would no longer be touched by the message auto-delete process. A little late.... So, ultimately, I released a version of the story with that section gone, and with a notice in its place asking for anyone else who might have the lost text to please get in touch with me. The first version was simply called "the Oz BBS story" or whatever, not really a name, simply a description. This started to bother me: I began to realise it needed a real name, to differentiate it from any other "Oz" BBS stories that might come out, so I sat down and tried to come up with a better title. I released a second version of the story, containing this title, and with titles for each section it was broken down into as well, chapter-names if you will. These secondary titles were, in fact, taken from the titles of the original messages. That is, except for the long-ish title of the first segment, which I simply made up myself because there was no suitable title for that part of the story, at least, not as part of the extant material. (I DID have the TITLES of the missing messages, and there were a couple of titles in there that would have been nice, but would have made no sense without the part of the story in place that they had come from.) It also had a slightly-revised version of the missing-text notice. The material was otherwise left unchanged. I had made some mistakes with the first release, though: I deleted the names of the ones who posted each message, and the titles of each message. All that was left was the story-prose itself. I didn't know any better, since all the other stories I had seen preserved like this didn't have them either, but, then, the others were either written by one person, or where written on a system where it was done entirely anonymously, and so such information wasn't present to begin with. I continued doing that with all the other BBS stories I preserved since then. Well, in recent months I got hold of a couple of BBS stories someone ELSE had preserved, and both had all the message titles and username stuff intact, and I looked at it and realised it looked more complete that way. Now I'm trying to restore such information to all the stories I had done. This one was one of the first of that batch to be restored. Anyway, I had to go back and retreive the original captured files, which still had the message headings and stuff. Some of it was in print-out form, only, the material having since been editted out or lost to corrupted disks. But I did manage to find it all and put it back in. And in searching for the printed material -- in fact, while looking for something else entirely -- I blundered across a printout of the missing parts of the story! There still was one message missing, the system having timed out on me just before I got to it, but the others were intact. I had to type it all in, but I was thrilled to find it. So anyway, this is the fully restored version of "A Kreep in Oz." --Nomad of Norad, August 1993