The Greater Omaha Commodore Users Group (GOCUG) BBS
Posted on 22 Aug 2026
Posted on 22 Aug 2026
One of the first sites I visited during my earliest forays into BBSdom in late 1984 was the GOCUG board. I don't know if it had that acronym at the time, but that's the acronym that it eventually held. The GOCUG BBS was written by a gent named John Stephenson. I'm not sure if I ever managed to spell his last name correctly, so there are some other possibilities for that last name. John went by the handle "American Flyer" or just "Flyer".
The BBS was written completely in BASIC and was compiled using the popular Blitz! compiler. It had it's own personality as did many of those boards. The board ran almost flawlessly although I did encounter some pauses that were almost assuredly the C64's BASIC string garbage collection routines (which still plagued Blitzed programs ) tying up BASIC. This didn't happen too often. It was a pretty solid piece of software.
I chatted with John over the Sysop chat feature very early in my BBSing days. I tended to converse with him via messages on his board. I had expressed an interest in the C64 Z-80 cartridge and the C64 version of the CP/M operating system. John happened upon the cartridge and disks and sold them to me. That was the only time we'd met face-to-face.
Local legend has it that John won some kind of car in a local basketball free-throw contest and he sold the car very quickly. He took the money from the car sales and bought a bunch of computer gear, like a true nerd. At one time, he had a PDP in his basement. I never saw the PDP and when I met up with him, I don't think the place he was living in had a basement.
The GOCUG BBS lived on for many years but it used more commonplace BBS programs until it came to an end. I lost touch with John as I moved away from C64 computing. His name is difficult to search for as it's a common name with a lot of spelling variations. I'd enjoy a good chat with him some time if he remembers those glory days of being a C64 BBS sysop.
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