Sanctuary

Posted on 22 Aug 2026

I called a local BBS named Sanctuary often. Often enough, that I still remember the phone number. ( Those things get drilled into your head when you have to manually dial the phone for your "dumb" VIC-1600 modem. ) Sanctuary's sysops ... Andre De Courtney (Bruce) and Casca the Eternal Mercenary (Tom) were cordial hosts. I met with Tom and Bruce shortly after I started visiting Sanctuary. We had a nice chat. Later on, Tom talked me into trying out Turbo Pascal on my C-128's CP/M system and I'm glad he did.

Sanctuary ran on a Commodore 64 but I don't know that it had 1541 drives which were common on other boards. It might've used a CBM dual-drive of some sort at one time. Sanctuary had one of the smoothest, responsive presentations of any of the local BBS's. Message retrieval was very quick and I never saw an instance of string garbage collection delays like you'd see on other C64 boards. Tom was pretty proud of this, but he never did reveal any of the real tech details to me. I know that Tom was pretty good at coding in assembly language, but he kept a lot of the board's tricks close to the vest.

As far as participation goes, lot of local folks ... mostly teens and twenty-somethings ... frequented this board. Although they temporarily stood up file-transfer as a sort of experiment for a while, Sanctuary was better known as a BBS specializing in conversations with frequent chatter. I dropped out of the BBS hobby for a short while and by the time I resurfaced, I believe that Sanctuary was gone. This was before the BBS's were fading away as consumer Internet access was ramping up. I'm not quite sure what happened. I was sorry to find out that it had gone as it was a fun place to visit.

Sanctuary - An Omaha BBS

Sanctuary

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