COOLBBS line listening

Cape Town · South Africa · Early 1990s

A bedroom.
A phone line.
A whole world.

Cool BBS was a Cape Town dial-up bulletin board run by Gaven “Gadi” Cohen. It began as BBS ‘R’ US and became a small, noisy doorway into South Africa’s early online community.

Enter the archive Read the 1994 scan
HAYES COMPATIBLE

ATDT 0217618573

CONNECT 14400

SYSOP
GAVEN “GADI” COHEN
LOCATION
CAPE TOWN, ZA
DATA
(021) 761-8573
MAIL
COOL.ALT.ZA *

PRESS RETURN TO CONTINUE

* Historical association recalled by the sysop; surviving mail headers are still being sought.

021761·8573ONE LINE · CALLERS TOOK TURNS

THE ORIGIN STORY

Before social media, you dialled in.

The board began with a borrowed laptop, a discovered modem, and the particular confidence of an eight-year-old who thought Cape Town needed another place to meet online.

BBS ‘R’ US ran first. By 1992, CoolBBS appeared in a preserved South African list. Callers connected to leave messages, exchange files, and encounter the emerging culture of bulletin boards—one occupied phone line at a time.

In November 1994, PC Review visited Gaven’s bedroom and found dismantled PCs, banks of modems, telephone lines, and a machine running around the clock. The magazine called its thirteen-year-old subject South Africa’s youngest sysop.

01DOCUMENTED

The number

Both the 1994 feature and the preserved BBS list give the data line as (021) 761-8573.

02RECOLLECTION

The domain

Cool BBS was associated with cool.alt.za, likely for mail or news rather than interactive Internet access.

03OPEN QUESTION

The early line

Before Cape Town's number change, the line may have been (021) 71-8573. No independent record has surfaced yet.

PC Review article headed The Boss: At age eight, Gaven Cohen started his own dial-in serviceOpen the original scan · PDF · 2 pages ↗

THE SURVIVING FEATURE · NOVEMBER 1994

“The Boss”

At age eight, Gaven Cohen started his own dial-in service.

Words · Leon PerlmanPhoto · Nick BothmaPC Review

The feature is the richest surviving record of Cool BBS. It traces the route from an Apple II+ and a password-protected Toshiba laptop to a 24-hour board run from a teenager’s room.

It also records the board’s former name, the data and voice numbers, its first paying subscriber, the first hard-drive crash, and the household network wired through the Cohen home.

Read the two-page scan

This working archive links the supplied scan while reproduction and photography rights are being clarified.

CARRIER HISTORY

A partial timeline

The early dates are reconstructed from ages given in the 1994 feature. They are clues, not timestamps.

  1. c. 1986
    Approximate

    First commands

    Gaven begins exploring the family Apple II+ at about five years old.

  2. c. 1989
    Approximate

    BBS 'R' US goes online

    After discovering the modem in his father's laptop, an eight-year-old Gaven starts his own board.

  3. 1992
    Documented

    CoolBBS is listed

    A preserved South African BBS list records CoolBBS, Gaven Cohen, and the 761-8573 data line.

  4. Nov. 1994
    Documented

    The country's youngest sysop

    PC Review visits the thirteen-year-old sysop and the always-on computer room behind Cool BBS.

THE NATIONAL PHONE BOOK

Still looking through Roblist.

Rob Fisher’s list became the de facto directory of South African bulletin boards. Several editions survive, from 1993 through the final December 1996 issue—but no inspected edition has yet tied Cool BBS to Roblist conclusively.

The exact CoolBBS record does survive in another consolidated South African BBS list. Finding its original source is one of this archive’s main open investigations.

Explore surviving Roblists ↗Visit the HMVH archive ↗
SEARCH RESULT / EXACT MATCH
NAME       CoolBBS
SYSOP      Gaven Cohen
NUMBER     (021) 761-8573
LINES      1
FIELD      1992

The meanings of the final fields have not yet been independently verified.

WERE YOU THERE?

The best archive may still be in a cupboard.

If you called Cool BBS or BBS ‘R’ US—or still have an old disk, QWK packet, screenshot, ad, phone list, story, or handle—Gadi would like to hear from you.

Send a memory Nothing private will be published without review and permission.

SOURCE NOTES

What is fact, memory, and inference?

Documented

Contemporary records

The 761-8573 number, former BBS ‘R’ US name, Cool BBS operation, and 1994 profile details appear in the supplied article. The phone number and CoolBBS name also appear independently in the preserved BBS list.

Recollection

Sysop’s memory

The cool.alt.za association and possible earlier six-digit number are remembered by Gadi, but no surviving message header or separate listing has yet confirmed them.

Approximate

Reconstructed dates

The c. 1986 and c. 1989 dates are inferred from ages in the November 1994 article. They remain approximate until more precise records emerge.