Folks who are old enough and have been online long enough will surely recall that before there was the World Wide Web, there were numerous networks and services offering competing experiences, such as CompuServe, GEnie, QuantumLink, etc. Playing board games was almost always at least a small niche area within these networks, but then in 1986 LeisureLINC opened as a new concept, a service dedicated primarily and almost entirely to offering board games!
I was a member of the LINC from very early on --- their servers happened by pure chance to be located in my home town and I quickly signed up when I learned of the service. I have a lot of good memories of that network, as it was there that I became a strong chess player (by playing games with postal time limits), while also advancing my skills in backgammon and learning how to be a high level Othello player, and I was genuinely very sad the day they closed their digital doors and unplugged the servers.
There is now an organized effort to preserve and perhaps even revive the LeisureLINC experience, beginning with locating and preserving the original floppy disk client media for PC, Macintosh, and especially Commodore 64. I became involved with the project in a small way when one of the original LINC technicians remembered me on BGG and wrote to ask if I had any LINC disks. I did have one in my old computer pile, but sadly it was not readable, so now we are looking for a little help in the online boardgaming community.
If you would like to know a little more about the LINC, or about the search for client software and what the team hopes to do with that if any usable copies can be found, please feel free to visit the "Save The LINC" website, which is linked below.
If by some small chance you happen to have any LeisureLINC distribution floppies, please let the team know on the website, or even write to me here on BGA or on BGG.
https://savethelinc.org/
I was a member of the LINC from very early on --- their servers happened by pure chance to be located in my home town and I quickly signed up when I learned of the service. I have a lot of good memories of that network, as it was there that I became a strong chess player (by playing games with postal time limits), while also advancing my skills in backgammon and learning how to be a high level Othello player, and I was genuinely very sad the day they closed their digital doors and unplugged the servers.
There is now an organized effort to preserve and perhaps even revive the LeisureLINC experience, beginning with locating and preserving the original floppy disk client media for PC, Macintosh, and especially Commodore 64. I became involved with the project in a small way when one of the original LINC technicians remembered me on BGG and wrote to ask if I had any LINC disks. I did have one in my old computer pile, but sadly it was not readable, so now we are looking for a little help in the online boardgaming community.
If you would like to know a little more about the LINC, or about the search for client software and what the team hopes to do with that if any usable copies can be found, please feel free to visit the "Save The LINC" website, which is linked below.
If by some small chance you happen to have any LeisureLINC distribution floppies, please let the team know on the website, or even write to me here on BGA or on BGG.
https://savethelinc.org/
