The Hellfire Club BBS was run by Sebastian Shaw (Michael Paul Meredith) and CO-SYSOPed by his friend and business parter Captain Picard (Richard Dale Ruffner) originally on Trek BBS and then later on WWIV BBS in the Saint Louis Missouri 314 area code. The Hellfire Club was based on Marvel Comic's "The Hellfire Club" in the X-Men Comics and Sebastian Shaw was the leader at the time.
History[]
It was started out on a room mate's Nikodemus (Norman King) Amiga 1000 computer using the PC-Transformer software to emulate MS-DOS on an Amiga 1020 5.25" floppy disk and 1200 baud MODEM. Eventually Shaw bought his own Bentley Model-T 286 clone and 2400 baud modem to run the BBS on using Trek BBS software. After the failure of Trek BBS it was switched to WWIV BBS using Turbo C. Using DoubleDOS Shaw was able to write software for the BBS and other projects while still running his BBS. It became a main node of The Dead Poets Society Network after the WWIVlink came about and Shaw split up from Third Stage and brought The Hellfire Club back from the dead. He and his wife, Black Widow (Michelle Meredith), ran it for several years until the birth of home based internet, which made Hellfire obsolete.
The Later Years[]
Shaw had a falling out with Picard and Ebony Eyes that was very personal and should not be mentioned here. Shaw had written BBS software and barcode scanning software and went to work for various consulting companies. One of which was Polygon where he wrote DEC emulation software and software for Novell Netware. Ploygon had gotten into a finacial problem and started to lay off employees. One of the last ones left was Shaw, who was over worked and stressed out. He'd turned to alcohol when things got hard which led to problems in his marriage and at his job. When his mother was diagnosed with cancer things got even worse, which, along with the divorce of him from his wife and having been fired from his job, his depression spiraled out of control. He eventually ended his life on May 31, 1999 using a shotgun after shutting out friends and family members for months. His funeral was attended by many BBSers from the Saint Louis Area. Shaw will always be remembered for his kind works for helping other people out, always being there for his friends, contributing a lot of work and source code to the BBS community, and mentoring people at his work.
He left behind many wonderful friends who will never forget him, an ex-wife who still grieves for him and a daughter who never really got to know him.