That name comes from when I had a 69 Mach1 Mustang back in 1987. It was an R code car with the 3.91 9 inch rear. 4 speed Toploader tranny and 428 motor. The stock shifter used to piss me off because you just couldnt bang gears with it. So I bought a Hurst pro shifter with new linkage, bushings and shims (Yes you had shims on shifters back in the day). It was an old school shifter,.. nothing like what you guys see today. Back then the tranny had linkage on the side of the transmission much like an automatic.



Once I got the Hurst shifter on there I was ripping through the gears. I got the car running 12's which was pretty good bragging rights back then. They said you couldnt power shift a Toploader yet I was doing it. My buddy nick named me "The Hurstmiester".

Then around that same time I bought my first computer. They didnt have the internet back then but there were local BBS lines you could dial into. You called them up and they gave you a login and password. You could not just dial into it and get your pwd emailed to you,.. there was no email back then. The sysop had to set you up on the thing first. Most BBS onle had one (1) node. That means only 1 person could dial in at a time. So if someone else was logged in you got a busy signal. Then some of the more popular BBS boards added 2 or 3 nodes. But realize that meant getting another phone line and back then there was only 1 phone company and to add another phone line with free local access cost $45 - $60 a month per line. To call another county was usually long distance. Especially if it had a different area code. But I became Hurst on the BBS boards and then later when the internet came along I used to do IRC chat all the time and I was known as Hurst. Most of these forum especially the car forums the name Hurst is always taken,.. so I just use Hurstmeister.

But yeah,.. Hurst are my favorite shifter. The simple little pot metal T5 Hurst short throw shifter 20 years ago is still one of the best ever made.

Hurst

 

10fizzle big dog. Lol

 

BBSs kicked ass. Oh, the games...Land of Devestation, Usurper...well, okay, I pretty much just played Land of Devastation, but that game kicked ass.

There was also Trade Wars, and all of the MU* based games. MUDs were MMORPGs before graphics were sent over the interwebz. And Tradewars was pretty much the absolute shiznit in strategy.

 

My dad ran "Outer Limits" BBS back in the day. I don't remember the games we would play, but I remember that was before anything like AOL or Forums had really taken off. I think one of the games we could get money and buy hookers I was like 12, buying hookers, learning how to play on the computer instead of studying for school

 

There were several BBS that I was into back in the day. Some for trading games. They would let you download but only after you uploaded something first. It would keep track of what you uploaded and then you had a ratio to which you could download. Usually 3:1 and some of the good ones had 5:1 ratio. Being on a 9600 baud modem took hours and forever to download some of the game. Fortunately most were only a few discs in size. I remember Mudd. I remember scroll shock when the lag finally caught up. remember the old copy protection? "Turn to page 5,.. 4th line down 3rd word." So we had to provide either a scanned image of the book pages or a text file describing what you needed to know. Remember the first Monkey Island? Or Apache Attack chopper? Stunt driver? Even at 43 I'm still a big kid at heart. Still love my video games. We still get 3 way Star Craft going on the lan here between my son, my brother and myself. Or we'll get some good old Quake or UT going. My son wants to be a video game programmer.

Hurst

 

9600 baud?!!! Sheeut, I rocked with 300 baud for a long time. It was amazing seeing little green letters appear on your screen o n e a t a t i m e .

 

QUAKE WAS THE ABSOLUTE SHITTTTTTT!!! i still play it. those days never die.