The PMS Commando Team Takes to the Air!

I bought my first computer in June of 1982, a TRS-80. It was a low-class computer with a modest software base. It wasn't my first choice, but I enjoyed using it.

For my birthday that year, my mom bought me a 300 "baud" modem. To put that in modern terms, it was a 0.3Kbps modem. But it was enough! (Remember that there were no graphics back then; everything was text. So 300 bps was a good text-reading speed.)

Anyway, I started phoning up other computers with my modem. Back in those days there wasn't really a dail-in Internet (called ARPAnet at the time). Instead, various hobbyists would put their computers online so that you could dial in, get e-mail, read public messages, and download software. There were several such systems I called every day.

Eventually, a group of us settled on a system called PMS Santee. PMS stood for People's Message System. It was software that ran on Apple II computers with a modem. You could dial in, read messages, get e-mail, and so on.

(Actually, we could have been on PMS Lakeside or even PMS El Cajon. Eventually we all wound up on a system called P.dBMS, the People's database Message System, which was written in dBASE and run on a CP/M box. All systems were run by Apple telecommunications pioneer Bill Blue.)

The group of guys I communicated with eventually went on to become very famous computer type people, both programmers and writers. But at the time we were just some geeks who liked to hang out on-line and exchange messages, jibes and debate the various topics of the day.

There was one message in 1983 where a woman (very few women on-line then) chided us all for being keyboard jockeys. She accused us of being all-talk and no action, which was cruel but also accurate. I mean, I remember visiting with two of my BBS friends out at the beach one day and noted that none of us had a tan. But anyway, a challenge was made and we were up to it.

Various members of the group suggested that we perform some external, atypical computer activity to prove that we weren't all keyboard geeks. We had been talking about getting together anyway, so it seemed like a good idea.

Eventually we settled on the idea of parachuting out of an airplane. Writing about that now it seems totally insane, but at the time we were all gung-ho. From that point on, those of us who volunteered for the mission became known as the PMS Commando Team. T-shirts were printed. And on February 24th, 1984, we loaded ourselves up into a van and drove to Perris Valley, California, where we trained and eventually jumped out of a DC-3 flying at 3,000 feet.

Yes, that's me in the photo above, high over Perris Valley early one Sunday morning. (We didn't get to jump on Saturday due to weather conditions, so we came back on Sunday.)

I'm doing it wrong above. Sure, I have my eyes tightly closed, which is safer because you can't see the ground that way. But I bent my knees back, which meant that .01 seconds after this picture was taken I flipped over backwards. Then I passed out. When the chute opened, it yanked me back to consciousness. I was most gleeful.

The chutes were the old military chutes, round and not square or very steerable. In my group, two of us landed on the taxiway back at the airport, which was hard gravel (and 200 yards from the softer, planned impact zone). One of my group landed on a plane parked in the taxiway.

Fellow PMS Commando Bruce Webster kept a copy of all the messages the commandos wrote back and forth before and after the jump. I'll see if I can wrangle them up from him and post the more relevant ones here for your amusement.

No, I never plan on jumping out of an airplane again, not unless the airplane is on fire or in some other way going down — and providing that I have a nice, big parachute.