For those that may be curious, I started up the old Firebird last night... cringing with a little fear, but confident that the majority of you were right. Sure enough she started up just fine. I gave her some gas, sounded good, so I took her out for a little ride to see how she would handle the road. Sure enough, she ran like a champ. Ironically, I think the Firebird ran better than in the past, so maybe the backfire cleared out some carbon or something!

Thanks for all the advice, you guys saved me a few hours of work checking the distributor, compression, etc. It has been a long time since I have experienced a backfire, so I was a bit nervous.

Thanks again