Slashdot Mirror
Tales from a BBS Junkie
Jason Scott writes "As someone who is bathed in Bulletin Board System (BBS) history nearly every waking hour, I can sometimes feel like I'm the only one going completely out of his way to find narratives. It's easy enough to copy together a bunch of floppy disks or scan a bunch of printouts but that's not really the glue of what put the online world together and why it still holds a strong meaning for people who were there. As a result, I'm always seeking out people to tell their stories from a personal perspective, or at least take a good shot at putting together the human side of the whole BBS era for the sake of those who missed it. If I'm lucky, I stumble upon a few sites where people do a great job of cobbling together what they didn't throw out from their teenage years. I might even find an extended story out on a website, spanning multiple pages." Read the rest of Jason's review.
COMMODORK: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie
author
Rob O'Hara
pages
167
publisher
Lulu.com
rating
8
reviewer
Jason Scott
ISBN
978-1-84728-582-9
summary
A memoir of one young teenager's life in the BBS world in the 1980s
With Rob O'Hara's book Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie, I believe we have the world's first BBS Memoir. Weighing in at around 160 pages, O'Hara covers his life from 1977 through to 2002, tracing the effect that Bulletin Boards, videogames, and computers have had on his life. Just 33 years old, it might seem strange for someone to write an autobiographical narrative so soon, but like a lot of youth who've grown up in the age of the home computer, O'Hara's gotten a lot of living done in that short time.
This is a self-published book, or more accurately, an author-controlled book. It is currently distributed by Lulu.com, an on-demand printer that provides you with a very "book"-looking book that you would be hard-pressed to think didn't come right off the shelves of the local chain bookstore. The only difference is there's no professional editor jamming through the work before it gets to you. It's easy to find flaws in a lack of slickness and flow in a self-published book, but also no real filtering out of "the good stuff", either. So I think of this book as a real sweet homebrew creation, rough-hewn but full of heart, not unlike the boards it talks about.
Because of this, the first few dozen pages are choppy. O'Hara works his way around his memories to find his voice: He tries to explain what it is that drives a person to still keep a pile of Commodore 64s in his garage, or build a 20-machine arcade in his back yard (the author includes a picture of this great-looking playroom), or even to want to talk about this history in the first place. He covers it from different angles: the urge to be a collector, the nostalgic dad remembering his carefree days, and the computer guy with the cred built up from now-decades of experience with the machines. He also struggles, initially, with who the book is for: folks completely unaware of the history of the BBS and home computers of the 1980s, or other 30 and up computer geeks who want to take a joyride through a shared childhood? In doing so, he actually touches on some great thoughts on what attracts people to old pieces of plastic and microchips, and why things were so different for him.
A sixth of the way in, O'Hara dispenses with the helping hand, cracks his knuckles, and goes in whole hog. Instead of asking if anyone gets it, he assumes you've gotten this far because you want to know it, jams the wayback machine into full throttle, and plunges into the world of BBSing for a teenager in Oklahoma. Except, of course, it's really every BBS kid's childhood: The little bargains, the quiet victories, the betrayals, the triumphs.
The heart and soul of the book actually are warez. Warez in the old sense, of newly-acquired one-off floppies of games, painstaking bargained for, traded, and spread out to gain fame and reputation. Throughout the book, it comes back to the warez, and O'Hara does an absolutely fantastic job of capturing the sense of power and expression that engulfs a teenager who has been able to use his skills or his patience to get his hand on a program that nobody else has and then turn around and use that slight lead to his advantage. The methods he uses are laid out in brilliant detail; one involves registering with bulletin boards in a city his family will be vacationing in shortly, allowing his far away "exotic" location to be verified by the system operator, and then traveling to that city and leeching them dry for a free local call.
O'Hara never lets it get dry and technical; it's about people he met while trading software, the kind of people who he partied with, got into fights with, or loved. He's not always nice and he's not always the hero; what really rings true is how none of it feels pumped up or faked, dressed up as some inherently soul-searching activity where every moment in bristling with poignant meaning. That said, some of it rings very close to the heart indeed.
In fact, this book's greatest effect may be the touchstone it provides for one's own experiences. Even as Rob's younger self is getting drunk at a BBS party and stumbling in panic from a perceived bust into the flatbed of a parked truck to sleep it off, I'm harkening back in my own mind to events that accompanied my BBSing that I'd forgotten wholly and totally. But I was there again, saving my own warez for the right moment, meeting my own soon-to-be-lifelong friends, making my own grievous mistakes. Anyone who used BBSes for any period of time will want to run to their keyboards and tell their own story; I see a lot of long e-mails in Mr. O'Hara's future.
One small disclaimer: On page 14 of the edition of the book I have, Rob mentions my BBS Documentary, but just to say it's not what he was aiming for with his book. And he's right; we don't step in each other's territory and his book does what my film couldn't; go front to end on one boy's story to turning into a man online. And for that, I thank him, and I think a lot of others will too.
Is it for everyone? No way, but a book that takes on its subject so intensely shouldn't be. If you or an older sibling or parent touched a plastic-and-metal home computer, sipped your bandwidth through a modem, or held a 5 1/4" floppy disk in your bag to give to someone else, this book is your book. It might even be your memories, too.
It's a good book and can be ordered through Lulu or directly from the author, who sells autographed copies.
Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
With Rob O'Hara's book Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie, I believe we have the world's first BBS Memoir. Weighing in at around 160 pages, O'Hara covers his life from 1977 through to 2002, tracing the effect that Bulletin Boards, videogames, and computers have had on his life. Just 33 years old, it might seem strange for someone to write an autobiographical narrative so soon, but like a lot of youth who've grown up in the age of the home computer, O'Hara's gotten a lot of living done in that short time.
This is a self-published book, or more accurately, an author-controlled book. It is currently distributed by Lulu.com, an on-demand printer that provides you with a very "book"-looking book that you would be hard-pressed to think didn't come right off the shelves of the local chain bookstore. The only difference is there's no professional editor jamming through the work before it gets to you. It's easy to find flaws in a lack of slickness and flow in a self-published book, but also no real filtering out of "the good stuff", either. So I think of this book as a real sweet homebrew creation, rough-hewn but full of heart, not unlike the boards it talks about.
Because of this, the first few dozen pages are choppy. O'Hara works his way around his memories to find his voice: He tries to explain what it is that drives a person to still keep a pile of Commodore 64s in his garage, or build a 20-machine arcade in his back yard (the author includes a picture of this great-looking playroom), or even to want to talk about this history in the first place. He covers it from different angles: the urge to be a collector, the nostalgic dad remembering his carefree days, and the computer guy with the cred built up from now-decades of experience with the machines. He also struggles, initially, with who the book is for: folks completely unaware of the history of the BBS and home computers of the 1980s, or other 30 and up computer geeks who want to take a joyride through a shared childhood? In doing so, he actually touches on some great thoughts on what attracts people to old pieces of plastic and microchips, and why things were so different for him.
A sixth of the way in, O'Hara dispenses with the helping hand, cracks his knuckles, and goes in whole hog. Instead of asking if anyone gets it, he assumes you've gotten this far because you want to know it, jams the wayback machine into full throttle, and plunges into the world of BBSing for a teenager in Oklahoma. Except, of course, it's really every BBS kid's childhood: The little bargains, the quiet victories, the betrayals, the triumphs.
The heart and soul of the book actually are warez. Warez in the old sense, of newly-acquired one-off floppies of games, painstaking bargained for, traded, and spread out to gain fame and reputation. Throughout the book, it comes back to the warez, and O'Hara does an absolutely fantastic job of capturing the sense of power and expression that engulfs a teenager who has been able to use his skills or his patience to get his hand on a program that nobody else has and then turn around and use that slight lead to his advantage. The methods he uses are laid out in brilliant detail; one involves registering with bulletin boards in a city his family will be vacationing in shortly, allowing his far away "exotic" location to be verified by the system operator, and then traveling to that city and leeching them dry for a free local call.
O'Hara never lets it get dry and technical; it's about people he met while trading software, the kind of people who he partied with, got into fights with, or loved. He's not always nice and he's not always the hero; what really rings true is how none of it feels pumped up or faked, dressed up as some inherently soul-searching activity where every moment in bristling with poignant meaning. That said, some of it rings very close to the heart indeed.
In fact, this book's greatest effect may be the touchstone it provides for one's own experiences. Even as Rob's younger self is getting drunk at a BBS party and stumbling in panic from a perceived bust into the flatbed of a parked truck to sleep it off, I'm harkening back in my own mind to events that accompanied my BBSing that I'd forgotten wholly and totally. But I was there again, saving my own warez for the right moment, meeting my own soon-to-be-lifelong friends, making my own grievous mistakes. Anyone who used BBSes for any period of time will want to run to their keyboards and tell their own story; I see a lot of long e-mails in Mr. O'Hara's future.
One small disclaimer: On page 14 of the edition of the book I have, Rob mentions my BBS Documentary, but just to say it's not what he was aiming for with his book. And he's right; we don't step in each other's territory and his book does what my film couldn't; go front to end on one boy's story to turning into a man online. And for that, I thank him, and I think a lot of others will too.
Is it for everyone? No way, but a book that takes on its subject so intensely shouldn't be. If you or an older sibling or parent touched a plastic-and-metal home computer, sipped your bandwidth through a modem, or held a 5 1/4" floppy disk in your bag to give to someone else, this book is your book. It might even be your memories, too.
It's a good book and can be ordered through Lulu or directly from the author, who sells autographed copies.
Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I have this urge to share my favorite (or, at least top 3) Slashdot post of all times:
3 21834
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=159051&cid=13
As an ex-sysop, I wonder occasionally how a modern chatter would do on an old style BBS....
Broderbund software used to have a support BBS that a bunch of us in the San Francisco Bay Area took over for our personal chat room. Used to spend hours there, we even used to get together in real life.
It got to the point where Broderbund came to us to find beta testers for their software products. I dont think I ever once saw anyone use that system for its intended purpose.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Man, this takes me back. Thought I would key in with one of my earliest BBS experiences. I remember back at my highschool, in our computer lab, my programming teacher allowed me to set up my own BBS, at my school. I remember setting that up, think we had 3 or 4 lines, and just watching the rest of the geeks form my school pour in. We had quite a few games we would play, turn based stuff, the one that really comes to mind was this space trading game, can't for the life of me remember what it was called, but it was great. Would still play it if it was around. Man, i miss those days....
I can recall when:
Modems hooked up the handset on your rotary phone...
We thought we were big time with a 9600 baud internal modem...
Whistling into pay phones for free calls was legal...
I can recall an internet before the BBS's came...
2 cents,
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank
...I'm kidding! It'd be funny, though.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
What slashdot needs is a "[F]lirt with Violet" option.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I still play LoRD everday. Remember the "jennie" code? =)
How great it was to be on the computer at the start of the new day knowing you once again had turns to use!
I bought this book straight from Rob when it premiered at OVGE (Oklahoma Video Game Expo). The memories it brought back were almost overwhelming during parts of the read (which I did in one marathon reading night).
I remember when I went off to college, finally got to a city that had a decent supply of BBSs, and discovered online PORN for the first time. 256 color VGA online porn....
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
When I ran a BBS in the 'old days' as they were, I remember when the internet and IRC started to take hold and I wondered- just what a "Door" would end up looking like.. (i.e. Tradewars)... Somehow, the "door" became the grand-daddy of the "MMORPG"..
... People have no concept of a 300bps modem with the "phone coupler", and how when a 1200pbs modem with the "High Speed" light was worth $2500bux....
Also....
Ever notice how if you try explaining the BBS days to someone that never experienced it, you somehow end up looking like that stereotypical "wild eyed old coot" who raves about "back in my day, we walked 100 miles to school in the snow, with one shoe! AND WE LIKED IT!"
I am not a wild eyed old coot. I'm 28 damnit!
....move along....nothing to see here....
It is great to know this is being documented. I went to high school with two, maybe three other people who used a BBS. All the way through getting a BS in CS I encountered only a handful more. I try to explain how they worked to people today and they can't quite seem to grasp why anyone would bother, but back then it was bleeding edge stuff.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Anyone else read that as "every wanking hour"?
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
I used to run a BBS back in highschool in the small town (11k people) where I still live. In fact, at one point in time, there were 4 BBS's to choose from, hehe. I ran Wildcat! BBS software with a single dialin line. Had the ol' NightOwl shareware CD's to download off of and even registered copies of TradeWars, Usurper, and some other turn-based game that I can't recall at the moment. The games were the best. I was the 2nd person in town to own a 28.8kbps modem. 'Tis what got me started into computers. :)
I don't reply to Anonymous posts; if you have something to say to me, identify yourself or I won't reply.
Here's a pic that will wet your eyes. Here's another. Man, we were so lucky to have lived those years and experienced all this! Modern kids don't have an idea..
I was born in '82, in very rural western PA, and lived on a retired farm. No cable, no municiple services (water/trash), we even burnt wood to heat our house/water. My first computers were a TI-94a and a TRS-80 I started using at the age of 5, though I couldn't do much with them for a few years except play video games and wonder why programming had "order of operations" (I wasn't yet to discover the joy of algebraic constructs for a few years). I had fun learning BASIC and making inane programs that let me type to my friend ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE ROOM by using a *VERY* long printer cable.
Two or three years after I got my Mac Classic in '91, I discovered the joys of using a modem to chat with that same friend, who lived two miles away. It's a shame he was in a pay phone code from my house (yes, things are that messed up here that you have to pay to call two miles, thanks regulations) otherwise I'd have experimented more - at least I found the control-G trick and used it to freak him out at will.
I'd been to a few BBSes, but they were all pay calls from where I was, and my parents didn't take too kindly to that. My friend's parents took even less kindly to his $500 phone bill one month. That was pretty much the end of that.
I used to watch C-NET and yearn for internet access... after watching that horrible Sandra Bullock movie, The Net, with my parents, I thought it'd be impossible to talk them into it, but I woke up on my 14th birthday to get what was, perhaps, the best birthday present I got since my 0th - a real, live, 2400kbps AOL connection. Two weeks of that convinced my parents to upgrade to a 14.4 modem, of course, but I digress.
I really missed out on the BBS culture, and on newsgroups (only occasionally posted for tech support, which I'm probably happy about now that anyone can go back and read my inane teenage programming discussions). I missed out on something that people on slashdot look back at with nostalgia, and I realize I'll never really understand those experiences. The "MMO" tradewars (or corewars if you had shell access), the novelty of the online discussion format itself, the sharing of interesting and new software (I had a mac though, probably couldn't run any of it). I guess my question is - am I missing that much? Ever since the day I started using the internet, I've been addicted to it and have really gotten a lot out of it - heck my girlfriend went to my high school but we were in different grades and never talked until facebook came along. It's a part of me and a part of my culture. Did I miss something in there, by not having been absorbed in BBS culture? There was nothing to do where I grew up anyways, and I actually spent most of my time engaged in self-educational activities rather than just playing video games.
I used my school loan money to get the Wildcat! 4 BBS software, a faster modem and a second phone line for my souped up IBM AT computer in 1995. I had this weird idea -- probably from reading too many issues of Boardwatch -- that I could go into business while still a college student. Then this thing called the Internet crashed the market and I got kicked out of the university. (I'm sure playing Magic: The Gathering and Risk with my roommates until three in the morning had nothing do with me being tossed out.) I was a dotcom bust before there was a dotcom to go bust on. The only thing left of my BBS ten years later is the name that I'm using for my website.
Sadly I missed those days, but I remember my dad running a BBS Business, unfortunately with the invention of the internet he closed it down and packed up, also unfortunate is the fact what little I remember of it.
I remember my dad kicking Fido and Fido flying to the moon.
Before the advent of the BBS there were the precursors in the way of Message Systems back where I once lived. In the late 70's and early 80's, at the college there was Message System and at a local school district was something called NOOZ. Different styles, but ultimately the same result. Places users signed up for accounts, posted and read notices. Flamewars errupted, on such meaningful topics as Gun Control, what bands constituted Heavy Metal proper and whether music was better during republican or democratic administrations. Posters tended to be people taking a programming class, so it was similar in respect to USENET where the orignal posters tended to be other than mainstream.
There were no shortage of characters, from Tonto, the comic personality of a fellow to Justin Case a bit of an ultra-patriot. We devoted a nice little chunk of 1.5% of the system drive to these people and as a sys admin I made sure it was never threatened in the quest for space. (There was always space to be had somewhere, you just had to look hard enough.)
25 years later, I still have stacks of printouts in a box somewhere in a closet, messages from people I knew and didn't know. Some stuff I can still recall the context of, other bits are now arcane. Still, it was a good era and I miss it. Now any idiot can get on a blog/USENET/etc. and totally disrupt things.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Wolfenstein 3D, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem I, II, 3D, Monster Bash, Wacky Wheels. These are now at the 3d realms website.
BBSes provided a major launching ground for shareware and online text-based games like Tradewars, I remember dialing in with my 2400 baud modem every day tying up the phoneline for my daily fix.
I got my first c64 at the age of 12 in the 80's and a 300 baud modem, seeing BBS's and downloading demos and sid tunes, was great. I enjoy these books and the BBS Documentary (worth the buy), lots of stuff pre-Internet that people never experienced. Rehashs some good times as a kid not many people know, and I'm not even freaking ancient yet.... Not talking punch cards or wireing my own computer, or begging for mainframe time.
Trying to fit your entire OS on a floppy (amiga days)
Downloading Demos and mods. (HA after Number 5 is alive on the 64!)
Single line BBS's for tech support
Fido
40 column screen sizes
Upgrading to zmodem (ya, that was good)
Multiline Galacticom boards with multiuser chat.
Waiting all night for a file to download and its only 100K in size.
BBS's turned ISP's.
Door games
Ha, good times.
Just 33 years old, it might seem strange for someone to write an autobiographical narrative so soon, but like a lot of youth who've grown up in the age of the home computer, O'Hara's gotten a lot of living done in that short time.
Uh...I thought the usual joke was that BBSers DIDN'T get out and live life. How about giving an example of this "lot of living done"?
The only difference is there's no professional editor jamming through the work before it gets to you. It's easy to find flaws in a lack of slickness and flow in a self-published book, but also no real filtering out of "the good stuff", either. So I think of this book as a real sweet homebrew creation, rough-hewn but full of heart, not unlike the boards it talks about. Because of this, the first few dozen pages are choppy
A few dozen pages of "choppy" (poorly written) material? Look. I know it's popular to discredit professions; these days we've got bloggers running around claiming they're journalists, for example...but editors exist for a reason. Sure, there are companies that will laugh and tell you to take a hike, or insist you 'sex up' the story. That's not an editing decision; that's a PUBISHING and MARKETING decision; get it straight. He could have worked with a professional editor (there are many who are independent; my aunt is one of them) and THEN published...or offered up an electronic edition for community review and then published a printed edition.
Memoirs are written by people who have a unique, interesting story to tell about their lives- or people who are really good storytellers/writers. Rarely are they both, which is why many memoirs are ghost-written. From the sounds of it, this is just one of a hundred thousand plus people who traded warez, writing about...how he traded warez, and how cool he is for doing it. He's too life-inexperienced to realize that the same fights and drama occur in every situation in society where a bunch of people are involved in something.
Lastly- is there ever a time where Jason Scott doesn't hawk his film? His "disclaimer" wasn't; it was a blatant ad.
Please help metamoderate.
I remember running WildCat, Renegade, and then RA 2.02 which I still run to this day from time to time. All I have to do is unzip the BBS into the directory and away I go. Doors, Message Boards and the works. Mostly I run the open sourced synchronet.bbs as it has a slew of features previously only found in the MajorBBS back in the day. Man I feel old just thinking of BBSes and that was not that long ago really. I remember doing bong hits while downloading. You could damn near drink a six pack of beer while downloading anything good.
When the going gets tough, the tough get drunk
Mom?
I'll never forget the music my Apple II played on mild or hot days in Lemonade Stand. I also liked seeing how much I could charge for a glass on hot days ($20? $30?).
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
O'Hara's gotten a lot of living done in that short time.
First of all, we're talking about 25 years! That's hardly a short time.
Secondly, since it's a memoir of BBSing in the days of dialup access, I doubt there was "a lot of living done", either.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I was lucky enough to be in the twin cities during the BBS days. Lucky because there were hundreds to choose from, including one BBS that was dedicated solely to producing a monthly list of all the other BBS's - and I still remember the list's name (Abiogenetic Moobasi).
;)
Had about 20 that I'd call regularly including my own which I co-ran with the guy who owned the computer. We had a Remote Access 2.0 system for files, and a Citadel system set up as a door to the RA for messaging.
We were getting pretty popular, but I went off to college and he went off on a mission, so Reflex Point / Farpoint Station died.
But I still occasionally get comments about it from an old user of mine that I still know to this day.
Somehow BBS's, Fidonet, and of course Bluewave with its rotating taglines were a lot more fun than www and email
It all came down to the personality, and personalness of it. Each BBS had it's own style, flavor, charm, and was very personal. That is what is missing from the internet. Even the telnet bbs's that are up now have an impersonal feel to them. It is very hard to describe the full difference unless you have experinced the BBS world, and can compare that experience to the internet.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
I always found the hacker 'zines endlessly fascinating. I didn't enter the scene until around '90 so I was a little late coming in. Computer Underground Digest was sort of a 'Your Rights Online' before slashdot. Many of them, such as Phrack or Cult of the Dead Cow, were outdated even while I was reading them (how to create the blackbox to hack pay phones, etc).. there was some crazy sh*t in those that would probably not go down well in modern times.. how to build all sorts of bombs, hack streetlight computers, phone companies, etc. And CDC was full of fun juvenile humor. I think a few of them are still around in one form or another.
I think the main thing that made what Pat Kroupa once called the "modem world" special is unlike most communication medium, it was homegrown, sociable, and a little anarchic. I was never much of a ham radio person, but it serves as a comparison - I am not an expert, but in the rules I read you must register with the FCC before you are able to make a communication, you must identify yourself before any broadcast, you must speak in English, you must not use any code words etc. Then compare that to the freedom of logging onto the BBS of some 16 year old kid with a Commodore 64 and 5.25" floppy disk drive on his room's phone line, and being able to say whatever you wanted. It was organic, it was homegrown, it was a community.
He just barely mentions it in TFA, but the documentary DVD set that Jason Scott produced is incredibly interesting and everything you'd want if you lived through those days. I was a classic lurker back then, not really into the scene, but certainly racked up my hours on BBSs. I found all 5 and half hours fascinating. The material is under a CC license -- heck, he'll even sell you the printed package for 10 bucks into which you can place your copied disks. I split the price of a purchase copy with a friend. Very cool, very authentic, very fun.
Yep, I'm nostalgic for those days. I had 110 echomail feeds coming in from Fidonet and several other mail networks. I remember being among the first SysOps to stumble into the Adam Hudson 20meg limit on a message base (which crashes the system and you lose every message). It still amazes me what we could get done with .BAT files and Frontdoor.
I remember getting a message from a user one day who kindly listed for me the entire contents on the root directory on my C: drive after gaining sysop priviledges and using my hidden menu to drop to DOS on my computer. He said, "if you create a menu option for ALT-254 on the numeric keypad, then when hackers try this they won't get sysop priviledges, they'll just be redirected to whatever that menu option takes them to." I was pretty shocked, went and tried it, and sure enough... In the early versions of Remote Access, anyone who hit alt-254 on the numeric keypad received user level 64000 and had access to any menu option. That was my first lesson in not being able to trust the author of a program. Several months later, Andrew Milner fixed the "bug", but I'd already done away with any drop-to-dos options. Good times.
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
The real BBS transition came when TeleFinder and later FirstClass hit the market --- both were graphical BBS systems and although initially only available on the Mac, they gave a glimpse of what was to come. I was especially impressed by FirstClass and at the time I felt that their system was about to change the way the world would share information. However, that change did not occur until Mosaic was released.
I don't usually post, but I feel compelled to since I'm an old BBS Sysop from down in Miami.
What I really enjoyed was the close-knit community. We used to have monthly get togethers at a local park and we would routinely have 20-30 people show up from all around. It was great to put faces with the names and use the computer as a way to meet real friends face-to-face. What fun!
Thanks for the trip down memory lane, now if I could find a way to resurrect all the awesome ASCII art I had for my BBS...
I was a long time computer type, having used Multics' forum before the personal computer craze began. I got into PCs through the Atari 400/800 side and produced the Washington DC area bulletin board list for that community for a few years, then gravitated to the IBM side due to work related use.
The unique aspect of my list was that it contained only phone numbers and data that were verified every month. Now remember many of these boards had one phone line so you had to wait in line to verify that the board was still operating. I could get 90% the first week of the month, 97% by the end of the second week, and then it was a struggle to get the last 3%. Sysops liked the list because it contained a short summary of what the focus of the board was so they weren't spending time verifying one time callers.
Just to focus on the DC area IBM boards, at the beginning there were perhaps 50 which over time grew to 750 that I could dial locally (and boy did I hear from the SysOp who was just outside my range, how I was discriminating by not listing him. Some even got one local-to-me number so they could be listed.). There was about a 5% drop out rate per month, even at the height. Mostly kiddie boards when mom and pop found out they couldn't use their phones. As the Internet became the new thing, boards started dying so that the drop over a year must have been 70%. It was quite sudden, you could hear the whoosh. At the end, there were perhaps 70 boards still up but no one was using them. I could verify them all in about 2 hours.
My kids got status in school for a while because their dad was the BBS list guy. All I got is a lot of lost sleep. Though oddly enough, perhaps 10 years after the boards died, I ended up hiring one of the SysOps. I still bump into someone occasionally who remembers my name from those days. I have no idea how many are still operating in the DC area.
Every once in a while I get a querry from one of the BBS historians asking if I have data on how many lasted through the entire period etc. Strangely enough, I still have a few of those old ZIP files lying around. None of the files I produced for the Atari community though.
I have not read the book, but I read the article commenting on the book
and as a BBS'r and heavy oldtime C64, and early era PC Pirate,
WE HATED PEOPLE LIKE THIS IDIOT. I would ban him from a second from my BBS, and from all group affiled BBS's. As a matter of fact as he tells stories of leeching just for being a 'LDer' I can imagin the crap quality of BBS's he was on.
P.S. I'll be non -anon coward when I write my book, and maybe I should? Is this guy maing good money for it?
Here is a few links to some BBS lists... USBBS, Telnet BBS Guide. You should be able to come up with even more using the search engine of your choice. :) Man, I miss the old days sometimes. And how about the old VAX days too??
I remember starting my own BBS with firstclass when i was about 12 and calling it FART online....I came up with the acronym "Files And Remote Telecommunications". So stupid, but at 12 the name amused me endlessly. I even remember buying Courier V. Everything modems through the SYSOP program, so they were only $250 each instead of $500 that they cost retail....
Wow, that really brings back the memories. In the early 80's, in the bay area, I ran a BBS called -=Tiger's Grotto=-. I even remember the number! 415-329-0159. I ran it off an Apple II clone, a Franklin Ace 1000, seven floppy drives, and a Hayes 300baud micromodem. The system was called apple-net by John Pechachek. Eventually, I found a used Corvus 10MB external hard drive and a thundercard to tell time. Otherwise, users didn't have any time restriction. The Corvus drive was about the size of a large size XT box, and was really loud. Like an obnoxious turbine. I even advertised in the local BYTE magazine and to my amazement, people actually dialed it. Great fun. I remember a couple other BBS's in the bay area; The White House, and Pirates Bay. Pyroto Mountain was another favorite.
I just found my entire BBS, Quicksilver, in a cardboard box. It's on a 105MB Hard Card with an ISA bus. Not sure what to do with it, though I kind of hate to toss it. It's a FidoNet board complete with Binkleyterm and a horrednous batch file to make it all work--really taught me some batch tricks. Oh, well, a casualty of the Internet.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Operation. Overkill. ][.
Before Civ
Before Doom
Looong before WoW
This was our crack:
http://www.operationoverkill.com/
For those that don't know, this is "The original wastelands game." In a lot of ways, there are many "modern" games that could learn from the gameplay and user interface design. It was an excellent combination of nethack-style map navigation, narration, and turn-based combat. The funny thing is, one could say the same thing about the Fallout games, which are of course also "wastelands" games and have content as good as their interfaces and gameplay.
After playing OOII for a while, you really start to make mental images of the critters you meet and their surroundings. The narration is that good. Doom et al. could take a few pointers from the weapons. What sounds more intimidating: lighting gun, rocket launcher, and BFG, or Xendrix, Tevix-Bahn, and Raxhaven? Just imagining what these things might look like from their names and descriptions of their use in combat added a lot to the game. Especially when you splattered some skinless freak all over the desert with one of them.
One of the coolest combat features was that you could choose to base your combat accuracy on your ability to decimate the space bar on your keyboard at exactly the instant that a rapidly-moving line of dots went a random distance (a bit like timing your swing power in golf games). If you had a local ANSI terminal the thing was accurate even at 1200bps.
Anyway, enough reminiscing, go check it out.
-Blake
...as another BBS junkie from back in the day. =) Had a 2-node Renegade BBS in Northern California. Called my first board at 2am with my best friend because when my brother's friend showed us how to do it, every one of them were busy.
After it connected (my first recollection of the 2400 baud modem connection sound), it asked "What is your name: ". My friend and I looked at eachother with fright. What is this?? We put in "Beavis" (yes, that Beavis.)
Then it asked, "What is your LAST name: " We again looked at eachother, with more fear. Could it be we just hacked something? What dorks we were. =p We typed in "Smith".
Then it displayed it's user agreement, a page long with disclaimers and verification. We were so scared that we were connected to something that we weren't supposed to be, that we hung up, turned off the computer, and unplugged it (including the monitor). We spent the next hour talking about it.
That's what turned me into a techie. =) Man, I wish everyone could feel the way I felt in the BBS days. Of course, I'm sure there is an equivelent in everyone's life.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I always enjoyed the ANSI graphics better myself (the people who made pictures out of those colored blocks were so creative).
was trying out new software and new ways of doing things. Freeware was everywhere, and you could find new programs all the time. I liked Telix for a terminal program, because of its C-like scripting language. You needed a mail reader like SLMR or Bluewave and software for file transfers: xmodem, ymodem, zmodem, and I had a nifty automator for that written by the Byte Brothers.
In addition to the various online games mentioned, I had a cool one called Modem Wars that you played against someone else with a direct one to one dialup connection. It was liek a techie version of Stratego. Great fun.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Maybe some sort of combo discussion and directory service?
SYS 64738
I remember when Leech Z Modem came out. Man that lasted for a while!!!! Wouldn't affect your ratios at all.
obUseful: Anyone wishing to reconnect with BBS pals from "back in the day" should check out BBSmates.com. Not a lot of users in my old area code, but worth checking out.
//c.
//gs in about 1989 or so. In 1991 (I think that was the year), I got a 2400 baud modem for my birthday. Most people were upgrading to 2400 around this time, but there were still several 1200 (and even 300's) out there still.
I got my first computer in 1986, an Apple
Upgraded to an Apple
The Louisville, Kentucky BBS scene was fairly active. The BBSs became "homes away from home". As a geek in high school, it was a wonderful opportunity to find people like me, especially when they were all collected together in one place, and there were no embarrassing introductions needed.
The fact that you had a computer, a modem, and had found the BBS was proof you were worthy enough to be treated, at minimum, as "one of us."
I had my normal four or five that I would call every evening (and more often if I could). Watching discussions, checking my personal messages...
it was a whole other life. People were not judged on looks, on fashion, on anything like that. It was your typed word as who you were.
Louisville also had monthly gatherings, referred to as "The Meat". It was held the first Saturday of each month in the now defunct Galleria downtown. The first couple of times I went, I believe I had to have my parents drive me and pick me up. I have no idea what I told them I was going to be doing down there.
I slowly met some of the people I knew on the boards. Looking back now, I realize I was closer to those people in high school than my actual classmates. I even dated a girl for over a year that I met on a board.
In the fall of 1993 I started college, and got access to the Internet. As quickly as the BBS scene changed my life, it disappeared from my life. By the time I got nostalgic for those days, the boards I remembered were all gone.
-singularity (a.k.a. "Merlyn" around the Louisville scene back in the day)
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Ah, I remember cDc. I got suspended from school for printing "Desert Road Dick Disaster" in the school library and making the mistake of giving it to an acquaintance of mine, who then got caught and got me suspended. I emailed Deth Veggie about it, and he suggested I buy some cDc stickers and put them on my backpack. I wish I'd kept that email.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Those 256-color GIFs, heavily dithered though they might be, are still viewable with current machines. Remember .dl animations? Ah, back when we thought those were the shit...
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Was I the only one to make several accounts on each BBS and then sorta team up my guys to beat the crap out of others? Find some super fortified guy sleeping out in the middle of space, attack him over and over with all the fighters I had with different accounts until finally I come in with the basic ship and steal his with some loser account that's only been running for a few days. What a jerk eh? :-) Those were the days.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
www.textfiles.com for hours of "gphiles", bbs history, etc.
I'm reading it right now. I met Rob on one of the vintage computer forums I frequent (actually, it was http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/index.php ) and saw the tag in his .sig about his book, so I checked it out (you can read the first chapter in PDF format, from his website). I liked it and ordered the book directly from Rob. It cost a little more, but he autographed it for me.
If you lived through the BBS scene back in the early to mid 80's (and even later), then you owe it to yourself to read this book. I was a little bit older than Rob back in the early 80's, but we did all the things he talks about in his book.
A great trip down memory lane, to a simpler time that we will never have again.
No matter where you go... there you are.
I hope this isn't off topic.
But, is there a place to play Tradewars online? I would LOVE to play this game again, but have been out of luck in finding anything via google.
Thanks!
The first machine that I had that was electronic (I had built a mechanical computer previously) was a Commodore VIC-20. It took about a month before I had a C64 and was running a BBS out of the house. It was EBBS and it was written by Ed Parry. I ran EBBS for eons - first on that C64 and then on a C128 with all the bells and whistles and a 10 MB HDD (that was huge in those days). When the USRobotics 9600 surfboards came out, I got one of those. Eventually I had EBBS-PC running on a 10 Mhz Turbo-XT clone machine but I was running the BBS offering Amiga files. AT the time I was running the largest Amiga BBS west of the Mississippi River.
Later on, I dropped the Amiga support and started running Searchlight BBS software on a 386-24 and then a 386-40 machine.
It was fun in those days. The BBS was up 24/7 and I could chat with any of the users any time that I wanted.
I wrote some doorware for Searchlight BBS, but then moved on to internet access. I miss the old days so much that I just downloaded FreeDOS 1.0 and am going to see if I can find that free Turbo Pascal compiler that I used to write my first software that generated any income.
Nice memories of stacked Commodore drives, EGA monitors, and stack and stacks of Borland manuals lying around the living room. Ohhh.. I'll need TASM too!
2. Teenager turns 16 and gets car
3. +++ATH0
--
You weren't a real BBS if your AC
wasn't one of the 35 reachable by
PC PURSUIT
My buddy had an Apple IIe with a 300 baud modem. We called one BBS that would say "300 baud detected... F*** OFF L0SER!" I had an Atari 1200XL, and when I finally got a modem (1200 baud) the first thing we did was call that BBS to see what it was about--and it turned out to be a damn COMMIE 64 BOARD!!! I taught myself how to program in Turbo Pascal by modding WWIV BBS. Caveman and Food fight forever! There was one local BBS called "The Swamp". The SysOp was Swampman. They were one of the first multi-line BBS's. Many years later (post internet age) I found out later he had an address you could telnet to and it connected to the old BBS.
...apparently you also missed out on the phreaking culture too. $500 phone bill? No respected BBS'er actually paid phone bills like that. They used 2600 or another tool to call long distance when needed.
It's sad, but true. On the positive side, we did learn a LOT about how things work.
...we're all socially-inept BBS'ers now!!
The funny thing is, everything bad (locally) that happened in the 80's that you didn't read about in the papers, only in BBS posts, happened again this century, but only only-time BBS'ers knew. Like people going to jail for removing wiretaps from their phone lines...
I recall configuring Procomm Plus to continually dial a set of 10-12 BBS numbers, sometimes it would connect on the first, othertimes it would cycle through all of them for nearly an hour. On those BBS systems you'd find chat, games, and other interactive features that I seldom used. I instead used them as a source for shareware (games, utilities, apps), digital art, and ascii art. You'd have BBS systems bragging about the number of CD-ROMs they had available (or perhaps they'd say they had over 2GB of downloads). Downloads took forever and I don't remember if you could actually continue downloads that were broken by something like a relative calling in. Sometimes I'd browse through jokes, quotes, and other trivial content. There was a time I scoured some systems for Pascal programs that I could compile and run. One time, I read that I could hit for the meaning of life and I fell for it.
That's about all I remember...
I keep thinking that I should check it out some day. I never even knew it existed back in the day.
It is still around:
www.firstclass.com
These days it is a groupware suite. Email, calendaring, conferencing and so-forth. It is a quite spiffy alternative to Outlook and Notes. Servers and clients are available for Linux, OS X, and Windows.
If it ever had that "BBS Feel", it hasn't since at least FirstClass 4 (up to 8.x now). It seems to be the most popular in education markets.
TproBBS SysOps represent. 612 fo life.
For those of you who never saw a BBS, check out http://www.bagledog.com/wordpress/wp-login.php. It gives a pretty authentic example of the BBS experience.
Ahhh nostalgia.... Here's my story, after I picked up a 286 computer with an EGA monitor and a whopping 210 megs of hard disk space off of a building company when their power flickered, I changed out the power supply and I was online shortly with a 2400 baud modem. I was 12 at the time (1993). I found the Southeastern Information Depot (SID) and downloaded a list of atlanta area BBS's (Hacker's Layer, the Brick Wahl, etc). After that, it was onto some hacking and warez BBS's. I stayed on those until internet services weren't pay by the minute. Well I didn't feel old until just now :-) Anyone else frequent Atlanta area BBS's back in the day?
My first BBS was a close to stock Renegade system that could only be up during evening hours (10pm to 7am I think), because I only had one line to use. I remember someone paged me (I hadn't shut that feature off) and I got in a lot of trouble with my parents.
I ran quite a few systems after that. Some Renegade, one was Oblivion/2 and another Iniquity. They went down for quite a few reasons too.. one went down because a user got me to run a modified version of f-prot virus scanner that screwed my MBR.. and I didn't know about fdisk /mbr then..
My favorite part of BBSing was the art scene.. with all of the ansi groups like iCE and ACiD.. I was even in a couple of them, euphoria and SEPTiC.. the only more well known one I was a part of was Dark Illustrated. But it was a great time having all of the art packs in the file bases, and the messages full of flame wars and I had some message nets to some places where the scene was big (416/905 was big in Canada).
There were some really exceptional artists.. and I have a lot of really good memories.
A lot of them are still around today. But it's much different now. I was writing my own BBS software near the end of the age. In fact, if I remember correctly, my last BBS (called Oxide) was the last in my area code of 519. It wasn't art.. in fact the file bases were never really used. I had 10's of thousands of messages, mostly flames and fart jokes but it was good all the same.
And since a lot of people speak of how old some of their equipment was.. I started with a 2400 baud modem, worked a paper route to afford a 14.4.. and then got a 33.6 when they were new technology. That lasted many years until I bought a US Robotics 56k for Oxide.. dunno where it is now though.. :)
In fact, I remember when I first realized that :) was a smiley face. :)
Have a good one.
I didn't start my BBS days with an 8bit machine like many folks in their early thirties did, but I had friends that had the Commodores, and the Ataris and the Apples and even the Coleco Adams with tape drives.
;)
My first machine was an XT clone with 640k, no hard drive, two 360k 5 1/4 floppy drives, CGA graphics. I had a 2400 baud internal modem. It was good times - started off using Procom Plus - really nice text UI and funky sounds too
Then I discovered Telix and soon after, DesQview 2.11 I think. DesQview allowed true multitasking under DOS (beating the system that Windows31 used, hands down) and Telix was actually DesQview aware, meaning I could get decent performance without screwing up the screen...
If a DOS program wasn't DesQview aware, one of two things would happen, either it would run very very slowly, or it would trash the screen even while in the other applications. Telix rocked, and I could actually do other stuff in DOS, work on my homework in Turbo Pascal and download stuff at the same time. This old version of DesQview could also handle a graphic app, but it would suspend it instead of keeping it running when you switched, and it was always fullscreen.
I remember the thrill of zmodem auto-download and multiple transfers. For a while, we were all using y-modem batch, lol, wow, the memories...I haven't said "y-modem batch" in ages...jmodem was popular for a while, faster than zmodem I guess, but zmodem was just too damn handy not to use.
I lived in the Phoenix, Arizona area and I was a co-sysop for a while. Lots of cool BBS systems, one called WW4 was popular for a while. I miss that "life".
I remember the BBS days.. spending days trying to get ahold of the sysop to get a couple extra d/l credits to get that 1mb game that *just* came out on his BBS, uploading whatever junk I could find to get more, then finally getting enough credits and not having enough connection time to actually download that 1mb file and getting disconnected, then the next day trying to get ahold of the sysop again to see if I could get unlimited time for the day to d/l that 1mb file, then not being able to continue the d/l, so having to start over, then 'oh, i need the phone, can i use the phone for just 2 minutes...' after getting almost all of that 1mb game. DAMN YOU DUKE NUKEM and Monster Bash! :)
.
I remember back in the mid 90's running a BBS. There was this one guy who would type 1 letter every 10 seconds or so. I would watch him play LORD each day and the minutes would expire before he was done with his turns. One day I saw him online and broke into game chat [SYSOP HAS BROKEN IN FOR CHAT]. I asked why he typed so slow. The man was paralized from the neck down and would type on the keyboard with a pencil in his mouth. After that day, I gave him 1440 minutes of access so he did not have to rush to play his turns. He told me a story about how he had dropped his pencil one day after his sister immediately left. He would just sit there sitting and watching the screen as his minutes ticked by with nothing he could do until she came home a few hours later. He found this to be a funny BBS story. The man gave me $20 a month for tying up the node. Never saw or knew him in person... but I was definately happy that my system was able to make someone like that forget about his condition and allow him to interact without people looking at him with pity.
No shit.
Was 16/17sh in high school, met a woman who was 10 years older than me (25/26sh). (.. and yes, I know she had committed statutory rape but she was hot as hell, and I was the one that instigated it). I remember the huge parties we would have with a bunch of my friends , we would get together.. work on setting up a new BBS using one of our phone lines, or a old 80x86 that my grandma gave me from her small office after she had upgraded...).
I remember when I tried to get a MFM drive through the Security Screening in Las Vegas airport flying home my grandma again gave me, which we used as the storage device for our 28k dialup dos based BBS. 8BBS (Shamelessly stolen from another BBS name that I read in a book which I have long forgotten the source) was our BBS.. I even remember getting pulled into the Principals office for having the "Mad Rudabegas Bomb Handbook". Shit, I would of been sent to Juvi for years for doing that now I am sure.
After years of parties, drinking and even dabbling in drugs, we all seemed to make it through the 1989-1993 BBS years reasonbly unharmed and most of us now live surprisingly productive lives. Eventually my days of BBSing where brought down by wide-spread Internet access.. most of us migrated to ISCABBS when we where able to get low cost Internet dial-up. I attribute 100% of the experience I had in the BBS days to lead me into a great career doing software development.
Just yesterday I bumped into a guy who has got to represent, in my mind, the hardest of the oldschool hardcore:
He was playing MAngband via his BBS. Damn! That's so many layers of oldschool I feel like I need to go stand in the corner. And for some reason, this meant he didn't have a shift key available. Chaos hounds without being able to run?! Yikes!
First post on /., all because of this story and the memories brought back to me by BBSs. I'm not a guru programmer like many here, and my time in the BBS world was limited to a handful of years near the end, but BBSs still had a profound effect on me that I will never forget. It was BBSs that got me interested in tech in the first place, as in the early 90's a friend showed me a multi-line Worldgroup BBS and I figured that - as a shy kid - it would be a great way to meet women. (boy was I wrong on that count!) Still, I met many of the best friends I've ever had on the local BBSs in my area, and even met several girlfriends on the local boards. I cut my techie teeth on BBSs, finding all sorts of softwares to experiment with that opened up a whole new world to me. While I never ran my own board, I was a co-sysop on several local boards and did ansi art menus for at least six local boards in my day.. and because of the interest BBSs awoke in me, I was one of the first BBSers in my area to fork out dough I did not have to get myself a shell account when the Internet started gaining ground in the mid 90's.
I love the Internet, but I miss BBSs more than words can convey. I owe a lot to them, and it's a window of time that can never be repeated or duplicated. Those of us lucky enough to have experienced it experienced a slice of tech history, and I for one am glad to have been a small part of it.
You can mod me down now for my sentimental and uninformative comments now.. just had to get this off my chest.
one of the few articles where I actually read the majority of posts.
I miss the BBS days hard. I think the world could benefit from a return to those days. That being said, I know everyone and their dog spooned LORD at night, but not I... I much preferred The Pit, and Land of Devestation. Multiplayer goodness. You could build forts, move around a big map (in real time even, sorta). Sysops could complete reconfigure the map, create new towns, scripts, etc. Its a shame it didn't catch on more. In all honesty it completely surpassed LORD in all aspects.
Its honestly the precursor to the modern MMORPG, except its fun and didn't feel like grinding.
ProCOMM Hayes 9600 baud XMODEM, YMODEM, wow ZMODEM is fast! FidoNET ah memories we've moved from war dialing to war driving heh.
You can find out more about my 'efforts' here, and some photos of the efforts here.
Smegma.
What seems to be completely missed is the fact that only "phreaking" enabled 15 year old kids to trade 880KB Amiga game images over 2400bps modem connections, back when international calls cost 2 dollars per minute.
SEGWAY.
Made quite an impression at the last Defcon.
The latest Slashdot meme.
I was born in Poland in 1980. I remember finding first computer magazine in my life (it was called "Bajtek") when I was nine - I have read through the walkthrough for "Three weeks in Paradise" and thought I didn't understand the rules of the game (there was a map for the game, so I thought it was a sort of board game). I got some explanations and fell in love with the idea. I was then reading on about games in other computer magazines, watching the photos of Lords of Midnight and l'Aigle d'Or in French computer magazines that my parents got - and I kept asking my parents to buy me one of these wonderful machines. Occasionally, my Dad would take me to his work, where I could play some Amstrad games (hey, Ghosts'n'Goblins!).
My dream took quite a long time to realize, since my parents didn't really have much money (plus take into account the fact the official exchange rates between Polish zloty and American dollars, as well as the availability of even 8bit computers, remember that it was still '89). On the funny note, I can vaguely remember that in the eighties the Polish radio would broadcast ZX Spectrum programs and games, so that anyone with tape recorder could record it on the tape and use. How about that, American imperialists? We shared everything in the communist period (tee hee), and come to think of it, one might consider it to be a rough equivalent of the government warez (or BBS). Gives all new meaning to the term 'radio connection'.
I finally got my first computer in 1991 - it was ZX Spectrum + with a tape recorder. Games took five minutes to load, and the loading would often crash, since it was a cheap, Polish tape recorder and read the data with a little bit of liberty. Sometimes if you touched the cable, the game would abort loading before the end. My younger brother even got beaten by me once, when he crashed loading of Draconus (I feel ashamed even today when I recall it). Of course in '92 most of my friends would already have Amigas. Words can't describe it how gorgous looking these games appeared to me back then (Wolfchild, Moonstone, Swiv, Agony). However, instead of just playing my ugly (by comparison) ZX games, I took to BASIC programming, so there was something good in the situation.
Well, things got quicker after that period. AT 286 with monochrome Hercules (I learned a lot about PCs back then, some of it trying to emulate CGA on Hercules to play games) - Colorado, Targhan, Leisure Suit Larry. Then 386DX 40MHz - Wolfenstein, Doom, my first 3D arts. Oh, on another funny note my first opinion on Doom was "Nah, it's just a sci-fi clone of Wolfenstein 3D, it won't catch". Talk about wrong. Then my highschool (had AMD K-6 200MHz with Riva 128ZX, man, was that thing powerful) and my first contact with the internet : 33.6 modem which was our only window to the world (for all of our school, remember). I remember first IRC sessions, first FTP session (I think it was sunnet.se), Battle Angel Alita covers download... And first BBSs too!
It is all a history now, but these were great times and we had incredible sense of power, forcing this crude (but then they appeared almost almighty) devices to do what we wanted them to do. And then the feeling of being connected to the world, even through an old copper phone cable, it was something special. I think I am not the only one that was a little behind the global trends, but nevertheless the beginning of information era was a great time to all of us involved.
you should have seen jason scott aka "sketch cow" bite it on a segway at defcon this yr. He was doing laps in the lounge area when all of a sudden it lunges forward and jason goes over the front.....it was awesome!!!
Though i know the real story behind some of the incidents - I used to work for PRESTEL/Telecom Gold doing billing systems (I had L6 on all the Telecom Gold systems) and still see some of the PRESTEL people ocasionaly
oh and I got a mention the dedications to the book
You will never get to heaven with an Ak 47... But A Zu 30 is good for Low Flying Cherubim
I am trying to build a hard disk image of a DOS PC from 1987 with all the software and versions from that time. See http://cyberreviews.skwc.com/dos87/
I miss the days of the BBS era also. Anyone remember forum hacks, like VisionX? If anyone is interested, below is a coupled of good links.
Remember ACiD and iCE ANSI groups? http://www.acid.org/ http://www.ice.org/index.php?display=pack&packID=1 99207
I am not trying to promote or anything, but I got a great movie called BBS: The Documentary. It is a great 4 disc set documenting the history of the BBS scene. Their link is below. http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/
I find it funny that the developer's motto is "Providing Tomorrow's Ideas...Today."
You can find a list of BBSs that have telnet access here.
I would set my alarm for 3:30am to get up and re-start my Tele-Arena auto leveling script after the system clean-up kicked me offline. Then I would reset my alarm for about an hour earlier than I would for getting ready so I could bank my gold and try to rob the other auto levelers who were less willing than me to get up early and bank. Which, of course, reminds me of how much fun it was to give the annoying kiddies a copy of your leveling script (I promise I didn't modify it, dude) that would, when it detected Sparkster saying "ATM!" it would automaticaly type "give sparkster 500 G^M" "/cls^M". Ahh the old days...
Anyone else read that as "every wanking hour"?
Anybody who used to download porn line-by-line at 2400 bps knows full well what a "wanking hour" was.
As a modemer from the OKC area in the 80's and 90's, I am so buying this book. I have since moved, so I won't be getting it hand-delivered, darn it. I do believe Jack Flack and I were in different circles, though. While I had a CoCo (much better than the C64, of course (as he mentioned, we had MCIBTYC long before PC and Mac did)), I tended to flock around the Apple (GBBS) boards. I really would like to sit and chat with him though, I'm sure we could remember some board names, and if I scan my saved user lists, I may even find him, who knows?
All I know is, just reading the first chapter has taken me down memory lane. For Riverwind. For Raist. For Jubal. For Random. For Moira. For Bigaxe. For The Four Fluffs. And even for Lexicon. Love and miss you all.
My, but those were good times.
The Ace aka
Ace & Animal aka
Stile
And thanks to Jubal's Hollow, many other names. Of which I still have the list in a text file.
I once belonged to several BBSs back in the Eighties. The one I frequented the most was probably Lynzie's Motherboard. I met some nice, weird, interesting people on that BBS, and THEN they formed a bowling league! That was inventive and a perfect way to further personalize the online interactions. I even met Jamie (James) Cromwell and his wife and "Larry, Darryl, and his other brother Darryl" (William Sanderson et al from "Newhart") in that bowling alley during the league. Them was good days.
I remember that! oh man.. that reminds me. My first time logging into a BBS. It asked my my first name which i provided, then it asked for my last name which is found in the dictionary. It automatically assumed that I was trying to fraud it and it said something to the extent of .."only REAL names are accepted!" and then disconned me! i was like WHAT!? that bastard!
Are BBS's still up and running? Id dial into one just for memories :) im sure i wouldnt be the only one out there....
*Sigh* I used my Commodore 64 from around 1984 when I got it until 1994 when I went off to college. My father's friend used to bring me hundreds (around 400 in total I think) of floppies of cracked and trained games and software. I loved those times. It was difficult to find software in stores near me, so the disk collection was my main source. All I had to do was spend my buy empty floppies.
One of those diskettes was a Q-Link disk, which I had previously read about in Run Magazine-- which portrayed it as a virtual world where you create a graphical avatar and interact with other people. I begged my dad for a modem, but he refused stating I could not have one until I start paying for my own phone bill-- understandable considering most dial in services where long-distance call and would become expensive just from the phone call alone.
Upon moving off to college (1994), Drexel urged us all to buy the first line of PowerMacs and their was a campus wide network where, during the first year or two, most people shared all their games and software. Strangely enough, being able to try games for free lead me to buying a lot of sequels in stores. Most dorm-mates would play the free Beta version of Bungie's Marathon, their first first-person shooter, I believe. And the shareware app Broadcast was used to freely message around the dorm. I even recall thinking it would be great to write an app that would allow you to message across the internet and not just an Appletalk network-- this was about a year or two before I stumbled across ICQ and later AOL Instant Message. My theory of great ideas: at the moment you have a great idea, a dozen other people have just had that same idea, and whoever implements it first wins. (I guess I lost there in this case.)
Of course, the year I went off to college seems to be the year that the internet began penatrating the popular lexicon. Anyone remember the annoying but catchy auto-by-tel commercial? (And they still exist!) But I wonder, by not being allowed to own a modem before '94, what might I have missed out on? I guess I'll never fully know.
Still, remembering all of this makes me smile.
--Dave Romig, Jr.
P.S. As I recall from articles I read, the long-time AOL screen name limit of 10 characters was a carry over from Quantum Link on the C64. The screen was 40 characters wide and thus 4 screen names could be displayed at once.
Read DEAD.DOC (the history of modem users in 5 parts)
It's well worth googling for.
Andy Out!
BLOTTO BOX?
I was severly interested in seeing how that might work....
Proof of concept only of course.
Wtf...@)($%%
Dropped carrier...
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Take it from someone who was there. Actually, there was a particular box of cereal that offered the perfect whistle as the "prize"...
It wasn't ever necessary to purse your lips and whistle as such. Some people used boxes to gen the tone, but when you start whipping out a device and attaching it to a payphone, passers-by tend to look at you oddly. We went lo-tech to avoid notice. Several of us were also musicians and it's not that hard to create a whistle that will produce a specific tone.
2 more cents,
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank
I was involved in an inter-BBS BRE league. One of the BBSs that had allied with us broke the alliance and started to send massive attacks our way. I decided to do something about it.
I found out that every couple of hours, the other BBS sent all of their attack packets out. I dialed into the BBS and logged in immediately before the packets were supposed to go out. I was automatically logged off so that the attacks could go out. My next strategy was to dial in and sit at the logon prompt. It timed out and disconnected me. I hit pay dirt with this strategy...I dialed into the logon prompt and had a script running that would enter and delete a couple of keystrokes every 15 seconds. I used to tie up their board overnight so that none of their players could get in and none of their attacks could go out. When I dropped the attack, incoming attacks from all of the enemies and from their former ally smashed them and a few nights of this took them right out of the running for victory.
Hey all -- Rob O'Hara here, author of Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie. Right off the bat, let me say thanks to Jason Scott for the positive and fair I think he was fair in his assessment. He was right to state that there are a few rough spots throughout the book. Although I do have a degree in Journalism, there's no doubt a few of those bumps could have been smoothed out with an editor's assistance.
... and yet I almost missed my wife's birthday last year. When someone mentions the name of an old Commodore game to me, sometimes I can still come up with the number I had written on the disk label. With 700 disks I could usually remember where any particular disk was, and yet I can never remember if the microwave at work cooks microwave popcorn in two (or is it three) minutes. My brain's full of nostalgia -- overflowing, perhaps.
A lot of people have compared Jason's BBS Documentary with my book, although to me they are two completely opposite approaches on the same subject. Jason attempted to document the entire history of BBSes by interviewing hundreds of people. Through the eyes of many, his viewers can deduce what it must've been like for individual users. My book takes the opposite approach -- by telling one guy's BBS experience, you can then multiply that story and get a feeling for what it must've been like for other people in other area codes. As I state in the book, there was nothing particularly special about my area code (405) and my memories aren't any more imporant than any of yours -- I just wrote mine down.
The greatest thing about this whole experience has been reading all the comments that have been either e-mailed directly to me or posted here on Slashdot. There is something reassuring about the thought that halfway across the country, someone else was experiencing the exact same things I was as a teenager. There are so many stories and experiences that we all shared, which is incredible considering we didn't talk! One that has been mentioned to me multiple times is, "remember when sysops used to take their phone off the hook Christmas Day so that they wouldn't have to deal with all the kiddies who got new modems from Santa?" It's those things I get a real kick out of, things that seem to have developed simultaneously across the country (or even world). I also love all the comments from all the "first time posters" this has brought out. It's great!
I don't know why BBS memories are so vivid to all of us, but they are. You would be amazed at the details that come out in the e-mails I've received. People rattle off their FidoNet node like it was their social security number. I still remember dozens of BBS phone numbers
As to those who thing that 33 years old is too young to publish one's memoirs, I completely agree. "Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie" isn't "the complete memoirs of Rob O'Hara" -- instead, it's a collection of my experiences and memories of my local BBS scene. I feel fairly confident that there will not be any future earth-shattering developments in my local BBS scene, and that it's a pretty safe story to document "in the past tense" now. There would be no advantage I can see to delaying the documentation and publication of these stories. And as for the "why are glorifying an old, pirating weasel," comments, well, guilty as charged. My book is a time capsule of that era, and as Jason mentioned in his review, not all the stories are pretty. There are more than a couple in the book that I'm not proud of, but I felt compelled to include the good and the bad. I wanted to portray modeming how I remembered it. Yes, there were phreakers, and people trading codez, and cc#s, and all that stuff, and that's all in the book. When retelling some of those tales I hoped to document it without glorifying it. So am I proud to say I stole a lot of people's software back in the day? No. But did it happen? Yes. Would I find the humor in finding a torrent of my own book? Probably. Karma's a bitch.
Thank you all for all the kind words. If you e
Me too. So I started a group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/ansi/
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Your list was my equivalent of "Google" from 1988-1993. Thank you for your excellent work!!
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Speaking of which -- remember when ".com" meant "executable program" and not "company website"? I almost forgot.
I ran a BBS, WWIV heavily modded, which was telnet-accessible and thus had about 800 users. It got up to over 250 messages a day. This is a lot for a single-access BBS. Offline readers helped multi-task things by allowing multiple people to be typing up their messages at once, because they were offline.
Find the last state of the BBS here: On Earth As It Is In Hell ... As It Is On The Internet.
Also, I have some BBS-related links saved: http://del.icio.us/ClintJCL/BBS. BBSMates is truly the best.
Anyway, I actually started on a dumb terminal with a NON-Hayes compatible 2400bps modem. This was government issued [Dad was an analyst at the postal service headquarters -- I grew up on money earned from coding in BASIC, for chrissakes!]. DEC VT-220 terminal. Most of the BBSes were 300bps or 2400bps and plenty of Commodore BBSes were around.
The damn modem could store only 10 numbers, so you had to manually type in a lot of BBS numbers to dial. And it wasn't "ATDT", it was "Control-T". Non-Hayes, remember? Of course, I couldn't download because THERE WAS NO OPERATING SYSTEM OR DISK DRIVE. Just a monitor, keyboard, a modem.
A friendly sysop of the RE BBS gave me a free 1200bps modem for the PC, and the downloading started. It never stopped. (Seriously.. Not a day goes by that I don't download at least 2 gigs.)
I ultimately met my wife that way, by determining via local BBS that we went to the same school, and meeting and hooking up in a semi-normal way: I invited her over to see how much better Telemate is than Q-Modem. 14.5 yrs later, we're still happy, except now our 2 computers are in the same room, and I run a blog instead of a BBS. In fact, a blog with RSS comment feeds and active reader-participants is the closest feeling I've had since running a BBS; it took us 13 years to get back to where we started.
Mike Focke was the Google of 1990. His BBS list was the only way to KNOW where to start (assuming you had the list . . .) And the phonenumber file used by Telemate? It was flat text. I started putting personal numbers in it. I still use it today. It no longer obeys the telemate .FON file format, BUT IT IS THE SAME FILE I'VE BEEN EDITING SINCE THE 1980S. And thus, I even have the phone numbers of girls I knew in middle school. Quite useless, but it's on my thumbdrive and on a [password-proteced] webpage, of course. I don't have a cellphone so this is useful for me.
I fucking love technology. It's the politics related to technology that scares the crap out of me. I talk about these various issues, sometimes, at my blog . . . [shameless plug]
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com