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.
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 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.
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 have this urge to share my favorite (or, at least top 3) Slashdot post of all times:
Cor! I remember reading it the first time.
I dunno which is funnier, the post or me actually having met the kind of personality which would have been the user. A few times. One now owns and runs his father's chain of pharmacies. That was 25 years ago. Come to think of it... I wonder if he's behind any of the spam I get these days.
I AM SCUDER. I WANT PRIVILEDGE ACESS
Why do you need a privileged account?
BECAUSE I AM SCUDER AND I WILL WALE ON YOU IF YOU DON'T
You're crazy, who are you?
I'M THE BEST PROGRAMER ON THE SYSTEM
right...
I AM AND I'LL PROVE IT I'LL CRASH SYSTEM!!!
The sad thing is he was pretty good at writing spoof login programs and had several student account numbers and passwords. We eventually had to have the campus police escort him out of the building and ban him from the computer labs.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
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.
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.
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.
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