From TradeWars Museum
BBSes
A New York Times journalist named Katie Hafner wrote a book and long article about how utterly
important The Well is in Net history. (As an "online community" of writers and thinkers you had to pay to
join, it let you avoid the embarrassment of encountering people who knew anything about computers.)
Oh, "Small BBSes were around" in the 1980s and early 1990s, "but they had about them the whiff of the
lonely nerd's hangout," she sniffs.
Reader Email"I met the first girl I ever kissed on a BBS. Her dad was the SysOp..." More ›
With that she moves on, casually dumping whole universes of 2400 baud hobbyists back into the
Recycle Bin of history.
Now, it would be a reckless assault on the integrity of the Times' Circuits section to suggest Hafner
doesn't speak from first-hand experience.
Consider this scenario: The year is 1991. After becoming hooked on "Tetris" and hence personal
computing, someone turns Katie Hafner on to the presence of a Bulletin Board System. The idea comes as a
revelation: another computer your computer can phone up and converse with.
Perhaps her first board is called "The Volcano," or "Red Sector A" (like the Rush song), or even the
"Pirate's Cove," as much a place of iniquity as the name implies. When Hafner dials up, glittering ANSI
graphics scroll up and paint a mosaic of a winking Bluebeard on the terminal screen, lighting her way into
a seductive den of illegally-copied software.
She must not have been impressed.
The Bulletin Board System is no longer with us. It was a local establishment, like a favorite pub at
the end of the street. It was lovingly maintained by a SysOp, some guy who left his computer on all day
so you could call up. It was mouseless and didn't have any of what you'd call graphics, though a
generation of ANSI graffiti artists left vivid pictures made from simple shapes.
ASCII conceptual art gets its snooty acclaim at Museums of Modern Art. ANSI depictions of badass
samurai are still waiting for their exhibit.
You called up the BBS and read messages left by locals, comparing milkshakes at local restaurants
or arguing about the Gulf War.
You could also hop to other systems via rickety networks with names like "FidoNET" and "IceNet." On
a handful of computers sporadically tossing data packets back and forth across the United
States, biology students argued with creationists, X-Men fans hammered out their first FAQ files, and
perfectly normal outcasts were getting in touch with each other for the first time.
The World Wide Web, on the other hand, is just a bunch of menus.
Sure, you can post on a forum at the enormous corporate website of your choice. It's not the same. Even
if someone notices that you left your idea about Mullah Omar on the CNN.com site, you won't cross
paths again. And when you loiter around MelanieGriffith.com, you do so in obscurity.
On a BBS, however, it was vital to know who was on and who had called up in your absence, if only to find
out who was holding up the phone line. The SysOp, who saw on his monitor everything you saw, might
suddenly split the screen in half to chat about whatever you were doing.
He would use complete sentences. This was before people had agreed to Roll On The Floor Laughing.
Even the word "e-mail" still had the ring of insider slang.
The enduring dream of the teenage BBSer was that late one night he might check on Line 2 to find out an
actual female person had dialed into this modem Batcave. Split a chat screen with her, and who knew what
could happen next?
If Katie Hafner wants to call that midnight modem marauder a lonely nerd, so be it. On the other
hand, Katie Hafner would almost certainly have gotten her [butt] kicked at "TradeWars 2002."
After Day 1 she would have logged on to this game of galactic trading companies to find her small space
cruiser adrift in sector 627, and the screen would have read, in blinking, humiliating blue letters:
*** ADMIRAL PICARD KILLED YOU! ***
I wish I could say it was my disruptor beam she caught, but it probably would have been
Thunderchicken's. Thunderchicken was the greatest player of Door Games in the Ventura County area. You prayed
that on one of his slow days, his 45th level gladiator in "The Pit" or "Legend of the Red Dragon" didn't
take an interest in slaughtering you with his Magic Bow like his name was Odysseus.
His secret was never missing a day. You had only so many turns per day on a Door Game. Calculating and
brutally efficient in his thinking, Thunderchicken put them to murderous good use.
I met Thunderchicken at the BBS barbecue.
"Look, Thunderchicken showed up," someone said. I turned and saw the fattest man I had ever seen,
lurching across the park towards the gathering.
At a BBS user meeting, a 15-year-old could hang out with bearded, working-class dudes, a Robert
Heinlein-reading 'Nam vet, or a chain-smoking British lady named MsJuge who invited the 15-year-olds over to her
house to drink beer. Everyone called each other by nicknames. You could play touch football with
Rigger, a shady individual in his 20s who used to design movie sets, around whom rumors swirled that he
dealt drugs and once shot at a cop. You wondered if someone you flamed would show up.
Then, one day, you realized everyone was talking about the Internet.
As time passed, newsgroups, then the Web came and seduced everyone. The astonishment of being
able to talk to some Swedish or Ukranian person without long distance fees made it all the less
compelling to call up your BBS and see whether anyone left a funny auto-message.
Postings on the boards thinned, the battlegrounds of "The Pit" turned silent as Roman ruins, and
public-domain programs lay unused beyond menus the color of gun metal, waiting for downloads that never came.
There were a million things to see and do on the Internet, where a golden age of information was
dawning.
But computing would never be so local again.
— John Gorenfeld (john@flakmag.com)
