💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 2-10.gmi captured on 2024-07-09 at 01:51:17. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

What a BBS Is

(CW: discussion of assault and sexual assault)

Spectres of What Came Before (re: "Reverberations of What Came Before" by winter)

This entry is in response to Nat's thoughtful post on my recent writings about the smolweb, HTML journals, and reaching back. And I want to respond to one paragraph in particular. Nat writes,

BBS, IRC and even web forums all feel kind of mysterious to me. Most of the people in my life probably wouldn't even really know what a BBS is. I only know vaguely. This thing you log into every once in a while. But like, you have to call it? With the landline? My parents got rid of their landline around the time I reached high school. I tried reading Cyberville by Stacy Horn a while back about an online community called Echo which I understood as being a BBS, but the author kind of just assumes you know exactly what that means.

That's entirely fair; BBSs really encompassed a weird moment in time, reaching their zenith in the microcomputer era. This was the era of the 300, 1200, 2400 bps (bits per second) modem. If this seems slow, it's because it was. But slow compared to what? At the time, copper phone lines were the limiting factor. There were new tricks. Modems got slightly faster. But cable and fiber were years off.

I almost missed this time entirely. I caught it on its dying edge, as "online" shifted meaning, from literally "on the [phone] line" to something larger, more spacious, and ever-expanding. But I have a rough idea of when I called my first BBS - sometime around the end of the eighth grade. I would have been 13 years old. I had a very old computer - it would've been state of the art in the mid 80s, but almost a decade later, it was a relic. And I didn't have a modem. But my friends did. They had faster computers (a 386! a 486!), and modems, fast ones (14.4 kbps), which to me were these mysterious peripherals that jacked into the wall with curly cords and connected you to other computers. I didn't quite understand. But that was all about to change, quickly.

In August 1995, newly caught up in this world, I got permission from my parents to spend some savings on a modem. There was a mom-and-pop computer shop a ten minute drive from the house. I biked over with my friends, put down $30, and got a used Supra 2400 bps modem. I took it home. I read the manual a few times. Figured out what I needed to do. I adjusted jumpers, physical jumpers, to set the COM port and IRQ. I set the values in my CONFIG.SYS. After a few failed attempts, I got DOS booting without error. I installed the software that came on the 5.25" floppies. ProComm Plus. This was enough to get started. I had a list of a few BBSs, on paper!, from my friends. I started calling.

I can't stress enough that this was life-altering. I think it was always understood that I was a computer nerd, but I didn't really have any outlet for it before. I played DOS games. I wrote long, awful, self-insert fantasy novels in WordPerfect. But that was it. And BBSs changed that.

For three years I called BBSs every day. I'd play games, download utilities and programs and whatever else. What's 2400 bps like? Slow, its stated rate a best-case scenario. I still remember that on that modem, under the best conditions, using ZModem, I could download around 640 KB in an hour.

Yeah.

But here's what you did: opened your terminal program (I'd eventually prefer my cracked copy of Telix 3.21). Opened your BBS list. Tried to call a few. Depending on the time of day, you might get a lot of busy signals. I learned quickly that I could get up early, 5:30, 6:00 am, and I could call whatever I wanted. So I called them before school, I called them after school, and before I went to bed. I was in deep.

But what is a BBS? A system, running on someone's computer, that you dial or ssh into. Back then, only the former. You could create an account, post and read messages, download files, play online games. Mostly, the sysops (systems operator, the admin) were hobbyists, just someone who paid the phone company an extra $50/month (or more!) for a dedicated line for the board. The system was very likely to be running on some older computer in a closet or side room. And every one was different. Every BBS was unique.

Oh, they all ran one of a handful of different packages - where I lived, the most common were Maximus, WWIV, Renegade, Wildcat!, and later, Iniquity. But you could configure them in different ways. Create custom displays for each screen. You might disable file transfers, or games (the messages-only boards were clearly for the adults). Your look and feel, what message areas you put in, what games you had, those gave your board its vibe. There were general, run-of-the-mill boards. There were warez boards, occult boards, Amiga and Linux user groups. Any weirdo or nerd could start their own BBS. Many did.

And there were message networks, which let you send messages to, and receive messages from, faraway boards, each of them a node in a shaky network; and this was handled by a series of long-distance calls made by your board, every day, or roughly so. In the dying days of BBSs there were even email-BBS gateways. Send someone an email at tnet.bluethun.com, and they'd (eventually - again, a day or two) be able to see it on their board. I had one of these, and used it for several years. It didn't matter how old my computer was, if I dialled in via ProComm Plus or Telix, I could see it. That was the beauty of it, and the reason I love text, which I will never abandon. The slow flow of bits over a modem. It was early and it was janky and it was exciting.

My friends and I called a handful of boards. It's hard to be active on many of them regularly; I might call twenty unique boards over the course of a month, but I was really only active on half a dozen. And as a group, we played networked, turn-based, inter-BBS games. Fantasy and sci-fi empire building games: Barren Realms Elite, Falcon's Eye. Every day you had a number of turns. The goal was to be on top of the league at the end of three weeks, or two months, or whatever the league had set.

Our favourite game was Falcon's Eye. My friends and I all settled on one board. Planned strategies and attacks in person. They took long-term builds and strategies, whereas I built wholly for the short-term, aggressively, my role to attack other boards early, draw retaliation, let my friends build up unopposed. The rankings on the board didn't matter. It was about what board won the league.

We always won our league. Most of us went into computer science; one of us now teaches it; two of us are developers; and the last one is dead.

This is the easy answer: a BBS is messages and files and games. It's a spare computer, a scrounged modem, a dedicated phone line. It's something you call, maybe something you run. It's a labour of love. It's community, writ small.

But there's a harder answer. BBS are a collection of the best and worst people you've ever met in your life. One of the guys I met back then, I'm still friends with, decades later. He and I chatted on BBSs, at first. Then via email, via ICQ, AIM, IRC, and finally Facebook.

But there's darkness, too, and the truth is, I remember that era because the mid 90s were the worst period of my life. When I say BBSs contained the best and the worst of people, I mean it. I was assaulted by someone close to me. I was sexually assaulted by someone a few years older. It was my introduction to dangerous people.

These days, online means distance. There's safety in that, in all the friends you make that you'll never, ever meet. Then, it was people in your city, your community, nearby. You accumulate stories. Most benign or banal. You go to BBS coffee meet-ups with fellow teenagers and bored moms, talk with people you've talked with online a few times, drink coffee so sweet you could stand a spoon. But some of the stories rot and fester. Some you have trouble telling thirty years later.

Ask me to define a BBS and I'll tell you it's the slow crawl of text across the screen. It's grandiloquent aliases and the people behind them. It's the possibility and deep horizon of a CRT glowing in a darkened room. It's people's hopes and wants; their intentions for you, which you can never know at the time, and if you'd been smart, if you had known, you'd have hung up the line and never answered the door. It was fun and beautiful and it was horrifying. It was my coming-of-age, shaping me in ways that I'm still untangling today, decades later.

One day I'll talk more about this, in detail, but not quite yet. The fear never quite leaves. You never know about people, never.

gemlog