O, BBS

Now, don't get me wrong: I wouldn't trade the Internet for a bajillion perfect BBSes. But those things had something special that the Internet just can't deliver. Maybe I'm just not a teenager anymore, but no--I think those things did something that no modern-day social network can do.

More and more, I'm encountering folks born in the nineties (as if that weren't a criminal offense), so maybe I should start by going back in time to 1984 or so, whenever it was I entered the computer age. We got a PC, with full-on aircraft-carrier grade metal casing. The keyboard was in a metal case, for crying out loud. It weighed a ton, and you could hear the *CLACK* of its keys from nine time zones away. I would totally use that keyboard if I still had it. After we had it a while, I saw my brother using a terminal program to dial out to a couple of local BBSes. So that's what that handsome metal box with the colorful lights--a 300 baud Hayes Smartmodem--was for. Who knows where he got the numbers from; my brother seemed to have been born knowing what to do with a computer, and I absorbed what I could when he felt like teaching me bits and pieces. They were probably posted on (actual) bulletin boards at the local computer shop. Of which there was one.

Did I not expand "BBS" yet? That stands for Bulletin Board System, you philistine. It worked like this: some pimply kid set up his Apple ][ in the garage and connected it to a dedicated phone line. Thus a sysop (system operator) was born. Then one person at a time could call in, log on, and leave messages. Some places required you use your real name; those did not interest me, except in a couple of rare cases where I knew the people, and never at first. There were two boards that most interested me at first, both running 40-column displays, I think on Apples: Stonehenge and Xanadu. (40 columns per line at 300 baud, 8 bits per character, works out to just shy of one line per second. When I upgraded to a 2400 baud modem several years later, hoo nelly! And then when a user gifted me a 14,400 baud modem? The screen could hardly keep up.)

ATDT 899somethingsomethingsomethingsomething
CONNECTED

I remember making my first account, on whichever board I got through. The bloop-bleep-squawk completed and suddenly text was appearing <i>on my screen</i> that came from <i>somewhere else</i>. It was rather thrilling. "I am in the goddamn future! How could this even be happening?" Something like that basically went through my mind the entire time I used modems. Anyway, it came time to create a logon, and I suddenly realized that I didn't have a clever epithet ready.

ATH0
NO CARRIER

I went and paced in the living room of an empty house, racking an 10 year-old brain for something clever. Something clever and original. And totally awesome. And totally original. For maybe twenty minutes I searched for something just right. Ah-HA! Excalibur, what an awesome fucking name. No one fucks with Excalibur! Back on board. Oh crap, need a first & last name. Very well, "*** EXCALIBUR / ***" it is. They passed me back a computer-generated password that I use to this very day. That's right, find the old computer that Xanadu ran on, get that password, and you can update this blog yourself.

Of those first two boards, Stonehenge was harder to call into--because, as it turns out, that board had an "Elite" section (what kids nowadays might call a warez site--at ridiculously slow transfer rates, but of course there were hardly as many bits to copy per game). Stonehenge had message boards, of course, but the discussions were a little less involved and a little more, well, dickish. The sysop, I believe, was called Elrond. I think it was based out in Marina. Anyway, I called there plenty to check on new messages. (I don't think I had a clue about the Elite section until after he got in trouble with the law. And that was the end of that board.)

Where I spent more of my time at first was Xanadu. That was out in Seaside, I believe. I forget who ran that one, but I remember my favorite user name was Silver Samurai. Anyway, the message boards there were a bit more active and interesting. General discussion, mostly. A "never-ending story" board or two (where one is to post a couple of paragraphs to continue someone's story). Eventually an RPG-type board with more of a shootin'-from-the-hip approach to rules.. All good stuff for a little kid to play around on.

What was great about these places was that a prepubescent kid with strong spelling skills could engage in discussions with full-on teenagers and adults on an equal setting. I have always been a lot more loquacious through a keyboard than through my throat, partly because I rely heavily on the ability to edit as I go. Words tend to come to me in a jumbled order, and I tend to forget what I'm talking about in the middle of speech. I do a lot better with writing. BBSes became a primary means of socializing for me, and I made friends of various ages over the years.

So what was it that was so great, apart from happening to cater to my proclivities? Why am I down on current social networks relative to the BBS? After all, in a way LiveJournal is a nice way to sort of roll-your-own BBS experience: from a huge pool of other users, you can decide whose navel-gazing you will make a regular part of your reading experience. These here blogs aren't really any different; they are better, hypothetically, since they are more agnostic.

It turns out to be a good thing, a more interesting thing, to lack complete control over the group you're in. Different boards set different tones, attracted different populations, and if what was happening someplace was uninteresting or bothersome in some way, you would just take it out of your terminal program's list of phone numbers (or, I suppose, sort it to the bottom). Once you became a regular somewhere, though, you had to take the bitter with the sweet. If there is someone who annoys you there, they probably annoy the community at large, and social pressure would either force them out or they would become a lively wellspring for debates. Or perhaps merely a whipping boy. But the boards were open forums, regulated only by the sysop's policies--which tended to be liberal, or else the boards tended to be unpopulated. Generally, anyone who liked could call in and smear their stupid opinions all over the place. Over time, the ever-growing population of callers self-selected into different communities. You'd see mostly the same faces on the different set of boards you were interested; some people made up a new name everywhere they went, some never changed. The only thing that no one expected to be tolerated on a BBS were personal threats etc. But ragging on people was a pretty regular enterprise (though sometimes restricted to dedicated forums).

Of course, your average person didn't know what a modem was, so there was a significant selection bias at work. How many times did I explain my hobby by telling someone a modem was like what Matthew Broderick used in War Games, and then answer no, I didn't hack into NORAD. So the random selection of co-users wasn't so random as it is today, when literally everyone and their grandma is on the Internet. Only the nerdiest, least poverty-stricken people were around.

It is also interesting when just about everyone that you encounter is local. Users would get together individually at and restaurants. We'd copy disks, go hang out, whatever. My parents thought it was weird that their fifteen year-old kid was hanging out with thirty year-olds, but they didn't know me as a kid, they knew me as an articulate but slightly fucked-up kid who complained about his parents a lot and who liked to write. (Man did I ever write a lot in those days. That was going to be my future.) The occasional long-distance caller was the rare and compelling exception. But good message boards were hard to find, so if you found a cool community on the other side of the continent, you'd use one of the features that let you download all the new messages, read and respond to them offline, and send those back across afterwards.

I think maybe there was something important about having to dial a board's number, redialing every so often until it wasn't busy. During peak traffic times, it was pretty common to just sit there auto-redialing until you were lucky enough to be the first one to slip in between callers. It was a little bit special that at any given moment, you were the one who got to use the board. If you'd been waiting for the line to free up, you would scan through and figure out who'd just been on by which new messages had been posted. You would figure out how the last caller had been using that time. If hardly any new messages had been left, and it wasn't a big file-transfer board, then you knew they had either been dealing with a lot of private messages (what we called "email") or else chatting with the sysop.

Ah, chatting! That was one of the distinctive features of message boards. Whenever you were on, it was always possible that the sysop was sitting there, watching you browse around. And you could request a live chat, or they might break in at any moment to say hi, or "stop doing that," or whatever. That's what really tended to blow my mind as a youngster. The idea that RIGHT THIS MOMENT, you just hit your "e" key in Carmel Valley and it showed up on my screen in Monterey. No reason that should be any more amazing than phones working in general, but somehow it was far more impressive to me. I became a faster-than-average typist, since I basically was growing up on a keyboard. Waiting for slow typists in chat was rather tedious.

It has crossed my mind once or twice to try and figure out how to make something like that happen in Internet world. People have, of course, done things like set up websites that are portals into old-fashioned BBSes. But the potential user base is too big, somehow. They aren't really any different than any other online forum.

It's occurred to me that you could do something similar to what Google Buzz and Google Reader both ended up doing--aggregating people's posts from a variety of places. With a little more work on a front end, it could end up being like your own personal BBS. But that doesn't suffice either, because it's a vantage point onto many places that you alone use. The other people you are watching will not see each other, and discuss crosswise. Sure, you could set it up so that anyone could get onto your "board," but I think hardly anyone ever would. They would just check their own aggregate list. You could set it up so that what appears for you are friends-of-friends, and that might be best. But I don't know, I haven't come up with quite the model I think would work yet.