originally posted august 10, 2004
bygone era
Over much of this year, I've talked much about improving my life -- finding meaning, bettering myself physically and emotionally -- but until recently I had never really thought about the past. Then, on this warm weekday night, I remembered: oh yeah, I used to have a full-time hobby. I came to a realization: I miss the BBS days.
before the 'net was big
"Does anyone know what a modem is?" my middle-school computer teacher would ask. My hand would shoot up, and so would a few of my classmates'. Someone would inevitably ask, "Oh, is that what Prodigy is?" and I'd get all upset. There was a different movement going on: a scene all its own. Every night, I hogged my family's phone line and called a slew of boards (short for BBSes, or "Bulletin Board Systems") to pass the time.
Before the Internet captured my interest, there was FidoNet. Thousands of message boards, all with a "To" header so that I could have real conversations, spewed colorful messages around the world -- routed almost entirely by plain old telephone lines. I learned what HPACV meant. If you search for the term now, you'll find documents written before some Internet users were born. I was gullible, I was stupid, but I bought into all the fun of a scene that was about as underground as it could get.
my own
I attended a gathering of local BBS users on Long Island in 1994. As a 13-year-old, I met 20-somethings that I had been trash-talking in InterBBS games of Barren Realms Elite. After seeing how fun it was to play, I figured that it would be fun to run a board of my own.
In February of 1995, about nine and a half years ago, I launched a BBS that I named after my then-awesome online handle: "DaCool BBS." The name had no significance other than I thought it was cool. It ran off a cobbled-together 486 that I had built in an IBM AT case with a phenomenal 1 GB hard drive and external parallel-port CD-ROM. Like many of my idealistic pursuits, I promoted the hell out of it everywhere I could. I ended up using it to chat with my friends from school and from other boards, and I eventually set up games and boards to connect with other folks around the world about all sorts of interests.
In many ways, the disparate community of the Internet seems very lonely compared with the old board days. Gone are the times when you might be interrupted when the SysOp breaks in for a chat -- nowadays such spying is cause for outrage, but back then I considered it a very friendly thing. Because the community was so small and tightly-knit, administrators were held much more accountable for what went on with their systems. At the same time, there was a certain sense of distance. I remember talking with a SysOp of a local "Afrocentric" board who misinterpreted my handle; like a couple other folks I met at SysOp meets, he was surprised to learn that I was just another scrawny white kid with a dopey handle. I got great pride in seeing the amateur systems administrators pour a lot of effort into making their systems work. I learned how hard downtime can be when you've got customers to serve (even if the customers never paid).
It's the old sense of comfort and community that makes me so angry to read hyperbole like "the Internet is going to change society" and "thanks to blogs, we don't have to read the news any more." I still find any FidoNet Echo infinitely more useful than the rampant narcissism and meta-reference on web journals today. ("This week: Dave blogs about how blogs are reblogging onto the retromoblogging blog! Blog at 11. Republicans.") I've also come to regret spending so much time and energy writing about myself instead of creating a fun environment for others like I did so long ago.
isolation
What hit me tonight was the fact that this whole era, this scene in which I participated in for six years (three of them as a SysOp myself), had completely passed me by. I no longer talk to anyone from the old FidoNet days. Nobody made the transition from FidoNet to Internet alongside me. I thought about moving the whole board to an Internet system, but at the time that would have meant buying a hugely-overpriced ISDN line into my family's house.
I met some fantastic people those many years ago. I remember having
lengthy chat sessions and even phone conversations with people whose faces
I would never see. Nobody had digital cameras then; scanners were a rarity
reserved for graphics companies with loads of cash. I remember being late
to work because I had 100 unread e-mails to deal with first thing in the
morning. I remember being woken up by modem noise because I didn't know about
the ATM0 command.
User #9 was the first female on DaCool BBS. The women were few and far between, but I always noticed and felt accomplished in a very pathetic and geeky way when one signed up. And as is the case now, the fakes were always easy to spot.
The whole BBS experience that I remember now is evocative of what I went through first in 1999 when I finished high school, then last year when I moved into the working world. Suddenly and uncontrollably, my world changed and everything old became irrelevant all of a sudden. My only BBS-era remnants are four Zip disks with the programs backed up, and four unique hits on Google. I almost never talked about the experience when I was in college. It wasn't on my college applications. It isn't on my resume. Until tonight, it was almost totally out of my mind. Yet here I am, unable to sleep at 12:30 in the morning, and it's all I can think about.
I sure live a strange life.
Back to August 2004, or to the year 2004.
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