Okay, so this is not one of those "hey, look at that kind of things" if you've ever been on one of those systems or seen one. Everybody has some sort of cute label which varies from board to board and maybe has something thematically to do with the subject matter. "User Bob, Gearhead", "Sargent Smith, Expert Marksman." Something where the system measures your points based on some sort of obscure criteria and then gives you a cute little label comensurate to your status and whatever the hell it is, at least its not "newbie".
All very 1985. I think that was the year "Back To The Future" came out.
Back then of course we had no idea that not all that many years later everybody would be using such things. Back then it was this small closet community of geeks with hardware, but it was pretty much the same.
Except it was more in a great many ways. Less too.
My friend Scott Paige (wherever he is now) had this modem for his Commodore 64. If I recall it was this clunky thing that plugged into the back of his box like a cartridge -- maybe I'm mis-remembering.
Scott was pretty hardcore for a kid back then. He was one of those guys who would make you start second-guessing whether what you were doing was a good idea, whatever it was he was up to.
He was this super-smart guy, on top of his general ruffianness, and somehow managed to get into this whole "bulliten board" thing. Back then, here's how it worked:
You kicked on your modem which used your phone to dial out and connect to another machine with a modem. This isn't unlike the recent past of the Internet, except that these weren't ISPs. These were systems sitting in someone's office or bedroom. Chthon, the board we called that day and I'd later get into myself, was located in a side room at our Jr. High. I remember the first time I saw it. It was sitting in this small room behind a smoked glass sliding door looking very nondescript. It was amazing -- there was a community in there.
With that, Scott slammed the door shut and went on to play more levels of Temple of Aspia or Jumpman or whatever. The bug was set in me, however.
Its hard to imagine now, but back then it was all text, or mostly so. Sometimes people would use approximations of graphics but even then they were just characters.
You'd get a list from your friend, either their personal list or something they'd pulled offline. Part of the habit of a BBSer back in the day was to regularly check new systems for lists of other new systems that might be within the free calling radius -- you had to know where "free" ended and long distance began to make it a worthy "kid" hobby.
I'd tuck into my dad's office and fire up one of the original IBM PC systems, an 8088, and hop online at a whopping 300 baud -- about 30 characters a second.
Imagine that. That's about 150 words a minute. Not an awful lot and even worse if you were trying to download something.
Programs were small and rather hard to come by back then, but every bulliten board worth its salt stocked a fairly good amount of system resources away in devotion to file transfer. If you've ever used ZIP, that was the last in a very long line of file compaction schemes that came over the years. ZIP was cool because you could put multiple files in it. Before that we had stuff like like ARC and other foolishness, seemed like there were a dozen schemes wrapped around trying to squeese the most extra juice out of files.
In addition to forums (called "boards") and files, most systems had a way you could talk to the system operator realtime or in the exotic cases, a chance to talk user-to-user when the system extravigantly had more than one phone line. This was always kind of weird and exploratory since the person on the other end would always be a stranger. Usually the conversations would go "hello" and then something like "what do you want?"
There was a whole fleet of software that ran bulliten boards and it was always neat to come across a new one or someone who had done something interesting with theirs. PCBOARD came with this "door" system that would allow you to play games and do other interesting things.
Many systems restricted choice features to their more veteran users on a level system. Unlike the modern forum system levels, these levels provided more than just a little access -- one could configure users to have nearly every function available to the operator themselves. The granting of levels was sometimes automatically calculated but more often times granted by the operator themselves per request or in a moment of pique.
Nothing was greater than logging in to find that one had leveled up, even if that meant about as much as it does now.
This hands-on approach and the fact that the number of haunts were fairly limited meant that each place became infused with its own character and community not unlike the neighborhood bar. The world was finite. Sometimes a new board would come up, sometimes one would suddenly vanish and there'd be chatter at another location: what happened to the old one, what did you think about the new board? You'd recognize people from place to place.
The Internet killed all that, of course. Sure, there are some nostalgic holdouts, but for the most part what would drive a 'board is now long gone. Nobody comes for the files and stays for the conversation. Such are sliced and diced, niche-marketed and provided like the infinate television station that it is. Community is rare anymore, I think. Some exist and are carefully cultivated but there are too many distractions. You're not confined to just a few places to spend your time.
In the end days of this medium I found myself using a fairly large system called "The Compass Rose" or "TCR" for short. TCR was something a friend of mine (now my wife) tipped me off to one night. She was a compulsive for the system back then and finding I had a modem dialed in one night and I once again became hooked in the world of dialup BBSes.
TCR was different even for its time as it was a multi-line system which was still kind of rare for a small local system. Being multi-lined meant that things like chat became more practical. The message boards could follow a larger swath of interests with sufficient traffic to maintain them.
One of the more interesting facets of this board was that at night the operator, Albert, would take advantage of this weird phone plan that let you call into the next area zone for free to link his two systems together. You'd be in your one town talking to someone in the next town over through the late hours until four a.m. when the system would go down for maintainance. The die-hards would lurk in chat until the system kicked you off and it was always quite the occasion when it did.
TCR was neat too since it had such a community that it became a regular occasion that some sort of get-together would be called. Many of the users were young people with a lot of free time on their hands and it was good to match faces with logins and actually meet the people you'd been talking too.
Beyond community, it became actual family and people I met from back then are still close friends to this day.
It is interesting that in this modern time there exists nearly no paralell to the old social systems provided by simple text dialup services. Even now, to have messages and chat is exotic, and who does messages and files and chat and games. For free? Without advertising? For the love of doing it?
Sadly, I don't think hardly anybody.
[Systems, for the googlers: POPNET, Walnut Creek. PROTON, Danville. CHTHON, Danville. PCBOARD, Various (who the hell could tell them apart). TCR/The Compass Rose, Davis/Sacramento. The Transfer Station, Walnut Creek]