[17] Things To Do When You're Board

 Well, I'm a nerd.

(Don't everyone run up here at once to dispute that...)

But as I write this post, it's becoming the nerdiest one I've written so far.  And that's saying something.

Back around 1990, perhaps a little late in the game compared to some, I got my hands on a modem and discovered Dial-up BBSs.  It came late to me, because I lived in the middle of nowhere, and there were no systems a free phone call away yet. Still, I convinced my parents to make the occasional call to a system about 30 miles away, and started to get a lot more up to date with the world.

No BBS user was this attractive, and never had such an attractive girlfriend looking over their shoulder.

What's a BBS?  A Bulletin Board System is a precursor, in ways, to the Internet.  You had your computer call another one, a publicly advertised system with a dedicated phone number, When you signed in (with your name, and perhaps a flimsy password), you could browse the offerings, which usually included message boards, file downloads, and online games.  As time went on, most BBSs became part of networks that would share message boards, the biggest being FidoNet.  These message boards were Usenet before most people had access to Usenet, and the message volume was incredible, considering it was being passed along on 2400-baud modems.

Needless to say, I became hooked.  Thank goodness someone invented a way to download the messages from the boards to read on your computer offline, or else my parents would have had to declare bankruptcy from the phone bills.

ASCII art made the EGA/VGA screens of old look incredible.

My favorite call was to the Red Onion Express BBS in Wawayanda, New York.  Run with the RemoteAccess BBS software, it had all of the above features.  It's where I got many of the brand new Apogee games when they first came out, for example.  Like Pharaoh's Tomb.

This was hi-res artwork for the time.

I soon became friends with the SysOp of that BBS.  (Terminology for the youngsters: SysOp, or usually, Sysop, refers to the SYStem OPerator, or the guy running the board.  Usually on a spare computer in his living room.  And yes, usually a he.)  After some time, he helped me set up a board of my own.  

I didn't yet have a dedicated phone line, or the money to pay for one, so my board was limited access to acquaintances at certain times of the day.  Like, you can call between 8-10pm on Friday this week, next week, I don't know yet.)  But it helped me get the foundations set, for later when I had my own.  I hooked it into a couple of the computer networks, like FidoNet, and a couple smaller, regional ones like SKY-Net and SCN-Net, the latter run by a high school friend of mine who also ran an official school BBS, one I would later take over.

For me, it was all about the power trip.  I ran this.  I didn't rule with an iron fist, but it felt good to run it.  Even if only a few people ever called it.  Even when I later got a job, and a separate phone line, my BBS didn't get much traffic, because I grew up in a rural area and not enough BBSers were a local phone call away.

We shared the newest games, and news about them.  We shared other software, too, and not always legally (ahem).  The message boards were diverse, and international.  It really was the closest thing to the Internet before there was a public Internet. 

Around that same time, I had a popular program I had written spread online.  It was a database of computer game cheats titled, rather appropriately (but boring), CHEAT.  People seeking the newest version flocked to my site, or more often, asked about it in the FidoNet echos (message boards). 

George Carlin had a routine about magazines.  (Remember when we used to read stuff on dead trees?)  He pointed out that there was a magazine for just about everything. 

"There's actually a magazine called 'Walking'! 'Look, Dan, the new 'Walking' is out!' Here's a good article: putting one foot in front of the other!"

That said, there was a BBS Magazine.  And I was featured in it.  

Soon after, however, BBSs faded away.  As I went to college, I gained access to broadband internet, not just the slow dial-up connection.  While so many things weren't there yet, by the time I left college, Amazon.com was a growing site, eBay was building a solid fan base, and Google was crawling the web, adding every page it could find.  I came home and still had a modem, which I used to connect to dial-up internet.  I didn't look to see if any new BBSs were around.  They were a thing of the past.