Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
<ari>, I think your comments in <8> are really interesting because
they are both informed by firsthand experience and NOT colored by
nostalgia. My hunch is that you're not wrong-- a lot of BBS activity
was just about modems, software, download ratios, etc. Even today,
ham radio contacts are often super short signal reports (RST 576
73!).

(NB: Kristen Haring and Susan Douglas are both radio historians who
have written about the gendered implications of this kind of
intimacy-at-a-distance between men, e.g.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/25148208>)

So, on one hand, there's nothing inherently wrong with computer
geeks geeking out about computers. Big chunks of USENET were more of
the same (comp.* was one of the "Big Eight", after all...) But on
the other hand, it must have been frustrating for others to know
that this technology could/should be used for more than that.

As a researcher, I've been struck by how vast and varied the modem
world was. There were over 100,000 systems in North America. Some
area codes hosted dozens of systems at the same time. It would be
been extremely difficult--and painfully expensive--for any one
person to really get their arms around the whole thing while it was
happening. 

In retrospect, we can see how the same software enabled wildly
different sorts of communities to develop. Thrasher magazine ran a
BBS for readers to talk about skateboarding. In NYC, the Thing BBS
was being used by new media artists.
(<https://anthology.rhizome.org/the-thing> And while there was only
one FidoNet, there were many other messaging networks using the same
or similar software. For example, check out Avery Dame-Griff's maps
of TGNet which used Fido to create "one of the first independent
international transgender communication networks":
<https://queerdigital.com/tgnmap>

Here's a lingering question for me: one of my starting assumptions
was that USENET is more widely know and far better documented than
any of these BBS systems and networks. But has it also been
forgotten or misunderstood? 
  

    
<choco> thank you for your question in <9> about the meaning of
"amateur"! My gut says that there is something important for us to
learn from the way that BBS sysops and shareware authors talked
about money and labor. It doesn't seem to fit into typical
categories like "non-profit" or "non-commercial" but I still haven't
found the right language. "Semi-commercial"? "Occasionally
entrepreneurial?"
  

    
Back in response #11, <esau> was talking about CB radio and how it
seemed like a public payphone that was also a party line, and then
mentioned ham radio.

I wondered, did all of this reaching out to connect start for me in
the 50's with my grandmother's party line?

Or later, when I was in college in Southern California and one night
my roommate got a phone call from a ham operator patching through a
call from a friend stationed at McMurdo in Antarctica?

Or when I was immediately hooked upon getting my first email address
in 1987 - llt@peregrine.com (which according to some lists was one
of the first .com domains) - and someone showed me "r n" on my Sun
350... and I fell into USENET.  

I found it very exciting, with an extra punch because it seemed like
outside of government agencies and universities, nobody knew about
it.  And the topics people talked about...well let's just say I
spent way too much time there. So many people!  From all over the
world!  Talking about so many interesting things!  

But, what I wanted to bring up to Kevin is the email path you had to
know if you wanted to have a private conversation with someone on
USENET.  I printed out some reports about the Loma Prieta quake in
1989 from ca.earthquakes (coincidentally, some of the people whose
stories I printed out I met years later on the WELL, like Laura
Lemay and Sharon Fisher).  The path looked something like this, with
xxx replacing PPI:

peregrine!henry.jpl.nasa.gov!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ames!amdahl!rtech!xxx!xxx

I could never send an email!  I could only reply to emails.
  

    
Wait, I got on USENET in 1988 from my work/home UNIX box.  I think my
first post is here:
<https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/6.14.html#subj6>.

A little while after that I was hired at the maths department at
uh.edu and had access to their USENET feed.

>USENET is more widely know and far better documented than any of
>these BBS systems and networks. But has it also been forgotten or
>misunderstood?

Both and more? 

I think that USENET's death began with web interfaces and `qearly social
media sites like slashdot.  It didn't help that the well and other
sites dropped their USENET feeds in the late 90s.  When I started at
TiVo in 2001 I was still active on a lot of USENET groups, but my feed
became saturated with spam and a couple more providers shut down.  And
I was face down in a startup trying to survive laying off something
like 50% of its employees after going public.

I think part of the death call for USENET was when google bought the
USENET archives on deja then basically shut it down.  There have been
attempts to bring the archives back, including
<https://www.usenetarchives.com>, but they are woefully incomplete. (I
would love to be wrong about this and discover a USENET archive
service with decades of data.)

So nobody knows about USENET today or they aren't old enough to
remember the history or they think it's a great replacement for
torrent.

I've thought about checking out USENET again to see what it's like but
haven't managed escape velocity.  When I was using USENET emacs was my
client and would be today.  With machine learning and improvements in
spam technology maybe it's worth a few pennies?

IMHO the well suffered similar problems with the advent of facebook,
Myspace, LinkedIn, and Friendster.  Someone who works here can post a
pointer to the numbers, but there were high activity groups here (ex
<genx>) that are effectively doa.
  

    
One other USENET vs. BBS comment.

When I was on USENET there were a lot of locals (in Houston) who were
hams, engineers, gamers, motorcyclists, etc.  There were also a couple
of people who used remote USENET servers (like mine) but had a FIDO
node in their home.  When we were having brunch the FIDO vs. USENET
discussion would come up every now and then.  I think the argument
then is a bit like your description of BBS networks falling to the
Internet and the web.  Jennings did *amazing* things with FIDO
design and development.

USENET?  We were the Borg.
  

    
> a lot of BBS activity
> was just about modems, software, download ratios, etc. Even today,
> ham radio contacts are often super short signal reports (RST 576
> 73!).

Agreed. And one might take the observable historical artifacts as a type
of indicator for the in-the-moment activities that can never be (or 
rarely are) recorded. So, yeah, a contact log may be boring tables of:

 Date/Time Duration Frequency Mode Power CallSign Location Signal Notes

but each entry represented the thrill of making a contact -- with 
someone who certainly had some sort of shared interest -- a defining
attribute of a community of interest!  A building-block.

As brief as a single contact might be, feedback like "RST 576" tells me
a great deal: 

   1. My 'Readability' is 5, which is the max, and means that my 'fist'
      is pretty good -- the payoff for the weeks and maybe months I
      worked to learn Morse Code -- from audio records in my case.
   2. My 'Strength' is 7 (where 9 is max) -- which tells me something
      about how the transmitter I built is doing, how my antenna is
      working (maybe dipole or vertical), and the physics of the radio 
      signal path from my location (the lower slopts of the Vermont 
      Canyon in LA, Calif.) to wherever my contact may be.
   3. But my 'Tone' is only a 6 (out of 9) and this disturbs me -- it
      suggests I may have a problem. I studied radio theory in order to
      pass the license exam; I built this transmitter (yes, from a kit
      but it's simple and I understand each circuit) -- do I have a bad
      solder joint? A failing capacitor? A tube going soft? More research
      needed ASAP. 

Yes, lots of BBS activity is going to be self-referential -- I think it 
would have to be: that' how we learn, and maybe even what it means to 
have an 'experience.'

When we look back and think about what it all might have meant, we need
to synthesize the real significance and meaning from such inevitably
boring, tiny details.
  

    
Trying to do that (extract significance from the seemingly mundane), I 
get a whiff of what we sometimes refer to as 'control dynamics' from:

> My gut says that there is something important for us to
> learn from the way that BBS sysops and shareware authors talked
> about money and labor.

This seems important. Speaking of "money and labor" in terms of systems
of control might easily lead us into political discussions. But it seems
to me that what BBS sysops experienced first and foremost was a sense 
of individual and personal control. Control over hardware, software,
user sign-ups, subject matter, etc. 

In contrast, my late 60's, early 70's ARPANET experience afforded a
very limited sense of personal control. I wrote 'telnet' plus some
datacom code for UCSD's B6700 mainframe, which is what basically put 
UCSD "on the ARPANET" -- so I had personal control over some software
components, but had *NO* management role -- I was a physics undergrad
who needed an on-campus job to help pay for tuition.

I was at the bottom rung of a decision-making ladder involving many
steps between San Diego and Washington DC. So, as personal as anyone's
ARPANET experiences may seem, I think they were all aspects of national 
impulse that flowed down to the various activity sites.

I was a BBS *user* but never an *owner* (in the sense I was as a HAM
radio operator) -- and I'm guessing that was a big difference between
the ARPANET and BBS sysop experiences.
  

    
It is true that a lot of especially early work was all too like
amateur radio, discussions about gear/code on that same gear/code;
but it's easy to forget how hard it was to make work at all, and the
sort of obsessive effort applied to making it go, etc. 

But underlying that, what made it slightly different was that it was
oriented towards reaching out: communications with others. It was
this combined thing, engaging the intricacy and subtlety and physics
(radio, modems, code) and that at the other end, some fellow fool
doing the same.

Much of that describes me. I was very into electronics, then radio
broadly, messed with junk CB gear, hung antennas, was present for
the later CB fad (coincided with my first cross-country road trip,
Falmouth MA to Bremerton WA and back, 1975?, some radio shack set,
104" whip, KEJ1377) where I learned a lot about road culture. (I
just returned Sunday from a road trip, LA to Santa Fe NM, in a car
two years older even than the one in '75. No CB this time, though I
still have one on the shelf...)

That all fits within american boy culture and reward system, which
amplified/suppressed various aspects, some of which Kirsten Haring
covered in her book (which I only found years aft4er it was
written).

But one way or another, pretty much everything I was interested in,
beyond "technology", was somehow off the map and in opposition to
someone with power; the margins of car culture (cops), then sex/gay
culture (cops, culture at large), CB (cops again, cars, truckers),
... it's not that I was some outlaw, hardly, but the boundaries were
ever-present. 

Moving to Boston area afforded a social and sexual life (more cops,
coming into bars to harass), but then flourishing tech culture, most
quite nerdly; clubs BCS, NECS, the latter quite active, monthly or
weekly meetings/hangouts into the night. 

NECS ran a BBS, I forget whose code. There was Andover CNODE where I
came across the idea of a series of BBSs' hopping messages across
adjacent/contiguous toll-free phone boundaries...


At the leading/bleeding edge of BBSing (and probably widespread
telephony) was sex and socializing. Though I met more people via
personal ads in the Boston Phoenix than BBSs, for a lot of people it
was their main channel. (DIAL-A-MATCH doesn't get enough credit
here, as klunky as it was.) 

In 1983 I was running a one-off system for dialing into my home
computer remotely; this was the cusp of the Judge Greene decision
breaking up the Bells. I took my gen-u-wine Bell 212A modem and
handset to San Francisco; NE Tel had no way to demand the return of
the gear, since I was now in PacBell territory...

In San Fran I soon ran into local nerds, Tim Pozar one, and his
friend Bill ???? ran what I think was the very first BBS in San
Francisco -- a gay sex (and more) board called Kinky Komputer (whose
phone number was MAN-KINK; Bill was uber-telco nerd, no idea how he
procured that number. He ran a PBX at home, in 1983!) I lurked on
the sex boards but mainly ended up chatting with Bill and other
nerds on the more general boards.


My move to San Francisco was enabled by changes at my employer,
Phoenix Software. Before the move I had been writing for them MSDOS
BIOS code for various x86/x88 machines, and had the process down to
a few days work. They embarked on the portable ROM BIOS about this
time; I was too "dirty" to write any of the code, but I wrote/began
the specification for it since I was intimate with the IBM code. It
was around this time I moved to SF. Phoenix basically paid for my
move.

Years later I puzzled out, I think!, that Phoenix was more or less
happy for me to be out of the loop; Phoenix had gone from two or
three employees and a couple outsider "consultants" (more intimate
than that really) and needed to grow... I wasn't one of those people
at that time anyway. So in SF I did more MSDOS work, but that was
waning in importance (I realize now). (This is conjecture, but...) I
also had competitive knowledge, and the MSDOS work made money, and
I'm sure they didn't want me to go work at Eagle etc. So I was
basically paid full rate, but they stopped giving me work....

... I was already working on Fido, using the modular techniques I'd
built the MSDOS BIOS stuff with, so with all my unallocated time,
guess what got attention... in essence Phoenix funded, by neglect,
early Fido/FidoNet work.

I don't feel bad, some years later one of the principles (Hansche)
essentially tricked my into selling him at face value my founders
stock in Phoenix So umm fuck them.




Sorry for the bit of a ramble here; I was gonna go back and edit but
what the hell, I'll leave it. It's a rough pre-history of the drive
to write Fido.
  

    
USEnet vs FidoNet was also a very large culture/class collision.

Very roughly, USEnet, large and networked computing at that time
(early 80s) was tied tightly to corporate but mainly, as far as I
can tell, culturally to university experience. For obvious economic
reasons large machines were all institutional.

I never went to college (MFA at 55 through some
trickery/complexity), and though of course many BBSers did, the
culture was much less filtered/unified by that institutional
experience and so you had people like me, unconcerned with much of
what I saw as baggage. 

The downside of some of this (lol) is that around the time of
Pozar's UFgate, some of the larger technical Fido echoes had become
cesspools of bickering and in-fighting; tools gained us reach and
volume, alas, the skills to navigate that took longer. (Likewise on
the USEnet side, for a different set of particulars.) 

(At one point, pre-UFgate, one of the FTS (FidoNet Technical
something) discussions on modem interface tech, with the Telebit
folk, devolved into too much rancor for Telebit to work with us; it
was embarrassing.)
  

    
But behind this obvious layer of growth, technology change, and
culture growth was the international work. This doesn't get a lot of
attention because it didn't make a lot of noise.

Somewhere around '90 I "met" Randy Bush, high nerd admin and
implementor of NSC grants deploying basic networking to places in
the world that didn't have it -- african continent mainly. During
apartheid SA times, randy worked with university folk on growing
networking intra and inter. (At one point FidoNet was one of the few
holes in the apartheid blockade; yeah that sounds dubious but it was
an strongly anti-apartheid university folk doing good work). 

Randy stumbled upon FidoNet ((details lost to the fog of time; ask
him)) and passed out binaries I'm sure... but contacted me wanting
to know if I would be willing to document the protocol for
dissemination. I immediately agreed.

I didn't have the skills for what he wanted then, but I gave him
code, we talked on the phone, FidoNet mail, etc and he worked up
what's now known as FSC001, describing the FidoNet protocol in state
machine terminology. This uncovered errors in my protocol, so
somewhere around 93, 94, I modified the FidoNet code to match the
now-orthogonal protocol.

This was made public and became the basis for the FidoNet
compatibles, and the end of my programs dominance in the net, which
was just fine by me.

(Thom Henderson had, by this time, reverse-engineered my protocol
and write Seadog. He never asked me; I don't know why. Maybe he
thought I'd object and fight him. Reasonable enough I suppose at the
time.)

Randy wasn't a BBSer, he was a university/institution-based
researcher (still is; he does global routing research and science,
for IIJ and a new startup) but had a strongly
internationalist/leftist/aggressively-open worldview that I entirely
share. 

So it was this world-wide angles that kept me interested up through
94? 95? Most of the american crowd was busy perverting the
Net/Region thing into power struggles, then the zone gates
(inter-continental/inter-telco) became battles, etc and I lost all
interest domestically. 

There was much Bosnian war use against Milosovich (response to
taking down radio stations: "you can't stop us, we have FidoNet"),
the connection to at least one african-continent uni (SA? Kenya?)
was on a party-line telephone line! and in Kenya, when the russians
or french left, they stripped all the copper off of the poles to the
university. So a phone line was all they had. Etc.

Randy is unlikely to expound on this stuff but he might answer
pointed questions about specifics.
  

    
Last detail left out, can't edit: I am technically-speaking a ham:
KF6QFI, Amateur Extra. I had one last hurrah of interest in radio ~
2005, but it was far too straight and often bigoted old white guy
stuff. STILL talking about their goddamn antennas and radios, even
though it's all store-bought now. And 2M was like CB without the
fun. So much for that. I keep the license from expiring, is all, a
quaint artifact of the past.
  

    
hey tom!  great to see you here.
  

    
Thanks lena!
  

    
Big thanks for joining us, Tom, and contributing so much detail
about your part of the history Kevin covers in his book. I remember
a comment you made in the Wired offices when FringeWare was
visiting, probably in 1995 or so - "We made the modem a wire." I
didn't understand it when you said it; figuring out what you meant
was part of my education as a more non-technical Internet maven.
  

    
Since my interest is mostly in the social aspect of the story, a lot
of the technical details fly right over my head, unfortunately.

Before Judge Greene and the breakup of AT&T, there were telephones
that I saw at airports that accessed the internet; I think they were
called AT&T 2000's.  I could log into the WELL, and post in the
"What Strange Place Are You Logging in From" topic, and since I was
using Pico, I could see who was online and do "sends" with them. 
One time, I was at LAX doing sends with <nexsys> who was at an
airport in Georgia, I think, and we were all puffed up because we
were doing the coolest thing ever.  Look at us!

When I first did online banking, we had to log into Tymnet first,
and from there to Bank of America, but it was only available during
certain hours.

What killed USENET for me was the infiltration of the alt.sex groups
that I liked to voyeuristically lurk in by self-described
Christians, (although Puritans is a more apt label), who disrupted
every discussion by posting endless remonstrances about how evil the
subject matter was.  If they were so offended, why did they go there
unless they were titillated and angry about it?
  

    
<tomj>:

>tightly to corporate but mainly, as far as I can tell, culturally to
>university experience.

That was true for me in the late 80s and early 90s.  I think most of
the local, Houston USENET people worked a university or were lucky
enough to own a UNIX box of some sort.

When I went to NASA Ames in the early 90s there were a *lot* more
locals on USENET because of jobs at Sun, SGI, and all the tech-related
companies.
  

    
Back in 2006 some Roundtable members decided to recreate the
experience on the Internet: <https://rt2.us/>

The important bit (I think) is a detailed history of Jim Penny's
creation of Roundtable, a CB simulator tacked on the side of the
Freelancin' BBS:

<https://rt2.us/history.php>
  

    
one of the early but hyper local
systems was community memory 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory

founded in berkeley in 1973.
  

    
A system which i was surprised was in the book
was EIES (eyes) developed by Murray Turoff at
the New Jersey Institute of Technology from
1974-1978. Howard Rheingold called EIES
the great great grandmother of all virtual communities.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Information_Exchange_System
  

    
darn.  NOT in the book.
  

    
I have no idea what I did with my Telebit modems but just found a 56K
in the basement.  I wonder if it will work on phones that are no
longer copper to the CO.
  

    
unlikely 
  

    
 > telebit

... and no one to talk to! They make cool sounds though.

I'm [ trying to ] shed gear, now: teletype, expendables, HP test
gear, paper tape stuff, it has no value (and I don't mean monetary)
and I'm at a point [ a good one ] where it's all just burden and
needs to go.

It is interesting to observe: cherished objects radiate meaning,
become walls around me. I've got new things brewing but the old ones
gotta go.

I'm not very nostalgic, lol.
  

    
I don't even remember keeping the modem, it was just in a box of old
PC gaming stuff.  I probably sold the telebits as soon as I could
afford ISDN.

My backup/archive directory has dozens of bbs-related text files.
Maybe I can post them all on my art blog?
  

    
Thanks, Tom for all the detail above. As Kevin mentions in in <26> 
"firsthand experience and NOT colored by  nostalgia." So important, 
I think to help fight-off the false narratives -- so easy to fall prey
to the ever attractive oversimplification. 

Particularly interesting is your comment about how Phoenix indirectly
funded your Fido/FidoNet work. "Follow the money" is a common axiom.

But your example clearly illustrates that 'intention' does not flow as
neatly and cleanly as does cash.

And Randy Bush!! I remember him from the UCSD Pascl project and Volition
Systems days. Impressive international uses of FidoNet.