Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
re: <99>

In terms of *today's* definitions, conferencing vs BBS seems moot.

Perhaps 'social media' has largely taken over the conceptual space, at
least in the public's eye.

There also used to be another type of system as well: 'chat' systems.
But if we look at systems being marketed *today* for the purpose of
group 'problem solving' -- the stuff that used to be called "Groupware"
-- it seems to also fall into the 'social media' category: products
like Slack, Teams, Google Groups, etc.
  

    
I'm sure this has been raised, but it's not clear to me how BBS
culture has influenced social media, or for that matter, largely
conversational descendents such as the WELL. Yes, they facilitated
exchange between people who didn't know each other or see each other
f2f, and yes, in many ways, nerd gatherings have not changed since -
but is that because nerds haven't changed, or because something
about BBS culture has left an imprint?
  

    
One thing that Keven mentions is the role of the early BBSs that became
grassroots ISPs at a time and in a way that contrasted with the
prevailing 'Time-Sharing' mindset.

I think the early expectations about computer networks was that they
would eventually become products/services offered by the major
telecommunications companies of the day.

Here's a timeline of dates from wikipedia.

Tymshare was founded in 1964.

Compu-Serv Network, Inc (CompuServe) was founded in 1969.

Dialcom Inc. was founded in 1970 and provided the world's first
commercial email service (but it did not sell to end-users).

The first public commercial packet-switched network was Telenet, Inc.
created in 1975 by the contractor that built the ARPANET (BB&N) and
headed-up by Larry Roberts, the former head of the ARPANET.

The Source (Source Telecomputing Corporation) is another early
commercial player (1978) and was a Dialcom customer.

Certainly not the only players, but the pattern is a familiar one of
commercial products and services building out the commercial 'computers
and networks' marketplace.

But along came the Carterphone decision and hobbyist modems. Arguably,
BBSs, over time, opened the door to another networking 'business-model'
that became available to individuals, rather than just large
organizations.
  

    
I think something a lot of people forget (or don't know) is the amount
of control AT&T had over the phone networks and accessories.  When I
was in college (late 80s) one of the people I met on a BBS showed me
the answering machine his dad had made in the early 70s.  He was an
audio engineer on Apollo and this was just a weekend project.  I
bought an answering machine in 88 or 89 when I started doing UNIX
consulting and I remember it being rather expensive, just like my
modems.

I'm still surprised how the ham radio crowd mostly ignored the BBS
world.  The only people I knew with licenses who were on local BBSes
were also computer nerds of some sort or the other.
  

    
So what BBSes were you on other than the WeLL?

I really don't have notes on this as much as files I saved on my C64
and Amiga that got migrated to my unix account at school.  My guess is
it was mostly sites trading software and mixtapes of punk and
industrial music.  Some of the oldest archives I can find are of my
first days on mailing lists and USENET.

Also great bits of email I saved for I dunno why. But some of it is
interesting history

--- cut here ---
From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: FIDONet Censorship?
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 93 11:06:44 PDT

FIDONet operators are sometimes blocking encrypted messages. So what
else is new?

Their machines, their rules. Strictly speaking, this is not
censorship.

However, we can try to get them to change their rules. Better, route
around such machines.

John Gilmore has one of the best lines I've seen on this, quoted in
the new book by Howard Rheingold (something about "Living on the
Virtual Frontier," just out in the stores). John says something along
these lines:

"The Net tends to view censorship as damage and routes around it."



-Tim May

--
..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@netcom.com       | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409           | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA  | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
Note: I put time and money into writing this posting. I hope you enjoyit.
  

    
Next message, hidden, is some of the oldest email I can find.  It's
about creating a group on netcom of people who are all members of the
well.
  

    <hidden>
  

    
Wow, Dallman Ross. Been a while.
  

    
I know, some days I forget how many people used to be on the well when
I started.
  

    
I must've gotten one of those missives, being a Netcom-and-Well member at
the time, but I would have ignored it. But that sig. Remember composing
sigs?
  

    
Something we *didn't* do on BBSes!

I still compose them for email.  Because nerd.
  

    
Wow. Thank you for digging those emails up for us, <jet>. I love the
idea that folks would be signing up for Netcom as a cheaper way to
reach The WELL! I've also heard stories about people jumping through
multiple X.25 networks to log on from Europe. Is there a thread
somewhere for the most convoluted pathway to get here?

Random memory dredged up by <105>: I definitely went to my first
punk show at a local VFW hall after reading about it on a BBS!
  

    
Thanks!  I'll keep digging around and see what I can find.

Netcom had a lot of great better-than-bbs offerings in addition to
being an ISP:

- unix shell for free, before linux
- USENET for free
- SMTP email
- some amount of disk space for uploading/downloading and writing
  shell scripts

I think I moved from Netcom to DSL in the mid-90s, then to ISDN soon
after that just because I loved trashing people on Quake from my house
instead of from my office.  (I know, "you were THAT jerk?")

More history!

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISDN_%28album%29>
  

    
Ooh, yes. Thanks to <clm> for bringing an important historical
perspective. I'm reminded that <lendie> also mentioned EIES
(Electronic Information Exchange System) back in <44>. And we might
also include PLATO on this list of systems developed within
educational institutions or research environments.

An amazing book exploring this period is _A People's History of
Computing in the United States_ by Joy Lisi Rankin. Rankin describes
participation in time-sharing systems as a form of
"citizenship".<https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674970977>

For another perspective, Nathan Schneider wrote a recent paper
characterizing the governance model of many online communities
(including BBSs) as "implicit feudalism":
<https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820986553>

Yet, purpose-driven decision-making was not a part of (most) hobby
BBSs, as far as I know. All of which reminds me of some of the
recent discussion about the future of the WELL in <news.3624>.
Sometimes it feels like... we're here. What now?
  

    
OK! Sorry for the repeat posts. Just one more... ;-)

Here's an interesting system that pushes on the conventional meaning
of "BBS" as a small-scale DIY operation.

PTT in Taiwan is one of the net's longest-running and most
influential BBSs. It was started as a student project in 1995 and
remains a popular site for daily discussion today. Wikipedia
suggests that there were as many as 1.5 million registered users in
2014. As I understand it, most folks get on PTT through the Web but
it is still accessible via telnet.

- PTT homepage: <https://www.ptt.cc/>
- Wikipedia has a good pocket history of PTT:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System>
- And this is an interesting article about early discussions of
COVID on PTT:
<http://archive.today/2021.06.21-022601/https://www.scmp.com/abacus/tech/articl
e/3080309/how-reddit-forum-helped-taiwan-prepare-early-covid-19>
  

    
In 1983 I explored BITNET from public terminals in Stanford's Terman
engineering building. I tried downloading some software bundles and
discovered that cross country Internet connections gave me download
rates between two and three kilobits per second.

I remember teasing Theodore Ts'o, who was then an MIT undergraduate
visiting Stanford for the summer. He called himself Teddy Bear.
  

    
I used to used the Compuserve Packet Network to get to the Well
instead of long-distance dialup from Washington, DC.  But even that
was $22 per hour.  People like me used Sweeper to download from the
Well, disconnect, read and respond offline, and then reconnect to
upload.  So we used about 2 to 5 minutes of that expensive
connection time for an hour or more of Well participation.  And that
was when the Well also charged by the hour for connections.  Only so
many modems!

I also used BIX and Compuserve, as well as a number of dial-up BBSs.
A guy named Mike Focke put out "Focke's List," which listed publicly
available BBSs, updated monthly or maybe eve weekly.  The BBS I used
the most was The Running Board, which was part of FidoNet and thus
had email and forums that covered multiple BBSs.  The woman running
Running Board, Bonnie Anthony, was a doctor at NIH whose brother in
NY had developed FidoNet.  She passed away a couple years ago.
  

    
I woefully neglected to say earlier, the book is quite good -- Kevin
got the basic facts right, but also the sense of the culture and how
it unfolded. I'm also the worst person to ask since my POV was so
warped, I really don't know what a non-sysop's view of the BBS world
looked like, after say 1982. 

To me the inheritor(s) of BBSs are forums. The whole point of BBS
boards/conferences/etc is conversation continuity, which is
precisely what nearly all "social media" is not interested in and
actively deprecates. Facebook, TikTok and the rest are about
reaction and novelty. I use both but forums are more useful.

I'm on one system for going on 15 years; before that it was a
mailing list (listserv, then Mailman). The conversation is the
thing.

One thing that never caught on that I've regretted is forum combined
with archive: a method of building and accumulating knowledge.
Wikipedia does this, with more one-to-many approach; I'm thinking
more as a benefit to participants. But the number of things that
don't exist is infinite...

Many hams adopted BBS concepts (there are BBSs on HF) but um...
being the fairly extreme conservative creatures they tend to be it's
not surprising (ref Kirsten Haring's book). I did my best to keep
FidoNet weird and aggressively non-commercial, lol.

(I am a ham though; KF6QFI Amateur Extra; did I say that already.
Mainly I like radio as a physical phenomenon.)


(IFNA needs its own exploration, but I'm not sure anyone would care.
I was deeply involved in its inception. THe plan was entirely within
the free open general approach but 1) we did a truly shit job of
exposition and 2) a cabal of people who wanted to turn FidoNet
money-driven attempted a coup; a scumbag lawyer, Tom someone, who
took me aside and attempted to tell me "how the world works", and
other sysops. I'll stop here.)
  

    

When Pacific Bell changed something about their rates in the Bay Area, a
bunch of Oakland residents persuaded the WELL to install a plain phone line
in <onezie>'s basement and forward  calls to the Sausalito dial-up port.
That was a free call, so I could dial the Berkeley number and get to the WELL
for free. I don't know how many of us took advantage of it, but it sure saved
a bunch of us a bunch of money.
  

    

When was that, David? I was going broke on dialup until discovering Sweeper,
in 1993. Don't recall teh number at Tina's.
  

    
<117> I used Compuserve Packet Networks (CPN) until I got an account
providing access to telnet from John Quarterman. My recollection is
that CPN was $2 per hour? I don't think I would have paid $22. 

Before I used CPN, I used PC Pursuit from Sprint. PCP allowed a user
to log in via Sprint's packet network and multi-city modem banks. It
was a flat rate of $30 per month, I recall. CPN was more given how
much I used it, but the connection was better.
  

    
<120> early '90s, I'm sure.
  

    
When I was working in Mountain View I wrote a shell script that
would See All New in my cflist, write the output to a file, and then
email it to my work account. I'd be online for maybe a minute or
two, then peruse the feed at my leisure. Saved a bundle on phone
charges.
  

    
Sounds like picodown?
  

    
Re: <lendie>'s mention of EIES: Also interesting to note Stewart's
help with Engelbart's demo in 1968. 

By then, PLATO I, II, and III had been developed to the point that it
was given "steady funding" from the NSF (in 1967). See:

  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)#Genesis>
  
When we look back, we (I certainly) find it difficult to see clearly 
the many human interactions that caused a given artifact to come into
being -- in this case the PLATO system. The artifact is a just token of
the many complex processes involved in both its creation and use.

I also suspect that EIES was were Peter & Trudy Johnson-Lenz formulated
their notion of "groupware" as being a *combination* of both the 
software and the social practices that make it useful. It's the latter
that we always drop out of the picture.