When Computers Were Neither Media Nor Social

Posted: May 3rd, 2009 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Geeking It Old School | Tags: BBS, D&D, kansas city | Comments

The cartoon that started the meme “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” was printed in 1993, but already this is no longer true. If you’re online, you’re probably on Facebook, Linkedin, and other real-life networking services. Everybody you meet online who could possibly know who you really are is probably going to find out.

Question: What happened?

Answer: The popular kids took over the Internet.

When my family got our first computer in 1984 (Apple II+), my desire to talk about it at school was a sign of social awkwardness. Nobody in their right mind discussed technology with a straight face school unless a) they just didn’t get how the social system worked, or b) they had already given up on any hope of ever being even mildly popular. It was understood that computers were for people who were unable to negotiate the more nuanced planes of human relations, and had to take comfort in the “ones and zeroes.”

There was some truth to this. It wasn’t an accident that one of the first computer games to become really popular was Adventure, a text-only fantasy in which the user discovers treasure, fights dwarves, and negotiates labyrinthine cave passages (ironically based on real cave passages).

I made my own map of those caves on graph paper. And the reason I had graph paper sitting around, of course, was because I used it to chart adventures in Dungeons & Dragons, the other activity popular with boys in their early teens whose most exciting activities took place in their own imaginations.

My first experience communicating regularly with other people via computers came in the form of “boards.” “Boards” consisted of BBS software running on a personal computer that was never shut off, connected to a single dedicated phone line. There was no “server.” You typed the phone number you wanted to dial onto the screen, and then you listened while the modem speaker amplified the hissing and beeping of the connection being made. If there was a busy signal, you waited.

If you ran a board, then you were a sysop. Sysop is pronounced “SISS-ohp” because it stands for System Operator. But my circle of computer friends pronounced it “SIGH-sop” because we had never heard it properly pronounced.

To be a real sysop, you had to have a computer and a phone line that were both dedicated to your board 24/7. Which meant, in the early 80s, that your parents were rich.

Software piracy truly came into its own on the boards. Hence, it was the kids who could afford the software who facilitated its “theft” by everyone else. But that’s another story.

The board that I most enjoyed was called Proving Grounds. When you logged into Proving Grounds, you played a game (all text) that was basically a one-on-one gladiatorial match against other players in a D&D-esque universe. Only one player could log on to the system at a time, so only the player logged in got to witness the conflict taking place. Witnessing the conflict” meant watching a series of sentences scroll down your screen, like this:

You strike Smorgath with your +5 vorpal blade!
It hits!!!
He loses 23,431 hit points.
His status is STILL ALIVE.
Smorgath smacks you upside the head with his +17 adamantine battle-axe!
It hits!!!
You lose 243,243,102 hit points.
You are dead.
BUT you have resurrection!!
You come back to life with 35,135 hit points!
Attack again? <Y/N>
{{ Porsche. There is no substitute. }}

Sometimes, the text would appear one line at a time, and it was unclear whether this was the programmer trying to simulate a real-time experience, or whether that’s just how long it took the sysop’s computer to execute each part of the program.

The person you’re doing battle with never got to see the battle. He would log in later and see something like this:

At 03:23:23 on 05/02/85, miconian attacked you!
He won!
You died!
He took all your cool magic shit!
{{ Porsche. There is no substitute. }}

I used to sometimes set my alarm for 3 am just so I could sneak downstairs to the basement where the computer was, dial up Proving Grounds, and kill my nemesis, Smorgath. Apparently I was the only kid vindictive enough to bother doing this, because the line was always free at 3 am. So I killed Smorgath every night, and then when I came home from school, I would obsessively dial until I didn’t get a busy signal, so that I could log in and find out that, in the intervening time, he had logged in and killed me.

I had no desire to ever meet the guy. And yet, it was personal. We each had a specific identity. There were lots of other people playing, but he and I attacked only each other, day after day, night after night.

I heard rumors about the rich kid who ran Proving Grounds. Supposedly, his parents had bought him a Porsche for his 16th birthday. That’s why he had caused a line of dialog from Risky Business regarding Porsches to show up asynchronously in the middle of the medieval text battle experience. He was also rumored to have a sister who was hot. These rumors had a tangible quality to them, because the sysop, like me and all the other players, was somewhere in Kansas City. Otherwise, calling Proving Grounds would have been a long distance call.

The sysop of Proving Grounds launched the board as a free service, and then started charging. It was the best board of its kind in Kansas City, and there was very little competition. I paid for my membership with cash in a mailed envelope, sent directly to the guy’s house.

There were a lot of boards that were more or less like Proving Grounds. Some of them were places to discuss politics or religion. Most were places to share pirated software.

There were no “meetups,” at least not that I went to. And it wasn’t because of the illegal activity (which, in kid chronology, had already been going on so openly for so long that it was hard to believe a crackdown would ever come).

It was because we knew what would happen at a meetup. It would be like a computer club meeting. Which is to say, it would be a bunch of people who looked like they got picked last in gym class. And that wasn’t a bad thing; we weren’t ashamed of who we are. But coming together in real life just wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t the point. The point was that we had developed online extensions of our best possible selves. With computers, we could interact only with our minds, which was the only way that mattered. I remember one guy I used to talk to on the boards all the time, whose computer name was Big Dude. Later I found out that he went to my school, when we ended up sitting across from each other at the nerd table in the cafeteria. He was a skinny little guy. But there was no embarrassment in his voice when he revealed his online name to me, nor did I find the incongruity funny or arrogant. Big Dude was a description of his persona, not his biology.

Even ten years later, in 1995, things hadn’t changed all that much in terms of online identities. In AOL chat rooms, on IRC, on forums, we “socialized,” but it was understood that the socialization was all within the context of online life. Meetups took place among groups of people who had, through many late-night joint chat sessions, already come to know and trust each other. But the point was never to network or to branch out and find new friends. It was merely to reinforce relationships that had already been created.

Eventually, recently, there was a massive influx of people who had two characteristics previously unheard of in combination:

a) They identified as “normal.”

b) They enthusiastically used computers as a social tool, and told their popular, attractive friends about it, out loud, in public.

… and now we have social media.

How exactly we got from there to here is a subject for another post.

Here are ten minutes of excerpts from a great documentary called BBS: The Documentary. I didn’t watch it until after I’d written the above post and was searching for images and links. But I’m pleased to find so much correspondence between the interviews and my own memory, even within this brief segment. Note that many of the interviewees are credited at the end with their BBS names instead of their “real” ones.

Aside: Years later, I the Proving Grounds guy’s sister in high school, and she actually was hot. We had a surreal conversation in which she fondly recollected how her non-gendered persona had kicked ass on her brother’s game board. She also confirmed the Porsche story.

girl/dog/computer image by striatic

BBS billboard image by dllong

The Crazy Eddie image is from the documentary.

blog subtitle: With what? Your bare hands?

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