Kim Zetter is an award-winning, senior staff reporter at Wired covering cybercrime, privacy, and security. She is writing a book about Stuxnet, a digital weapon that was designed to sabotage Iran's nuclear program.
It was called a bulletin board system, or BBS, and was essentially a virtual living room where people hooked up remotely to chat, exchange freeware or play computer games, albeit at a really slow speed.
Anyone nostalgic for those halcyon days can now thank digital archivist and filmmaker Jason Scott for BBS: The Documentary, a five-and-a-half-hour paean to the era when computers were named Stacy and Lisa, and tech loyalists fought bitter battles over the superiority of Ataris to Amigas.
Filled with interviews of the founders of the first bulletin board, the creator of Fido software, internet patriarch Vint Cerf and many others, the surprisingly engrossing documentary grew out of a project Scott began in 1998 when he started collecting text files posted to BBSes over the years and published them at textfiles.com. He just wanted to preserve a bit of tech history that meant a lot to his teen years, but he was soon inundated with BBS artifacts that other people sent in.
BBSes were the blogs of their day and began sprouting up in the late '70s, after the appearance of the Hayes modem, with names like Aladdin's Lamp, The Puzzle Palace and Leprechaun Heaven, each one devoted to a different topic. Users and system operators, or sysops, compiled directories of BBS names, phone numbers and their topics. Scott culled the names he could find and composed a list that has now grown to 105,000.
When he posted the list online, it gave old BBS users a blast from their past.
"They would type in their name on Google and here would come up the name of a BBS that they had run 20 years ago when they were 13," Scott said. "I had a guy tell me that he was dating a girl and she asked him, 'What was the Wizard Castle?' It was the name of a BBS he had run for only a few months in 1983."
People began sending Scott personal essays reminiscing about their life on the boards. So Scott, who studied film in school, decided to make a documentary. The four-year project, begun in 2001, was just released as a three-DVD set containing eight episodes and bonus material. Fans can see various aspects of the BBS story, such as the birth of boards, the creation of FidoNet, the appearance of online porn and the digital art medium called ANSI art.
The first BBS was launched in 1978 by Ward Christensen, an IBM mainframe programmer who developed Xmodem, and Randy Suess. It was born during a snowstorm.
When a blizzard struck Chicago where Christensen lived, he couldn't go to work one day, and he decided to fiddle with an idea he and Suess had discussed for their computer club, the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange, or CACHE. The plan was to replace the group's answering machine that announced meetings with a computerized message board allowing people to leave messages on the board using their computer. It took Christensen two weeks to write the software while Suess assembled the hardware.
The board launched Feb. 16, 1978, as CBBS, for the Computerized Bulletin Board System, using a 300-baud modem. Only one caller could connect to the board at a time (eventually someone developed software to allow multiple phone lines to connect to a board at once), and the system could transfer only about five words per second. But it was a hit.
Months later, Christensen and Suess published an article about the board in Byte magazine and distributed free copies of the BBS software. BBSes began popping up everywhere, but callers to them were scarce since few people owned modems yet.
Within two years, 200 to 300 BBSes flourished, and eventually more than 150,000 existed in North America at the peak of their popularity.
Unlike the nascent internet, whose use was confined at the time to researchers and the military, BBSes were populist to their core, available to anyone who could afford the hefty $3,000 to $10,000 price tag for a computer. All it took to establish a BBS and become your own sysop was to install the software on a home PC with a modem and connect it to a phone line that remote users could dial into and leave messages.
On the surface, the BBS was, perhaps, a ridiculous idea. Conversations took an eon to unfold. And a game of digital chess or Battleship played on the boards would take days to progress because a player had to wait a day or two after making a move for an opponent to dial in and take a turn.
Tom Jennings, creator of the Fido protocol that allowed hundreds of BBSes to network with each other, recalls describing the concept to friends and getting blank stares.
"With this program you'd have on your computer you'd dial a number, you'd enter your name and password ... and then you could go to the messages so you could read the messages. And then you could add one," Jennings told friends. "And if you waited long enough, and I had to say months, other people would have called in and left messages. And after a few months you would have a conversation.
"And they're like, why?... It was unbelievably stupid."
And yet more and more people signed on. Scott said "BBS" became a code word for passage to a revolutionary underground society.
"If you mentioned the term 'BBS' to someone and no spark of recognition appeared in their eyes," one user told Scott in the film, "you said screw them, they're not worth your time."
A number of sysops interviewed in the film described watching the lights on the computer next to their bed flash at night as they lay in the dark and feeling awe that technology had brought the world to their bedroom.
Often the information superhighway came at a hefty price, however, because cross-country calls to BBSes not in the area could cost $1 a minute, leading to $600 phone charges for heavy users who frequented half a dozen or more boards daily.
Lasting friendships were forged, and marriages were made and broken, as the online medium offered new ways for people to meet and cheat. The boards also saved lives.
One woman told a sysop that finding his board led her to abandon a plan to commit suicide, while closeted gays expressed relief at finding alternative lifestyle boards for communities they never knew existed.
Although board communication could be laborious, its nature changed in 1983 with the appearance of Fido, a protocol that allowed BBSes to communicate with one another to create a FidoNet for wider distribution of messages. Instead of posting a message to just one board, a user could post a message and have it fan out to hundreds or thousands of boards at a time.
In 1984, FidoNet had only 132 nodes; by 1995, the number had grown to more than 35,000 worldwide.
"FidoNet really felt like it was changing the world. And it was," Scott said. "The idea that you could send a message and it would filter out to a thousand BBSes within a day or two was intoxicating to a person. It's easy now when people can send messages instantaneously. But at the time nobody thought this was something that was ever going to fall into the hands of regular people."
The ills that hit the internet later struck BBSes early – from innocuous but annoying flame wars to pornography and pirated software, which drew the attention of law enforcement and critics who hated the free-for-all nature of the boards.
"I found quotes online ... a person was talking to a librarian at a BBS convention and the librarian said it would be a lot easier for librarians if these BBSes would just go away," Scott said. "Here's all this stuff going out and nobody knows where it's from. People are transferring information willy-nilly and there's no protection. You could see all of this fear."
And there arose a philosophical schism between free and fee-based boards, leading purists to accuse the fee-based boards of violating the open-source spirit of the community.
"That's where the real fights started," Scott said. "For a certain group of people ... the minute you started charging money, you lost them. You made it uncool."
Around 1995, just as the mention of BBSes on an episode of Law & Order signaled the phenomenon's entry into pop culture, the reign of boards came to a crashing end. That's when the internet took hold and, like vinyl records and 8-track tapes, bulletin boards quickly faded to obscurity. Some BBS owners morphed their systems into the first internet service providers but most disappeared. Only a few hundred dialup BBSes still exist, Scott said.
Now he laughs at the people who feared the BBS.
"I just say to them, oh yeah, BBSes went away. I hope you're happy with what you have now," Scott said. "And let's see what comes next."
