Hobbyist inter-networking and the popular Internet imaginary: forgotten histories of networked personal computing, 1978-1998

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Content HOBBYIST INTER-NETWORKING AND THE POPULAR INTERNET
IMAGINARY:
FORGOTTEN HISTORIES OF NETWORKED PERSONAL COMPUTING, 1978-1998
by
Kevin Edward Driscoll
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)
August 2014
Copyright 2014 Kevin Edward Driscoll
ii
Acknowledgements
My foremost thanks goes to my long-time advisor Henry Jenkins, and committee
members François Bar and Alison Trope. Each modeled an approach to daring,
socially-engaged scholarship and pedagogy to which I aspire. Tara McPherson, G.
Thomas Goodnight, and Sarah Banet-Weiser also provided feedback that shaped the
direction of this research. Kjerstin Thorson, Mike Ananny, and Lian Jian offered their
advice and challenging research opportunities. Anne Marie Campian and Amanda Ford
gave their invaluable guidance and support.
This project was strengthened by the feedback I received from my fellow
participants in the Cultural Digitally workshops, particularly my “shadow committee” of
Tim Jordan, Hector Postigo, and Thomas Streeter, who took a first crack at my proposal.
It also benefited from the feedback of my colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute
Summer Doctoral Programme. As the project developed, it was further improved by the
comments and questions of the diverse audiences at ROFLCon II and the Free Art &
Technology (FAT) Lab Public Access program organized by Bennett Williamson. Finally,
I learned how to manage the writing process thanks to the advice, criticism, and support
of the members of an interdisciplinary dissertation writing group organized by Laura
Isabel Serna including: Elena Bomono, Lara Bradshaw, Umayyah Cable, Samantha
Carrick, Nadine Chan, Alison Kozberg, Luci Marzola, Kathryn Page-Lippsmeyer, and
Roxanne Samer.
iii
Several former BBSers shared their memories and personal collections with me.
In particular, I wish to thank Tom Jennings, whose openness and candor during our first
meeting fueled my commitment to studying the grassroots origins of the Net. Thomas
O'Nan, Mike Nichols, and Rey Barry each gave generously of their time and resources to
help me understand the lived experience of modeming in the 1980s. Brian Grace of the
New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science lead me through a hangar full of
dinosaur bones to visit his institution's unique collection of personal computing artifacts.
Finally, this research would have been impossible without Jason Scott's commitment to
preserving the history of BBS culture and passion for making it accessible to the general
public. Days of my life have been spent deep in the textfiles.com directory tree and I
continue to be delighted and surprised by what I find there.
But my deepest gratitude is reserved for the people who stuck with me through
the grind. Whether working together in a coffee shop, walking around around Echo Park
Lake with Cooper, or out dancing somewhere at 3 AM, Lana Swartz filled my life with
love, compassion, and wit. More than once, she lent her intellectual powers to unraveling
a thorny knot in my thinking. I could not have completed this project without her. My
parents, Mary and Ed, made their unwavering support known through a cross-continental
stream of hilarious and thoughtful cards, texts, and tweets that always arrived at precisely
the moment I needed a boost. And my brother Mark inspired me with his discipline,
humility, and sense of humor. This dissertation is dedicated to them.
iv
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements..............................................................................................................ii
Introduction..........................................................................................................................1
The popular internet imaginary.......................................................................................2
The technical culture of microcomputer hobbyists.........................................................6
Hobbyist contributions to networked personal computing.............................................8
The dominant history of the internet.............................................................................11
A popular history of the internet...................................................................................16
Methodological challenges in the history of the modem world....................................22
Chapter overview..........................................................................................................27
Expanding the popular internet imaginary....................................................................30
Chapter 1: From ARPANET to the Internet: The Genealogy of a Popular Myth..............32
The production, maintenance, and circulation of a popular mythology.......................38
Public conflict and the revelation of popular mythology..............................................42
Toward a systematic study of popular internet mythology...........................................48
An explosion of historiography, 1993-1999..................................................................56
A critical look across Sterling, Hafner & Lyon, and Abbate........................................63
Conspicuous absences...................................................................................................75
Chapter 2: The Origins of the Modem World....................................................................80
Favorable conditions for networked personal computing.............................................84
The popularization of telecommunications: A half century with Ma Bell....................87
The long tradition of amateur telecommunications in North America ......................102
“Hobby computers are here!”: From amateur radio to hobby computing..................125
The modem world.......................................................................................................133
Conclusion: The place of the modem world in the history of the internet..................157
Chapter 3: From Computerized Bulletin Board to BBS..................................................161
The dial-up BBS as a platform ...................................................................................162
Building a “computerized” bulletin board..................................................................166
The BBS network infrastructure.................................................................................169
Text, terminal, and the visual culture of BBSing........................................................176
Decentralized innovation in the development of BBS host software.........................199
Selecting a BBS host package.....................................................................................222
Beyond ASCII and ANSI: Protocols for error-correction and compression ..............225
Remote computing and the cottage industry of BBS “doors”.....................................232
Conclusion: The BBS as a platform ...........................................................................242
v
Chapter 4: A Field Guide to the North American Dial-Up BBS.....................................245
Part I. Discovering BBSes...........................................................................................254
Costly first encounters with commercial online services.......................................255
BBS lists: Modem world treasure maps.................................................................257
Circumventing long-distance, lawfully and otherwise...........................................262
Making a home in the modem world......................................................................264
Part II. Dial-up file-sharing: Come for the files, stay for the community...................265
From sneaker-net to ASCII Express: Individual file repositories..........................266
Warez: Unauthorized file-sharing...........................................................................270
Shareware: Authorized file-sharing........................................................................273
GIFs: “Heavenly Bodies Online”...........................................................................279
Textfiles: Electronic publishing for the BBS world...............................................290
File-sharing as a communal activity.......................................................................303
Part III. Community-oriented BBSing during the boom of the early 1990s...............306
BBS etiquette and social policy..............................................................................311
WELL-documented experiments in computer-mediated community....................320
Opening the door to the TARDIS BBS..................................................................327
A tale of two area codes..........................................................................................335
Part IV . “Adults-only” BBSing...................................................................................341
Health, faith, and information sharing among users of “adult” boards..................344
Queer visibility in the modem world......................................................................350
Matchmakers, hookups and and swingers: Computer-mediated heterosexuality...356
“Adult” sociality in the BBS world........................................................................364
Conclusion: The internet as “just an overgrown BBS”...............................................367
Conclusion: The stakes of forgetting and the promises of remembering........................371
Where did all the BBSes go?: Rhetorical closure in the naming of the Net...............374
Memory work and narratives of decline among former BBSers................................387
Re-calling the dial-up history of social computing.....................................................391
Bibliography....................................................................................................................395
1
Introduction
Popular social computing began in the late-1970s with the emergence of dial-up
bulletin-board systems (BBS). For nearly two decades before the privatization of the
state-sponsored internet, tens of thousands of dial-up computer networks were run out of
the homes and offices of hobbyists, volunteers, and entrepreneurs throughout North
America. It was on these “boards” that personal computer owners first began to use their
machines for popular communication: chatting with friends, flirting with strangers,
debating politics with neighbors, and trading information with peers. Participants in the
BBSing movement were a vanguard in networked personal computing. Their experiments
in community-building established the foundation on which today's social computing was
built.
The best-known histories of the internet tend to focus on institutional time-sharing
systems rather than smaller-scale personal computer networks. This imbalance is due in
part to the ambiguity between the generic term “internet”—meaning “a network of
networks”—and the particular family of research networks that came to be known as “the
Internet” during the 1980s. Today, internet users are more likely to have heard of the
ARPANET, a state-sponsored system that connected a small number of university and
military research labs, than FidoNet, a transnational network consisting of thousands of
publicly-accessible bulletin board systems. Consequently, the spatial and socio-economic
history of social computing is seriously distorted. Whereas the ARPANET family of
networks were populated by a largely homogeneous community of elite researchers
2
concentrated in New England, New York, and California, personal computer networks
like FidoNet were built by enterprising hobbyists in cities and towns throughout the U.S.
and Canada. The history of BBSing more closely matches the social, economic, and
geographic diversity of the present-day social computing ecology.
The history of BBSing portrays amateurs, hobbyists, and enthusiasts as key agents
in the development and diffusion of social computing. Indeed, the users and
administrators of early BBSes were the first to confront the fundamental challenges of
living and working in online communities. Their experiences and experiments with
anonymity, identity, privacy, sexuality, and trust established norms and values that were
reproduced in the commercial services and social media systems to follow. Today,
however, amateurs are rarely given voice in conflicts regarding the corporate stewardship
of personal data or the state regulation of network infrastructure. Restoring the popular
memory of the BBS movement confers legitimacy on non-professional users to enter into
these debates. With a visible role in the internet's past, amateur users will have the
authority to speak about its present and future.
The popular internet imaginary
Popular knowledge about the history of the internet has profound material effects
for a society enmeshed in ubiquitous telecommunications. “Internet imaginary” refers to
the beliefs that individuals and groups hold about the internet and their role within it. It is
not an explicit theory but rather an implicit way of being that develops over time as
groups of people work to make sense of the information and communication
3
technologies.
1
Not only does the internet imaginary describe factually what the internet is,
it also sets normative constraints on what the internet ought to be, and proscribes which
institutions and individuals are able to shape its future. In this sense, internet imaginaries
also grant legitimacy to some actors to speak with authority on matters related to the
internet. Although many internet imaginaries may be in circulation at a given time, some
will be more widely shared than others. Investigating the range of internet imaginaries in
circulation at different times and places is essential for understanding the emergence,
diffusion, and destruction of particular regulatory regimes, economic relationships,
cultural practices, and technological paradigms.
The role of history in the circulation of internet imaginaries is made most explicit
when speakers attempt to establish their authority during a public conflict. The “net
neutrality” debate over proper network management offers a particularly clear example.
As the debate grew increasingly active in the late-2000s, veteran engineers frequently
prefaced public comments by asserting authority grounded in a particular history of the
internet. In a 2006 blog post, Tim Berners-Lee began “When I invented the web, I didn't
have to ask anyone's permission.”
2
Vint Cerf similarly opened a 2012 post on the Google
Policy Blog, “Starting in 1973, when my colleagues and I proposed the technology
behind the Internet, we advocated for an open standard to connect computer networks
1 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction,” Public Culture 14, no. 1
(December 21, 2002): 1–19, doi:10.1215/08992363-14-1-1; Charles Taylor, “Modern Social
Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (December 21, 2002): 91–124, doi:10.1215/08992363-14-1-91.
2 Tim Berners-Lee, “Net Neutrality: This Is Serious,” Decentralized Information Group (DIG)
Breadcrumbs, June 21, 2006, http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/144.
4
together.”
3
In each case, authority, legitimacy, technology, and history were entangled in
the expression of a particular internet imaginary.
An internet imaginary can also delegitimize certain groups and practices. During
conflicts over internet regulation, politicians are routinely mocked for describing the
internet as a “superhighway” or “tubes.” Although they may be poorly suited to
describing a massive packet-switched digital network, the policing of these metaphors
reveals a legitimacy problem rooted in conflicting internet imaginaries. The persistence
of counter-factual terminology, such as “tubes,” is sustained by some an underlying belief
about how the internet ought to function. Rather than simply dismiss these moments as
evidence of ill-informed legislators, it is helpful to interrogate the stories through which
such an imaginary is assembled and sustained.
Technical expertise plays a particularly important role in the development of an
internet imaginary. Until the early 2000s, computer networking was an niche activity due
to the arcane knowledge required to participate. For many enthusiasts, the technical
challenge of telecomputing offered its own inherent pleasures. Kristen Haring identified a
similarly commitment to technical expertise in the “technical culture” of postwar amateur
radio.
4
Indeed, amateur radio and BBSing cultures each gave rise to comparable
socio-technical imaginaries. But whereas amateur radio operators engaged with the state
to develop overt structures of collective identity such call signs and licenses, BBSing
emerged within a more libertarian political atmosphere that rejected state regulation. As a
result, amateur radio operators continue to enjoy privileged access to the airwaves and are
3 Vint Cerf, “Google Public Policy Blog: Keep the Internet Free and Open,” Google Public Policy Blog,
December 3, 2012, http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2012/12/keep-internet-free-and-open.html.
4 Kristen Haring, Ham Radio’ s Technical Culture (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT, 2008).
5
represented in regulatory debates. No similar identity or political category exists for
computer hobbyists.
In times of crisis, the lack of shared history and identity limits the capacity of
internet users to take collective action. Although there are a number of highly-visible
examples of online protests disrupting institutions of power during the past decade, they
have been narrowly targeted and have rarely lead to the development of enduring
institutions. In other words, a shared internet imaginary alone is insufficient for the
formation of ideal publics of the sort described by John Dewey or Jürgen Habermas.
56

Whereas amateur radio operators may appeal to the Amateur Radio Relay League
(ARRL), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), or the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU) to redress grievances, no similar institutions represent
the interests of internet users. Furthermore, with rare exception, only a few layers of
internet infrastructure are accessible to users; the lower levels are managed by private
industry. Faced with service interruptions, users may not even have access to the
information required to develop a formal complaint.
5 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1927); Jürgen Habermas,
The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
6 Across many different disciplines, scholars have examined the potential for publics to form in less than
ideal conditions. Michael Warner's notion of the “counter-public” helps make sense of the protest
actions taken by unstable collectivities such as of Anonymous but it does not provide a normative view
toward a more durable, persistent arrangement. Christopher Kelty's description of the deliberative
practices of free software developers as “recursive publics” begins to move toward sustainability, but an
engineer’s intimate knowledge of networking infrastructure should not be required to register a public
complaint. Mary Gray's observation that queer youth carve out “boundary publics” from within the
walls of retail spaces offers a hopeful reminder that opportunities exist in the tension between public
interest and private ownership. Mary L. Gray, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in
Rural America (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Christopher M Kelty, Two Bits: The
Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Michael Warner,
Publics and Counterpublics (New York; Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books ; Distributed by MIT Press,
2002).
6
An internet imaginary informed by BBS history will enable everyday users to act
collectively in debates regarding the internet's social, political, technical, and economic
future. For engineers, entrepreneurs, and regulators, the stories, images, and legends that
make up BBS history provide a set of resources for thinking more broadly about the
future of social computing. The BBSing movement offers a lived example of a network
of networks that existed under a very different political, economic, and technical regime.
There is presently a rising demand for an enlarged internet history, exemplified by the
unexpected embrace of technical hobbies by educators, industry, and government. The
history of BBSing is essentially a chapter in the longer history of hobbyist
telecommunications.
The technical culture of microcomputer hobbyists
“Hobbyist” takes on special meaning in the context of this project. Comparable to
terms like “amateur,” “hacker,” or “maker,” the term “hobbyist” reminds us that the
activities of enthusiasts are situated within a wider social life. Although hobbies are
typically imagined in opposition to work and outside of family, they may still be sites of
rich sociality, entrepreneurship, professional development, and family bonding.
Hobbyists share a sense of passionate engagement with people who might be called
"fans," but their passions are, by definition, expressed through a craft practice.
In histories of networked personal computing, the term “hacker”—as defined by
Steven Levy's account of early computing culture, Hackers—is often used synonymously
7
with the term “hobbyist.”
7
In the long tradition of technical hobbies, however, the MIT
hacker culture documented by Levy was actually quite unique. Unfettered access to
powerful computers, for example, was extremely rare in the 1960s and 1970s. Without
direct access to time-sharing computer systems, the popular computing culture that
developed outside of academia was characterized by all manner of hands-on electronics
—hi-fi stereo, programmable calculator, and amateur and CB radios; devices that could
be built from kits, modified, and customized like a hot rod car. As home computer kits
like the Altair 8800 became increasingly accessible, they were incorporated into this
lively socio-technological habitus.
The fuzzy distinction between hackers and hobbyists is due in large part to their
comparable orientations toward technology. The ethos of the MIT hackers’ “Hands-On
Imperative” would surely have been familiar to most readers of a magazine like Popular
Electronics in the mid-1970s, even if MIT’s iconic Incompatible Timesharing System
was not. The crucial difference is that for even the most passionate hobbyist, computing
was, by necessity, a pastime pursued outside of commitments to family, work, and school.
To focus on hackers and ignore the contributions of hobbyists is to risk overlooking the
influence of labor and family in the social construction of networked personal computing.
Geography is another important characteristic of the hobbyist/hacker distinction.
In the 1984 documentary, Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age, the narrator describes
“hacker culture” as a phenomenon unique to “the Bay Area” and the “universities of
Cambridge [Massachusetts].”
8
Even a cursory look at the hobbyist literature of the time,
7 Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Garden City, N.Y .: Anchor
Press/Doubleday, 1984).
8 Fabrice Florin, Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age, DVD, 1984, http://hackersvideo.com.
8
however, reveals computer clubs and companies meeting and operating throughout the
U.S. with some of the most active communities in Midwestern and Southern cities that
are rarely recalled in histories of computer technology—Chicago, El Paso, and Atlanta.
In terms of location, the hobbyist history of personal computing is considerably more
diverse than its hacker complement.
9
Hobbyist contributions to networked personal computing
Since the fabled emergence of the Apple I from Steve Wozniak's garage in the late
1970s, hobbyists have figured prominently in the folklore of personal computing.
10

Amateur contributions to telecommunications and computer networking, however, are
less widely documented. The tradition of hobbyist inter-networking predates the
ARPANET project by more than fifty years. In the early 1900s, a lively amateur radio
culture gathered around the emerging field of wireless telegraphy. Communicating as
often through the pages of periodicals such as Popular Electricity and Modern Electrics
as through the ether, wireless hobbyists formed regional clubs and associations to
socialize, share technical knowledge, and gain legitimacy in the face of impending
9 Judith Halberstam coined the term “metronormativity” to describe the reiteration of a coming-out
archetype in which queer youth migrate to one of a few big cities. Although the connection of queer
studies to hobby computing may at first seem flimsy, the overwhelming representation of the Bay Area
and Metro Boston similarly obscures the plurality of early computing cultures that emerged in the 1970s
and 1980s. See: Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives
(New York: New York University Press, 2005).
10 The image of the garage itself may be more fiction than fact according to an interview with Wozniak
from 1996, “We didn't build the computer in a garage. I built most of it in my apartment and in my
office at Hewlett-Packard[.] I don't know where the whole garage thing came from. Maybe it's because
Bill Hewlett and David Packard built their machine in a garage, everyone assumed we built ours there,
too. But really, very little work was done there.” Jeff Goodell, “The Rise and Fall of Apple Inc.,”
Rolling Stone, April 4, 1996.
9
government regulation.
11
By 1910, the largest of these clubs, Hugo Gernsback's Wireless
Association of America, claimed as many as 10,000 members.
12
In 1914, Hiram Percy
Maxim of the Hartford Radio Club announced the creation of an Amateur Radio Relay
League (ARRL) to coordinate the exchange of wireless messages among regional clubs
throughout the nation. Within a few months, more than two hundred stations joined the
ARRL, forming a coast-to-coast grassroots messaging network.
13
Neither commercial nor
military wireless networks could boast such comprehensive coverage.
The number of active, licensed amateur radio operators continued to grow over
the next several decades and by the time the ARPANET team began to join its computers,
a considerable portion of the amateur radio community had turned its attention to hobby
computing.
14
During the mid-1970s, ham radio magazines like Radio-Electronics
regularly featured articles about personal computing. Wayne Green, editor of 73
magazine, was particularly enthusiastic about microcomputing and encouraged his
readers to build bridges between amateur radio and hobby computing. In an op-ed from
1976, he wrote of his surprise at not getting more “static” about his enthusiastic coverage
of computers and suggested that interested readers might enjoy attending an upcoming
computer convention. “An unusually high percentage of the computer hobbyists seem to
also be radio amateurs,” he wrote, “so you might find an event like this fun.”
15

Enthusiasts with a background in ham radio like Green encountered personal computing
11 Susan J Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987).
12 Ibid., 205.
13 Ibid.
14 Kristen Haring explores the shared values of hobby computing and ham radio in the introduction to
Ham Radio's Technical Culture.
15 Wayne Green, ed., Hobby Computers Are Here! (Peterborough, NH: 73 Publications, 1976), 58.
10
within the context of amateur telecommunications. As a result, it was easy for them to
imagine computers as tools for communication and community-building.
With generative hands-on technologies as their central preoccupations, hobby
computing and ham radio are examples of what Haring described as “technical
cultures.”
16
In each case, participation in the technical culture shaped the social meaning
of the technology at the same time as it produced new identities for the participants
themselves. In the case of computing, hobbyists in the 1970s not only self-identified as
“computer people” on the cutting edge of a new technological paradigm, they also
developed social practices and habits of mind that enabled the popularization of personal
computing during the subsequent decades. In other words, participants in technical
cultures such as hobby computing play a crucial role in producing new socio-technical
imaginaries that they then share with family members, friends, neighbors, and
co-workers.
Tracing the shared technical culture of ham radio and hobby computing is
essential for developing an alternative internet imaginary. For the radio amateur,
communication and community are fundamentally interrelated with the development of
hands-on expertise and the circulation of technical knowledge. As hams' curiosity turned
toward computers, they carried their community norms and structures with them.
Building on their existing social networks, amateur computer enthusiasts organized clubs,
planned conventions, and published newsletters about the burgeoning new hobby. It is not
hard to imagine a hobbyist setting up a VHF transceiver above his workbench to listen in
on the amateur bands while soldering together a new kit computer. Computer hobbyists
16 Kristen Haring, Ham Radio’ s Technical Culture (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT, 2008).
11
of the 1970s may have tinkered in basements and garages but they were hardly tinkering
alone.
The dominant history of the internet
The long tradition of amateur telecommunications is rarely linked to the history of
the internet. Instead, the dominant history of the internet focuses on a community of
researchers clustered around several large university and military institutions. The core
structure of this account began to take shape in the late 1980s alongside the rise of
“information superhighway” rhetoric and was reinforced through an explosion of internet
historiography during the “dotcom boom” at the end of the decade. Through countless
retellings in popular and academic venues, this narrative was transformed from first-hand
accounts and scholarly research into a folklore that circulates in independent fragments.
The dominant history of the internet is factually correct but it is limited in scope. Rather
than situate computer networking among the larger telecommunications scene, the
dominant narrative centers on the concerns of computer networking researchers. Indeed,
the contributions of computer hobbyists and telephony engineers are scarcely
represented.
The standard folklore can be concisely expressed.
17
In the early 1960s, J. C. R.
Licklider, an unusually open-minded administrator in the Advanced Research Projects
17 The description of the dominant history of the internet as a “standard folklore” draws on Thomas
Streeter's analysis in: Thomas Streeter, The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (New
York: New York University Press, 2011).
12
Agency, began to direct Department of Defense funding toward researchers, projects, and
laboratories that would eventually yield the foundational technologies for networked
personal computing as we know it today.
18
ARPANET was designed to interconnect the
computing facilities at each of the institutions receiving ARPA funding. A number of
engineers contributed ingenious solutions to tricky problems such as linking together
incompatible mainframe platforms and routing messages across a dynamic and
unpredictable network topology.
19
In telling this story, a tension is usually drawn between
the strategic priorities of the Department of Defense—namely preparation for nuclear war
—and the counter-culture ideals of many younger computer engineers.
20
As computer
networks proliferated during the 1970s, the story turns toward the project of
“inter-networking,” or the production of “networks of networks.” For the sake of
concision, re-tellings of the ARPANET tale usually leapfrog the emergence of regional,
commercial, and interest-specific sub-networks during in the 1980s to conclude with the
privatization of the "backbone" infrastructure descended from the ARPANET at the start
o the 1990s and the commercialization of the user-friendly World Wide Web that soon
followed.
As parents, teachers, legislators, students, journalists, and scholars have struggled
to make sense of social computing over the past two decades, they will have encountered
18 M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made
Computing Personal (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2001).
19 If any single technology is given priority in the telling of the ARPANET story, it is the packet-switching
approach to networking. For a concise discussion of packet-switching, see: Martin Campbell-Kelly and
William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (New York: Basic Books, 1996),
290–292.
20 For the best account of the interrelationship of computing and the 1970s counter-culture, see: Turner,
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital
Utopianism.
13
the dominant narrative in countless magazines, books, technical manuals, TV specials,
and documentary films. Lora Koehler's Internet, a children's book from 1995, offers a
typical telling of the standard folkore in its first two chapters. In chapter one, “What is the
Internet?,” readers learn that the internet is a “network of computers...made up of smaller
networks,” a friendlier version of the conventional “network of networks” definition
discussed earlier.
21
And in the second chapter, “Where did it come from?,” Koehler
recounts the story of "a Department of Defense network known as ARPANET" designed
for stability in the face of disaster.
22
She concludes with an optimistic note about the
Clinton-Gore administration's vision for a National Information Infrastructure to provide
universal internet access.
23
Though the intended audience for Internet is under 11 years
old, the narrative reflects a set of beliefs that have long sustained the internet imaginary
shared among leading figures in government and industry.
The design and implementation of the ARPANET is at the heart of the dominant
internet history. In 1996, Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon published an accessible
account of this complex story entitled Where Wizards Stay Up: The Origins of the
Internet.
24
Drawing on similar sources as contemporary projects realized in a more
scholarly idiom, Hafner and Lyon's book found a large popular audience as a national
bestseller and has remained in circulation through multiple printings, editions, and
translations.
25
While historians of technology have since produced more
21 Lora Koehler and Childrens Press, Internet (Chicago: Children’s Press, 1995), 6–10.
22 Ibid., 11.
23 Ibid., 13.
24 Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1996).
25 Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999); Arthur L Norberg, Judy E
O’Neill, and Kerry J Freedman, Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the
Pentagon, 1962-1986 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
14
rigorously-researched accounts,
26
their scholarship is limited, by design, to a niche
audience engaged in an on-going process of collective knowledge production. The
dominant internet imaginary, in contrast, is sustained across large groups of people
through the repetition of mythic stories. The high visibility of Hafner and Lyon's book
therefore underscores the effect of its particular account on today's dominant internet
imaginary.
Referring to ARPANET history as a “tale,” “story,” and “folklore” is not to meant
to undermine the veracity of the events, figures, institutions, and technologies that make
it up. Indeed, Hafner and Lyon's book is grounded in considerable archival research,
notably from the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota. It is not the
individual facts themselves that are in dispute but rather the repetition of one particular
arrangement of those facts to the exclusion of other possible accounts. With dozens of
researchers and institutions contributing to its development, there are numerous
permutations of the ARPANET story. That the narrative sequence summarized above
recurs as often as it does in both the scholarly and popular literature indicates the
transformation of the ARPANET story from a critical interpretation of historical facts to
the restatement of accepted mythology.
In and of itself, the mythologization of the ARPANET story is not cause for
concern. The deployment of the ARPANET myth in service of a particular internet
26 In a 1998 review of several recently published books on the history of networked computing, Paul
Edwards identified 1996 as a turning point in the field: “The computers-in-use perspective marks a
mature historiography that seeks a many-leveled, situated, and ultimately critical view of computers in
sociocultural context.” Paul N. Edwards, “Virtual Machines, Virtual Infrastructures: The New
Historiography of Information Technology,” Isis 89, no. 1 (March 1, 1998): 93–99,
http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.usc.edu/stable/236658.
15
imaginary, however, merits closer inspection. In many re-tellings of the ARPANET story,
the ARPANET is meant to serve as a metonym for the internet in general. This slippage
between ARPANET and the internet—enabled by their use of common protocols—
asserts that the evolution of today's vast, global network society might be reasonably
traced back to the original four ARPANET nodes that came online in 1969, an rhetorical
move that, at best, ignores and, at worse, obscures the contributions of thousands of
hobbyists, entrepreneurs, and inventors who labored outside of the comparatively tiny
community of ARPA-affiliated researchers. In the imaginary that arises out of this myth,
the social and technical norms of the founding group are afforded considerable authority
to assess the legitimacy of all future internet development. The practical implications of
this imaginary surface in statements such as Secretary of State Clinton's 2010 remark
that, “We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge
and ideas.”
27
Without the authoritative single point of origin enshrined in the ARPANET
myth, the notion of a “single internet” is strange indeed.
One additional weakness of the ARPANET myth is that it does little to account
for the social experience of early internet use. Instead, the dominant narrative focuses on
the development of new technologies, the struggles for standardization, and the promises
of commercialization. More detailed accounts of the ARPANET emphasize the swift
adoption of e-mail and the popularity of public mailing lists but say little about the
content of all that mail. The notable exception to this absence is a recurring mention of
SF-LOVERS, an ARPANET mailing list dedicated to the discussion of science fiction.
27 Hillary Clinton, “Remarks on Internet Freedom,” U.S. Department of State, January 21, 2010,
http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/01/135519.htm.
16
Hafner and Lyons refer to SF-LOVERS in passing as “the first widely popular unofficial
list” but a more vivid account is found in Sherry Turkle's description of the early-80s
hacker culture at MIT.
28
Turkle explains that most of the hackers she spoke with
participated in SF-LOVERS, “a forum for pondering the technical and philosophical
implications of fantastical technologies.”
29
SF-LOVERS was an underground
phenomenon, however, and its members worried that if certain members of Congress
were to learn about the list, it would jeopardize federal funding for the entire ARPANET
project.
30
Although the ARPANET usage policies were rarely enforced, using Pentagon
resources to debate hyperspace was not particularly sustainable and the conversation on
SF-LOVERS soon moved to USENET. In contrast, many of the hobbyist bulletin-board
systems that sprang up in the late 1970s existed to serve the underlying impulse of
SF-LOVERS: to use networked computers as a platform for the discussion and
circulation of popular culture.
A popular history of the internet
The history of dial-up bulletin-board systems (BBS) offers a powerful
complement to the standard ARPANET folklore. The dial-up BBS grew out of a long
tradition of amateur telecommunications inclusive of fanzines and the underground press,
amateur and CB radio, CCTV , home video, and audio cassette tape trading cultures.
28 Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late, 201.
29 Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1984).
30 “Any publicity concerning SF-LOVERS would be VERY dimly viewed, as it puts the whole ARPANET
in what I might call a 'wasteful' light.” Laura Weinstein, “SF-LOVERS and the ARPANET: SOME
MISC. COMMENTS,” February 16, 1980.
17
Conceptually, BBSing began in the late-1970s as a hobby project to “computerize” the
traditional cork-and-pins community bulletin board. The computerized bulletin board
idea was easy to understand and provided a surprisingly flexible platform for the
emergence of online social spaces. By the mid-1980s, thousands of small businesses,
clubs, community organizations, and individuals throughout North America were
running small-scale BBSes from their home computers. From a macro perspective,
BBSing became a socio-technical movement that provided low-cost, accessible computer
networking more than a decade before the networks descended from ARPANET were
opened to everyday users.
As far as most personal computer owners were concerned, the internet simply did
not exist in the 1980s. Modems were marketed as tools for telecommuters, traveling
businesspeople, and curiosity-seekers. Nationwide commercial services such as
CompuServe and QuantumLink were beginning to thrive but their hourly rates were
prohibitively expensive for most PC owners. Dial-up BBSes, however, offered a
low-cost, low-tech alternative. The typical “one-liner” board consisted of: a
microcomputer, a modem, and a dedicated telephone line. Remote users dialed into the
host system to asynchronously exchange messages and files with one another. Unlike the
large, distributed topology of the ARPANET, each bulletin-board system was a small,
highly-centralized hub-and-spokes network with the host machine at the center.
The first BBS was implemented during a blizzard in 1978 by Ward Christensen
and Randy Seuss, two members of CACHE, a Chicagoland amateur computing club.
31

31 Christensen elaborates on this story in an interview with Jason Scott in Jason Scott, BBS: The
Documentary, 2005, http://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary.
18
Christensen and Seuss planned to use the BBS as central repository and distribution
platform for their club's newsletters. After a few months, the two published a how-to
article in Byte magazine and dozens of similar systems began to spring up throughout the
country. As the BBSing movement expanded during the 1980s, most systems continued
to be run on a voluntary basis out of the homes of computer hobbyists.
With a few exceptions, dial-up BBSes were idiosyncratic islands with their own
unique cultures. Although most were open to public and anyone with the telephone
number could dial in, calling a distant system could incur significant long-distance
calling fees. As a result, most boards were populated by users from the local calling area.
The implicit regionalism of BBSing facilitated a unique sort of sociality. Many BBS
communities extended their online activities to regular “get-togethers” at local parks,
bars, and pizza parlors. In some cases, a system's operator might invite the users to a
party at their home and people would have their pictures taken with the host computer.
Far from the deterritorialized “cloud,” in the BBS world, users knew exactly where their
data was stored and who was responsible for its care.
BBSes did not exist in isolation from one another. Many users routinely
participated in more than one system and BBS operators in the same area could share
resources with one another. In 1984, Tom Jennings introduced FidoNet, a system for the
automated exchange of messages among BBSes. In principle, FidoNet employed a simple
store-and-forward approach to inter-networking. Each night, nearby BBSes would call
one another and exchange bundles of electronic messages. Suddenly, users of one BBS
could address messages to users of any other BBS on the FidoNet. At a time when
19
ARPANET e-mail was available at only elite universities, military institutions, and
high-tech companies, FidoNet represented the beginnings of a hobbyist internet.
Whereas well-funded research networks such as ARPANET were built atop
high-speed, dedicated transmission infrastructures, BBSes and BBS networks like
FidoNet were designed for off-the-shelf microcomputers run by volunteers over noisy
home telephone lines. Recognizing that most BBS operators spent money out of their
own pockets to maintain their systems, minimizing cost was an organizing principle for
most BBS infrastructure. The primary cost of running a FidoNet node, for example, came
in the form of monthly long-distance charges so all FidoNet exchanges were done
automatically in the middle of the night when the long-distance rates were cheapest.
32

Should the machine need to exchange messages with a distant BBS, its owner would be
charged for each minute that it stayed on the line. In order to avoid hefty phone bills,
transactions were kept “extremely short” and took place between geographically
proximate nodes as often as possible.
33
To address this problem, Thom Henderson,
another volunteer BBS operator, implemented a compression algorithm to reduce the size
of the files being transferred.
34
Together, the store-and-forward architecture, clever
“off-peak” exchanges, and use of data compression kept the network operating costs low
and distributed among all the various nodes rather than concentrated in a few large
institutions.
32 Randy Bush, “FidoNet: Technology, Tools, and History,” Commun. ACM 36, no. 8 (August 1993):
31–35, doi:10.1145/163381.163383.
33 Tom Jennings, “Fidonet Electronic Mail Protocol,” October 20, 1984,
http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/FIDONET/JENNINGS/STANDARDS/fidomail.doc.txt.
34 Bob Hartman, “FTS-0004 EchoMail Specification,” December 12, 1987,
http://ftsc.org/docs/fts-0004.001.
20
Although BBSing is seldom mentioned in popular media today, in the early
1990s, the movement had grown sufficiently familiar to be featured in primetime
television programs like Law & Order. Unfortuantely, it is difficult to quantify precisely
how many people were involved in the modem world because of the radically
decentralized nature of BBSing and BBS networks. Historical records of regional BBS
listings indicate that there were more than 90,000 BBSes operating at one time or another
in the U.S. and Canada between 1978 and 1998.
35
Of course, these BBSes are not easily
compared to one another. Whereas a hobby system serving a small circle of friends might
log a thousand calls in a year, larger BBSes attracted a thousand of calls in a single day.
FidoNet, the largest of a dozen or more BBS networks, offers another indication of the
growth of the movement. By 1986, FidoNet consisted of approximately one thousand
nodes and by the start of the 1990s, the network had grown an order of magnitude larger,
including more than 10,000 BBSes in North America, Europe, Australia, Asia, and
Africa.
36
For many early enthusiasts, “the Net” was a BBS.
The BBSing movement was more diverse in terms of geography and
socio-economic class than early ARPANET-related networking projects but BBSing was
not taken up equally among all personal computer owners. Consistent with earlier
technical hobbies such as amateur radio, dial-up BBSes in North America were
overwhelmingly operated and populated by men. In the face of this extreme gender
disparity, a small number of women created women-only spaces but, by and large, the
35 Jason Scott, “Statistics Generated by the BBS List,” Textfiles.com, December 15, 2001,
http://bbslist.textfiles.com/support/statistics.html.
36 Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1993), 136–139.
21
BBSing population was predominantly made up of men. Within this exclusively male
population, however, there was considerable room for sexual difference and queer
sexualities were particularly visible. Bulletin boards provided valuable space for
members of regional queer communities to gather, discuss issues of local importance, and
exchange information.
Although the majority of men involved with early networked computing were
white-identified, BBSes and BBS networks operated and populated by people of color
were very active in a number of regions in North America. The local focus of most
dial-up BBSes may have enabled greater participation among people of color than in
nationwide systems encouraging a deterritorialized sociality. In a 1991 survey of FidoNet
users, communication scholar Kenneth Lansing found that 11% of respondents
self-identified as “Hispanic” and 4.3% self-identified as “Black.”
37
These few BBSers of
color suggest a population shift similar to the transition that occurred with the
popularization of two-way radio in the 1960s. While amateur radio was predominantly
taken up by white men during 1940s and 1950s, Citizen's Band radio (CB) attracted tens
of thousands of Black and Latino radio operators who installed CB transceivers in their
homes and automobiles. Indeed, the histories of CB radio and BBSing share a common
organization of race, technology, and space. Grassroots, ephemeral, fun, and informal—
yet both remain largely undocumented.
37 Kenneth Lansing, “Fidonet: A Study of Computer Networking” (Master’s Thesis, Texas Tech
University, 1991), 70.
22
Methodological challenges in the history of the modem world
The central activity of the modem world—computer-mediated group
communication—was a largely ephemeral phenomenon. Data storage was at a premium
for most of the 1980s and many BBS operators either could not afford or did not think it
necessary to archive the messages on their systems. A small number of how-to books and
technical manuals were published between 1983 and 1998, along with numerous articles
in microcomputer magazines. These artifacts detail the technical infrastructure of the
modem world but they only minimally depict either the individual or collective
experience of ritually calling local dial-up bulletin-board systems day after day.
To access the phenomenological qualities of the modem world, the present
research depends on a loose network of self-archiving hobbyists throughout North
America and Europe who have generously made their personal collections and
recollections accessible through a variety of different repositories on the web. Nearly all
evidence of the BBSing movement persists thanks to the preservation efforts of these
enthusiasts. Beyond merely collecting hardware, software, and ephemera, many of these
dedicated hobbyists actively curate and maintain online exhibitions dedicated to topics of
special interest. Significant expertise, labor, and material resources are required to
maintain these sites. Volunteers pay hosting fees out of pocket, scan and upload images
from magazines and catalogs, and learn specialized forensic techniques to recover data
from aging floppy disks. In most cases, these online resources are produced without
formal institutional support and rely instead on the generosity of other hobbyists. A
23
comprehensive exploration of the technical culture of retro-computing is beyond the
scope of the present research but certainly merits further examination.
Certain areas of computing lend themselves more easily to amateur preservation
than others. The restoration of aging hardware, for example, follows principles shared
among many areas of DIY electronics. Once the underlying hardware is running reliably,
single-user programs such games or programming tools continue to function more or less
identically as they would have thirty years before. Computer networking, however,
presents several thorny archival challenges. Modems, terminal software, and network
games were designed to operate within a particular telecommunications environment that,
in many cases, no longer exists. For this reason, information related to early PC
networking surfaces much less frequently in hobbyists' online collections. Given both
their limited resources and commitment to practice, hobby archivists give priority to
materials that will be of immediate use to others. In contrast to computer games or
programming tools, residual networking technologies are simply less useful.
Fortunately, a small number of retro-computing enthusiasts have dedicated their
time and attention to the problems of preserving the material history of networked
computing. Bo Zimmerman, for example, has cataloged and reviewed more than
eighty-six bulletin-board system host programs for the Commodore family of personal
computers. Perhaps the single most important resource, however, is textfiles.com, an
archive that has been continuously organized and maintained by documentary filmmaker
Jason Scott since 1998. Not only does Scott's site include a vast collection of materials
24
solely dedicated to the history of networked personal computing but it also includes back
up copies (or “mirrors”) of materials found on other retro-computing sites.
In addition to his archival and preservation work, Scott also produced a
documentary film dedicated to the history of BBSing. The BBS Documentary is presented
in a series of eight episodes organized around various aspects of the modem world. The
production of BBS was a one-man effort and lasted from approximately 2001-2005
during which time Scott continued to work professionally as a Unix system administrator.
Scott also documented his progress on a personal blog and in periodic posts on
technology websites like Slashdot. This commitment to working transparently served as
an explicit invitation for BBSers to contact him and share their stories. Rather than
present an idiosyncratic personal memoir, Scott hoped to represent the plurality of the
BBSing movement, “It would break my heart to wrap up filming and discover that an
entire huge subset of BBSes were completely looked over.”
38
BBS was released as a DVD
box set in 2005 and later uploaded to the Internet Archive where viewers can now stream
it free of charge. Consistent with the spirit of the original project, Scott has posted over
two hundred hours of unedited interview footage to the Internet Archive for public use.
39

These interviews represent a significant source of data for the present research.
The history of networked personal computing is intensely social. The key features
of BBSing movement were not modems, PCs, or software, but rather the relationships
and communities they enabled. For this reason, although there are fewer hobbyist sites
38 “BBS: A Documentary: The Pitch,” accessed February 3, 2014,
http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/longpitch.html.
39 Jason Scott, “BBS Documentaries,” Internet Archive, accessed February 3, 2014,
https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary.
25
dedicated to early networking, they tend to be more explicitly dedicated to memory work.
BBSmates.com is a database site that began with listings for over 75,000 BBSes drawn
from the materials at textfiles.com. The purpose of the site goes beyond simply listing the
old systems, however. Visitors who create accounts can register as former members of a
BBS and leave comments. BBSmates.com explicitly positions itself as a bulwark against
the loss of BBS history. The site's tagline, “Lose contact with your old buddies during the
internet revolution?,” inverts the progressive narrative that positions internet access as a
superior successor to BBSing. Instead, the commercialization of internet access is
portrayed as an outside force that disrupted existing online communities, separating “old
buddies” from one another. With this alternative narrative, BBSmates serves a restorative,
genealogical function. Rather than reuniting visitors with a piece of hardware or software,
BBSmates attempts to bring visitors back into contact with each other.
While sites like BBSmates are explicitly organized around recollections, BBS
memory work appears informally—and unexpectedly—in many other spaces across the
web. Whenever a bulletin-board system is mentioned on a technology news sites, it
typically draws recollections from readers who may not have otherwise have made their
stories publicly available. In 1999, a post on Slashdot titled “Are BBS-Like Communities
Dead?” drew more than 355 posts including several whose recollections ran on for more
than five paragraphs.
40
During the production of The BBS Documentary, Jason Scott
began to receive similarly detailed stories in unsolicited email from former BBSers who
wished to share their experiences. To accommodate these voices, he set up a special
40 “Are BBS-Like Communities Dead? - Slashdot,” accessed May 13, 2014,
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2660&cid=1501117.
26
section of textfiles.com titled “History” where visitors were encouraged to formally
contribute their own memories. By 2013, there were 65 individual files in the “History”
section written by people in North America, Australia, and Europe who remembered
using BBSes during the 1980s and 1990s. Some of the files are little more than a few
sentences while others are thoroughly conceived essays that trace the historical trajectory
of regional and transregional communities across multiple years, infrastructures, and area
codes.
In spite of this desire to connect with other former BBSers, only one BBSing
memoir has appeared in print to date. Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie is a
self-published memoir from retro-computing hobbyist Rob O'Hara.
41
O'Hara's book
focuses on a group of teens and young adults living around Oklahoma City, OK who are
drawn to BBSing through a shared interest in personal computing, computer gaming, and
unauthorized software trading. As with BBS, the publication of Commodork—and
subsequent reviews by, among others, Scott—prompted another flurry of story-telling
from readers who were prodded by O'Hara to share their own memories of the modem
world.
While books and magazines offer institutional and technological details, and
memoirs present the affective dimension of networked personal computing, it remains
difficult to apprehend the peculiar sensory experiences of the modem world: dialing into
a popular BBS and hearing a busy signal, watching text-mode graphics emerge on your
screen at 1200 bits per second, or carrying on a debate for weeks at the rate of one or two
messages per day. Emulation projects, such as the Multi Emulator Super System (MESS,)
41 Rob O’Hara, Commodork: Sordid Tales From A Bbs Junkie (Self-published, 2006).
27
effectively simulate most of the dominant personal computing systems of the 1980s and
1990s but unfortunately, even the best emulator is limited to the reproduction of a
single-user system. A considerable interpretative leap is necessary to imagine the
experience of connecting two or more of these machines together. The gap is not a matter
of technical accuracy—it would be trivial to emulate the jerky appearance of on-screen
text at 300 baud—but rather a problem fundamental to any socio-technical history. The
structure of feeling of BBSing cannot be intimately known without also examining the
particular social, technical, and political conditions within which it emerged.
Chapter overview
The first chapter of this dissertation—the one that you are reading—provides a
context and a motivation for the chapters to come. It outlines the social and political
implications of various histories of the internet. The dominant narrative follows the
emergence of the ARPANET and the internet protocols out of the the time-sharing
paradigm. The second narrative, developed in this dissertation, concern the construction
of dial-up bulletin board systems (BBS) among microcomputer enthusiasts. The core
analytic work to follow investigates how these two narratives have been told, retold,
mythologized, and forgotten.
The second chapter concerns the ARPANET narrative, as history, hagiography,
and mythopoeia. Drawing on a diverse corpus of internet histories including popular
books, documentary films, individual and corporate biographies, features from
newspapers and magazines, political speeches, encyclopedia articles, and scholarship
28
from across the academy, it presents a comprehensive set of recurring artifacts, events,
figures, and organizations. As historians and archivists continue to make possible more
complex, nuanced internet histories, a small number of tales are told and re-told in
popular and political discourse, transforming their constituent details from peculiar
historical facts into enduring myths. This myth-making process explains how one
particular telling of the internet's history—the ARPANET narrative—might settle into
place, as inconspicuous as common sense. This infrastructure of common sense, in turn,
gives rise to an internet imaginary that affords the greatest authority to a very few
engineers and institutions, universally funded through the U.S. military research agendas
of the 1960s and 1970s.
The third chapter explores the social, political, economic, and technological
conditions that gave rise to technical culture of BBSing at the end of the 1970s. This story
unfolds in multiple directions simultaneously but the central thread traces the long
tradition of amateur telecommunications from the Amateur Radio Relay League in the
1910s to the adoption of Citizens Band (CB) radio in the 1960s and 1970s. In the
mid-1970s, this lively technical culture converged with the production of affordable
microelectronics, and deregulation of the telephone industry to enable an early form of
amateur telecomputing. This chapter concludes in the winter of 1978 as hobbyists Ward
Christensen and Randy Seuss brought their “computerized bulletin board system”
(CBBS) online in the Chicago suburbs.
The fourth chapter examines the dial-up BBS as a platform for virtual community.
Between 1978 and 1983, the population of BBSing was limited to participants in the
29
technical culture of hobby computing. During this time, most BBSes were homegrown
systems designed and implemented by their operators. By 1983, however, a number of
pre-built BBS host programs were in circulation and the BBS began to settled into a
stable technological form. In its generic form, the BBS was characterized by three basic
features—file-sharing, messaging, and remote computing—conveyed through a
text-mode interface over a serial connection. For more than two decades, this framework
provided the foundation for countless systems, from small “one-liner” hobby boards, to
the nationwide networks with hundreds of incoming telephone lines.
The fifth chapter examines the use of the BBS as an infrastructure for popular
culture. It unfolds in four parts that roughly correspond to the technical features of the
BBS as a platform. The first part examines the process through which microcomputer
owners discovered BBSes. In spite of its accessibility, BBSing was largely invisible to the
general public, and information about BBSes often passed informally among
communities of computer hobbyists. This informal circulation of knowledge effectively
excluded women from participation, the implications of which are explored throughout
this chapter. Part II presents four software economies that were enabled by the
file-sharing practices of BBS users and operators. The decentralized circulation of warez,
shareware, GIFs, and textfiles were each accompanied by novel popular cultures with
their own unique sets of social norms and values. Part III examines the use of BBSes for
community-building. The central task of this section is to compare The WELL, a
relatively well-known example of a community-oriented BBS, with the TARDIS, a
grassroots community system operated by volunteers in central Indiana. Finally, the
30
fourth part of this chapter examines the interplay of file-sharing and community-building
in the “adults-only” BBSes that arose during the peak of BBS activity in the early 1990s.
This class of systems was inclusive of sexually-explicit media and discourse but it also
provided uncensored space for BBS users to “relax,” “unwind,” and “speak freely.”
The concluding chapter speculates about the implications of an alternative internet
imaginary informed by the history of bulletin-board systems. How might a public, formed
through this alternative internet imaginary, see itself differently able to shape the future of
networked personal computing and telecommunication? Of particular interest is the role
of place in the history of dial-up BBSing. How might this alternative internet imaginary
reconfigure locality in everyday experience of the internet? Advocates of internet
freedom generally regard regional difference as undesirable—i.e., "the Great Firewall of
China"—but BBS networks offer real-world examples of hyperlocal cultures in which
plurality was an advantage. Nostalgia is a confounding variable at work in this final
chapter. The memories of former BBSers are often structured through the
progress-oriented narratives of the dominant internet history. They typically regard
BBSes as technologies of the past that have been superseded in the course of linear
technological progress.
Expanding the popular internet imaginary
The use of the phrase “modem world” to refer to BBSing throughout this
dissertation is a reminder that this is not a history of technologies, technology companies,
or even technology users. It is a history of a social world, albeit one that was organized
31
around and thoroughly interwoven with networked personal computer technologies. From
1978 to 1998, dial-up bulletin board systems across North America were sites of
experimentation that shaped the widespread adoption of networked personal computing.
For more than twenty years, BBS callers and sysops represented a social computing
vanguard. Trust, anonymity, identity, sexuality, commerce, and play were all central
preoccupations of this modem world and the experiences of early modemer established
baseline norms and values for the nascent social Web.
The history of the modem world fastens today's internet to a long tradition of
amateur telecommunications that extends well into the 19th century. It demonstrates the
central role that popular technical cultures played in the widespread adoption of new
media technologies. And it grants today's amateur users a renewed legitimacy in public
debates surrounding communication technologies. The genealogy of today's centralized
social apps leads back to the decentralized BBSes operated out of the homes of hobbyist
volunteers. The technological innovations and social experiences of BBS history suggest
an alternative imaginary in which amateur users have the authority to make normative
claims about the internet's past, its present conditions, and how it ought to work in the
future.
32
Chapter 1: From ARPANET to the Internet: The Genealogy of a Popular Myth
In November 2009, political cartoonist Michael Ramirez published a piece titled “Two
Liars” depicting caricatures of Al Gore and Barack Obama with speech bubbles reading,
“I created the Internet,” and “I created 650,000 jobs,” respectively (figure 1). Only the
figure of Gore is labeled with his name, a subtle acknowledgement that readers may not
have recognized the former Vice President in 2009. And yet, the joke turns on an
assumption that readers remember Gore being skewered by political opponents and
late-night comics for supposedly claiming to have invented the internet. Although the
story was thoroughly debunked by 2000—indeed, Gore and his colleagues played a key
role in funding the research that became “the Internet”
42
and never exactly claimed to
have “invented” it in the first place—it nonetheless continues to circulate more than a
decade later.
43
In 2013, the IEEE Computer Society published an interview with Katie Hafner,
reflecting on the long life of her 1996 book, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, a best-selling
popular history of the internet. When asked about the role of the U.S. government in the
development of the internet, the conversation turned to Gore's dubious legacy. Hafner
defended Gore's record of supporting computer networking research. But Hafner also
42 In this chapter, “Internet” with a capital “I” refers to the family of computer networks descended from
the ARPANET using the Internet Protocol. For the more inclusive, colloquial usage of the term,
“internet” is written with a lowercase “i.”
43 John Schwartz, “Gore Deserves Internet Credit, Some Say,” Washington Post, March 21, 1999,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/gore032199.htm; Richard
Wiggins, “Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet,” First Monday 5, no. 10 (October 2, 2000),
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/799.
33
also complained about the effect that the lingering joke about Gore has had on the
reception of her work:
“Every time I tell people I wrote a history of the origins of the Internet, they say
very mockingly, "Oh, did Al Gore invent it?"”
Hafner's irritation underscores the gap between academic historiography and popular
mythologies regarding the origins of networked computing. This chapter examines the
telling of internet history since the early 1990s as a way to understand the mythologies
that undergird everyday internet use. If Al Gore didn't invent the internet, who did?
One candidate in the popular imagination appears to be Apple co-founder, Steve
Jobs. In the aftermath of Jobs' death, fans left thousands of remembrances and tributes
Figure 1: Michael Ramirez, “Two Liars,” Investor’ s Business Daily, November 2, 2009,
http://townhall.com/political-cartoons/michaelramirez/2009/11/02/1830.
34
throughout the internet.
44
Mini-memorials filled the comment areas of newspaper
obituary pages, appeared across hundreds of blogs, and appeared across thousands of
tweets and Facebook updates. Jobs' critics—and there are more than a few—took
umbrage at the frequency with which the businessman was credited with the work of his
engineering staff. One common form of this critique compared the relative fame of Jobs
and Dennis Ritchie, one of the computer scientists who worked closely on the
development of UNIX and the C programming language at Bell Labs. A eulogy published
in Wired magazine began, “The tributes to Dennis Ritchie won’t match the river of praise
that spilled out over the web after the death of Steve Jobs. But they should.”
45

Jobs' critics tend to underestimate the role that narrative, vision, and management
play in the social construction of new consumer technologies but they were right to
question the praise afforded to Jobs in the days and weeks following his death. A look
through some of the memorials left online suggests that Jobs' fans often credited him with
achievements that extended far beyond the products he oversaw at Apple. In many, Jobs
was credited with inventing the internet itself.
On the Apple fan blog, The Cult of Mac, blogger John Brownlee offered a slightly
more measured take, “the Internet owes a debt of gratitude to Steve Jobs.”
46
Brownlee
went on to trace a circuit of influence from Jobs to NeXT computer to the workstations
44 For an interesting study of this period of public mourning, see: Andrew K. Przybylski, “We’ll Miss You
Steve: How the Death of a Technology Innovator Emotionally Impacts Those Who Use and Love His
Digital Devices,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 15, no. 7 (July 2012): 335–38,
doi:10.1089/cyber.2011.0623.
45 Cade Metz, “Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com,”
Wired Enterprise, accessed January 24, 2014,
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/thedennisritchieeffect/.
46 “Steve Jobs Created The Computer That Gave Us The World Wide Web,” Cult of Mac, accessed
January 24, 2014,
http://www.cultofmac.com/225838/steve-jobs-created-the-computer-that-gave-us-the-world-wide-web/.
35
used by Tim Berners-Lee to develop the basic technologies of the World Wide Web in the
early 1990s. But crediting Jobs with the diffusion of the internet was not limited to
hardcore Mac fans alone. In a short tribute, U.S. President Barack Obama portrayed Jobs
as a thought leader who brought computing out of the realm of work and research, “By
making computers personal and putting the internet in our pockets, he made the
information revolution not only accessible, but intuitive and fun.”
47
Together, these two counter-factual tellings of internet history describe the
dominant themes in today's popular epistemology about the origin of networked personal
computing. The story about Al Gore reflects an uncertainty regarding the role of state
support and regulation in the development of information infrastructure. Many people
likely know that the U.S. Government played some part in the early internet but they feel
certain that it could not have been engineered by a politician such as Gore. Similarly, the
credit that Steve Jobs posthumously received for his role in the popularization of the
internet reflects a blurring between the history of the internet and the dominant image of
Silicon Valley as a place where young men hacking away in a garage can change the
world.
A history of the internet told from the point of view of the personal computer
hobbyist in the 1980s, however, tells a different story. For early adopters of home
computing, an encounter with something like the internet occurred first through either
commercial data services like CompuServe or a locally-owned bulletin-board system.
47 “President Obama on the Passing of Steve Jobs: ‘He Changed the Way Each of Us Sees the World.’ |
The White House,” accessed January 24, 2014,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/10/05/president-obama-passing-steve-jobs-he-changed-way-each
-us-sees-world.
36
Strikingly, the overwhelming majority of published histories of the internet neglect both
of these forms of networked computing. If they are mentioned at all, they are described as
“stepping stones,” “on ramps,” or “early experiments.” In short, the prevailing origin
story of the internet does not account for the first decade of popular networking.
Relatively few personal computer owners in the 1980s purchased a modem or
accessed an online service. In contrast, today, an overwhelming majority of American
adults access the internet through a broadband internet connection from their homes or
workplaces.
48
Increasingly, these users also carry smartphones to access mobile
broadband connections outside of home and work.
49
As access becomes more ubiquitous,
it simultaneously becomes less conspicuous. Absent a clear moment of transition—i.e.,
“going online”—network connectivity fades into the background of everyday life.
50

Rather than a distinct technology comparable to the telephone or television, the internet
has become a more fundamental medium; an infrastructure on which other
communication media are assembled.
51
The failure of internet history to account for this
widespread diffusion of internet access throughout daily life enables the proliferation of
narratives that focus on a handful of geniuses and elite institutions at the expense of a rich
48 As of May 2013, 70% of Americans aged 18 or older access the Internet through broadband
connections in their homes. “How Americans Go Online,” Pew Research Center’ s Internet & American
Life Project, September 25, 2013, http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/09/25/how-americans-go-online/.
49 As of May 2013, 56% of Americans aged 18 or older have a smartphone. “Broadband and Smartphone
Adoption Demographics,” Pew Research Center’ s Internet & American Life Project, August 27, 2013,
http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/08/27/broadband-and-smartphone-adoption-demographics/.
50 Sociologist Nathan Jurgenson suggests “digital dualism” as a convenient term to describe arguments
that depend on a rigid online/offline distinction. Nathan Jurgenson, “When Atoms Meet Bits: Social
Media, the Mobile Web and Augmented Revolution,” Future Internet 4, no. 1 (January 23, 2012):
83–91, doi:10.3390/fi4010083.
51 This observation is not novel, of course. Ted Nelson outlined the use of networked computers as a
fundamental hypermedium that might subsume newspapers, cinema, radio, television, etc. in the second
half of Computer Lib/Dream Machines. See: Theodor H. Nelson, Computer Lib / Dream Machines
(Self-published, 1974).
37
legacy of amateur telecommunications. Users are left without coherent historical
narratives to explain how or why the devices and services that make up their everyday
experience of the internet came to exist.
The purpose of this chapter is to reverse engineer the dominant mythology of the
internet in order to recover narratives that better explain the contributions of computer
hobbyists and emergence of popular cultures. Working back from the present, it begins
with an examination of moments when a history of the internet is invoked in public
discourse. Often, these momentary encounters are users' primary points of contact with a
historiography of the internet. Next, I will examine the explosion of historiography that
occurred alongside the initial popularization and commercialization of internet access
during the 1990s. From this milieu, three complementary histories stand out: Bruce
Sterling's brief grassroots history, in circulation online since 1993; Katie Hafner &
Matthew Lyon's journalistic account, a paperback bestseller published in 1996; and Janet
Abbate's scholarly monograph, widely-cited since its publication in 1999.
52
Although
each author set out to address a different audience, all three accounts trace a very similar
set of stories that lead to the same conclusion: that the internet is the product of
state-sponsored computer science research. Read alongside one another, these books
reveal a number of common anecdotes from which the prevailing mythology of the
internet's history arises. This internet mythology thoroughly describes the development of
particular institutions and technologies such as ARPA and the Internet Protocol, but is
strikingly narrow in terms of its user population. With few exceptions, all of the
52 Abbate, Inventing the Internet.; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late; Bruce Sterling,
“‘INTERNET’ [aka ‘A Short History of the Internet’],” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
February 1993, http://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/internet_sterling.history.txt.
38
characters that appear in the dominant internet mythology are white men affiliated with
elite academic and military research labs.
The production, maintenance, and circulation of a popular mythology
By definition, the socio-technical assemblage that we call “the internet” has
multiple origins. The very purpose of inter-networking is to produce interoperable
gateways among diverse computer networks. The history of the internet is therefore
always preceded by the histories of the computer networks that make it up. Over the
course of more than three decades, the on-going project of interconnection has drawn
together thousands of individuals, institutions, technologies, and ideologies, some of
which have become well-known, while others remain obscure. The goal of delving into
the dominant internet mythology, is not to “set the record straight” by replacing one
narrative with another. Rather, the value in studying this mythology is to identify the
range of historical narratives in circulation at different times and places. Tracing the
boundaries of this mythology draws attention to areas of opportunity: narratives that have
been forgotten or abandoned, narratives that might be renewed or enlarged; and
stakeholders that have been left out of the prevailing stories.
In Keywords, Raymond Williams described Myth as “a very significant and a very
difficult word,”
53
noting the diverse meanings that the term has taken on among
anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and modern literary scholars. In this chapter,
“mythology” refers to collections of stories, tales, and parables used to make sense of
53 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1976), 211.
39
daily life—in particular, daily life among information and communication technologies.
Although this definition of mythology is inclusive of a greater range of narrative forms
than a strictly technical usage, it preserves the same focus on origins that is found in
folkloristics.
54
Prevailing myths about the internet include stories about the discovery and
implementation of core technical ideas, legends about the early users, and anecdotes
about the uses they devised for networked computers. When people encounter a novel
communication technology today, their expectations are shaped, in part, by this
mythology.
Mythologies are essentially social. They exist in circulation among different
groups of people and may be changed or adapted to suit changing social circumstances.
Likewise, new stories become mythological through repetition. This social process of
story-telling and myth-making—a process that literary scholars term mythopoesis
55
—is
especially important in the face of conflict or confusion. In times of unfolding crisis
regarding issues of broad public concern such as regards state surveillance or individual
privacy, mythologies offer common narrative resources on which groups of people being
to chart pathways toward resolution. In this respect, my use of “mythology” describes a
54 Ibid.
55 Mythopoeia is typically used to describe the fictional world-building typical of sweeping fantasy and
science-fiction literature such as J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or Frank Herbert's Dune. Although
folklorists tend to resist this elision of literary and cultural myth-making, the ambiguity is appropriate to
the mythology of the 1980s and 1990s. During this period, historical facts about networked computing
are enmeshed with the terminologies and narratives found in contemporary works of science fiction.
See: the “Delphi pool” in John Brunner, Shockwave Rider (1975); “cyberspace” in William Gibson,
Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988); the “Grid” in John Shirley,
A Song Called Youth (1985); the “metaverse” in Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992); and the “matrix”
in The Wachowski Brothers, The Matrix (1999). John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider (New York:
Harper & Row, 1975); William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984); William Gibson,
Count Zero (New York: Arbor House, 1986); William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (Toronto; New
York: Bantam Books, 1988); John Shirley, A Song Called Youth (Gaithersburg, MD: Prime Books,
2012); Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam Books, 1992); Andy Wachowski and Lana
Wachowski, The Matrix, Action, Sci-Fi, (1999).
40
kind of modern folk knowledge about technology in society and departs from scholarship
that treats myths as fundamentally false. Roland Barthes' criticism of popular media in
Mythologies is emblematic of this latter approach to myth.
56
In Barthes' project, popular
myths are vehicles for false consciousness that present existing power relations as natural
and timeless. Although the prevailing internet mythologies often do support a particular
arrangement of normative authority regarding the implementation and regulation of
internet technologies, they should be accompanied—if not altogether replaced—by myths
that suggest an alternative distribution of power. Instead of placing myth and truth in
opposition, as Barthes does, the present project assumes that mythologies contain their
own truths. According to this perspective, the study of internet mythology is the study of
everyday truth regarding network-mediated communication.
Barthes' attack on “myth” conforms to a common colloquial use of the term as a
synonym for “falsehood” or “unfounded belief.”
57
Raymond Williams similarly noted that
“myth” was used as early as the 19
th
century to mean “untrustworthy” or “deliberately
deceptive.”
58
On the other hand, folklorist Alan Dundes vigorously defends “myth”
against these negative associations, arguing that myths play a sacred role in the
communication of cultural values.
59
Indeed, mythologies accommodate the
counter-factual but this does not mean that they are inherently unreliable or in need of
correction. In the case of internet mythologies, counter-factual myths prevail so long as
56 Roland Barthes and Annette Lavers, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 150–159.
57 Dundes also worried that the colloquial use of myth was particularly prevalent among social scientists.
Alan Dundes, “Folk Ideas as Units of Worldview,” The Journal of American Folklore 84, no. 331
(January 1, 1971): 93–103, doi:10.2307/539737.
58 Williams, Keywords, 211.
59 Ibid.
41
they conform to popular expectations about the role of technology in society. The notion
that an entrepreneur like Steve Jobs “invented the internet” may ring true for someone
who encounters networked communication technologies principally as sites of
commercial exploitation..
The relationship between mythology and historiography is tricky, in no small part
because myths may incorporate false facts and fabrication. The purpose of this chapter,
however, is to produce an internet historiography that makes productive use of the
internet's many origin myths. These stories, collected from different people at different
points in time, indicate more about the contemporary moment in which they were
recorded than the past they purport to represent. In spite of their preoccupation with the
past, mythologies are told according to the values, expectations, and norms of their
present. By comparing a range of different tellings of internet history across time, a
narrowing of internet history is revealed. Instead of the ideological diversity one expects
to find in a “network of networks,” the dominant story offers a smooth narrative of
progress from the “wizards” who developed the ARPANET in the 1970s to the
free-thinking frontiersmen who made it accessible to the everyday American consumer in
the 1990s. To produce a smooth narrative, however, all of the rough edges and angles—
the hobbyist networks, the commercial failures, and the independent networks that sprung
up all over North America—must be worn away and be forgotten. Examining the smooth
narrative is to contemplate the stakes of this forgetting and to launch this project toward
the promises of remembering.
42
Public conflict and the revelation of popular mythology
In the course of everyday computer use, popular myths about the internet
typically remain in the background. Users have rarely been invited to articulate their
working knowledge of the internet's history and, if they have, these articulations are
rarely recorded, indexed, or archived. This presents a problem for scholars who hope to
identify, catalog, and analyze popular myths. Fortunately, there are a few occasions in
which myths about the internet are reliably called forth in the public discourse: the deaths
of key figures such as Steve Jobs or Dennis Ritchie;
60
initial public offerings (IPOs), or
bankruptcies; technological breakdowns, service interruptions, and publicized threats
such as the Morris Worm, Stuxnet virus, or the Y2K bug; and political debates regarding
the telecommunications regulation. One approach to the study of internet mythology is to
identify and analyze such momentary discursive bubbles.
Public conflicts need not be dire to draw popular mythologies into view. In the
present case, the repetition of a simple joke calls attention to the lack of a widely-shared
consensus regarding the history of the internet. Early in his 2000 Presidential campaign,
Democratic candidate Al Gore told an interviewer that he was proud of “taking the
initiative in creating the internet” as a U.S. Senator.
61
Although Gore was referring to his
long record of enthusiastic support for federally-funded computer science research, critics
seized on the ambiguous remark and accused the Vice President of taking credit for
60 Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Computer, and Ritchie, a prominent computer scientist, passed within
seven days of one another in October 2011. Ritchie's death received little public attention relative to
Jobs', a contrast that provoked numerous articles in the tech press detailing Ritchie's contributions,
which include the C programming language and Unix operating system. Readers took these
comparisons one step further, circulating images in social media that decried Jobs as a mere salesman
while praising Ritchie for his engineering acumen. See: Cade Metz, “Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders
Steve Jobs Stood On,” Wired, October 13, 2011, http://www.wired.com/2011/10/thedennisritchieeffect/.
61 “Al Gore, Interview by Wolf Blitzer,” CNN Late Edition (CNN, March 9, 1999).
43
“inventing” the internet, an interpretation that was shortly taken up by late-night
comedians who used it to skewer the candidate for several months.
62
Although pundits
took pleasure in pointing out that the legislator was hardly capable of “inventing” a
computer network, they were just as likely to issue their own apocryphal shorthand
accounts such as, “The Internet was invented in the 1960s” or “The Internet was invented
in 1969.”
63
The emerging confusion eventually provoked responses from within the early
internet community itself. John S. Quarterman, an engineer best known for his
cartography of North American computer networks during the late 1980s and early
1990s, published an essay on the circulation of “revisionist” internet histories in which he
criticized publications such as Wired for “simplifying” the complex collaboration that
occurred among idiosyncratic individuals with multiple academic, commercial, and
military affiliations.
64
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, the engineers who designed the Internet
Protocol, vigorously defended Gore, calling him “the first political leader to recognize the
importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.”
65
In spite of
being easily debunked, the story of Gore claiming to invent the internet became an
enduring piece of the prevailing internet mythology.
66
62 A thorough analysis of the discourse surrounding Gore's remarks may be found in: Wiggins, “Al Gore
and the Creation of the Internet.”
63 Ibid.
64 John S. Quarterman, “Revisionist Internet History,” Matrix News, April 1999,
https://web.archive.org/web/20000313011653/http://www.mids.org/mn/904/large.html.
65 Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, “Al Gore and the Internet,” September 28, 2000,
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00311.html.
66 Reflecting on her research in 2013, Katie Hafner told an interviewer, “Al Gore is totally underestimated
and unappreciated. Every time I tell people I wrote a history of the origins of the Internet, they say very
mockingly, "Oh, did Al Gore invent it?" I won't play into that...” Charles Severance, “Katie Hafner: The
Origins of the Internet,” Computer, 2013.
44
One key feature distinguishing mythology from historiography is that it need not
be coherent or complete. The incompleteness of myth is what enables it to circulate and
adapt to changing social circumstances. In the case of the Gore joke, each time it is
reiterated—either by critics or supporters—we are reminded that the internet lacks a
satisfying popular historiography. The joke rests on the implausibility of Gore's (alleged)
claim but provides no alternative truth. And as the joke continues to circulate (notably, in
the absence of Quarterman, Cerf, and Kahn's responses), it carries with it a serious
question: who did invent the internet?
67
In the face of incompleteness, popular mythologies may incorporate
counter-factual narratives to fill these gaps. Communication scholars concerned with the
role of editorial algorithms in the production of public culture have recently begun to
document moments in which users reveal their counter-factual mythologies. In an
analysis of Twitter's “Trending Topics” system, Tarleton Gillespie examined claims
among Occupy Wall Street supporters that Twitter, Inc. was actively “censoring”
Occupy-related hashtags.
68
Gillespie noted with some surprise that the activists'
accusations indicated that they otherwise trusted the opaque Trending Topics system to
equitably represent users' discourse:
To suggest that the best or only explanation of #occupywallstreet’s absence is that
Twitter “censored” it implies that Trends is otherwise an accurate barometer of the
public discussion. For some, this glitch could only mean deliberate human
intervention into what should be a smoothly-running machine.
67 Of course, no one person could have invented the internet and “invented” may not be an appropriate
verb in the first place!
68 Tarleton Gillespie, “Can an Algorithm Be Wrong?,” Limn, 2012,
http://limn.it/can-an-algorithm-be-wrong/.
45
Mike Ananny encountered similar expressions of counter-factual faith after he published
an essay in The Atlantic detailing the persistent pairing of social media apps for gay men
with an app titled “Sex Offender Search” in the Android Marketplace.
69
Readers
discussing the article on The Atlantic website offered their own folk theories of how the
underlying algorithms must have made the association between these two applications,
for example:
If two apps are related, isn't that based on peoples actions, and therefore indicative
that people who view / install one also view install the other?
Exactly how the underlying algorithms produce such associations cannot be known
without access to Google's proprietary systems (and, if Google's representatives are to be
believed, the infrastructure may be so complex as to evade human comprehension.)
Nevertheless, subscribers of both Twitter and the Android Marketplace are able to use the
two systems despite uncertain—if not wholly untrue—beliefs about the mechanics of the
underlying technologies. These counter-factual beliefs only surfaced, however, in
moments of public conflict.
Mythologies about the internet may be exploited, as Barthes warned, by those in
power to advance particular political positions or to mark emerging practices as aberrant.
As the internet increasingly occupies a central role in the production of global wealth,
stories about its history have been called forth in support of a variety of different—and
occasionally contradictory—ideological positions. In the hands of the public rhetoric, the
idea of the internet is a powerful chimera, used variously to symbolize an incoherent set
69 Mike Ananny, “The Curious Connection Between Apps for Gay Men and Sex Offenders,” The Atlantic,
April 14, 2011,
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/the-curious-connection-between-apps-for-gay-
men-and-sex-offenders/237340/.
46
of social and political values. Different speakers tell stories about the internet in order to
underscore either the importance of federal funding for science and technology, or the
triumph of an unfettered free market. Similarly, internet-mediated communication may be
heralded as an ideal tool for democratic participation, or the ultimate distraction from
civic duty. To make these claims, speakers strategically assemble fragments of internet
folklore into teleological narratives that support their ideological positions.
Histories of the internet tend to surface most forcefully in public conflicts
regarding the role of the state in regulating online communication. During the last
decade, a series of conflicts among government regulators and commercial internet
service providers has occasionally drawn the “net neutrality” debate briefly into public
discourse.
70
Critics and advocates regularly invoke idiosyncratic accounts of internet
history in order to support various positions for or against proposed net neutrality
legislation. In 2006, Tim Berners-Lee, the engineer credited for developing the World
Wide Web, wrote in support of net neutrality on his blog, “When I invented the web, I
didn't have to ask anyone's permission.”
71
And in 2011, libertarian pundit John Stossel
echoed Berners-Lee in a televised segment opposing net neutrality, saying,
The Internet has changed the world and it happened without government
regulation. OK...Defense Department research helped create the first intranet but
what makes today's internet valuable [is that users are] creating stuff without
having to get permission from anybody.
72
70 A timeline of key events during this period is available at:
http://kevindriscoll.org/projects/netneutrality/nn.html#timeline
71 Berners-Lee, “Net Neutrality: This Is Serious.”
72 John Stossel, Stossel (Fox Business Network, February 17, 2011).
47
Although both Stossel and Berners-Lee were arguing for opposing political positions,
they each called forth a nearly identical description of the early internet as a site of
unrestrained innovation.
When participants in a public debate recite internet mythology, they often also
assign an original purpose to the network that it may or may not have had. By doing so,
the speaker is able to mark a present-day practice as consistent or inconsistent (and
thereby deviant) with internet tradition. For example, during his 2012 presidential
campaign, U.S. President Barack Obama emphasized the role of federal funding in
encouraging new market opportunities with the following anachronistic anecdote, “The
Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that
all the companies could make money off the Internet.”
73
Of course, the commercial
potential of the internet could not have been known in the 1970s when the term “internet”
came into use among a small number of computer science researchers. In an even more
extreme example of tactical apocrypha, pop singer M.I.A. conflated the history of the
internet with the history of personal computing in 2013 in order to criticize the
proliferation of online surveillance,
Even the Internet, which started with the hippies, who did go to India and do LSD
and fucking meditate on the mountains. They came back and invented that shit.
They were like, “Ooh let’s liberate the world...” And then it got taken up by the
same [commercial] system. And they took it and they’re like, “This is ours now.
And we’re going to use it how we want to use it.”
74
73 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at a Campaign Event in Roanoke, Virginia” (Roanoke Fire
Station #1, Roanoke, V A, July 13, 2012),
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/07/13/remarks-president-campaign-event-roanoke-vir
ginia.
74 Rob Kenner, “M.I.A. Talks Matangi, Spirituality, Technology, and Why She Was Called ‘The Female
Kanye,’” Complex, November 7, 2013,
http://www.complex.com/music/2013/11/m-i-a-interview-matangi-spirituality-technology-superbowl-fe
male-kanye.
48
In each case, the internet is described as having divergent original purposes. On one hand,
President Obama suggests that the appropriation of public funds was justified by the
commercial opportunities that the internet would eventually create. On the other, M.I.A.
ascribes a counter-cultural populism to the early internet, from which commercialization
is a departure.
Clearly, there is little popular consensus concerning the history of the internet. In
moments of political conflict and technological breakdown, fragments of internet
mythology surface in public discourse, but it is difficult to assemble a general mythology
of the internet from these brief expressions. Instead, it is productive to consider how the
speakers came to hold such beliefs about the internet. Counter-factual narratives about the
origins of the internet are rarely the result of complete fabrication. Rather, the prevailing
internet mythology arises out of multiple incidental encounters with more formal
accounts of internet history. A half-heard public radio broadcast, a paragraph in the
introduction of a technical manual, a short visit to an exhibition in the local science
museum. Internet histories abound in public culture; our popular mythology is a hazy
reflection.
Toward a systematic study of popular internet mythology
Mythologies circulate primarily in in the form of ephemeral interpersonal
communication. The stories that make up these mythologies, however, frequently
originate in media texts that attempt to tell a history of the internet, in whole or part. In
addition to scholarly books with titles like Inventing the Internet, histories of the internet
49
are also told in magazine and newspaper features, documentary TV series, textbooks,
technical manuals, obituaries, and fictional films. Fortunately, histories of the internet
only began to circulate widely during the mid-1990s so a comprehensive corpus is still
within reach.
Assembling a corpus of internet histories depends first on when the internet
became historical. Although the term “internet” did not come into wide usage until the
late-1980s, the technical and theoretical problem of internetworking had been actively
pursued since at least 1973.
75
Likewise, the general public could not access the networks
that would eventually be termed “the internet” until the mid-1990s. This lag in
popularization created an intriguing problem: for readers in the 1990s, the internet was
simultaneously new and old. As a result, authors of early internet histories were in the
odd position of both introducing and historicizing the technologies, services, and
communities that made up the early internet.
Ed Krol's 1992 how-to guide, The Whole Internet, is an excellent example of the
challenge presented by the internet's age problem.
76
The first chapter, “What is this book
about?,” serves as a pitch to the non-technical reader (and, presumably, book buyer).
Under the heading, “Something for Everyone,” Krol assures the reader that the internet is
not limited to “antisocial misfits sporting pocket protectors.”
77
Indeed, he argues, each
new user that joins the network adds value to every other user. “Potential network users,”
he writes, include:
75 Abbate, Inventing the Internet., 122.
76 Ed Krol, The Whole Internet: User’ s Guide & Catalog (Sebastopol CA: O’Reilly & Associates, Inc.,
1992).
77 Ibid., 2.
50
A science teacher in an area who needs to remain current and develop curricula,
A Unitarian-Universalist minister in a town of fundamentalists, looking for some
spiritual camaraderie,
A criminal lawyer who needs to discuss a case with someone who has a particular
kind of legal expertise,
An eighth grader looking for others whose parents don't understand real music,
And so on...
Notably, this list of potential users does not include computer scientists, engineers, or
telecommunications specialists. As the chapter goes on to describe locating and accessing
a local internet service provider, Krol does not minimize the significant technical (and
economic) hurdles that new users will have to overcome, but is careful to emphasizes the
social payoff they will enjoy for these efforts.
After detailing the process of procuring internet access, Krol proceeds to the
second chapter, “What Is The Internet?.” Rather than jump right to the sites and services
available on the network, Krol begins with a brief chronology of internet history. He
describes this section as “background material” and assures his readers that he will
include “just enough so you can understand why the Internet is like it is.”
78
Like so many
invocations of internet history, Krol's historiography begins with a description of the
network's supposed original purpose:
The Internet was born about 20 years ago, as a U.S. Defense Department network
called the ARPANET.
79
The ARPANET was an experimental network designed to
support military research—in particular, research about how to build networks
that could withstand partial outages (like bomb attacks) and still function.
80
78 Ibid., 10.
79 ARPA stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency within the U.S. Department of
Defense that is responsible for supporting research that will lead to the development of new military
technologies. At different points in its history, the agency has also been called the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
80 Krol, The Whole Internet, 11.
51
This account—known among historians of computing as the “survivability” narrative—
will eventually become the subject of public disagreement among key figures in the
development of the ARPANET. But its inclusion in these opening chapters marks an
important milestone in the emergence of a popular internet mythology.
The Whole Internet was the first widely-available how-to manual for internet
users. Although it was published as part of the O'Reilly & Associates “Nutshell” series of
technical books, its friendly prose explicitly addressed a non-technical readership. Krol
was well known on the nascent Internet for writing The Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet,
a helpful (and humorous) reference to internet engineering, but The Whole Internet was
distributed far beyond those who could have accessed the network in 1992.
81
It became an
early hit for O'Reilly & Associates, reportedly selling 250,000 copies in its first few years
of publication.
82
As “the Internet” became the subject of speculative excitement in the
business community following the development of the World Wide Web in 1993, Krol's
book became an unlikely point of reference for those who hoped learn what all the hype
was about.
83
81 Ed Krol, “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet,” August 25, 1987,
http://www.textfiles.com/internet/hitchhik.gui. A revised and reformatted version of the Guide was
republished in September 1989 by the Network Working Group as RFC 1118. See: E. Krol, “RFC 1118:
Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet” (Network Working Group, September 1989),
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1118.
82 Steven Levy, “The Trend Spotter,” Wired, October 2005,
http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/13.10/oreilly_pr.html.
83 Comparing different editions of The Whole Internet reveals the rapid rise of the WWW from one among
many services, to the internet's dominant interface. In the 1993 edition, a mere twelve pages are
dedicated to a discussion of the text-only web as a convenient gateway to other internet resources. By
1999, however, nearly every chapter of the book deals with the Web and Web browsers in some way.
Kiersten Conner-Sax and Ed Krol, The Whole Internet: The Next Generation: A Completely New
Edition of the First and Best User’ s Guide to the Internet (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly, 1999); Krol, The
Whole Internet.
52
Because of the considerable circulation of The Whole Internet, Krol's
historiography represents a baseline against which subsequent histories were written.
With this in mind, let us review his narrative briefly, paying close attention to the key
terms and anecdotes that make up this account of internet history. (For those of you with
a fear of acronyms, proceed with caution.)
Krol begins with a description of the ARPANET as “an experimental military
network” designed to “withstand partial outages (like bomb attacks).”
84
He proceeds to
explain the addressing and transmission of data “packets” according to the Internet
Protocol (IP) and describes why the interoperable IP was attractive to both governments
and universities, “Everyone bought whichever computer they liked, and expected the
computers to work together over the network.”
85
Krol dismissively mentions that the
Organization for International Standardization (ISO) attempted to design a competing
protocol by committee but that the process took to long and “people could not wait.”
86
He
goes on to describe the creation of local area networks (LAN) using IP, the Berkeley Unix
operating system, and Ethernet cabling. Krol next spends three paragraphs describing the
development of NSFNET, an internet of regional networks joining together the five U.S.
supercomputing centers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Finally, Krol
describes the technical improvements that have been made since responsibility for the
maintenance of the NSFNET was awarded to Merit Network, Inc., a public-private
84 Krol, The Whole Internet, 11.
85 Krol, The Whole Internet.
86 Ibid.
53
partnership with IBM and MCI that formed around the regional computer network in
Michigan.
87
The prevailing internet mythology is a dynamic collections of narrative fragments
drawn from incidental contact with various internet histories. Four key features stand out
from the distilled version of Krol's chronology. First, the U.S. government—specifically,
the U.S. military—played a central role in the beginning of the internet. Second, the
fundamental technologies making up the internet—IP, Ethernet, and Unix—all seem to
have been developed in the U.S. Third, the extension of the network beyond the initial
ARPANET experiment was carried out through a collaboration between academic and
commercial institutions with the financial support of the National Science Foundation.
Finally, Krol's narrative describes the diffusion of network access from a small cadre of
computer scientists, to anyone an affiliation to a large academic institution, to the public
at large. As he writes in the final paragraph of this brief history,
Now that most four-year colleges are connected, people are trying to get
secondary and primary schools connected. People who have graduated from
college know what the Internet is good for, and talk their employers into
connecting corporations.
88
In Krol's telling, the term “internet” does not refer to all online activity. Rather, it refers to
a family of networks developed by computer science researchers working in the U.S.
under the aegis of various state agencies.
89
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid., 13.
89 Later in this chapter, Krol speculates about the potential costs and benefits of commercialization and
privatization. His strongest note of caution regards the provision of access to smaller educational
institutions. “Major research institutions would certainly stay on the Net; but some smaller colleges
might not, and the costs would probably be prohibitive for most secondary schools (let alone grade
schools.)” See: Ibid., 16–17.
54
Krol's historiography may have been the first to find a mass audience, but it was
soon joined by a torrent of popular and scholarly publishing about computer-mediated
communication. To understand the core narratives that make up the prevailing internet
mythology, we need a method for making sense of the proceeding decade of internet
historiography. Returning once more to Krol's chronology, let us distill it yet further
down to its most discriminating pieces: people, institutions, locations, technologies, and
times. These terms represent the building blocks from which narrative fragments might
be assembled (table 1).
Looking only at the key terms, it is possible to discern the basic elements of
Krol's chronology. Without knowing anything about the text itself, it is clear that Krol's
history depicts a complex collaboration among academic, military, and industrial
institutions. It also reveals the core technological features of the early internet, namely,
Times Places Institutions Technologies Networks Concepts
1987
20 years ago
the late 80's
Berkeley
Michigan
U.S.
Defense
Department
IBM
MCI
Merit Network
Inc.
National
Science
Foundation
NSF
Organization
for International
Standardization
ISO
U.S.
Government
56k telephone
lines
bits per second
bps
Ethernet
Internet Protocol
IP
local area
networks
LAN
packet
supercomputer
UNIX
workstation
ARPANE
T
NSFNET
Internet
bomb
attacks
computer
science
universal
educational
access
Table 1. Key terms drawn from Krol, The Whole Internet, 1992, pp. 11-13.
55
several network infrastructures, network protocols, and a network-ready operating
system. The short lists of “Times” and “Places” suggest that Krol's historiography is
principally concerned with the interplay of technologies and institutions rather than a
careful chronology detailing the geographic diffusion of network access. Lastly, by
including a selection of colloquial phrases and neologisms under the heading “Concepts,”
this collection also represents some of the ideological features found in Krol's tale.
Mythologies are shaped through chance encounters with internet histories rather
than deliberate study or careful reflection. At the risk of oversimplification, reducing a
narrative history to a set of its fundamental semantic elements offers a few new analytic
opportunities. First, treating documents as sets of key terms facilitates a high-level
comparison among multiple documents that may suggest recurring motifs or major
departures from the prevailing internet mythology. Second, as we become more familiar
with the corpus of internet histories, it is possible to quickly infer from a set of key terms
which the likely diversity of myths that might arise from an encounter with a given text.
In other words, if a text makes no mention of ARPA, the Defense Department, or the U.S.
military, it is unlikely to support the “survivability” narrative in which the internet's
distributed architecture was designed to withstand thermonuclear war. Finally, this
analytic approach offers an pragmatic benefit. If it becomes desirable to extend this study
to a very large corpus of texts—for example, all newspaper and magazine articles
mentioning the term “internet”—extracting a limited set of key terms is a task that may
be reasonably automated through software-assisted text analysis.
56
An explosion of historiography, 1993-1999
The principle narratives in today's dominant internet mythology were published
from 1993-1999, a period that coincides with the initial popularization of internet access.
In 1993, a team at the University of Illinois released Mosaic, a web browser designed to
run on personal computers.
90
Meanwhile, the NSF was in the process of facilitating a
transition from the public-private partnership paradigm that characterized the NSFNET to
a fully privatized internet infrastructure.
91
By 1995, long-running private online services
such as CompuServe and America Online opened internet gateways, enabling their users
to exchange internet e-mail, participate in discussion groups, and explore the growing
World Wide Web. Each of these events greatly enlarged the population of potential
internet users in the U.S., leading to considerable enthusiasm among the speculative
investors who, in turn, facilitated the rapid growth of internet-related industries during the
last half of the decade.
92
Amid all of this activity, a considerable amount of historiographic work was
undertaken by scholars, journalists, and internet users themselves to meet the popular
demand for information about the internet. While books such as The Internet for
Dummies followed the template set by Krol and included only brief histories in passing, a
smaller number sought to provide a more fully-formed account of the internet's
development. The mandate in these latter histories is nicely summarized in the opening
chapter to Ed Krol's 1999 revised edition of The Whole Internet, “to most people, the
Internet seems to have sprung fully formed on the world some time after 1990. That is not
90 Abbate, Inventing the Internet., 217.
91 Ibid., 199.
92 See: Robert J Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
57
the case.”
93
Evidently, a rudimentary internet mythology was already in place prior to the
print publication of any significant historiographic work.
The historiographic explosion of the 1990s occurred in three successive waves.
First, avid, evangelical users of the internet began to assemble and circulate their own
internet histories. Some of these were collaboratively authored and circulated in online
discussion forums such as the alt.folklore.computers newsgroup, while others were
independently researched and published in computer club newsletters, fanzines, and
hobby magazines. A second wave of internet histories were produced by journalists
covering the computing industries. On one hand, this work was facilitated by the
eagerness of many early participants in networks like ARPANET to talk to the press, as
they watched a younger generation of engineers rising to national acclaim. On the other
hand, the long-standing efforts of archivists and historians of technology at the Charles
Babbage Institute had produced a rich collection of materials related to the formation of
computer science in general and federally-funded computer research in particular.
94

Finally, scholarly histories of the internet began to appear toward the end of the decade.
95
For this project, I have selected three texts that represent the three historiographic
periods during the 1990s. In 1993, Bruce Sterling published an essay in The Magazine of
Fantasy & Science Fiction titled, “Internet”that was shortly transcribed and widely
93 Krol, The Whole Internet, 3.
94 William Aspray, “Leadership in Computing History : Arthur Norberg and the Charles Babbage
Institute,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 29, no. 4 (December 2007): 16–26,
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=19995616.
95 This periodization is merely a organizational convenience and likely reflects more about the rhythm of
publishing in each field than anything substantive about the histories themselves. The early histories
were self-published and circulated immediately online, while the later histories required longer periods
of review and revision as they passed through the process of peer review and academic publication.
58
circulated online with the alternate title, “A Short History of the Internet.”
96
In many
respects, Sterling's history mirrors Krol's narrative—in fact, Sterling recommends The
Whole Internet in his footnotes. Similarly, Sterling urges his readers to get online as soon
as possible, stating frankly, “if you don't own a computer and a modem, get one.”
97

Where the two texts differ is that Sterling endeavors to produce work of history and his
text seems to have been received as such by its audience. In the online archives of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example, Sterling's essay is stored under
“internet_sterling.history” alongside other early works of internet history.
98
A second
distinguishing characteristic is the author's reputation. As the editor of a canonical
collection of cyberpunk science-fiction, and the author of a recent book about the moral
panic over young “hacker” criminals in the 1980s, Sterling's auto-historiography was
likely to reach a wider audience that works by less notable contemporaries.
99
Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, the most
widely-read history of the internet, was first published in 1996.
100
The book was the
subject of immediate acclaim and shortly became a best-seller. Positive reviews appeared
prominently in both the scholarly and popular press, including both the New York Times
Book Review and Science.
101
Wired magazine ran an article by the author in advance of
96 Sterling, “‘INTERNET’ [aka ‘A Short History of the Internet’].”
97 Ibid.
98 “EFF ‘Net Culture & Cyber-Anthropology’ Archive,” March 13, 2003, http://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/.
99 See: Bruce Sterling, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (New York: Arbor House, 1986); Bruce
Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. (New York: Bantam,
1992), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/101/101-h/101-h.htm.
100Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late.
101Daniel Akst, “Cyberculture: Sometimes Dry, Detail of Magic of 1st Internet ‘Wizards,’” Los Angeles
Times, August 26, 1996; David Colker, “Looking Into the Origins of the Online Universe,” Los Angeles
Times, August 20, 1996; L. Goeller, “Insomniac Wizards Revisited,” IEEE Technology and Society
Magazine, 2000; Laurel Graeber, “New & Noteworthy Paperbacks,” New York Times Book Review,
March 22, 1998; Robert D. Hof, “Where Did the Net Come From, Daddy?,” BusinessWeek, September
16, 1996; Stephen Manes, “The Info Footpath: How the Internet Got Its Start in the Early Days...,” New
59
the book's release and none other than Stewart Brand was tasked with reviewing it upon
publication.
102
During the past two decades, Wizards has remained consistently in print,
appearing in more than seven editions including a 2008 German translation that replaced
the “wizards” title with ARP A Kadabra oder Die Anfänge des Internet .
103
Hafner and Lyon's account details the development of the ARPANET, paying
special attention to the collaboration among the Advanced Research Projects Agency
(ARPA), the Bolt, Beranek, and Newman corporation (BBN), and the federally-funded
academic researchers working on computer networking in the 1960s and 1970s. The
authors' notes reveal considerable research into the archives at the Charles Babbage
Institute, as well as the institutional archives of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and BBN. The authors also conducted extensive interviews with many of the engineers
who contributed to the early ARPA network and the resulting narrative reflects a sense
among some of this milieu that, in spite of considerable popular interest in the internet,
they were not receiving appropriate credit for their work.
104
In the Acknowledgements,
the authors also note that Bolt, Beranek and Newman offered partial support for their
project in the hope that “BBN's considerable role in the creation of the original
ARPANET” would be preserved.
105
York Times, September 8, 1996.
102Stewart Brand, “The Revolution Will Be Netcast,” Wired, September 1996; Katie Hafner, “Ghosts in
the Machine,” Wired, July 1999, http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.07/ghosts.html.
103Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Arpa Kadabra oder die Anfänge des Internet (Heidelberg:
Dpunkt-Verl., 2008).
104Historian Arthur Norberg made note of this theme in title of his review: Arthur Norberg, “Credits for
the Information Highway,” Science 274, no. 5293 (December 6, 1996): 1627–28,
doi:10.1126/science.274.5293.1627.
105Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late, 287.
60
Indeed, Hafner and Lyon approach the project of internet history as an exercise in
“setting the the record straight.” The book begins with a short prologue in which we
follow Bob Taylor as he enters the lobby of Copley Plaza in Boston in 1994 for the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the installation of the first ARPANET node. Straight away,
they summon and dismiss the survivability narrative,
Rumors had persisted for years that the ARPANET had been built to protect
national security in the face of nuclear attack. [They] had gone unchallenged long
enough to become widely accepted as fact.
106
Hafner and Lyon depict Taylor and his colleagues as misunderstood and nearly forgotten,
“Taylor wrote a letter to the editor [of Time], but the magazine didn't print it[.] Taylor was
beginning to feel like a crank.”
107
As the book's central narrative unfolds, it portrays the
ARPANET (and, implicitly, the internet) as the result of considerable creative labor on
the part of a collegial band of brilliant weirdos. The military justification for their
continued funding is treated as a bureaucratic formality rather than a force shaping their
research priorities.
108
In 1999, Wizards was joined by Inventing the Internet, an authoritative scholarly
history written by historian Janet Abbate.
109
a Inventing represents a thorough revision of
Abbate's 1994 dissertation which was itself widely read and cited during the intervening
years.
110
In the book's introduction, Abbate notes that the majority of the historical work
106Ibid., 10.
107Ibid.
108The political implications of ARPA funding were thoroughly examined in an academic book published
that same year: Paul N Edwards, The Closed World Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold
War America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?
direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=1410.
109Abbate, Inventing the Internet.
110Janet Ellen Abbate, “From ARPANET to Internet: A History of ARPA-Sponsored Computer Networks,
1966-1988,” Dissertations Available from ProQuest, January 1, 1994, 1–185,
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI9503730.
61
on the internet's origins have focused either on specific technical developments or the
contributions of heroic individuals.
111
Abbate draws on many of the same resources as
Hafner and Lyon—notably the rich archives of the Charles Babbage Institute, but her
ambition is to situate the ARPANET-Internet narrative in a broader socio-cultural context.
To this end, Inventing the Internet is unprecedented within the explosion of internet
historiography of the 1990s.
Whereas Wizards is organized around the experiences of specific individuals,
Abbate produces a more holistic account of the same period. She describes the
ARPANET project as the combination of “inspiration” and “need.”
112
On the side of
inspiration, she finds Bob Taylor, an enthusiastic adherent to the vision of “man-machine
symbiosis” conceived by J. C. R. Licklider, the director of ARPA's Information
Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). On the side of need, Abbate describes mid-century
computing in terms of extremely expensive mainframes that were totally isolated from
one another. Each machine used its own unique set of commands and data storage
techniques. Data produced in one environment could not be moved to another without
considerable effort. A platform-agnostic network seemed like a promising solution.
Abbate's thorough account of the ARPANET project also considers the multiple
simultaneous invention of key technical features, such as packet-switching. In her
opening first chapter, she devotes considerable space to Donald Davies' underfunded
efforts to develop a distributed, packet-switched computer network in the United
111“In the years since the Internet became a media sensation, a number of more popular books have
appeared that deal in some way with its origins, often in heroic manner.” Abbate, Inventing the
Internet., 221, footnote 2.
112Ibid., 43.
62
Kingdom beginning with a prototype network in the National Physical Laboratory in
London.
In late 1999, Roy Rosenzweig published a review essay reflecting on the corpus
of historical writing that had been published during the previous decade.
113
His essay
begins with a pair of anecdotes that illustrate the challenge that the internet's novelty
presents to historians: before the New York Times covered the Morris Worm in 1988, it
had mentioned the term “internet” only once, and as recently as 1994, Microsoft's
CD-ROM encyclopedia, Encarta, did not include an entry for “internet.”
114
Rosenzweig's
round-up of internet histories includes all three of the texts analyzed in this chapter.
Sterling's essay, he notes, informs the prevailing folk history among internet users and is
reiterated in “the many technical manuals on the Internet.”
115
Rosenzweig does not challenge the basic shape of the ARPANET-Internet
narrative but rather considers the historiographic method by which it is retold.
“Bureaucracy...rarely makes for lively reading,” he writes, but the internet lacks
conventional inventor-heroes like Edison or Morse on which a heroic narrative might be
constructed. The extent to which Hafner and Lyon were able to craft a compelling “great
man” story is a testament to their “lively” and “well-written” account but “slights the
technical and intellectual...roots of the ARPANET experiment.”
116
Rosenzweig's
comparative reading also suggests that there is considerable evidence supporting the
113Roy Rosenzweig, “Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet,”
The American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (December 1, 1998): 1530–52, doi:10.2307/2649970.
114Ibid., 1530; ibid., footnote 1. See: John Markoff, “Author of Computer ‘Virus’ Is Son of N.S.A. Expert
on Data Security,” New York Times, November 5, 1998, sec. A.
115Rosenzweig, “Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers,” 1532.
116Ibid., 1534.
63
survivability narrative but that a contextualist history of the internet need not take a side
in this debate. Some stakeholders in the ARPANET project may have valued its military
applications, while others were concerned with sharing computer resources and
supporting online communities.
117
Abbate's approach, he assures readers, more fully
accounts for the political and economic forces that bore down on the engineers and
institutions tasked with developing the internet. Whereas engineer-centric histories such
as Krol's tend to dismiss standards-making processes as technically inept and painfully
bureaucratic, Abbate's research indicates that valuable computer networking research
occurring outside of the ARPA purview may have been swept aside by the rush to
implement IP as a de facto standard. Furthermore, the resulting hegemony of an
American standard secured a competitive advantage for American suppliers in the
emerging market for computer networking technology. Whether the computer science
researchers working closely with the technologies day-to-day could see it or not, the
internet was produced by and for a diverse range of stakeholders, many of whom stood to
benefit strategically and financially if the network developed along certain paths.
A critical look across Sterling, Hafner & Lyon, and Abbate
Sterling, Hafner and Lyon, and Abbate draw on similar patterns of facts to
produce the narrative anecdotes that make up their respective histories. But once they are
published, these anecdotes quickly escape from their original contexts. Each time one of
the books is reviewed, one or another anecdotes is reproduced and circulated among new
117For evidence of the survivability narrative, see: Norberg, O’Neill, and Freedman, Transforming
Computer Technology.
64
audiences, many of whom will never seek out the original texts. For this reason, to
understand the mythologies that arise out of highly-visible historical texts, it is necessary
to identify the key anecdotes shared among them.
Following the procedure demonstrated with Krol's historiography, the three
exemplary texts selected from 1993-1999 were transformed into sets of terms. These
terms were manually extracted and normalized such that synonyms are grouped together.
For example, “Web,” “WWW”, and “World Wide Web” are all considered instances of
the same term. All of the comparisons among texts were case-insensitive.
Sterling's “Short History” contains 132 terms, Hafner and Lyon's Wizards contains
886 terms, and Abbate's Inventing contains 694. In total, there are 1,375 unique terms
across all three texts. Taking intersections of each pair of histories and the three histories
together, we find that clear overlaps emerge (figure 2). The two books share 268 terms,
while all three texts share just 46 (table 2.) And yet from these 46 terms, it is possible to
Times Places Institutions Technologies Networks Concepts People
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
Canada
Europe
UK
US
ARPA
Congress
MIT
NASA
NPL
NSF
NSA
RAND
SF-LOVERS
UCLA
Paul Baran
Backbone
DNS
E-mail
English
Ethernet
FTP
Gateway
Host
Network Control
Protocol
Open Systems
Interconnection
Packet switching
Personal Computer
Radio
TCP/IP
Terminal
UNIX
UUCP
ARPANET
BITNET
Internet
Milnet
NSFNET
USENET
Apocalypse
Command-
and-control
Resource-
sharing
Routing
Paul Baran
Table 2. Terms in common among Sterling, Hafner & Lyon, and Abbate.
65
assemble the core narratives that make up the foundation of today's dominant internet
mythology.
From 1993-1999, the social meaning of the term “internet” changed dramatically.
At the time Sterling's article appeared, the World Wide Web was just beginning to diffuse
across the net but by the time Abbate's book arrived in stores, many users would not have
been able to distinguish the World Wide Web from the Internet. This synonymy was
further ensured with the bundling of the Internet Explorer web browser with Windows 95
Plus! in 1995. Unlike other applications that appeared in the operating system's “Start”
menu, Internet Explorer appeared on the desktop and was simply captioned, “Internet.”
In spite of the dynamism of the term “internet,” the following six narratives
appear in nearly all of the texts that seek to tell a history of the internet. The first narrative
Figure 2: The relationship among unique terms in Sterling, Hafner & Lyon, and Abbate.
66
details the research on “distributed networks” by the RAND corporation in the 1960s to
ensure that telecommunications infrastructure would withstand the devastating impact of
nuclear war. The second narrative details the development of basic networking
technologies during the 1970s by computer science research labs funded through the
Department of Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). The third narrative
concerns research in the late-1970s dedicated to the inter-connection of ARPA-funded
computer networks—the likely origin of the term “internet.” The fourth narrative
describes the appearance of virtual community through public mailing lists as an
unexpected side effect of computer networking research. The fifth narrative is a
high-level gloss on the emergence of post-ARPANET networks at academic institutions
throughout North America and Europe. The sixth and final narrative describes the
struggle over standardization that occurred among various multinational computer
engineering organizations in the 1980s.
Each of these six narratives is suggested by the small subset of terms found in
common among the three texts analyzed below. Adding fourth and fifth texts scarcely
affects this subset, an indication that it represents a kind of narrative core. In the
following section, I offer a closer look at each of the six narratives with an eye toward the
gaps and absences they represent. This is an index of the prevailing internet history and
an account of the common pool of narrative resources on which the popular mythology
rests.
67
Cluster 1: Designing for survivability
1960s, apocalypse , command and control, packet switching , Paul Baran, RAND
Corporation , routing, United Kingdom, National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
The first cluster of terms outlines the communications research carried out by
researchers at the RAND Corporation in the United States and the National Physical
Laboratory in Great Britain during the 1960s. As an employee of RAND, Paul Baran was
immersed in Cold War scenario planning and his focus was on designing communications
systems that could withstand considerable damage.
118
In 1964, Baran published a twelve
volume set of reports on the subject of “distributed communication” in which he
described a network topology in which each node is connected to at least one another
node, and messages are broken up into uniform segments and dynamically routed through
whichever set of nodes is available in the moment of transmission.
119
Baran's work was
distributed widely among communications specialists but was not immediately taken up
for implementation. Meanwhile, Donald Davies, a researcher at the National Physical
Laboratory (NPL) in London, had arrived at a similar idea in the pursuit of an economical
method for building out a nationwide data network and called the procedure
“packet-switching.”
120
A prototype network, Mark I, was eventually constructed and word
of the network reached members of the incipient ARPANET team back in the U.S.
121
In
Hafner & Lyon's telling, Davies and Baran eventually met, at which point, Davies
memorably remarked, “Well, you may have got there first, but I got the name.”
122
118Abbate, Inventing the Internet., 10–20.
119Paul Baran, On Distributed Communication, Rand Report Series, 1964.
120Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late, 67.
121Abbate, Inventing the Internet., 31–33, 39–41.
122Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late, 67.
68
Cluster 2: Developing the core ARP ANET technologies
1960s, 1970s , ARP A, ARP ANET, command and control , FTP , host,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Network Control Program (NCP), terminal,
University of California at Los Angeles
Although the theoretical concepts of packet-switching and distributed, dynamic
routing were in place before the ARPANET project came into being, the project's success
was far from assured. The core requirement of the ARPANET was to interconnect a set of
machines that were not designed to communication with one another. The key terms in
this cluster point to the series of inventions that overcame this interoperability problem.
Rather than attempt to connect the diverse machines directly, each ARPANET node
would be given a minicomputer that would serve as a gateway between the local “host”
system and the ARPANET. These gateway computers were called Interface Message
Processors (IMP), they were designed and tested by engineers at Bolt, Beranek and
Newman (BBN), and built by Honeywell Corporation. The protocol for passing messages
along to the IMPs was handled by a piece of software called the Network Control
Program (NPC). Abbate notes that the NPC was designed to be easy for the users at
different sites to implement on their local host machines.
123
As much as possible, network
communication would be handled by the IMP and remotely managed by the engineers at
BBN.
124
Notably, both “IMP” and “BBN” appear in the list of key terms shared between
Hafner & Lyons and Abbate. The absence of these terms from the popular accounts by
123Abbate, Inventing the Internet., 68.
124Ibid., 70–71.
69
Sterling and Krol explain, to some extent, the fear BBN engineers felt that their
contributions to the early ARPANET were being forgotten. As might be expected, the
clever engineering required by “the IMP Guys” at BBN is one of the central
preoccupations in Hafner & Lyon's account.
125
Cluster 3: Inter-networking: assembling networks of networks
1970s , ARP A, ARP ANET, Domain Name System (DNS), gateway, host, internet,
packet switching , radio, routing , Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol
(TCP/IP)
By 1972, the experimental ARPANET had become a demonstrated success and
was being adopted into real service by members of both the military and academic
communities. Networking researchers, meanwhile, began to consider new applications
for packet-switching and distributed, dynamic routing. At the University of Hawaii, a
network of radio beacons called Alohanet was used in place of leased telephone lines to
enable a wireless form of packet-switching.
126
At the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(PARC), an alumnus of the ARPANET project lead the development of Ethernet, a
technology for building high-speed, local-area networks (LAN).
127
And, around the globe,
American, British, and Norwegian researchers were experimenting with the use of
satellites to exchange digital packets across very long distances.
128
This proliferation of
isolated packet-switched networks during the 1970s paralleled the proliferation of
isolated mainframe computer systems during the 1960s and ARPA was again compelled
125Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late, 95–163.
126Abbate, Inventing the Internet., 115–116.
127Ibid., 117.
128Ibid., 121.
70
to support the production of a new networking protocol. Instead of connecting individual
computers, however, the “Internet program” promised to enable communication among
diverse computer networks.
129
In 1973, Bob Kahn, the director of ARPA, invited Vint Cerf to begin thinking
about a protocol for internetworking and by 1978, Cerf's team had arrived at a working
design.
130
Their plan was designed to minimize the amount of work for any intermediate
node in a transmission. When two far-flung computers connect over the internet, the
transmission control protocol (TCP) checks for errors and manages the sequence of
packets flowing in and out of each local machine. All of the gateways and intermediate
machines, however, only have to run the Internet Protocol (IP), a program that simply
ensured that all incoming packets are passed along in the direction of their destinations.
By the early-1980s, TCP/IP was being used by numerous computer networks,
resulting in a growing inter-net of interconnected systems. The system was growing so
fast, in fact, that it was becoming difficult to explain how to reach a particular node. The
solution to this problem, the Domain Name System (DNS), was proposed by Paul
Mockapetris, an engineer at the University of Southern California. DNS is the system that
provides a friendly name, e.g., usc.edu, for the computer-readable addresses assigned by
the Internet Protocol, e.g., 128.125.253.136.
129Ibid., 122.
130Ibid., 122, 130.
71
Cluster 4: The unexpected appearance of virtual community
1970s , 1980s , ARP ANET, e-mail, file transfer protocol (FTP), gateway, internet,
resource-sharing, SF-LOVERS, UNIX, USENET, UUCP
The fourth cluster of terms concerns the everyday use of the fledgling internet.
The previous three clusters, for all their technical innovation, tell us very little about what
practical benefits such a system offered contemporary organizations. In 1993, Sterling
answered the rhetorical question, “What does one *do* with the Internet?,” with the
following simple list: “mail, discussion groups, long-distance computing, and file
transfers.”
131
All four of these uses were in place on the ARPANET by the end of the
1970s and were adopted by thousands of users of other computer networks during the
1980s.
Long-distance computing, known to ARPA researchers as “resource sharing” was
one of the original justifications for the ARPANET project. Bob Taylor imagined that if
users could access machines at different locations, ARPA would maximize the
system-wide utility of the very expensive mainframes that occasionally sat idle in their
home institutions.
132
As early as 1978, however, e-mail was heralded as the “largest single
impact” of the ARPANET project, an outcome which would have been totally unexpected
at the start.
133
Soon ARPA officers began to require e-mail communication with their
fundees, a small managerial nudge that contributed to the adoption of e-mail throughout
the community of ARPA-funded researchers.
134
E-mail also proved especially adaptable
131Sterling, “‘INTERNET’ [aka ‘A Short History of the Internet’].”
132J. Abbate, “The Electrical Century: Inventing the Web,” Proceedings of the IEEE 87, no. 11 (1999): 96,
doi:10.1109/5.796364.
133Abbate, Inventing the Internet., 107.
134Ibid.
72
to different structures of communication, and mailing list software was developed to
facilitate open-ended discussions among geographically disperse participants.
“SF-LOVERS” refers to an unofficial ARPANET mailing list populated by
science fiction fans that enjoyed a degree of benign neglect from the Department of
Defense during the early 1980s.
135
SF-LOVERS is frequently mentioned in histories of
the internet as evidence that the network has long served as an infrastructure for popular
culture, but it was on USENET that popular communication truly flourished. USENET
was a system of public discussion groups that was started by a pair of graduate students
who jokingly referred to it as a “poor man's ARPANET.”
136
Excluded from the
ARPANET, nodes in USENET ran the comparatively simple Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP)
command to exchange messages with each other over standard telephone lines. As
regional IP networks proliferated with the support of the NSF in the late-1980s, however,
USENET was soon enclosed by the growing “internet.”
Cluster 5: Internet after ARP ANET: Regional networks and interconnection
1980s , ARP ANET, backbone , BITNET, Canada, Ethernet, Europe, gateway, host,
internet, MILNET, National Science Foundation (NSF), NSFNET, personal computer,
TCP/IP , United Kingdom, United States
Beginning in the early 1980s, the U.S. military gradually shifted its operations
away from the ARPANET and onto private networks, such as the newly-established
MILNET. At the same time, computer scientists around the country began to petition both
135Ibid., 85–86; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late, 201.
136Abbate, Inventing the Internet., 201; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late, 244.
73
ARPA and the National Science Foundation for support to create new regional computer
networks. By the middle of the decade, over a dozen regional networks were in operation
throughout the U.S. and the NSF began to implement plans to assemble a high-speed
“backbone” network to interconnect all of these regional networks. The resulting
NSFNET served as a sort of freeway system for internet traffic until the privatization of
the backbone in the mid-1990s.
In addition to the regional networks implemented by academic computer scientists
in the U.S., countless other computer networks were assembled using similar
technologies as those that underpinned both NSFNET and USENET. For example, The
Because It's There Network (BITNET) began as an experiment and grew into a voluntary
network open to anyone working on an IBM system. Some systems were made for
personal computer users connecting over standard telephone lines, others were designed
to interconnect powerful Unix workstations over dedicated “leased lines, and still others
could accommodate a combination. Crucially, the late-1980s became a period of
widespread interconnection and gateways were built among these different networks to
enable the transnational exchange of email, files, and news.
Cluster 6: The Protocol Wars
1980s, ARP ANET, English, Europe, Internet, Open Systems Interconnection,
packet-switching, routing, TCP/IP , UNIX
The final cluster of terms refers to a conflict over the adoption of an international
standard for internetworking. Those in the ARPANET milieu naturally advocated for the
TCP/IP protocols that had been developed by their colleagues and collaborators. On the
74
other side, a community of networking researchers convened by the Organization for
International Standards (ISO) developed a theoretical approach to protocol design that
they called The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. For several years, the
international networking community was split over whether to formally adopt the de
facto standard, TCP/IP, or the standard that had been arrived at through a roughly
democratic process, OSI.
Although the technical details of this conflict are arcane, it is repeated often in
histories of the internet. One reason for this repetition is that the ultimately adoption of
TCP/IP conforms to a technocratic ideology shared among many champions of the early
internet. This perspective is best characterized by a common saying among voluntary
participants in the Internet Engineer Task Force, “We believe in: rough consensus and
running code.”
137
The contrast between Hafner and Lyon's account of the “protocol wars,”
and the treatment offered by Abbate is striking.
In Where Wizards Stay Up Late, the conflict over standardization is covered in
three pages, under the subheading, “TCP/IP versus OSI.” The ISO is described as
“entrenched bureaucracy, with a strong we-know-best attitude” while the advocates of
TCP/IP are depicted as highly rational actors who have arrived at their position through
rigorous engineering and practical experience:
Cerf and others argued that TCP/IP couldn't have been invented anywhere but in
the collaborative research world, which was precisely what made it so successful,
while a camel like OSI couldn't have been invented anywhere but in a thousand
committees.
138
137See: Andrew L. Russell, “‘Rough Consensus and Running Code’ and the Internet-OSI Standards War,”
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 2006.
138Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late, 246–248.
75
In contrast, Abbate maps out the conflict over standardization as a complex struggle over
the position of computer networking relative to existing regulatory categories. If the
innovations nurtured in the closed world of the ARPANET were to find general use, they
would have to contend with both the political and technical legacies of the systems that
preceded them. If internetworking is principally about communication, should it be
overseen by the telephone companies—organizations which remained state-run
monopolies in most developed nations? Or, on the other hand, if internetworking is
primarily about computing, should a standard be enforced such that consumers are not
locked into a single platform by proprietary networking protocols? Where as Sterling
regards non-TCP/IP systems as “fringe-realms” and Hafner and Lyon side with their
heroes, Abbate dedicates a full chapter to mapping out the multiple stakeholder
perspectives that came to bear on the question of internetworking standards during the
1980s.
139
Conspicuous absences
For twenty-first century readers, there are some conspicuous absences in the
clusters that emerge out of the intersection of these three texts. By removing Sterling, we
find that there are 222 additional words in common between just Abbate and Hafner and
Lyon. This is not particularly surprising as these two works represent considerably longer,
sustained research than Sterling's column. The additional terms include much more
information about the systems that predate the ARPANET, such as Project Mac and the
139Abbate, Inventing the Internet., 149–179; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late, 246; Sterling,
“‘INTERNET’ [aka ‘A Short History of the Internet’].”
76
Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) at MIT, as well as systems that were developed
alongside, such as Alohanet at the University of Hawaii and the commercial network
Telenet. At the same time, there are more references to the popularization of internet
access during the mid-1990s, a phenomenon about which Sterling could only speculate.
The most glaring omission in the six clusters, the Web, is restored as both Tim
Berners-Lee and HTTP are included. Finally, there is also more information about the
cultural interests of the early ARPANET milieu. In addition to the SF-LOVERS mailing
list, there are now several references to characters and events from J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord
of the Rings.
Most telling among these absences is the Sterling's failure to mention the World
Wide Web. Although the web quickly became the visual symbol of the internet in 1994
and was, for many contemporary users, indistinguishable from the underlying internet
protocols, Sterling made no mention of the Web when he described the internet at the
start of 1993. On its face, this absence seems to illustrate the speed at which the social
and technical norms of internet use were changing during the 1990s—a rate of change
that journalists in the trade press referred to as “internet time”
140
—but under closer
examination, the absence of attention to the web seems to reflect a diversity of internet
use that no longer exists. Whereas the convergence of internet services on the web
promises a uniform experience across devices and platforms, the early internet was
marked by a plurality of text-mode interfaces that is as hard to fathom today as it was not
necessary to remark upon in 1993.
140Andrew Odlyzko, “The Myth of ‘Internet Time,’” MIT Technology Review, April 1, 2001,
http://www.technologyreview.com/review/400952/the-myth-of-internet-time/.
77
In the same year that Sterling published his “Short History of the Internet,”
Howard Rheingold published The Virtual Community, a personal memoir about the
author's exploration of several early online systems.
141
Throughout the book, Rheingold
describes logging into several different systems: The WELL, a popular Bay Area
bulletin-board system; Minitel, a state-sponsored conference system in France; FidoNet,
an inter-net of regional bulletin-boards; TWICS a Japanese dial-up system; and the
several others, including USENET and BITNET. Although very few of these networks
use the Internet Protocol (IP), Rheingold nevertheless refers to them, collectively, as “The
Net.” For him, “The Net” is defined by the particular social experience of
computer-mediated communication rather than the implementation of one or another set
of protocols.
Rheingold's inclusive use of “The Net” demonstrates the narrowness of the
prevailing internet mythology. The ARPANET figures into his experience only as a
historical curiosity. It is neither a extant system, nor one that would have ever been
accessible to him as an unaffiliated researcher in the 1980s. Indeed, Rheingold is only
half-joking when he describes the ARPANET in terms of “high-tech, top-secret
doings.”
142
Furthermore, the lively social interaction that inspired both Sterling and
Rheingold to publish passionately about the internet were all but absent on the
ARPANET (SF-LOVERS notwithstanding!). Abbate affirms this observation when she
relates a memory shared with her by an informant in 1997:
You have to realize how FEW people were on the Net before the '80s...There just
weren't enough to support a conversation on any but the most geeky or the most
141Rheingold, The Virtual Community.
142Ibid., 8.
78
general topics...It was boring, unless you could 'see' down the cables to the rest of
the world...and into the future.
143
The practices that we value most on the internet today are not reflected in the prevailing
mythology of the internet because the prevailing mythology depends on
ARPANET-centric narratives of the internet's history.
Historians of technology were aware of the limitations of the ARPANET narrative
during the explosion of historiography that took place during the 1990s. Rosenzweig's
round of up internet histories includes a brief discussion of Michael and Ronda Hauben's
Netizens, an history published in 1997 that centers on the early years of USENET rather
than ARPANET.
144
The Hauben's account of internet history suggests that the
popularization of computer-mediated communication began with “bottom-up” networks
such as USENET and were only later projected back on the ARPA-related networks.
145

This perspective seems consonant with Rheingold's description of dial-up bulletin-board
systems (BBSes) as a “grassroots” form of computer-mediated communication that
operate “without the benefit of Department of Defense funding.”
146
In 1998, Rosenzweig
concluded that the Haubens' cultural approach to USENET “should be central to any
future Net history,” and yet, it largely fell out of circulation after its first edition and is
rarely cited in the literature today.
147
143Michael S. Hart, quoted in: Abbate, Inventing the Internet., 84.
144Rosenzweig, “Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers,” 1543.
145Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben, Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet
(Los Alamitos, Calif.: IEEE Computer Society, 1997).
146Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 8.
147Michael Hauben passed away in 2001 but his son continues to maintain many of his online archives,
including a plain-text version of Netizens, accessible at http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/.
79
Of course, Abbate, Hafner and Lyon were also well aware that the ARPANET
narrative was not the last word on early computer networking. Indeed, each of their books
described several of the regional and independent networks that emerged in parallel with
the ARPA-related networks during the 1980s. A complete account of this period was
beyond the scope of their projects but both point readers toward John S. Quarterman's
comprehensive reference, The Matrix.
148
In the mid-1990s, it must have seemed like the
histories of these other networks would soon be taken up by other scholars in
forthcoming articles, books, and dissertations. Unfortunately, these histories were never
written.
148See: Quarterman, The Matrix.
80
Chapter 2: The Origins of the Modem World
On January 12, 1978, snow began to fall across the midwestern and northeastern United
States and within a few days, more than a foot of snow blanketed the region. Power lines
were downed, freight trains derailed, and hundreds of cars were stranded alongside
treacherous roadways.
149150
The brutal storm continued to “clobber” cities and towns from
Michigan to Massachusetts for more than five days leaving thousands stuck in their
homes with unplowed streets and unreliable power.
151152
On the morning of Monday,
January 16, Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss were among those Chicagoans facing
another day out of work. Feeling restless, Christensen phoned his friend, and suggested
that the two begin building a “computerized bulletin board system” for their computer
club. Christensen had been toying with the idea for a while and now, with little but
shoveling to distract them, the two men set to work. By the end of the day, they had
settled on a rough design and after a few weeks of assembling, soldering, programming,
and testing the system in their spare time, the two were ready to present “CBBS” to the
rest of the club's members. By February 16, 1978, the first homegrown dial-up
149“Snowfall a Nuisance Here, Deadly in East,” Chicago Tribune (1963-Current File), January 15, 1978,
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/docview/169687909/abstract/143322C01D5626AE669/1?
accountid=14749.
150Tribune Photo by Roy Halt, “Freight Car Tumbles off Viaduct,” Chicago Tribune (1963-Current File),
January 15, 1978,
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/docview/169659247/citation/143322C01D5626AE669/2?
accountid=14749.
151“Snowfall a Nuisance Here, Deadly in East.”
152This storm would soon be overshadowed, however, by two even more punishing storms—the
“Cleveland Superbomb” on January 25-27 and the “Blizzard of '78” on February 5-8 in the Midwest
and Northeast, respectively.
81
bulletin-board system was up and running in Seuss's basement; waiting to accept a call
from anyone with a computer terminal and a modem.
The founding of CBBS marks the beginning of “the modem world,” a period of
time from roughly 1978-1998 during which the use of computers for communication
remained a niche, peripheral activity in the broader culture of personal computing.
Although this period overlaps chronologically with the interconnection of many computer
science research facilities in the U.S., notably those with financial support from the
Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) or the National
Science Foundation (NSF), such institutional computer networks remained almost wholly
inaccessible to the typical personal computer owner. Indeed, from the perspective of the
typical 1980s PC user, the ARPA- and NSF-funded networks simply did not exist.
“The modem world” is a phrase that recurs in the recollections of former modem
users.
153
While histories of computer networking tend to focus on a single system or a
family of related systems—e.g., ARPANET, The WELL, or USENET—a history of the
“modem world” is inclusive of a diverse range of networking activities among personal
computer users. The term “modem world” is meant to evoke the distinct structure of
feeling that characterized networking computers via home telephone. In contrast to the
dedicated “leased-lines” used to interconnect campus networks in the 1980s, participants
in the modem world exchanged data using the same basic pair of copper wires designed
to carry residential telephone service to and from their homes. For this vanguard, the
modem—and the sound of its aural “handshake”—symbolized the transformation of the
personal computer from a productivity and entertainment device into a conduit for
153See: Chris, “The Fall of the Modem World,” August 1, 1991, http://textfiles.com/bbs/fotmw.txt.
82
communication. Likewise, the modem recast the RJ-11 telephone jack—ubiquitous and
standardized after 1976—from a unremarkable detail of modern life in the U.S. into a
portal through which an untold number of remote computer systems and users might be
waiting to receive your call.
Bulletin-board systems (BBSes) represent the principal form of computer
networking in the modem world. By the early 1980s, dial-up bulletin-board systems
modeled after Christensen and Seuss' CBBS were accessible throughout North America
and Europe. Hosted on modest hardware and piggybacking on existing telephone
infrastructure, BBSes provided a low barrier to entry for those groups and individuals
who endeavored to create publicly-accessible online communities. Often affiliated with a
small business, civic organization, or social club, and attracting users from the local area,
BBSes were as likely to be found in a rural or suburban area as they were in a large
metropolitan city or university town. Furthermore, low start-up costs made BBSes a
useful communication platform for niche interest groups who might not otherwise have
had access to large-scale telecommunications. In addition to computer enthusiasts and
civic organizations, BBSes were operated by radical political activists, queer
communities, evangelical religious movements, fetish practitioners, and more. The
modem world was more diverse than the contemporary academic networks in multiple
dimensions: technology, culture, politics, and socio-economic class.
In spite of a dearth of scholarship on the culture of personal computer networks,
the modem world was by no means secret. In addition to regular coverage in the
computer hobbyist and trade presses, online systems for PC owners were often discussed
83
in widely-circulated newspapers and magazines, as well as the subject of several
televised specials in both Canada and the US. In popular media, communication by
modem became a recurring motif in both espionage and science fiction stories—most
notably in the 1983 feature film WarGames. By the middle of the decade, personal
computers and modems were available in nationwide retail chains like Toys-R-Us as well
as in specialty computer stores such as ComputerLand. And yet, in spite of this sustained
visibility across North America, collective memory of the modem world scarcely
survives.
Re-calling the modem world begins with a re-construction of the technical, social,
and political surroundings within which the modem and microcomputer were adopted as
tools for popular communication by hobbyists like Christensen and Seuss. This chapter
thus concerns the particular historical conditions that gave rise to the modem world in
late-1970s North America. It begins with three stories that overlap and interleave with
one another: the arc of the AT&T monopoly, the long history of amateur
telecommunications, and the emergence of microcomputing. As these stories converge,
each contributes significantly to the shaping of hobby telecomputing and the emerging
modem world. Finally, this chapter will return to the story of Christensen, Seuss, and the
founding of CBBS. With the benefit of a larger historical aperture, the CBBS story
provides a useful origin myth for a popular history of computer networking.
84
Favorable conditions for networked personal computing
At the end of the 1970s, three seemingly distinct areas of social, technical, and
regulatory activity converged in the U.S., creating a favorable environment for the
emergence of networked personal computing. For much of the 20
th
century, AT&T—
colloquially referred to as “Ma Bell”—enjoyed a de facto monopoly over
telecommunications in the United States as a result of the Communications Act of
1934.
154
As soon as 1949, however, the wisdom of this arrangement was under increasing
scrutiny from regulators, leading to the break-up of the monopoly on January 1, 1984.
155

Both the Bell monopoly and break-up effected changes in the global telecommunications
environment—intended and unintended—that contributed to the emergence and diffusion
of the modem world. The monopoly put a standardized telephone jack in nearly every
U.S. home, while the break-up created a market for telecommunications devices—like
the PC modem—that could interface with that jack.
Parallel with the halcyon days of Ma Bell, a similarly long tradition of amateur
telecommunications—exemplified by the thriving “ham” and CB radio cultures—
nurtured a popular interest in communication technologies. Whereas early amateur radio
activities were limited to those who could produce and maintain complex equipment,
vastly simpler radios and radio kits entered the market in the 1960s based on integrated
circuits (IC) and other solid-state microelectronics. By the 1970s, the availability of these
new radios had opened both the amateur radio hobby and the Citizen's Band (CB) radio
service to wider participation by reducing the technical and financial barriers to entry.
156

154Michel Carpentier et al., Telecommunications in Transition (Chichester [etc.]: J. Wiley, 1992), 1.
155Ibid., 19.
156Jared Barton and Tyler Watts, “‘I Can’t Drive 55’: The Economics of the CB Radio Phenomenon,” The
85
Meanwhile, the popularization of two-way radio communication in the mid-1970s
coincided with the emergence of a new arena of amateur experimentation:
microcomputing.
Although amateur computing had been practiced by small groups of enthusiasts
since the mid-1960s, historians of computing generally agree that hobby computing first
became widely accessible with the production of do-it-yourself personal computer kits in
1974. Kit computers such as the Altair 8800 were featured in magazines of general
technical interest such as Popular Electronics as well as publications aimed at amateur
radio operators such as QST and 73. These were difficult kits to build but a large
community of experimenters had developed significant electronics expertise through their
past experience with technical hobbies like amateur radio, model rocketry, and hi-fi home
stereo. As pre-built systems became available and interest in personal computing grew
beyond the hobbyist community in 1977, a thriving market emerged around hardware
peripherals, including devices for telecommunications. By the start of the 1980s, the
basic requirements for amateur telecomputing were accessible to a sizable number of
Americans.
In contrast to the Bell system, amateur telecom, and early microcomputing, a
fourth arena of activity occurred largely out of sight of the technical hobbyist. Beginning
in the early 1960s and continuing into the 1980s, the Advanced Research Projects
Agency (ARPA), an organization within the U.S. Department of Defense, took a serious
interest in the challenges and opportunities of computer networking.
157
Research funded
Independent Review 15, no. 3 (2011).
157Abbate, Inventing the Internet.; Edwards, The Closed World Computers and the Politics of Discourse in
Cold War America; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late.
86
by ARPA during this period produced the fundamental theories and technologies that
form the basis of inter-networking. In addition to demonstrating the principles of
packet-switching and dynamic, distributed routing with the experimental ARPANET, the
work of this milieu yielded TCP/IP, the networking protocols that continue to undergird
much of today's telecommunications activity. The ARPA story is typically the starting
point for any history of the internet and will not be recounted in detail here. Instead, a
popular history of the internet begins with a consideration, in turn, of the role of the Bell
system, amateur telecommunications, and early microcomputing, the crucible of the
modem world.
The purpose of this section is not to be proscriptive or to suggest that these are the
ideal conditions for any popular socio-technical movement. Instead, this chapter will
provide a broader context for the modem world and join together several scholarly
literatures that do not often meet. This narrative lightly revises and significantly enlarges
the prevailing internet origin story by demonstrating that complementary concerns
regarding popular telecommunications were in parallel circulation among seemingly
disparate technical, political, intellectual, and industrial cultures. This account argues that
the popularization of networked personal computing begins in the late-1970s rather than
the mid-1990s as the story is conventionally told. On the afternoon that Christensen and
Seuss decided that a computerized bulletin-board system might be a fun project for a
snowy day off work, elsewhere in the US, songs about CB radio were topping the pop
charts, economists were arguing for the end of the AT&T monopoly, and amateur
computer enthusiasts were turning their niche hobby into a booming new market.
87
The popularization of telecommunications: A half century with Ma Bell
Between 1876 and 1894, Alexander Graham Bell enjoyed exclusive control over
the patent for telephony—voice communication by wire. Bell assembled a number of
integrated businesses to commercially exploit the patent: Western Electric manufactured
telephony hardware, the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) provided
long-distance service, several regional companies provided local access, and the national
Bell Company managed the whole structure. This agglomeration is often colloquially
referred to as “The Bell System” or, even more informally, “Ma Bell.”
After a period of open, unregulated competition in the telephone market, AT&T
continued to dominate the market for long-distance telephone service and was a clear
target for antitrust litigation. In 1913, AT&T voluntarily submitted to federal regulation in
an out-of-court agreement called the “Kingsbury Commitment” that permitted its
monopoly position so long as it allowed independent local telephone providers to
interconnect with its long-distance network. The government's explicit support for the
AT&T monopoly continued through to the passage of the Communication Act of 1934, a
piece of legislation that establishing for the first time a holistic framework for
telecommunications regulation in the US. The Act affirmed the important role that
telecommunications would play in matters of trade, public safety, nation-building,
warfare, and security and, in turn, prompted the creation of the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) to administer and enforce the new rules. Consistent with the belief
that telecommunications were best served by a “natural monopoly,” the FCC continued to
allow AT&T a de facto monopoly to maintain a single, unified telephone network in the
88
US. In the wake of these regulatory interventions, the diffusion and adoption of
residential telephone service continued to steadily rise, reaching near total adoption by
the early 1980s. With AT&T managing the infrastructure, the FCC appeared to achieve
the goals set out in the 1934 Act.
The de facto AT&T monopoly over US telecommunications lasted until 1984,
when an ideological movement toward deregulation and privatization finally gained
enough political traction to prompt the dismantling of the Bell System. Recently, scholars
of telecommunications policy have tended to portray AT&T as a bully that abused its
monopoly, engaged in anti-competitive behavior, and squashed or delayed technical
innovation.
158
An alternate account—preferred by AT&T, no doubt—depicts a patriotic
public-private enterprise with a solemn mandate to provide rock-solid service to the
American public.
159
In fact, for the purposes of thinking through the popular experience
of mid-century telecommunications, it is not necessary to choose between these two
narratives. Whether benevolent or poisonous, both the AT&T quasi-monopoly and its
dissolution provided crucial resources for the emergence of the modem world.
Residential telephone service was the first form of electrified telecommunications
to be used widely among different socio-economic and professional classes in North
America.
160
As telephones began to appear in offices, on sidewalks, and, eventually, in
private homes, technologically-mediated communication over long distance became an
158See: Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2010).
159See the corporate history presented on AT&T's own website: “The History Behind the Formation of the
New AT&T,” History Timeline, accessed February 16, 2014,
http://www.att.com/Common/files/multimedia/history_flash/index.html.
160Electrification aside, the postal system was the first telecommunication service to be widely adopted in
the US.
89
increasingly common feature of everyday life. The domestication of the telephone
transformed America's collective orientation toward space and time.
161
Beginning with
the early Bell System, the production of a nearly-ubiquitous nationwide telephone system
set in place certain technical standards, regulatory norms, and social expectations that
would shape the emergence and adoption of networked personal computing during the
1980s. The proceeding section will focus on three developments that directly affected the
design of early bulletin-board systems like the one deployed by Christensen and Seuss in
1978: the provision of ubiquitous service, the spatial dimensions of cross-subsidized
billing, and the standardization of the telephone network's end-user interface.
Ubiquitous service: A telephone in every home
In its early days, AT&T was lead by Theodore Vail, a charismatic leader who
endorsed and promoted the notion that telecommunications represented a “natural
monopoly.” Vail's ambitions for AT&T were neatly summarized in a company slogan
adopted under his leadership: “One System, One Policy, Universal Service.”
162
In the face
of unstable, incompatible telephone network infrastructure, “universal” took on two
meanings for AT&T. On one hand, it meant that any one of its subscribers should be able
to reach any other subscriber, regardless of which local exchange they dialed into. On the
other hand, “universal” could take on a more ambitious meaning. The 1910 annual report
161Claude S Fischer, America Calling a Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992), http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?
direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=19208.
162This phrase was coined by Vail and appeared in company reports and publicity materials from at least
1907-1914, see: Milton Mueller, Universal Service: Competition, Interconnection, and Monopoly in the
Making of the American Telephone System (Cambridge, Mass.; Washington, D.C.: MIT Press ; AEI
Press, 1997), 4.
90
made this grander ambition plain when it described one day offering “a system as
universal and extensive as the highway system...extending from every man's door to
every other man's door.”
163
Although Vail died before the passage of the Communication
Act of 1934, his vision of ubiquitous service played (and continues to play) a crucial role
in the regulation and provision of telecommunication services in the US.
The ubiquitous availability of residential telephone service was not an inevitable
development in the history of telecommunications. During its initial expansion, the Bell
System focused mainly on attracting business customers located in major urban areas.
With the expiration of the Bell patent in 1894, however, thousands of new telephone
companies were formed, many of which set up shop in the smaller towns, cities, and rural
communities that were being ignored by Ma Bell. By 1907, more than 10,000 different
companies operated telephone services in the United States.
164
Unfortunately for phone
users and potential phone users, AT&T refused to connect these rivals to its long-distance
service. In practice, the lack of interconnection meant that customers of one company
could not place a phone call to customers of another. As the telephone market continued
to expand, the build-out of overlapping, redundant networks lead to system-wide
inefficiencies, user frustration, and, in the case of emergency communication,
considerable risks to public safety.
In cities where telephone competition was most fierce, businesspeople
complained about having to subscribe to two telephone services in order to reach all of
their customers.
165
This period of “dual service” was not without its positive effects,
163Annual Report of the American Telephone and Telegraph (New York, 1910), 23.
164Carpentier et al., Telecommunications in Transition, 3.
165Mueller, Universal Service, 93.
91
however. The geographic reach of telephone service was extended by new phone
companies who focused their efforts in communities and regions poorly served by the
Bell System. While Bell was occupied providing long lines for their business customers
in New York and Chicago, for example, independent firms built thriving regional
networks in the cities and towns of Indiana and Ohio.
166
Furthermore, in those urban areas
where Ma Bell faced a direct rival, users of both systems enjoyed falling prices and
quality of service improvements driven by the competition.
In a history of the idea of universal service, Milton Mueller describes the role of
independent phone companies as “filling the gaps” left by the Bell System after the
expiration of the telephone patent.
167
The “gaps” Mueller referred to were largely
geographic and in the years leading up to the 1913 Kingsbury Commitment,
entrepreneurs established local telephone exchanges throughout the US. By 1920, a
network of local exchanges connected by nationwide long-distance lines provided
sufficient physical infrastructure to support near-ubiquitous service.
168
Significant work
remained to be done in order to bring telephones into all of the homes in these
communities but the basic framework was in place.
With the passage of the Communications Act of 1934, the federal government
began to justify its interventions into the telephone market by arguing for the social value
of ubiquitous residential service. In terms clearly inspired by the vision articulation
earlier by Vail at AT&T, the preamble to the 1934 Act included the following statement
of purpose:
166Ibid., 59.
167Ibid., 55.
168Ibid., 147.
92
to make available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States,
without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex,
a rapid, efficient, Nation- wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication
service
169
With AT&T's monopoly position affirmed by federal regulation, telephone service
became a utility and the incentive to deliver phone service to rural and remote areas was
substantially reduced for independent providers. To ensure that these communities
continued to be served, the FCC implemented an “obligation to serve” which restricted
telephone service providers from exiting a market.
170
Within a few decades of the 1934 Act, residential telephone service became a
standard feature of most American homes. By 1965, 80% of Americans subscribed to
residential telephone service; by 1970, that number rose to 87%; and by 1983, 91.4% of
American households were connected to the telephone network.
171
In a 1996 study of
Camden, NJ residents without residential phone service, Mueller & Schement found that
household income correlated strongly with telephone penetration. In the wealthiest areas
of Camden, as many as 98.5% of homes were connected.
172
In the late 1970s, therefore, it
is safe to assume that the penetration of telephony was greater than 91.4% among those
households financially able to purchase a microcomputer.
169Communications Act of 1934, 47 U.S.C. 151, 1934.
170Mueller, Universal Service, 153.
171Ibid., 161; Federal Communications Commission, Statistics of Communications Common Carriers,
2004 2003, http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FCC-State_Link/SOCC/03socc.pdf.
172Milton L. Mueller and Jorge Reina Schement, “Universal Service from the Bottom Up: A Study of
Telephone Penetration in Camden, New Jersey,” The Information Society 12, no. 3 (1996): 273–92,
doi:10.1080/019722496129468.
93
Cross-subsidies and the spatial imaginary of telephone billing
Since the early days of the Bell System, local and long-distance services have
been handled and billed by different firms. This economic arrangement is reflected in the
hierarchical structure of the network: long-distance “trunk” lines connect local network
exchanges. The separation of local and long-distance service was also mirrored in the
implementation of the Communication Act of 1934: state regulators set the rates for local,
in-state service while federal regulators did the same for long-distance, inter-state service.
In the course of everyday use, telephone subscribers paid a flat monthly fee for
inbound service and paid variable rates for outbound service. Outgoing calls were billed
according to distance. A call to the next state cost more per minute than a call next door.
The challenge for regulators in setting rates, then, was to strike a fair balance between
long-distance and local-area calls such that users could afford their monthly bills and the
phone companies could afford to maintain their systems. The conceptual problem at the
heart of this balance was a tension between the immediate service being delivered and the
value of the telephone network as a whole system.
173
In the course of making a local
phone call, the caller only activates a tiny subset of the total network but the value of
telephony is in the knowledge that the network will continue to be available into the
future. Fair rates should reflect both the cost of the immediate service and the overall cost
of sustaining the network.
A commitment to ubiquitous service further vexes the economics of rate
regulation. Sustaining a large network requires considerable material investment and
human labor: miles of insulated copper wire, telephone poles, power plants, switching
173For further elaboration of this point, see: Mueller, Universal Service, 153–155.
94
stations, and customer service offices. The return on these expenses varies according to
population density, local economics, and state-by-state regulation. In densely-settled
areas with small plots and multi-family homes, many more customers can be connected
than with the same infrastructure in a sparsely-settled rural area.
Beginning in the 1920s, regulators tended to set long-distance rates relatively
higher than local rates. The rationale for this arrangement is that local network
infrastructure is required for callers to access long-distance services. In the early 1930s,
the Supreme Court authorized this rationale and a portion of the revenue generated by the
higher-cost long-distance services was set aside and transferred back to local providers.
174
This practice—known as a “cross-subsidy”—ensured a lower monthly rate on local
service, thereby enabling more households to join the network and increasing the value of
the whole system for users and providers alike.
In the 1950s, the on-going discussion of telephone rate regulation moved out of
the somewhat dull provenance of the FCC and into the realm of broader social policy.
Assuming that business customers were more likely to use long-distance services than
residential customers, some members of Congress began to recode the process of rate
regulation as a contest between large corporations and the “average housewife.”
175
This
discursive change brought public interest groups to bear on the regulatory process and
prompted a significant increase in the amount of long-distance billing that was
apportioned to subsidize local service. Between 1965 and 1982, the subsidy rose over
20% and the monthly cost of local service fell by half.
176
174Ibid., 155.
175Ibid., 159.
176Ibid., 160.
95
In the 1970s, the falling cost of monthly service ensured that nearly everyone
could receive a telephone call. When the phone rang, one could pick it up confident in the
knowledge that it cost nothing to answer. Dialing a phone, however, activated a particular
spatial imaginary in which the geography of one's social life was sorted out according to
the variable rates set by telephone regulators. It might be free to call your son's school
downtown but it costs five cents a minute to call your friend across the state and twenty
cents a minute to call Uncle Larry in Walla-Walla. Personal computer networking by
telephone enlarged this spatial imaginary by including distant data sources, bulletin-board
systems, and time-sharing services. For microcomputer users on a budget, telephone
calling rates drew attention to one's location in the larger American telecommunications
complex.
Unexpected uses for the infrastructure of plain old telephone service
With the domestication of the telephone in postwar America, some users began to
dream up new applications for the network. These enterprising users encountered the Bell
System as a stable telecommunications platform connecting nearly every dwelling in
their community. In an effort to protect its monopoly position, AT&T enlisted the help of
federal regulators to block the production of any new telephone accessories. By the
late-1960s, however, the ideological winds had changed around the FCC and AT&T was
forced to standardize its network interfaces, opening up a nationwide telecommunications
platform to a whole new population of experimenters, tinkerers, hobbyists, and
entrepreneurs.
96
The Communication Act of 1934 only officially sanctioned AT&T's monopoly
over long-distance service but through a series of mergers and acquisitions, “Ma Bell”
once again extended her reach from the intercity “long lines” all the way into the homes
and offices of its customers. By the 1940s, AT&T was not only the exclusive wireline
long-distance carrier in the US but also the exclusive provider of end-user telephone
equipment. Residential subscribers did not own the telephones in their homes, they
merely rented them from the Bell System. The notion that users could attach fax
machines, answering machines, and modems to the telephone network seemed like
science fiction.
The Bell monopoly was focused principally on assuring the reliability of its
existing voice services and had little incentive to enlarge the scope of its services. Indeed,
what little end-user “innovation” they did offer was largely limited to manufacturing the
standard Bell telephone in colors other than black. As late as 1967, the Chicago Tribune
ran an article on updates to the Bell System's home telephone offerings that nicely
illustrates the institutional inertia regarding terminal equipment innovation:
Choosing a telephone [used to be] simple. All phones had dials, were black, and
sat rather innocuously on a table in the corner. Today, one has to choose from a
variety of colors and styles—Trimline, Touch-tone, wall phones, Princess, and
desk phones. Illinois Bell has tried to make the selection of a telephone a pleasant
task for the new homeowner[.] Each set is tested carefully by [Bell subsidiary]
Western Electric[,] before the instrument is delivered to you.
177
These choices could only have seemed daunting after years of stasis. Anticipating this
response, the author goes on to describe over “1,800 modifications” that have been made
177“More and More Choice in Telephones Available,” Chicago Tribune (1963-Current File), September
23, 1967, sec. West,
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/news/docview/179278064/abstract/2BC04AEEAE4249A8
PQ/3?accountid=14749.
97
to the interior of the standard Bell phone in the last thirteen years although “the exterior
appearance is practically unchanged.”
178
By revealing these technical details, Bell hoped
that users would experience the wireline telephone as an exciting, high-tech instrument,
but after fifty years, telephony was likely seen as little more than a reliable commodity
service. Faced with this slow rate of change and the near-ubiquitous reach of the
telephone network, enterprising designers were eager to pick up the slack and build new
product atop the Bell platform.
As early as 1949, regulators in the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FCC began to
question whether the vertical integration of the Bell System continued to serve the best
interests of the American consumer.
179
Bell argued that overseeing the manufacture and
installation of all “terminal equipment” was necessary to ensure high quality of service.
The first formal challenge
to this position came in 1947 when a conflict arose between AT&T and an
inventor named Henry Tuttle over a strange-looking device called the Hush-a-Phone. The
Hush-a-Phone was a privacy device designed to fit over the microphone of a standard
Bell telephone and obscure the mouth of the speaker. Initially, the FCC agreed with
AT&T that the Hush-a-Phone was an illegal “foreign attachment” but Tuttle persisted
and, in 1956, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the decision.
180
The
Hush-a-Phone was permitted on the grounds that the FCC was neither “just” nor
178Ibid.
179Carpentier et al., Telecommunications in Transition, 5.
180HUSH-A-PHONE CORPORATION and Harry C. Tuttle, Petitioners, v. UNITED STATES of America
and Federal Communications Commission, Respondents, American Telephone and Telegraph Company
et al., and United States Independent Telephone Association, Intervenors, 99 U.S. App. D.C. 190; 238
F.2d 266; 1956 U.S. App. LEXIS 4023 (UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT OF
COLUMBIA CIRCUIT 1956).
98
“reasonable” in prohibiting an attachment that was “privately beneficial without being
publicly detrimental.”
181
The Hush-a-Phone decision represented a first opening in Bell hegemony over
end-user equipment but because it was such a quirky device, the outcome was hardly
generalizable. In 1968, however, AT&T wanted to prohibit the use of another device—the
Carterfone—and found the FCC far less sympathetic than it had been in 1950. The
Carterfone was an interface for interconnecting a standard Bell telephone handset with a
two-way radio system that enabled an early form of mobile telephony. Although a
stronger case could be made that the Carterfone interfered with the Bell network, the
FCC declared that AT&T's ban on foreign attachments was “unreasonable and unduly
discriminatory.”
182
The commission continued on to strike down the prohibition on
foreign attachments altogether, arguing that attachments and interconnection devices
should be allowed as long as they do not harm the system or otherwise adversely affect
the utility of the system for others. As will be demonstrated shortly, the implications of
the Carterfone decision were truly transformative for technical hobbyists as it opened the
Bell system to experimentation.
The promises of the Carterfone decision could not realized immediately because
the architecture of the Bell System was not designed to enable interconnection with
arbitrary unknown devices. Prior to Carterfone, residential service could only be installed
by a trained technician who would wire an official Western Electric telephone directly to
the wall. As a result, devices like the Carterfone had to include specially designed cradles
181Ibid.
182USE OF THE CARTERFONE DEVICE IN MESSAGE TOLL TELEPHONE SERVICE, 13 F.C.C. 2d
420 (1968).
99
that could accommodate the standard Bell handset, a far inferior solution to directly
interconnecting with the wireline network itself. The standard, modular telephone jack
(RJ-11) was not introduced until 1976 after an order from the FCC barred the use of its
proprietary connection points.(Fig 1.) Finally, in 1984, the FCC's rules for
interconnection—now colloquially known as “Carterfone rules”—were codified in the
Title 47, Part 68 of the Code of Federal Regulations.
183

Although it nearly two decades passed between the Hush-a-Phone decision and
the production of standard telephone jacks, the Carterfone rules created a lively new
market for end-user terminal equipment. During the 1970s, third-party companies
introduced numerous devices for interconnection with the Bell system. In addition to fax
and answering machines, modem-equipped video and printer terminals could use of the
public telephone network to connect to computer systems. Hobbyist magazines such as
Popular Electronics even ran how-to articles describing how users could build new
terminal equipment to install on their home networks.
Implications of liberalized telecom for the emerging modem world
In 1984, the FCC officially dissolved the public-private partnership between the
US government and the Bell System. Inspired by Milton Friedman and the “neo-liberal
school” of economics, the break-up of AT&T represented the latest in a series of
industries to be deregulated during this period.
184
The “break up” was swift but the
political will to end the de facto monopoly had been building since the 1960s. In addition
183FCC 47 CFR Part 68, n.d.
184Carpentier et al., Telecommunications in Transition, 16.
100
to the decisions that allowed foreign attachments, the FCC had also begun to allow
competition in long-distance calling from MCI and Sprint. The structure of post-breakup
Ma Bell reflected these areas of competition. The vertically-integrated Bell System was
“sliced” horizontally into three parts: long-distance, local service, and competitive
attachments. Local service was then “diced” vertically into four “Baby Bells,” each
assigned to a different geographic region of the United States.
Computer networking experiments were among the many new devices and
services introduced during the deregulation period. Tymshare, Inc., a company that
provided a variety of time-sharing computer services, was uniquely positioned to take
advantage of the new opportunities. A 1977 brochure for Tymshare's “Decision Support
System” describes the use of modem-equipped video terminals to enable managers to
directly access computing resources that would otherwise require hiring a consultant:
Telephone lines linking computer-stored information directly to a terminal
on-location have made the immediate availability of information a reality.
Interactive systems allow quick two-way communication between computer and
user. A user makes a simple request for information and receive it in minutes.
185
As more of their customers had access to modem-equipped computers, networking
became increasingly central to Tymshare's activities and they soon spun off a public data
network (PDN) called Tymnet. Public data networks like Tymnet and the
ARPANET-inspired Telenet interconnected with local telephone exchanges to offer
dial-up access to high-speed, packet-switched data networks.
186
Although PDNs billed
users a flat monthly fee along with per-hour connection fees, the telephone company
185Tymshare, Inc., “Decision Support Systems: Managerial Tools Enhance Decision Making,” 1977,
http://www.computerhistory.org/brochures/full_record.php?iid=doc-4372956ebe631.
186Quarterman, The Matrix, 620–621.
101
billed only for the initial local telephone call. In this respect, savvy users could use a
PDN to circumvent long-distance calling fees.
Deregulation succeeded in opening new markets for telecommunications devices
and services but it also introduced significant uncertainty and frustration for the everyday
user. As Tim Wu describes in his book on the history of telecommunications regulation:
An American public wearied and bewildered by the years its government had
spent hounding the nation's most reliable corporation would very shortly face a
rude awakening to inflated and complicated phone bills, including all sorts of
mystifying connection fees and surcharges.
187
The same chaos that frustrated everyday telephone subscribers, offered opportunities for
exploration and exploitation among the curious and technically inclined. Phone phreaks
had long enjoyed finding quirks and gaps in the corners of the telephone infrastructure
and the break-up of the Bell monopoly seemed to opened up new vistas for exploration.
188
Teenage modem enthusiasts were similarly motivated to exploit the phone network in
order to circumvent long-distance charges in pursuit of their new hobby. In a 1990 feature
for Spin about the teenage computer underground, tech journalist Julian Dibbell
recounted the widespread use of stolen Telenet user credentials among a transnational
network teens who would meet on chat channels and bulletin-boards hosted throughout
Europe and North America.
189

The story of the Bell System provides one half of the foundation on which the
modem world was built. By 1978, nearly every American home in the US was outfitted
with a standard RJ-11 telephone jack and a low-cost subscription for plain old telephone
187Wu, The Master Switch, 195.
188Phil Lapsley, Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma
Bell, 2013.
189Julian Dibbell, “Cyberthrash,” Spin, March 1990.
102
service. Furthermore, the law and the market were encouraging the détournement of that
humble plug toward new applications. In its rigorous pursuit of ubiquitous, reliable voice
telephony, Ma Bell had inadvertently produced a nationwide telecommunications
platform for experimentation and exploration. The other half of the foundation for the
modem world is the growth of a technical culture uniquely poised to seize on this
opportunity.
The long tradition of amateur telecommunications in North America
The modem world emerged out of a long tradition of amateur telecommunications
in North America. Beginning with the earliest experiments in wireless communication at
the end of the 19
th
century, new media and communication technologies have been
adopted, modified, and re-produced for community-building, resource sharing, collective
intelligence, and public safety purposes. Alongside the forces of regulation,
commercialization, and militarization, these amateur activities played a critical role in
shaping the social value of media technologies during the 20
th
century. However, unlike
their contemporaries in academia, the tech industries, or the military whose work was
rationalized, bureaucratized, and archived by virtue of its institutional affiliation, the
typical middle-class American amateurs worked out of their homes using the “free” time
and money left over from their work and family commitments. As a result, the social and
technical contributions of amateurs are easily obscured, overlooked, or ignored in popular
histories of media and communication. To understand the emergence of the modem
103
world, it is essential to outline the norms and values of amateur telecommunications that
were already widespread among North American technical hobbyists by the late-1970s.
Networked personal computing emerged out of a milieu of technical hobbyists
who were steeped in the traditions of amateur telecommunications—particularly amateur
radio. Over time, these technical activities gave rise to participatory cultures that valued
low barriers to entry and informal mentorship. As radio, television, and telephony
diffused throughout the domestic and professional lives of post-war America, enthusiasts
frequently found unanticipated uses for these new media apparatuses. In the hands of the
technical hobbyist, military surplus and cast-off consumer products provided raw
materials for hands-on learning and experimentation. And in addition to their mediated
communications, participants organized local and regional clubs and associations that met
regularly in person, published newsletters, and managed shared technical infrastructures.
As early as the mid-19
th
century, these local organizations were also linked into
trans-regional networks that met at conventions and carried on long-distance
communication through store-and-forward networks criss-crossing the North American
continent. From the amateur press associations, to the “wildcat” rural telephone
operators, to the early community access television systems, hobbyists and enthusiasts
have consistently pushed telecommunications in new directions by finding unexpected
uses for existing media technologies.
190
190See: Patrick Parsons, Blue Skies a History of Cable Television (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2008), 19–21, http://public.eblib.com/EBLPublic/PublicView.do?ptiID=432874; Paula Petrik, “The
Youngest Fourth Estate: The Novelty Toy Printing Press and Adolescence, 1870-1886,” in Small
Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950, ed. Paula Petrik (Kansas City, Kansas: U of
Kansas Press, 1992); Christian Sandvig, “Disorderly Infrastructure and the Role of Government,”
Government Information Quarterly 23, no. 3–4 (2006): 503–6, doi:10.1016/j.giq.2006.07.008.
104
A comprehensive indexing of all amateur telecommunications movements is both
beyond the scope of the chapter and unnecessary for the purposes of understanding the
origins of the modem world. Many different technical cultures have gathered and
disappeared during the history of amateur telecommunications. Although they have all
been organized around one or another media technology, they all draw from a superset of
common norms and values. These areas of commonality are not determined by a focus on
media technologies but are rather a side effect of the overlapping populations of people
who have been drawn to amateur telecommunications and the residual materials they
have created during the past hundred years. In some cases, the same individuals and
organizations will contribute to more than one technical culture. In other cases, the
artifacts of previous technical cultures have provided models for emerging cultures. To
draw out the key features of amateur telecommunications as an umbrella for all of this
activity, the next few sections will examine three exemplary cases in turn: amateur radio,
citizens band radio, and hobby computing.
The participatory technical culture of “ham” radio
Although amateur telecommunications includes a diverse range of activities,
amateur radio provides the cultural and technological foundation on which (or against
which) new technical cultures could develop. In many cities and towns in North America
since the 1950s, local amateur—or “ham”—radio operators represent a community that
closely fits the participatory culture model outlined by Henry Jenkins in his work on
popular media fandom.
191
This comparison is significant because it illustrates the
191Henry Jenkins et al., Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education of the 21st
105
resonances that existed (and continue to exist) among the technical cultures of amateur
telecommunications and other popular culture activities such as science fiction and
fantasy fandom and the underground press. In spite of their demographic differences—in
the U.S., technical hobbies such as amateur radio have tended to be overwhelmingly
white, male, and middle-class
192
—these cultural traditions eventually came into material
contact with one another in the 1980s as bulletin-board systems provided a
telecommunications infrastructure for interest-driven communities.
Consistent with Jenkins' formulation, the technical culture of amateur radio
invites and rewards multiple modes of engagement. Some “hams” are drawn to the
technical challenge of building, repairing, and operating sophisticated electronic
equipment, while others primarily enjoy chatting with fellow hobbyists over the
airwaves. Still others take on the responsibilities of a community leader: organizing club
meetings, outings, and annual conventions. This wide range of legitimate forms of
participation provides multiple avenues of entry into amateur radio.
193
Another important feature of ham radio reflected in Jenkins' definition of
participatory culture is the central role of informal mentorship. With its arcane
terminology and complex technology, amateur radio can be an intimidating hobby, even
for the most curious potential participant. For this reason, experienced hams are strongly
encouraged to be patient and offer assistance to newcomers. Mentorship is so prevalent in
Century (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 2006), 7.
192Kristen Haring, “The ‘Freer Men’ of Ham Radio: How a Technical Hobby Provided Social and Spatial
Distance,” Technology and Culture 44, no. 4 (2003): 734–61, doi:10.1353/tech.2003.0164.
193It is important to note, however, that the barriers to entry are not equally low for all potential
participants. The population of licensed amateur radio operators has traditionally been overwhelmingly
male, white, and middle class, in spite of various efforts to welcome new participants into the hobby.
106
ham radio discourse that the slang term “Elmer” is used to describe a particularly helpful,
friendly ham. The use of “Elmer” is believed to have started with a 1971 column by Rod
Newkirk in the amateur radio magazine QST:
The head Elmer in our old neighborhood, for example, was pre-WWII W9NUF,
one real amateur's amateur...Though busy with his own operating, building,
arduous studies, chronic family illness, and full social calendar, he miraculously
found time to be big brother to any local youngster or oldster groping uncertainly
toward hamdom...He's gone now but the many amateurs he spawned doubtless
include a few Elmers in their own right.
194
As Newkirk's description demonstrates, “Elmers” are considered among the most valued
participants in ham radio—the “the amateur's amateur.” Not only do the Elmers assist
with newcomers but they play a pivotal role in carrying on the tradition of amateur
telecommunications. Mentorship is further institutionalized by magazines and amateur
associations in the form of Elmer-of-the-Year awards and glowing remembrances of
deceased hams—known in the community as “silent keys” or simply SK.
Store-and-forward networking in the Amateur Radio Relay League
In the U.S., “amateur radio” is not simply a convenient name for the radio hobby,
it is a special class of radio operators licensed by the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) to operate certain types of wireless equipment on a set of clearly
defined frequencies. In this respect, amateur radio is unique among other forms of
amateur telecommunications. Not only are valuable areas of the electro-magnetic
spectrum set aside for amateur radio activity, but the amateur's right to operate in this
spectrum is guaranteed by federal legislation. The inclusion and protection of radio
194Rod Newkirk, “How’s DX,” QST, March 1971.
107
amateurs was by no means a foregone conclusion and the origins of this designation are
useful for thinking about the later emergence of amateur computer networking.
As radio communication apparatus became more widely accessible in the late
1900s, wireless enthusiasts considered the electromagnetic spectrum—or the “ether”—to
be a fantastic new frontier; at once invisible and omnipresent. Many of these new radio
operators were young men who were trained through Boy Scouts or after school
programs. In contrast to their experiences of school and home life, the boys believed the
ether to be a radically egalitarian medium, free from traditional social hierarchies and
structures of social control.
195
This populist perspective was further strengthened by
accounts in the popular press of heroic “boy” radio operators who saved lives by
providing communications support during maritime disasters.
Ironically, then, the Titanic disaster in 1912 marked a turn in public opinion
regarding the young amateurs. When readers learned that distress signals from the Titanic
were not received by nearby ships, interference from amateurs was given as a possible
cause.
196
Instead of boy heroes, the young enthusiasts were now portrayed as
mischief-makers interfering with the use of radio for public safety. Later that year,
Congress passed the second piece of legislation regulating the use of wireless
communication technology: the Radio Act of 1912.
197

In the course of implementing the 1912 Act, the newly-formed Federal Radio
Commission created an “amateur” classification and severely restricted their activity.
Hobbyists were accustomed to operating on whichever frequencies their equipment could
195Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922, 214.
196Ibid., 229.
197Ibid., 216–239.
108
reliably tune in but after the passage of the Act, they were legally limited to wavelengths
of 200 meters or less, a portion of spectrum considered useless at the time. In spite of this
technical restriction, the Radio Act an the unexpected side effect on the social lives of the
amateurs. Whereas terms like amateur, enthusiast, and experimenter were used more or
less interchangeably, the classification of all non-commercial and non-military activity as
“amateur” produced a collective identity marker around which the radio hobbyists might
rally. In the years following the passage of the Act, popular interest in radio actually
increased, as evidenced by rising readership of special-interest magazines and
membership in local and national radio clubs.
198
Among the newly classified amateurs was a 43-year old automobile engineer and
radio hobbyist named Hiram Percy Maxim.
199
Older than most of his contemporary
amateurs, Maxim was introduced to wireless through his son and a younger colleague.
200

Believing that a lack of political representation was to blame for the severe restrictions of
the Radio Act, Maxim sought to organize the radio amateurs and demonstrate the social
utility of their activities. On April 6, 1914, he suggested the formation of the Amateur
Radio Relay League (ARRL) at a meeting of the Hartford Radio Club in Hartford, CT.
After receiving enthusiastic support from his fellow club members, Maxim enlisted the
18-year old Clarence Tuska as a secretary and they began to invite other clubs to join the
nascent league.
198Ibid., 295.
199Today, Maxim represents a key figure in the self-history of amateur radio operators and was featured in
a series of magazine articles in QST celebrating the centennial of the Amateur Radio Relay League.
Chris Codella, “Hiram Percy Maxim,” QST, February 2014.
200Ibid., 72.
109
Along with to Maxim's political goals, the founding goal of the Amateur Radio
Relay League was to create a nationwide communication network among cooperative
wireless stations. Using a store-and-forward networking technique, amateurs participating
in the League could communicate over far greater distances than were possible given the
harsh restrictions of the Radio Act. The response to Maxim and Tuska's initial call for
participation was great and by August 1914, the Amateur Radio Relay League included
more than two hundred stations across the US and Canada.
201
In 1915, Maxim and Tuska
incorporated the ARRL and, in December, began to publish QST, a magazine that
provided a common forum for amateur radio enthusiasts. By 1917, the League included
more than three thousand members and reached amateurs throughout the country.
The store-and-forward structure of the Amateur Radio Relay League more closely
imitated the structure of a postal network than a telephone network. Short, discrete
messages were transmitted from one node to the next in Morse code and recorded
manually by a human operator. This process was repeated as messages were routed
manually to their final destinations. Participants were required to maintain high quality
equipment and to keep regular on-air hours to ensure that messages could be transmitted
in reasonable time. Under-performing stations were regularly removed from the
network.
202
In spite of this complexity, the network could be quite efficient. On March 8,
1917, a message made the round-trip from Los Angeles to New York and back in less
than two hours, a feat unmatched by either commercial or military wireless systems.
203
201Ibid., 73.
202Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922, 296.
203Ibid., 297.
110
As the United States was being drawn into World War I, Maxim attempted to
portray the ARRL as a citizen service ready and willing to provide reliable wartime
telecommunications. Military leadership was unconvinced and when the US entered the
war in April, all amateur radio operators were ordered to take their stations off the air.
Just as soon as it had come on-the-air, the ARRL was silenced. At the conclusion of the
war, amateur radio activity was not immediately restored. Instead, Congress considered
new legislation that would permanently ban amateurs from the airwaves. Unlike 1912,
the amateurs of 1918 were organized and with the advocacy of the ARRL, the bill was
defeated.
204
Amateur radio resumed in the spring of 1919 and in December 1919, the
ARRL held a third demonstration of its transcontinental relay.
205
The trajectories of military and amateur telecommunication technologies in the
US often overlapped during the 20
th
century. In spite of being briefly forced off the air,
amateur radio culture blossomed in the decades following the first World War. Wireless
communication was a crucial strategic technology during the war and many enlisted men
returned home with training and experience operating the latest radio communications
equipment. Between 1920 and 1921, the number of licensed amateur radio stations rose
from 6,103 to 10,809—far outnumbering any other class of radio licensees.
206
Amateur radio repeaters as community hubs
The technical culture of amateur radio experienced a significant shift in the early
1960s as the consumer electronics industry adopted integrated circuits (ICs), small
204Codella, “Hiram Percy Maxim,” 74.
205Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922, 299.
206Ibid.
111
self-contained components that could replace a whole board full of transistors, resistors,
and and capacitors.
207
For manufacturers, ICs enabled the production of smaller, simpler
equipment that could be sold to consumers at a dramatic discount. For some hams, ICs
represented impenetrable “black boxes” that resisted tinkering and experimentation.
208

Others welcomed the lower-cost commercial equipment and new social practices
emerged as more hams began to adopt miniaturized radio technologies. One of these new
practices involved the adoption of small, mobile transceivers designed to transmit voices
using frequency modulation (FM) over very high frequencies (VHF).
In the early 1960s, the FCC changed the allocation of frequencies above 30 MHz
in response to the adoption of two-way radio communications by businesses. This
regulatory change made a significant amount of commercial radio equipment (of the sort
found in police cruisers and taxicabs) obsolete.
209
Hams eagerly bought up this discarded
gear and modified it for use on the amateur radio frequencies. By the early 1970s, the use
of voice on the VHF bands was growing sufficiently popular that electronics
manufacturers such as Motorola began to produce new VHF/FM equipment specifically
aimed at the amateur radio market.
210
With the short antennas required by VHF and the
use of integrated circuits, many of these new radios were small enough to be handheld,
enabling a new mobility among ham radio operators.
207Haring, Ham Radio’ s Technical Culture, 147.
208Ibid., 148.
209Gary Pearce, “VHF/UHF-FM, Repeaters, Digital V oice and Data,” in The ARRL Operating Manual For
Radio Amateurs, 9th ed. (Newington, CT: Amateur Radio Relay League, 2010), 21–229.
210One notable transceiver produced in this period was the 1969 Motorola HT-220. The HT-220 was a
large handheld radio that was used as a prop in numerous police dramas on television and in film. The
radio continues to be used today and a small memorial page is kept online by the HT-220 Preservation
Society. “HT220 Page,” accessed February 9, 2014, http://mfwright.com/HT220.html.
112
Although VHF/FM radios offered greater audio clarity for voice operation and
enabled hams to access to new areas of the electro-magnetic spectrum, their range was
considerably shorter than many earlier modes of amateur radio. Hams refer to the typical
distance for VHF/FM communication as “line-of-sight,” a rule of thumb that translates
into roughly five-fifteen miles.
211
The overcome this limitation and expand the operating
range of the VHF/FM radio, groups of ham radio enthusiasts began to build VHF/FM
repeaters for their local communities. A repeater is telecommunications system made up
of a few key parts: an antenna placed at a high altitude, a transceiver, an
electromechanical “controller” or microcomputer for operating the radio autonomously,
and a “duplexer” that allows the repeater to simultaneously transmit and receive
information on a single antenna. The fully assembled kit is approximately the size of an
office filing cabinet.
In practice, a VHF/FM repeater feels like a chat room or a party line. Only one
participant can speak at a time and the repeater typically enforces a short pause between
each transmission. Nearby operators wishing to be heard on the repeater set their radios
to transmit on the “input” frequency. If all goes well, the repeater will re-transmit the
sound of their voice on its “output” frequency. Because the repeater is at a higher altitude
—and typically employs a stronger transmitter—than the original sender, the message
can be heard over a much greater range than would be possible from the sender's own
transmitter. In many parts of North America, ham radio operators keep their receivers
tuned to the output frequency of a local repeater all day, waiting for friends to show up
for a short chat.
211Pearce, “VHF/UHF-FM, Repeaters, Digital V oice and Data,” 22.
113
The VHF/FM repeater represents a very different sort of amateur
telecommunications system from the ARRL's store-and-forward messaging network. In
terms of topology, the ARRL network was a decentralized, hierarchical network designed
to move messages efficiently across significant distance. The typical VHF/FM repeater,
by contrast, is organized into a centralized “hub-and-spokes” network with participating
hams at the ends of the spokes and the repeater in the center. Whereas the ARRL network
encouraged hams to imagine themselves as individual members in a nationwide
socio-technical movement, the local repeater invites a smaller number of hams in the
same geographic area to reliably communicate with one another on a regular basis.
The material infrastructure of the VHF/FM repeater represents a collective good
of significant value to its users. Maintenance for amateur radio repeaters typically falls to
a local club or civic organization. The club is often strengthened, in turn, by the
availability of the repeater which invites participation from new members and enables
existing members to more easily stay in touch. In Elkhart, Indiana, for instance, the
Elkhart County Radio Association has continuously operated a VHF/FM repeater since
the early 1970s. Initially, the repeater's antenna was on a “modest” 80 foot tower
belonging to a local radio business.
212
Following the death of one of the club's founders,
the repeater's antenna was moved to a new 500 ft antenna erected in his memory and
ceremonially activated on January 1, 1980. The new antenna was said to fulfill the late
founder's dream of reaching “at least 50 miles in all directions” and lead to considerable
growth of the club as the repeater invited participation from an even greater geographic
212“Repeater History,” accessed February 9, 2014, http://www.ecra.us/history.html.
114
range.
213
Although an in-depth exploration of the amateur radio repeater phenomenon is
somewhat beyond the scope of this chapter, it is useful note the similarity between the
Elkhart repeater and the electronic mailing lists frequented by anthropologist Christopher
Kelty in his study of free software developers. Not only is the repeater a crucial
infrastructure for the social life of the local ham radio club but it represents the material
contributions and technical labor of the club's membership. A short history of the repeater
on the Association's homepage suggests what a powerful bonding experience erecting the
first repeater must have been:
In the early 70's Clarence established an amateur radio club station inside [his
place of business,] for employees interested in radio communications and
experimentation. This station was a low band station and attracted only moderate
use. However, the club operators, all seven of us, soon set our eyes on the VHF
band and kindled a burning desire in Clarence to operate a repeater station on the
plant.
214
While the initial installation of a VHF/FM repeater is a fun and educational hands-on
activity for club members to perform together, its on-going maintenance requires mutual
investment—in money as well as time—over a long period of time. For many ham radio
operators, participating in the upkeep of a local repeater is a powerful symbol of their
commitment to the community.
Breaker, break: unlicensed radio communication on the Citizen's Band
In terms of infrastructure and community organization, amateur radio is a
paradigmatic example of 20
th
century amateur telecommunications but amateur radio was
just one of several technical cultures that converged at the beginning of networked
213Ibid.
214Ibid.
115
personal computing. The falling price of two-way radio equipment during the 1960s had
an even more profound effect on the culture of Citizen's Band (CB) radio than on amateur
radio. Whereas postwar ham radio culture was largely defined by the ham's identification
with particular radio technologies, CB radio culture was focused principally on the
pleasures of on-air communication. Ham radio operators of the time may have derided
their contemporary “CBers” as technically unsophisticated and socially disorganized but
the popular adoption of CB in the 1970s included participants from much more diverse
backgrounds—both in terms of race and socio-economic class—than was true among the
licensed amateurs.
215
In 1948, the FCC set aside a portion of the electro-magnetic spectrum for
short-range mobile communication among motorists and commercial enterprises. The
Citizen's Band, as it is currently known, was formalized in 1958 with the demarcation of
twenty-three distinct channels. Both the “channelization” and the diffusion of integrated
circuits enabled the production of low-cost CB radio gear and made two-way radio
communication accessible to non-technical users.
While the technical and regulatory barriers to amateur radio were quite high, there
were very few barriers to entry into the discourse of Citizen's Band radio. CB radios were
marketed alongside consumer electronics and aimed at a less specialized audience than
ham equipment. The cover of the 1965 Radio Shack Catalog depicted two men on a
beach communicating over hand-held radios and promised, “No license. No kit building!
Ready to talk.”
216
The first seven pages of the catalog featured a wide range of CB radio
215Haring, Ham Radio’ s Technical Culture, 154.
216“1965 Radio Shack Catalog Pages 1 to 50,” accessed February 9, 2014,
http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/html/1965-a/hindex_050_001-050.html.
116
equipment at a variety of price points: from the Archer “Space Patrol” Walkie Talkie
($9.90) to the Radio Shack TRC-1 Walkie Talkie ($21.95), to the top-of-the-line Realistic
TRC-X23 ($169.95.) These prices were closer to the hi-fi stereo amplifiers and turntables
than the amateur radio transceivers that began at $69.95. A decade later, not only were
CB radios still prominently featured in the Radio Shack catalog, but The Electronic
Industries Association estimated that more than 4 million CB radios were sold in 1975
alone.
217
Beyond the lower financial costs, the few regulations on CB radio operation were
scarcely enforced. Whereas amateur operators were required to pass a written
examination and demonstrate basic competency in Morse Code before receiving their
licenses, a CB radio license could be obtained by mail with no similar examination. In
spite of this minor bureaucratic formality, the New York Times reported that most CB
radio owners simply “didn't bother” to acquire a license.
218
By the mid-1970s, purchasing
a pre-built CB radio set from a nearby Radio Shack—or a garage sale—was all that was
required to get on the air. In Kristen Haring's words, “the culture of CB radio was as free
as amateur radio's was restrictive.”
219
Furthermore, the discourse that one encountered on CB radio in the 1970s
sounded distinctly more open and free than ham radio. The signature “dits” and “dahs” of
Morse code remained a dominant mode of communication for hams across the spectrum
217“1975 Radio Shack Catalog Pages 101 to 150,” accessed February 10, 2014,
http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/html/1975/hindex_050_101-150.html; ERNEST DICKINSON,
“Business Tunes In On Citizens Band: Giants Enter Booming Market for 2-Way Sets Business Tunes in
on Citizens Band,” New York Times, March 7, 1976, sec. Business & Finance,
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/news/docview/122850452/abstract/C0300D82BE1549C8P
Q/181?accountid=14749.
218DICKINSON, “Business Tunes In On Citizens Band.”
219Haring, Ham Radio’ s Technical Culture, 154.
117
but even when using voice–or “phone” transmission—hams tended to follow fairly strict
and orderly procedures on the air. CB radio, in contrast, could be rollicking and chaotic
with frequent interruptions, trash talking, and endlessly mutating slang. If amateur radio
could feel like a warm and welcoming classroom, tuning into CB radio could be like
wandering into a late-night saloon.
The popular image of CB radio took a dramatically different shape from earlier
forms of amateur telecommunications. If the ham radio operators were “boy heroes” and
innovative technologists, the CBers were telecom outlaws, flagrantly violating FCC
regulations, the new interstate speed limits, and the global shortage of crude oil. CB
operators were supposed to identify themselves on the air by their call signs and to avoid
transmitting foul language, music, advertising, or malicious interference—but, like the
licensing requirement, these regulations were difficult to enforce and largely went
ignored by the everyday CB operator.
During its mid-1970s boom, country and western artists brought the sounds and
slang of the citizens band to the AM/FM broadcast bands in countless trucker songs. In
1972, Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner recorded an early CB-themed song titled, “10-4
Over and Out.” Lyrically, “10-4” set the template for later CB songs in which the verses
are written as though they are being sung over the air. In “10-4,” Dolly and Porter play
out a series of escalating arguments between a wife and a chronically late husband over a
walking bass line and shuffling snare drum:
DOLLY:
This is Unit 1 calling. Unit 2, do you read me, Unit 2?
You better answer me, Unit 2
118
I'm getting sick of fooling around with this CB radio
I'm gonna cram this thing down your throat
PORTER:I read you, mm-hmm, do I, golly
I read you, Unit 1, loud and clear !
But seems like there's a little turbulence on the line
CB slang provides a rich poetic resource for the songwriter and the scratchy sound of CB
allows for playful interpretation on the part of the singer. When Porter sings, “there's a
little turbulence on the line,” in “10-4,” he flutters his lips as though the transmission is
being interrupted. And when she signs off, Dolly sarcastically tells Porter that she'll “be
seeing” him, an inversion of “CB.” The song's final chorus gestures toward the
ephemerality and uncertain audibility of radio communication:
UNISON:
10-4 over and out
The way we talk sometimes you'd think our love is filled with doubt
But when we're all alone by the fireside of our home
The angry words we spoke that day
Have forever gone away
Then it's love we talk about
To the world outside we say
10-4 over and out
PORTER:
Everybody in the country knows what we're talking about too
They listen in on us
DOLLY:
I know, I know
In everyday use, listening in on the local CB could provide access to mini-dramas like the
one outlined in “10-4.” To lurkers on the citizens band, Dolly and Porter's daily
arguments may have provided a kind of real-life soap opera, but the couple affirm their
119
mutual commitment when they turn off the radio and say “over and out” to the rest of CB
world.
While a love song like Dolly and Porter's suggested the equal use of CB among
men and women, popular media during the CB craze often portrayed CB as a deeply
masculine space. Blockbuster films such as Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Convoy
(1978) depicted long-haul trucking as a ruggedly male counter-culture on the open road.
These films placed the CB radio alongside the 18-wheeler, the .38 revolver, and the
American muscle car as icons of roadhouse masculinity. Convoy was adapted from a
1975 country-western hit by C. W. McCall of the same name that describes a dramatic
protest in which long-haul truck drivers evade and defy the highway patrolmen through
their tactical use of CB. McCall's recording departs sonically from Dolly and Porter's
through its use of actual CB sounds. Atop a lush arrangement of strings and choral
singers, a deep man's voice is heard through a haze of static as though it is coming in over
the crackly, compressed sound of a two-way radio. The authenticity of McCall's story
enhanced by the use of nearly impenetrable CB lingo:
Ah, breaker, Pig Pen, this here's the Duck. And, you wanna back off them hogs?
Yeah, 10-4, 'bout five mile or so.
Ten, roger. Them hogs is getting in-tense up here.
If “10-4” portrayed CB as the locus of daily chatter and flirtation, “Convoy” portrayed it
as a medium of mass resistance, used to organize mobile truckers on a cross-country
protest in which “they just ain't a-gonna pay no toll.”
120
The popular perception of CB radio as an ungovernable space for free-wheeling
communication supported its use for the expression and experimentation with gender and
sexuality. In addition to the cute micro-drama of “10-4” and the outlaw masculinity of
“Convoy,” the citizens band offered a unique medium for anonymous flirtation
among geographically proximate people. As Ernest Dickinson reported in the New York
Times in 1976, some CB communities informally set aside one channel for this type of
communication; in his words, “a singles bar of the airwaves.”
220
The uncertain audience
for radio transmissions certainly offered an additional exhibitionist thrill for those
engaging in the sexier side of the citizens band and popular coverage of the CB craze
frequently remarked on the use of citizens band radio among sex workers.
Representations of sexuality on the citizens band occasionally took on a distinctly
queer character. Rod Hart's novelty song, “CB Savage,” was a minor hit in 1976. The
narrator in “Savage” is a long-haul trucker sharing his cab with another (male) driver on a
convoy passing through New Mexico when they encounter a transmission—rendered
with signature CB distortion—from a stereotypically gay, lisping male voice identifying
himself as the handle, “CB Savage,” and seeking interest from any truckers in the
convoy. Each verse, the Savage escalates his flirty come-ons with CB and trucker slang
double-entendres,
Break 19 again, this is your one and only C.B. Savage
Mercy sakes, good buddy, could I please have your 20?
I'd settle for a big 10-4, mercy, mercy, how about a mile post?
Listen, you can't keep your handle down forever, you know
Speak to me peddle pumpers, how about it?
220DICKINSON, “Business Tunes In On Citizens Band.”
121
The narrator and his driving partner are surprisingly flustered by the transmissions and it
is trivial to read their reactions against the grain.
221
They narrator describes turning red in
the face, losing his breath, and nervously gripping the CB microphone in his sweating
palm while his partner sat “grinning away like a big old bird-fed cat .” In the song's final
verse, the truckers are instructed to pull over as the CB Savage is revealed to be a
highway patrolman disguising his voice and “dressed up for a ticket-writing party.” What
transpires next is left to the listener's imagination.
While popular representations of the CB tended toward the sensational, quotidian
CB use was surely more tame. In 1975, at the apogee of the CB radio “boom,” Harvey A.
Daniels from the Education Department at Rosary College in River Forest, IL published a
fascinating article encouraging K-12 English teachers to bring CB radios into their
classrooms. The unusual vocabulary and dynamic lexical choices of CB slang, Daniels
argued, offered a unique opportunity for students to think critically about the
relationships among language, culture, and communication. Daniels' first-hand account of
CB radio discourse in suburban Chicago indicates the extent to which the romanticized
depictions of cowboy truckers were taken up in everyday user. “The most common
phonological judgment made by first-time CB listeners,” he noted, “is that 'they all sound
like southerners.'”
222
Although the predominance of Southernness “defied demographic
221Indeed, although the liner notes describe Hart as a “good ole, straight ole country boy,” the Plantation
Records label seemed to encourage a pro-gay reading of “CB Savage” and issued the 7” single with a
pink label in place of their conventional green. “Gay Ballad Is Joined By ‘Savage,’” Billboard,
November 13, 1976.
222Harvey A. Daniels, “Breaker, Break, Broke: Citizens Band in the Classroom,” The English Journal 65,
no. 9 (December 1, 1976): 55, doi:10.2307/815750.
122
reality,” Daniels observed a surprising harmony among speakers exhibiting different
phonological characteristics:
There does not seem to be any conflict or discrimination between speakers whose
phonological patterns do reveal different social or regional backgrounds. Blacks
and whites, northerners and southerners, and all other possible combinations of
speakers, converse more peacefully and more often on the radio than they ever
would in person. I have never heard any linguistic discrimination or put-downs of
anyone's language as long as both sides were employing the basic CB dialect—
and this is a medium where wisecracks are more the rule than the exception. (55)
Daniels was careful to note, however, that this tolerance had its limits and that languages
other than English were often poorly received. In one interaction, an operator transmitting
briefly in Spanish was criticized harshly by another who stated, “Somebody forgot they're
in America.” (55). The egalitarian possibilities of the citizens band were not equally
accessible to all users.
In addition to the “Southern” characteristics of the CB dialect, Daniels also
observed linguistic habits that suggested comparisons with “Black English.”
223
Not
coincidentally, CB radio was already widely adopted among middle-class black
Americans by the time that the 1976 “boom” brought CB radio in the homes and cars of
millions of white Americans.
224
Whereas hams were often drawn to radio out of technical
curiosity, black CBers were additionally compelled by the sonic qualities of radio
communication. In a landmark 2011 article on the origin and growth of black CB radio
culture for American Quarterly, Art M. Blake describes black CB culture emerging out of
a pre-existing black “aural-oral sphere” at the conjuncture of black-interest radio, jive
223Ibid., 54.
224Art M. Blake, “Audible Citizenship and Audiomobility: Race, Technology, and CB Radio,” American
Quarterly 63, no. 3 (September 1, 2011): 534, http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.usc.edu/stable/41237565.
123
talk, and jazz and blues lyricism.
225
Even as the mobility of black bodies remained
socially and politically constrained, the active, omnidirectional antennae of the black
CBers emanated black voices and black cultural concerns without restraint.
The motivations for black CB radio adoption were explicitly connected to the
civil rights struggles of the 1960s and the future political implications of continued CB
radio use were no less explicit.
226
In 1976, Ebony published a statement from Berkeley G.
Burrell, the president of the National Negro Business League and advisor to President
Nixon, celebrating the potential applications of black CB radio for political organizing
and economic development.
227
“With the strength of thousands of black CBers,” enthused
Burrell, “they could be organized to do almost anything.”
228
Two years later, Burrell
repeated this appeal to an audience of over ten thousand black CB radio enthusiasts at the
fifth annual convention of the African-American radio club, the Rooster Channel
Jumpers.
229
Within a few months, this political potential was demonstrated in the city of
Boston as the public crisis over desegregation and busing erupted into street violence.
Residents, white and black, in the South Boston and Roxbury neighborhoods adopted CB
radios to coordinate political and public safety activities with their neighbors.
230
In spite of its rapid adoption and pop visibility, the CB craze did not last long.
Kristen Haring speculates that a combination of uncertain technical standards and
225Ibid., 532.
226Blake, “Audible Citizenship and Audiomobility.”
227Shawn D. Lewis, “10-4, Bro,” Ebony, October 1976.
228Ibid., 126.
229Blake, “Audible Citizenship and Audiomobility,” 533.
230Robert Rosenthal, “Busing Foe: South Boston Ready to Defend Itself,” Boston Globe (1960-1982),
April 21, 1976,
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/hnpnewyorkbostonglobe/docview/661473676/abstract/F9E
E242ABBFB4251PQ/1?accountid=14749. Blake, “Audible Citizenship and Audiomobility,” 544–545.
124
unfavorable atmospheric conditions may have contributed to a decline in the reliability of
CB.
231
The FCC specifically prohibited the operation of repeaters on the citizens band so
even tight-knit CB communities were unable to (legally) engineer solutions to the rising
inference and limited range.
232
Without the freedom to experiment with alternative
frequencies and modes afforded to the licensed ham radio operators, CBers were at the
mercy of forces out of their control. With declining functionality, many CB radio owners
may have simply abandoned the habit, regarding the CB radio as a passing fad.
Nevertheless, after more than half a century of ham radio activity, the accessibility
and popular pleasures of the citizens band finally opened amateur telecommunications to
participation on a mass scale. Furthermore, the lower barriers to entry made CB a more
appropriate tool for political organizing among communities of people with variable
technical expertise. As a result of these features, CB radio culture included participants
from a greater range of racial groups and socio-economic classes than were welcomed
into the ham's rather homogeneous society. This diversity was audible in the unrestrained
slang, regional colloquialisms, and ethnically marked discourse that listeners encountered
across the citizens band. Finally, the CB craze overlapped chronologically with the
emergence of affordable personal computing. How many microcomputer enthusiasts
heard the galloping rhythm of McCall's “Convoy” on their drive down Interstate 40 to
Albuquerque, NM for the first World Altair Computer Convention in March 1976?
231Haring, Ham Radio’ s Technical Culture, 157.
232The ham and CB radio populations were not as distinct as my narrative might suggest. On a web page
about his CB radio experiences, Dave Hall N3CVJ recalls that CBers with “some knowledge and a lot
of free time” were capable of setting up a CB repeater in the late-1970s. “CB Repeater,” accessed
February 11, 2014, http://home.ptd.net/~n3cvj/repeater.htm.
125
“Hobby computers are here!”: From amateur radio to hobby computing
As the social and technical pleasures of ham radio were shared through the
popularization of CB radio in the 1970s, a new technical culture began to grow among
amateur computing enthusiasts. Although computer-driven data processing was
increasingly common across a variety of occupations, unfettered access to a computer
was extremely rare in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly for individuals without an
affiliation to a university or corporate research lab. Even within these institutions,
computing resources were often tightly managed. Despite the scarcity of computer
access, however, a popular computing culture nevertheless emerged outside of academia
with significant links to the thriving amateur telecommunications cultures. As a teen ham
radio operator and future “phone phreak,” Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple
Computer, remembers hanging posters of various computers on his bedroom walls.
233
Fan
practices such as these were supported by a rich literature of hobbyist magazines and
science fiction that provided countless opportunities for tech enthusiasts like Wozniak to
imagine a personal computing experience.
The cultural connections among amateur radio and early hobby computing were
not coincidental. Countless computer hobbyists were active amateur radio operators and
photos of early home computers frequently depicted them among the larger technical
apparatus of a ham radio “shack.” Magazines of interest to amateur radio operators—e.g.,
Popular Electronics, Radio-Electronics, QST, 73—featured articles on home computing
and advertisements from the nascent microcomputer market. Indeed, both amateur radio
233Florin, Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age.
126
and hobby computing offered similar technical pleasures, hands-on challenges, and
entrepreneurial opportunities.
Kristen Haring described the late-1960s as a period of crisis in amateur radio's
technical culture.
234
The advent of microelectronics—particularly the integrated circuit
(IC)—transformed the materiality of the typical radio transceiver. Whereas opening up
the case of a big military surplus “boat anchor” radio presented the amateur with a
functioning circuit diagram accessible for study and modification, integrated circuits
internalized multiple functions into literal black boxes. ICs were cheaper to mass produce
than earlier electronics but some amateurs complained that the use of ICs made newer
radio kits too easy; more like assembling a puzzle than building a sophisticated technical
instrument. Worse still, the rapidly expanding market for user-friendly CB radios meant
that amateur radio was losing its high-tech edge, a tremendous blow to the collective
identity of the ham community as a vanguard.
For frustrated ham radio operators in the 1970s, home computing offered a
compelling mix of novel and familiar technical challenges. In ham radio magazines,
computer kits were described as reasonable additions to hams' existing kit-building
practices, while the theoretical details of digital logic and software design were presented
as wholly new.
235
Between 1974 and 1976, 73 magazine ran a series of articles on the
fundamentals of computer science: number systems, binary arithmetic, discrete logic,
234Haring, Ham Radio’ s Technical Culture.
23573 magazine represents a particularly important crossroads between amateur radio and hobby
computing. The founding editor of 73, Wayne Green, would later start Byte, one of the first
widely-circulated personal computing magazines. Green also published an edited collection of
computer-related material from 73 to encourage amateur radio enthusiasts to participate in the nascent
hobby computing scene. See: Green, Hobby Computers Are Here!.
127
serial communications, and memory addressing. Beyond the inherent pleasures of
learning a new technical field, home computing promised to expand the scope of hams'
existing radio practices. In an article titled, “Computers Are Here—Are You Ready?,”
Wayne Green, the editor of 73, described microcomputing as complementary to amateur
radio:
More and more amateurs are tackling the new inexpensive computer kits and
coming up with very usable results. Some are using the units to aim their antennas
for moonbounce, some to predict or even aim antennas at Oscar, some to operate
a virtually automatic RTTY station, some to run a repeater or even a system of
repeaters...and so forth.
236
In this opening paragraph, Green specifically situates hobby computing alongside recent
developments in amateur radio such as VHF/FM repeater operation. If microelectronics
had upset the position of amateur radio as cutting-edge, microcomputing promised to
renew the hobby by both expanding and enhancing amateur radio's technical culture.
The technical and financial challenges of hobby computing
The earliest amateur computer enthusiasts gained access to computers in the
1960s through the beneficence of institutions—often universities—that made their
expensive computing facilities available on a part-time basis to a broader community of
users. Beginning in 1971, however, a line of microchips from Intel began to make the
thought of owning a home computer increasingly plausible.
237
Starting with the Intel
4004, relatively affordable microprocessors enabled electronics hobbyists to start
building programmable home computer kits using off-the-shelf components. A
microprocessor is an integrated circuit designed to perform a set of basic arithmetical
operations but their utility dependents on the architecture into which they are deployed.
236Ibid., 4.
237Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal,
339.
128
In the 1960s, Intel imagined that their microprocessors would be built into household
appliances like coffeemakers and washing machines to automate simple, per-determined
tasks. As they had done many times before, experimenters and entrepreneurs found an
unexpected application for these chips for as the central processing units (CPU) for
general-purpose programmable computer kits.
238

In 1976, Wayne Green published a paperback anthology of hobby computing
articles from 73. The cover of Green's book depicted the standard home computing
apparatus: a cassette drive for long-term data storage, a small television and video
interface, a homebuilt keyboard, pocket calculator, and a blue Altair 8800 computer.
Although there were several other popular microcomputer kits in circulation, the Altair
represented a milestone in the popularization of hobby computing. Seven years before, in
1969, a pair of Air Force engineers working out of the Weapons Lab in Albuquerque
co-founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) to provide tools and
components for model rocketry enthusiasts.
239
Inspired by the success of a successful
electronic calculator kit, co-founder Ed Roberts designed a microcomputer based around
the Intel 8080 that mimicked the design and interface of much more powerful
computers.
240
In 1974, MITS developed the Altair 8800 into a do-it-yourself kit product
and pitched a feature story to Popular Electronics magazine, one of the leading hobbyist
publications.
241
The Altair appealed to hobbyists and business users by promising practical uses
along with fun technical challenges. A cover story in the January 1975 issue of Popular
Electronics declared the Altair a “minicomputer kit to rival commercial models.”
242243

This claim was accurate insofar as the Altair could very reasonably replace a
238Ibid., 430.
239More information about early MITS products may be found on the personal homepage of co-founder
Forest M. Mims III: “Forrest M. Mims III,” accessed February 18, 2014,
http://www.forrestmims.org/biography.html.
240Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal,
430.
241Ibid.
242H. Edward Roberts and William Yates, “Altair 8800 Minicomputer, Part 1,” Popular Electronics,
January 1975.
243The piece was authored by Roberts and Microsoft founder Bill Gates who was mis-attributed as
“William Yates.”
129
considerably more expensive minicomputer in industrial and commercial settings, but it
did not at all reflect the practical usability of the kit alone. Housed in a blue steel case, the
Altair user interface was limited to one row of red LED lights and a bank of on/off
switches. Without the additional of a teletype terminal and tape reader, programming the
machine was a slow, difficult task. While programmers with access to university
time-sharing systems sat at glowing video terminals or teletypes and entered commands
using a familiar QWERTY keyboard, Altair users entered commands by arranging the
bank of switches to represent one binary number at a time. If the program ran
successfully, they would carefully read the output one numeral at a time from the row of
red lights above the switches. When the power was shut off, the machine's memory
would be lost and the program forgotten. Needless to say, it was easy to make a mistake.
As painstaking as it may have been to program the Altair, the experience brought
hobbyists into close contact with the microprocessor's digital logic. Whereas
microelectronics introduced a layer of opacity between radio operators and the
electro-mechanical foundations of radio-communication, the microcomputer brought the
hobbyist back down “close to the metal.” Without the abstractions of a programming
language like FORTRAN, LISP, or BASIC, the hobbyists needed to express their ideas in
the limited vocabulary wired into the circuits of the Intel 8080 microprocessor. Hobbyist
programmers typically wrote out their programs by hand using a set of easy-to-remember
mnemonic “opcodes.” For example, the 8080 machine language instruction for halting a
program might be the binary value 1111111 but the programmer would use the mnemonic
“HLT” when planning out a program. To prepare the program for execution on the Altair,
programmers referred to a printed table of opcodes and machine language instructions to
translate their program into a list of binary numbers.
244
Eight of the switches on the face
of the Altair corresponded to the eight digits that could be read at a time by the 8080
microprocessor. The “on” position indicated a “1” and the “off” position, a “0.” Though
considerably less efficient than the programming and debugging tools available to
244Charles Petzold, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (Redmond, WA:
Microsoft Press, 1999), 236.
130
programmers on more sophisticated systems, this interface forced the hobbyists to
“speak” the same language as the microprocessor.
The Altair was not the first, nor the only, microcomputer available in 1975 but it
was the first commercial success and it presaged a “boom” in the microcomputer market.
Following the Popular Electronics feature, MITS was overwhelmed by orders for the
Altair kit and shortly developed a reputation for slow shipping and poor customer
service.
245
Further, those who received their kits were likely to become frustrated by the
complexity of the kit and the arduous programming experience. To satisfy the needs of
this newfound customer base, MITS soon announced bundled systems that included
printers, disk drives, tape readers, and keyboards along with the Altair. Unfortunately for
MITS, the marketplace had grown more competitive and they had largely lost their
advantage.
Just as two-way radio communication left the sole province of the technical
hobbyist, personal computing also shortly reached a broader population. Between 1977
and 1983, numerous personal computers were brought to market from multiple
manufacturers for a wide range of prices, users, and applications. The low-cost TRS-80
Color Computer was prominently featured in the Radio Shack catalog and retail chain.
Atari and Commodore computers, meanwhile, were distributed through toy stores and
appropriately packaged in brightly colored boxes. IBM, in contrast, presented its PC in
somber silver and beige for the business user. The BASIC programming language became
the lingua franca of personal computing and a thriving market of BASIC workbooks and
programming magazines accompanied the “boom” in PC sales.
Amateur telecommunication and hobby computing
As Wayne Green suggested in his mid-70s columns in 73 magazine, hobby
computing was a comfortable fit amid the culture and practices of amateur
telecommunication. Home computers served three key roles in the broader culture of
245Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal,
431.
131
amateur telecom. First, computers extended the technical facilities of amateur radio
stations by, for example, automating the control of a directional antenna or interpreting
incoming Morse code messages. Second, hams adapted office applications such as
database management and word processing to facilitate hobby activities outside of radio
communication, e.g. printing a club newsletter or organizing one's contact history. And,
third, microcomputers offered wholly new telecommunications opportunities that were
not previously available.
Amateur radio enthusiasts were uniquely suited to the technical challenges of
computer-mediated communication. Although they would not have described their
activities as “digital,” hams of the 1970s regularly communicated in code. Until 2003, all
licensed amateurs were required to demonstrate minimal proficiency with copying and
transmitting messages in Morse code. Furthermore, a popular activity within amateur
radio since the 1940s included adapting cast-off teletype equipment for “radio teletype”
or RTTY operations.
246
One early ham application for microcomputers was to facilitate
automatic translation between Morse and the ASCII/Baudot codes used on teletype
networks.
247
Since the organization of the Amateur Radio Relay League in 1914, local and
regional clubs have been a crucial feature of amateur radio's technical culture. By the
late-1970s, many amateur radio clubs were also actively engaged in hobby computer
activities. In 1983, the “Club Corner” section of QST magazine specifically addressed
this area of contact between the two hobbies in a column by Sally O'Dell (KB1O) titled,
246John Evans Williams W2BFD, “The Story of Amateur Radio Teletype,” QST, October 1948.
247Stanley P. Levy WB6SQU, “A Morse to RTTY Converter--Using a Microprocessor,” in Hobby
Computers Are Here!, ed. Wayne Green W2NSD/1 (Peterborough, NH: 73 Publications, 1976), 78–81.
132
“Clubs and Computers: A Simple Interface.”
248
O'Dell compared the early days of ham
radio with the nascent personal computing movement and encouraged club members to
make computing a more central feature of their activities. As a place to start, she
suggested finding access to desktop publishing tools, noting that at least 25% of
ARRL-affiliated clubs were already producing a computer-generated newsletter. O'Dell
further portrayed hobby clubs as crucial spaces for learning and sharing technical
information about new technologies such as home computing. To this end, O'Dell urged
club organizers to reach out to local computer users groups: “it may well be that
computer enthusiasts are are as interested in Amateur Radio as you are in computers.”
249

Finally, O'Dell announced that two microcomputer videos were added to the ARRL film
library and were available for rent by any affiliated ham radio club.
Along with magazines and clubs, amateur radio provided a few additional venues
for the nascent amateur computing community to gather: on-air “nets” and regional swap
meets. Amateur radio “nets” are on-air meetings in which geographically-dispersed hams
gather on a pre-arranged frequency to share information and socialize. In 1980, QST
magazine published a short note from David P. Allen (W1UKZ) of Scituate, MA inviting
readers to join several computer hobbyist nets.
250
A Boston-area net met on Wednesday
nights, an East Coast net for Apple owners met on Saturday nights, and an international
Atari net was held on Tuesday evenings. In Southern California, the W6TRW Amateur
Radio Club began hosting a monthly swap meet in the parking lot of an aerospace
248Sally O’Dell KB1O, “Clubs and Computers: A Simple Interface (Club Corner),” QST, July 1983.
249Ibid.
250David P. Allen W1UKZ, “Computer Net Info (Strays),” QST, November 1980.
133
company where many club members were employed.
251
Although a valid amateur radio
license is required to rent a table, the swap meet organizers specifically allowed
participants to sell computer parts along with amateur radio gear. Amateur radio nets and
swap meets provided valuable spaces for informal socializing among hams interested in
learning about hobby computing.
During the 1970s, the established technical culture of amateur radio provided a
nurturing foundation for the emergence of hobby computing. Not all of amateur
computing originated in ham radio, of course, but the two hobbies served as valuable
complements to one another. In particular, the existing values, practices, and structures of
amateur radio provided useful models for the organization of amateur computing's
technical culture. For those computer enthusiasts who were hams, however, amateur
radio significantly shaped their expectations of the microcomputer. Beyond the advertised
uses of microcomputers as tools for business and entertainment, the amateur radio
operator encountered the home computer first and foremost as a technology for
communication and community.
The modem world
During the 1980s and 1990s, the gateway between personal computing and
networked personal was the acquisition and activation of a modem. Until the mid-1990s,
most personal computers shipped without any networking hardware or software. Users
who wished to use their computers for telecommunication needed to buy a modem, figure
251The W6TRW swap meet continues to operate monthly in Redondo Beach, CA. For more information,
see: “W6TRW Swap Meet,” accessed February 18, 2014, http://www.w6trw.com/swapmeet/index.htm.
134
out how to set it up, and learn to run the software required to operate it. Without
first-hand experience of computer-mediated communication, many computer shoppers
likely regarded the modem as an expensive curiosity without an immediately obvious
application. Whereas the benefit of paying a few hundred dollars for a joystick, hard
drive, sound card, or printer was self-evident, the value of the modem remained obscure.
In short, the lack of either an integrated modem or a compelling justification for
purchasing the peripheral presented significant technical, financial, and cultural barriers
that kept the majority of personal computer users off-line for almost two decades.
Yet, for those users who purchased one, the modem could fundamentally the
social meaning of the microcomputer. The modem represents a material bridge between
the historical trajectories of amateur and institutional telecommunications. Like the
amateur radio operator's antenna, the modem revealed a layer of communicative potential
in the domesticated telephone system that otherwise remained invisible. Suddenly, the
same unassuming wall jack that carried voice phone calls could be used to explore distant
computers, and to build communities of pseudonymous strangers, and to access large
stores of data and software. For its final section, this chapter turns now to examine the
popularization of the modem in the late-1970s and early-1980s.
A lack of scholarly attention to the modem
By the mid-1990s, a number of scholars were deeply engaged with studies of
online cultures and communities. The material apparatus of networked computing,
however, was rarely a central object of analysis. The term “modem” is not included in the
indexes of either Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk (1995) or Cultures of Internet
135
(1996), two widely-read anthologies, though nearly every contribution describes a
technological system enabled by modems. Likewise, in First Monday, the
longest-running academic journal dedicated to studies of the Internet, the modem is
mentioned only to illustrate the technical requirements for network access. For example:
• “With the Internet, everyone with a modem, a computer and a telephone
line can be connected and can not just receive but also produce
information”
252
• “Recognizing the importance of network connections, manufacturers are
now shipping new computers with integral modems that make network
connection more convenient to use than those purchased separately.”
253
• “In global terms, Americans are by far the heaviest users of the Internet,
and the proportion of American homes with personal computers and
modems is increasing quickly.”
254
• “In spite of the efforts by many businesses, strategic capacities are lacking.
There may be a lack of adequate and sustainable structures and
institutional procedures needed to get connected to a computer, modem,
and telephone.”
255
252Viola Krebs, “The Impact of the Internet on Myanmar,” First Monday 6, no. 5 (May 7, 2001),
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/855.
253Lloyd Morrisett, “Habits of Mind and a New Technology of Freedom,” First Monday 1, no. 3
(September 2, 1996), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/483.
254Charles Swett, “Revisiting a Strategic Assessment of the Internet,” First Monday 1, no. 4 (October 7,
1996), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/488.
255John Abdul Kargbo, “Business Information and the Internet in the Developing World: A New Outlook,”
First Monday 2, no. 9 (September 1, 1997), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/551.
136
Whereas the modem carried significant cultural meaning for network users (some of
whom referred to themselves as “modemers” and their online society as “the modem
world”), scholars of the period continued to treat the modem as little more than a
technical instrument.
There are two likely explanations for the lack of scholarly attention paid to the
modem during the 1990s: the first is structural and the second is cultural. Anyone
attending or employed by a university during this period would have accessed the internet
primarily through a campus network. Some people may have had a PC or workstation
installed in their offices; others would have walked to a computer lab somewhere nearby.
In either scenario, all network activity was mediated first by a local-area network (LAN).
Whether by leased-line or fiber optic cable, the gateway between the local campus
network and other networks—the internet—was always-on and out of sight, invisibly
financed and maintained by an institution. For users accustomed to seamless,
round-the-clock network connections, dial-up networking must have felt tedious and
jury-rigged. On the other hand, those scholars without high-speed network access may
simply have taken the modem for granted and assumed that any discussion of online
activity implicitly relied on a modem; to mention it by name would have been redundant.
Indeed, amid all of the exciting, provocative possibilities of computer-mediated
communication, writing about your modem must have seemed quite dull.
Although science fiction writers also played an important role in popularizing the
internet, they also seemed largely uninterested in the lowly modem. The indirect
influence of SF on science and engineering is well-documented,
256
but during the 1980s
256Brian David Johnson et al., Science Fiction Prototyping Designing the Future with Science Fiction
137
and 1990s, a handful of science fiction writers worked directly with journalists,
entrepreneurs, and engineers to produce a shared set of terms, symbols, narratives, and
images to describe networked personal computing. In a study of the first several years of
Wired magazine, Patrice Flichy notes that the magazine's editors not only recommended
cyberpunk literature to their readers but that a small number of cyberpunk writers—
notably William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Bruce Sterling—were regularly invited to
report on current events and emerging trends in technology and society.
257
Given that
acquiring and operating a modem was a fundamental experience for anyone using
personal computer networks during the 1980s and 1990s, it is surprising to find that
modems rarely appear in the cyberpunk literature of this period. In Neal Stephenson's
Snow Crash, for example, the online “metaverse” is enabled by a “worldwide fiber-optics
network” that is almost universally accessible—even from the protagonist's home in a
commercial storage space.
258
The characters occasionally connect to the metaverse
through noisy public terminals but these access points are not analog telephones but
digital lines, obviating the need for a modem. Similarly, in Gibson's Neuromancer,
“cyberspace” is explicitly accessed by modem in just one scene, a minor passage during
which two characters in a tight situation use the telephone line in a hotel room to connect
to a remote network. The second-rate status of dial-up access in these near-future
scenarios reflects a widespread belief among late-1980s networking enthusiasts that
([San Rafael, Calif.]: Morgan & Claypool, 2011), http://public.eblib.com/EBLPublic/PublicView.do?
ptiID=881253; Bruce Sterling, “Design Fiction,” Interactions, 2009; Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell,
“‘Resistance Is Futile’: Reading Science Fiction alongside Ubiquitous Computing,” Personal and
Ubiquitous Computing, 1–10, accessed January 13, 2014, doi:10.1007/s00779-013-0678-7; David G
Stork, HAL’ s Legacy: 2001 s Computer as Dream and Reality ʹ (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).
257Patrice Flichy, The internet imaginaire (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 126–127.
258Stephenson, Snow Crash, 21, 25.
138
high-bandwidth digital networking infrastructure would soon be accessible throughout
the developed world.
The emergence of a standard modem for personal computing
In personal computing, a modem provides an interface between the computer's
serial bus and the standard telephone system. Digital computer systems transmit
information in a series of electronic pulses representing the binary digits 1 and 0.
259
The
telephone system, however, was designed to carry the continuous analog signals
produced by the microphone on a telephone handset. To transmit a stream of digital
information through this infrastructure, the modem “modulates”—or alters some feature
of—a continuous “carrier” signal with a second signal representing the outgoing digital
pulses. Conventionally, early computer modems modulated the frequency of the carrier
signal, an approach known as “frequency-shift keying” or FSK. On the receiving end of
the transmission, another modem then decodes the digital pulses by “demodulating”--or
extracting--the pulses from the carrier signal. The word “modem” is a contraction of
these two functions: “modulator-demodulator.”
The use of the plain, old telephone system as an infrastructure for data
communications was itself something of a hack. The Bell System was not designed for
data transfer and the lines were often noisy. Prior to Carterfone and the standardization of
the telephone jack, attempting to connect a terminal or modem to the network was
constrained by Bell policy and required a cumbersome “coupler” fitted to the standard
259The explanation of digital communication in this section draws on contemporary sources, in particular
Donald E. Murphy and Stephen A. Kallis, Jr., Introduction to Data Communication, ed. Ian Seidler
(International Communications Corporation, 1974).
139
telephone handset. Furthermore, other physical networks were being constructed
throughout North America for the specific purpose of handling data communications.
Beginning in the 1959, Western Union operated a teleprinter network called “Telex” that
enabled the distribution of text messages among subscribers in Canada and the US.
260

Similarly, public data networks discussed above such as Tymnet and Telenet were both
online by the mid-1970s. If data networks were so widely available, why wrestle with the
inconveniences of the voice network?
For personal computer owners, the telephone network offered no immediate
technical advantage over a dedicated data line. The principle reasons for choosing the
telephone network, then, were its ubiquity and low cost. In a sense, the distinction
between data networks and the public voice network reflected the split between amateur
and CB radio operations. Amateur radio operators enjoyed considerably more freedom to
explore different modes and frequencies than the users of citizens band service. But in
spite of their technical limitations, both CB radio and the telephone network were
available immediately and offered very low barriers to entry. In 1978, a computer
hobbyist could buy a modem—albeit an expensive modem—at the store, bring it home,
and start interacting with remote systems over the plain, old telephone service that
evening.
Prior to the Carterfone decision in 1968, any modem or modem-equipped terminal
that was not approved by Western Electric was considered a illegal “foreign attachment.”
Accordingly, AT&T Bell Labs designed and produced the first commercial modems. As
the only product in a tightly-controlled market, the Bell 103 modem, issued in 1962, set a
260Phillip R. Easterlin, “Telex in New York,” Western Union Technical Review, April 1959.
140
de facto standard for data communications that continued to be supported for more than
two decades. Two Bell 103 modems could exchange data at 300 bits-per-second (bps)
over a reasonably quiet telephone line.
261
Each was designated either the “originating” or
“answering” station and assigned to modulate the carrier signal on one of two
standardized frequencies. Differentiating the sending and receiving signals enabled
two-way simultaneous, or “full duplex,” communication. One of the earliest modems
produced after the Carterfone decision was the Livermore Data Systems 71 Series Data
Modem. A marketing brochure from 1974 prominently displays the modem's
compatibility with the Bell 103 standard.
262
In the post-Carterfone period, more firms were engaged in the production and sale
of computer modems but competition was not enough to drive the cost of modem
ownership down to a point that was reasonable for the typical amateur. Livermore Data
Systems boasted about its “competitive prices” but even its “low cost” modems cost as
much as $235 in 1974.
263
Faced with this high economic barrier, experimenters began to
design and build their own DIY modem equipment. In 1974, Kok Chen and his fellow
graduate students at Stanford University built several modems to connect remote video
terminals to the Artificial Intelligence Lab computer.
264
The Stanford students' design was
“asymmetric,” meaning that the modem could receive binary data at 1200 bps and
transmit at 150 bps. At the time, commercially-available modems of this speed cost more
261In addition to the acronym “bps,” bits-per-second is also referred to as “baud.” The definitions of these
two units are somewhat different but they are used interchangeably in colloquial discussions of data
communications and in the marketing materials for various modems.
262Livermore Data Systems, “71 Series Data Modems,” 1974,
http://www.computerhistory.org/brochures/full_record.php?iid=doc-4372957202661.
263Ibid.
264“Communication Technology,” accessed February 18, 2014,
http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/1-9.html.
141
than $1000. Although this feat enabled the graduate students to access the AI Lab
computer from their offices in a different building, their design was not made generally
available to the hobbyist community.
In March 1976, however, the top story on the cover of Popular Electronics read,
“EXCLUSIVE: Build the 'PENNYWHISTLE MODEM' for telephone-to-data system
communications.”
265
The article was submitted by Lee Felsenstein, one of the engineers
responsible for the early Community Memory bulletin-board system and a founding
member of the Homebrew Computer Club.
266
The top half of the first page of the article
featured a photograph of a fully-built Pennywhistle. The ear- and mouth-pieces of a
standard Bell Model 500 telephone handset fit snuggly into a cradle atop of a translucent
plastic case full of circuitry. The title of the article declared the Pennywhistle “The
Hobbyist's Modem” and promised that it could be built for “under $100.”
267
Felsenstein's
article began with an accessible description of the underlying technical principles of data
communication and proceeded to carefully walk through the steps required to build a
modem of one's own. Although Felsenstein did not explicitly mention the Bell System,
the design of the Pennywhistle conformed to the Bell 103 standard, ensuring that the
hobbyist modem could interconnect with any system that supported the—considerably
more expensive—commercial modems.
In addition to telecomputing, Felsenstein concluded his article with a number of
additional uses for the Pennywhistle. One application that might puzzle today's reader is
265Lee Felsenstein, “Build ‘PENNYWHISTLE’ The Hobbyist’s Modem,” Popular Electronics, March
1976.
266For more on Community Memory, the Homebrew Computer Club, and Felsenstein's contributions to
hobby computing, see: Levy, Hackers.
267Felsenstein, “Build ‘PENNYWHISTLE’ The Hobbyist’s Modem,” 43.
142
that Felsenstein recommended using it as an interface between the home computer and a
teleprinter like the Teletype Model 33. By convention, early microcomputers did not
include input/output equipment such as a video monitor or a keyboard. Like modems,
commercial video displays were prohibitively expensive for the amateur—even a “low
cost” video display like the Tektronix 4610 cost $3550 in 1971.
268
Instead of a video
display, many early computer hobbyists adapted teletype printer terminals like the Model
33 as interfaces to their homebuilt machines.
269
A brisk market existed for used teletype
equipment and working terminals from the 1920 could be purchased for several hundred
dollars and adapted for use with a microcomputer.
270
On the hobbyist's workbench, the
Pennywhistle modem itself could be turned toward unexpected, unanticipated purposes.
In the years following the publication of Felsenstein's Pennywhistle article, a
growing number of firms offered modems and modem kits specifically aimed at the
hobbyist market. In 1976, the Dallas-based Rondure Company, for example, recovered
modems from cast-off teletype terminals and sold them “as-is” to hobbyists for $20-35
each.
271
As non-hobbyists increasingly adopted personal computers for business purposes,
new companies like Novation and Hayes produced pre-built modems designed (and
priced) for PC owners. And yet, even as the technical and economic barriers to modem
268“Tektronix 4010 Computer Display Terminal” (Tektronix, Inc., 1971),
http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102646119.
269A second popular alternative was to build a DIY “TV typewriter” that could display text on a television
screen. Plans for building such a device were plentiful in the hobby press of the 1970s. See: Don
Lancaster, TV Typewriter Cookbook (Thatcher, AZ: Synergetics Press, 1976).
270Sol Libes, Small Computer Systems Handbook (Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden Book Company, Inc.,
1978), 128–129.
271Appropriately, Rondure accepted orders via teletype over the TWX network. See the unnumbered
advertising section in the middle of Green, Hobby Computers Are Here!.
143
user began to fall, the promises and potentials of telecomputing were not immediately
apparent.
The challenge of marketing the modem
From the early 1980s to the early 1990s, marketers generally failed to make a
strong appeal to potential modem buyers. In a study of first-time computer shoppers in
the 1980s, Thomas Streeter describes thousands of middle-class American families who
brought a PC into their homes without a clear sense of what, exactly, they would do with
such a machine.
272
This ambiguity was compounded in the case of the modem and
marketers struggled to explain the value of computer networking to new PC owners. In
1981, Atari began to subscribe all of its customers to The Atari Connection, a quarterly
magazine with information about new products from Atari and their corporate partners.
Consistent with Streeter's findings, The Atari Connection focused on microcomputer
applications that advantaged the members of the nuclear family in isolation of their
community—informal education, personal finance, and in-home entertainment. Near
the end of the first issue of The Atari Connection, an article promoting the Atari 830
modem presented computer networking as a convenient extension of existing family
management activities. Under the headline, “Computers for People,” a photograph
depicts a young white heterosexual couple sitting at a desk crowded with piles of paper, a
potted plant, an Atari computer, printer, disk drive, and video monitor. Seated side by
side, the woman is holding multi-colored slips of paper that appear to be bills or receipts
272Streeter, The Net Effect, 83.
144
and the man's hands are resting on the Atari keyboard's home row, a wedding band
plainly visible on his left ring finger. The article begins,
Imagine merely touching a few keys on your ATARI 800(tm) Personal Computer
and making all your travel arrangements yourself in just a few minutes at any
hour of the day or night.
273
In addition to do-it-yourself trip planning, the article goes on to list several other
activities enabled by modem ownership including online shopping; reading news, stock
reports, and sports results; accessing remote databases of government records and
“exciting” recipes; and e-mailing a birth announcement to friends. This laundry list of
online activities was not unique to Atari. Two years later, the packaging for the
Commodore 1650 “Automodem” offered a nearly identical vision:
Imagine sitting at home and getting...up-to-date financial information...the same
up-to-the-minute-newswire services reporters use...an electronic “post
office”...telephone shopping services...computerized entertainment...educational
programs.
274
For both the Atari and Commodore products, the marketing copy emphasizes the
convenience and speed with which the modem user will be able to carry out otherwise
quotidian tasks. Even the example of a birth announcement in The Atari Connection is
included to underscore the immediacy of computer-mediated communication—friends
and family will learn “immediately” about the new baby. With such pedestrian examples,
it is little surprise that consumers were much slower to adopt the modem than the
personal computer. In contrast to the home computer, which had become a symbol of
individual freedom, marking oneself and one's family as agents in the arrival of a more
egalitarian future, the modem promised little more than a low-res edition of the typical
273“Computers For People,” The Atari Connection, Spring 1981.
274Commodore, “Automodem 1650,” 1983.
145
small town newspaper. Even the most starry-eyed computer enthusiast would need a
more compelling story before opening his wallet.
Modems for experimentation and telecommuting
Novation was one of the earliest companies to specifically market a modem to
personal computer users. Apart from its packaging and price, the Novation CAT modem
did not depart substantially in either design or function from the Livermore 71 Series
modems. The CAT was an acoustic coupler-style modem designed to accommodate the
handset from a standard Model 500 Bell telephone. It was packaged in rectangular box
with an eye-catching illustration of a tiger along one side. On the back of the box, the
copy identified the two groups of early PC owners most likely to purchase a modem:
It's [sic] sleek in styling, silent in performance, responsive to your needs.
Designed for transmitting data over all telephone lines, Cat has many uses for
businessmen and hobbyists. Because it allows one computer or terminal to talk to
another, a businessman with Cat can work on his payroll, receivables/payables
and inventory right in his home. Or hobbyists can talk to each other and even
exchange special programs. In short, Cat is the ideal small computer's
companion.
275
Although the computer industry failed to provide a compelling general use case for
modems, hobbyists and telecommuting businesspeople represented two subgroups that
might make immediate use of networked personal computing in the late-1970s.
For hobbyists, modem ownership offered a self-evident pleasure and did not
require a practical narrative to justify the purchase. Any new peripheral expanded the
scope of their technical hobby, provoked their curiosity, and promised new technical
challenges. Whether building a Pennywhistle or purchasing a Novation CAT, a modem
275“CAT: A New Breed of Acoustic Modems From Novation” (Novation, Inc., 1977).
146
enabled interconnection with a range of other infrastructures. In addition to the home
telephone, hobbyists adapted their modems as an interface to amateur radio equipment,
teletype services, and cassette tape storage. Because the culture of hobby computing
valued technical experimentation, these mere potential uses could offset the cost of a
modem.
Businesspeople who adopted early modems tended to be either traveling
salespeople or members of an emerging class of “telecommuters.” These information
workers purchased modems—or were given modems by their employers—to enable them
to access company computing resources from home or on the road. Furthermore, the
microcomputer hobbyists and telecommuters were not mutually exclusive groups. Many
hobbyists actively pursued opportunities to integrate microcomputing into their
professional lives and many professionals developed a technical curiosity after
encountering computing and data processing in the workplace. This desire to merge work
and play through technology use had long featured in the advertising that appeared in
magazines aimed at a hobbyist readership.
The December 1980 issue of Creative Computing offers an exemplary snapshot of
home computing on the cusp of a boom in the microcomputer market. The cover of the
magazine depicts Santa Claus painting a toy robot with an array of consumer electronics
at his feet. The illustration is accompanied by the headline, “Buying Guides to Personal
Computers and Electronic Toys and Games.” Mail-order computer supply companies
make up a significant amount of advertising space in this issue and several feature
modems such as the Novation CAT ($148 from the CPU Shop), the Radio Shack modem
147
for the TRS-80 Color Computer ($179 from Microcomputer Technology, Inc.), and the
DC Hayes Micromodem II ($319 from Computers'R'Us).
276
Of these leading modem
brands, Hayes Microcomputer Products, Inc. was the only modem manufacturer to take
out its own ad in this issue.
The headline for Hayes' full-color, full-page ad read, “The Perfect Fit.”
277
This
phrase reflects the ad's attempt to address both the technical demands of the hobbyist and
the pragmatic values of the business user. Below two large columns of ad copy, the
bottom third of the page is taken up by a brightly-lit photograph of the complete Hayes
communication system. On the left of the page, we can see the familiar molded plastic
case of an Apple II personal computer. The top of the chassis has been removed,
revealing the Micromodem II inserted into one of the Apple II's expansion slots. A thin
plastic ribbon cable leading out of the back of the computer leads the viewer's eye across
the photo to a small black box sitting in the foreground. This box, labeled “microcoupler”
has a second cord leading back out of it and into a standard telephone jack on the wall in
the background of the photo. The minimal, modern design of the “microcoupler” evokes
the reliability and simplicity of an electronic appliance, while the Apple's open case, with
its bare motherboard, invites the attention (and, potentially, the soldering iron) of the
curious microcomputer hacker. The copy strikes the same balance, suggesting, on one
hand, that the modem will afford the reader greater flexibility to work anywhere—“out of
276The Micromodem's premium price foreshadowed the de facto standardization of the forthcoming Hayes
Smartmodem for the next several years.
277Hayes Microcomputer Products, Inc., “The Perfect Fit (Advertisement),” Creative Computing,
December 1980.
148
your office, home or out of town”—while, on the other, including a greater degree of
technical detail than is strictly necessary.
Although none of the technical articles in this issue of Creative Computing
addressed networked computing specifically, the vision of telecommuting in the Hayes'
ad copy was echoed in a speculative features by Alvin Toffler later in the magazine. An
article titled, “The Electronic Cottage” was excerpted from Toffler's recently published
book, The Third Wave.
278
Although Toffler did not specifically discuss modems, he
offered a strongly determinist argument for the rise of a telecommuting class of workers
who access remote resources through general-purpose computer terminals installed in
their homes. In this respect, Toffler's vision of the future supports the narrative suggested
by the marketing materials by Novation, Hayes, Atari, and others. Read together, these
texts suggest that anyone buying a modem in 1980 is getting a jump-start on an inevitably
networked future.
Modems for exploration and play
Toffler's vision of a telecommuting may have supported the claims in modem
makers' ad copy but it was unlikely to produce a sudden rush for modems. A rising
popular culture of computing, however, recast the modem as a tool for play and
exploration. In 1983, the feature film WarGames depicted a precocious pair of high
schoolers—played by Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy—changing their grades,
downloading free video games, and accidentally breaking into a military supercomputer
278Alvin Toffler, “The Electronic Cottage,” Creative Computing, December 1980.
149
facility using a personal computer and a modem.
279
Reflecting on the reception of the film
among young viewers, Bruce Sterling wrote, “It seemed that every kid in America had
demanded and gotten a modem for Christmas.”
280
Patrick Kroupa, a figurehead of the
1980s computer counter-culture, who was a kid himself in 1983, remembers WarGames
as an even more critical moment in the history of networked computing,
Within several months [of the release of WarGames,] the modem world literally
doubled in size. An entire new generation of people were about to take the plunge
into electronic wonderland and set off an explosive growth rate that has not
slowed since then. It was a major and irreversible nexus point that would begin
the abrupt transition from taking Cyberspace from the realm of underground
sub-culture to the forefront of mainstream media.
In both Sterling and Kroupa's recollection, the representation of modem use in
WarGames attracted a new constituency to networked personal computing: the teenage
computer enthusiast.
Teenagers in the 1980s were frequently drawn to personal computing because of
computer games. This motivation represents a significant distinction from the early
encounters of technical hobbyists and businesspeople. One obvious problem shared
among young gamers was a lack of access to new games. Most teens simply lacked the
financial independence required to regularly purchase new software. Beginning in the
late-1970s, small games could be found in the form of printed source code in workbooks
and computer magazines. Typically written in BASIC, though occasionally also in
assembly language, these games needed to be manually entered into the computer and it
279In 1999, Thomas Fischer revealed that the use of an acoustic coupler in WarGames was an anachronism
included for visual effect and that the “IMSAI 212 A” modem that appears on-screen was actually a
mock-up based on a Cermetek 212 A.“The ‘Wargames IMSAI,’” accessed January 14, 2014,
http://www.imsai.net/movies/wargames.htm.
280Bruce Sterling, “Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier,” June 19, 2008,
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/101/101-h/101-h.htm.
150
was easy to make mistakes.
281
Early modem user Rob O'Hara recalled in his 2006
memoir, “It was a frustrating process, but it was a cheap (and sometimes the only) way to
get new software.”
282
As computer games grew larger than could be feasibly transmitted
via printed source code, the problem was compounded. Floppy disks and cassette tapes
were the dominant storage media during the 1980s but they were expensive and easily
damaged. Even for two gamers living nearby to one another, sharing a library of software
was not a trivial undertaking.
For teen gamers, then, the modem offered a more convenient method of sharing
computer games. Rather than dialing into an online service such as a bulletin-board
system, time-sharing computer, or a commercial network, the modem could be used to
make a direct connection between two PCs over a home phone line. For many, this direct
connection was the simplest and most cost-effect method of transferring data between
two computers. Early modems such as the Novation CAT included special file-transfer
features specifically for this purpose.
The on-going hunt for new software lead many PC owners—gamers and
non-gamers alike—to discover online services in the early 1980s. Commercial systems
such as CompuServe, QuantumLink, and GEnie specifically advertised the availability of
games and other software in their marketing materials. In 1984, the Commodore
Automodem 1650 included a free trial account on the CompuServe Information Service.
Alongside the usual information services such as news, weather, and stock market
281In 2014, computer game designer John Romero explained the process through which games were
published as print articles in an interview with the podcast A Life Well Wasted: “A Life Well Wasted –
Episode Seven: Work,” accessed February 22, 2014,
http://alifewellwasted.com/2013/03/20/episode-seven-work/.
282Rob O’Hara, Commodork: Sordid Tales From A Bbs Junkie (Self-published, 2006), 23.
151
reports, the CompuServe manual specifically highlighted the availability of “public
domain software” for download. For some early users, the possibility of transmitting
computer program and data files over the telephone network may have seemed even more
radical than more conventional communication applications.
For a subset of users—particularly teen gamers—the hunt for software became
more compelling than the software itself. One former BBSer remembers mastering the
use of a modem and telecommunications software in order to trade games with friends
from a local computer class. Shortly, however, he found that the social structures and
technical infrastructures undergirding his game-trading practices were considerably more
complex and “entertaining” than the games themselves.
283
As a resident of Peterson Air
Force Base in Colorado Springs, CO, Dark Sorcerer remembers the strange feeling of
trans-regional communication,
The thought that you were conversing with people via a system on another
continent from all around the world seemed like something out of a futuristic
cyberpunk novel. Again, this broke down the conceptions that you'd typically
have as a suburban teenager, only confined to the options present at your high
school. Suddenly you were talking to hackers like Shatter from the UK, or Logex
from Mexico, and you might find out that the Mexican phone switching system is
more advanced than the one you're on.
284
Beyond its instrumental use as a conduit for the (unauthorized) exchange of software, the
modem presented novel, unique pleasures that could not be found elsewhere in the teen's
life.
In the 1980s, what little marketing and public discourse surrounded the modem
tended to focus on point-to-point communication. There was no indication that modemers
283Dark Sorcerer, “Confessions of a C0dez Kid,” February 20, 2001, http://textfiles.com/history/c0dez.txt.
284Ibid.
152
could engage in the sort of electronic derive described by Dark Sorcerer and his
contemporaries. Following the break-up of AT&T, the practice of telephonic wandering
was further enabled by a host of new long-distance products and business models. Both
Sprint and MCI offered calling cards that allowed their customers to route a call through
the backbone network of their choice, regardless of their point of origin. For a short
period, these calling codes were easily stolen and hundreds of illicit “codez” were in
circulation. Another former BBSer, Mr. Pez, recalls:
Thanks to the codez, I was able to maintain an active, nationwide presence on
various BBS’s. I became sort of addicted to codes, which normally did not last
long because you shared all your codes with your online buddies, who would use
them so much that the long distance service provider (I preferred Sprint) would
get wise and shut them down a day and a half later. It was dangerous to keep a
code to yourself, because it would last a long time and so you would use it a lot,
increasing your chances of getting caught. Thus, you did yourself and your
buddies a favor by sharing your codez with them; they would use it and share it
with their friends, thus diffusing the likelihood that any one code user could be
pegged as the primary abuser. I was active on the Dark Side of the Moon BBS, in
northern California, as well as Thieve’s World in Michigan run by Thomas
Covenant.
285
Modemers willing to risk breaking the law were thus able to briefly ignore the cost of
long-distance dialing and make contact with far-flung systems throughout the world. As
one might expect, among teen users, an illicit thrill only amplified the pleasures of
exploration.
In spite of the representation of modeming in WarGames and the subsequent
adoption of modems by teens and gamers (and teen gamers,) the modem remained a
niche peripheral in the broader ecology of 1980s personal computing. Toward the end of
the decade, new systems like the Apple Macintosh transformed many of the conventions
285Mr. Pez, “BBS Life in the 1980’s,” March 2000, http://textfiles.com/history/golnar.txt.
153
of earlier systems but continued to ship without the necessary hardware or software for
telecommunications. Nevertheless, the lack of information regarding telecomputing
enabled a compelling sense that the modem world was an uncharted area of activity with
unknown social and technical potential. Without a dominant narrative shaping their
encounters, these early users encountered the modem world as a space without clear
boundaries, inviting exploration and play.
Modeming and the popularization of the internet
In the early-1990s, the ARPA-/NSF-funded internet began to attract popular
interest, it was not at all clear how one might gain access to it. By necessity, popular
how-to guides included information about modems. In keeping with the subordinate
status shared by academics and science fiction, the discussion of modems was typically
found in an appendix or a chapter on troubleshooting. If e-mail, chatting, gaming, and the
web promised fun and excitement, the modem was, at best, a necessary evil—costly,
frustrating, and confusing.
The earliest how-to books scarcely mention modems. In the first edition of
Brendan P. Kehoe's Zen and the Art of the Internet, published in 1993, the internet is
defined as a “real-time” network, implicitly excluding the dial-up user:
The Internet is a large “network of networks.” There is no one network known as
The Internet; rather, regional nets like SuraNet, PrepNet, NearNet, et al., are all
inter-connected (nay, “inter-networked”) together into one great living thing,
communicating at amazing speeds with the TCP/IP protocol. All activity takes
place in “real-time.” The Internet offers mail, file transfer, remote login, and a
plethora of other services.
286
286Brendan P Kehoe, Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner’ s Guide (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PTR
Prentice Hall, 1993), 4.
154
Kehoe goes on to describe several alternative gateways through which personal computer
users can access internet services over an analog telephone line. Although these modem
users cannot connect in “real-time,” Kehoe's definition of the internet remains
considerably more inclusive than definitions that would soon predominate in the decade's
discursive explosion.
In contrast, Ed Krol's The Whole Internet, published the same year as Zen and the
Art of the Internet, mention modems just once, in the following brief parenthetical:
[A dial-up] connection has its pros and cons. On the good side, you probably have
all the hardware and software you need (i.e., a modem and a terminal emulation
package.)
287
The assumption that readers own a modem illustrates the significant gap that existed
between the personal and institutional computing paradigms during this period. Typical
institutional computing facilities had been conventionally outfitted with networking
hardware for more than two decades at this point, but modems were still not bundled by
default with new PCs. Krol and Kehoe reasonably assumed that anyone picking up their
books in 1993 must have had some affiliation with an internet-connected institution.
Tracy LaQuey's 1994 how-to book, The Internet Companion, appealed to a more
general audience of personal computer enthusiasts and dedicated considerably more
space to the discussion of modems and dial-up networking. In the foreword, Vice
President Al Gore enthusiastically described the “democratization and
commercialization” of the Internet and entreated readers to push past the technical arcana
to “explore the vast potential of networking.”
288
Whereas Krol suggested petitioning one's
287Krol, The Whole Internet, 334.
288Tracy L LaQuey and Ryer, The Internet Companion: A Beginner’ s Guide to Global Networking
(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993), v–vi.
155
employer to provide an institutional internet connection, LaQuey urged readers to find a
local internet service provider (ISP) with dial-up access. Chapter 7, “Getting Connected,”
begins with a detailed discussion of what a modem is, what it does, and what sorts of
services it can connect to. In a sidebar, LaQuey wrote a guide for modem shoppers that
estimated a budget “in the neighborhood of $100-200 for a good modem.”
289
LaQuey's
suggestions for finding an ISP are similarly frank. Rural users, she cautions, may have
trouble finding local access numbers for “full-access” providers but may be able to access
the Internet through a local bulletin-board system or a commercial service such as
CompuServe.
290

Whereas LaQuey's book addressed the typical personal computer owner, Russ
Walter's quirky Secret Guide to Computers was for the technically-inclined computer
hobbyist. From its tie-dye cover to its newsprint paper to its fanciful illustrations, the
Secret Guide was (and remained through 2007) a spiritual successor to the Whole Earth
Software Catalog. In 1995, Walter's description of computer-mediated communication
focused principally on the technical minutiae of transferring data over telephone wires
and only secondarily on the content and meaning of those data. For example, Walter had
very little to say about the internet:
Back when we were fighting the Cold War against Russia, the Pentagon created a
computer network so that universities could transmit research results to each other
and the Pentagon even if some phone lines and buildings got bombed. That
network has become civilian and is called the Internet. If you're in one of those
universities, you can use the Internet to send electronic mail. If you're not, join the
Internet by paying money to an Internet access provider who hooks you up.
291
289Ibid., 194.
290Ibid., 203–209.
291Russ Walter, The Secret Guide to Computers (Somerville, MA: R. Walter, 1995), 273.
156
Later in the chapter titled “Communication,” Walter describes his favorite networking
scheme as the healthier, more economical alternative, the “sneaker net,”
To transfer data to your colleague's computer by using sneaker net, just copy the
data onto a floppy disk, then put on your sneakers and run with your floppy to
your colleague's desk! That method is also called the Nike net. In Boston it's
called the Reebok net. Besides being free, it's also the healthiest network for you,
since it gives you some exercise!
292
In spite of Walter's good-natured sarcasm, the Secret Guide nevertheless provided readers
with a list of well-known bulletin-board systems (BBS) throughout the world and, like
LaQuey, it also includes a shopping guide for users interested in buying a modem.
Assuming that the hobbyist reader is more willing to shop around for deals, Walter
estimates that readers should budget $70-85 for their new modem.
In 1999, O'Reilly Media published a substantially updated version of The Whole
Internet.
293
Whereas the first edition addressed users of institutional computer networks,
the revised version focused on personal computer users. The assumptions that Krol and
co-author Kiersten Conner-Sax made about their readers indicates the extent to which the
modem world had grown during the intervening six years:
I'm sure you already know what a modem is: it's a small box that connects one of
your computer's serial ports to a telephone line.
294
But, given that this is the “Next Generation” edition, Krol and Conner-Sax suggest that
readers thinking about buying a new modem should first evaluate the broadband
providers in their area. By 1999, the modem world was nearly over for North American
readers.
292Ibid., 278.
293Conner-Sax and Krol, The Whole Internet.
294Ibid., 397.
157
Conclusion: The place of the modem world in the history of the internet
The history of the internet is conventionally told within the broader histories of
computer science and the computer industry but the origin of the modem world suggests
a complementary account organized by a history of media and communication. In 1978,
the founding of CBBS marked the beginning of a socio-technical grassroots movement in
personal computer networking that would last for another two decades. This modem
world was shaped by a unique conjuncture of professional and amateur telecom traditions
in the the United States. Strung alongside nearly every roadway in the country, the Bell
System represented fifty years of public-private collaboration to connect nearly every
home and office to a single interoperable telephone network. But Ma Bell's ubiquity
belied its mortality; the machinery of deregulation had already begin to dismantle the de
facto monopoly. Meanwhile, a popular culture of amateur telecommunications was
reaching the apogee of its public audibility. Practices with roots in the wild, unregulated
era of “wireless telegraphy” found widespread adoption in the form of cheap “citizens
band” radios buzzing under thousands of dashboards up and down the interstate. The
modem-equipped personal computer provided a material point of contact among these
various social, technical, economic, and regulatory domains. After 1978, the popular
vanguard in telecommunication was manifest in the form of regional bulletin-board
systems interconnected through the unlikely infrastructure of the Bell telephone network.
When the Federal Communications Commission granted a monopoly to AT&T
following the passage of the Communications Act of 1934, they sought a robust
residential telecommunications network that reached citizens throughout the United
158
States. Whether or not a natural monopoly was the optimal economic approach, their
vision was realized in the late-1970s as the diffusion of telephony reached a point of
saturation. This arrangement and its deconstruction had unexpected implications for
amateur telecommunications enthusiasts, however. The ubiquity, reliability, and
standardization of the Bell network provided hobbyists across the continent with a
nationwide platform on which they could imagine—and ultimately build—new
telecommunications applications. The “break up” of the AT&T monopoly further
enlivened this opportunity for innovation as the North American telecom market
underwent a fundamental a series of transformations, at first slowly and then suddenly.
These changes presented themselves to the end user in the form of manifold new
peripherals, terminal equipment, information services, long-distance calling plans, and
bureaucratic uncertainty at every level.
Amateur telecommunications is an umbrella term for a diverse ecology of
overlapping technical cultures that routinely encircle new media and communication
technologies. Although the participants in these cultures are drawn in by a fascination
with technological challenges, their cultures tend to be highly social. On the side of
institutionalization and endurance, amateur radio represents a high-water mark.
Beginning with the formation of the Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL) in the face of
unjust government regulation at the start of the 1910s, “ham” radio operators represent a
multi-generational community that prizes mentorship, public service, and technical
expertise. And on the side of popular communication, citizens band radio opened the
pleasures and political promises of two-way radio communication to a considerably
159
wider population than was possible within ham radio's relatively high barriers to entry.
Between the late-1950s and the late-1970s, the voices of CB radio were not only audible
across pop culture—in films, television shows, and pop music—but they rang with
regionally-specific accents, dialects, and a verbal playfulness that was absent from the
period's dominant modes of broadcasting. Furthermore, the use of CB radio by black
Americans ensured that black voices—and, consequently, black lives—remained audible
in spaces where they were otherwise silenced by structural racism.
The first affordable, accessible personal computer kits began to appear in catalogs
and hobby shops precisely in the middle of this lively moment in American
telecommunications. Magazines targeted at ham and CB operators regularly featured
articles on the emerging culture of amateur computing. Many of the same technical skills
that hobbyists developed building radios and hi-fi stereo equipment could be applied to
the construction of an early home computer. For these early hobbyists, the social
meaning of the personal computer was formed within the context of amateur
telecommunications. The home computer sat on the same workbench and was built with
the same tools that they first purchased to build and maintain their radio equipment.
The modem represents a crucial material bridge between the emerging culture of
hobby computing and the long histories of amateur and professional telecommunications
in the US. In the same sense that an antenna transforms the air from an inert gas into a
rich communicative medium, thick with signal; the modem transforms the telephone jack
from an unassuming feature of the home into a portal to unknown numbers of distant
communities. In the 1980s, modem owners were a niche among home computer
160
enthusiasts. For them, the combination of computer, modem, and telephone jack offered a
new form of amateur telecommunications. These early users occasionally self-identified
as “modemers” and described themselves as participants in “the modem world.”
Driven both by the technical curiosity characteristic of ham radio and the
communicative pleasures that animated the citizens bands, modemers constructed
thousands of bulletin-board systems during the 1980s. Although individual systems
differed substantially from one another, the term “modem world” describes a collective
sense that each was a node in a growing network. For many early participants,
telecomputing transformed their temporal, social, and spatial imaginaries. As the
newly-privatized “internet” became increasingly accessible in the 1990s, veterans of the
modem world played a key role in shaping its adoption. In some places, modemers built
the front-line infrastructure that made the internet accessible from a local phone call. In
others, modemers helped friends and family make sense of this new form of
communication. After all, they had been online for more than a decade—chatting,
gaming, shopping, flirting, arguing, and learning how to communicate via computer.
161
Chapter 3: From Computerized Bulletin Board to BBS
For nearly two decades, the predominant form of online community in North America
was the dial-up bulletin-board system or “BBS.” Built atop low-cost hardware and
accessible via plain old telephone service, bulletin-board systems operated out of the
homes and offices of volunteer administrators and were often affiliated with local clubs,
schools, and small businesses. From 1978 to 1983, as hundreds of hobbyists
experimented with the idea of a “computerized bulletin board,” the BBS host program
emerged as a new genre of microcomputer software, comparable to the database
management system or the spreadsheet. The archetypal BBS program provided an
interactive online service with functions for messaging, file-sharing, and remote
computing. Users accessed the functions of the BBS host by typing in special commands
in response to text-based menus. Over the years, hundreds of different BBS host
programs were written for various microcomputer architectures, but nearly every one
provided the same set of core functions. From this common foundation, BBS operators
(or “sysops”) developed myriad individual systems, each with its own theme, personality,
visual culture, and social architecture.
BBS host software provided a layer of abstraction between the underlying
hardware infrastructures—namely, the telephone network, the modem, and the
microcomputer—and the specific social structures that enable the formation of online
community. The purpose of this chapter is to detail the technical and metaphorical
characteristics of the typical BBS host program as a framework for community-building.
162
Beyond the core functions of messaging, file-sharing, and remote computing, BBS host
software typically performed a number of lower-level administrative tasks including
managing incoming connections, maintaining a database of user data, and preventing
abuse. Sysops often extended the functionality of their particular system through
extensive modification of the BBS host software. This tinkering provided a site of
considerable innovation and modifications introduced by one BBS were often circulated
among other sysops and incorporated into future host programs.
This chapter is not simply about documenting the technical details of the BBS
world. Rather, these technical details reflect the broader political-economic conditions
within which BBSing emerged. The communication protocols and programming
languages adopted by the authors of BBS host software tended to favor interoperability
and accessibility over technical sophistication. This flexibility, in turn, provided system
operators with a basic template for experimenting with new forms of social architecture.
In the hands of different “sysops,” the same underlying BBS software could give rise to
online communities with wildly divergent structures of feeling. Finally, the use of
“shareware” licensing, the informal exchange of source code, and the circulation of
modifications reflected a complex relationship to commercialism and property among
BBSers that defies simple categorization as for-or-against.
The dial-up BBS as a platform
Describing the dial-up BBS as a “platform” is a helpful anachronism. During the
1980s and 1990s, there was little consensus among observers about how to categorize the
163
BBS phenomenon. Technical writers variously described the BBS as a “medium,” an
“information service,” and a “community,”
295
among other definitions. In the hands of
different sysops and users, a BBS might reasonably fit any (or all) of those three
categories but its range of possible meanings continued to grow as it was adapted to new
uses. Recently, the term “platform” has begun to encompass a similarly dynamic set of
social and technical meanings in the context of the media industries. It is common, for
example, to hear the founder of a technology company describe developing an
advertising “platform” out of a proprietary software “platform” running atop a particular
hardware “platform.”
296
This ambiguity has provoked a lively disagreement among
scholars of media and communication who struggle to bring the term into focus.
On one hand, scholars concerned with the material specificity of computer media
embrace a narrowly technical definition of platform that hews closely to the meaning
preferred by computer programmers. In 2009, Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost argued that
“platform” should be used to describe the “low level” computational architectures on (or
with or against) which creative digital works are made.
297
Racing the Beam, their first
book-length effort to put this definition of “platform” into practice, explored the quirky
architecture of the Atari Video Computer System (VCS). As a demonstration of the
295Keith Wade, The Anarchist’ s Guide to the Bbs (Loompanics Unlimited (1990), Paperback, 1990), 1,
http://www.librarything.com/work/282305/book/105171509; Alan D. Bryant, Growing and
Maintaining: A Successful Bbs : The Sysop’ s Handbook (Addison-Wesley (C) (1995), Paperback, 323
pages, 1995), xiii, http://www.librarything.com/work/14625253/book/105171556; Mark L. Chambers,
Running a Perfect Bbs/Book and Disk (Que Pub (1994), Edition: Book&Disk, Paperback, 704 pages,
1994), 11, http://www.librarything.com/work/2678841/book/105171535.
296See: Ted Livingston, “After WhatsApp: An Insider’s View On What’s Next In Messaging |
TechCrunch,” TechCrunch, March 22, 2014,
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/22/after-whatsapp-an-insiders-view-on-whats-next-in-messaging/?
ncid=twittersocialshare.
297Montfort and Bogost, Racing the Beam the Atari Video Computer System.
164
technical meaning of “platform,” the Atari VCS was an ideal case. Lacking any sort of
operating system, the VCS required programmers to work in direct contact with the
material features of the platform; the microchips soldered to the circuit board and the
eponymous electron beam they controlled. Few other home computers, however, offer
such clear evidence of the determining effects of the platform within a media system.
Indeed, later efforts to take up Montfort and Bogost's approach have struggled to clearly
circumscribe a “platform” distinct from the many layers of software built atop them.
298
In contrast to Montfort and Bogost's suggestion that media scholars adopt the
strict definition of “platform” preferred by engineers,
299
others confronted the existing,
inconsistent meanings of “platform” in use among media industry professionals. Tarleton
Gillespie approached this discourse by mapping out the use of “platform” by the users
and employees of web services such as YouTube.
300
Gillespie's analysis began with the
dictionary definitions of platform—computational, architectural, figurative, and political
—and then attempted to classifying the new meanings of “platform” found in the
marketing of media products and services among them. YouTube, Gillespie's central case,
strategically deployed (and continues to deploy) the term “platform” in order to appeal to
multiple constituencies. To amateur video-makers, YouTube is a platform for populist
self-expression; to marketing professionals, it is a platform to buy and sell advertising;
and to existing media companies, it is a platform for the distribution of digital video. The
298This critique of “platform studies” was elaborated in Dale Leorke, “Rebranding the Platform: The
Limitations of ‘platform Studies’ - Digital Culture & Education,” Digital Culture & Education 4, no. 3
(2012): 257–68,
http://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/uncategorized/dce1073_leorke_2012_html/.
299Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, “Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers,” Digital Arts and
Culture 2009, December 12, 2009, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/01r0k9br.
300Gillespie, “The Politics of ‘platforms.’”
165
vagueness of “platform” enables YouTube to enjoy the benefit of all three interpretations,
in spite of their ideological incompatibility.
The dial-up BBS of the 1980s and 1990s similarly meets multiple definitions of
“platform,” though the term had not achieved the polysemy found today. For some users,
a BBS was a platform for the construction of intentional communities, defined by free
expression and open debate. For others, it was a crossroads for the exchange of software,
authorized or otherwise. And, for still others, the BBS was an extension of their existing
entrepreneurial practices; a site for advertising, product support, sales, and customer
service. In spite of the myriad uses for BBS technology and the radical changes that the
microcomputer underwent during the 1980s and 1990s, the fundamental concept of the
“BBS” remained remarkably stable.
As a platform, the dial-up BBS consists of a computer running a program
designed to interact with one or more remote users through one or more serial interfaces.
This basic architecture was standardized by 1983 and remained in use for more than
fifteen years. This chapter examines the technical apparatus of the typical “one-liner”
BBS, including the protocols used to shuttle data between the user's terminal and the host
system. In the course of everyday use, these features merit little attention but their
simplicity and accessibility provided software developers with a reliable set of tools with
which to assemble the defining features of a dial-up BBS: messaging, file-sharing, and
remote computing. Each BBS operator, in turn, combined these features with their own
unique usage policies to produce the myriad social architectures that enabled BBSing to
flourish.
166
Building a “computerized” bulletin board
A conventional bulletin board—i.e., a physical piece of cork board hung on the
wall of a local supermarket or church lobby—is an example of a centralized
“hub-and-spokes” communication network (figure 3). In such a network, one node serves
as a “hub” through which all of the other nodes communicate with one another.
Centralization has significant advantages and disadvantages for group communication.
On one hand, routing messages is trivial because the pathway between any two nodes is
the same, but, on the other hand, all messages pass through the same central node. If that
central node breaks down, the entire system is disrupted.
301
In the case of the community
301The vulnerability of a centralized network structure animated the research that lead Paul Baran to
Figure 3: A centralized "hub-and-spokes" network

167
bulletin board, as long as the supermarket is open, the board remains a convenient,
reliable place to post and read messages. But when the supermarket closes for the night,
the board becomes inaccessible and no one can use it to exchange messages until the
supermarket opens again in the morning.
The earliest BBSes simply emulated the function of the community bulletin
board. The cork board, with its push-pins and slips of paper, is replaced by a personal
computer running a special program that listens for incoming calls, answers the phone,
and keeps track of all the messages stored on the system. In computer engineering, this
type of system is referred to as a “client-server” system. Users—or, clients—periodically
connect to the central server to check for new messages, leave a message, download files,
or access other online services. The key differences between the BBS and other forms of
client-server networking (such as the World Wide Web) is that BBSes were assembled out
of readymade technologies—namely, the telephone network, the teletype (TTY) protocol,
and a microcomputer—that were not originally designed to facilitate this form of
communication. The story of the BBS as a medium for popular communication and
community-building begins in the late 1970s with two friends and a hobby project.
The CBBS origin story
In BBSing folklore, computerized bulletin-board systems originate in 1978, with a
collaboration between Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss, two members of the Chicago
Area Computer Hobbyist's Exchange (CACHE), a local computer club. On January 16,
both men found themselves snowed in during a storm. Christensen called up his friend
theorize packet-switching and dynamic routing in the 1960s.Abbate, Inventing the Internet., 14–15.
168
Randy and described his idea for a "computerized bulletin board." Rather than wait until
the next club meeting in February, they decided to get started on the project right way.
Seuss offered to tackle the hardware side while Christensen focused on the software.
For the next month, the two men spent their spare time building and testing the
computerized bulletin board system or “CBBS.” Christensen first sketched out a
prototype of the host software in BASIC while Seuss assembled a dedicated host
computer. They decided that the system should be installed in Seuss' basement because
Christensen lived in the suburbs and calling his house would incur long-distance charges
for most of the other members of CACHE. Seuss arranged to have a second phone line
added in his basement. By February 16, the system was accepting calls and after a week
of testing, they announced it a the club meeting.
Neither Christensen nor Seuss expected CBBS to be widely used. At most, they
estimated that 5 or 10 people would call the system. When they brought it to the club,
however, they were surprised to learn that 25 people owned the hardware required to call
in.
302
Soon, they had a steady stream of callers who were asking for help with projects,
offering parts for sale, and posting information of interest to the other members of the
club.
After the system was up and running for about six months, Christensen and Seuss
drafted an article describing the impetus for the project and detailing the hardware and
software they assembled to bring it to life. The resulting article appeared in the November
1978 issue of Byte magazine.
303
The piece not only described CBBS but entreated readers
302Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss, “Hobbyist Computerized Bulletin Board,” Byte, November 1978,
151.
303Christensen and Seuss, “Hobbyist Computerized Bulletin Board.”
169
to start up their own bulletin-board systems. Once a few systems were online, the authors
mused, it might be possible to form a network of “automated message and program
switching.”
304
Reading Christensen and Seuss' article today, one is struck by how closely CBBS
compares with bulletin-board systems from twenty or thirty years later. Unlike "the
internet," with its constantly shifting definition, the meaning of “bulletin-board system”
has remained remarkable stable since its introduction in 1978. The archetypal BBS used
the standard telephone system as its network infrastructure. Callers accessed the board
using a piece of “terminal emulation” software that displayed monospaced text characters
in rigid rows and columns. The majority BBSes were organized into a set of hierarchical
menus through which users accessed three broad classes of functions: messaging,
file-sharing, and remote-computing. Every BBS, from the smallest “one-liners” to the
massive multi-city systems of the mid-1990s, could trace its architecture back to the
fundamental idea of “computerizing” the community bulletin board.
The BBS network infrastructure
One of the ambiguities of BBSing is the fuzzy boundary separating the generic
form of the BBS concept from particular implementations and BBS communities. In their
article for Byte, for example, Christensen and Seuss used the term “CBBS” to refer both
to the specific system running out of Seuss' home in suburban Chicago as well as the
BBS host program authored by Christensen. Five years later, this ambiguity persisted in
304Ibid., 151.
170
the opening pages of Lary L. Myers' guidebook, How To Create Your Own Computer
Bulletin Board. Myers used “CBB” to refer both to Christensen's software and as a
generic term for any computerized bulletin board system.
305
Myers' text was chiefly
concerned with the technical aspects of building a BBS (or CBB) and his
conceptualization of BBSing began with the literal computerization of a traditional
community bulletin board:
Computer bulletin board (CBB) is a term used to describe a service that remote
callers can contact using a telephone and a computer terminal to access various
functions. These functions range from simple message entering and retrieval to
complicated data bases using the large storage offered by minicomputers. Think
of a bulletin board as a community corkboard where you can read and post
advertisements, items wanted, and future events. Add the ability to exchange
personal messages between friends and the fact that you can call the electronic
corkboard from your home, and you will have the basis for a computer bulletin
board.
306
By 1983, remote database access and electronic messaging were increasingly available on
university and commercial time-sharing systems. But CBBS and the bulletin boards that
it inspired were not simply hobbyist imitations of large-scale institutional networks.
Rather, the technology and culture of BBSing were significantly shaped by
confrontations with social, technical, and economic challenges that their commercial and
academic contemporaries did not face.
At first glance, the principle distinction between BBSes and other computer
networks was technological. The dial-up BBS uses standard copper telephone wires as its
medium for data transmission.
307
Users were colloquially said to “call” or “dial” into a
305Lary L. Myers, How to Create Your Own Computer Bulletin Board (McGraw-Hill/TAB Electronics
(1983), Edition: 0, Hardcover, 1983), http://www.librarything.com/work/12003526/book/105171549.
306Ibid., vii.
307Any serial data connection can replace the telephone line here and BBSes have been made using both
packet radio and the telnet protocol for access. For the sake of simplicity, this chapter focuses
171
bulletin-board system because the lines used to carry the connection were no different
from the lines that carry voice telephone calls. In fact, the function of a modem is to
transform a sequence of discrete electrical pulses representing 1s and 0s into a continuous
audio signal carried by the telephone network. Two modems quite literally speak—or,
perhaps more accurately, sing—data to one another.
308
Unexpected uses for the domesticated telephone
As an infrastructure for wide-area personal computer networking, the advantages
of the telephone network far outweighed its disadvantages. By the late 1970s, residential
telephone service reached nearly every home in the US. Among the socio-economic class
most likely to own a personal computer, penetration of the home telephone was
practically universal. Furthermore, in 1976, the Bell System began to install standardized
jacks into the homes and offices of its customers. This seemingly minor change
facilitated the production of “direct connect” modems designed to plug into a wall socket
instead of interfacing awkwardly with a telephone handset, as was customary in early
“acoustic coupler” designs. For the telecommunications hobbyist, the pervasiveness and
standardization of the Bell System meant that personal computer owners in the US were
already connected by a nationwide network of copper cabling. No special installation or
additional fees were required to attach a modem and start exchanging data with others.
The telephone network was not designed with data communications in mind,
however, and its accessibility came with a handful of technical and economic constraints.
exclusively on dial-up telephone BBSes.
308See Chapter 2 for a more detailed discussion of the personal computer modem.
172
First, the audio on standard telephone lines could be noisy and noise introduced errors
that would delay or interrupt a connection. In the best case, a noisy line meant that a few
characters would display incorrectly on the user's terminal as the receiving modem
misinterpreted the incoming signals. In the worst cases, however, lengthy data transfers
could be corrupted and require a costly retransmission. The problem of line noise
gradually receded during the 1980s and 1990s, however, as modem hardware, signal
processing techniques, and file transfer protocols were introduced that could
automatically detect, mitigate, or correct transmission errors. Notably, academic and
military networks such as the ARPANET and NSFNET tended to use dedicated “leased
lines” serviced by AT&T and MCI during this period rather than standard telephone lines
and did not face the same problems with line noise as their amateur contemporaries.
309
A
connection made on a leased line could be left open for twenty-four hours a day. It was
not necessary to “hang up” the leased line.
Practical implications of data communication by telephone
The use of standard telephone lines required BBSers to think differently about
time and space. Connections on the telephone network are circuit-switched. In a
circuit-switched network, the line between two points is kept open for the duration of a
connection which enables terminals at either end to act as though they are attached
directly to a single wire. This exclusive use of the line is essential for analog voice
communication between two humans but is quite inefficient for data transmission
between two computers. During computer-mediated communication, data is transmitted
309Abbate, Inventing the Internet., 53, 193.
173
only intermittently and the line remains unused for long stretches of time as the users and
machines at either end process the data they have just received.
310
For BBS callers, the technical inefficiency of circuit-switching was compounded
by both social and economic costs. The Bell System may have reached nearly every
residence in the US but most homes were connected by just one line. By the start of the
BBS period, use of the home telephone was already a source of tension in many families
and the modem represented one more competing interest. In a 1988 column for the Los
Angeles Times, Jan Hofmann interviewed three families with teenage children in Orange
County frustrated by competition over access to the telephone.
311
One of the families had
added “call waiting” to their lines, a feature that allowed one incoming caller to queue up
behind an on-going call, but admitted that it did little to alleviate the problem.
312
Many
local telephone service providers offered reduced rates for additional residential lines
occasionally referred to as “teen lines.” Only one of the families in Hofmann's article
chose to pay thirty extra dollars per month for a teen line and they found that it, too, was
inadequate:
“[The teen line] works, but it just didn't work as well as I thought it would. Now
about 50% of the calls [on the main line] are for [the children.] If their line is
busy, their friends just call the other number.”
313
310The inefficiency of circuit-switching was one of the motivations for the simultaneous invention of
packet-switching by Paul Baran and Donald Davis in the 1960s. See: Ibid., 7–41.
311Jan Hofmann, “Answering the Need for Time on the Telephone,” Los Angeles Times (1923-Current
File), July 30, 1988, sec. Orange County,
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/cv_791994/docview/909708106/abstract/84D11B1CF4DD
4777PQ/64?accountid=14749.
312Call waiting was wholly ineffective for sharing a line between voice and data communications because
the call waiting chime would be misinterpreted by the modems. Even a higher-end modem such as the
USRobotics Courier recommended “temporarily disabling” call waiting before attempting a data
connection. See: USRobotics Courier High Speed Modems User’ s Manual (Skokie, IL: USRobotics,
1988), B–13.
313Hofmann, “Answering the Need for Time on the Telephone.”
174
In a short memoir about BBSing, electronic music composer Basehead remembered that
his early modem use caused similar problems. “My parents became both sick of me using
up their phone line all the time,” he writes, “I got my own phone line finally, and that set
me free.”
314
In exchange for increased monthly bills, a second residential line addressed one of
the challenges of circuit-switching for the BBS caller. From the perspective of the BBS
host, however, circuit-switching meant that just one caller could be connected to the
system at a time. To enable a second simultaneous caller, the host would need a second
phone line, a second modem, and BBS software that could manage the two connections.
The cost of adding lines rose steeply from there. As a result, most BBSes were
“one-liners” that accepted connections in series. Installing a second line was not strictly
required to run a BBS, of course, and many systems ran on “part-time” schedules during
hours in which the phone line was unlikely to be needed for other purposes; late at night,
or during the workday.
Service upgrades and conveniences such as a second residential line were
available but not required for participation in BBSing. In fact, the primary economic risk
was not in special telephony features or products but rather in unpredictable long-distance
billing. Most users paid a flat rate for unlimited calling within a local geographic area but
314Basehead, “Eight Years of Glory,” June 29, 2003, http://textfiles.com/history/basehead.txt.
Figure 4: Serial exchange of binary data over a telephone line
175
incurred additional fees for inter-regional calls. Dedicated BBSers developed a unique
sense of time and space defined by the various toll rates applied to calling into distant
exchanges and area codes at different times of the day and night. By carefully avoiding
certain area codes or restricting one's BBS use to the “off-peak” hours late in the evening,
the strategic BBS caller could avoid incurring painful monthly phone bills. Nevertheless,
the threat of long distance billing strongly shaped one's experience of the BBS world and
many users restricted their activity exclusively to local systems.
In spite of the social, technical, and economic constraints, the circuit-switched
telephone network provided an widely-accessible, low-cost infrastructure for personal
computer networking during the 1980s and 1990s (figure 4). Between 1965 and 1982, the
cost of basic residential telephone service fell by nearly half while the rate of adoption
approached saturation.
315
Likewise, competition among microcomputer firms and the
introduction of “IBM-compatible clones” during the 1980s drove down the prices of
personal computers.
316
Furthermore, in contrast to computer gaming, BBSing demanded
very little of the user's computer hardware and older, secondhand equipment was often
adequate for both the BBS user and host. This infrastructure provided a means for
transmitting a stream of binary data—or “bits”—from one computer to another through
the telephone network using a modulated audio signal. To make meaning of those 1s and
0s, however, the computers at either end needed to perform a series of additional
transformations on the incoming data: grouping the bits into bytes, interpreting the
315Mueller, Universal Service, 160.
316Paul E Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 263–280,
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=9357. See
also: “Inside the IBM PCs (Special IBM Issue),” Byte Magazine, November 1985,
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-11.
176
symbolic and semantic meaning of the bytes, and presenting the resulting information to
the human user. This process of rudimentary meaning-making was managed by sets of
communication protocols shared at either end of the data connection. In contrast to the
ubiquity and homogeneity of the telephone network, early microcomputing was
characterized by dynamism and diversity. During the 1980s, the technical culture of
BBSing was the site of considerable innovation as participants simultaneously attempted
to maintain interoperability as they embraced new software and hardware. In practice, the
tension between these opposing interests was resolved through a lasting dedication to
text-mode communication that enabled the exchange of data among users with a diverse
array of old, new, and otherwise incompatible systems.
Text, terminal, and the visual culture of BBSing
With the telephone system as a stable, reliable, and universal network
infrastructure, BBS hosts consisted of a small number of hardware and software
components that could be endlessly swapped, upgraded, and modified (to the delight of
some administrators and the chagrin of others.) Working backward from the telephone
jack, a typical “one-liner” bulletin board included a modem, a personal computer, a data
storage device such as a floppy disk drive, and a special BBS host program to manage all
of it. This apparatus further distinguished the BBS from the time-sharing minicomputers
and workstations found in university and corporate research facilities. Whereas
time-sharing systems involved low-powered client terminals connected to a powerful
central server, the computing power of the clients and servers in a BBS network were
177
roughly symmetrical. The same commodity hardware used to dial in to a BBS could later
be used to host a system.
Unfortunately, the lively personal computing market of the 1980s lead to
considerable incompatibility among different PC brands. Diskettes written for an Apple II
could not be read by an IBM PC and vice versa. Amid these siloed, incompatible
systems, BBSes played an important bridging function. Momentarily setting aside its
myriad social uses, the core technical functions of a BBS server are to store sequences of
binary data and “serve” them out to a network of client terminals. By organizing the
binary data according to a basic standard (i.e., arranging it into 8-bit chunks,) the BBS
server software could be agnostic about the meaning and purpose of the data it stored. In
other words, owners of otherwise incompatible systems could exchange files and
messages using a BBS as common ground. This interconnection was possible because
BBSes were fundamentally text-based systems. All of the online activities—menus,
messages, and chats—were rendered in the text mode of the user's terminal. As long as
both the sending and receiving systems adhered to a common standard for the binary
representation of text, it was possible for messages and files to transgress the boundaries
set up by competing manufacturers in the microcomputer marketplace.
Interoperability in the exchange of digital text
Fortunately, by the start of the BBS era, a standard character set had already been
widely adopted throughout the computer industry. In the mid-1960s, the American
Standard Association developed a character set called American Standard Code for
Information Interchange (ASCII) that was popularized as the default character set in the
178
Teletype Model 33 ASR.
317
The Model 33 was the standard interface to the Digital
Equipment Corporation PDP-8 minicomputer, released in 1965, and ASCII was shortly
adopted by the engineers working on the emerging ARPANET, who favored Digital
systems both for their accessibility and the engineering-centric culture they
represented.
318
The adoption of ASCII by institutional data processing facilities
inadvertently influenced the later adoption of ASCII by home computing hobbyists. As
institutions inevitably upgraded their systems in the 1970s, their second-hand hardware
provided a valuable resource for amateur computer builders. By adhering to the ASCII
standard, hobbyists ensured that their projects remained compatible with the cast-off
ASCII keyboards and teleprinters found at military surplus shops, swap meets, and flea
markets around the country.
319
317Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, 133–134; Gerhard Salton, “Control Procedures for Data
Communication&Mdash;an ASA Progress Report,” Commun. ACM 9, no. 2 (February 1966): 100–105,
doi:10.1145/365170.365203.
318Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, 136–139; V . G. Cerf, “RFC 20: ASCII Format for Network
Interchange” (Network Working Group, October 16, 1969), http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc20.html.
319Libes, Small Computer Systems Handbook, 134–135.
179
The standard ASCII character set featured just 128 characters, each represented
by a unique 7-bit code (figure 5).
320
Upper-case “A,” for example, is encoded as
“1000001.” The complete character set included ten Arabic numerals, twenty-six Latinate
letters in both upper- and lower-case, thirty-two punctuation marks, and thirty-three
“control characters” (e.g., backspace and carriage return.) As the name implies, the
ASCII standard was intended for use in an American market dominated by the English
language. The coding scheme did not include accented characters such as ç or í, nor any
non-Latinate alphabets.
321
As a worldwide market for microcomputers emerged in the
320Cerf, “RFC 20: ASCII Format for Network Interchange.”
321For more technical detail on the continuing challenges of character encoding in multi-lingual
communication environments, see: Joel Spolsky, “The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer
Figure 5: Reference table for encoding ASCII characters in binary.
180
1980s, manufacturers began to deviate from strict adherence to the ASCII standard. In an
effort to include a wider range of printable characters without losing the benefits from a
common character set, microcomputer designers began to fragment the ASCII character
set into a series of partially-compatible character sets such as PETSCII on Commodore
systems, ATASCII on Atari.
New partially-compatible character sets produced by Atari, Commodore, Sinclair,
and other early commercial PC manufacturers tended to preserve the standard ASCII
alphanumeric character codes while discarding the thirty-two “control characters” that
were originally intended for use by teleprinters. In an ideal case, preserving the
alphanumeric codes meant that documents encoded with one system would be at least
partially legible with another. In both PETSCII and ATASCII, for example, capital “A”
continued to be represented by “01000001.” Outside of alphanumerics, however, Atari
and Commodore replaced the ASCII control characters with their own idiosyncratic sets
of semi-graphical characters. These special characters occupied the same number of
pixels as the standard, monospaced alphanumeric characters but instead of referring to
numbers, letters, or punctuation, they depicted abstract lines and geometric shapes. These
shapes could be cleverly arranged in rows and columns on-screen to produce pixel
graphics within a text-mode document. Commodore was particularly eager for its users to
Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!),” Joel on
Software, October 8, 2003, http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html. A comprehensive
evaluation of the effects of the English-centric ASCII character set on computer-mediated
communication and internet adoption is beyond the scope of this chapter but it is a topic that recurs in
transnational and post-colonial studies of internet culture. For a technology design perspective, see: E. J.
Sibley, “Alphabets &Amp; Languages,” Commun. ACM 33, no. 5 (May 1990): 488–90,
doi:10.1145/78607.78608.and for a cultural perspective, see: Peter Gerrand, “Cultural Diversity in
Cyberspace: The Catalan Campaign to Win the New .cat Top Level Domain,” First Monday 11, no. 1
(January 2, 2006), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1305.
181
adopt these special characters and the Commodore 64 keyboard featured the
semi-graphical symbols on the front faces of its raised keys.
322
By convention, most personal computers in the 1970s and 1980s stored data
locally in 8-bit chunks called “bytes.”
323
In addition to replacing control characters with
Latinate glyphs and semi-graphical characters, some microcomputer manufacturers
doubled the size of the available character set by adding an additional bit to the 7-bit
ASCII codes. Microsoft, for example, developed a series of 8-bit character sets to
accommodate most Western European languages that briefly became a de facto standard
among IBM-compatible machines running the MS-DOS operating system.
324
In 1987, the
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Eletrotechnical
Commission (IEC) issued a 191-character set labeled “Latin alphabet No. 1” in an
attempt to standardize an “extended” ASCII character set for European languages. As
personal computer owners upgraded to the latest operating systems from Apple,
Commodore, and Microsoft, they were smoothly transitioned from ASCII to the newly
standardized “Latin-1” alphabet.
In spite of the diversity of character sets in use during the 1980s, none deviated
from the basic relationship of one byte to one character.
325
The stability of this
fundamental relationship yielded surprising interoperability among the divergent
character sets. Non-standard characters could be transmitted with the same modem over
322For a detailed discussion of the use of semi-graphical characters on the Commodore 64, see: Nick
Montfort, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1));:GOTO 10 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013),
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=513654.
323The 8-bit byte offers some useful mathematical conveniences for computer programmers. Eight bits can
represent all of the decimal digits from 0-255. This is the same range as two hexadecimal digitals. In
other words, 255, FF, and 11111111 are equivalent.
324See: Bryant, Growing and Maintaining, 273.
325Most implementations of 7-bit ASCII simply added a zero in the place of the eighth bit.
182
the same telephone lines as the standard ASCII character set, even if the receiving
terminal could not display the character exactly as the author intended. Furthermore, even
if a system could not display the characters, it could still store their binary representations
in memory and pass them on to another machine that could. In practical terms, this meant
that a file encoded in ATASCII on an Atari 800 could be uploaded to a BBS running on
an IBM PC. The owner of the BBS might not be able to read the ATASCII-encoded file
but other callers with Atari computers could still download and view the file on their
local machines. For users accustomed to a microcomputing culture rigidly segregated by
platform, even this partial interoperability was rare.
Specialized terminal software for calling BBSes
The problem of incompatible character sets was further mitigated by innovations
in the handling of non-standard ASCII characters by BBS client and server software. In
the late-1970s, “dialing in” to a BBS was a very hands-on procedure. The user of an early
“acoustic coupler” modem such as the Novation CAT had to pick up their home
Figure 6: Novation “CAT” 300 baud acoustically coupled modem, 1978.
183
telephone, dial the BBS number by hand, listen for a carrier tone on the end of the line,
and place the handset onto a special cradle connected to their modem (figure 6). Once
connected, however, the modem simply translated incoming audio signals into a stream
of electrical pulses representing ones and zeros. A special piece of “terminal” software
was required to interpret these pulses, capture input from the user's keyboard, and send it
back down the line for the modem to transmit to the remote BBS.
Initially, terminal software merely emulated the functionality of a standard
teleprinter like the popular Teletype Model III. Although terminal software was not
included with the purchase of popular early modems like the Novation CAT, source code
listings for “dumb” terminal programs were abundant in hobby computing magazines and
technical manuals. In 1981, COMPUTE! published a terminal program by Henrique
Veludo for owners of the Atari 850 modem that was only nine lines long:
326
10 ? “}”: POKE 82,0
20 OPEN #1,4,0,''K:
30 OPEN #2,13,0,''R:
40 XI0 40,#2,0,0,''R:
50 GET #1,A:PUT #2,A:POKE 764,255
60 STATUS #2,R:IF PEEK(747)=0 THEN 80
70 GET #2,B:? CHR$(B);
80 IF PEEK(764)<>255 THEN 50
90 GOTO 60
As arcane as this compact BASIC syntax may have seemed, dumb terminal programs like
this one did little more than shuffle bytes among the keyboard, video display, and
modem.
327
By 1983, however, users no longer needed to code their own client software.
Newer, more user-friendly telecommunications peripherals such as the Commodore
326Henrique Veludo, “Atari as Terminal: A Short Communications Program,” COMPUTE!, February 1981.
327The translation between individual characters and their binary representations was performed
automatically by specialized hardware built into the computer's keyboard and video display.
184
Automodem shipped with simple terminal software on a cassette or floppy diskette
(figure 7). Soon, a new category of “smart” terminal software emerged that specifically
targeted the needs of BBS callers interacting with a plurality of microcomputer systems.
Lary L. Myers' LTERM Smart Terminal software for the Radio Shack TRS-80
demonstrates the role of “smart” client software in negotiating the incompatibilities of
1980s personal computing. Like much early BBS software, LTERM was distributed in
print as an appendix to the author's 1983 how-to book for aspiring sysops.
328
Myers
described the program “evolving” out of a homegrown dumb terminal program written to
access local BBSes. The key innovation in “smart” software like LTERM was to enable
328Myers, How to Create Your Own Computer Bulletin Board, 109–161.
Figure 7: Commodore Automodem 1650, 1983. Front cover (left), contents (right).
185
users to define alternative character sets for various BBSes. In the absence of
standardization, however, translating between two character sets could be extremely
tedious:
When on-line with an Apple computer while in Applesoft BASIC, the Apple's
prompt comes through as a 5DH byte (a left arrow). To change this into the
familiar [TRS-80] prompt, we could convert the 5DH byte into a 3EH byte in the
video table.
Other “smart” terminal software began to support multiple known character sets by
default. JTERM for the Atari was published in COMPUTE! magazine in 1983, the same
year that Myer's published LTERM. In the accompanying article, author Frank C. Jones
emphasized the importance of “internal translation” among different character sets for
communicating with non-Atari microcomputers:
Nothing that comes in from the [modem] port is changed at all before it is stored
in memory. Therefore, if you choose ATASCII or No translation for your port, you
will save in memory everything exactly as it was sent [...] In ATASCII mode, no
translation is done on any outgoing characters; everything is sent exactly as it
comes from the keyboard. In the No translation mode, two characters are
changed. The DELETE/BACKSPACE character is changed to the ASCII
backspace character so that the key will have the same function with most host
computers that it does in the Atari. Also, the RETURN key or EOL (ATASCII
155) is changed to the ASCII carriage return (ASCII 13) before it is sent.
329
JTERM's “No translation” mode implicitly treated the standard 128 ASCII characters as a
lingua franca for telecomputing. Later terminal software, however, began to include
support for the character sets of competing computer platforms. DawnStar Term for the
Commodore 128, for example, included explicit support for the Atari ATASCII character
set.
330

329Frank C. Jones, “Download/Upload For The Atari,” COMPUTE!, January 1983.
330A comprehensive comparison of Commodore terminal software with screenshots is accessible at:
“Commodore Warez,” accessed March 7, 2014, http://c64warez.com/files/browse/Terminal
%20Programs.
186
Beyond the use of character encoding systems to exchange text, the visual culture
of early BBSing was further shaped by differences in the local fonts and video output
devices. The semi-graphical characters included in platform-specific systems such as
PETSCII and ATASCII enabled BBS operators to transmit colorful, expressive graphics
to their callers without overstepping the technical limits of a text-mode connection.
Translating remote data into standard ASCII therefore meant eliminating all but the
strictly alphanumeric characters from the incoming stream. The expressive range of the
semi-graphical characters was lost on users calling from incompatible systems.
187
Figure 9: Main menu of the Jamming Signal BBS rendered in PETSCII.
Figure 8: Main menu of the Jamming Signal BBS rendered in ASCII.
188
Platform affinity and brand loyalty in opposition to interoperability
Incompatible character sets were part of a larger culture of competition and brand
loyalty among owners of different microcomputer systems. One former user fondly
described inter-brand conflict as a common theme on local BBSes:
I remember the various [forums], which naturally contained the usual flame wars
and grievances...PC vs. Amiga, Atari vs. Mac, Mac vs. Everyone else, Apple ][ vs
whoever was left. Ah, good times.
331
The limits of the personal computer market were uncertain in the early 1980s. Market
segments formed as manufacturers experimented with different combinations of features,
price, and aesthetics. At one extreme, IBM packaged its $2000 PC in a buttoned-up grey
case to appeal to corporate consumers while, at the other end, the $250 Commodore 64
shipped in a colorful cardboard box with the phrase “WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF
FRIENDLY COMPUTING” printed on the underside.
332
The competition among owners
of comparably-priced brands had a similar tone to that of rival sports fans. Conflicts
between owners of very differently-priced machines, however, also drew on the latent
socio-economic implications of their respective market positions. One former BBSer
recalls such class-based tensions arising between owners of the expensive Apple II and
the (relatively) affordable Commodore 64:
The C64 vs. Apple thing was very predominant during [the mid-1980s], and was
(IMO) steeped in class conflict. In retrospect, the C64 was not a bad computer,
and had much better graphics/sound and (important for every teenage geek)
consequently, video games. But the Apple was more predominant in
upper-middle class America, with all of the logical consequences not worth going
into here.
333
331Chickenhead, “The BBS Universe from the Perspective of a Simple Pleb,” July 2004,
http://textfiles.com/history/chickenheadbbs.txt.
332The prices listed here are estimates based on advertisements found in 1984 issues of Byte magazine.
333Dark Sorcerer, “Confessions of a C0dez Kid.”
189
Although the IBM PC eventually became an important gaming platform, it was rarely
portrayed by marketers or journalists as an entertainment machine during the 1980s. In a
special issue of Byte dedicated to the IBM PC, the magazine featured extensive coverage
of programming languages, database management systems, word processors, and
business graphics software. A section on telecomputing focused on connecting to a
mainframe and accessing “econometric forecasting” services rather than online
community or network gaming.
334
Readers interested in education, music, or popular
communications would have to wait until the next issue when coverage of Atari, Apple,
and Commodore computers resumed.
By 1983, many client and server software packages included a feature to detect
the character settings of a remote system. Some BBS operators wrote programs to
automatically reject callers with certain character encoding systems, effectively making
their boards inaccessible to owners of competing systems. This balkanization of the
modem world was reflected in use of brand names to describe various groups of BBSes.
For example, one Atari owner remembers infrequently accessing boards running on other
platforms:
I was a frequent Atari BBS'er until about 1987. […] I do remember calling in to
Apple boards and getting text that was barely readable - ATASCII was great, but it
really didn't translate well to other machines.
335
The use of brand names as adjectives, e.g. “Atari BBS'er” and “Apple board,” indicate
the extent to which the social world of BBSing was divided by the technical features of
incompatible microcomputer platforms. The problem of incompatible display
334Jay Siegel, “Moving Data Between PCs and Mainframes,” Byte, September 1984.
335CGO, “CGO’s BBS Story,” July 18, 2013, http://textfiles.com/history/cgo.txt.
190
technologies was compounded in the late 1980s as “clones” of the IBM PC became more
affordable. Whereas IBM-compatible machines could display 80-columns of ASCII-like
characters (important for visualizing spreadsheet data,) older home computers like the
Commodore 64 and Atari 600 could only display 40 columns without special software.
336
Social and technical distinctions were not the only reasons for splits within the
world of BBSing. In practice, file-sharing and messaging, two of the core BBS activities,
were seldom distinct. If a user started calling a system to download programs, they were
more likely to stick around and participate in its discussion forum. Technical manuals for
aspiring BBS operators suggested that files were the key to attracting new users. As one
author put it,
The average BBS users has an avaricious appetite for files to download. People
will use every second of their on-line time to download file after file if you let
them. But, on the positive side, files attract users to your BBS, and once on-line
you have the ability to lure them into different aspects of your BBS and get them
to participate in these other features that make BBSing so interactive at times.
337
Users in search of downloadable software rationally self-selected into platform-specific
sub-groups. After all, a bulletin-board running on an Apple computer was more likely to
host programs written and compiled to run on Apple computers than a bulletin-board
hosted on a competing platform. Unfortunately, this pragmatic decision effectively
reproduced the socio-economic differences embedded in the segmentation of the PC
marketplace.
336One reason that early home computers output only 40 columns was that they used conventional
televisions for display. The television did not display the same sharply defined pixels that one might
find on a dedicated video monitor. As a result, 80 columns of text were fuzzy and difficult to read on a
television screen.
337David Wolfe, The BBS Construction Kit: All the Software and Expert Advice You Need to Start Your
Own BBS Today (Wiley (1994), Edition: 1, Paperback, 373 pages, 1994), 33–34,
http://www.librarything.com/work/4517353/book/105171526.
191
By the end of the 1980s, the personal computer market in North America began to
converge on so-called “IBM-compatible” systems.
338
By reverse-engineering the platform
architecture of the IBM PC, new manufacturers such as Compaq and Dell brought
lower-priced machines to market that could run the same software as the more expensive
systems they imitated. Computer historian Paul Ceruzzi marks this period of “cloning” as
the end of the “pioneering phase” of PC design.
339
The market continued to be structured
according to price but there were now machines at every price point using the same
“IBM-compatible” architecture. This slide toward platform homogeneity was a boon to
software developers who no longer had to re-write their programs to run on multiple
systems.
ANSI.SYS and the visual culture of BBSing in the 1990s
The widespread adoption of IBM-compatible clone computers transformed the
visual culture of BBSing by creating a new de facto standard set of characters and a finer
on-screen grid to populate. Commodore, Apple, and Atari may have implemented
mutually-incompatible character sets but, given the importance of computer gaming to
their customers, each manufacturer shared a commitment to producing beautiful images.
338This is an inflection point at which the histories of BBSing in North American and Western European
significantly diverge. In his history of the Commodore Amiga (16-bit successor to the Commodore
64/128 system), Jimmy Maher indicates that Commodore and Atari computers continued to compete
with IBM-compatible clones until the mid-1990s in Europe. Maher found that European consumers
considered the Commodore and Atari machines desirable alternatives to dedicated gaming consoles
such as the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis that enjoyed relative popularity in North America.
However, while the Commodore and Atari machines were general-purpose microcomputers that could
host and access BBSes, the Nintendo and Sega consoles could only be used for gaming and included
neither keyboards nor modems. See: Jimmy Maher, The Future Was Here the Commodore Amiga
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012), 199–200, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?
direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=449840.
339Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, 278.
192
When the first IBM PC was released in 1981, however, IBM emphasized its business
applications by shipping a default display adapter that generated 80-columns of
sharply-rendered text in amber, green, or white on a black background.
340
Like its
competitors, the IBM PC included an “extended” ASCII-like character set with a mix of
accented and semi-graphical characters.
341
IBM's alternative character set included
thirty-nine “border,” three “shade,” and six “block” characters that could be used to paint
the screen with the active foreground color. Border characters included lines, joints, and
corners that could be arranged into rectangular shapes; shade characters included a
pattern of foreground pixels approximating half-tone screens of three densities: light,
medium, and dark; and block characters partially filled the character space with the
foreground color, splitting it in half either vertically or horizontally. Initially, IBM's
extended character set was stored on a physical chip in the display adapter. As
IBM-compatible machines spread throughout the globe, however, variants of the
extended character set were created by manufacturers of clones aimed at language groups
outside of North America and Western Europe. Crucially, for the production of text-mode
graphics, nearly all of these new “code pages” left the semi-graphical characters
untouched (figure 10). As clones of the IBM-compatible platform diffused
transnationally, they inadvertently produced a world-wide de facto standard for producing
text-mode graphics.
340Color output could be generated with a third-party adapter such as the Hercules Graphics Card. See:
Dan Gookin, DOS for Dummies (San Mateo, CA.: IDG Books Worldwide, 1991), 73.
341Thomas J. Glover and Millie M. Young, Pocket PCRef, 3rd ed. (Littleton, CO: Sequoia Publishing,
1993), 10–17.
193
In addition to the forty-eight semi-graphical characters, the IBM PC shipped with
a set of special instructions that allowed even more fine-grained control over the display
of text-mode graphics. The file ANSI.SYS was a device driver included in the Microsoft
Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) that moved the cursor arbitrarily around the screen,
made individual characters blink, and swapped among sixteen foreground and
background colors.
342
(Monochrome displays interpreted the color instructions along a
scale of grays.) ANSI represents a second layer of encoding between the binary and video
representations of binary-encoded text. ANSI commands were first rendered as ASCII
characters within a stream of text. ANSI sequences could thus be translated into binary
code and transmitted across a standard modem connection. Instead of displaying the
ANSI instructions to the user, however, the operating system on the receiving machine
would pluck them out of the incoming stream of text and execute them on the display
hardware.
With the diffusion of MS-DOS and ANSI.SYS, BBSes running on IBM-
compatible PCs began to offer similar text-mode graphics as Commodore and Atari
systems. Users, likewise, began to expect bulletin-board systems to exhibit a unique
visual character through the use of ANSI graphics. In BBS Secrets, a how-to books for
sysops, Ray Werner emphasized the importance of graphics for BBS callers. “A little
color,” he assured readers, “makes the board look interesting and unique, and can even
ease your caller's souls.”
343
Werner noted that the authors of BBS host software “nearly
342This discussion of ANSI draws on Michael A. Hargadon's thesis on the North American ANSI art
movement of the 1990s, see: Michael A. Hargadon, “Like City Lights, Receding: ANSi Artwork and
the Digital Underground, 1985-2000” (Concordia University, 2011), 100–113,
http://mhargadon.ca/media/mhargadon-thesis.pdf.
343Ray Werner, BBS Secrets (John Wiley & Sons Inc (Computers) (1995), Paperback, 668 pages, 1995),
194
always” included ANSI “paint” programs for designing titles, menus, and other interface
elements.
344
Soon, nearly all homegrown BBSes included text-mode graphics of one sort
or another.
From the late-1980s through the 1990s, the eighty columns and sixteen colors of
the IBM PC provided an near-universal technical framework for the production of BBS
graphics in North America. Even as more sophisticated graphical display technologies
entered the market, semi-graphical characters and ANSI codes continued to offer a high
degree of graphical sophistication without sacrificing the low barriers to entry and
interoperability that had characterized the first decade of BBSing. For MS-DOS users, no
special software was required to view these graphics. Furthermore, text mode graphics
could be translated into streams of binary data and transmitted over noisy telephone lines
82, http://www.librarything.com/work/12265688/book/105171569.
344Ibid.
Figure 10: The 8-bit "extended" character set found on the IBM PC (also known as
"Code Page 437"), 1981.
195
more efficiently than compressed image formats. Sysops, for their part, embraced text
mode graphics to express a unique visual personality for their BBSes.
By the early 1990s, “ANSI art” adorned the login and logoff screens, menus, and
messaging areas of many DOS-based BBSes in North America (figure 11). Whereas the
sysops of earlier systems manually constructed the visual elements of their boards using
text editing software, ANSI artists tended to work with tools specifically designed for the
production of visual images. TheDraw, first released in 1986 by Ian Davis, was a
widely-used shareware program for creating ANSI images and animations.
345
Technically,
it is accurate to describe TheDraw as a specialized text editor, since its primary outputs
are text-mode ANSI files. However, the user interface—complete with color palette and
drawing tools—is clearly designed for the production of visual images rather than text
documents or source code. TheDraw became an indispensable tool for the production of
text-mode graphics and by 1992, nearly 5,000 people had mailed $22 to Davis to register
the program.
ANSI art struck a productive balance between accessibility and complexity. No
special hardware was required to view ANSI graphics on a computer running DOS and
BBSes provided both an everyday demonstration of the sort of art that could be produced
with ANSI. Furthermore, because tools like TheDraw were distributed as shareware, they
were widely available to any BBS users interested in trying their hand. As artists adopted
text-mode ANSI as a visual medium, BBSes began to feature ever more elaborate
graphics. In some cases, a single ANSI image could extend far beyond the standard 25
345TheSoft Programming Services, “TheDraw Version 4.30 Color and Monochrome Screen Image
Generator/Editor Operation Manual,” 1991,
http://textfiles.com/computers/DOCUMENTATION/thedraw.txt.
196
rows of characters on a typical DOS screen. BBS callers encountering such an image
would be treated to a long scrolling mosaic of thousands of colorful ANSI characters.
ANSI artists, most of whom were young men, drew promiscuously from the visual
languages of superhero comics, subway graffiti, rave flyers, Japanese anime, videos
games, and science fiction to produce elaborate pastiches, layered with obtuse references
and coded messages.
As BBS users gradually adopted operating systems with graphical user interfaces
such as Window and OS/2, several software companies produced “graphical” BBS
systems. The most widely-discussed graphical system was the Remote Imaging Protocol
(RIP) by Telegrafix Communications, Inc.
346
Although RIP could be used to produce
mouse-driven BBS interfaces, a special RIP-compatible terminal program was required to
view them. In retrospect, it is clear that the accessibility and interoperability of text-mode
communication were among the central advantages of dial-up BBSes but many
contemporary critics assumed that their users would gladly abandon blocky ANSI
graphics for the vector images made possible by RIP. In 1994, David Pogue of MacWorld
predicted that graphical interfaces would soon “replace the boring scrolling text of
yesteryear.”
347
Pogue's argument rested on an assumption that non-technical users were
alienated by text-mode interfaces. With graphical protocols, he argued sarcastically, “you
can use a BBS without a degree from MIT.”
348

346None of the graphical systems seem to have been widely implemented but RIP was the subject of
several magazine articles and garnered close attention in most of the how-to books published after 1993.
347David Pogue, “Not Your Father’s BBS,” Macworld, August 1994,
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/science/docview/199383455/19A8896B22C4189PQ/171?
accountid=14749.
348Ibid.
197
Figure 11: Custom ANSI art for the Cat's Cradle BBS by numberoneprisoner, 1995.
198
At the start of the 1990s, technology writers like Pogue could not see that a
fundamental paradox lay at heart of the BBS technical culture. As much as BBSers were
at the vanguard of microcomputer communications, they were stubbornly committed to a
particular mode of interaction that they had nurtured and created for more than a decade.
BBSers may have seemed like “techies” but, on the whole, they were not so easily
dazzled by new communication technologies. Whereas text-mode BBS interfaces from
ASCII to ANSI had each built upon and maintained a degree of compatibility with a
pre-existing system, graphical protocols such as RIP represented a discontinuous break
with tradition. Furthermore, by the time that popular client software such as Qmodem had
implemented RIP, users who were inclined to experiment were already exploring new
(and newly-graphical) nationwide systems such as America Online, CompuServe, and, in
some areas, the World Wide Web. Dial-up BBSing was, for better or worse, defined by
and confined to text-mode communications.
Engineers conventionally conceptualize networking technology using a stack
metaphor. The lowest level of the stack refers to the physical infrastructure—wires and
airwaves—and each successive layer adds an additional layer of abstraction. In a BBS
network, the lowest level would be made up of the telephone network and data
communications standards described in Chapter 2. The next set of layers would include
character encoding schema such as ASCII and ANSI. These layers in the stack enable the
barest form of communication among computer owners but they do not yet proscribe
metaphorical structures such as the “forum” or “file library.” The conceptual organization
of resources and functions on a BBS requires the use of a specialized host program.
199
Decentralized innovation in the development of BBS host software
In the five years between Christensen and Seuss' Byte article in 1978 and the
publication of Myers' how-to book in 1983, a first generation of bulletin board systems
came online in North America. The designers of these early computer bulletin-boards,
steeped in the technical culture of microcomputing, were drawn to the technical
challenges of designing, building, and programming a homegrown BBS host program.
Once their own boards were up and running, however, many of these early sysops
decided to circulate their BBS software for use by other hobbyists. Programs like CBBS,
Apple BBS (also known as ABBS), and Forum-80 provided customizable templates for
the production of new systems. As these new boards continued the practice of informally
Figure 12: Logical structure of a typical one-liner BBS
200
circulating their modifications, a set of BBS conventions began to emerge. By 1983, the
typical bulletin-board system featured a combination of three functions—messaging,
file-sharing, and remote computing—organized into a series of hierarchical menus (figure
12).
CBBS as the archetypal “linear” bulletin board system
As the archetypal hobbyist system, CBBS served as common root from which
subsequent experiments branched off. As the name “computerized bulletin board”
suggests, CBBS was designed to provide the basic functionality of a traditional
cork-and-pins bulletin board. When Christensen and Seuss brought their system online in
1978, the underlying CBBS software system exposed six functions to incoming callers:
1. Log in
2. List saved messages
3. Enter a new message
4. Delete an old message
5. Search for a message
6. Log off
Like the cork bulletin boards that one might find on the wall of the local computer shop,
all of the messages on CBBS were publicly accessible. This reflected the founders'
expectations that callers would use the system to share information with one another. The
one exception to this default publicity was a function called “COMMENT” that was
invoked just before a user logged off the system. The COMMENT function provided a
private guestbook addressed to the system's administrators. Users took advantage of this
open-ended channel to leave suggestions for improvement, notes of congratulations, and
any other messages that they didn't want posted in the public forum.
201
In addition to reading and writing messages, CBBS provided several additional
features to make the system easier to use. More than 200 messages could be stored on the
system at once so Christensen added a simple search function to enable users to locate
specific messages by date, author, or keyword. The syntax for these commands could be
quite arcane, however, so an interactive help system was added to explain how each
command worked. Conversely, an “expert mode” simplified all of the system's menus to
reduce the amount of data being sent back to the user's terminal.
In 1978, the hardware and software ecology of microcomputing was highly
heterogeneous. As new users attempted to connect to their bulletin board, Christensen
Figure 13: The CBBS login screen as it appeared in Byte magazine (1978).
202
and Seuss continued to update the system in order to accommodate the wide variety of
their callers' hardware. Some folks called in with microcomputers, modems, and video
displays—the same hardware used to host CBBS—but many others employed an
unpredictable mix of quirky homebrew modems, used video terminals, and refurbished
teletype equipment. These latter interfaces were often designed according to the demands
of a particular time-sharing system and expected certain special characters to be sent
down the line in order to display properly. Furthermore, paper-based terminals offered a
crucial advantage over video terminals: users could simply refer to the paper gathering at
their feet in order to see a previous message. Video users without dedicated memory to
buffer their display, however, could not "scroll up" the text on their screen to see
something that they missed. Most of the development effort that went into CBBS focused
on accommodating these various input/output systems rather than improving or
experimenting with new features.
With the singing modem, humming PC, and clacking teleprinter (or buzzing video
display,) accessing CBBS was visceral sensory experience and the founders of the board
took care in the visual presentation of information on their system (figure 13). While
low-level tasks such as arranging for the modem to autonomously answer incoming calls
were complex, the user-facing elements of CBBS remained quite simple. Menus were
organized into a logical hierarchy, the archive of messages could be searched and sorted,
and many of the board's functions could be invoked with keyboard shortcuts. This
commitment to clarity extended to the care that Christensen invested in the board's visual
design. The login screen (reproduced in the pages of Byte) used asterisks, dashes, and
203
other punctuation marks to approximate design elements such as arrows and borders. The
tone of the text was friendly and visitors were invited to contact Christensen and Seuss
directly by telephone if they encountered any problems with the system. Through the
creative use of text, Christensen and Seuss imbued CBBS with a warm, welcoming
personality that established a convention for the many thousands of boards to follow.
The CBBS program represented a foundation for the design of future BBS host
software. For each incoming call, the host program controlled the modem, determined the
optimal connection speed, and selected an appropriate character encoding standard. From
there, it exposed a set of messaging functions to the caller through an interactive menu
system. These functions, in turn, allowed the caller to read and write messages to disk
without handing over complete control of the host system. For the sysop, CBBS offered
considerable opportunities for customization. Interface elements such as the opening
screen were stored in plain text files apart from the program's source code.
Administrators could therefore modify the appearance of their systems without having to
know any particular programming language. During the 1980s and 1990s, the authors of
hundreds of BBS programs adopted the CBBS idea to enable the production of
increasingly complex online systems that ran on countless microcomputer platforms. In
spite of this proliferation, each system shared a common conceptual ancestor in the basic
framework of CBBS.
Disjointed parallel development of early BBS software
By 1983, sysops no longer needed to design and program their BBS software
from scratch. Pre-built BBS host software, distributed electronically, dramatically
204
reduced the technical barriers to starting up a new BBS. Although there was considerable
innovation in BBS software during the 1980s, most BBS host programs were written and
maintained by just one or two programmers. Whereas widespread internet access
facilitated large-scale coordination of projects like Linux in the 1990s and 2000s,
programmers in the 1980s could not collaborate easily unless they lived near to one
another. Tom Jennings, author of the Fido host program, described dictating source code
to a remote collaborator over a long-distance telephone call as “the most painful code I
have ever written.”
349
Innovations spread among geographically dispersed BBS
programmers through inspiration, rather than direct collaboration. As copies of new host
programs were circulated among sysops, useful new features were transferred indirectly
as programmers attempted to imitate one another's innovations.
Although IBM PC clones became the dominant BBS host platform at the end of
the 1980s, lingering 8-bit systems from Apple, Atari, and Commodore continued to be
sites of considerable grassroots innovation. Commodore enthusiast and former C64
programmer, Bo Zimmerman cataloged eighty-six different BBS host programs for the
Commodore 64 and 128 computers in circulation during the mid-1980s. Reflecting on
this collection, Zimmerman argued that the principal advantage of running a BBS on a
machine like the Commodore 64 was its low cost:
Before the age of multi-tasking operating systems [such as OS/2 or Windows], the
prospect of running a BBS meant losing your computer for general use. If you
paid the price of a car for your computer, the way [IBM-compatible] folks have
always had to do, losing your computer to a full time BBS just wasn't worth it.
However, good 'ol [Commodore], whatever their other faults, gave us cheap
machines that did the job, which meant we could spend a couple hundred dollars
349Tom Jennings, “FOSSIL Drivers’ Ancient History,” FidoNews, February 3, 1992,
http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/FIDONET/FIDONEWS/fido0905.nws.
205
on a fancy set up, and then make it available to the modem using world, while still
reserving another machine for the games we loved so much.
350
Commodore, for its part, embraced this reputation as an affordable PC and explicitly
marketed its products to working families as alternatives to the higher-priced machines
sold by Apple and IBM.
351
The 64 Exchange family of BBSes represents a concise example of the indirect
diffusion of innovations in BBS software design. A BBS host program titled 6480
appeared around 1984 and changed hands so frequently that its original authorship
remains uncertain. Although the name “David Tingler” appears on screen when the
program starts up, if a visitor were to select the “version” feature from the main menu, a
different programmer named “John Collins” is given credit!
352
6480 afforded very little
customization beyond changing the name of the BBS and adding a master password.
Nevertheless, it reliably performed the same simple function as an FTP server: allowing
remote users to upload and download files from the host's disk drives. In 1986, a new
BBS program, titled 6485 credited to “Ivory Joe,” began to circulate on Commodore 64
boards in Texas. 6485 was nearly identical to 6480 except that it now featured public and
private messaging along with the file transfer features. Either the authors of 6485 had
access to the original source code of 6480, they reverse-engineered the compiled binary,
or they designed their new program to look nearly identical to the popular predecessor.
350Bo Zimmerman, “Carrier Detected,” C= Commodore BBS Programs Web Page!, accessed March 12,
2014, http://www.zimmers.net/bbs/index.html.
351A Commodore advertisement in 1983 began, “A personal computer is supposed to be a computer for
persons. Not just wealthy persons. Or whiz-kid persons. Or privileged persons.” This ad is reproduced
in Montfort, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1));, 214.
352Bo Zimmerman, “6480 BBS v2.2 Preview Page,” accessed March 12, 2014,
http://www.zimmers.net/bbs/68bbs.html.
206
One year later, the family tree appeared to grow another branch as a new BBS titled 6487
surfaced in North Carolina. In addition to the file transfer features of 6480 and the
messaging features introduced in 6485, the new software included a more sophisticated
password management function and a “news” file announcing the status of the system to
callers.
From 1984 to 1987, at least three different programmers worked on variations of
64 Exchange (figure 14). Although 6480 was little more than a file-sharing tool, by the
end of those three years, the latest iteration, 6487, included the core features of a
fully-realized BBS: messaging, file-sharing, and a persistent user directory. This
development cycle cannot be described as “collaborative” since the programmers were
not in direct communication with one another. Nor was the transfer of ideas strictly a
matter of inspiration. inspiring since some amount of code appears to have been shared
among the three. Instead, the disjointed development of 64 Exchange depicts an early
form of distributed development in which programs circulated more freely than their
programmers. As the BBSing population grew, however, more explicitly coordinated
forms of collaboration became possible. Unlike the free and open source software
(FOSS) model made famous by the GNU project, BBS software tended to fall into one of
three classes: shareware, public domain, and commercial. In the discourse of BBS users
and sysops, these terms took on specific social meanings that rested on their shared
history in the culture of amateur, rather than academic, computing.
207
Collaboration and commercialization in BBS shareware
Early BBS software like 64 Exchange pushed 8-bit computing platforms to their
technical limits. With the diffusion of IBM-compatible “clone” PCs, however, the
lower-cost, lower-powered systems from Atari, Commodore, and Radio Shack fell out of
favor with computer hobbyists. By the end of the 1980s, the typical one-liner BBS in
North America was hosted on an IBM-compatible “clone” PC with a 16-bit processor
running the Microsoft Disk Operating System (DOS.) These systems offered
improvements in processor speed and memory capacity, but the crucial advantage for
BBS programmers was that the operating system increased the portability of
communications software. Whereas earlier BBS programmers had to contend
individually with the idiosyncrasies of each brand of microcomputer, modem, and disk
drive, DOS provided a relatively standard set of interfaces for interacting with the
computer's input and output devices. Further, software development tools such as
Borland's Turbo Pascal for DOS facilitated the production of source code that was easier
to read (and, therefore, modify) than the conventional mix of BASIC and assembly found
on most 8-bit BBS programs.
Figure 14: Stand-by menus for the 6480, 6485, and 6487 BBS host programs.
208
Beginning in the mid-1980s, hundreds of BBS host programs were written for
DOS. Some began as “ports” of programs originally written for Apple, Atari, or
Commodore systems but many others were written specifically to run on
IBM-compatible clones. As BBSing grew increasingly popular during the late-1980s and
early-1990s, a varied market emerged for commercial BBS host software. One class of
potential customers wanted “turnkey” BBS software that required very little technical
knowledge to operate, while another class wanted software that they could tinker with
and modify. BBS authors, many of whom regarded BBSing as a hobby, responded to
these opportunities by experimenting with a diverse array of commercialization
strategies, most of which could be collected under the broad category of “shareware.”
WWIV, pronounced “World War Four,” became one of the most popular BBS
programs for “one-liner” hobbyist BBSes thanks in part to its unusual commercial model
and accessible source code. In the summer of 1984, Wayne Bell was a teenage computer
enthusiast living in a wealthy part of Los Angeles county. During his senior year of high
school, Bell wrote the first version of WWIV in GW-BASIC, a dialect of the BASIC
programming language that came bundled with DOS.
353
Prior to writing his own board,
Bell had only used Apple BBSes and, consistent with other technical hobbyists, Bell's
goal in writing WWIV 1.0 was as much about learning his way around an IBM PC as it
was an effort to start a online community. After graduating from high school, Bell
re-wrote WWIV from the ground up in the Pascal programming language, released
version 2.0, and took his own BBS off-line as he prepared to matriculate at UCLA in the
353Wayne Bell, “The Official History of WWIV,” WWIVNEWS, January 1991,
http://textfiles.com/bbs/WWIVNEWS/wwiv9101.txt.
209
fall of 1985. During the winter break of his freshman year of college, Bell started
working on the WWIV software again and developed it into a program that could be used
by other sysops. Over the next twelve months, Bell released several incremental updates
that added new features and fixed bugs reported by his users. During this period, his own
board went up and down as it moved between his parents house, his dorm at UCLA, and
the care of a friend.
The versions of WWIV that Bell released publicly were hardly “turnkey” BBS
packages for the non-programmer. Version 3.11 was distributed as a 90 kilobyte archive
containing nine files of Pascal source code, eleven default menu templates, and two text
files explaining how to compile and configure the system.
354
In the documentation to
version 3.21d, Bell was not yet using the term “shareware” to describe his project but he
included his parents' home address asked that users mail in a $25 “donation” if they
found the program “useful.”
355
There was no technical incentive for sending in a
donation, nor technical penalty for failing to do so—the software was distributed as a
fully functional collection of source code after all. Although Bell chided users who failed
to pay the modest donation as “stingy,” he entreated them to write anyway so that he
could add their system to his list of known WWIV boards.
356
As an undergraduate living at
home, Bell's interest in spreading and improving his software superseded its commercial
potential.
354Wayne Bell, WWIV, version 3.11, 1986,
http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/WWIV/wwiv311.zip.
355Wayne Bell, “WWIV v3.21d,” 1986.
356Ibid., 21.
210
By January 1987, a sizable number of people were evidently using WWIV to run
their own BBSes, many of whom were beginning to extensively customize the basic
system provided in Bell's distribution. In addition to allowing the free distribution of his
software, Bell explicitly encouraged this type of DIY modification, suggesting that
sysops should feel free to build unique menus for their boards. In fact, he seemed to
playfully challenge fellow programmers, warning them that they should dive into the core
logic of his program only “if you feel brave enough [and] you really know what you are
doing.”
357
Bell's sole request was that users distribute their modifications separately from
the original WWIV source code. He was aware that several modified versions were
already in circulation and feared that he would not be able to offer customer support to
registered users running heavily-modified software.
358

Although Bell did not release a new version of WWIV for another twelve months,
version 3.21d spread far beyond his circle of friends in Southern California. Bell's
permissive attitude about licensing and modification attracted other hobbyists who
enjoyed exploring the source code and learning how to make changes to the system.
Within a few months, several modifications were in circulation alongside the main WWIV
package that added new features or changed the behavior of the software. In some cases,
modifications to WWIV were bundled together and released under a new name as a
wholly different BBS program. VBBS, TAG, Telegard, and Renegade, for example, each
descended from Bell's original 1987 source code and became relatively popular systems
on their own.
359
These various forks were then independently maintained in parallel with
357Bell, “WWIV v3.21d.”
358Ibid.
359VBBS, or Virtual BBS, is a particularly compelling example of the generativity of Bell's attitude toward
211
WWIV by their own adherents. In later versions, the WWIV documentation acknowledged
this legacy in a short historical note: “Many modern day PASCAL BBS systems are
based wholly or in part upon [an] early version of WWIV .”
360
Rather than squash these
derivative systems through legal means or attempt to besmirch their reputations socially,
Bell discursively embraced them as distant nodes in a distributed network of
mutually-beneficial software development.
The widespread modification, reuse, and re-distribution of the Wayne Bell's
source code created a large population of users and sysops familiar with the internal
structure of WWIV . In June of 1987, during the free time left over after his summer job,
Bell began a second complete re-write of WWIV using the C programming language.
361

Whereas earlier versions were the work of a single author, Bell found himself
increasingly collaborating, formally and informally, directly and indirectly, with a
growing community of users. The resulting system, released as version 4.0 in December
1987, remained the canonical major version of WWIV for more than two decades. In
addition to many improvements to the WWIV source code, the new version differed from
its predecessors in two crucial ways: the documentation was considerably expanded and
improved, and the shareware policy was clarified. Each of these changes reflected Bell's
interest in sustaining and growing the community of WWIV users.
derivative works. Not only was VBBS based on the WWIV source code but it could be run either as a
standalone BBS or as an extension to an existing WWIV system. See: Roland De Graaf, “The Virtual
BBS/NET Version 4.01,” 1990.
360WWIV Software Services, “WWIV BBS Documentation v4.30 Public Beta 1 For the Sysop,” 1999,
http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/WWIV/wwiv430.txt.
361Bell, “The Official History of WWIV .”
212
Bell remained the sole author of WWIV but the new package included
contributions from several other BBS enthusiasts and support was available throughout
the US thanks to a volunteer support corps. The revised and enlarged documentation for
WWIV version 4 was not written by Bell but by William Daystrom, a member of the
WWIV user community. Daystrom's documentation, which stretched over five files and
more than 27,000 words, was shipped in the same archive as the WWIV source code but
Daystrom retained the copyright and the documents were credited to Daystrom's
company, White Star Software. In a file titled READ.ME, Bell included a brief note
thanking Daystrom for his work, admitting that if Daystrom hadn't decided to “just do it,”
there would not have been any “real” documentation for the new software. The
documentation also now also included a file titled SUPPORT.LST that included a list of
23 “support bulletin boards.” The distribution of the support boards' area codes illustrated
the geographic spread of WWIV . In addition to Bell's home state of California, users could
dial local support boards in Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Lousiana, Missouri, North Carolina,
New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington. Clearly, WWIV had grown into
something larger than a teenager working along in his dorm room.
The gradual incorporation of community contributions into WWIV represents an
intermediate step towards the emergence of large-scale distributed collaboration that
would enable projects such as Linux beginning in the mid-1990s. Initially, the
development of WWIV began to follow a path of indirect innovation similar to 64
Exchange. Early adaptations of Bell's Pascal source code such as TAG and Telegard were
released as independent “forks” instead of improvements to be incorporated into a future
213
version of the original software. But Bell's eagerness to keep in touch with the users of
WWIV (and his generous shareware policy) enabled the growing network of users to
contribute their improvements, modifications, and expertise to a common pool of WWIV
resources. The emergence of “support boards” at the start of the 1990s reflects the
transformation of WWIV from an experimental bit of code into a lively technical culture
with an evolving piece of software at its center.
Tracing the genealogy of public domain source code
Although users were free to modify WWIV to their heart's content, Wayne Bell
controlled the canonical version of the software and collected all of the shareware
registration fees. The source code to Citadel BBS, in contrast, was committed to the
public domain early in its development and spawned countless forks, ports, derivative
and duplicate systems, none of which was governed by a central authority. One reason for
for all of this activity was that Citadel featured an unusual user interface that attracted a
dedicated population of users and developers. Whereas most BBS software enforced a
hierarchical structure of menus descending from a “home” or “main” menu, Citadel
BBSes were organized into a series of “rooms” and “corridors,” each with its own
forums, file libraries, and special features.
362
Users navigated the system by “moving”
among the various rooms. The spatial organization of Citadel BBSes gave users the sense
that they were visiting a three-dimensional virtual world rather than a computerized
bulletin board.
362John V . Hedtke, Using Computer Bulletin Boards (MIS Press,U.S. (1990), Paperback, 290 pages,
1990), 177–180, http://www.librarything.com/work/1254908/book/105171578.
214
The first version of Citadel was written in 1980 by Jeff Prothero, a student at the
University of Washington, for his own homegrown BBS using the C programming
language.
363
Prothero took as much inspiration from DandD.pas, a text adventure
program popular among UW students, as he did from Christensen and Seuss' notion of
the “computerized bulletin board.” As a result, Citadel software was frequently used to
build text-based “virtual worlds” rather than a community forum or file-sharing platform.
Prothero ran the first Citadel board on a Heathkit H89 microcomputer in Seattle, WA for
just three months during the winter of 1981 before a hardware failure forced him to retire
the system.
364
In January 1982, he committed the source code to the public domain and
shared it with anyone else who wished to try their hand at running a similar system.
365
In
April 1982, David Mitchell brought a second Citadel system online from Bainbridge
Island in Puget Sound using a Teletek FDC-1 microcomputer.
366
Citadel's unique
“room-based” architecture and accessible source code soon attracted other programmers
who adapted the early Citadel code to build their own dial-up virtual worlds.
Both Prothero's Heathkit and Mitchell's Teletek computers were relatively
uncommon architectures in the early-1980s and Citadel was soon ported to run on more
widely-available Apple, Atari, Commodore, and Radio Shack machines. In 1984, Hue A.
White Jr. of Minneapolis, MN (better known as “Hue Jr.”) released a new version titled
Citadel-86 designed to run on the DOS operating system. As the 8-bit microcomputers
were replaced by more sophisticated hardware, enthusiasts wrote new versions of Citadel
363Prothero is widely known by the handle “Cynbe ru Taren,” occasionally abbreviated to “CrT.”
364Cynbe ru Taren, “History.doc,” December 7, 1982.
365Ibid.
366Ibid.
215
for the IBM PC, Macintosh, and Amiga. Consistent with its origins in the undergrad
computing culture of the University of Washington, Citadel was also ported to the UNIX
operating systems found in most university computer labs. A decade after Hue Jr.'s
influential port, more than 73 distinct versions of Citadel were available on the web,
credited to nearly as many different authors, and covering a wide variety of hardware and
software configurations (figure 15).
367
Collaboration in the development of Citadel more closely resembled the sort of
coordinated open source development structures that would emerge in the 1990s. One
reason for this was the Prothero's original release remained explicitly in the public
domain and many of the derivative systems followed this example. Gary Meadows of the
Sacramento-based Asgard variant wrote, “The [Asgard-86] code is a simple
public-domain release: it can be used without fee in commercial systems, repackaged and
sold, or whatever takes your fancy.”
368
Not all authors were as eager to give up the
copyright to their code but the complex history of Citadel made it difficult to disentangle
one programmer's contribution from another. Hue A. White Jr. released all of the source
code to Citadel-86 v3.45 with a weary set of notes regarding the long, messy history of
the system: “Please keep in mind this source has been worked on by at least a half dozen
people, with various and changing skill levels.”
369
He reserved the copyright to a few
specific modules that he wrote independently but otherwise, his modifications were
simply merged into the on-going, multi-authored source code tree.
367“Citadel Family Tree,” May 1996, http://anticlimactic.retrovertigo.com/Miscellaneous/cittree.txt.
368Gary Meadows, “aaBuyMe.doc,” July 5, 1990.
369Hue A. White Jr., “READ.ME,” July 5, 1993.
216
By the late 1980s, the source code to many Citadel variants resembled a
well-worn library book, complete with marginalia and dog-eared pages. Following
Prothero's example, downstream authors began to informally tag their contributions with
three-letter initials. Most of the source files include a brief chronology like this one from
CTDL.C in Citadel-85 v3.45:
/*
* history
*
* 86Aug16 HAW Kill history from file because of space problems.
* 84May18 JLS/HAW Greeting modified for coherency.
* 84Apr04 HAW Upgrade to BDS 1.50a begun.
* 83Mar08 CrT Aide-special functions installed & tested...
* 83Feb24 CrT/SB Menus rearranged.
* 82Dec06 CrT 2.00 release.
* 82Nov05 CrT removed main() from room2.c and split into
sub-fn()s
*/
Beyond simply listing their contributions, the authors occasionally gave lengthy credit to
their peers and forebears for ideas and inspiration. In 1988, Vince Quaresima
significantly modified Citadel-86 as the basis for a commercial release. In the
documentation to K2NEDOOR.C, a module that enabled Citadel sysops to run
third-party add-ons developed for more conventional BBS packages, Quaresima credited
Alan Bowen for “hacking” an earlier version of the feature. “If it were not for [Bowen's]
experience,” wrote Quaresima, “Doors for Citadel:K2NE probably would never have
come to pass.”
370
At the risk of false modesty, Quaresima downplayed his own
contribution as “kludgey.” The collegiality of Quaresima's comments is exemplary of the
discourse woven through the many variations of Citadel that have survived since the
1980s.
370Vince Quaresima, “K2NEDOOR.C,” September 15, 1988.
217
In addition to Prothero's unusually liberal licensing, Citadel emerged out of
somewhat different cultural circumstances than BBS software like WWIV or 64
Exchange. Whereas the majority of BBS software grew out of the hobby computing
Figure 15: Freejack, “Column #3 Citadel Family Tree,” The Cita News, December
1994, http://anticlimactic.retrovertigo.com/Newsletters/news9412.txt.
218
tradition of Christensen and Suess, Citadel was equally the product of the academic
computing culture of the 1970s that spawned the free software movement at MIT in the
1980s. Many of the programmers who contributed to the Citadel family described their
interest as exploratory or academic in nature. Hue Jr. defended the uneven quality of his
source code as a result of his own process of learning to program: “I myself got the
source when I was a raw novice and have long used it as an experimental programming
arena, and have left those experiments in 'cuz they work, more or less.”
371
John Luce, the
author of CopperCit, explained that as an assembly language programmer, he was drawn
to Citadel because he hoped that it would motivate him to learn the C programming
language. In the 1980s, C became the dominant programming language in many areas of
the computing industry and learning could therefore enlarge a programmer's professional
opportunities.
372
Luce remembers struggling initially but, although his code was “ugly,”
he finally managed to get a new version of Citadel up and running: “A 'C' Poet I was not.
But it got me the experience to get a job.”
373
Just as Wayne Bell had inadvertently
provided the WWIV community with a working model of an archetypal bulletin board
system, Citadel served a similarly pedagogical function for students and programmers
interested in the project of building virtual worlds during the 1980s and 1990s.
The peculiar meaning of “commercial” in multi-line BBS software
As lively and active as their communities may have been, neither WWIV nor
Citadel were among the most widely installed bulletin board systems. Both were
371White Jr., “READ.ME.”
372Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, 106.
373John Luce, “CopperCit, Part of the Citadel BBS Lineage,” December 18, 2003,
http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/COPPERCIT/luce.txt.
219
well-suited to “one-liner” systems run by hobbyists but as interest in “going online” grew
during the early 1990s, entrepreneurial sysops sought out more robust software that could
support multi-line BBSes. Unlike the shareware and freeware packages that drove most
hobby systems, “commercial” BBS software cost hundreds of dollars, often required
specialized hardware, and included all the trapping of an enterprise software product:
shrink-wrapped packaging, formal documentation, and 24-hour customer support.
Although they could handle dozens of simultaneous connections, these systems rarely
deviated from the fundamental “linear” structure of the typical one-liner BBS. Instead, by
bringing more than one user into the system at once, they expanded the temporal and
social dimensions of otherwise familiar features. Asynchronous messaging was
accompanied by real-time chat, and turn-based gaming was extended to include
simultaneous play.
Although multi-user, time-sharing operating systems like UNIX were common by
the 1980s, the majority of microcomputers were designed for use by just one user at a
time. This technical limitation two key implications for BBS sysops and users. First and
foremost, it meant that a PC acting as a BBS host could not be used for any other task. If
the sysop wanted to play a game, use a word processor, or call into another BBS, they
would have to take their own system off-line. The second implication was that most
BBSes accepted only one incoming connection at a time. If one user called in while
another was reading messages or downloading files, the second user would hear a busy
signal over the line and have to wait to call back later. To add a second connection, the
220
sysop needed a second phone line, a second modem, and software that could reliably
switch between the two connections.
In the absence of multi-tasking operating systems, sysops of the 1980s developed
two creative approaches to expanding their systems.
374
Desqview by Quarterdeck Office
Systems added multi-tasking features to DOS by assigning separate memory and CPU
cycles to each process. By running two or more copies of the same BBS program in
Desqview, a high-end PC could interact with multiple callers simultaneously.
375
Without
the use of additional specialized software, these callers could not communicate directly
with one another, but, for popular boards, this approach reduced the likelihood of busy
signals. Running a BBS under Desqview became so common by the early 1990s, that
several commercial BBS software providers designed their systems specifically to take
advantage of Desqview's multi-tasking features.
376
A second, more expensive solution to
creating multi-line BBSes was to purchase multiple PCs (each with its own modem and
phone line,) build a local network and share a single database of messages and files
(figure 16). In a small number of cases, the two approaches were combined into a
network of multi-tasking PCs, each with a stack of modems and a copy of Desqview. In
practice, the costs associated with building and maintaining a multi-line system scaled up
so steep that nearly all multi-line BBSes charged a subscription fee for access.
374For a more detailed technical discussion of multi-line BBS architectures, see: Wolfe, The BBS
Construction Kit, 319–346.
375A single PC running multiple copies of a BBS under Desqview needed more available RAM and a
faster processor than the typical BBS host because its resources were shared among each process. Or, as
David Wolfe helpfully recalled in 1994, “Just a few years ago, running more than one active task on a
single machine meant both tasks went really slooooowwwwww.”Ibid., 321.
376IBM's OS/2 operating system was another popular solution to adding multi-tasking to DOS-based
BBSes. Both the PCBoard and Wildcat! BBS host programs recommended Desqview or OS/2. See:
Chambers, Running a Perfect Bbs/Book and Disk, 56.
221
Multi-line BBSes tended to run one of a small number of “commercial” host
programs. Colloquially, the distinction between “shareware” and “commercial” BBS
software was cultural and structural rather than technical or economical. Wayne Bell's
registration requirement was certainly a form of commercialism but WWIV remained
ideologically situated in the technical culture of amateur telecommunications. BBS
systems marked as “commercial,” however, attempted to distinguish themselves by
appealing to a non-hobbyist ideology through self-branding. PCBoard marketed itself as
“Professional Bulletin Board Software,” The Major BBS promised to “coordinate
communications between hundreds of people, around your office or around the world,”
and TBBS assured customers that “Companies who win know what it takes. And it takes
Figure 16: At its peak, Rusty & Edie's BBS consisted of more than 128 PCs, one for
each incoming caller. eSoft, Inc., “TBBS Version 2.2,” Boardwatch, May 1992; Russell
Hardenburgh and Edwina Hardenburgh, “The Birth of Rusty N Edie’s BBS,” accessed
June 18, 2014,
http://web.archive.org/web/20060114152623/http://www.pixi.com/~irvdili/page-22.htm.
222
TBBS.”
377
Technical how-to books likewise featured “demo” versions of commercial BBS
software as bonus CD-ROMs. Running a Perfect BBS included a copy of Wildcat! Lite
and BBS Secrets included “trial” versions of Wildcat! and PCBoard. While books written
for BBS callers discussed all of the different shareware and public domain software they
were likely to encounter, books aimed at BBS sysops seldom mentioned non-commercial
systems. Serious sysops, they argued, should purchase software from “well-established”
companies.
378
Selecting a BBS host package
Despite the vast number of different programs in circulation, nearly all BBS host
systems provided the same core set of features: messaging, file-sharing, and
remote-computing. Faced with this daunting volume of seemingly similar software, the
decision to adopt a particular piece of software was often based on cultural, rather than
technological reasons. Bulletin board systems were frequently identified by their host
software, i.e. a “Fido board” or a “Wildcat system,” and the choice of host software
carried significant symbolic weight. When calling a new BBS, experienced users could
easily identify the host software used by the remote board and, depending on the social
meanings they attached to that software, this could be a strongly positive or negative first
impression.
377PCBoard, “Virus Got You Down?,” Boardwatch, May 1992; The Major BBS, version 6 (Galacticomm,
Inc., 1992); eSoft, Inc., “Sysops Who Win Know What It Takes.,” Boardwatch, October 1995.
378See, for example, S. Carol Allen, How to Successfully Run a Bbs for Profit/Book and Disk (Infolink
(1993), Edition: Bk&Disk, Paperback, 302 pages, 1993), 70–72,
http://www.librarything.com/work/2139314/book/105171524.
223
Age played an important role in the social organization of bulletin board systems
in a given area. In 1990, as modem use grew exponentially through the US, the BBSing
population experienced a generational split. Adults with several years of online
experience were generally not eager to interact with groups of high school students
trading insults. One long-term BBS caller in the Los Angeles area remembers actively
avoiding any system running WWIV because of the likelihood that he would be a decade
older than the rest of the users. Instead, he looked for BBSes running software introduced
in the early 1980s such as Fido or RBBS. Older systems, he reasoned, attracted older
callers who were more likely to engage in “reasonably serious debate” rather than simply
pranking one another or “uploading viruses.”
379
Teens, for their part, also used BBS
software as a marker of affinity. One former teen BBSer from Phoenix remembers
thinking that any multi-line board was likely to be populated by boring adults and looked
instead for boards running variants of WWIV such as Renegade.
BBS host software also earned symbolic meaning if it was used by a particularly
famous (or infamous) bulletin board. Telegard, for example, was a fork of WWIV that
included a feature to “hide” files on a BBS. This feature was exploited by the sysops of
notorious “pirate” boards to hide unauthorized copies of commercial software and,
though Telegard was later developed and deployed in a variety of contexts, it never lost
its illicit reputation.
380
Similarly, TBBS was used by several of the longest-running and
most populous systems in North America.
381
The thousands of users who regularly called
379Charles P. Hobbs, “The Modem World,” 2000, http://textfiles.com/history/modemwld.txt.
380Martin Pollard, “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish...,” December 8, 1991,
http://textfiles.com/bbs/telegard.txt.
381eSoft, Inc., “Sysops Who Win Know What It Takes.”
224
systems like Pennsylvania Online, Springfield Public Access, The Gay and Lesbian
Information Bureau (GLIB) came to associate TBBS with large-scale online services with
institutional affiliations rather than hobbyists systems run out of a neighbor's home.
As with many aspects of the modem world, geography was also a powerful factor
in the decision to adopt one or another BBS host package. Various regions of the US and
Canada were marked by the prevalence of particular host software, which in turn
reflected the concentration of peer expertise and support in the region. In 1984, several
BBSes in the St. Louis area all began to run Fido although the software was authored by
a programmer in San Francisco. At the time, the city of St. Louis had a particularly active
club dedicated to the somewhat uncommon DEC Rainbow PC, and many of the BBSers
all belonged to the club. By choosing to run the same software, members of the club
ensured that they had a trusted friend nearby who might be able to help out when bugs
inevitably arose.
Because BBS users tended to focus their activity to a local calling area, however,
these regional differences were often invisible until the user was forced to move. In 1992,
Tom Kirkland, sysop of the Cincidel BBS, recalls moving from Minnesota, “a hotbed of
Citadel activity,” to Ohio, “a bastion of flashing ANSI and callback verify BBSs.”
382

Kirkland set up his bulletin board, hoping to convert some of the local BBSers away from
“linear” BBSes to Citadel's “room-based” architecture. Ultimately, Kirkland's evangelical
efforts were not successful (his new BBS was “greeted by the local modem community
with a chorus of yawns”) but the clash in regional preferences lead Kirkland and one of
382Tom Kirkland, “The QWK Gate or Why Anybody in Their Right Mind Would Want to Connect to
Another Net,” Citanews, April 1993, http://anticlimactic.retrovertigo.com/Newsletters/news9304.txt.
225
his new neighbors to design a messaging gateway between their two boards so that users
of Kirkland's Citadel could communicate with users of more conventional systems.
383

In spite of the rich technical culture and diverse models of collaboration and
commercialization, the practical experience of operating a BBS remained remarkable
stable from the early 1980s to the late 1990s. A user of CBBS in 1978 would have had no
trouble recognizing and operating the messaging features of a bulletin board running 64
Exchange in 1986 or WWIV in 1996. The transition from ASCII to ANSI and the
development of multi-line software may have enabled richer visual and social systems,
but the messaging aspects of the BBS user experience continued to be structured through
hierarchical text-mode menus. File-sharing, however, involved a different set of technical
constraints. As home computing grew beyond its hobbyist roots during the 1980s, users
who wanted to exchange programs and data that were poorly served by error-prone
ASCII text-mode transfers. Instead, BBSers began to exchange files in compressed
binary formats using specialized file transfer protocols. And, yet, even as these new
techniques grew more sophisticated, their design indicated a persistent commitment to
maintaining interoperability and accessibility.
Beyond ASCII and ANSI: Protocols for error-correction and compression
The difference between a “message” and a “file” was fuzzy on many early
bulletin-board systems. Indeed, what is an e-mail but a text file transmitted over a
telephone line? A meaningful distinction exists, however, in the case of digital images,
383For a closer look at efforts to interconnect BBSes, see Chapter 4.
226
compiled programs, and compressed data, often referred to as “binaries.” Binary files
consist of a series of binary digits intended to be interpreted by the microprocessor or
another program, not read by the user directly. Attempting to send a binary file over the
line to a terminal that expects a stream of ASCII characters will, at best, fill the terminal's
screen (or printer) with nonsense characters. Whereas BBSers could adopt the existing
ASCII standard for the exchange of text-mode menus and messages, new “file transfer
protocols” were required to exchange binary files.
Hobbyist innovation in error-correction protocols
In practice, binary file transfers are much more sensitive to errors than exchange
of human-readable text. Should a few characters be mistranslated in a text file, a human
Figure 17: Illustration of an XMODEM file transfer rendered in ASCII. Larry Jordan,
“XMODEM File Transfer Protocol,” 1983,
http://www.textfiles.com/programming/xmodem.txt.
227
reader will still be able to interpret the meaning of the text.
384
If just one character is
mistranslated in a binary file, however, the program may fail to execute or, worse, may
perform erratically and exhibit unpredictable bugs. This sensitivity to error made binary
transfers difficult over noisy telephone lines. All binary transfer protocols therefore
included an “error correction” algorithm that attempted to detect and re-transmit
mistranslated bytes in mid-stream.
XMODEM, designed and implemented by Ward Christensen in the
late-1970s,
385386
served as the de facto standard personal computer file transfer protocol
for more than a decade.
387
As one how-to book put it, “Regardless of what other transfer
protocols your communications program and the BBS support, you can be sure that both
will support XMODEM.”
388
Although XMODEM was revised, updated, and superseded
by more sophisticated, robust protocols during the 1980s, it remained in use as a reliable
fall-back option due to its availability across microcomputer platforms.
389
In an interview
384“If, for example, the word COMPUTE! were changed to COMPOTE! by line noise or some other error,
a person reading the text would probably notice the mistake and be able to infer how the word is
supposed to read.”Arlan R. Levitan, “Telecomputing Today,” COMPUTE!, May 1985,
https://archive.org/stream/1985-05-compute-magazine/Compute_Issue_060_1985_May.
385There is some disagreement over the date that Christensen released XMODEM. Accounts vary between
1975 and 1979. See: Chuck Forsberg, ed., “XMODEM/YMODEM PROTOCOL REFERENCE,”
October 10, 1985, http://www.textfiles.com/programming/ymodem.txt; Hedtke, Using Computer
Bulletin Boards, 65. Christensen did not publish an authoritative XMODEM specification until 1982
after “many people” asked him for documentation. Ward Christensen, “XMODEM PROTOCOL
OVERVIEW,” January 1, 1982, http://www.textfiles.com/apple/xmodem.
386XMODEM was developed by the same Ward Christensen who co-founded CBBS, the first dial-up
BBS. For more information on Christensen and CBBS see Chapters 2 and 3.
387In 1992, for example, Jim Heid wrote, “...the underlying details behind these protocols aren't important.
What is important is that you set up your program to use a transfer protocol that the sending computer
also supports. I recommend starting out with XMODEM. As you become an experienced downloader,
you might want to experiment with other protocols to see if they reduce downloading times, and if so,
by how much.” Jim Heid, “Downloading Freeware and Shareware,” Macworld, December 1992,
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/science/docview/199368542/3554F296B5374BD3PQ/54?
accountid=14749.
388Hedtke, Using Computer Bulletin Boards, 64.
389A decade after Christensen's first implementation, new implementations of XMODEM continued to be
written, e.g. Bert Kerkhof, “XMODEM: File Transfer for Commodore 64 and 128,” COMPUTE!,
228
from 1985, Christensen defended his decision not to add new features to XMODEM,
arguing that its “incredible simplicity” enabled programmers to implement the protocol in
their preferred programming languages across multiple incompatible microcomputer
platforms.
The XMODEM protocol and its error detection algorithm served both a technical
and pedagogical function for microcomputer programmers interested in
telecommunications. Not only was the protocol simple enough to implement in the
BASIC programming language but its logic could be easily understood with no prior
experience in digital communications theory. In an article about XMODEM circulated
online, technical writer Larry Jordan demonstrated the basic error correction mechanism
in an ASCII illustration of a typical file transfer session (figure 17). The record of two
machines communicating using the XMODEM protocol reads like the transcript of an
uneventful exchange between telegraph operators.
Indeed, the design of the XMODEM file transfer protocol takes advantage of
several special “control characters” that were originally included in the ASCII standard to
enable communication between teleprinters. When the receiving computer is ready to
accept data, it begins to transmit 00001111 every ten seconds until the transmitting
computer initiates a transfer. This sequence of eight binary digits—one byte—
corresponds to the ASCII character meaning “NAK” or “Negative Acknowledgement.”
390
If, after nine repetitions, no remote transfer is initiated, the receiver assumes that the line
is dead and disconnects. To initiate a transfer, the transmitting computer at the other end
January 1987, https://archive.org/stream/1987-01-compute-magazine/Compute_Issue_080_1987_Jan.
390See the ASCII reference table in Fig. 3.
229
of the line sends a 132-byte packet beginning with 00000001, the ASCII character
meaning “SOH” or “Start of Header.” SOH is followed by two one-byte block ID
numbers (one counting up, the other counting down), 128 bytes of data, and a one-byte
“checksum.”
391
The checksum enables automated error detection through a quick series of
arithmetical operations.
Before the transmitting computer sends out a block of data using XMODEM, it
determines a checksum by calculating the sum of all the bytes in the data block modulo
255. The final step ensured that the checksum would be a value between 0 and 255, no
bigger than a single byte. The one-byte checksum is then packaged up and sent along
with the data block. After transmission, the receiving computer re-calculates the
checksum on its own using the same algorithm and compares its outcome to the
checksum sent by the transmitting computer. If they are equal, the receiver assumes that
the transfer was successful and responds with 00000110, meaning “ACK” or
“Acknowledge.” If they are not equal, the data block is discarded and the receiver
transmits “NAK” instead. Once again, the receiver waits for nine cycles before
disconnecting. Depending on the result of the previous transmission, the sender either
transmits the next data block or re-transmits the previous block. When all of the data has
been sent, the sender transmits an 00000100, meaning “EOT” or “End of Transmission,”
and both machines disconnect.
The adoption of XMODEM throughout BBSing was politically significant above
and beyond its technological affordances. Unlike contemporary file transfer protocols
391An XMODEM checksum is the sum of all the bytes in the data block modulo 255. Both the transmitting
and receiving computers calculate this value for each block of data. If the two checksums match, then
the computer assumes that the transmission was free of error.
230
such as CompuServe's B and Columbia University's Kermit, XMODEM was neither a
commercial product nor the result of academic research. This is not to say that there was
animosity between the hobbyist and academic communities—indeed, there was quite a
bit of overlap—but protocols popular on university campuses such as UUCP were not
designed with microcomputers in mind.
392
Christensen, in contrast, was a fellow
computer hobbyist and his work reflected the social and technical needs of the hobbyist
community. The accessibility of the XMODEM protocol reflected the importance of
interoperability among microcomputer owners. Furthermore, as a de facto standard,
XMODEM provided a baseline on which several more sophisticated protocols were
eventually developed.
393

Hobbyist entrepreneurship in file compression
As the multimedia capability, disk capacity, and overall affordability of home
computers continued to rise during the 1980s, BBS callers wished to exchange ever larger
files with one another. Whereas the file libraries on early hobbyist systems were
populated by technical reference documents and snippets of source code, BBSes soon
emerged with vast libraries of digitized photographs and pre-compiled applications. The
sizes of these files began to creep beyond the capacity of a single floppy disk and could
take many hours to download, even with relatively fast modems. Error-detecting transfer
392If anything, hobbyists and academics remained quite unaware of each other's networks. As Richard P.
Wilkes complained in 1984, “People in the micro BBS environ often are totally unaware that there is a
working, FREE, network of mini and microcomputers exchanging gigabytes of mail around the country
(by phone).”Richard P. Wilkes, “FIDONET: Response,” May 24, 1984,
http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/FIDONET/JENNINGS/STANDARDS/fidonet.rpw.txt.
393The most detailed documentation of XMODEM was assembled by Chuck Forsberg, a hobbyist
programmer who went on to develop the YMODEM and ZMODEM protocols which were also widely
adopted. See: Forsberg, “XMODEM/YMODEM PROTOCOL REFERENCE.”
231
protocols reduced the likelihood that a long transfer would be interrupted and need to be
restarted but the process of calculating and comparing checksums and re-transmitting
corrupted blocks of data could double or triple the time it took to download a large file.
Sysops developed three general strategies to manage the challenges of sharing
large amounts of data. The first strategy was social: various time and data limit schemes
prevented single users from dominating a system.
394
The second strategy was a simple
technical convention: large files were broken up into parts, each of which could fit onto a
typical floppy disk. The third strategy, however, was the most significant for the present
discussion. Many sysops required users to first shrink files using a file compression
program before uploading them. As in the case of XMODEM, the predominant file
compression programs were developed by fellow BBSing enthusiasts, rather than large
software companies.
File compression algorithms complemented error-detecting file transfer protocols
like XMODEM (and its descendants, YMODEM and ZMODEM.) Compression
programs had three key implications for BBSing. First, they allowed sysops to offer
larger file libraries in smaller amounts of space. Second, they enabled users to package
multiple files into a single archive. And, third, they improved the efficiency of file
transfers. Together, these improvements meant that each caller could exchange a greater
volume of data in less time, leaving the telephone line open for others to call in. Although
an in-depth analysis is beyond the scope of the present discussion, the use of compression
by BBSers played an important role in driving the commercial success of programs like
394For a more in-depth analysis of the social architecture of file-sharing, see Chapter 4.
232
Thom Henderson's ARC, Phil Katz's PKZIP, Aladdin Systems' StuffIt, Fifth Generation
Systems' DiskDoubler, and Bill Goodman's Compact Pro.
395
File compression software enabled the use of BBSes as hubs in a decentralized
file-sharing network. Due to network effects, file compression for microcomputers
represented a tremendous economic opportunity by the middle of the 1980s. It is
significant, then, that the dominant compression programs were developed by small
businesses founded by participants in the technical culture of BBSing rather than one of
the larger software firms that had emerged during the decade. The willingness of BBSers
to embrace the commercial success of SEA and PKWARE reflected a tradition of
hobbyist entrepreneurship within the longer history of amateur telecommunications. In
addition to messaging and file-sharing, a third broad class of remote computing functions
known as BBS “door” programs, further enlarged the market opportunities for hobbyist
entrepreneurs.
Remote computing and the cottage industry of BBS “doors”
The third and final class of archetypal dial-up BBS functions provide callers with
access to some or all of the underlying computational capacity of the host computer.
Whereas messaging and file-sharing features are contained with the BBS host software,
remote computing features allow the user to run external programs that may or may not
have been designed for use over a network. Colloquially, sysops refer to these features as
395A legal dispute between Henderson and Katz over rights to the algorithm underlying PKZIP and ARC
became a public scandal across several BBS networks during the 1990s. See: Jason Scott,
“CONTROVERSY: LAWSUITS: SEA vs. PKWARE,” The BBS Documentary Library, accessed March
22, 2014, http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/research/CONTROVERSY/LAWSUITS/SEA/.
233
“doors.” BBS door programming became a lively area of small-scale development that
occurred wholly out of sight of the non-BBS software marketplace. By the late-1980s a
vast ecology of BBS doors was in circulation. Door programs were as varied in their
functionality as desktop software: from silly joke programs to productivity applications to
complex multi-player games. In some cases, BBS doors provided gateways into other
computer networks by using dedicated packet-switched lines. Along with visual design,
host software, and social policy, the curation of doors gave sysops yet another dimension
with which to develop a unique personality for their systems.
The “door” concept came later to microcomputer BBSes than it did to earlier
computer networks. Previously, remote computing was of central importance to computer
networking research. In the late 1960s, funding for the ARPANET project was justified
by a promise that it would facilitate “resource sharing” among the various ARPA-funded
research centers throughout the US.
396
The resource-sharing vision rested on a belief that
reliable, real-time computer networking would reduce the duplication of work at each
site. Rather than re-engineering a useful program to run on their local machines,
researchers could simply reach across the network and run the program remotely. By the
end of the decade, however, researchers were surprised to discover that messaging and
file-sharing were the truly transformative uses of the ARPANET, rather than remote
computing.
397
As the authors of a report from 1978 remarked, email and file-sharing
changed the “feel” of collaboration among geographically dispersed researchers.
398
396Abbate, Inventing the Internet., 96.
397Ibid., 107.
398Frank Heart et al., ARP ANET Completion Report (Bolt, Beranek and Newman, January 4, 1978),
III–110, McKenzie box 2, Bolt, Beranek and Newman library. As quoted in Abbate, Inventing the
Internet., 107.
234
The development of resource-sharing on BBSes followed an inverse trajectory to
the ARPANET story. Early bulletin-board systems began as platforms for messaging and
file-sharing; only later were remote computing features added on. On one hand, this
reverse timeline reflects the technical limitations of early microcomputers when
compared with the state of the art minicomputers installed in institutional computer labs.
Whereas time-sharing systems were designed to handle multiple processes at once, small
one-liner BBSes, with just a few thousand bytes of memory, had very little extra capacity.
General-purpose remote computing was not technically impossible but its usefulness was
rather limited. Beyond these technical details, of course, microcomputer BBSes and the
ARPANET family of campus networks grew out of very different cultural and
institutional contexts. Whereas university researchers enjoyed a lively intellectual
community of peers, many early microcomputing enthusiasts pursued their hobby in
relative isolation. This cultural difference is evident in the social shaping of the
institutional and amateur computer networks. The ARPANET, with its pre-existing social
structure, was intended to maximize the communal use of limited computing resources,
while BBSes, like computer clubs, retail shops, and hobby magazines, were designed to
help foster community among otherwise estranged local enthusiasts.
The origin of the BBS “door”
Initially, most BBS host software was homegrown and few BBSes grew beyond
the core set of messaging and file-sharing features. As pre-written BBS host software
began to circulate more widely in the early 1980s, however, ambitious sysops started to
extend the functionality of their systems through the development of extensive
235
modifications. Soon, the authors of BBS packages such as WWIV and PCBoard began to
formalize the creative re-construction of their systems by providing architectural features
that enabled further modification. Accessible templates, scripting languages, and
resource-sharing protocols encouraged the growth of a cottage industry for third-party
modifications, add-ons, and plug-ins. As BBS software packages became more robust in
the early 1990s, the locus of experimentation increasingly shifted from the host software
to its “doors.” These external programs provided a sandbox for microcomputer
programmers to play with the possibilities of multi-user software design.
The term “door” was not widely used until the mid-1980s but the notion of
providing services beyond of the core bulletin-board functions was widely shared among
BBS users and sysops. Commercial and state-run information services such as
CompuServe and Minitel provided highly-visible examples from which BBS operators
drew inspiration. The July 1983 issue of Byte, for example, featured extensive coverage
of the videotex systems being developed in Europe and North America. The lead article
featured a hand-painted illustration by Robert Tinney of a red telephone in the iconic
style of the Western Electric Model 500 with a pair of “rabbit ear” antennae sticking up
from the base and a television display in place of the rotary dial. Beaming out of the
screen beneath the word “VIDEOTEX” was a numbered menu with options for news,
banking, shopping, electronic mail, games, and “computing.”
399
For long-time Byte
readers, the convergence of telephony and computing was hardly a technical marvel; after
all, Christensen and Seuss's article about the computerized bulletin board was more than
five years old. But the expansion of data communications to such traditional arenas as as
399Rich Malloy, “Videotex Brings the World to Your Doorstep,” Byte, July 1983.
236
banking and shopping may have been more intriguing. “The technology is here,” argued
contributing author Darby Miller, “the marketplace, however, is not.”
400
Videotex itself
was never widely adopted in the US but the notion that computer-mediated
communication might extend beyond the technical culture of amateur computing
continued to spread. Within ten years, all of the services depicted in Tinney's painting
would be implemented independently by BBS developers.
The term “door” depicts the BBS as an enclosed and controlled space within a
larger, potentially limitless, virtuality. The metaphorical passage from one room to
another—through the “door”—simultaneously illustrates both the spatial imaginary of the
typical BBS structure and the passage of control from one running program to another.
Although the term would emerge later, the conceptual foundation for “doors” was in
circulation from the start. As early as 1983, Myer's how-to book described programming
features that allow callers to “transfer control” of the host computer from the BBS to an
external program and back again.
401
In this early conceptualization, however, none of the
programs generally available for microcomputers were designed to be operated remotely.
Instead, Myers offered advice for how to modify the source code found in workbooks
like David Ahl's BASIC Computer Games in order to create new online services.
402
As
long as the program used standard ASCII text for input and output, he reasoned, those
bytes could be sent out over the modem as easily as they would be sent to the local
screen. Modifying and debugging for remote use required significant technical expertise,
400Darby Miller, “Videotex: Science Fiction or Reality?,” Byte, July 1983, 42.
401Myers, How to Create Your Own Computer Bulletin Board, 39–40.
402David H. Ahl, ed., BASIC Copmuter Games: Microcomputer Edition (New York, NY: Workman
Publishing, 1978).
237
however, and Myers cautioned his readers that adding “special features” like online
games should only be undertaken by sysops who had otherwise mastered the basic
features of their boards.
403

As BBS host software grew more modular and accessible to non-programmers
during the 1980s, door programs no longer required programming skills to install or
customize. The instructions in Myers' 1983 book assumed that readers would be
manually keying in the code for any external programs that planned to offer. Within a few
years, however, sysops rarely worked directly with the source code of their systems.
Instead, the process of transferring control from the BBS host to an external door
program was handled by an underlying operating system such as DOS. Conventionally,
403Myers, How to Create Your Own Computer Bulletin Board, 35–40.
Figure 18: Documentation of the WWIV 4.21a drop file format. Filo, “Documentation
for Using Chains,” WWIVNEWS, September 1991,
http://gopherproxy.meulie.net/gopher.meulie.net/0/textfiles/bbs/WWIVNEWS/wwiv910
8.txt.
238
data shared between the BBS and the door programs were stored in a temporary “drop”
file accessible to both processes. This simple separation enabled non-programmers to
experiment with adding new door programs without substantially altering the main BBS
host system.
The “drop” file was a simple method of passing data through a BBS door.
Programs designed to be run as BBS doors read the data in the “drop” file, modified it,
and handed it back over to the BBS host when the user was finished. The standard WWIV
drop file, CHAIN.TXT, provides a helpful example. CHAIN.TXT included 32 pieces of
metadata about the user who was “passing through” the door (figure 18). In addition to
the user's biographical information—“alias,” “real name,” “age”—and their “security
level” within the BBS, CHAIN.TXT exposed some other telling information about the
social context within which BBS doors were written and run. The fourth line of the file
provided space for the user's ham radio call sign and the sixth line was a number
indicating the amount “gold” they carrier with them. The inclusion of the call sign
reflected the large overlap in the technical cultures of amateur radio and BBSing while
the use of “gold” to refer to virtual currency was likely borrowed from fantasy
role-playing games. The drop file also included information about how much time the
user had already spent connected to the system. Doors were frequently designed to kick
users out after a certain period of time in order to free up the phone line for other callers.
In practice, the exchange of data via a “drop” file expanded the possible
applications of the “door” concept by allowing the activities carried out within a door
program to have effects elsewhere in the system. The “gold” listed in the WWIV drop file
239
referred to a persistent virtual currency that users carried with them as they moved among
various area of the board; earning gold in one door and spending it in another. Some
sysops created microeconomies within their systems through which users could trade
their gold for extra time on the board, free downloads, and other privileges. Although the
host and door programs were distinct from one another, the drop file provided a simple
mechanism through which they might feel integrated to the user moving among them.
By the late-1980s, invoking an external program from within a DOS-based BBS
was effectively standardized. Each BBS host handled the process somewhat differently—
WWIV referred to external programs as “chains,” while PCBoard and Wildcat! used the
more common term, “doors”—but even more specialized BBS software like Citadel
eventually adopted a modular door system. Doors were often designed for use with a
particular host package but interoperability was often achieved through the use of
external utilities such as QKDOOR by Christopher Hall, a small program that
automatically translated among more than thirteen different types of drop files.
404
While
translation utilities like QKDOOR mitigated the problem of incompatible file formats,
doors were generally limited to software specifically designed to run within a BBS. In
other words, BBS sysops could not offer any arbitrary program as a door.
Standardization in the development of BBS doors
In 1987, however, Marshall Dudley released the first version of Doorway, a
program for IBM-compatible PCs that promised to turn any text-mode DOS program into
404Filo, “Documentation for Using Chains,” WWIVNEWS, September 1991,
http://gopherproxy.meulie.net/gopher.meulie.net/0/textfiles/bbs/WWIVNEWS/wwiv9108.txt.
240
a BBS door.
405
Doorway effectively wrapped itself around the external program, creating
a virtual “shell” environment. In addition to managing the running process, Doorway read
user data out of the drop file and managed all of the live data passing through the
membrane of the “shell.”
406
In version 2, Dudley introduced DOOR.SYS, a common drop
file format that was soon adopted as a de facto standard by popular BBS host software
such as PCBoard. As far as the external program was concerned, it was being operated by
a local user, rather than a remote caller. Furthermore, Doorway provided a number of
features to help the sysop manage the use of her system by users. If the program crashed
or halted, Doorway would attempt to recover by transferring the user back to the BBS. If
the user was spending too much time playing door games, Doorway could display a
warning message or kick them out. Finally, Doorway could also be configured to allow
system administrators to access DOS remotely as if they were sitting down at their own
desk.
407
The political economy of Doorway was typical of the BBS software market of the
early 1990s. Marshall Dudley was the sole author of Doorway and all correspondence
regarding the software was directed to a residential address in Knoxville, TN. Likewise,
customer support was provided through the Doorway BBS at a Knoxville telephone
number. Doorway was both freely distributed as standalone shareware and bundled with
commercial BBS software such as PCBoard.
408
The unregistered version of Doorway
405Marshall Dudley, “DOORWAY Version 2.22,” August 30, 1993; PC Micro, “NetFoss Internet FOSSIL
for Windows Version 1.11,” December 1, 2013, http://pcmicro.com/netfoss/guide/.
406David Wolfe, Expanding Your BBS (Wiley (1995), Paperback, 371 pages, 1995), 194–195,
http://www.librarything.com/work/14625250/book/105171518.
407Doorway was later acquired by PC Micro and continues to be sold for its remote administration
capabilities. See: PC Micro, “DOORWAY - DOORWAY to Unlimited Doors.,” October 20, 2006,
http://pcmicro.com/doorway/.
408PCBoard, version 14.5a (Clark Development Company, Inc., 1991).
241
included both social and technical constraints that encouraged users to purchase a license.
Each time that the unregistered version was invoked, for example, it announced itself to
callers as “UNREGISTERED SOFTWARE” and after ten minutes, it automatically
returned users to the main BBS. In contrast to the rising cost of the commercial BBS
software, Doorway cost just $30 and Dudley accepted payment through the mail, by
phone, or, appropriately, via a door on the Doorway BBS.
Doorway had many uses outside of BBSing but, like Desqview, it addressed a
technical need peculiar to running a BBS and was likewise championed by many BBS
sysops. In addition to transforming “nondoors into doors,” Doorway provided an
interface through which sysops could create custom scripts to perform maintenance tasks
or experiment with novel features.
409
In his second how-to book for BBS sysops,
technical writer David Wolfe enthused about the value of Doorway for the remote
management of his board: “I use Doorway...as my DOS gateway when I am at another
computer and I need DOS access to my home system.”
410
Beyond convenience, however,
Wolfe encouraged readers to conceive of their systems as “gateways” into other
networks. Users of Wolfe's board, for example, were able to send and receive faxes
through a custom Doorway script that invoked a standard DOS fax program.
Doors provided an open-ended platform on which sysops could continuously
tinker and experiment with the services provided by their bulletin boards. The process of
adopting and modifying door programs offered both a technical challenge and an
expressive opportunity for BBS sysops, regardless of their technical sophistication or
409Wolfe, Expanding Your BBS, 179.
410Ibid., 203.
242
programming expertise. Dudley's Doorway represented a final expansion of this creative
space as it bridged the divide between BBSing and the broader market of DOS-based
software. In the conclusion to Wolfe's chapter on doors, he described the creative use of
Doorway in terms of both thriftiness and pride in his workmanship; familiar values in the
long tradition of amateur telecommunications.
Conclusion: The BBS as a platform
For more than twenty years, the dial-up BBS provided an accessible platform for
the development of computer-mediated community spaces. Beginning with Christensen
and Seuss's “computerized bulletin board” in 1978, microcomputer enthusiasts took
advantage of the nearly-universal residential telephone network to build thousands of
small-scale computer networks throughout North America. Although no two bulletin
board systems were exactly alike, all shared a common set of messaging, file-sharing, and
remote-computing features. Throughout the late 1980s, BBS enthusiasts experimented
with a variety of collaboration and commercialization models, leading to the production
of hundreds of pre-built BBS packages that lowered the barriers to entry considerably for
new system operators. Finally, the widespread adoption of a standard protocol for adding
new features enabled transformed the BBS into a modular platform, subject to nearly
endless tinkering, customization and re-configuration.
As with all twentieth century communication technologies, the dial-up BBS
emerged at the crossroads of many existing technologies, standards, and cultural norms.
The earliest systems drew heavily on devices, protocols, and standards that were
243
developed in the 1960s for use in teletype systems. The initial adoption of the standard
ASCII character set for the exchange of digital text enabled BBSes to act as common
crossroads amid an early microcomputer ecology marred by incompatibility. The use of
text-mode communication ensured that owners of different microcomputers could
exchange messages, code, and data. Later, the constrained palette of semi-graphical
characters implemented in the ATASCII, PETSCII, and ANSI standards (among others)
lent a unique visual culture to the BBSes of the 1980s and 1990s.
Initially, bulletin board systems were imagined to be “computerized” counterparts
to the cork-and-pins community bulletin boards found in churches, cafes, town halls, and
retail shops around the country. During the 1980s, hundreds of hobbyists experimentally
stretched this metaphor to accommodate new logical structures: from the hierarchical
menu systems of “linear” BBSes like PCBoard to the virtual space of “room” BBSes like
Citadel. Early in the 1980s, BBS programmers worked in isolation and developed dozens
of similar systems in parallel. As the practice of BBSing spread, however, BBS
programmers were able to more directly collaborate and coordinate their efforts. The
disjointed, decentralized development of software like WWIV and Citadel offers a crucial
pre-history to the highly-coordinated free and open source software projects like Linux
that would become possible with the diffusion of internet access in the mid-1990s.
This chapter illustrates the technical ingenuity and geographical diversity of the
programmers and sysops who developed the conceptual basis of the BBS as a platform
for social computing. It also details the technological characteristics of the archetypal
BBS that allowed it to persist, nearly unchanged, for more than two decades. But this
244
technical story only hints at the plurality of users who adopted the BBS and the range of
social uses they found for it as an infrastructure for popular communication. Indeed,
many of the most active BBS users hardly gave a second thought to the protocols and
programming languages that brought their favorite systems to life. If this chapter began at
telephone jack and worked up through the modem to the spinning floppy disk, the next
chapter begins at the keyboard to explore the myriad publics (and counter-publics!) that
were supported by the three basic functions of a dial-up BBS: messaging, file-sharing,
and remote-computing.
245
Chapter 4: A Field Guide to the North American Dial-Up BBS
Formed in the late-1970s at the intersection of amateur telecommunications, ubiquitous
telephony, and hobby computing, the bulletin-board system (BBS) offered a basic
framework for production of low-cost computer networks.
411
As its name implies, the
social meaning of the BBS was shaped by an emphasis on community-building,
information-sharing, and many-to-many communication.
412
Beyond providing a set of
common technical features—namely, messaging and file-sharing—BBSes were
implemented by a diverse array of individuals and organizations to fulfill a variety of
community needs. As personal computing spread beyond the the hobbyist community,
BBSes began to attract an increasingly diverse population of users. Many of the questions
and challenges that remain central to the study of social computing first emerged as this
early cohort struggled with trust, privacy, and community-building on their homegrown
bulletin-board systems.
For more than twenty years, the BBS provided a conceptual and technological
foundation for widespread grassroots experiments in computer-mediated communication.
Initially, bulletin-board systems were accessible to only the most dedicated computer
hobbyists. Potential participants needed to procure not only a working microcomputer but
also a modem, a costly proposition in the 1970s. Nevertheless, by the early 1980s, there
were hundreds of homegrown “computerized bulletin boards” in North America. These
411See Chapter 2 for a detailed account of this historical conjuncture.
412A “bulletin board” is a piece of cork hung in a common space such as the lobby of a library or the front
of a grocery store, on which visitors pin notes for public attention. Traditionally, these include informal
advertisements and announcements.
246
BBSes were primarily operated by skilled hobbyists who took pleasure in the technical
challenges of BBS administration.
413
As the cost of microcomputers and modems fell,
however, BBSing became accessible to a wider population of potential users. These
newcomers were drawn to BBSing as much for the promises of “virtual community” as
the technological marvel of amateur computer networking.
414
With this enlarged
population of participants, the hobbyists' technical innovations were soon joined by
experiments in moderation and management. Community-oriented system operators—
known colloquially as “sysops”—experimented with a variety of rules for their small
systems, exploring the implications of anonymity, moderation, and self-regulation. With
the popularization of internet access in the mid-1990s, the BBS community brought this
wealth of experience and expertise to bear on the nascent World Wide Web.
In spite of this innovation and experimentation, the fundamental form of the BBS
remained quite stable from 1978-1998. From the start, the dial-up BBS was characterized
by the use of the standard telephone network for physical infrastructure,
modem-equipped personal computers (PCs) for terminal equipment, and cross-platform
text-mode protocols for communication.
415
With a handful of exceptions,
416
BBSes
413In 1983, Lary L. Myers, a sysop from Albany, compiled a list of BBSes that he believed represented a
“majority” of hobbyist systems in the US. The list included 275 boards in 43 states. Myers, How to
Create Your Own Computer Bulletin Board, 202–208.
414Patrice Flichy distinguished BBSes from contemporary academic networks by their computing cultures.
The “microcomputer world” of the 1980s, he argues, was populated by people with a shared interest in
community and communication, rather than computation. Furthermore, he explicitly links this interest
in communication to the amateur radio and cable TV networks of the 1920s and 1970s. Flichy, The
internet imaginaire, 86–87.
415For a more detailed examination of the technical underpinnings of the BBS movement, see Chapter 3.
416By 1994, several technologies existed for designing graphical BBS interfaces but most sysops
continued to operate text-mode systems. The Remote Imaging Protocol by TeleGrafix Communications
was implemented by several popular BBS hosts but only callers with special terminal software would
see the “RIP” graphics. All other callers would fall back to the text-mode ANSI interface. For a
technical description of RIP graphics, see: Chambers, Running a Perfect Bbs/Book and Disk, 133–137.
For a more in-depth discussion of the visual culture of BBSing, see Chapter 3.
247
continued to operate in text mode throughout the 1990s, even as graphical interfaces such
as Microsoft Windows became ubiquitous. In his index of computer networks published
in 1991, John S. Quarterman described BBSes as “rudimentary” systems with “not very
sophisticated user interfaces.”
417
With the introduction of graphical clients for commercial
services such as America OnLine in the 1990s, bulletin-board systems began to seem
antiquated and underwhelming.
In hindsight, however, it is clear that the relative stability of BBS technology was
to its advantage. Rather than spending their time continuously installing upgrades and
learning new interfaces, BBS users and sysops developed a degree of intimacy and
familiarity with their systems that is rare in the history of networked personal computing.
Furthermore, the modest system requirements of text-mode interaction preserved
BBSing's low barriers to entry; a tacit form of resistance to the planned obsolescence that
had taken hold throughout the microcomputer industry. In 1990, activist Keith Wade
argued that a dedicated BBSing computer should cost no more than five hundred dollars
and urged first-time computer shoppers to avoid computer stores in favor of used and
“orphaned” equipment.
418
For community-oriented observers, the BBS represented an ideal type of
participatory media. Howard Rheingold's 1993 bestseller, The Virtual Community, is
conventionally read (and occasionally criticized) as an enthusiastic exploration of the
democratic potential of the internet, but the internet qua internet, that of dot-coms and
@-signs, was scarcely accessible to personal computer owners at the time Rheingold was
417Quarterman, The Matrix, 14.
418Wade, The Anarchist’ s Guide to the Bbs, 26.
248
assembling his manuscript. Instead, Rheingold's narrative centered on his experiences as
a regular participant on The WELL, a popular dial-up bulletin-board system in the Bay
Area that he describes as “a virtual village of a few hundred people.”
419
When he
enthused over computer-mediated communication as a “potent political and educational
tool” and “a new medium for community-building,” he was imagining the dial-up BBS,
with all of its local grassroots implications, not the highly-capitalized Web of the dotcom
era.
420
The elision of BBSing and the capital-I Internet in the reception of Rheingold's
book may stem from his use of “The Net” as a generic term for any computer-mediated
conferencing system.
421
Of course, this idiomatic expression is an accurate reflection of
the plurality of computer networks that early users like Rheingold routinely encountered
in the early 1990s. A similar slippage was evident in the pages of Mondo 2000 magazine
where “The Net” was defined as “an international web of computer networks and bulletin
board systems (BBSs).”
422
For everyday modemers, the convergence of diverse computer
networks into the packet-switched internet was more than a decade a way.
Scholars concerned with culture, communication, and community have tended to
portray BBSes in contrast to commercial and state-sponsored networks. In 1999, Tim
Jordan was one of the first theorists to organize the history of the internet in this fashion,
describing BBSes as “co-operative networks” that made the ARPANET seem like “a
baroque, military-industrial fantasy of global domination.”
423
A decade later, in an
419Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 2.
420Ibid., 132.
421Ibid., 5–6.
422Rudy v. B Rucker, R. U Sirius, and Mu, Mondo 2000: A User’ s Guide to the New Edge (New York, NY:
HarperPerennial, 1992), 188.
423Tim Jordan, Cyberpower the Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet (London; New York:
Routledge, 1999), 38, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?
direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=77179.
249
accessible book warning readers against the “lockdown” of the internet by
vertically-integrated monopolies, Jonathan Zittrain invoked a similar memory of BBSes
as alternatives to “appliancized proprietary networks” such as CompuServe and America
Online.
424
The community function of the BBS is further emphasized in scholarship
dealing specifically with the “hacker” subcultures of the 1980s and 1990s. Doug Thomas
described the BBS as an essential communication technology among early hackers and
argued that its accessibility and capacity for information-sharing made the BBS a “perfect
medium” for the emerging subculture.
425

For critical media scholars opposed to the corporatization of the web, the appeal
of the BBS as grassroots medium is clear, but it is a mistake to portray BBSes as
inherently anti-commercial. From the late-1980s to the mid-1990s, BBSes were also
widely adopted by entrepreneurs who built profitable small- and medium-sized
businesses on the popular pleasures of virtual community. In 1993, its first year in print,
Wired magazine featured an article with the rather unsubtle title, “Home-grown BB$,” in
which Jack Rickard, founder of the BBS trade publication Boardwatch, described the
potential of profit-oriented BBSes to liberate “corporate burnouts” from their desk jobs.
426
Unlike the million-dollar dotcom fantasies that would populate the pages of Wired later in
the decade, however, Rickard's vision was resolutely middle-class. With a “modest
amount of capital and sweat equity,” he argued, a dedicated sysop could expect to take
home an annual income of $40,000.
427
424Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, 25.
425Douglas Thomas, Hacker Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 118.
426Jack Rickard, “Home-Grown BB$,” Wired, October 1993,
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.04/bbs.html.
427Ibid.
250
Entrepreneurial sysops like Rickard saw no inherent conflict between the business
and community goals of their systems. The online spaces they constructed operated less
like public libraries and more like privately-owned cafes Of course, as in a cafe, a BBSes
commercial interests depended on the health of its community.
428
Indeed, even The
WELL, Rheingold's ideal BBS, was a profit-seeking business from the start. “WELLites”
paid a monthly $10 membership fee plus $2 per hour for access to the system.
429
With
few models to follow, pricing was an area of considerable speculation and BBSes varied
widely in how they charged for access.
430
Many sysops implemented tiered pricing
schemes in which a small number of paying subscribers offset a larger number of
free-riders in exchange for special privileges. This compromise enabled wide-ranging
participation in the community side of the BBS while ensuring a stream of revenue to pay
the bills.
Nor did the commercialization of BBSing limit the emergence of lively
counter-public spaces. In general, the culture of BBSing skewed toward technical
interests but numerous individual boards welcomed and encouraged a plurality of
cultural, political and sexual affinities. Readers of Boardwatch magazine consistently
ranked several “adults only” boards among their favorite systems in the annual “Top 100”
poll. Although the novelty of downloadable erotica was a major draw for many of their
users, adults-only boards also frequently touted their lively, “anything goes” forums and
428Jenkins et al. previously explored the comparison between cafes and online services in their discussion
of commercialism in “Web 2.0” businesses. See: Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green,
Spreadable Media Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York
University Press, 2013), 173–174, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?
direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=529617.
429Allen, How to Successfully Run a Bbs for Profit/Book and Disk, 21.
430Ibid., 80–81.
251
chat channels. Lifestyle Online, a self-described “alternative lifestyles” board with roots
in the mid-Atlantic swingers community, was one of the most popular (and populous)
systems in the country, boasting a reported 2,000 callers per day and two Boardwatch
“Readers Choice” awards. Upon connecting to Lifestyle Online, callers were greeted with
a graphical welcome screen that described the board as “A Live ADULT Correspondence
Magazine” and touted its “erotic personals” and “hot online chat.”
431
The interdependence
of commerce and community were even more clear on Lori's Toy Store, an adults-only
BBS that featured both “monthly face-to-face gatherings” as well as a “kinky online
shopping mall.”
432
BBSes like Lifestyle and Lori's were both profit-seeking enterprises
and safer spaces for callers to explore their local cultures of fetish and kink.
Toward the end of the 1980s, typical BBS host software for IBM-compatible PCs
included a “door” feature through sysops could expose additional functionality to their
callers. Doors created a new arena of experimentation, innovation, and entrepreneurship
for programmers in the BBS. A cottage industry formed and thousands of freeware and
shareware “doors” were available for DOS host software like Wildcat! and Renegade.
Door games featured complex text-mode graphics and turn-based mechanics that
transformed the BBS into a gaming platform. Similar to a large file archive, engaging
games like Legend of the Red Dragon and Tradewars could draw hundreds of new callers
to a board. Doors also gave callers access to information databases, news feeds, online
shopping, fax services, and other gateways into other computer networks. By 1994,
431Richard Scott Mark, Internet BBSs: A Guided Tour (Prentice Hall (1996), Edition: Pap/Dsk, Paperback,
300 pages, 1996), 218, http://www.librarything.com/work/14625252/book/105171538.
432Ibid., 221.
252
large-scale BBSes offered libraries of third-party door software that approached the
offerings of nationwide commercial systems like Genie and CompuServe.
433
With the privatization of the internet backbone in the early-1990s, door software
could be used to provide a gateway from a dial-up BBS to the larger packet-switched
network. As stories of the nascent “internet” began to gain exposure in the popular press,
many personal computer owners were eager to gain access. In response, a growing
number of BBSes began to offer internet e-mail, USENET news, and, in some cases,
full-blown UNIX shell accounts. Although neither DOS nor Microsoft Windows
implemented the internet protocols (TCP/IP), third-party communications software
enabled users to run TCP/IP software using a dial-up BBS as a gateway to the internet. In
the parlance of the day, dial-up BBSes served as local “on-ramps” to the information
superhighway.
From 1978 to 1983, a distributed network of amateur programmers collectively
produced the BBS as a generic media form characterized by three features: file-sharing,
messaging, and remote-computing.
434
During this early period, the discourse on most
BBSes mirrored the narrow thematic and demographic character of the technical culture
of hobby computing. In short, thousands of middle class white men talking about
technology. After 1983, however, BBS technology was gradually re-imagined by a
growing population of individuals and organizations who deployed microcomputer
networks as infrastructures for popular and political communication. Compiling a
comprehensive index of the myriad BBSes of this period technology is a hopeless task,
433Chambers, Running a Perfect Bbs/Book and Disk, 367.
434For a close look at the emergence of a standard BBS framework, see Chapter 3.
253
comparable to summarizing the many uses of the typewriter. Nevertheless, classification
is as useful as it is difficult.
This chapter proceeds in four sections, each of which concern a different aspect of
the ecology of networked personal computing in North America during the 1980s and
1990s. The first section examines the pathways through which everyday microcomputer
owners discovered the modem world. Information about dial-up BBSes passed from one
user to the next through interest-driven communities dominated by men, effectively
reproducing the exclusion of women that characterized earlier technical cultures.
435
The
second section examines the use of bulletin board systems as platforms for file-sharing.
Digital media traded among BBSers often fell into one of four classes, “warez,”
shareware, GIFs, and textfiles, each of which developed its own unique technical,
cultural, and economic norms and conventions. The third section focuses on the use of
BBSes as tools for building virtual communities. By comparing a well-known example,
The WELL, to a lesser-known example, The TARDIS BBS, this section depicts BBSing
as a geographically dispersed phenomenon. Rather than focus on one or another
exceptional examples, the history of BBSing should be told as a history of thousands of
similar small-scale systems frequented by tight-knit groups of local callers. Finally, a
fourth section explores the emergence of a “adult-only” BBSes in the early 1990s. In
spite of the implicit sexual connotation of the “adult” tag, these systems also provided
valuable “after work” spaces for working adults; more neighborhood pub than Las Vegas
strip club.
435For a thorough examination of the exclusion of women from amateur radio, see: Haring, Ham Radio’ s
Technical Culture.
254
The bulletin board systems profiled in this chapter represent the popular origins of
21
st
century social computing. It was on these systems that everyday people began to use
networked personal computers to access health information, sell handcrafted products,
meet potential romantic partners, trade technical information, seek support in times of
crisis, engage in collective creativity, and more. All of these activities were enabled by an
affordable, accessible set of technologies that were standardized through the de facto
consensus of thousands of amateur programmers in the middle of the 1980s, and
maintained for more than a decade. As the boundaries among various computer networks
grew porous during the late 1990s, the social and technical experiments carried out on
BBSes reappeared in the discourses of internet listservs, web-based forums and social
networking sites. Today, the socio-technical assemblage colloquially known as “the
internet,” is a direct descendant of the creatures found in this field guide, warts and all.
Part I. Discovering BBSes
In the late 1980s, dozens of new BBSes came online each month throughout
North America. And yet, in spite of all this activity, the modem world remained invisible
to most computer owners, even those who routinely dialed into commercial online
services like CompuServe and Prodigy. As a decentralized phenomenon, BBSing lacked
any inherent structure for the discovery of new systems. Faced with the ten opaque digits
of a telephone number, there was no way—short of dialing—to know for certain that a
BBS was waiting at the other end.
436
For some, this ambiguity lent BBSing an attractive
436One rather tedious approach to discovery was to write a program that would systematically dial every
telephone number in a given range and log whether or not a modem answered at the other end. This
255
air of mystery; a sense of participating in an underground society. For others, it was
merely frustrating. Consistent with the decentralized structure of the network, BBS users
developed and circulated their own directories organized by region and interest.
Costly first encounters with commercial online services
Many BBS enthusiasts remember first encountering the modem world through a
commercial service. In the 1980s and 1990s, only highly centralized (and highly
capitalized) systems could advertise in spaces that would be seen by non-hobbyists. As
early as 1983, modems aimed at personal computer owners shipped with promotional
materials including diskettes, colorful pamphlets, and printed coupons for trial
memberships. The Commodore 1650 Automodem, for example, included one free hour's
access to the CompuServe Information Service. (Though, at 300 baud, one hour was
hardly generous!) By the mid-1990s, however, new personal computers frequently
shipped with a modem pre-installed. In light of this, America Online infamously mailed
more than 250 million unsolicited diskettes and CD-ROMs to households throughout the
US.
437
In spite of the wide circulation of promotional coupons and “trial” memberships,
centralized commercial services remained prohibitively expensive for most households in
North America. While wealthier and more populous regions of the US were served by
local dial-up numbers, most users needed to pay for a long-distance toll call on top of the
baseline subscription fees. One former BBSer in northeast Ashtabula County, OH
practice was known colloquially as “war dialing” after it was dramatized in the 1983 film War Games.
437Kara Swisher, AOL.COM : How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions
in the War for the Web (New York : Times Business c1998., 1998), 99,
http://www.librarything.com/work/84025/book/108899559.
256
remembered that the major commercial systems were still long-distance when the first
local internet service provider opened in 1995.
438
Many former BBSers share a common memory of blithely ringing up a very large
monthly bill with a commercial online service before discovering local BBSes. Whereas
middle-class adults can have self-deprecating sense of humor about paying hundreds of
dollars on a CompuServe “addiction,”
439
younger users remember causing significant
intrafamily conflict. For the curious latchkey kid with access to a family computer,
signing up for a trial account while home alone was easy. Four weeks later, inevitably, the
bill would arrive by mail, the account was canceled, and, in the best cases, debts were
paid by “mowing a lot of lawns.”
440
In the dominant version of this tale, users remember
being “hooked” by the experience of posting on forums, downloading files, and playing
on games. As one former user sarcastically described the experience, “It was a very
costly journey to put it mildly, but worth every penny (of my folk's money, of course.)”
441
One recurring theme in the recollections of former young BBSing men is the role
that their fathers played in modeling the amateur use of communication technologies. In
the 1980s, personal computers were marketed and sold as “family” computers. Although
the computer was marketed to all members of the family, “dad” is often named as the
parent who brought the computer and modem into the family's home.
442
In some cases,
438David Bucci, “What in the World Is a Happy Hacker BBS?,” 2001,
http://textfiles.com/history/happyhack.txt.
439Joseph Sheppard, “Ten Years on The Ledge,” 2004, http://textfiles.com/history/lifeonledge.txt.
440Mr. Pez, “BBS Life in the 1980’s.”
441Chickenhead, “The BBS Universe from the Perspective of a Simple Pleb.”
442“In the fall of 1981 my father brought home a line terminal and a modem.” Adam David Barr, “Proudly
Serving My Corporate Masters: What I Learned in Ten Years as a Microsoft Programmer,” 2000,
http://textfiles.com/history/proudlyserve.txt.
257
dad is also the one who first experimented with telecomputing,
443
while in others,
modeming was something that the son discovered on his own. In 2003, self-described
“internet junkie” Steve Reevers remembered watching his dad exchange pornographic
ASCII pin-ups with his friends via modem as a “life changing moment.”
444
Reevers father
later gave him a list of local BBSes and taught him how to dial out from the “family” PC.
In a similar story, Tom Hare, a former modemer from Florida, described both of his
parents as working at “the forefront of computer technology” during the 1980s, but
specifically remembers his father teaching him how to access the local Tallahassee
BBSes.
445
The transfer of computing knowledge from father to son recalls the father-son
relationships encouraged in postwar ham radio culture. Indeed, one former BBSer
remembers his dad denying his request for an America Online subscription and directing
him, instead, to The Hamshack, a local BBS for amateur radio operators.
446
BBS lists: Modem world treasure maps
Modem use remained a niche activity into the 1990s and most computer owners
lacked the social connections necessary to learn about BBSes through word of mouth.
Facing this lack of information, an important form of voluntary labor was the compilation
of “BBS lists.” BBS lists, circulated in both print and electronic forms, were the primary
channels through which people discovered the online systems in their local areas. Retail
shops posted copies of local BBS lists on their community corkboards and kept stacks of
443“The first thing I did with the modem was to use my father's CompuServe account to access the
CompuServe chat rooms.” Mr. Pez, “BBS Life in the 1980’s.”
444Steve Reevers, “Memories of a BBS Childhood,” January 2003, http://textfiles.com/history/reeves.txt.
445Tom Hare, “My Name Is Reo: A Look at How the Electronic Me Was Born,” July 7, 2000,
http://textfiles.com/history/nameisreo.txt.
446Jon, “Jon’s Story of His Time on the BBSes,” October 7, 2001, http://textfiles.com/history/jon.txt.
258
xeroxed copies next to the cash register to hand out to customers. Today, surviving BBS
lists offer valuable snapshots of local BBS scenes at particular points in history.
BBS lists varied widely in their design and purpose. Some were little more than
lists of phone numbers while others were carefully formatted with ASCII and ANSI art
decorations and detailed information about each system (figure 19). Dedicated list
compilers approached the task with an curatorial vision, tracing an idiosyncratic pathway
through the modem world. Lists such as Clark Gilbo's “Westcoast 813 BBS Directory,”
Gerry George's “Caribbean BBS List,” and Charles R. Grosvener Jr.'s “Worcester Area
BBS List” focused on particular regions and calling areas.
447
The scope of each regional
447Gerry George, “Gerry George’s Caribbean BBS List,” February 22, 1994,
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~benedett/trinidad/bbs.html; Charles R. Grosvenor Jr., “Worcester Area
BBS List,” July 1995, http://www.inthe80s.com/july1995/bbs/worcbbs.html; Richard A. Ziegler,
“Westcoast 813 BBS Directory Feature,” Pasco BBS Magazine, February 1993,
http://textfiles.com/bbs/PASCO/pbm12.mag.
Figure 19: Ad for Westcoast 813 BBS Directory, Pasco BBS Magazine, Feb. 1993.
259
list varied along both economic and geographic dimensions. The numbers “813” in the
title of Gilbo's list referred to the Florida area code stretching “from Pasco County to
beyond Naples.”
448
With 460 individual systems, Gilbo aimed at making a comprehensive
account of the BBSes along the Florida coast. Grosvener Jr.'s list was similarly organized
by space but instead of being comprehensive, Grosvener Jr. sought to include only those
systems that could be reached by a toll-free call from within Worcester and sixteen of its
suburbs. George's Caribbean list, meanwhile, began as a local listing of BBSes in
Trinidad & Tobago and grew to encircle a much larger, discontinuous, but culturally
meaningful geographical area. In a tacit acknowledgement of the difficult of
communicating via computer among the islands, additions and corrections to the list were
accepted by post and fax as well as by calling into the George's home BBS.
449
Another general type of BBS list was organized around the technical features of
the boards they listed. These technically-oriented lists were as likely to focus on older
technologies with dedicated user populations as they were to feature cutting-edge
technologies that were not yet widely distributed. Mike Shecket and Gabe Sanchez, for
example, continued to maintain the “International Apple II BBS List” nearly two decades
after the release of the original Apple II personal computer.
450
Lists organized around new
technologies were necessary for early adopters to find one another. As high-speed
modems became commercially available in the late-1980s, several early adopters began
448Ziegler, “Westcoast 813 BBS Directory Feature.”
449Gerry George, “FAQ: Caribbean Related Internet/BBS Links & Resources,” September 9, 1993,
https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?
msg=soc.culture.caribbean/yOd06S1bww4/VhHy_XQcgKsJ.
450Mike Shecket and Gabe Sanchez, “International Apple II BBS List,” January 20, 1996,
http://textfiles.com/bbs/BBSLISTS/apple9601.txt.
260
to compile lists of BBSes that could support these faster connection rates. Ken Sukimoto,
sysop of the DownTown BBS in Los Angeles, maintained a series of nationwide lists
during the 1990s that included only systems with 9600 and, later, 14400 bps modems.
451

Occasionally, even more narrowly focused lists were compiled that combined two or
more technical features. For example, “The Complete 9600 bps Apple list,” maintained
by a pseudonymous Southern California enthusiast named The Byter, was limited to
boards running on an Apple II or Apple IIgs PC with a USRobotics HST modem.
452
In a
small number of cases, technology was used as a proxy for an implicit set of cultural
values. Bill Karpowicz's “National Room-oriented Systems List,” for example, included
only Citadel-style BBSes.
453
For passionate fans, simply the fact that a board ran Citadel
software marked it as socially desirable.
A third genre of BBS list addressed a particular subculture, profession, hobby and
other community defined by interest or identity. These more closely curated lists were
often published on a regular schedule, distributed among a network of related systems,
and diligently maintained to ensure the accuracy of their information. Interest-driven
BBS lists also tended to include specialized information relevant to members of the
community. All of the systems on Tom Brown's “Ham Radio Phone BBS List,” for
example, were known to have “radio-related files or message sections” and each BBS
was identified by its sysop's amateur radio call sign.
454
“The Gay & Lesbian BBS List”
451Ken Sukimoto, “96INTRO.TXT,” October 10, 1991,
http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/BBSLISTS/96intro.txt.
452The Byter, “The Complete 9600 Bps Apple List,” March 1988, 96,
http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/BBSLISTS/9600apple18.txt.
453For details on the distinguishing technical characteristics of Citadel BBSes, see Chapter 3.
454Tom Brown KA2UGQ, “Ham Radio Phone BBS List,” March 1988,
http://textfiles.com/bbs/BBSLISTS/hamradio8803.txt.
261
provides an even more compelling example of the interest-driven BBS list.
455

Collaboratively compiled by members of the Risqilly BBS in Chicago and the S-Tek
BBS in Montreal, the list included both North American and “world-wide” systems.
Along with names and phone numbers, the compilers made special note of boards that
carried information about HIV and AIDS, featured a separate area for trans members, or
were designated as “women-only” systems.
456

Occasionally, lists of interest-oriented BBSes were printed in similarly-themed
books and magazines. The January 1990 issue of Law & Order magazine included an list
of BBSes related to police work, several of which were designated as “police only”
boards and required validation from the sysop before callers were granted access to the
system. This article later provided the basis for Timothy Woll's on-going electronic list of
“Police Bulletin Boards.”
457
Erotic Connections was a how-to book aimed at readers
curious about “love and lust” on BBSes. The 1994 edition included dial-up details for
over 500 boards, including detailed reviews of a select 100 “featured” systems.
458
In
addition to basic information regarding the host software and subscription fees, the
reviews in Erotic Connections detailed the social norms of each featured system. For
readers interested in swinging, kink, or queer boards, these additional details were
essential for establishing appropriate expectations before dialing into a new system.
Whether or not users were willing and able to pay, long-distance calling fees
substantially structured the network imaginary of the modem world. The prevalence of
455Leedell J. Miller, “Gay & Lesbian BBS List,” October 2, 1992, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!
original/soc.motss/gjXBQzUgk5s/k0S0FCjP3NAJ.
456Ibid.
457Timothy Woll, “Police Bulletin Boards,” n.d., http://textfiles.com/bbs/BBSLISTS/police.txt.
458Billy Wildhack, Erotic Connections (Corte Madera, CA: Waite Group Press, 1994).
262
regional BBS lists like Grosvenor Jr.'s “Worcester” list reflected the extent to which
BBSing was, by and large, a local phenomenon. Callers seeking special-interest boards
may have been more inclined to pay a long-distance fee than those looking for
general-interest chat, but toll calls could easily overwhelm the careless modemer. BBSes
with adult content, particularly original images and video clips, typically charged a
monthly access fee but the authors of Erotic Connections cautioned their readers to be
mindful of their telephone bills: “Even a free board...can get expensive to use if it's an
out-of-state call.”
459
It was implicitly because of long-distance billing that the Erotic
Connections BBS directory was organized by geography rather than fetish.
Circumventing long-distance, lawfully and otherwise
BBSers of the 1980s and 1990s generally stuck to their own local calling area.
However, two opportunities existed for circumventing long-distance calling fees: one
above-the-board, one below. PC Pursuit was an unusual commercial service that provided
a kind of wormhole for BBS explorers in North America.
460
Instead of routing one's call
through the expensive long-distance telephone network, PC Pursuit users dialed into a
local node that connected them to the Telenet packet-switched network. Telenet, in turn,
billed the call at a flat rate rather than a rate based on distance.
461
Once connected, PC
Pursuit users could select another node in the Telenet network and “dial out” to distant
459Ibid., 21.
460PC Pursuit represented an interesting experiment in consumer telecom. Between 1979 and 1983, GTE
had acquired both Sprint's long-distance telephone network and Telenet's packet-switched data network.
In a sense, PC Pursuit stitched these two acquisitions together. MathisonS.L. Mathison, L.G. Roberts,
and P.M. Walker, “The History of Telenet and the Commercialization of Packet Switching in the U.S.,”
IEEE Communications Magazine 50, no. 5 (May 2012): 41, doi:10.1109/MCOM.2012.6194380.
461The genealogy of PC Pursuit cuts a fascinating path through the history of networked computing. In
1972, Telenet began as a commercial spin off of research pursued by Bolt, Beranek and Newman as part
of the ARPANET project. Ibid.Ibid., 32.
263
BBSes as though they were placing a local call. Initially, just a few cities were included
in the PC Pursuit system but, according to marketing materials from around 1991, local
numbers for dialing into the network were accessible from 18,000 cities and towns and
“outdial modems” were installed in 34 “major” cities in the US and abroad.
462
At more
than $25 per month with a per-hour fee over the top, PC Pursuit was expensive, but for
dedicated modem users, it offered access to unknown numbers of remote systems for less
than the cost of a typical CompuServe subscription. At the height of PC Pursuit use, some
BBS lists made special note of “pursuitable” systems that were within the local calling
area of a PC Pursuit “outdial” node.
463
PC Pursuit was such a useful service for BBSers that less scrupulous users found
ways to exploit the network and avoid paying for access. Incoming calls to PC Pursuit
were authenticated through the use of username and password. Programs such as PC
Pursuit Thief (or PCPTHIEF) effectively stole the authentication information of
legitimate users by repeatedly attempting to connect to the network with semi-random
username and password combinations.
464
PCPTHIEF users typically left the program
running silently over night in the hope of finding just one working combination. As new
long-distance services proliferated following the break up of the Bell System, similar
exploits were developed for calling card and calling code products. In some areas of the
BBSing movement, a brisk underground exchange of illicit “codez” enabled users to
462Digital-demon, “PcPursuit Outdialing System: The Complete Guide,” January 26, 1992,
http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/research/CONCEPTS/SERVICES/PCPURSUIT/pcpursue.htm.
463Blade Runner, Apple Bomb, and Phrank, “Complete Pirated Apple/IBM Pirated ‘Pursuitable’ BBS List
01/08/88,” January 8, 1988, http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/BBSLISTS/piratedbbs.txt.
464Brew Associates, PC Pursuit Thief, version 1.0 (Phortune 500, 1989).
264
routinely connect to long-distant systems without incurring large monthly bills.
465
As
active as these users were, however, their experience of transgressing the geographic
constraints of the long-distance calling area was unusual among modem owners. For the
most part, modem owners restricted their adventures to a single area code.
Making a home in the modem world
The search for the perfect BBS combined spatial, economic, technical, and social
concerns. During the 1990s, most callers first encountered BBSing through either word of
mouth or a local BBS list. Whether that list was passed on from a coworker, downloaded
from a nationwide service such as CompuServe, picked up off the counter of a retail
shop, or printed in the back of a computer magazine, the BBS list served a crucial
function for making accessible the otherwise invisible network of online systems that had
developed during the previous decade. Once exposed to the notion of a BBS, however,
users often continued to search for a system organized around their particular interest,
identity, culture, or ideology. Special-interest BBS lists provided an alternative portrait of
the contemporary BBS landscape in which systems were organized according to the
communities they supported rather than their location within one or another area code.
Just as internet users access a variety of sites and services, a typical BBS session might
involve calling several BBSes in succession, each offering a different mix of technical
features and social opportunities.
465“Working codes could be used for free long distance calling, or they could be traded for various other
goods: usually either software or access, although trading codes for hardware was not unheard of.”
O’Hara, Commodork, 63.
265
BBS lists help to illuminate how users discovered new systems to call but they
alone cannot account for why anyone would want to call a BBS. With the exception of
computer hobbyists, for whom the technical challenges of computer-mediated
communication offered their own intrinsic rewards, the promises of BBSing could be
difficult to convey to a non-user. By the end of the 1980s, BBSing had grown far beyond
the hobbyist population and there were thousands of “virtual communities” thriving
throughout North America. In practice, however, it was file-sharing rather than
community that initially motivated non-users to purchase a modem, contend with its
arcane programming, and begin to call their local BBSes.
Part II. Dial-up file-sharing: Come for the files, stay for the community
Moving data from one machine to another is one of the fundamental challenges of
personal computing. The technology and culture of BBSing were each shaped by the
degree to which bulletin-board systems could be adapted to the task of file-sharing. Prior
to the popularization of modems and BBSes, microcomputer owners were stuck with one
of two methods of exchanging files. With the purchase of additional hardware, they could
transfer their data to a mobile medium such as a cassette tape or floppy disk and
physically carry it over to another machine—the proverbial “sneaker-net.” Or, they could
copy out the source code long hand and type it into the other machine manually. Neither
solution was ideal; both were prone to error and costly in terms of time and money. The
modem offered a third way to exchange data: by connecting two machines directly over a
standard telephone line. As an autonomous intermediary, BBS host software transformed
266
file-sharing from a synchronous, linear exchange into an asynchronous, networked
phenomenon. Furthermore, as an accessible central node, a BBS could be set up to act
like a local software library for a community of microcomputer owners.
The status of software as property remained very much in flux throughout the
start of the microcomputer industry and there were few stable ethical norms governing
the small-scale exchange of software. As Paul Ceruzzi notes, manufacturers of
minicomputers and mainframes of the 1970s, such as Digital, did not consider software
part of their product lines. Rather, software was “what the company did to get people to
buy hardware.”
466
The amateur culture reflected this perception and hobbyists became
accustomed to trading software freely with friends. In 1975, Bill Gates infamously
challenged this social norm in an open letter criticizing the widespread duplication of
Microsoft's first product, Altair BASIC.
467
Although Gates' letter sparked an intriguing
discussion among hobbyists about the value of software, it did not fundamentally alter the
norm of free exchange. As modeming became more accessible during the 1980s, the
informal exchange of floppy disks among friends was increasingly mediated by a bulletin
board system.
From sneaker-net to ASCII Express: Individual file repositories
One of the challenges of writing BBS history is conveying the temporal
experience of early computer networking. When connecting to a hobbyist BBS during the
early 1980s, individual characters appeared linearly from the top left corner of the screen.
466Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, 236.
467Bill Gates, “An Open Letter To Hobbyists,” Computer Notes, February 1976.
267
The text mode of most affordable microcomputers displayed one thousand equally spaced
characters arranged into a grid of 40 columns and 25 rows.
468
Each on-screen character
corresponded to a sequence of eight bits called a “byte.” Affordable modems, meanwhile,
exchanged data at 300 bits per second (bps). With this common configuration, filling the
entire screen with text took approximately thirty seconds. It was faster than watching
someone type their message in real time but hardly instantaneous.
Connecting at 300 bps was adequate for reading and writing short messages—in
fact, some users enjoyed the tempo of reading a message as it unfurled across their screen
—but it was tedious for transferring files of any significant length.
469
For the user with
files to trade, the BBS provided a common space to meet other computer enthusiasts, but
any substantial exchange of data took place off-line. Because of the costs of long-distance
calling, of course, most of the other callers lived within a short distance of the board.
BBS memoirist Rob O'Hara humorously recalls that in the hours it would take to transfer
a single floppy by modem, he could “just drive to the person's house, copy an entire
box-load of games, and drive back home.”
470
As a teenager, O'Hara began to routinely
visit the homes of his online acquaintances, some of whom became friends. Duplicating
floppy disks was not a particularly engaging activity, however, and teen BBSers often
found themselves navigating unfamiliar social terrain. As O'Hara put it, the first visit to
468The VT-100 terminal, a de facto standard among minicomputers and mainframes, displayed a finer grid
of 80 columns by 25 rows. As a result, microcomputers aimed at business users output this mode by
default. Special peripherals for Apple, Atari, Commodore, and Radio Shack computers added an
optional “80 column” mode and was required for certain business applications.
469More expensive modems offered faster speeds but the maximum speed of any connection was limited
by the slowest participant. Two Novation AppleCat modems, for example, could exchange files at 1200
bps. BBS sysops with high-speed modems occasionally advertised the brand of their modem to
encourage calls from others similarly equipped.
470O’Hara, Commodork, 28.
268
another hobbyist's home usually involved “coming up with creative ways to fill the
awkward silence.”
471
In the early 1980s, Apple computer owners began to host very minimal
file-sharing services using software that enabled remote users to browse the contents of
an attached floppy or hard disk drive. ASCII Express II “The Professional,” or AE Pro,
written in 1982 by Bill Blue and Mark Robbins, was an update to an earlier program that
provided Apple users with access to the basic functions of their modems through a simple
menu.
472
Among its many new features, AE Pro, included a new “unattended
auto-answer” mode which allowed remote users to browse a local disk, view text files on
screen, and upload or download files. In the AE Pro documentation, unattended mode
was described as a “turnkey operation” that required no special configuration: “you can
power-up your computer on the AE disk and automatically enter the unattended remote
mode.”
Systems running AE Pro in unattended auto-answer mode were known
colloquially as “AE Lines.” Unlike full-featured BBSes, which included messaging as
well as file-sharing functions, AE Lines were little more than anonymous caches of
software. On BBS lists, AE Lines were conventionally marked with the initials “AE”
next to their phone numbers so that readers would know not to expect a thoughtful
discussion board. The AE interface, likewise, was impersonal and efficient; a list of
filenames and a command prompt (figure 20). While callers could “page” the sysop and
471O’Hara, Commodork.
472Bill Blue and Mark Robbins, ASCII Express “The Professional,” version 3.4x (Santee, CA:
Southwestern Data Systems, 1982).
269
converse through a rudimentary chat interface, the only way to communicate with
another caller was to upload a file with their name and hope that they noticed it the next
time they dialed in. In spite of their poor communication functions, AE Lines offered a
no-fuss file-sharing interface that appealed to technically sophisticated users. By the
mid-1980s, some BBSes advertised two phone numbers, one for the main BBS and one
for the AE Line, while others were modified so that callers could jump from the BBS
host program into AE Pro for file-sharing and the jump back to the host program for
messaging.
473
473Omega, Lord Vision, and Rock ’n Roll Doctor, “Getting AE/CATFUR to Work with Apple-Net,” July
9, 1986, http://www.textfiles.com/apple/applenet.txt.
Figure 20: Example of remote file listing on ASCII Express II: "The Professional."
270
Stories of early-1980s sneaker-nets and AE Lines are valuable complements to the
more widely-known histories of messaging-oriented systems like CBBS.
474
Both
file-sharing and messaging were crucial features of the BBS world and one rarely
developed without the other. Even amid the seemingly solitary experience of the typical
AE Line, users struggled to communicate with one another. The next section details four
of the dominant forms of file-sharing that emerged during the peak of BBSing in the
early 1990s. The first two, warez and shareware, depict novel software economies
facilitated by the decentralized distribution of files among BBSers. The second two, GIFs
and textfiles, concern the generative cultures that emerged around the production and
circulation of digital media.
Warez: Unauthorized file-sharing
By the end of the 1980s, file-sharing via BBS had enabled the growth of two vital
new software economies: “warez” and “shareware.” Warez, a corruption of the term
“software,” referred to the illicit exchange of commercial software through online
computer networks. Warez was a term of great linguistic flexibility and by the end of the
1980s, the goods, the practice of their exchange, and the attending cultures were all
variously referred to by participants as “warez.” Although the individual people involved
with warez were unquestionably drawn in by the promise of new games and applications
at no cost, a peculiar subculture emerged around this unauthorized exchange. It is
difficult to properly assess the demographics of the warez “scene” but, given its
geographic spread, a modest estimate would number in the tens of thousands.
474CBBS is frequently identified as first BBS. A detailed account of the CBBS story appears in Chapter 2.
271
As the “warez scene” grew larger, the warez economy grew increasingly formal.
Individual participants organized themselves into groups with evocative names such as
“Razor 1911” and “The OK Krackers” (from Oklahoma.)
475
The colorful names were
emblematic of the playfulness of the warez scene but they belied the formality of the
management structures of the larger warez groups. Organization and collectivization
enabled, in turn, specialization, and individual participants began to play distinct
technical roles within their groups. “Crackers,” for example, were programmers who
removed the copy protection from commercial software, while “couriers” circulated the
newly cracked software among a network of affiliated BBSes. Larger groups included
artists, programmers, and musicians who produced short multimedia presentations that
were packaged with (and occasionally incorporated into) cracked software like
neighborhood gang tags.
476

Over time, the rationalization of unauthorized file-sharing produced social
structures that began to resemble the conventional hierarchy of an otherwise legitimate
corporation. Aspiring members of the Public Enemy warez group were asked to fill out a
application that asked familiar human resources questions such as “Why do you want to
be a courier?” and promised opportunities for future advancement.
477
A short history of
Razor 1911 written by a long-time member in 1998 included numerous passages that
would not have been out of place in the annual report of a mutual fund: “We have had
475These two examples reflect the size and diversity of the warez scene during the1980s and 1990s.
“Razor 1911” was a transnational organization founded in Norway that was active continuously from at
least 1985-1998 while “The OK Krackers” were a short-lived regional group started by two teens in
Oklahoma City. O’Hara, Commodork, 75–76; $ector 9, “RAZOR 1911: The History (1985-1998),” June
9, 1998, http://www.textfiles.com/piracy/RAZOR/rzrhistory.
476Lassi Tasajarvi et al., ̈ Demoscene: The Art of Real-Time ([Helsinki, Uudenmaankatu 33 a 2]: Even Lake
Studios, 2004).
477“Public Enemy Courier Application,” n.d., http://www.textfiles.com/piracy/COURIERS/courier.app.
272
hundreds of dedicated persons doing their best to keep the group on top...They all deserve
a great salute!”
478
United Couriers similarly adopted the language of corporate America in
a self-promotional document circulated in 1994: “Don't choose a second rate operation
for your courier needs. Go with the OLDEST and most RESPECTED group in the
business. UC '94!”
479
With all of the attention paid to organization, management, and
marketing, it was easy to forget that both the commercial software industry and the US
government considered unauthorized file-sharing a criminal activity.
Ironically, considering the risk, the most active participants in the warez scene had little
interest in the contents of the files they traded. Certainly, cracking commercial software
offered an illicit thrill and ensured that there was popular demand for the product of their
efforts, but higher level, “elite,” crackers rarely seemed excited to play the computer
games they cracked. Instead, “warez d00dz” transformed the grey market exchange of
commercial software into a competitive meta-game in which formalized groups competed
to obtain, crack and re-release software faster than their peers.
480
In the context of the
global circulation of warez, commercial software products were game tokens of decaying
value.
BBSes played a dual role for participants in the warez scene. On one hand, prior
to the popularization of internet access in the mid-1990s, BBSes were the primary
distribution channels for warez. On the other hand, however, the community and
478$ector 9, “RAZOR 1911: The History (1985-1998).”
479UNiTED COURiERS SPREADING TEAM, “THIRD YEAR ANNIVERSARY ,” 1994,
http://www.textfiles.com/piracy/COURIERS/uc.nfo.
480Walt Scacchi makes a similar observation about the competitive aspects of the warez scene in a 2010
article about the culture of computer game modding. See: Walt Scacchi, “Computer Game Mods,
Modders, Modding, and the Mod Scene,” First Monday 15, no. 5 (2010),
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2965.
273
communication functions of BBSes were central to the competitive meta-game that drove
the warez scene. BBSes provided platforms on which warez traders could organize,
gossip and talk trash with one another. Without BBSes, warez was just digitized
bootlegging. But with the DIY infrastructure of the BBS, a unique culture and economy
developed around the exchange of illicit artifacts.
Shareware: Authorized file-sharing
“Shareware” was the term used to describe a second software economy enabled
by BBSes. Unlike warez, the producers of shareware not only authorized but depended
on the redistribution of their software by BBS users. Although the history of shareware
lacks the sexy outlaw vibe of the warez scene, it suggests much more challenging
questions regarding the status of digital information as property. Some warez traffickers
may have believed that they were liberating software from an unjust marketplace but
their actions did little but to polarize the nascent net between those who tolerated and
those who condemned software “piracy.” Shareware authors, meanwhile, were
experimenting with alternative models for the production, circulation, and, yes,
commercialization of their software. The legacy of these efforts is evident in the
ubiquitous “30-day trial version,” the proliferation of ad-supported mobile apps, and the
latest experiments by Adobe and Microsoft to sell renewable subscriptions rather than
one-shot licenses.
The archetypal shareware license granted users a short period during which they
were welcome to use the program free of cost. At the end of this evaluation period, the
user is obliged to mail a small “registration fee” to the author. Registration fees were
274
conventionally under $25 and often included a printed manual, backup diskette, or
promise of future upgrades. Contemporary accounts often describe the shareware
protocol as a matter of “honor.” In the 1995 edition of The Secret Guide to Computers,
Russ Walter encouraged readers to give shareware a try but reminded them that they were
“honor-bound” to pay the suggested fee for software they found useful.
481
Rey Barry
made a similar argument in his Guide to Free Shareware, published in the same year. The
shareware economy, he argued, is an “Honor System” and as long as users continue to
register their software, shareware authors will continue to produce affordable programs of
high quality, “as good as any you will find [in a retail shop.]”
482
Shareware represented vast industry of small- and medium-sized software
development firms, many of which were, behind their PO boxes, lone programmers
working in their spare time. The shareware business model—try now, pay later, pass it on
—depended on bulletin-board systems as an infrastructure for the distribution of new
software, word of mouth marketing, and as a decentralized customer support network.
Large-scale BBSes specializing in file-sharing deployed racks of CD-ROM and hard disk
drives to keep vast libraries of shareware online. Near its peak 1996, for example, the
aptly-named Infinite Data Source in Alexandria, V A hosted more than fifty gigabytes of
files across sixty CD-ROMs.
483
Similarly, Exec-PC in Elm Grove, WI, the self-anointed
“World's Largest BBS,”advertised a library of “450,000 programs and files” available for
481Walter, The Secret Guide to Computers, 65.
482Rey Barry, Guide To Free Software (Charlottesville, VA: The Freeware Hall of Fame, 1995), xi–xiii.
483Mark, Internet BBSs, 203.
275
free download.
484
As shareware advocate Rey Barry put it plainly in 1995, without
BBSes, the shareware industry would have simply ceased to function.
485
The shareware model proved a particularly effective method of selling new PC games.
During the early 1990s, Software Creations in Clinton, MA was an uncommonly active
North American BBS. With over 134 simultaneous incoming lines, Software Creations
might have felt more like one of the nationwide commercial systems than the local
hobbyist “one-liner.” Ranked the top system in Boardwatch magazine's Readers Choice
Awards poll from 1993-1996, Software Creations was renowned for its comprehensive
shareware archives.
486
On the login screen, Software Creations dubbed itself the “Home
of Authors” and reviewers gushed that it featured “more than 100 new uploads every
day.”
487
Among the many shareware companies that considered it their primary
distribution node, Software Creations was particularly well-known for hosting
high-quality shareware games such as Commander Keen by Apogee and Doom by id
software.
During the 1990s, innovative game designers often released short versions of their
games as shareware. Learning to navigate dial-up BBSes gave PC gamers access to titles
that would not appear in retail stores for months. Likewise, the community functions of
the BBS facilitated discussion, debate, and collective intelligence among players
grappling with the latest games. The initial release and reception of Doom, a wildly
popular first person shooter, is a helpful demonstration of the interdependence of
484Exec-PC, “Sorry Prodigy,” Boardwatch, May 1992.
485Barry, Guide To Free Software, xii.
486“1995 Dvorak Awards Winners,” accessed April 25, 2014,
http://www.citivu.com/dvorak/95awds.html#bbswebsite; Glover and Young, Pocket PCRef, 484.
487Mark, Internet BBSs, 283.
276
shareware, BBSes, and North American PC gaming culture during the mid-1990s. In a
review for COMPUTE!, critic Denny Atkin enthused: “No computer game you've ever
seen has graphics and sound like this.”
488
But at the time that Atkins' review appeared in
print, readers could not buy Doom at the mall. Instead, the developer, id Software, had
made the first “chapter” available as a free download from BBSes like Software
Creations. Additional chapters were sold directly to players through mail-order. Gamers
who wanted to experience the graphics and sound described in Atkin's review needed
either to access a BBS themselves or find a friend to download it on their behalf.
The developers of Doom, id Software, were steeped in the hobby computing tradition and
several technical features of Doom mirrored the existing norms and habits of North
American BBSing culture.
489
First, the “chapter” structure was well-suited to the
shareware business model. The shareware chapter, freely downloadable, was a
fully-realized standalone game. There were no time limits and it did not expire like a
“demo” or a “trial” version might have. Instead, it gave players an opportunity to evaluate
the game, left them with a narrative cliffhanger and the promise of novel weapons,
monsters, maps, and challenges in the future chapters. Second, Doom included a
multi-player game mode in which players connected to one another via modem. By
distributing the game through BBSes, the developers of Doom reasonable assumed that
their players would have the necessary hardware and telecommunications experience to
488Denny Atkin, “We’re DOOMed,” Compute, April 1994,
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/science/docview/223179659/19A8896B22C4189PQ/140?
accountid=14749.
489John Romero, the designer of Doom, began his career in the early 1980s selling games to magazines
such as inCider that published them in print as source code listings. See: “John Romero,” Retro Gamer,
January 17, 2014, http://www.retrogamer.net/profiles/developer/john-romero/; “Scout Search for Apple
II (1984) - MobyGames,” accessed April 25, 2014, http://www.mobygames.com/game/scout-search.
277
take advantage of this advanced feature. Finally, Doom became a site of considerable
user-driven innovation as enthusiasts began to “mod” the game. Popular mods included
changing the art and sound, altering the game's mechanics, and designing new maps
specifically designed for multiple players to explore.
490
Many of the same BBSes that
carried the original shareware release of Doom became repositories for the prolific
culture of Doom modding. These practices were not limited to shoot-em-up games, of
course. A similar shareware ecology developed among flight simulator fans who
produced new scenery, mechanical models, and accurate maps of every runway in the
US.
491
Game-oriented BBSes were not merely distribution nodes but rather community
spaces from which a more participatory form of PC gaming culture emerged.
The shareware model depended on the willingness of authors and publishers to
not only permit but to encourage the autonomous circulation of their software products.
This permissive orientation towards copying facilitated a mutually beneficial relationship
with BBS users and sysops who derived their own benefit from sharing new software.
Although a handful of large BBSes like Software Creations were marked as “official”
distribution sites for companies like id Software, few gamers outside of the 508 area code
in Massachusetts could afford to stay on a toll call long enough to download from
490D. Kushner, “It’s a Mod, Mod World [computer Games, Copyrighted Material Modification],” IEEE
Spectrum 40, no. 2 (February 2003): 56–57, doi:10.1109/MSPEC.2003.1176517; David Kushner,
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (New York:
Random House, 2003); Sue Morris, “WADs, Bots and Mods: Multiplayer FPS Games as Co-Creative
Media,” in Level Up Conference Proceedings (University of Utrecht, 2003),
http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/05150.21522.pdf; Hector Postigo, “Of Mods
and Modders Chasing Down the Value of Fan-Based Digital Game Modifications,” Games and Culture
2, no. 4 (October 1, 2007): 300–313, doi:10.1177/1555412007307955.
491Robin Nelson, “The Spirit of Cyberflight,” Popular Science, April 1995,
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/science/docview/222948359/CC93D739798548B3PQ/234?
accountid=14749#.
278
Software Creations directly. Instead, shareware games like Doom were relayed
throughout the BBS world by users and sysops who downloaded files from one board and
uploaded them to another. There were several motivations for this sort of voluntary labor.
Mike Nichols, the sysop of Lamplighter BBS in Hobbs, New Mexico, remembers
routinely dialing into BBSes in Dallas, Ft. Worth, and Albuquerque to download the
latest shareware files. Nichols considered these occasional toll calls a form of community
service for the benefit of fellow BBSers in Hobbs who could not afford to make the
long-distance call on their own.
492
Both warez and shareware depended on BBSes for communication,
community-building, and distribution. But whereas the warez scene was antagonistic to
software producers, shareware authors developed a mutually-beneficial relationship with
the BBSers who manually circulated their programs. Warez groups seemed to perceived
the software they cracked and re-released as originating outside of their community; it
was remote, “commercial,” and therefore unjust. Shareware and BBSing, by contrast,
shared common roots in the technical culture of early hobby computing. Shareware
programs were also cracked and circulated as warez but their authors could not be so
easily vilified.
Although new users were often drawn to BBSing by the promise of free
downloads, many found themselves returning for the pleasures of online community. The
individual file libraries shared by Apple II users, the complex organizations of the warez
scene, the voluntary re-distribution of shareware, and the rich ecology of Doom mods
each demonstrated the extent to which file-sharing practices were embedded within larger
492Nichols, Mike. Telephone call with the author, April 15, 2014.
279
communities of BBS users. Experienced BBS callers were likely to encounter both warez
and shareware as they explored the modem world but these were not the only types of
files in circulation among BBSes. Whereas warez and shareware were economies
consisting of executable programs, many BBS sysops organized their file libraries around
digital media, particularly digital images and electronic texts.
GIFs: “Heavenly Bodies Online”
493
Text-mode communication defined the BBS as an accessible, affordable medium,
but as some PC makers started shipping “multimedia” machines capable of displaying
high-resolution photos and video clips in the early 1990s, BBS users and sysops began to
assemble large online archives of digital media. The convergence of photography and
computing was not uniformly distributed throughout the BBSing world, however. Even
as multimedia systems such as the Apple Macintosh, Atari ST and Commodore Amiga
were taken up by the creative industries in the late 1980s, IBM-compatible PCs continued
to be sold with monochrome displays well into the next decade.
494495
As one tech writer
493“Heavenly Bodies Online” appeared in an ad for Event Horizons published in Omni magazine and
shared on Facebook by former sysop, Jim Maxey.
494Reviewers of both the Atari ST and Amiga families of PCs tended to focus on their large color palettes
and high resolution displays but, generally, they portrayed these systems being used to create new
computer art and special effects, rather than manipulating digitized photographs. Indeed, Andy Warhol
was famously commissioned by Commodore International to create a series of original drawings using
the new Amiga 1000 in 1985. Instead of incorporating the Amiga into his well-known photographic
silkscreen process, Warhol doodled on screen using the Amiga mouse. Rich McCormick, “Andy
Warhol’s Amiga Computer Art Found 30 Years Later,” The Verge, April 24, 2014,
http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/24/5646554/andy-warhols-lost-amiga-computer-art-photo-essay;
Maher, The Future Was Here the Commodore Amiga, 43–44; Emily Meyer, “Press Release: The Andy
Warhol Museum Announces Newly Discovered Amiga Experiments” (The Andy Warhol Museum,
April 24, 2014),
www.warhol.org/uploadedFiles/Warhol_Site/Warhol/Content/The_Museum/Press_room/documents/The
_Warhol_Amiga_Project_Release_4-24-14.pdf.
495Nearly every PC dealer advertising in the May 1990 issue of PC Magazine charged $200-600 extra for
color and high-resolution displays. All base PC packages remained monochrome.
280
put it in 1990, “graphics [are] more of a perk than a foundation” for everyday computer
users.
496
The content and form of the “graphics” files found on BBSes varied wildly from
text-mode renderings to high-resolution, procedurally-generated images such as fractals
or three-dimensional ray-traced scenes.
497
“Multimedia” computers shipped with graphics
software pre-installed but DOS users needed to locate specialized utility programs to
decode images stored in compressed formats such as GIF.
498
Fortunately, DOS shareware
authors quickly adopted new graphics standards and astute sysops listed shareware
image-viewing programs like CompuShow alongside their collections of graphics
files.
499500
Once again, BBSers lead the popular adoption of a new media technology.
At the start of the 1990s, digitized photographs were difficult to create, expensive to
transmit, complicated to view...and in extremely high demand. From 1983 until at least
1996, Jim Maxey, a sysop in Lake Oswego, OR, famously capitalized on the seemingly
insatiable demand for digital images among BBS callers. In 1983, Maxey, unemployed
and living alone with his six year old daughter, founded Event Horizons BBS with the
496Bradley Dyck Kliewer, “VGA to the Max,” Byte, December 1990, 360,
https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1990-12/1990_12_BYTE_15-13_State_of_the_Art_Advanced
_Graphics.
497Some systems focused on the generation of novel computer art rather than digitized copies of existing
photos. Leo's Graphics in Torrance, CA offered four CD-ROMs of files related to computer graphics
programming including source code in C, C++, Pascal, and BASIC. Markus W. Pope, Que’ s Bbs
Directory (Que Pub (1994), Paperback, 256 pages, 1994), 123,
http://www.librarything.com/work/88718/book/105171521.For more on personal computers and ray
tracing see: Kliewer, “VGA to the Max”; Steve Upstill, “Graphics Go 3-D,” Byte, December 1990,
https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1990-12/1990_12_BYTE_15-13_State_of_the_Art_Advanced
_Graphics.
498For a snapshot of the state of image compression in 1992, see: Lori Grunin, “Something Lossed,
Something Gained: Image Compression For PC Graphics,” PC Mag, April 28, 1992,
http://books.google.com/books?
id=HERlo0BgpGYC&lpg=PP1&dq=supervga&pg=PT321#v=onepage&q=targa&f=false.
499Within a year of VESA's Super VGA standards, Byte magazine reported that “several shareware
programs” already supported the new standard. KliewerKliewer, “VGA to the Max.”
500Rey Barry's Guide to Free Software lists more than 20 different freeware image viewers. Barry, Guide
To Free Software, 22.
281
intention of building an online archive of astronomy-related images.
501
Unlike many of
his hobbyists contemporaries, finding a way to turn a profit was paramount to his
continued participation in BBSing. Although Maxey's space images were exquisite, the
business side of Event Horizons picked up after he began to scan centerfolds from adult
magazines.
502
From 1987 to 1993, the hourly rate for access to Event Horizons jumped
quickly from $1 to $3 to $10.
503
By 1992, Event Horizons was a profitable small business
with office space and ten employees producing a steady stream of new files for the BBS.
Journalistic coverage of the “world's most expensive BBS” suggested revenues
approaching $8,000 per day, and more than three million per year.
504
Maxey and his crew were prolific digitizers and the digital photo library they
assembled was constituted of many images scanned in-house. In 1987, scanning
high-resolution images and preparing them for download was a “painstaking” and “slow”
process but it was this labor that justified Event Horizons' “premium” price.
505
Consistent
with the norm of interoperability in BBSing, CompuServe's Graphics Interchange Format
(GIF) was the de facto raster image standard among BBSes because of the wide variety
of GIF file viewers. As one shareware author wrote, GIF was “by design, an
INTERCHANGE format [and] the graphics can be 'moved' from one type of computer to
501Fran Gardner, “Entrepreneur Hits Bulletin Board Bull’s Eye,” The Oregonian, February 10, 1994; Nick
Jones, “Jim Maxey Interview,” BostonSun, July 19, 2003,
http://www.bostonsun.com/archives/story_a1933_part1.htm.
502Anonymous, “America’s Information Highway: A Hitch-Hiker’s Guide,” The Economist, December 25,
1993, http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/docview/224146251/1E4552BA8F6D431CPQ/1?
accountid=14749.
503Ibid.; Jim Maxey, “README.TXT” (Event Horizons, 1988),
http://cd.textfiles.com/multimediamania/GAMES/UNIVERS/README.TXT; Rickard, “Home-Grown
BB$.”
504“Playboy Magazine Sues Event Horizons BBS For Copyright Infringement,” Boardwatch, May 1992;
Rickard, “Home-Grown BB$.”
505Gardner, “Entrepreneur Hits Bulletin Board Bull’s Eye.”
282
another.”
506
Rather than a flatbed scanner (which would have been prohibitively
expensive in the mid-1980s), the early images on Event Horizons were produced using
specialized hardware for capturing still images from composite video streams.
507
To
transform the resulting files into GIFs, a second piece of software was required crop the
image, reduce the resolution, transform each hue to one of just 16 colors, and run the GIF
compression algorithm. Finally, a third program was required to overlay captions, titles,
or other text on the GIF. Overall, the human labor, computational time, and hard disk
memory required to produce each image was considerable, but for users accustomed to
spreadsheets and text-mode terminals, the results were remarkable.
506CompuShow, version Standard Version 8.50a (Sedona, AZ: Canyon State Systems and Software, 1992).
507The description of Event Horizons' production process is based on investigative work by Benj Edwards
of the Vintage Computing and Gaming blog. See: Benj Edwards, “Digitized Autumn Leaves,” Vintage
Computing and Gaming, January 11, 2013, http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/918.
Figure 21: Still from Jim Maxey's Universe, 1988.
283
Many BBSes offered downloadable images but the runaway success of Event
Horizons seemed to rest on a few specific factors. First, Event Horizons included many
thousands of unique images not available from other systems, including a particularly
voluminous collection of “adult” GIFs, and, second, Maxey was committed to educating
PC owners about the latent graphics capabilities of their systems. Print advertisements in
popular computer magazines, a rarity among BBSes, assured readers, “Viewing computer
images is much easier than you might think,” while also promising a visual thrill,
“Experience your computer's maximum graphics ability!”
508
In 1988, Maxey released a
freeware program titled Universe that nicely conveyed his commitment to encouraging
amateur interest in space. Universe was a user-friendly slide show program with eleven
digitized astronomy photos. Each photo was encoded with 4-bit color depth, the upper
limit of a typical IBM PS/2 clone, to ensure maximum compatibility and overlaid with a
short caption (figure 21).
509
Even uncompressed, the entire program fit easily on a single
floppy and Maxey explicitly permitted users to share copies with friends and local
BBSes.
Event Horizons rightfully earned a reputation as makers of “mighty fine .GIFs”
and their work began to circulate beyond northwestern Oregon.
510
The colorful titles
displayed at the top of the Universe images were characteristic of the captions added to
each and every “MaxiPic” found in the Event Horizons collection.
511
In addition to
508Event Horizons, “Computer Images,” PC Magazine, December 1990.
509For further detail concerning the screen resolutions and color depth of PCs in this period, see: Adam
Bellin and Pier Del Frate, “True Color for Windows,” Byte, December 1990,
https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1990-12/1990_12_BYTE_15-13_State_of_the_Art_Advanced
_Graphics.
510Eddie Rowe, “A New Call to Arms - Event Horizons vs. Joe Sysop?,” FidoNews, October 28, 1991,
http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/FIDONET/FIDONEWS/fido0843.nws.
511“MaxiPic” was one of several graphics-related terms coined by Maxey, including (purportedly) the term
284
describing the contents of the image, these captions included the phone number of the
Event Horizons BBS. As was the case with shareware, the captions assured that as the
images traveled floppy-to-floppy and BBS-to-BBS throughout the country, viewers could
find their way back to the source. The BBS network may have been decentralized but
Maxey's captions marked a direct route to Event Horizons. One question remained,
however: who owned these images?
Although the small staff at Event Horizons spent hours digitizing images, they
were not out in the field with cameras photographing images. But when a reporter from
The Oregonian described Event Horizons' archives as “breath-taking,” she was clearly
referring to the “skiers in midflight, landscapes with mountains or palm trees, [and the]
real astronomical images from NASA,” not their pixel density, accurate color, and high
resolution.
512
Around 1990, with no precedent for guidance, Event Horizons issued a
confusing policy regarding the re-distribution of their images. Though the images were
clearly marked “freely distributable,” the new policy stated that sysops of other BBSes
should limit their collections of “MaxiPics” from Event Horizons to just twenty files. The
rule was never enforced—indeed, it may have been unenforceable—but sysops bristled at
the notion that they were obligated to follow a policy set by Event Horizons. “I am not a
huge BBS,” complained Eddie Rowe, the sysop of the HOTLine BBS in Ruston, LA, “It
really pisses me off that a company who gets free advertising has such a 'rule.'”
513
Rowe
went on to call for a boycott of Event Horizons. He could not abide the inherent
“Super VGA” which later became an industry standard. Kliewer, “VGA to the Max.”
512Gardner, “Entrepreneur Hits Bulletin Board Bull’s Eye.”
513Rowe, “A New Call to Arms - Event Horizons vs. Joe Sysop?”.
285
contradiction of an enterprise that made its reputation (and fortune) on the free circulation
of digital media attempting to constrain the downstream uses of that media.
The question of ownership came to a head on March 28, 1992 when Playboy
Enterprises announced that it was suing Event Horizons for copyright and trademark
infringement.
514
The copyright claim asserted that Event Horizons was unlawfully selling
Playboy's property by charging users to download digital copies of nine photos that
originally appeared in Playboy magazine. In an article for Boardwatch magazine, tech
writer Lance Rose remarked that unauthorized copying had become a “well-known fact
of life” for BBS users and that observers had long wondered “who will get nailed by a
copyright owner, and when.”
515
The trademark claim, however, struck at the crux of the
tension between labor and ownership. Playboy argued that because the files were hosted
by Event Horizons and Event Horizons had layered its own name and phone number over
the images, viewers may have mistakenly believed that the photographs were originally
taken by Event Horizons rather than scanned out an issue of Playboy magazine.
516
Rather
than answer this charge dead-on, Jim Maxey pointed out that the file libraries on Event
Horizons contained numerous images contributed by users, over whom Maxey had little
control. Specifically, he argued, the infringing photos were uploaded by an unknown user
and that Event Horizons staff had missed them in their routine check for infringing
514Lance Rose, “Playboy’s New Playmate - Event Horizons BBS,” Boardwatch, June 1992.
515Ibid.
516In the mid-2000s, image-oriented blogs began to watermark the images on their sites. Once again,
watermarking was at the center of public conflicts regarding authorship and labor in the production of
digitized images. For an example of one such conflict, see the back-and-forth published in: Jason Scott,
“The Passion of the Scanner,” ASCII, March 11, 2006, http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/950. For an
analysis of the broader context within which this new form of watermarking emerged, see: Ryna M.
Milner, “The World Made Meme: Discourse and Identity in Participatory Media” (Dissertation,
University of Kansas, 2012), http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/handle/1808/10256.
286
files.
517
With thousands of incoming calls each day and fewer than a dozen employees,
the defense was plausible but the notion that Maxey was not ultimately in control of the
files on his computer was almost incomprehensible to anyone outside of the small
517Maxey also told Boardwatch that Playboy had sent “an enormous man” to the Event Horizons office to
intimidate his staff. Further, he claimed that this “250-300 pound” man had “smashed the receptionist
against the door,” causing her to miss a month of work while she recovered from a hip injury. Rose,
“Playboy’s New Playmate - Event Horizons BBS.”r
Figure 22: Advertisements for Event Horizons promoted high-resolution computer
graphics as both a technical marvel and means to access pornography. Event Horizons,
“Computer Images,” PC Magazine, December 1990.
287
population of modem users.
518
Event Horizons ultimately settled the case out of court for
a reported sum of $500,000.
519
The Event Horizons story is rife with contradiction but perhaps the most
compelling is the tension between Maxey's genuine commitment to popular astronomy
and the financial reality that the profitability of his BBS depended on the sale of
high-resolution pornography. As an allegory, it continued to resonate well into the
twenty-first century as pornography tacitly continues to push the adoption of new media
technologies. Most BBS lists noted the availability of X-rated images on Event Horizons.
The entry in Boardwatch magazine's directory, for example, read simply, “64 Line
Digitized Graphics Image Library – Adult .GIF files.”
520
In 1990, Event Horizons took
out a series of ads in print magazines such as Byte and PC Magazine that seemed to
reveal a discomfort with its growing reputation as a source of pornography (figure 22). At
the top of the ads, a young white woman was pictured with her arms raised and her hands
behind her head. She was topless but the image was cropped suggestively just a few
inches below her armpits. Above the photo, logos for Visa and MasterCard flanked the
words “Computer Images.” At the bottom of the ad, a second photo of the same size
appeared. This photo depicted Saturn and several of its moons in sharp detail. The
confusing ad copy promised access to high resolution images of “astronomy,” “nature,”
and “scenic” subjects, on one hand, and a “huge adult section” featuring, simply, “girls,”
on the other. Following the Playboy settlement, Maxey told reporters that Event Horizons
518Notably, Playboy had yet to build a BBS of its own although it was still reportedly working “furiously”
to build one in 1993.Rickard, “Home-Grown BB$.”
519Ibid.
520“National List of Electronic Bulletin Board Systems and On-Line Information Services,” Boardwatch,
May 1992.
288
was shifting its resources to focus on “games and programs for children” including an
interactive educational game in which players pilot a spacecraft through the known
universe.
521
By that time, the BBSing movement was in decline, however, as modemers
increasingly turned to the web in search of “heavenly” GIFs.
Whether or not Jim Maxey was entirely comfortable selling access to
pornography, plenty of other sysops were happy to follow his example. As one
anonymous sysop put it, “adult files pay the rent.”
522
With the high cost of image capture
equipment, most of the GIFs in circulation during the late-1980s could be traced back to
one of a dozen or so BBSes. Like Event Horizons, the names and numbers of BBSes such
as DataShack, Farmer's Daughter, Nitelog, and the Roman Empire appeared alongside the
images in their collections.
523
As the population of BBS callers grew larger, several larger
adult-oriented BBSes began to create their own images. The General BBS in San Diego
produced on-going series of nude and semi-nude photos featuring amateur models known
as the “Giffy Girls.”
524
The originality of each GIF was emphasized by the Giffy tagline,
“On Location in San Diego.” Similarly, Ebony Shack BBS in Toledo, OH boasted “the
largest collection of minority images.”
525
In addition to nearly 50,000 images and video
clips, the Black owned and operated BBS produced an original series of images and
video clips featuring amateur women of color identified by filenames beginning with
“ES.” For most everyday users, the cost of digitizing equipment remained prohibitive and
521Gardner, “Entrepreneur Hits Bulletin Board Bull’s Eye.”
522Wildhack, Erotic Connections, 73.
523Ibid., 87–88.
524Ibid., 89.
525“The Ebony Shack BBS,” BBS Magazine, August 1995,
https://archive.org/stream/BBS_VOL_06_08_1995_Aug#page/n73/mode/2up.
289
BBS callers rarely produced their own images for upload. Truly amateur imagery
remained the domain of VHS tapes and Polaroid cameras for several years to come.
With the intensely visual culture and the accessibility of porn on today's web, it is
difficult to convey the impact that an encounter with digital images might have had on
Figure 23: Although sexualized depictions of the human body were widespread on
image-oriented BBSes of the time, this 1990 advertisement for the Hercules graphics
card was rare for tacitly acknowledging the place of sexuality among the visual
pleasures of computer graphics. Hercules, “24-Bit Color Is Just One of Our Strengths,”
Byte, December 1990, https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1990-12.
290
BBS callers in the early 1990s. At the time, coverage of computer graphics was the only
space in the tech press that regularly included representations of human sexuality. In
1990, a half-page advertisement for the Hercules Graphics Station featured a long,
muscled arm holding up a computer monitor (figure 23).
526
On the screen, a cropped
photograph depicted the flexing shoulders, neck, and back muscles of a body builder
against a background of neon abstractions. Followed by an ad for Event Horizons, this
was the most overtly sexualized image of a human body in all 422 pages of a special
issue of Byte promising “State of the Art” computer graphics. Personal computing at
large had yet to experience its adolescence.
Textfiles: Electronic publishing for the BBS world
Producing original digital images was an expensive, technically complex process;
out of reach for most everyday BBSers. Consistent with the underlying infrastructure,
however, plain text provided an affordable, accessible, and interoperable medium for the
publication and circulation of new ideas and information among BBSes.
527
An order of
magnitude smaller than binary programs or audio-visual media, “textfiles” easily fit onto
floppies and might number in the thousands on a CD-ROM or modest hard drive. From
collectively authored e-zines and detailed how-to guides to original erotica and
transcribed arcana, “textfiles” were diverse in content and form. Furthermore, the
portability of plain text across diverse computing platforms made these files mobile in
526Hercules, “24-Bit Color Is Just One of Our Strengths,” Byte, December 1990,
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1990-12.
527“Plain text” is a colloquialism and not a technical term. In practice, “text” comes in a variety of formats,
most of which are at least partially interoperable. For a more detailed look at various character encoding
schemes from this period, see Chapter 3.
291
ways that their readers and authors often were not. Textfiles originally uploaded to a BBS
were frequently re-posted to contemporary networks like USENET, BITNET, and
CompuServe. From the early 1980s to the late 1990s, the circulation of textfiles revealed
the gradual interpenetration of previously distinct computing cultures, leading up to the
twenty-first century assemblage conventionally termed “the internet.”
In the early 1980s, the term “textfiles” was necessary to distinguish human
readable documents from executable programs. This colloquial usage was soon codified
by the default configurations of popular BBS host programs. Version 3.11 of WWIV ,
released in 1986, for example, automatically created a “gfiles” subdirectory for “general
text files.”
528
Callers accessed the textfiles area by pressing “G” at the main menu, a
convention that lead to occasional use of “g-files” as an synonym for “textfiles” among
WWIV users. The documentation for later versions of WWIV suggested that the “G-Files”
section might be divided into separate sections for “Communications files,” “Humorous
files,” and “ANSI pictures.”
529
Oblivion/2, a host program released in 1991, not only
created a “TEXTFILES” subdirectory automatically but included a set of textfile
authoring utilities that sysops could invoke from within the BBS.
530
One of the more
common BBS modification during this period was to add an online textfile viewer so that
users could preview textfiles on-screen before committing to downloading them. The
features of these viewers varied widely. DISPLAY , a modification for PCBoard, simply
528Bell, WWIV.
529Wig De Moville, “THE USER’S GUIDE TO WWIV,” 1991.
530Eric Katz and Rony Daher, Oblivion/2 Bulletin Board System, version 2.40 (Darkflame Enterprises,
1995), http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/OBLIVION2/.
292
output a stream of text, while ANSI Gallery, a modification for Oblivion/2, transformed a
textfiles library into visually rich “art gallery.”
531
Textfiles, as a category and a neologism, reveal a novel conceptualization of the
role of the BBS in popular culture. Whereas most early BBSes were conceived of either
in terms of the traditional community bulletin board or as an asynchronous alternative to
trading floppy disks, the production, circulation, and curation of textfiles imagined the
decentralized BBS network as a platform for independent publishing. This perspective is
evident in the production of electronic periodicals organized into “issues” and “volumes”
like their print counterparts. As was the case with Event Horizons, of course, some
textfiles were simply “digitized” (or, more accurately, “painstakingly transcribed”) copies
of existing print materials. But whereas Event Horizons found itself enmeshed in an
increasingly uncertain copyright regime, the manual transcription of text documents was
generally safer. Firstly, many important texts were already in the public domain so
creating a digital copy was not only legal but socially valuable. And, secondly, the
accessibility of BBS technology facilitated the integration of textfiles with the existing
underground press.
Indeed, the history of textfiles lights an electronic arc from the underground
literature of the 1970s counterculture to the online publications founded during the
“dotcom” era of the early web. At one end of this arc sat figures like Mike Gunderloy, the
founding editor of the widely-distributed fanzine Factsheet Five.
532
After moving to New
531Mindcrime, Ansi Gallery, version 1.00 (ACiDic, a division of ACiD Productions, 1994),
http://artscene.textfiles.com/acid/BBSMODS/.
532For history of Factsheet Five and the milieu it served, see: Stephen Duncombe, Notes from
Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (London; New York: Verso, 1997).
293
York state around 1988, Gunderloy ran the Factsheet Five BBS out of his East Greenbush
home until 1994, after which he embarked on a new career as a freelance computer
programmer.
533
And at the other end of the arc sat transmedia projects like Boing Boing.
Before moving to the web in 1995, Boing Boing (or bOING bOING as it was occasionally
known) was one of the thousands of DIY print publications reviewed in Factsheet Five
(figure 24).
534
Appropriately, Boing Boing re-organized its site in 2013 from a
blog-and-comments format to a blog-and-BBS format.
535
In a blog post announcing the
transition, editor Rob Beschizza joked that the new format would be “a bulletin board
533Jason Scott, “518 Area Code BBSes Through History,” Textfiles.com, accessed April 28, 2014,
http://bbslist.textfiles.com/518/.
534Mark Frauenfelder, “bOING bOING Advertisement in Factsheet Five #33 (1989),” Boing Boing,
August 7, 2009, http://boingboing.net/2009/08/19/boing-boing-advertis.html.
535Rob Beschizza, “Can We Talk?,” Boing Boing, June 27, 2013,
http://boingboing.net/2013/06/27/can-we-talk.html.
Figure 24: bOING bOING advertisement in Factsheet Five #33 (1989)
294
system, accessible exclusively via dial-up modem,” which prompted several readers to
reminisce about their favorite BBSes.
536
“I would have been so stoked if you had really
gone dial up BBS for comments,” wrote one reader. “Can you still play the dial-up
modem tones when we log-in to our accounts?,” asked another. For many participants in
alternative publishing, the dial-up BBS was their first encounter with “the net” and all of
the social computing technologies to follow—particularly, blogs and forums on the web
—continue to be measured against it.
Textfiles and the “computer underground”
By the mid-1980s, thousands of textfiles were already in circulation. As with
zines and underground comics, textfiles promised access to forbidden, repressed
knowledge. The medium was particularly prevalent on “hacker boards,” which were, for
the most part, both operated and frequented by young men in their teens and twenties. In
contrast to file-sharing boards, which could be segregated by microcomputer brand into
“Apple boards,” “Atari boards,” “Commodore boards,” etc., textfiles offered simplicity,
reliability, and accessibility. No special software was required to either edit or view a text
file. As one enthusiast put it, “Everyone can use a textfile on the first try.”
537
In March of 1986, Jason Scott, a teenager in Chappaqua, NY , founded The Works
BBS in his childhood bedroom using an IBM PC, a ten megabyte hard drive, and a Hayes
300/1200 modem (figure 25).
538
The 914 area code, not incidentally home to IBM
536Ibid.
537Jason Scott, “Why I Prefer Textfiles,” February 27, 1987,
http://www.textfiles.com/groups/OCTOTHORPE/whytext.oct.
538Jason Scott, “Overview of The Works,” July 16, 1986,
http://www.textfiles.com/groups/OCTOTHORPE/allworks.bbs.
295
corporate headquarters, was already host to a lively modeming scene.
539
Inspired by print
zines like Factsheet Five, on one hand, and the early “modem sub-culture,” on the other,
Scott decided to differentiate his system by designating it “text-files only.”
540
Scott's sense
of humor and enthusiasm for textfiles pervaded The Works. In a short file pitching the
system to new callers, he noted that his pet ferret would serve as “co-sysop” and
encouraged his readers to print out the files they found on his system and to read them “at
school or at the job, or even on the beach.”
541
Within three months, The Works, with
dozens of callers and “900+ Textfiles,” dubbed itself “914's Text-file BBS.
542
” As one
former user recalls, The Works was “a text file HEA VEN.”
543
539Between 1978-2003, 914 was home to over 500 bulletin board systems. “914 Area Code BBSes
Through History,” The TEXTFILES.COM Historical BBS List, accessed April 29, 2014,
http://bbslist.textfiles.com/914/.
540Jason Scott, “The Works BBS,” accessed April 29, 2014, http://cache.cow.net/works/.
541Scott, “Overview of The Works.”
542Ibid.
543doctor_x, “Curt Vendel on the BBS Documentary,” AtariAge, May 18, 2010,
http://atariage.com/forums/topic/163089-curt-vendel-on-the-bbs-documentary/?p=2016015.
296
Not only was The Works an archetypal teen “hacker” BBS, but its archive was
uncommonly well-preserved. When Scott moved to Boston to attend Emerson College in
1988, one of his users took over as the primary sysop of the BBS and The Works
continued for another five years from the new sysop's home in Lexington, MA.
544
In the
late 1990s, Scott began to collect and curate the digital history of networked personal
computing at textfiles.com, a project that lead ultimately to the production of a
544Jason Scott, “Does the BBS Guy Run a BBS?,” ASCII, October 21, 2003,
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/753.
Figure 25: Jason Scott, sysop of The Works BBS, c. 1988
297
documentary series on BBSing, released on DVD in 2005.
545
To date, Scott's preservation
efforts in this area are unmatched.
The use of the contraction “textfiles,” as opposed to, say, “electronic journal,”
also signaled affinity for a particular subculture of BBSers for whom the wit and
wordplay of their fellow callers superseded the computer games they had to trade. Unlike
activist or evangelical users, these adherents of the textfile, many of whom self-identified
as “hackers” or “phreaks,” composed their files for an imagined community of
like-minded peers. In 1986, several regular callers to The Works formed a “writing
group” and began to publish an irregular series of original files under the collective name
“Octothorpe.”
546
From 1986-1988, the group produced fifty-two files, the thematic range
of which reflected the interests and sense of humor of the dominant teen hacker
demographic. Parody pop lyrics reminiscent of “filk” music and transcribed articles from
Playboy sat alongside inscrutable technical files with information about local telephone
systems. Many of the files satirized the modeming subculture with coded in-jokes related
to specific users of The Works. “The Guide to Real Works Users,” for example, included
a list of one-liners such as, “Real Works Users thrive on Doritos, Diet Pepsi and dial
tones.”
547
For the most part, the messages posted to The Works were lost, but the files
produced by Octothorpe and preserved by Scott offer a glimpse of the fellowship among
users that must have characterized day-to-day life on the board.
545Jason Scott, BBS.
546Appropriately, the textfiles produced by Octothorpe are available in Scott's archive. See: Jason Scott,
“Groups: Octothorpe Productions,” Textfiles.com, accessed April 29, 2014,
http://www.textfiles.com/groups/OCTOTHORPE/.
547J. Scott and The Cruiser, “The Guide to Real Works Users,” February 26, 1987,
http://www.textfiles.com/groups/OCTOTHORPE/works2.oct.
298
The circulation of textfiles across networks
Crucially, textfiles often traveled where their authors could not. Before finding its
way to The Works, a textfile might have been posted to a CompuServe forum by one user,
copied to a USENET newsgroup by another, and downloaded to a floppy disk by a third.
The portability of standard ASCII characters across diverse computer systems conferred
considerable mobility to the textfile. Beginning around 1990, as the boundaries among
various networks began to grow increasingly porous, a new form of textfile emerged.
Electronic newsletters, magazines, and “e-zines” mimicked the conventions of a print
periodical. They were published on a consistent schedule and each file was assigned a
“volume” and “issue” number. Starting an electronic periodical was relatively easy;
maintaining one was hard. Hundreds of e-zines were assembled and released but few
lasted beyond a handful of issues.
548
Read alongside one another, Phrack and the Computer Underground Digest offer
a concise illustration of the mobility of textfiles among disparate spaces on the emerging
network of networks.
549
Phrack was founded in 1985 by Taran King and Knight
Lightning, two “phile writers” from the Dark Tower BBS in Ladue, MO.
550
Each issue
included contributions from multiple authors and was distributed both as a compressed
archive of individual files and a single, concatenated textfile. Phrack was published
548Jason Scott's collection of e-zines includes more than 400 unique titles founded during the 1980s and
1990s. See: Jason Scott, “Electronic Magazines,” Textfiles.com, accessed April 30, 2014,
http://textfiles.com/magazines/.
549For a closer reading of Phrack in the context of hacker culture, see: Douglas Thomas, “Representing
Hacker Culture: Reading Phrack,” in Hacker Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 115–40.
550The Dark Tower was shortly renamed The Metal Shop. Variations on these names, including “Metal
Shop: Dark Tower Phase II” appear in extant BBS lists under the same phone numbers. For a history of
this particular system, see: Crimson Death, “Phrack Classic Spotlight Featuring Knight Lightning,”
Phrack, November 17, 1990, http://textfiles.com/magazines/PHRACK/PHRACK32.
299
continuously from 1985-2008, although the frequency of publication slowed after
1993.
551
Unsurprisingly, articles in the first issue of Phrack were squarely in the
“forbidden knowledge” genre: instructions for cracking Apple software, making a bomb,
picking a lock, and breaking into university computer networks.
552
In issue 3, however,
Phrack introduced “Phrack World News,” a feature that set it apart from other hackers
zines. Toward the end of the decade, as fear of “viruses” and “hackers” began to make
headlines, the “World News” represented an increasingly important counter-narrative to
the sensational coverage by professional journalists.
553

In 1990, in the midst of a growing panic about hacking and cyber-crime,
sociologists Gorden Meyer and Jim Thomas founded Computer Underground Digest,
also known as CuD or CU Digest. In the first issue, Meyer and Thomas explicitly
described CuD as a more “open” complement to the hacker perspective found in Phrack.
Meyer offered an inclusive definition for the “computer underground” drawn from his
Master's thesis: “the social world of phreaks, hackers, and pirates.” Notably, while both
warez and textfiles might be included in this definition, shareware boards like Software
Creations and GIF boards like Event Horizon fell somewhere outside of Meyer's
boundaries.
New issues of Phrack were posted first to the Metal Shop BBS, while new issues
of Computer Underground Digest were circulated on a BITNET mailing list. Although
551Gaps in publication were often attributed to contributors “going off to college” and editorial control
changed hands several times. See: Phrack Staff, “Introduction,” Phrack, September 9, 1999,
http://textfiles.com/magazines/PHRACK/PHRACK55.
552Phrack Staff, “Introduction,” Phrack, November 17, 1985,
http://textfiles.com/magazines/PHRACK/PHRACK-1.
553In Thomas's reading, “[Phrack World News] provided a corrective measure by filling in important
pieces of information that revealed biases or hype” in the coverage of hackers and BBSes. Thomas,
Hacker Culture, 138.
300
each was issued to different computer networks, they clearly addressed an overlapping
population of readers. This was possible because some of the readers of these publication,
exceptionally savvy modemers, had ready access to two or more computer networks.
These readers acted as voluntary relays, manually transferring copies of the newsletters
across the gaps. As a result, both Computer Underground Digest and Phrack were
accessible to readers throughout the modem world.
Why were there no riot grrl textfiles?
One striking difference between the textfiles produced by BBSers during the late
1980s and early 1990s and the xeroxed zine culture of the same period is the almost total
absence of female voices. This is a shocking contrast to the scholarship and archival labor
concerning zines and zine publishing which draws attention to the considerable
production of zines by young women.
554
Indeed, young women were among the most
prolific, dedicated, and innovative zine writers of the period. Furthermore, women had
similar access to home computers and were clearly present elsewhere in the nascent
modem world. During the 1990s, for example, feminist forums, chatrooms, mailing lists,
and “e-zines” proliferated on a variety of commercial and non-commercial computer
networks including America Online, Prodigy, USENET, and the early web. And yet,
contra expectations, there is no evidence that the predominantly male teen hacker
554Catherine Driscoll, “Girl Culture, Revenge and Global Capitalism: Cybergirls, Riot Grrls, Spice Girls,”
Australian Feminist Studies 14, no. 29 (1999): 173–93, doi:10.1080/08164649993425; Melanie A.
Ferris, “Resisting Mainstream Media: Girls and the Act of Making Zines,” Canadian Woman Studies
21, no. 1 (April 1, 2001), http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/cws/article/view/6906; Alison
Piepmeier, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (NYU Press, 2009); Janice Radway, “Zines,
Half-Lives, and Afterlives: On the Temporalities of Social and Political Change,” PMLA 126, no. 1
(January 1, 2011): 140–50, doi:10.1632/pmla.2011.126.1.140.
301
subculture included “riot grrl” dial-up BBSes or explicitly feminist textfile writing
groups.
One explanation for the exclusion of women from smaller-scale BBSes like The
Works concerns the social pathways through which information about local BBSes
circulated in the 1980s and early 1990s. Consistent with more than two generations of
amateur radio, young men frequently encountered BBSing through pre-existing
homosocial relationships.
555
Fathers, older brothers, and schoolmates passed along lists of
telephone numbers and offered advice on making a successful connection by modem. By
and large, young women were not included in these crucial moments of informal
mentorship.
Finally, in the early 1990s, the sexism that had plagued amateur
telecommunications for more than fifty years began to break down as networked personal
computing became more routinely integrated into the academic and commercial spheres.
On one hand, university campuses throughout Canada and the US began to provide
access to e-mail and USENET news to all incoming students, not just those enrolled in
particular departments or participating in certain clubs. Students were introduced to these
systems as a routine part of university orientation exercises. Commercial services,
meanwhile, invited new users through trial memberships that were packaged with new
modem-equipped PCs and, later, distributed blindly through the mail. No pre-existing
555Kristen Haring notes the difficulty of accurately measuring the gender diversity of technical hobbies
like amateur radio. Most of the data regarding the participation technical cultures depends on the
records of club and newsletters but, as Haring points out, these are merely a proxy. Methodological
difficulties aside, the consensus among historians of technology is that men dominate technical hobbies.
This imbalance is not natural, of course, and Haring provides convincing evidence that ham radio
operators took steps to ensure that their hobby practices were gendered male. See: Haring, Ham Radio’ s
Technical Culture, 4.
302
social connections were required to join either the academic or commercial systems. On
both counts, the networks of hidden knowledge that preserved gender-based inequity in
amateur telecommunications were disrupted by the introduction of impersonal,
institutional bureaucracies.
Dial-up BBSing, however, remained an overwhelmingly male culture in spite of
changes elsewhere in the modem world. The sysops of long-running BBSes were happy
to discover any women at all among their callers. When one technology journalist
remarked that in 1983, “all of the users [of a particular BBS] were males,” he was not
speaking metaphorically.
556
On some systems, literally every single caller identified
themselves as men. The skew was so extreme and the inertia so strong that in 1990, the
wife-and-husband team that ran EXEC-PC seemed almost eager to report that their
female-identified population had reached just 15%.
557
This number may under-represent
the gender divide—particularly if women tactically masked their genders and adopted
conventionally male pseudonyms—but it corresponds to the low numbers of young
women pursuing computer science at the top universities in the US. In 1995, for example,
only 7% of the incoming computer science students at in the elite Carnegie Mellon
University department were women.
558
Despite the best intentions of many individual
sysops who would have liked to welcome women to their boards, the history of BBSing
remains an exceptionally grim story of gendered exclusion.
556JOHN E. MOLLWITZ, “Electronic Bulletin Board Posts Information around the Globe,” Milwaukee
Journal, July 9, 1990, sec. BUSINESS,
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/science/docview/333454975/3554F296B5374BD3PQ/14?
accountid=14749.
557Ibid.
558Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 2002), 63.
303
File-sharing as a communal activity
For many personal computer owners, file-sharing was the principal justification
for the monetary cost of buying a modem and the investment of time required to learning
how to use it. Some of the earliest dial-up BBSes were simply file repositories; little more
than a more convenient alternative to exchanging a shoebox full of floppies with a friend.
By the mid-1980s, however, asynchronous file-sharing via BBS gave rise to several
unexpected socio-technical forms. The authors of shareware not only permitted but
encouraged their users to make copies of their software, share it with friends, and upload
it to BBSes. Tellingly, the most commercially successful shareware products addressed
the needs and interests of BBS callers and sysops. Indeed, from BBS-oriented terminal
software like Qmodem and Procomm, to sysop utilities like Doorway and PKZIP , to the
modem-ready Doom, nearly the entire software infrastructure of BBSing was
commercialized using the shareware model. Shareware was thus perceived of as
originating within, and being of benefit to, the BBS community.
At the same time, “commercial” software was regarded by some BBSers—
particularly younger users—as coming from outside of the hobbyist milieu, and therefore
less deserving of copyright protection. In practice, the same network that enabled the
authorized distribution of shareware also enabled the unauthorized distribution of
so-called “commercial” software. This underground economy, known to participants as
“warez” (and to vendors as “piracy”), ultimately grew up from small pockets of
individual traders into a complex, transnational “meta-game” in which highly organized
groups competed with one another to be the first to crack and release new software. For
304
many participants, the thrill of the meta-game trumped the market value of the pilfered
software and any interest in playing games or running local applications was forgotten.
By the end of the 1980s, warez “releases” increasingly included a rich collection of
digital media including complex multimedia displays. These flamboyant “demos”
included music, animation, and scrolling texts taunting the group's competitors. Once
again, the social pleasures of networked computing superseded its instrumental ends.
Elsewhere in the modem world, the file-sharing features common to all BBS
software facilitated the production of vast libraries of digital (and digitized) media files.
Event Horizons, perhaps the single most profitable BBS in history, made its fortune by
charging for access to a unique archive of thousands of photographs and stills scanned
from magazines and captured from streams of video. In addition to a particularly
beautiful collection of astronomical images, users were drawn by the novel opportunity to
download and view sexually explicit GIFs on their computer screens. In 1992, Event
Horizons was sued for hosting several photos scanned from the pages of Playboy and was
forced to settled for a considerable sum. The highly-publicized lawsuit may have hurt the
Event Horizons bank account but it created a new market for non-infringing adult images.
This opportunity was soon met by enterprising BBS sysops and callers whose original
works constituted the first generation of commercial pornography produced specifically
for a computer-mediated audience.
The most productive file-sharing subculture was in many ways the most modest
and easiest to overlook. The authors of “textfiles” took advantage of the fundamental
accessibility and portability of plain old text to create a wildly creative medium that
305
carried the tradition of the amateur press, underground comics and xeroxed fanzines into
the modem world. From collectively authored “e-zines” published on a schedule, to
anonymous screeds about causing mayhem at the local department store, textfiles
imposed very little structure on their authors. Textfiles also offered an early indication of
the interconnection of BBSes, commercial systems, and academic networks that was
beginning in earnest at the start of the 1990s. The automated “headers” prepended to
many of the textfiles that survive in archives today bear evidence of these travels. Like
postage stamps on a piece of well-traveled mail, they are adorned with university email
addresses, CompuServe user IDs, and the tell-tale ASCII ad for a dial-up BBS. Textfiles
traversed the boundaries among computer networks even when their authors could not.
306
Part III. Community-oriented BBSing during the boom of the early 1990s
Unlike BBS file-sharing practices, which required some labor to uncover, the use
of BBSes for community-building seems obvious. Why else would someone build an
online database of public messages if not for community use? And, furthermore, the
earliest BBSes were conceived, implemented, and operated by hobbyists who were
themselves members of clearly articulated communities of interest: computer clubs,
church groups, Boy Scout troops. Naturally, a computerized version of the conventional
bulletin board would inherit the community function from its cork-and-pins forebear.
The taken-for-grantedness of bulletin boards systems' community function is
reflected in the popularity of “social” boards during the period of peak BBS activity in
the early 1990s. At the start of 1992, amid rising popular interest in the promises of the
“information superhighway,” Boardwatch magazine conducted a poll of its readers to
determine “the best BBS in North America.”
559
In addition to naming the “best” BBS, the
ballot also included an open response question asking readers to elaborate on their
choices. By the time that the May issue of Boardwatch went to press, the editors believed
that a clear set of winners was emerging. Of the 3,967 tallied responses, 1,234 of the
voters named one of ten BBSes as their favorite. To the editors' surprise, seven of this
likely top ten were categorized as “socially oriented” systems.
560
Admittedly broad, the
“social” category was defined as any board emphasizing “people communicating with
559“Boardwatch Magazine Announces the Boardwatch 100 Reader’s Choice Bulletin Board Contest,”
Boardwatch, May 1992.
560“V oters Favor Online Communities,” Boardwatch, May 1992.
307
people” rather than downloads, online games, or commercial services; in other words,
“social” was inclusive of everything from “G-rated” discussion boards to “swinger's
clubs.”
561
Before digging deeper into the significance of the 1992 Boardwatch survey, a few
biases should be noted. First, the raw count of votes necessarily favored large-scale,
centralized boards over intimate, local systems. Sure enough, only two “one-liners”
appeared in the Top 100. Second, with its emphasis on commercialization and
professionalism, Boardwatch magazine appealed to a peculiar subset of the modem
world. In contrast to the teenage textfile writers who dialed into The Works, more than
50% of the voters in the Boardwatch poll identified their ages falling between 30 and 50
years old. This skew was even more pronounced among voters for the “top ten.” The
winners of the Boardwatch Top 100 were a highly visible set of boards—the list was
re-printed in several how-to books and issues of Boardwatch—but they represented the
interests an older, more tech-savvy subset of North American BBSers.
In spite of its biases, the Boardwatch survey is an important reminder that the
material history of messaging, the principal function of the computerized bulletin board,
is almost totally lost. Whereas thousands of shareware programs, textfiles, and digitized
images were burned to CD-ROMs or preserved by hobbyists, the day-to-day activity that
gave life to these beloved BBSes was rarely saved. On occasion, a particularly humorous,
rancorous, or informative post was saved to a floppy, printed out, or, in some cases, made
into a textfile, but for the most part, messages were considered ephemeral by their authors
561Ibid.
308
and readers. Eventually, every message scrolled up off the top of the screen, never to be
read again.
The overwhelming preference for “social” BBSes among Boardwatch readers is a
mandate from the past to seek evidence of the everyday lived experience of BBSing. The
next section of this chapter details several examples of BBSes that existed primarily as
infrastructures for community-building. The visibility of general-purpose “nationwide”
social systems like Software Creations at the top of the Boardwatch list belies the
prevalence of smaller-scale, locally-focused BBSes. In fact, although “nationwide”
systems topped the Boardwatch poll, an overwhelming majority of readers (78%) voted
for a BBS in their own area code.
562
In smaller cities and towns, general-purpose BBSes
provided online meeting places for local users to chat, flirt, and debate with one another.
The architectures and aesthetics of these systems reflected the personalities of their
sysops and the social scenes they enabled were comparable to a local donut shop, dive
bar, or CB radio channel. At a micro scale, any one of these general-purpose local
systems might include a hundred or so individual enthusiast. But at a continental scale,
tens of thousands of such systems come into view. Considered collectively, the local
waterholes dotting North America during this period represented into a dynamic,
decentralized network of social computing enthusiasts.
Alongside general-purpose BBSes, a second type of community-oriented BBSes
served communities defined by shared interest or identity. Interest-driven BBSes tended
to attract users from a wider territorial scope than general-purpose systems because they
provided discursive space for topics that could not draw enough users from a single area
562Ibid.
309
code. Initially, a majority of interest-driven BBSes were organized around technical
hobbies such as ham radio. But as the 1980s wore on, veteran modemers grew tired of
talking about disk drives and operating systems. “Enough tech boards already!,” cried
one self-described “old-timer” in a textfile from 1985.
563
As BBS technology grew more
accessible and PCs more affordable, a greater variety of interests and identities were
represented. Themed BBSes like the Batboard in Columbia, MO were home to fans of
particular pop media. The messaging areas of these systems were used to debate the finer
points of favorite texts and the file areas were filled with the products of fan creativity
such as artwork, episode guides, and photos from related conventions.
564
Professional
sports fandom was another particularly active type of interest-driven system. In several
area codes, bulletin board systems provided a platform for fantasy sports enthusiasts to
organize their leagues. Sports-themed boards surfaced in area codes throughout the US,
including Princeton, WV (304); Conway, AR;(501); Cape Girardeau, MO (573); St. Paul,
MN (612); Springfield, V A (703).
Other interest-driven systems appealed to users with particular religious or
ideological affiliations. The sysops of the WinPlus BBS in Kent, WA dubbed their system
“the largest Christian based BBS” and hosted family-friendly get-togethers such as pizza
parties and softball games.
565
Further down the west coast, meanwhile, members of Burn
This Flag BBS in San Jose, CA prided themselves on having thick skins and exploring
563Tom Jennings, “BULLETIN BOARD ETTIQUETTE FOR NEW USERS AND OLD TIMERS,”
August 12, 1985, http://winramturbo.com/fnsp/doc/1985/1985-08-12-tj-bbs-etiquette.txt.
564Pope, Que’ s Bbs Directory, 109.
565Gary Wolf and Michael Stein, Aether Madness: An Offbeat Guide to the Online World (Berkeley, Calif.:
Peachpit Press, 1995), 128–129.
310
the limits free speech.
566
Still others were exclusively open to members of a profession or
guild: The Backdraft BBS in Key Largo, FL was populated by Firefighters and
Emergency Medical Services professionals, and the Dissociation Network in Albany, NY
was devoted to social work and mental health.
567

In 1992, even a close observer would have been hard-pressed to generalize about
the types of communities and activities emerging around BBSes in North America.
Modemers were in broad agreement that something new and important was happening
but they imagined wildly different futures for these grassroots systems. The editors of
Boardwatch magazine touted individual economic liberation; a “new cottage industry”
that “thousands are leaving corporate America forever to join.”
568
Activists like Keith
Wade of New York City, NY, a self-proclaimed “lover of freedom,” saw the promise of
radical social change and described BBSes as “five hundred dollar anarchy machines.”
569

Across the country, Colonel Dave Hughes, sysop of the Ross Perot for President BBS,
was hard at work campaigning for a candidate who envisioned “national town halls”
enacted through interactive TV broadcasts. David Fox, author of Love Bytes, meanwhile,
encountered BBSes as friendly gathering spaces—“pubs on the information
superhighway”—catering to “every interest, every hobby,” and packed with “colorful
people,” some of whom might turn out to be future friends or lovers.
570

In spite of their divergent social meanings and purposes, each of these visions of
online community was produced, fundamentally, by the ritual of dialing-in to the same
566Pope, Que’ s Bbs Directory, 111.
567“Backdraft Bulletin Board System,” ModemNews Magazine, 1993; Pope, Que’ s Bbs Directory, 115.
568“Subscribe to Boardwatch Magazine,” Boardwatch, May 1992.
569Wade, The Anarchist’ s Guide to the Bbs, 2.
570David Fox, Love Bytes: The Online Dating Handbook (Corte Madera, CA: Waite Group Press, 1995), 3.
311
system, night after night, for a sustained period of time. In the punctuated temporality of
BBSing, communities and relationships developed gradually over weeks, months, and
years of asynchronous written communication. For this long-lasting interaction to occur
however, users needed to feel that they were welcomed to regularly participate in a
system. This affective dimension of the BBSing ritual was shaped strongly by the
performance of the system operator, or sysop. Not only did the sysop manage the
technical aspects of the board, from setting up the host software to paying the telephone
bills, they were also responsible for devising the social policies governing appropriate
behavior on the board. When a user transgressed the norms of the community,
furthermore, it was up to the sysop to enforce the rules and issue a consequence. For
many sysops, drawn to the role because of an interest in technology, the task of designing
and policing a novel social space presented an unexpected challenge.
BBS etiquette and social policy
At the risk of hyperbole, the social life of a particular bulletin board system rested
in the hands of whoever sat within reach of the host computer's power switch. Short of a
total shutdown, however, each BBS was governed by a set of rules devised by the sysop
—conveniently also the one near the switch—and agreed to by the users. In practice, of
course, appropriate behavior was defined through a combination of explicit policy
documents and implicit social norms. Early on, when modems were expensive and
BBSes were rare, most users were assumed to be “hardcore techie types.”
571
In this
monoculture, explicit policy documents were considered unnecessary, if they were
571Jennings, “BULLETIN BOARD ETTIQUETTE FOR NEW USERS AND OLD TIMERS.”
312
considered at all.
572
It is no surprise, then, that Lary L. Myers did not cover the topic of
social policy at all in his 1982 how-to book for aspiring sysops.
573
Sysops reasonably
assumed that their callers shared common ground in the technical culture of hobby
computing. Plus, though they might be strangers, they were likely to live nearby to one
another and probably shared a pre-existing social connection. Destructive behavior, such
as intentionally crashing the host, tying up the phone line, or “flooding” the system with
nonsense messages, were obvious violations of the tradition of goodwill in amateur
telecommunications and it seemed unnecessary to prohibit these acts in an explicit policy
document.
574
Trickier, however, were the social norms regarding appropriate use of BBS
facilities. How long was too long to stay connected? What constituted an “off-topic”
message? Who evaluated new uploads before they were made available to others?
By the mid-1980s, as the modem world grew larger and more diverse, sysops
began to establish explicit ground rules for the users of their systems. In general,
individual BBS policy documents were not well preserved, but several surviving
examples suggest that sysops of this middle period tended to avoid legalistic language,
and conveyed their polices with a friendly, accessible, and, at times, humorous tone. In
Using Computer Bulletin Boards, a handbook for BBS callers, John V . Hedtke outlined
the typical policies that readers were likely to encounter as they explored their local
systems. Hedtke's examples emphasized personal responsibility on the part of users and
572The monoculture of early 1980s BBSing mirrored the monoculture of academic networks such as
ARPANET discussed in Chapter 2. But whereas the ARPANET monoculture remained intact, BBSing
grew increasingly plural over time.
573Myers, How to Create Your Own Computer Bulletin Board.
574For a more detailed examination of deviant behavior on BBS networks, see: Carla G Surratt, Netlife:
Internet Citizens and Their Communities (Commack, NY: Nova Science, 1998), 209–226.s
313
re-iterated the final authority of the sysop. In mock-up of a hypothetical policy document,
users were asked to “act in a reasonably civil fashion” and reminded that “use of the
board is a privilege, not a right.”
575
Similar language appears today in the user policy for
The Outpost BBS, a hobby system run “off and on” since 1998 by Sean Dennis, a ham
radio enthusiast from Mountain Home, TN. In addition to a note about civility, Dennis
asked users to avoid avoid uploading or posting “illegal” content. Similar policies
prohibiting “warez” became more common in the late 1980s after the sysops of several
highly-visible systems were sued for copyright infringement.
Throughout the BBS era, a number of textfiles were in circulation that specifically
discussed proper BBS etiquette and social policy. These files tended to blur the boundary
between social behavior and technology use. For example, in a satirical twist on the
biblical Ten Commandments, the anonymous author(s) of “The Thirty BBS
Commandments” began, “Thou shall love thy BBS with all thy heart and all thy bytes.”
576
Commandments further down the list included a mix of banal platitudes—“Thou shalt
help other users,” “Thou shalt not post messages while drunk”—and serious policies—
“Thou shalt not exchange copy protected software thru the BBS,” “Thou shalt not upload
'worm' programs.”
577
Mixed in with these commonsense commandments, a number of
curiosities revealed the extent to which the sociality of a BBS was shaped by its
infrastructure. Two commandments specifically referred to the technical constraints of the
telephone network. “Thou shalt first dial BBS numbers during the day by way of voice
line to assure correct numbers,” suggested that a courteous caller would first dial a new
575Hedtke, Using Computer Bulletin Boards, 30.
576Anonymous, “The Thirty BBS Commandments,” n.d., http://textfiles.com/bbs/commands.bbs.
577Ibid.
314
BBS by voice in case the system was offline and some poor stranger would be blasted
with modem noise. In an environment constructed primarily through text, communication
was necessarily interwoven with technology use, but this did not mean that the social
world of a BBS was wholly distinct from the larger social and political contexts.
In the 1990s, many BBSes, particularly for-profit systems, began to include more
formal social policies. These policy documents, and the legal regimes they invoked,
evidenced an increasing investment in signs of legitimacy among sysops who hoped to
turn their hobbies into businesses. Several technical books published between 1993 and
1996 specifically addressed sysops as businesspeople and positioned computerized
bulletin boards as promising business ventures. In his 1994 book, Creating Successful
Bulletin Board Systems, an exemplar of the BBS-as-business genre, Alan D. Bryant
warned sysops with a hobbyist past to avoid thinking about their callers as peers. In fact,
Bryant explicitly recommended that readers treat their callers as “customers” rather than
“users.”
578
This small ontological shift in thinking reflected a larger legal transformation
that occurred when hobbyist BBSes became profit-seeking businesses. Instead of
allowing informal social policies to become, implicitly, ambiguous contracts, wise sysops
tended to display a legalistic “service agreement” to users at the login prompt.
Abandoning the casual tone of a former hobby system could destroy the culture of the
BBS, however, and even the business-oriented Bryant cautioned sysops about presenting
users with too much legalese. “Disclaimers plastered all over your BBS are likely to do
578Alan D Bryant, Creating Successful Bulletin Board Systems (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994),
260–261.
315
more harm to your image as an inviting, friendly BBS than good for your legal
liability.”
579
In addition to social policies and community norms, sysops could shape the
sociality of their BBS by modifying the functionality of the underlying technical
system.
580
Time limits, download ratios, and tiered access levels were common
architectural features built into nearly all popular BBS host software by default. GAP
BBS, for example, assigned each user to one of 255 levels, each of which corresponded
to a specific set of constraints.
581
By default, users were assigned to level 50 which
granted them 50 minutes and 600 kilobytes of file downloads per session.
582
In addition,
level 50 users were required to upload one new file for every twenty files they
downloaded, regardless of size. The definitions of each “security level” were stored in a
plain text file called SECLEV . The default settings reflected the received wisdom of the
GAP programmers—as technical writer and sysop David Wolfe suggested, following
these guidelines was “probably a good idea”—but the simplicity of the SECLEV file
provided the sysops with an accessible means of experimenting with the protocols
governing the social life of their boards.
583
579Ibid., 213.
580The notion that a single sysop might pull specialized technical levers to constrain a social computing
systems can be quite frightening. However, it is helpful to remember Alexander Galloway's caveat to
his grim analysis of the telecommunication protocols underlying the early-2000s World Wide Web: “for
all its faults, protocological is still an improvement over other modes of social control.” Progressive
social change, he reasoned, was more likely achieved through direct engagement with protocols rather
than against them. Alexander R Galloway, Protocol How Control Exists after Decentralization
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 17, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?
direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=122510.
581Wolfe, The BBS Construction Kit, 71.
582GAP BBS, version 6.6 (GAP Development Company, 1999).
583Wolfe's 1994 book The BBS Construction Set included a floppy disk containing a shareware copy of
GAP BBS. In addition to a mutually beneficial advertising arrangement, including GAP gave Wolfe a
chance to dig more deeply into the nitty-gritty technical details of running a BBS, something that
confounded authors who were reluctant to recommend one or another BBS host program. Wolfe, The
316
By 1990, “virtually all” bulletin-board systems implemented time limits and many
incorporated upload/download ratios (figure 26).
584
Time limits were especially important
on popular “one-liner” systems which could occupied for hours by a single inconsiderate
(or ignorant) caller. The likely cause for such a long connection was downloading large
files but the primary side effect of a long call was a disruption in the flow of the
messaging areas. If other callers cannot reach the system, they cannot participate in the
forums, and conversation grinds to a halt. Sysops employed a number of strategies to
reduce the negative impact of rampant downloading on their messaging areas. One tactic
adopted by shareware authors was to slice big programs into smaller chunks so that users
could download one chunk at a time over several days. In other cases, sysops rotated the
availability of their files so that popular files were simply not accessible during peak
hours. Hedtke, for his part, shifted the burden of responsibility back to the users and
recommended that readers schedule long downloads for off-peak hours when others were
unlikely to attempt to access the system.
585
Of course, knowing which hours constituted
“off-peak” time required an intimacy with the ebb and flow of activity on the board. On
systems populated by students or office workers, mid-day on a Tuesday might be
considered “off-peak,” while on a system catering to retirees, a weekday afternoon could
be very busy. File-sharing was always embedded within a larger social context.
One challenge of running a board with tiered access was determining how to
classify each user. Frequently, boards with “adults-only” areas segmented their user
populations by age. Verifying the age of a new caller could be tricky, particularly for a
BBS Construction Kit.
584Hedtke, Using Computer Bulletin Boards, 74.
585Ibid., 74–75.
317
hobbyist managing a BBS in her part time. Wolfe, who was also sysop of the
Pandaemonium BBS in Carmel, IN, described an ideal case in which each new user
would be required to mail in a photocopy of their driver's license. In practice, however,
keeping track of this material was a “pain in the neck” and few users would comply. On
his own board, Wolfe required users to fill out a questionnaire before giving them access
to the “adults-only” areas.
586
Wolfe's questionnaire asked for several pieces of identifying
information including their home address, phone number, and birthday. Only users that
586Wolfe, The BBS Construction Kit, 67.
Figure 26: Many BBS sysops implemented strict time limits to keep their phone lines
open. Ev Cheney, “Your Time Is Up,” 1986,
http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/FIDONET/JENNINGS/IMAGES/toon-03.gif.
318
were listed in the local “white pages” telephone directory were granted immediate access.
Anyone else was required to mail in a photocopy of their driver's license.
Verifying the identity of new callers by voice was surprisingly common on BBSes
of the late 1980s and early 1990s. On GAP BBS, for example, “unverified” new callers
were assigned to a very limited security level that afforded just twelve minutes online and
no download privileges. “V oice verification,” as it was known, was a low-tech approach
to validating the identity of new callers. On most systems, it was up to the sysop to attend
to the queue of new callers awaiting validation.
587
Verification was rarely instant but
Hedtke assured readers that the sysop would “probably [call] within the next day or
so.”
588
V oice was the most common verification medium but it was not the only option.
Joseph Negron, sysop of The Programmer's Mark BBS in Brooklyn, NY , offered
“postcard verification” as an alternative.
589
Visitors were asked to mail a postage-paid,
self-addressed postcard to his P.O. Box. Negron would then write a secret password on
the postcard and mail it back to the new user to complete the process.
For the sysops of locally-focused boards, voice verification served a secondary
purpose. Talking to each new user over the phone, even briefly, was part of introducing
them to the board's community. It gave the caller an opportunity to ask the sysop a
question and get a feel for their personality. As previously noted, sysops played a central
role in setting the tone for their boards. The importance of the sysop's personality was
reflected in the open responses that readers sent in to the Boardwatch poll. One of the
587
588Hedtke, Using Computer Bulletin Boards, 31.
589Joseph Negron, “The Programmer’s Mark BBS Verification Policy,” November 25, 1995,
http://artifacts.textfiles.com/718/718-921-9267/blt-1.12.
319
reasons cited most often for choosing a particular BBS was its “friendly, helpful
sysop.”
590
V oice verification also gave the sysop a chance to meet their new caller. It is
scarcely a metaphor to portray this telephonic encounter as a sysop welcoming a stranger
into their home. A local “one-liner” BBS was likely sharing living quarters with its
sysops. While connected to the BBS, callers were quite literally manipulating a PC sitting
right there on the sysop's desk, in their basement, or even on their kitchen table.
591
V oice
verification played a crucial role in tacitly introducing new users to the social norms
governing the intimate communicative space they were about to enter.
The unique shared imaginary of each community-oriented BBS was mutually
constructed by users and sysops through the on-going negotiation of social norms, the
development of explicit social policies, and the manipulation of social technologies.
Whereas a shareware-oriented system like EXEC-PC might advertise its “450,000
programs and files,” and an image archive like Event Horizons could boast about the
“50,000 top quality” GIFs in its collection, the characteristics of “social” BBSes were not
as easily quantified. Beloved BBS communities tended to be characterized by intangible
feelings; they were welcoming, friendly, lively, respectful, and fun. In 1992, The Whole
Earth 'Lectronic Link, or The WELL, a multi-line for-profit system in Sausalito, CA, was
becoming world famous for its unusually thoughtful and supportive community. The
TARDIS BBS, meanwhile, a one-liner run by a ham radio operator in Terre Haute, IN
590“V oters Favor Online Communities.”
591Keith Wade described a popular local system running on the sysop's kitchen table: “It takes up about
two square fee and consists of an IBM compatible computer, a 40 meg hard drive[,] a monitor, an
internal modem, and a keyboard cover to keep the cat from accidentally depressing the keys on the
keyboard. It's small, takes up very little space, is unobtrusive, and is used by several hundred people
each week.” Wade, The Anarchist’ s Guide to the Bbs, 10.
320
during the same period, never quite achieved worldwide visibility but it nevertheless
attracted a devoted, loving community. The next section will explore the histories of these
boards alongside one another to develop a more holistic view of community-oriented
BBSing during the late-1980s and early-1990s.
WELL-documented experiments in computer-mediated community
Today, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, or the WELL, is often cited or
remembered as an ideal instance of “virtual community” by scholars, critics, and former
callers. First-hand accounts by users such as Katie Hafner and Howard Rheingold portray
the WELL as an uncommonly collegial space in which participants from many walks of
life gathered to share the stories of their lives and debate the topics of the day.
592
Unlike
the community-oriented hobby systems that were already spread throughout North
America at the time of its founding, however, The WELL was a profit-seeking venture
and relied on subscription fees to stay online. The implications of this economic
arrangement are more clearly integrated into Fred Turner's historical analysis than in
most popular accounts. In Turner's narrative, the WELL was the latest iteration of an
approach to social and industrial organization that was first articulated by Stewart Brand
during the publication of the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1970s.
593
Under the continued
influence of Brand, the WELL served as a working model of a new form of egalitarian
community enabled by the tactical use of networked personal computing technologies.
An important detail often neglected in idealized portrayals of the WELL, however, was
592Katie Hafner, The Well: A Story of Love, Death, and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community (New
York: Carroll & Graf, 2001); Rheingold, The Virtual Community.
593Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise
of Digital Utopianism, 141.
321
the extent to which the intellectual discussions cherished by journalists and futurists were
supported financially by the reliable subscription fees of a much larger population of
Grateful Dead fans. To fully appreciate the place of the WELL within the larger history of
North American BBSing, it is important to keep in mind the political-economic realities
that enabled its unmatched community to flourish.
During the 1970s, a counter-cultural notion of community as a radically
democratic form of social organization animated several well-documented efforts at
amateur computer networking in the Bay Area. In 1973, the Community Memory project
was an early effort at providing an “electronic bulletin board” to people outside of the
technical culture of amateur computing. Public terminals were installed alongside the
conventional cork community bulletin boards in various popular hangouts near to the
university campus in Berkeley and in the Mission district of San Francisco.
594
The
Community Memory founders were pleased to find that approximately ten messages
were posted and more than fifty searches conducted on the system each day.
595
During the
year that the system was in operation, it was used for conventional purposes such as
finding musicians to jam with and organizing car pools, as well as unexpected uses such
as publishing poetry and engaging in dialogues with strangers. In fact, the organizers
were particularly excited to find that users “invented” new uses for Community Memory
“in response to their needs and desires.”
596
They believed that this reinvention of
594Ken Colstad and Efrem Lipkin, “Community Memory: A Public Information Network,” SIGCAS
Comput. Soc. 6, no. 4 (December 1975): 6–7, doi:10.1145/958785.958788.
595Ibid.
596Michael Rossman, “Implications of Community Memory,” SIGCAS Comput. Soc. 6, no. 4 (December
1975): 7–10, doi:10.1145/958785.958789.
322
Community Memory was a consequence of its open, unmoderated design in which “no
central authority determines who shall know what in what way.”
597
A second well-documented experiment in social computing began in 1978, when
John James, another computer programmer with roots in the Bay Area counter-culture,
established CommuniTree in Santa Cruz, CA. Whereas Community Memory was used as
a computerized bulletin board, CommuniTree was designed to serve as a platform for the
unrestrained discussion of New Age spirituality. Consistent with the principles behind
Community Memory, CommuniTree provided no facility for the system operators to
moderate or edit user contributions.
598
CommuniTree remained online for nearly four
years, during which time Howard Rheingold came upon the system and saved copies of
some of its posts.
599
Unlike Community Memory, however, CommuniTree was a dial-up
system, accessible to anyone with a modem. Teenage pranksters soon flooded the system
with offensive nonsense and the system operators—who could not delete the off-topic
messages or prevent specific callers from accessing the forum—decided to take
CommuniTree offline. One former participant described CommuniTree being being
“choked to death” by the unwanted messages.
600
A few years later, the system returned as
“CommuniTree—Second Edition” but by that time, BBSing had become more accessible
and users were as likely to call newer systems like EarthMind, Peacenet, and the WELL
that offered a similar ethos and operated in the same local calling area.
601
597Ibid.
598Flichy, The internet imaginaire, 70–71.
599Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 134–135.
600Ibid., 135.
601See: Mike Cane, Computer Phone Book: Directory of Online Systems (Plume (1986), Edition: Rev Upd
Su, Paperback, 685 pages, 1986), 104–111,
http://www.librarything.com/work/4315677/book/105171565.
323
In February 1985, The WELL came online from a small office in Sausalito, CA.
602
Thanks to frequent mentions in Wired magazine and the historiographic work of
Rheingold and tech journalist Hafner, The WELL is the most well-documented
community BBS of the 1980s and 1990s.
603
In its encyclopedic User's Guide, the editors
of Mondo 2000 magazine defined “The Net” as “an international web of...bulletin board
systems” but The WELL was one of just two systems mentioned by name.
604
And yet, in
spite of this visibility, the WELL was quite an atypical system among its homegrown
contemporaries. Whereas most BBSes were hosted on a personal computer with just one
dedicated line, The WELL ran on a much more powerful, if aging, V AX server with a
bank of modems and phone lines. Furthermore, while most BBSes were operated on a
voluntary basis by enthusiasts, The WELL was founded as a profit-seeking business with
$90,000 in startup capital and its machines were maintained by two paid staff members.
The WELL was hardly flush with cash but it existed in a different economic sphere from
its hobbyist contemporaries. Finally, although its roots were in the Bay Area, The WELL
eventually attracted users from around the globe, many of whom paid significant
long-distance tolls to access the system.
605
And yet, though this technical infrastructure
and political economy were organized like a nationwide commercial systems, The
602Ron Pernick, “WELL Historical Timeline - the Good, Great Place,” 1995,
http://www.well.com/conf/welltales/timeline.html.
603Hafner, The Well; Rheingold, The Virtual Community.
604The other BBS mentioned in Mondo 2000's awesomely weird book was Private Idaho, a system run out
of Boise, ID. The sysop Robert Carr was described as “the man who brought you the famous Mac
programs Momonoids from the Deep, Porno Writer, and MacJesus.” Rucker and Sirius, Mondo 2000,
188.
605Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 54–55.
324
WELL's core community of Bay Area users more closely matched the kind of regional
sociality found on a dial-up BBS.
606

Like the organizers of Community Memory and CommuniTree, the founders of
The WELL shared a commitment to free speech. Instead of pursuing a radically open
architecture to achieve this goal, however, they implemented a small number of
constraints to encourage accountability among participants. First, users were welcome to
adopt pseudonyms but they were required to register and reveal their “real” names.
607

Second, each user's past contributions were accessible in a message archive. This public
record of past behavior contributed to a system-wide principle known as “You Own Your
Own Words” or “YOYOW.”
608
Third, the messaging area of the system was organized
into a large hierarchy of “conferences,” each of which was further divided according to
special topics. For example, the ARTS AND LETTERS conference included Art and
Graphics, Beatles, Books, Comics, Design, Jazz, MIDI, Movies, etc. Each of these
architectural features shaped the types of interactions that took place on The WELL.
The WELL represented a culturally-specific ideal community that matched the
values of liberal progressives of a certain age. The founders granted free accounts to
well-known “interesting people” in the Bay Area to act as “hosts” and attract users with
similar habitus. Rheingold compared The WELL's conferences to an on-going “Paris
606The comparison with nationwide commercial systems is not coincidental. NETI, the company
responsible for the WELL's software infrastructure, also designed the software for General Electric's
nationwide GEnie service.Jack Rickard, “The New BBS On The Web--Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link,”
Boardwatch, October 1995.
607Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 49.
608In this context, “owning” your words took on two meanings. Colloquially, it meant that each user was
responsible for and accountable to their posts. Legally, however, it meant that The WELL considered
each post the property of its owners. This was intended to both protect the property rights of
contributors and to limit the organization's liability for unlawful speech acts such as copyright
infringement, libel, and obscenity.
325
salon” with “somewhat more elevated [discourse] than the usual BBS stuff,” an oblique
reference to the preponderance of technical minutiae on hobbyist systems at the time.
609

The intellectual atmosphere of the salons were not to everyone's taste, of course. Jack
Rickard of Boardwatch magazine described the system as “VERY California” and joked
that “at some point you just damn near choke on all the visionary thinking going on.”
610

Nevertheless, for dedicated WELLites, the system represented an ideal form of
computer-mediated public culture.
For its intellectual core, The WELL offered thoughtful discussions of myriad
topics from parenting to the social implications of networked technology, but the
financial survival of the parent organization depended on revenue generated by an almost
wholly distinct second population of users. Grateful Dead fans—the “Deadheads”—were
“by far” the biggest collective source of income for The WELL.
611
In 1992, access to The
WELL cost $10 per month plus $2.50 per hour, a price comparable to other subscription
large-scale subscription BBSes.
612
And yet, Rheingold also distanced the Deadheads of
the1980s from both the Deadheads of an earlier generation and, by association, the
WELL's counter-cultural elite. He characterized the WELL's Dead fandom as having
“drifted far from its counter-culture origins” and described the majority of Deadheads on
The WELL as “blithely unaware” of the high-minded discourse occurring elsewhere on
the system.
613
For all that The WELL represented an idealized form of BBSing for its elite
users, it was not without its own internal boundaries and social distinctions.
609Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 42.
610Rickard, “The New BBS On The Web--Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link,” 44.
611Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 49.
612“National List of Electronic Bulletin Board Systems and On-Line Information Services,” 73.
613Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 49.
326
In many ways, The WELL community of the 1980s and 1990s lives up to its mythic
reputation. In 1995, Boardwatch editor Jack Rickard, a long-time user, characterized The
WELL's discussion forums as “somehow a cut above” with a culture of an
“immeasurable” quality.
614
“No [sysop] knows quite how to get it,” he wrote, “but you
can recognize it when you see it.”
615
The success of The WELL's community-building
effort was not nearly so mysterious as Rickard's poetic description suggests. Unlike
hobbyist sysops focused on tweaking the infrastructures of their boards, the founders of
The WELL consciously designed a community-oriented system. To this end, they drew
together a population of users from a reasonably small geographic area with shared
backgrounds, diverse expertise, and an existing social network. Notable figures in the
emerging “cyberculture” were given free accounts and encouraged to take leadership
roles on a set of pre-determined conference topics. Furthermore, the experimental, niche
areas of The WELL were supported by a small but reliable stream of income generated by
a large population of tech-savvy Grateful Dead fans. An alternative history of the story of
The WELL might describe it as primarily an interest-driven BBS for fans of the Grateful
Dead that occasionally featured salon-style conferences hosted by well-known thinkers
on the transformative potential of social computing. But by the 1980s, followers of the
Dead were no longer the counter-cultural vanguard they once might have been, and a
Deadhead BBS was hardly headline material.
616
At the same time that The WELL began
to gain visibility in the popular press, hundreds of online communities with their own
614Rickard, “The New BBS On The Web--Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link,” 42.
615Ibid.
616The WELL wasn't the only dial-up system for Deadheads. Indeed, several other boards were organized
specifically for Dead fandom. The Mars Hotel BBS in Roachdale, IN and Terrapin Station in Darien,
CT were each named after Grateful Dead albums.
327
unique cultures were developing elsewhere on not-for-profit boards running on more
modest hardware out of the homes of volunteers.
Opening the door to the TARDIS BBS
The communities that emerged on various socially-oriented BBSes were
reflections of the norms, policies, and architectures introduced by the system's operators
and later negotiated and shaped by their callers. Like The WELL, the TARDIS BBS in
Indiana supported a deeply engaged community of local users for nearly a decade.
Outside of the friendly tone of their forums, however, the two systems differed in nearly
every other detail. The WELL was founded as business, albeit a socially-conscious
business; the TARDIS began as a hobby project. The WELL charged a fee for access; the
TARDIS was free to the public. The WELL could support more than 16 simultaneous
users on its 1980 V AX-11/750 minicomputer; the TARDIS was a “one-liner” running off
the floppy drive of an old Apple II+.
617
But history of the TARDIS offers more than
simply a scaled-down complement to the familiar myth of The WELL. As a labor of love
run by a hands-on team of sysops whose values, sense of humor, and care for one another
were interwoven in the socio-technical fabric of the system, The TARDIS was a practical
realization of the democratic potential of social computing valued by the champions of
the WELL. In the words of one former sysop, “All three [of the other sysops] were my
best friends and the board showed it.”
618
617Both The WELL and the TARDIS were upgraded occasionally during their lifetimes but neither
changed substantially from their original architectures until 1995 when The WELL opened a portal on
the World Wide Web.
618Tragically, three of the sysops of the TARDIS were killed by a drunk driver at the peak of their board's
popularity. Tom O'Nan, e-mail message to the author, March 26, 2014.
328
In the long-running science fiction series, Doctor Who, the TARDIS is a vehicle
for time-travel disguised as an ordinary telephone booth. Fantasy and science fiction
inspired the names of many BBSes, but “TARDIS” was an especially popular choice. At
various times between 1983 and 1998, more than thirty different BBSes in North
America were named after the quirky vessel.
619
One reason for its popularity is that the
Doctor's TARDIS and the dial-up BBS play similar roles in the lives of their users. In the
same way that the familiar desktop computer belies the complex social world of a BBS,
the internal structure of the TARDIS is impossibly large—far greater than the area inside
of a telephone booth. Further, like the low-powered 8-bit computers that continued to
host BBSes well into the 1990s, the Doctor's TARDIS is considered obsolete and
unreliable by many of his Time Lord peers. And, yet, like the dedicated owners of
Commodore and Atari systems, the Doctor and the ship share a deep, affective
interdependence.
620
According to Doctor Who mythology, the Doctor selected the
TARDIS for its “soul” rather than its technical features.
621
The TARDIS and the dial-up
BBS are technologies that encourage a long-term commitment to maintain and care for
them in the face of forced obsolescence and relentless technological progress.
One of the earliest BBSes named after the TARDIS was founded in 1982 by
Thomas O'Nan, an amateur radio operator living in Terre Haute, IN, about a 90 minute
619This data is drawn from the historical BBS database at BBSmates.com.
620A 2011 episode of the Doctor Who TV series explored the emotional relationship between the TARDIS
and the Doctor when the “matrix” of the ship was transferred into the body of a human woman and the
two could finally speak “with mouths.” See: “The Doctor’s Wife (TV Story) - Tardis Data Core, the
Doctor Who Wiki,” accessed March 21, 2014, http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/The_Doctor
%27s_Wife_(TV_story).
621“When the Doctor first decided to leave Gallifrey, he had the chance to take a Type 53, but dismissed it
as 'soulless' in favour of the Type 40.” “The Doctor’s TARDIS - Tardis Data Core, the Doctor Who
Wiki,” accessed March 21, 2014, http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/The_Doctor%27s_TARDIS.
329
drive west from Indianapolis. O'Nan initially ran the BBS over the airwaves, rather than
the telephone network, using a “radio BBS” program called Super-Ratt for the Apple
II.
622
A radio BBS, or RBBS, was a semi-autonomous amateur radio station operated by a
computer program that listened on particular frequencies for commands encoded as
RTTY signals. Like its dial-up counterparts, the RBBS included messaging and
file-transfer features, and was occasionally referred to as an “electronic mailbox.”
623

Soon, however, O'Nan discovered dial-up BBSes and decided to migrate from the
airwaves to the telephone lines.
In 1980s, Terre Haute shared an area code with several other cities in southern
Indiana, including several university campuses, but O'Nan had trouble attracting users to
his radio BBS. In his recollection, the local hams were not interested in microcomputers
and “refused to even try” connecting to the radio bulletin board system.
624
Upon moving
to Indianapolis in 1985, however, O'Nan came across new BBS software for the Apple
and was inspired to bring his BBS back online. Around the same time, the PBS station in
Champaign-Urbana, IL had started to air episodes of Doctor Who and O'Nan was quickly
becoming a fan. As O'Nan designed the first iteration of the system, he incorporated
numerous jokes and pranks into its architecture, some of which were fannish references
to the board's namesake, and others that reflected his own weird sense of humor. On one
menu, he included an option to “[C]hat with the Sysop” but instead of connecting the
caller to a sysop, the “C” command invoked a modified version of ELIZA, Joseph
622Timothy Daniel N8RK, “Super-Ratt RTTY/CW Program with RBBS,” 73 Magazine, September 1983.
623Robert J. Foster WB7QWG/9, “Unlock the New Electronic Mailboxes,” 73, April 1983.
624Tom O'Nan, e-mail message to the author, March 26, 2014.
330
Weizenbaum's infamous natural language chat bot.
625
More than a few new users found
themselves talking in circles before realizing what that they had been tricked. Like a
funhouse, the architecture of the TARDIS did not aim for efficiency or elegance but was
designed to delight and surprise its callers.
One of O'Nan goals for the new BBS was to ensure that “anybody, using any
equipment” could access the system. One of the four system operators, O'Nan's long-time
girlfriend, was deaf and they gradually learned that many of the board's regular users
were also deaf or blind.
626
Modemers with a visual impairment generally used “screen
readers” to translate standard ASCII characters into sound or touch, but as BBS sysops
began to incorporate semi-graphical characters in their menus, they inadvertently made
their systems inaccessible to visually-impaired callers.
627
From 1985-1992, the TARDIS
ran Prime BBS software on an Apple II+ with few changes, upgrades, or modifications.
Beyond the low maintenance costs, sticking with a relatively simple platform ensured
that the TARDIS remained accessible to callers with disabilities even as other BBSes
began to incorporate more complex graphical interfaces. In spite of—or perhaps because
of—this modest infrastructure, the TARDIS attracted 3,500 registered users, of whom
O'Nan considered 750 “regulars” and 40 “daily” callers.
628
At its peak, the TARDIS
625ELIZA has been reproduced many times and readers will have no trouble locating a version of the
program to try on their own computers. For Weizenbaum's original description of the program, see:
Joseph Weizenbaum, “ELIZA: A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language
Communication Between Man and Machine,” Commun. ACM 9, no. 1 (January 1966): 36–45,
doi:10.1145/365153.365168.
626The precise number of callers with disabilities was not known. The decision not to keep records
regarding their users was a political decision. As O'Nan put it, “I didn't believe in classifying people that
way.” Tom O'Nan, e-mail message to the author, March 26, 2014.
627See Chapter 3 for an in-depth discussion of the uses and implications of non-standard character sets.
628Thomas O’Nan, “About the T.A.R.D.I.S. BBS,” Textfiles.com, November 17, 2006,
http://textfiles.com/history/onan.txt.
331
logged more than 500 calls per day on its sole incoming telephone line and stored more
than 11 million messages in its archive.
629
O'Nan could not have predicted it at the start of the TARDIS but the Prime BBS
host software became known among Apple computer enthusiasts for its long-lasting
reliability and accessible source code. From 1985 to 1989, responsibility for Prime BBS
was handed off among three different programmers, each of whom released their own
versions. In 1989, the third programmer, Daniel Haynes, decided that he no longer had
time to maintain the softwares. But instead of handing it off yet again, Haynes committed
the source code to the public domain, wrote up detailed documentation, and encouraged
other Prime BBS sysops to start sharing their upgrades, modifications, and
customizations with one another.
630
By the early 1990s, Prime BBS was still being touted
as the best host software for running a “smaller” system for 10-200 users.
631
In fact, after
being released to the public domain, the value of Prime BBS rose dramatically as
volunteer programmers developed and shared more than seventy new add-on programs
that extended the core features of the system.
632
With the diffusion of IBM-compatible
clones at the end of the 1980s, second-hand Apple computers were widely available for
as little as $200. In a 1992 article circulated among Apple users on GEnie, BBS
enthusiast Jerry Penner suggested that readers “dig out that unused Apple II [from the]
629“317 BBS List,” accessed March 21, 2014, http://bbslist.textfiles.com/317/.
630“Prime Bulletin Board System: Zippety-Doo-Dah! Zippety-Day!,” n.d.,
http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/APPLE/II/PRIME/primebbs.txt.
631Jerry Penner, “RUNNING YOUR OWN BBS!,” GEnieLamp, August 1, 1992,
http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/APPLE/II/PRIME/primebbs.genie.txt.
632“Prime Bulletin Board System: Zippety-Doo-Dah! Zippety-Day!”.
332
back of the closet,” and build a new system on old hardware using Prime BBS.
633
From
the initial release of Prime to its revival, the TARDIS lived on, uninterrupted.
The telephone number for the TARDIS was circulated through BBS lists and local
newsletters but new users were not granted access immediately. First-time callers were
asked to fill out a short questionnaire that included a combination of demographic
questions—name, address, phone number, age, gender—and silly questions—planet of
origin, species, blood type, favorite M&M, and the rate that their fingernails grew.
634
All
of the questionnaires were reviewed by one of the four sysops before the user was
granted access to the system. If the user's answers seemed “bogus,” then the sysop would
look up their name in the phone book and, in some cases, verify the new user by voice.
Prime BBS allowed sysops to define nine different classes of users and, on the TARDIS,
users were sorted by age and gender. Certain areas of the board were visible only to users
in the “adult” or “female” classes. If a new caller self-identified as a woman, then one of
the two female sysops would call them on the phone. New users were usually verified by
one of the four sysops within a few hours of their first call.
635
One of the unique features of The TARDIS was that it provided an safe space for
women to gather apart from the rest of the board. O'Nan recalls that in the 1980s, women
experimenting with BBSes frequently experienced harassment from the men they
encountered online. Tilly M, a former member, described her experience of other BBSes
as a “nightmare” and credited the sysops of the TARDIS for actively intervening to stop
633Penner, “RUNNING YOUR OWN BBS!”.
634Tom O'Nan, e-mail message to the author, March 26, 2014.
635Tom O'Nan, e-mail message to the author, March 26, 2014.
333
harassing behavior on their system.
636
In addition to their hands-on approach to
moderating the open forums, the sysops of the TARDIS also created an exclusive “Ladies
only” area. All administrative oversight of the “Ladies only” section was performed by
the women in the community. “I stayed out of it,” O'Nan later recalled, “[the women] did
it all.”
637
Users classified as men on the TARDIS could neither see nor access the “Ladies
only” area. Even O'Nan himself was restricted. “To this day,” he remarked, “I don't know
what went on in that room!”
638
Community and conversation were the central features of the TARDIS BBS and
both the technical and social architectures of the system reflected these priorities. Any
user could introduce a new discussion topic on the TARDIS and there were few
constraints on what could be said. O'Nan's quirky sense of humor was evident throughout
the board and implicitly encouraged a friendly, casual tone.
639
O'Nan characterized his
core user population as “academic, moderate or liberal,” and, consequently, the only
topics that regularly required sysop intervention were, in O'Nan's judgment, “extreme
right wing” themes because they sparked “flame wars.”
640
Although O'Nan was the
board's founder, moderation duties were distributed throughout the community by the
“co-sysop” arrangement he created with his girlfriend and another couple. Prime BBS
allowed sysops to create sub-areas with their own forums and file areas and, in special
cases, a user was entrusted with responsibility for a particular sub-area. The TARDIS had
636“317 BBS List.”
637O’Nan, “About the T.A.R.D.I.S. BBS.”
638Ibid.
639All over the TARDIS, O'Nan made off-hand references to a “red button.” If users opted to “push the red
button” from the main menu, they were humorously logged off and disconnected from the system.“317
BBS List.”
640O’Nan, “About the T.A.R.D.I.S. BBS.”
334
no particular theme or core purpose beyond building community. Within that broad
mission, however, the system provided invaluable spaces for groups of people who would
have been outnumbered, unwelcome, or mistreated on any other BBS.
Like The WELL, the TARDIS attracted a dedicated core group of users who
became fiercely loyal and personally invested in the board's culture. O'Nan recalls one
instance in which a local technology writer gave the TARDIS an unfavorable review in
his monthly BBS column because it offered very few IBM PC files for download. The
users felt personally insulted and responded with angry letters arguing that the reviewer
misunderstood the purpose of the BBS. The TARDIS was a community constituted
through its public and private message forums, not “file exchange.”
641
For his part, O'Nan
did not participate in the controversy, preferring to “let the users do their thing.”
642

Consistent with the results of the 1992 Boardwatch poll, users valued the everyday
culture of a BBS over its technical features or media libraries.
Sadly, the TARDIS faced a similar fate as the CommuniTree. By 1992, the
infrastructure of the TARDIS began to show its age. Prime BBS could not support
connection speeds higher than 2400 bits-per-second. For the existing user population, this
was hardly a problem and most were happy to continue using the BBS at the speed they
had grown accustomed to. Unfortunately, if a new user attempted to connect with a faster
modem, the system could behave erratically and, in some cases, crash altogether. O'Nan
recalls that a group of kids “who wanted something destructive to do” discovered this
weakness and began to intentionally crash the TARDIS. For two months, they repeatedly
641Ibid.
642Ibid.
335
brought down the system and hogged the phone lines, preventing any of the regular
callers from getting through. Failing to appeal to the boys' better judgment, O'Nan
solicited the help of the telephone company. Instead of assisting him, however, the
telephone company argued that O'Nan was misusing his residential phone line and
threatened to start charging him at a higher business rate. Desperate to stop the assault,
O'Nan reported the boys as “nuisance callers” and they were subsequently arrested by the
police. The boys parents became extremely upset and could not understand what their
children had done. Worn out from the experience, O'Nan decided to close the TARDIS
for good: “I just didn't have the heart to run a system anymore.”
643
A tale of two area codes
The WELL and the TARDIS were dial-up BBSes operating out of two different
area codes. Although virtually anyone with a microcomputer, a modem, and a telephone
line could have called either board, only nearby callers could access the systems without
paying an additional long-distance toll. One consequence of this billing structure was that
the core populations of each system were constituted primarily of local callers.
644
The
area code is the technical abstraction through which the territorial and internet
imaginaries of BBSing meet. The histories of the two boards and the histories of their
area codes are, therefore, inextricably intertwined.
643Ibid.
644Some savvy modemers reduced the cost of long distance calling by subscribing to a packet-switched
intermediary service such as PC Pursuit. Less scrupulous users avoided the tolls by using stolen calling
cards. Neither case was typical of all modemers, however. See Chapter 3 for a more detailed discussion
of long-distance calling.
336
The WELL ran on a V AX minicomputer housed in a small office in the waterfront
town of Sausalito, CA, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.
645
In
1985, Sausalito shared the 415 area code with most of the Bay Area. 415 encircled the
San Francisco Bay, including Marin County to the North, Alameda and Contra Costa to
the East, and Santa Clara and San Mateo to the South. In the 1990s, the area code split
twice to accommodate the rising need for new phone numbers. First, in 1991,
communities in the East Bay were re-assigned to 510, and then, in 1997, the area south of
the city, beginning with Daly City, became 650.
646

The Bay Area splits reflected both the density of the settled areas and the
tremendous growth of the region. This growth and the accompanying demand for new
phone numbers was driven in no small part by the booming microcomputer industry of
the 1980s. In the 1980 Census, 4,545,701 individuals lived in the 415 area code and the
population was rising rapidly.
647
What were once quiet suburbs south of the city had been
transformed into “Silicon Valley.” Growth was climbing throughout the 415, but in the
area around Palo Alto and Mountain View, the population had jumped 21.6% since the
1970 Census.
648
When the WELL opened in the 415, there were a whole lot of modems in
that area code.
When Tom O'Nan brought his first BBS online in 1982, he was living in Terre
Haute, IN; the 812 area code. The 812 covered the southern third of the state, including
645Rheingold's account of visiting the WELL's office in 1985 is a wonderful example of a user paying
loving tribute to their favorite system. Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 38–39.
646NP A Database, Area Code Relief Planning (North American Numbering Plan Administration),
accessed April 14, 2014, http://nanpa.com/reports/area_code_relief_planning.html.
647Bureau of the Census, General Population Characteristics: Indiana, Indiana (U.S. Department of
Commerce, 1980).
648Ibid.
337
Bloomington, Evansville, and Terre Haute, but the land was much more sparsely
populated than in the 415. Indeed, the 1980 Census recorded 584,776 individuals living
in the cities and towns covered by the 812.
649
In 1985, the TARDIS moved to Indianapolis
with O'Nan and took up residence in the 317 area code. Until 1997, 317 covered most of
metropolitan Indianapolis as well as several nearby counties including the cities of
Muncie, Marion, and Lafayette. At 1,659,915 individuals, the population of the 317 in
1980 was nearly triple the 812.
In the 1990s, area code splits roughly corresponded with changes in population.
As in the Bay Area, Indiana's 317 area code was split in 1997 to accommodate the rising
need for telephone numbers. The 812 area code, however, was never split, although the
Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission approved a new “overlay” area code in 2013 due
to the widespread adoption of mobile phones.
650
The lack of urgency in providing new
area codes to central and southern Indiana reflected the stagnant population growth
throughout the TARDIS' primary calling areas. From 1970-1980, Indianapolis grew just
5.1% and in Terre Haute, where the recessionary effects of the decline in manufacturing
were particularly brutal, population growth nearly flat-lined at 0.8%. The area codes did
not split in these parts of Indiana but the people did.
The histories of these area codes do not end with their populations however. A
reasonable guess suggests that the flow of engineers to the Bay Area would support a
large number of local BBSes. After all, young engineers have all the money, technical
aptitude, and skills required to participate in the modem world. Extant historical BBS
649Ibid.
650North American Numbering Plan Administration, NP A 930 to Overlay NP A 812 (Indiana), September
3, 2013.
338
lists, however, indicate that the BBSing scene of central Indiana was as active if not more
so than in the Bay Area during the same period of time.
651
Indeed, from 1982 until the
early 2000s, there were 1,687 BBSes in California's 415 area code and 633 in Indiana's
less populous 317 area code. Normalized by the adult working populations of each area
code, these numbers are approximately equivalent (roughly 0.37 boards per 1000
working adults in each area.) The striking difference emerges when the technology
industry of the Bay Area is taken into account. Among the population of adults working
with computers in some fashion, there were nearly twice as many BBSes in central
Indiana (2.10 per 100 tech workers) as in the Bay Area (1.12 per 100 tech workers.)
652
In
other words, during the BBS period, not only did the TARDIS host its own exemplary
online community but it was part of a thriving local BBS scene in metropolitan
Indianapolis.
It may seem counterintuitive that BBSing would be more widespread in
Indianapolis than Silicon Valley. To understand the difference, it is necessary to think
differently about the relationship of various BBSes to one another within an area code.
With its global ambitions, The WELL attempted to transcend its local area code. The
TARDIS, however, was embedded in a local community and its callers enjoyed
significant network effects as a result. Each BBS in the 317 area code was, in practice, a
651The best known record of historical BBSes was compiled by Jason Scott with the help of a number of
other retrocomputing enthusiasts. Area code splits are a vexing problem because some BBSes are listed
twice under various area codes. In the present argument, however, the bias would seem to be in favor of
the Bay Area since it experienced two splits. To the extent that this error is present in the current
analysis, it does not undermine the conclusions. The data underlying Scott's meta-listing was shared
privately with the author but a publicly accessible version is available on the web. See: Jason Scott,
“The TEXTFILES.COM Historical BBS List,” Textfiles.com, accessed May 6, 2014,
http://bbslist.textfiles.com/.
652“Tech workers” include individuals in one of three categories defined in the 1980 US Census:
“engineers,” “technicians
339
node in a dynamic network of Indianapolis boards. In a city with more than two dozen
active boards at any given time, the individual systems grew to complement one another,
socially and technically, rather than compete. BBS users, likewise, regularly dialed into
multiple systems in the network for different reasons.
No single BBS in Indianpolis' 317 area code was as large or well-funded as The
WELL. Collectively, however, all of the BBSes in 317 area code represented a dynamic
amateur telecomputing network. The TARDIS was known for its intimate, thoughtful
community but it was not necessary for the TARDIS to also offer a large library of
shareware. Indeed, the 317 was already home to several BBSes that specialized in
shareware, including The Roadhouse BBS, headquarters of the Association of Shareware
Professionals (ASP).
653
Similarly, gamers might prefer the Doomsday Dungeon, run by an
Indianapolis high school student, to the discussions of fandom and philosophy treasured
by the adult users of the TARDIS.
654

The presence of Silicon Valley may have limited the emergence of a
complementary network of BBSes in the Bay Area. While certainly a similar network did
emerge, modemers in the Bay Area had access to a far wider variety of networks that
those in central Indiana. The growth of the low-cost PC Pursuit packet-switching service
neatly illustrates the effects of geography on the two local BBSing cultures. When
Telenet introduced PC Pursuit in 1985, the 415 area code was one of the first with a local
dial-up access number. A local number for 317 was not added until July, 1991—less than
three years before the service ended.
655
In practice, this meant that subscribers in the 415
653Wolf and Stein, Aether Madness, 153.
654“317 BBS List.”
655Digital-demon, “PcPursuit Outdialing System: The Complete Guide.”
340
area code could reach BBSes in more than a dozen other area codes for a flat monthly
fee. Modemers in Indianapolis, meanwhile, were limited to either costly nationwide
commercial services or nearby BBSes run by members of their local community. As a
result, BBSers in each area code developed vastly different spatial imaginaries. Those in
the Bay Area were more likely to have experienced the deterritorializing sensation of
moving through various interconnected systems via a packet-switched network. By
contrast, BBSers in Indianapolis, limited to the 317 area code, were more likely to cycle
through several local systems, participating differently in each one. For veteran
modemers in the 317, cyberspace was woven throughout the local infrastructure.
Like its 415 area code, The WELL was an outlier among contemporary dial-up
BBSes. From its infrastructure to its political economy to its legion of tech-savvy
Deadheads, The WELL was in nearly every way atypical. When BBSes are included in
the history of networked computing, however, The WELL is often the only system
mentioned by name. Unfortunately, this convention has produced a rather skewed picture
of BBSing that excludes considerable activity that occurred far from Silicon Valley.
The TARDIS, on the other hand, reflected a more widely-shared experience of
North American BBSing. Although both the TARDIS and The WELL each developed
unusually warm, welcoming, and thoughtful communities, the roots of the TARDIS
reached back much more clearly to the long tradition of amateur telecommunications.
Whereas the founders of The WELL endeavored to create a profitable worldwide
conferencing system, the TARDIS was operated by four self-described best friends who
ran the system at the pleasure of their users. With its modest hardware, focus on local
341
community, and commitment to accessibility, the TARDIS embodied a set of popular
values that enabled the diffusion of computer-mediated communication outside of
traditional centers of power.
The story of The WELL stands alone. Whether remembered as an Eden or a
vision of the future, The WELL is unfailingly singular. The TARDIS, however, is a
conjuncture of familiar people, places, and technologies. It is hard to imagine The WELL
exiting anywhere other than the Bay Area and it is hard to imagine that the Bay Area
would not have hosted a system like The WELL. (Why, of course those techno-hippies
built a weird cyber-commune!) The TARDIS, on the other hand, challenges the accepted
geography of the early internet. If the 317 area code could have played host to such a
vibrant online community, why not any other? The answer is, of course, that they did.
Part IV. “Adults-only” BBSing
During the early 1990s, “adult” BBSes combined features of both file- and
community-oriented in new and innovative ways. In addition to exploiting all of the
technical affordances of the BBS as a platform, the sysops of “adult” boards were among
the most experimental in developing new social, technical, and entrepreneurial practices.
Problems such as verifying a caller's age, accepting credit card payments, and contending
with interstate obscenity laws each disproportionately affected BBSes with so-called
“adult” materials and themes. These boards were simply about porn and, in fact, many
restricted the trading of GIF files in order to encourage a richer, communal sociality
among callers. As modeming entered its second decade, it was necessary to mark some
342
systems as “adult-only” to give veteran BBSers places to unwind after work, engage in
heated political debate, and, yes, explore the integration of technology and sexuality,
without the intrusion of the younger generation.
Beginning in the early 1990s, a large number of BBSes throughout North
America, but particularly in larger cities, described themselves as “adult” boards. The use
of this term was somewhat deceptive, however. Certainly, the colloquial use of “adult” as
a euphemism for pornography—e.g., “1000s of adult GIFs!”—was common but it was
not the only, nor the most common, meaning in circulation. “Adult” also referred to the
language, themes, and interests of older modemers. Teens were very active in the modem
world of this period and “adult” was frequently shorthand for “no kids, no teens.” Many
community-oriented boards were marked as “adult only” or “18+” because the sysops
wished to create an atmosphere where adult users would feel comfortable to talk freely.
In a 1996 review of the LINQ BBS in Montréal, Québec, BBS list maintainer Richard
Scott Mark referred explicitly to the multiple meanings attached to the term “adult.”
LINQ, he wrote, appealed to two types of adult users: those looking for a place “to
discuss matters of a more personal nature or download adult files,” and those calling to
“just kick back and talk to other adults.”
656
The GaRBaGe DuMP BBS in Albuquerque,
NM was marked as “adults-only,” despite the fact that it carried no pornography at all.
Instead, the board offered “stimulating real-time chat and exciting multiplayer games”
characterized by its slogan, “Adults at play.”
657
Even boards ostensibly organized around
656Mark, Internet BBSs, 219.
657Ibid., 186.
343
sex like the Adult Fantasy BBS in Arlington, V A featured discussion forums on a variety
of topics, including a particularly lively collaborative storytelling area.
658
Boards organized around free-form chat and messaging were often marked as
“adults only” because of the thematic nature of their forums. The period of widespread
BBSing overlapped with the rise of the “culture wars” in American society and as social
conservatism attained greater political power, exemplified by Jerry Falwell and the
mobilization of the Moral Majority, the specter of censorship haunted many areas of
popular culture.
659
In this context, the BBS world seemed to offer an independent
platform for unrestricted discussion and debate. While communities such as the TARDIS
preferred to keep their forums free of contentious far-right politics (and the flame wars)
they tended to inspire, others featured unmoderated “slam” boards in which flaming was
not only tolerated but tacitly encouraged and, in rare cases, celebrated.
660
In its pugilistic
form, the slam board reflected the growing popularity of reactionary talk radio
programming such as The Rush Limbaugh Show and television debate shows like The
Morton Downey, Jr. Show. As John Fiske pointed out at the time, though these programs
could be crude, they gave voice to less affluent audiences who felt otherwise excluded
from the discourses of mainstream news media.
661

658Ibid., 84.
659For an example of this chilling effects that the culture wars could have on popular cultures, see Jeff
Chang's discussion of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) campaign against hip-hop. Jeff
Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York City, New York: St.
Martins Press, 2005).
660Tom O'Nan, e-mail message to the author, March 26, 2014. For a glimpse of a joyfully tasteless “slam”
culture, see the first-person account of early-1990s teen BBSes in Phoenix, AZ: Mirage, “A History of
the Golden Age of the Phoenix, AZ BBS Scene,” Textfiles, March 25, 2004,
http://textfiles.com/history/phxbbs-m.txt.
661John Fiske, Media Matters: Race and Gender in U.S. Politics, Rev. ed (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996), 34–35.
344
New conservative talk radio programming produced an audience of
predominantly middle- and working-class white men, the same people traditionally
invited to participate in technical cultures of amateur telecommunications. It should come
as no surprise, then, that the themes and tropes of conservative talk radio surfaced in the
bulletin-board systems of the same period. David Wolfe, author of The BBS Construction
Kit, liked to advertise his board, the Pandemonium BBS, as a place for Rush Limbaugh
fans to talk politics.
662
By giving his BBS a partisan gloss, he attracted both the “ditto
heads,” as dedicated Limbaugh listeners were known, and those who enjoyed fighting
with them. “If you have two sides of a topic,” Wolfe remarked, “you have all the
ingredients you need for a good message base.”
663
Wolfe's board was not age restricted
per se, but it trafficked primarily in “adult” themes. When the recurring topics of
discussion included drug legalization, gun control, identity politics, and the Gulf War, the
adults users of the BBS preferred knowing that the person on the other end of their flame
war was at least of voting age.
Health, faith, and information sharing among users of “adult” boards
Fear of censorship similarly animated interest-driven bulletin-board systems
dedicated to information sharing, particularly those concerning health. By the end of the
1980s, thousands were dead and dying from the HIV/AIDS epidemic amid widespread
media silence. The turn to radical activism in New York City and elsewhere by groups
like ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) sought a life-saving form of
662Wolfe, The BBS Construction Kit, 352.
663Ibid.
345
visibility. The popular slogan “Silence = Death” indicted a lack of communication for the
crisis. The slogan invoked not only the silence of those suffering from the disease but the
healthcare providers, policy makers, and educators who censored themselves in the face
of calamity. In communities of crisis, a lack of access to health information was a death
sentence.
Facing the structural barriers of homophobia, HIV/AIDS activists turned to
dial-up bulletin-board systems as a means of distributing health information and support.
BBSes offered several key advantages from the point of view of HIV/AIDS activists and
health workers. First, the BBS was a file-sharing machine: information could be updated
continuously and files could be circulated without centralized coordination. Second,
BBSes were relatively cheap and accessible so they could be run by a small number of
staff on a volunteer basis. And, third, BBSes offered a degree of anonymity and privacy
that was critical because of the heavy social stigma attached to both HIV/AIDS and
homosexuality. Between 1985 and 1993, more than 100 bulletin boards were set up
specifically to share HIV/AIDS information with one another and their local
communities. During this period, BBSes became such critical hubs for information and
community support that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National AIDS
Clearinghouse published A Selected Guide to AIDS-Related Electronic Bulletin Boards
with step-by-step information about how to access dial-up BBSes.
664

Misinformation about HIV/AIDS was rampant during the 1980s and without the
careful oversight of trusted figures, BBS file-sharing practices were worth very little. In
664CDC National AIDS Clearinghouse, “A Selected Guide to AIDS-Related Electronic Bulletin Boards”
(U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, April 2, 1993),
http://cd.textfiles.com/internetinfo/answers/sci/aids-faq/part4.
346
1990, Sister Mary Elizabeth Clark founded the AIDS Education General Information
System (AEGIS), a not-for-profit BBS in her hometown of San Juan Capistrano, CA.
665

Drawing together information from a wide array of sources, AEGIS provided basic
information about HIV/AIDS and safer sex practices as well as the latest news regarding
treatment, clinical research, and related political affairs. AEGIS began as a typical
“one-liner” and, with the help of private donors, the board grew to accommodate
twenty-four incoming lines and, eventually, a gateway to the packet-switched internet.
666

By January 1996, AEGIS had 1,265 registered members, received approximately 25-75
calls a day, and stored more than 2 GB of information, including 104,000 files from the
National Library of Medicine's AIDSLINE database.
667
The information posted to AEGIS
was duplicated daily to a network of related BBSes, each of which was dedicated to
providing free, often anonymous, access to HIV/AIDS information. AEGIS information
also circulated beyond the borders of the US both through the grassroots FidoNet
network and HIVNET a European network dedicated to HIV/AIDS information. Because
of the fundamental decentralization of the BBS network, it was impossible to know
exactly how far this information traveled, but journalistic accounts estimate that AEGIS
reached more than 24 countries.
668
665Wolf and Stein, Aether Madness, 171–172.
666Jean O. Pasco, “A Life of Service: Sister Mary, Whose Past Has Seen Many Painful Twists and Turns,
Now Brings Comfort to Others with the World’s Most Comprehensive Web Site on AIDS and HIV,”
Los Angeles Times, December 1, 1997, http://ww1.aegis.org/news/lt/1997/lt971201.html.
667Sister Mary Elizabeth, “AEGIS Affidavit in ACLU, et Al v. Reno,” February 25, 1996,
https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/aegis-affidavit-aclu-et-al-v-reno.
668American Health Consultants, Inc., “AIDS Computer Bulletin Boards Gaining Popularity,” AIDS
ALERT, November 1993,
http://web.archive.org/web/19961018135646/http://hwmin.gbgm-umc.org/CAM/unique.html.
347
The information stored in AEGIS served multiple audiences. On one hand, health
care professionals throughout the world accessed AEGIS in order to provide the best care
for their patients. Dial-up medical databases already existed but none shared AEGIS'
focus on HIV/AIDS or its commitment to low-cost access. This was particularly
important for doctors working outside of major metropolitan areas in North America.
Indeed, Sister Mary Elizabeth decided to start AEGIS after meeting people living with
HIV/AIDS in rural Missouri who had no access to information about the disease. Her
goal was to provide access to information for “your average person with AIDS.”
669
The
hypothetical “average person” may not have been able to interpret all of the technical
information in a newly published clinical trial but they could use the information to
advocate for themselves when meeting with local doctors. One user, after suffering from
the side effects of drug therapy in 1995, went to his doctor with a stack of new research
that he downloaded from AEGIS.
670
In this ideal case, access to the online database
provided a set of resources that facilitated local, face-to-face communication between a
doctor and a patient.
BBSes providing access to health information often also encouraged the growth
of supportive online communities for visitors. In 1993, the Computerized AIDS
Ministries Network (CAM) in New York City, NY was founded under the slogan “There
is more to living with AIDS than AIDS.”
671
Unlike most dial-up systems, CAM provided
669Abe Opincar, “Holy Megabytes: In Her Crusade Against AIDS, A Social Justice Nun Goes Online to
the World.,” The Reader, October 8, 1992.
670Pasco, “A Life of Service: Sister Mary, Whose Past Has Seen Many Painful Twists and Turns, Now
Brings Comfort to Others with the World’s Most Comprehensive Web Site on AIDS and HIV .”
671“Computerized AIDS Ministries ASCII Home Page,” March 7, 1996,
http://web.archive.org/web/19961018015652/http://hwbbs.gbgm-umc.org/.
348
access through an 800 number so that callers could reach the system from anywhere in
the US without paying a long distance toll.
672
CAM was operated by the Health and
Welfare Ministries Program Department of the United Methodist Church's General Board
of Global Ministries and faith played an important role in shaping its community. In
addition to providing unrestricted access to basic AIDS information (e.g., “Facts, Fiction,
and How to Prevent It,”) CAM focused on bringing people suffering from AIDS out of
isolation and into a “safe...supportive community.”
673
Isolation often affected the friends
and family of people living with AIDS and many of the 750 registered members of CAM
identified as “caregivers.”
674

CAM was open to all users and some callers would not have identified as
Christian. Although no religious affiliation was required or expected of callers, nor was
CAM an explicitly evangelical project, the emphasis on support and compassion was
understood by many users to be an expression of Christian values. Not all congregations
in the United Methodist Church were equally supportive of families and individuals
living with AIDS and CAM provided access to a supportive community that was
nonetheless rooted in a familiar faith.
675
One caller from Virginia contrasted the lack of
672United Methodist News Service, “Computer AIDS Network Offers Support Without Judgment,”
August 1995, http://web.archive.org/web/19980425034431/http://gbgm-umc.org/CAM/camnews.html.
673Mark, Internet BBSs, 126.
674United Methodist News Service, “Computer AIDS Network Offers Support Without Judgment.”
675The AIDS ministry out of which CAM was built was part of a larger UMC community in New York
City with a long history of supporting gay and lesbian people. The Washington Square United
Methodist Church was renowned for its support of the gay and lesbian communities of New York City.
In 1970, for example, the church hosted meetings of the Gay Liberation Front. Later, openly gay pastor
Rev. Paul Abels served as the church's pastor from 1973 until 1984 when the national UMC voted to bar
“practicing homosexuals” from the clergy. See: Diana Davies, “Gay Liberation Front Meeting at
Washington Square Methodist Church, New York, 1970.,” 1970,
http://gvh.aphdigital.org/items/show/1344; “My Memories of Washington Square UMC | People of the
Village,” accessed May 8, 2014,
http://peopleblog.churchofthevillage.org/my-memories-of-washington-square-united-methodist-church-
1981-2005/.
349
compassion he encountered in his local church where AIDS was regarded by some as “a
plague sent by God to punish the evil sinners,” with his experience dialing into CAM.
676

While there is no attempt made at CAM to preach or moralize,” he remarked, “the love
and faith that is found here shines like a beacon.”
677
Another caller, who later adopted the
pseudonym “Rusty,” remembered coming to CAM with apprehension after losing a
cousin to AIDS. “Although I've known some good people who are Christian,” recalled
Rusty in a testimonial about her time on the site, “most I met seemed so full of judgment
and condemnation.”
678
On CAM, however, Rusty was “grateful” to find “a different kind
of God” ministered “without condemnation.”
679

For believers, however, an encounter with AIDS could be a significant challenge
to their faith. Debbi Hood Johnson, a devoted Christian and a particularly active user of
CAM, joined the BBS after learning that her husband was infected.
680
Although Johnson
lost her husband to AIDS in 1993, she continued to participate in the discussion forums
on CAM. As a self-described “white heterosexual female in the heart of the conservative
South” who was also HIV positive, Johnson provided considerable support to other
women in the community until her own death in 1996.
681
As a regular on CAM, Johnson
befriend a community of queer activists who practiced the sort of “unconditional love”
and “honest, unflinching AIDS prevention education” that she found lacking in her
676Richard B. Cory, “The UMC, CAM, and Me,” July 26, 1995,
http://web.archive.org/web/19970129083713/http://gbgm-umc.org/CAM/cam-me.html.
677Ibid.
678Rusty, “TESTIMONY AND THANK YOU,” June 14, 1995,
http://web.archive.org/web/19980425034516/http://gbgm-umc.org/CAM/rusty.html.
679Ibid.
680Debbi Hood Johnson, “I Wear a Red Ribbon,” 1994,
http://web.archive.org/web/19980425032633/http://gbgm-umc.org/cam/i-wear.html.
681Tragically, Johnson was killed in a car accident on February 24, 1996. Ibid.
350
religious community at home.
682
“What about the rest of us?,” she asked, “Where are the
mainstream churches?”
683
Rather than undermine her faith, Johnson's experiences on
CAM deepened her commitment to a principle of compassion that she associated with
Christianity and enabled her to hold her church community to a higher moral standard.
684

The Rev. Larry Mason, a regular caller from North Loup, NE, similarly credited his
participation in CAM for helping him achieve a “much deeper understanding and far
more acceptance” of gay and lesbian people.
685
Queer visibility in the modem world
For even casual BBSers, queer culture was pervasive in the modem world. In
November 1992, The Gay & Lesbian BBS List, just one of the queer-themed BBS lists,
included more than 320 systems in North America alone.
686
Even today, the visibility of
queer identities and sexualities in the discourse of early dial-up computer networks is
striking. The Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau, or GLIB, in Arlington, V A, for
example, offered “information servicing the gay, lesbian, and bisexual community.”
687

Not only was GLIB included in the Boardwatch Readers' Choice contest, it was voted
into the top five BBSes in North America. The only systems ranked higher than GLIB
were boards like Software Creations and EXEC-PC—in other words, “monster BBSes”
682Ibid.
683Ibid.
684The comments quoted in this paragraph draw on a short essay that Johnson first posted to CAM that
was then republished through both the UMC's Health and Welfare Ministries and Sister Mary
Elizabeth's AEGIS network.
685United Methodist News Service, “Computer AIDS Network Offers Support Without Judgment.”
686Leedell J. Miller, “The Gay & Lesbian BBS List,” Soc.motss, November 2, 1992,
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/soc.motss/mdXaPe3cw2k/NWGHeaoz0KkJ.
687“Announcing Winners in the Boardwatch 100 Readers’ Choice BBS Contest 1993” (Boardwatch,
1993), http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/mp3/93BBSCON/bw100.txt.
351
with dozens of incoming lines, exclusive shareware, or outside commercial support.
688

Further down, the top 100 list also included S-Tek BBS in Montréal—“Montréal's
premiere Gay & Lesbian BBS”—and the Zoo BBS, an “adult social network” in Chicago,
IL that advertised “gay, bi, straights welcome.”
689
To participate in the modem world in
the late 1980s was to encounter the vanguard of a particular emerging gay culture of the
1990s: out of the closet and mediated by computers.
Community followed information-sharing on many bulletin boards dedicated to
information about HIV/AIDS, but community could take many different shapes. Founded
in 1986 as a non-profit service providing health and legal information to the
“gay/lesbian/bi” community of Washington, DC, the Gay and Lesbian Information
Bureau quickly became an online meeting place for gay men.
690
In addition to health
information, GLIB users also traded tips on gay nightlife in the nation's capital city. By
the time of its Boardwatch award in 1992, GLIB was a lively social scene supported by
twenty-two incoming telephone lines, live multi-user chat, and personal profiles with GIF
images. For gay men—out and closeted—with a computer and a modem, GLIB provided
a low-risk opportunity to explore their local gay community. “This was a revelation, that
you could use your computer to connect with other gay people,” remarked Larimore in an
article from 2010 comparing GLIB to gay-oriented mobile social software like Grindr.
691

688Ibid.
689Ibid.
690“Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau,” accessed May 9, 2014,
http://web.archive.org/web/19970228045752/http://www.glib.org/.
691Hugh Ryan, Brian Joseph Ferree,Jennifer Livingston, “You Can Buy Gaydar at the Apple Store,”
Details, February 16, 2010,
http://www.details.com/sex-relationships/dating-and-cheating/201003/gay-fool-proof-hookups-tech-sav
y.
352
More adventurous callers might venture out to the GLIB Happy Hour, hosted weekly in
Dupont Circle, the city's upscale enclave.
For BBSers interested in talking about politics and culture, BBSes like GLIB
offer a valuable alternative the conservative-leaning boards that predominated. Queer
bulletin boards, like gay bookstores and other queer-coded spaces offline, served multiple
purposes. For local callers, a BBS like GLIB might offer a fruitful cruising opportunity
one night, and an opportunity to talk about Perot's candidacy on another.
692
In their 1995
guide to modeming, Gary Wolf and Michael Stein avoided characterizing queer BBSes as
simply hook-up sites or AIDS information repositories, rather, they focused on the rich
communities they encountered on these systems. Queer BBSes, they wrote, were among
“the most vibrant electronic subcultures of the online world.”
693
Indeed, the authors
speculated, the proximity of GLIB to Washington, DC made it a particularly rich forum
for discussing politics, queer and otherwise.
Consistent with the general population of the BBS world, queer BBSes were
predominantly operated and frequented by men who identified as gay and bisexual. As
the overwhelming majority, gay men implicitly dominated the representation of
queerness throughout the modem world. The Gay & Lesbian BBS List, for example,
included a special designation for “women only” boards, though no similar marker
existed for men.
694
Meanwhile boards such as the Male Box, the Male Room, and the
692Perot's candidacy was felt throughout the modem world in many and surprising ways. In June 1992, a
group of Perot supporters created an internet mailing list specifically to “facilitate the education of
potential presidential candidate Ross Perot about bisexuals, gays, lesbians, &c, and our issues and
concerns.” The list was titled, appropriately, “Bisexual Gay Lesbian & Other Educating Perot mailing
list” or “bglo-teach-perot” for short. See: bglo-teach-perot, “New Mailing List for an Impromptu Task
Force,” 8 Jun 92 18:20:52 PDT, http://www.qrd.org/qrd/electronic/1992/perot.glb.email-06.08.92.
693Wolf and Stein, Aether Madness, 58.
694Miller, “The Gay & Lesbian BBS List.”
353
Male Stop were not likely to offer much by way of lesbian interest! In 1996,
anthropologist Kira Hall described the obvious imbalance of the modem world as an
Figure 27: Advertisement for the Backroom BBS, Boardwatch, May 1992.
354
“intensification” of gendered discourse.
695
Instead of unsettled or erasing conventional
notions of gender, text-mode interactions seemed to exaggerate hegemonic conceptions
of femininity and masculinity.
In response to the intensification of dominant masculinity among queer BBSers—
a phenomenon that Hall termed “cybermasculinity,” a number of women created separate
“women-only” bulletin boards. Sappho BBS in New York City, NY , 10% Connection
BBS in Chicago, IL, and the Oak Tree BBS in Denver, CO were all open exclusively to
women.
696
In a study of a similar space—the SAPPHO mailing list—during the first half
of 1993, Hall observed a communal resistance in which participants produced a
“female-gendered discourse” that actively opposed the harassment they encountered
elsewhere online by creating an alternative set of social norms.
697
The participants in
SAPPHO endeavored to create a cyberfeminist form of discourse distinct from the “poor
example” exhibited by the men—gay, straight, and otherwise—who dominated most
online spaces. “Exclusion of men,” wrote one participant, “is a precondition...not the
purpose itself” of creating a newly feminist cyberculture.
698
Defining the boundaries of
the “women-only” space was an on-going challenge as the affordances of the mailing list
did not allow for the sort of personal verification that was carried out by the sysops of the
“Ladies Only” area of the TARDIS. Instead, women on SAPPHO relied on subjective
assessment of the content of new participants' posts: usernames, return addresses,
signatures, linguistic markers, etc.
695Hall, “Cyberfeminism.”
696Miller, “The Gay & Lesbian BBS List.”
697Kira Hall, “Cyberfeminism,” in Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and
Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996), 148.
698Ibid., 163.
355
Some of the larger queer BBSes included areas specifically marked as
“exclusively for women.” GLIB, for example, featured a sub-board titled “Lesbians On
Line” and anecdotal evidence similarly suggests that lesbian users were an active part of
the Backroom BBS.
699
Indeed, a print advertisement for the Backroom from 1992 depicts
both a pair of men and a pair of women women gleefully typing to each other through
computer terminals with large lambdas on their screens (figure 27). By and large,
however, the presumed user of most queer systems was a gay man and the systems were
structured accordingly. To gain visibility and voice in these spaces, lesbian women were
forced to either negotiate space within the existing architectures or to create their own
separate spaces. Not all adult boards marked by sexuality were overtly queer, of course.
699Nina Wakeford, “New Technologies and ‘Cyber-Queer’ Research,” in Handbook of Lesbian and Gay
Studies, ed. Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman (SAGE, 2002), 119.
Figure 28: ProMatch 3.0 main menu, 1995.
356
Within boards with a default heterosexuality orientation, gender was hailed, performed,
and constrained very differently.
Matchmakers, hookups and and swingers: Computer-mediated heterosexuality
Adult-oriented BBSes often featured an area of the system dedicated to dating,
hooking up, or personal ads. The use of dial-up BBSes for flirtation, romance, and sex
extended the metaphor of the BBS as an after-work hangout. In Love Bytes, a “handbook”
for BBS dating published in 1995, author David Fox described the adult-only BBS as an
idealized “electronic pub” and suggested that online dating was an attractive alternative
to the “real-world” dating scene.
700
His initial pitch for the electronic pub invoked the
familiar tropes of disembodiment—skin color, gender, age, and “physical flaws” are
made invisible by the text-mode sociality—but whereas other proponents of this
particular utopia drew from personal experience with the deterritorialized internet, Fox's
narrative centered on the BBS world, a cyberspace that was very much rooted in place.
“When it comes to making contacts with real people, for real-life dates, real relationships,
and real commitments,” he wrote, “it's tough to beat a good ol' local BBS.”
701
Markers of
difference might be diminished in an entirely online encounter, but many of Fox's readers
planned to extend their online interactions to offline romances. “Compu-dating” on a
local BBS involved the (potentially thrilling) knowledge that the person on the other end
of a sexy chat was dialing-in from one's own area code.
700Fox, Love Bytes, 4.
701Ibid., 99.
357
At the peak of BBSing in North America, meeting people online was still a
generally uncommon practice and as popular interest in the “information superhighway”
began to grow, so did the occasional human interest story about computer-mediated sex
and romance. These accounts tended to approach online interactions as wholly distinct
from “traditional” forms of dating and focus on particular details that emphasized that
distinction. For example, in an early “hitch-hiker's guide” to “America's information
highway,” the Economist described “steamy” sex talk on BBSes as the “textual
equivalent of grunts and groans.”
702
Others focused on the potential for fantastical sexual
encounters. In Erotic Connections, an early guide to cybersex, pseudonymous author
Billy Wildhack compared an adults-only chatroom to “a telepathic costume party” in
which the electronic utterances of other users stimulates the imagination and “gets the
702Anonymous, “America’s Information Highway.”
Figure 29: Example of a ProMatch ActionGram, 1995.
358
adrenaline going big time.”
703
Fox was more pragmatic in Love Bytes. If meeting
someone at the local singles bar could feel superficial, frustrating, or dangerous, the local
singles BBS offered a fun, low-risk opportunity to mingle with different population of
people, all of whom were comfortable expressing themselves in writing. “There is no
dressing up, driving across town and getting lost, ordering drinks, or squabbling over
bills,” enthused Fox, “If the person you end up with turns out to be a geek, jerk, lemon,
frump, or nerd, it's easy to mumble some excuse and just hit a few keys, logging yourself
off.”
704
That is, assuming that a geeky frump is not exactly what you are looking for.
The free-form messaging features of a one-liner BBS could be adapted for online
romance but most adult-oriented BBS were multi-line systems with a range of special
features specifically designed for match-making. By the late 1980s, most BBS host
software implemented a modular system for adding external programs from third-party
developers, colloquially known as “doors.”
705
Dating-oriented door software ranged from
simple “personality test” programs to complex, multi-user social environments.
ProMatch by Jerry Woody of WoodyWare was of the latter variety and was distributed
through the shareware network as “the most advanced and full-featured MatchMaker
Door Program on the market today” (figure 28).
706
By the release of the third version in
1995, ProMatch included all of the core features that would characterize web-based
social network sites a decade later.
703Wildhack, Erotic Connections, 51.
704Fox, Love Bytes, 14.
705For a more technical discussion of “door” software, see Chapter 3.
706Jerry Woody, ProMatch, version 3.0 (Cullman, AL: WoodyWare, a division of CompuLink, 1995).
359
Upon first logging in to ProMatch, users were prompted to complete a lengthy set
of surveys that combined multiple-choice and open response questions. Answers to the
“purity test,” which included questions about the users' sexual, criminal, and
hallucinatory experiences, were kept private; while answers to the “cultural,” “general,”
and “adult” questionnaires became part of their public profile. Sysops who paid the $25
registration fee were able to customize the profile creation process and continually add
new questionnaires. In addition to the text-mode profile, users were invited to attach a
GIF image for others to download alongside their profiles.
707
On boards with restrictive
time limits, the process of building one's ProMatch profile would have used up the
majority of one's minutes for the call.
707Adult BBSes like Compu-Erotica in Chicago, IL often provided digitizing services so that their
registered users would have a photograph to upload. For many people, this might have been their first
time that they were depicted in a digital image.
Figure 30: Advertisement for Lifestyle Online, Boardwatch, May 1992, 67
360
ProMatch was designed to be run on a multi-line system, and in everyday use, it
facilitated both synchronous and asynchronous social interaction. As new users
completed the profile creation process, ProMatch compared them with existing users in
the system and attempted to identify “perfect matches” based on their answers. Upon
finding a match, both users would be notified through the main menu. Beyond browsing
the profiles in the database and sending email to one another, users could also
communicate in real-time with anyone else currently connected to the BBS. Sending an
“ActionGram” would make a cute ANSI animation appear on the user's screen along with
a custom message (figure 29). The “Games and Utilities” section, meanwhile, offered
simple social games such as “Spin the Bottle.”
Door programs like ProMatch were typically customizable by the local sysop but
their default configurations frequently signal the ideological conditions within which
their authors expected them to be used. Although the algorithms underlying most
match-maker programs presumed a normative heterosexuality, they also included signs,
however superficial, of resistance. In the documentation for his Intelligent Match Maker,
door programmer Tom Cunha suggested creating three distinct databases: “Generic
Match Maker,” “Gay Male Match Maker,” and “Gay Female Match Maker.”
708

Presumably, the “generic” database was for those seeking heterosexual relationships but
Cunha awkwardly attempted to acknowledge the prevalence of gay BBSers through this
recommended set-up. ProMatch stored all of the users in a single database but whenever
users were asked questions related to gender or sexuality, they were consistently
presented with a catch-all option such as “Other” or “Plead the fifth.” When entering a
708Tom Cunha, TcSoft’ s Intelligent Match Maker, version 4.9 (San Antonio, TX: TcSoft, Inc., 1995).
361
“Spin the Bottle” game, for example, users were asked whether they wished to kiss
“Females,” “Males,” or “Doesn't Matter.” The architecture of programs like Intelligent
Match Maker and ProMatch rarely posed fundamental challenges to the dominance of
heterosexuality, but they universally acknowledged the existence and legitimacy of same
sex desire. It was in these small moments that BBSes afforded visibility to queer
identities, even on boards that were not explicitly coded “queer.”
Even as its fundamental structures remained intact, heterosexuality was often
unsettled and reconfigured in the modem world. Boards with more explicitly sexual
themes—say, swinging as opposed to dating—advertised dedicated areas for “alternative
lifestyles.” Lifestyle Online was a giant BBS hosted on Long Island, NY that described
itself as “A Life Adult Correspondence Magazine.”
709
Although Lifestyle Online had no
explicit GIFs, it received over 1,600 calls per day from users who interacted with one
another in themed sub-forums dedicated to “Swinging/B&D/S&M/Bi/TV/fetishes.”
710
By
marking queerness and kink as “interests,” the sysops of Lifestyle Online positioned them
as accessible options for curious heterosexuals. Indeed, each of these “alternative
lifestyles” were presented online to callers in the form of a browseable menu.
As with many pre-existing subcultures, swingers constituted a particularly active
part of the adult BBS world (figure 30). The login screen for Lifestyle Online boasted,
“THE LARGEST SWINGERS CORRESPONDENCE MAGAZINE IN THE WORLD!,”
an explicit reference to the underground swingers mailing lists that predated the modem
world. Swinging, like dating, exploited both the social and spatial characteristics unique
709Wildhack, Erotic Connections, 193.
710Mark, Internet BBSs, 218.
362
to BBSing. “Tom Terrific,” the pseudonymous sysop of the The Pleasure Dome, in
Virginia Beach, V A, started the board in 1985 as a “meeting place” for the local swingers
community and each month, he hosted both “regular parties” and “swing sessions” for his
callers.
711
As the system began to attract callers from outside of its local area code,
Terrific enforced the social focus of the board through the architecture of the underlying
software. Between 7pm and midnight every evening, the file area was automatically
shutdown to encourage all of the users to participate in the late-night chat rooms.
712
The
chat features on on multi-line adult boards like the Pleasure Dome enlarged the space of
possibility for many swingers. For some couples, sharing a modem, a screen, and a
keyboard offered an accessible, “softer” form of swinging than was previously available.
Consistent with many areas of the modem world, long-time participants in
sexually-themed adult BBSes unfailingly described their favorite boards in terms of
sociality rather than sexuality. In user testimonials, words like “fun”, “open-minded,”
“uncensored,” “village,” and “home” are common while details about the particular
games, files, or technical features of the BBSes are seldom mentioned. The sexy side of
adult systems often provided an illicit edge to an otherwise conventional chat. The
Paradise Play Line BBS in Houston, TX, for example, featured fifty incoming lines and
local access numbers throughout the 713 metropolitan area code. With its tropical theme,
erotic online games, live trivia, and frequent get-togethers at a local bar, the Paradise Play
Line offered an atmosphere more akin to an adults-only cruise ship than a kinky
711Phil Robinson and Nancy Tamosaitis, The Joy of Cybersex: The Underground Guide to Electronic
Erotica (New York: Brady Pub., 1993).
712Ibid.
363
after-hours club.
713
As one reviewer described it, the BBS offered “an island paradise for
Internet vacationers everywhere.”
714
While the overwhelming number of men in the modem world enabled gay BBSes
to thrive, the exclusion of women from BBSing for over a decade posed an obvious
problem for boards with a heterosexual orientation. Wildhack estimated that on most
adult boards, men outnumbered women five to one.
715
In the face of this imbalance, some
sysops attempted to attracted women through segmented pricing. Cost was hardly the
reason for women's disinterest in sexually-oriented spaces dominated by men. For years,
Compu-Erotica offered free access to women but men continued to make up more than
70% of their membership.
716
The Pleasure Dome added a dedicated line for women to call
but the results were similar: men continued to outnumber women two to one.
717
Laura's
Lair BBS in Ava, MO was one of a very few adult-oriented BBSes founded by women.
Run by a team four women, including Laura Brito, Laura's Lair featured moderated
discussions that went far beyond casual socializing to include collaborative storytelling,
safer sex information, and technical advice for producing amateur pornography.
Unfortunately, Laura's Lair was a singular exception amid hundreds of clueless men. “We
try to create an atmosphere that makes women feel comfortable and unharassed,” wrote
the sysop of one adults-only BBS, “as we know they are a valuable online commodity.”
718
713Wildhack, Erotic Connections, 206.
714Mark, Internet BBSs, 261.
715Wildhack, Erotic Connections, 54.
716Ibid.
717“Commented BBS List,” accessed May 10, 2014, http://bbslist.textfiles.com/comments.html.
718Mark, Internet BBSs, 159.
364
Of course, for some men seeking heterosexual online encounters, the exclusion of
women was not an insurmountable barrier. Text-mode environments provided
considerable flexibility for self-presentation and much of the ostensibly heterosexual sex
occurring in “hot” chat room was, in fact, the product of two men. Consistent with the
dominant media frame of the time, the authors of Aether Madness described this as a
“tragicomic scenario” but there is little evidence to suggest that all—or even most—of
the men participating in these mediated encounters would have considered them acts of
deception.
719
Indeed, the exclusion of women from the modem world was widely known
—though seldom described in terms of “exclusion”—as was the possibility, if not the
practice, of cross-gender presentation in sex-oriented online spaces. Indeed, in Love
Bytes, Fox suggested that the possibility of a coded same-sex encounter was “often part
of the appeal” for many men. On BBSes like Lifestyle Online that encouraged fantasy,
the tacit appeal of the “cross-gendered” user was preserved through an absence of voice
verification.
720
Beyond paying their subscription fees, users were not required to disclose
any additional personal information.
“Adult” sociality in the BBS world
During the peak of BBSing in early 1990s, “adult” BBSes represented more than
porn downloads and cybersex chat. In different contexts, the term “adult” took on a
variety of social meanings. For the users and sysops of larger, multi-line boards in
metropolitan areas, “adult-only” often took on no more sexual significance than the
719Wolf and Stein, Aether Madness, 101.
720Mark, Internet BBSs, 218.
365
bouncer checking IDs outside of the local bar. “Social” BBSes like the Paradise Play
Line BBS in Houston were prized for having a relaxed, friendly atmosphere where users
were free to converse freely. For many adult BBSers, social BBSes provided a
comfortable after-work scene akin to the traditional neighborhood bar. These systems
were “adults-only” but their sociality was more closely aligned with an episode of Cheers
than a strip club.
Adult BBSes with a more overtly sexual theme were not wholly different from
their “social” contemporaries, however. The sysops of renowned adult BBSes like the
Pleasure Dome and Laura's Lair preferred that their callers communicate with one
another rather than tie up the phone lines downloading erotic GIFs. The operators of adult
BBSes experimented with a combination of social and technical means to shape the
growth of their communities. In addition to time limits and download ratios, sysops
created novel pricing schemes, implemented new standards for user verification, and
modified their host systems to guide users toward particular activities at different times of
the day. During the early 1990s, adult BBSes were consistently among the most
sophisticated and innovative systems in North America.
Not only was sexuality omnipresent in the modem world, but BBSes provided
platforms from which users could challenge dominant gender norms and hegemonic
sexual mores. Queer identities and sexualities were absolutely fundamental to the
experience of North American modeming during the late 1980s and 1990s. In addition to
massive gay owned and operated systems like the Backdoor BBS, hundreds of smaller
systems were openly and unabashedly queer. Whereas other forms of emerging queer
366
media enforced a metronormative representation of queerness as particularly urban,
BBSes offered an alternative spatial imaginary. Each dial-up BBS was marked by its area
code and the callers it hosted could reasonably assume a sense of shared territory. The
persistence of gay-oriented systems on local BBS lists was like a series of rainbow flags
hung on the sides of the information superhighway. Whether or not users ever dialed in,
the existence of local queer modemers could not be denied.
Finally, many “adult” BBSes offered unmoderated discussion and unrestricted
access to information. In the aftermath of the 1980s “cultural wars,” a fear of censorship
gripped many areas of American popular culture and BBSes offered a framework within
which information could be stored and accessed outside of traditional structures of power.
Sister Mary Elizabeth Clark's efforts to provide HIV/AIDS information through the
AEGIS network offer a particularly moving example of the adoption of accessible BBS
technology for the purpose of circulation. With little more than consumer-grade
microcomputers and modems, members of AEGIS provided up-to-date information
regarding HIV/AIDS treatment and politics to healthcare professionals, caregivers, and
advocates throughout the US and beyond. In areas with structural impediments to the
flow of HIV/AIDS information, AEGIS offered a vital alternative channel.
Outside of the conditions of crisis that animated the AEGIS network, adult BBSes
organized around lively discussion forums occasionally gave rise to counter-public
discourses among users frustrated by the odious political and economic conditions in the
United States at the end of the 1980s. The politics of these spaces, some of which
mimicked the bitter conservatism of syndicated talk radio, may have been deplorable but
367
the opportunity for unrestrained debate revealed the extent to which even the members of
ostensibly dominant groups were alienated from mainstream news media. On boards like
the Pandemonium BBS, rhetorical pugilism was the primary draw and sysops worked
hard to allow heated debate without allowing them to erupt into destructive flame wars.
Whereas the men who dominated most BBSes seemed oblivious to the exclusion of
women, the sysops of adult BBSes tended to acknowledge the harassment that women
faced and attempted to take steps toward women's inclusion. Unfortunately, these efforts
were frequently misguided and, in some cases, wholly counter-productive. Reduced
access fees and special privileges were hardly an adequate solution to unrelenting
harassment. BBSes owned and operated by women offered a more welcoming alternative
but these were exceptions to the overwhelming number of systems run by men.
Conclusion: The internet as “just an overgrown BBS”
721
The origins of social computing are found in the many thousands of BBSes that
thrived in cities and towns throughout North America during the 1980s and 1990s. The
dial-up bulletin board system, with its low technical requirements and accessible
software, provided an affordable platform for the production of new online spaces. From
local boards with a single modem to nationwide systems with hundreds of incoming
lines, the core features of the BBS were applied to myriad social, economic, and spatial
conditions. At the peak of BBS activity in the early 1990s, system operators
721Erik Delfino, “‘Transfer, Please’ - The Low-down on Downloading,” Online 18, no. 3 (May 1994): 112,
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/science/docview/199910936/19A8896B22C4189PQ/148?
accountid=14749.
368
experimented with countless different uses for the networked personal computer. Their
experiments in community-building, file-sharing, and entrepreneurship gave rise, in turn,
to novel forms of computer-mediated sociality as users learned to collectively make sense
in the modem world.
As the cost of commercial online services fell and the structural barriers to
accessing the packet-switched internet were removed in the mid-1990s, long-time
modemers carried the popular culture of BBSing to the nascent World Wide Web. For the
remaining years of the century, the Net was characterized by a plurality of overlapping
networks with files, users, norms, and idioms in transit among them. During this period,
the operators of larger BBSes maintained multiple gateways: telephone lines and modems
for dial-up access, telnet ports and leased lines for internet access. Even Boardwatch, the
leading magazine of the BBS industry, changed its tagline to reflect the shifting internet
imaginary: the “Guide to Electronic BBS and Online Information Services” became the
“Guide to Electronic Bulletin Boards and The Internet.” In many places, a local BBS was
the cheapest and easiest “on-ramp” to the popular internet.
The history of the Crazy House BBS in Port Charlotte, FL traces the ideal path
from bulletin board system to internet service provider. Tim Grzechowski, a telephony
engineer by day, founded Crazy House as a “semi-private” board in the largely rural 941
area code along Florida's west coast. Over a few years, the BBS grew increasingly public
and widely used. Grzechowski had moved an hour north to Sarasota and spent as much
money on his hobby “as a really good used car.”
722
With his professional expertise,
722Tim Grzechowski, “The Legend of the Crazy House BBS,” November 2004,
http://textfiles.com/history/crazy.txt.
369
Grzechowski began to offer internet services alongside the BBS and set up local access
numbers covering more than 75 miles up and down the coast. By 1994, activity on the
BBS started to decline as callers increasingly used Crazy House as an “on-ramp” to
USENET and the web. In 1997, “Mom-n-Pop ISP's...were becoming a dime a dozen” and
Grzechowski sold his network to “one of the big guys.”
723
Many new internet users were
likely unaware that the numbers they dialed to access the web in 1998 were first deployed
for a hobbyist BBS. In a very material sense, an after-work hobby had provided the “last
mile” infrastructure for thousands of modemers along the west coast of Florida. As
Grzechowski put it in 2004, “Not bad for a BBS in rural America!”
724
It is tempting to position BBSes as “stepping stones” to the modern-day web and,
indeed, this is dominant narrative in most popular histories of the internet. Such a
teleological account assumes, however, that BBSes were universally perceived as
restrictive, compartmentalized systems. Not only does this narrative overlook the rich
popular cultures that thrived on bulletin-board systems of the time, it fundamentally
mischaracterizes the nascent web of the early 1990s. The leased lines and
packet-switched networks that connected BBSes like Crazy House to the emerging
internet were not simply exits through which users could escape from the constrained
BBS but two-way connections through which distant users might visit. The back cover to
Richard Scott Mark's 1996 guidebook Internet BBSs nicely lays out this alternative
internet imaginary:
“OK, so you use the Internet. You've surfed some Web sites and maybe sent
e-mail. But, chances are, you've overlooked the rich and really personal
723Ibid.
724Ibid.
370
dimension of the Internet represented by the explosive growth of Internet
BBSs.”
725
As Mark's pitch suggests, many long-time BBSers encountered the web as a fun,
accessible platform for publishing—but found that lacked all of the rich social activity
that they came to expect from BBSes. Internet access did not “replace” BBSes, nor did
BBS users “migrate” en masse to the internet. Instead, BBSes joined the emerging
internet at the same time as commercial online services, university campus networks,
cable television systems, and everyone else. For thousands of everyday computer users,
the internet was, first and foremost, a BBS.
725Mark, Internet BBSs, back cover.
371
Conclusion: The stakes of forgetting and the promises of remembering
In 1994, Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, admitted that he
had never called a dial-up bulletin-board system (BBS).
726
A long-time user of the
Internet, Metcalfe encountered BBSing after being invited to attend the Online
Networking Exposition and BBS Convention (ONE BBSCON) in Atlanta, GA. As he
toured the trade show floor with Jack Rickard, the editor of Boardwatch magazine and
organizer of BBSCON, Metcalfe was shocked to learn that 17 million personal computer
owners in the United States regularly called one or more local BBSes. With some
back-of-the-napkin arithmetic, he estimated that the BBSing population outnumbered
America Online, CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy and the Internet combined. Metcalfe saw
the light. “BBS usage,” he wrote, “is a $2 billion industry that gets no respect.”
727
Bob Metcalfe was not the only internet technologist working in total ignorance of
the modem world. More than 15 years after Ward Christiansen and Randy Seuss brought
the first “computerized bulletin board” online in the suburbs of Chicago, BBSing
continued to be ignored by the computer networking elite. For engineers dreaming of an
“intergalactic” broadband network, it may have been difficult to see the rich sociality of
small town networks built with secondhand microcomputers and modems. In spite of
their widespread adoption and diffusion, BBSes were rarely included in conversations
about the future of computer networking. If they were discussed at all, they were treated
726Bob Metcalfe, “Sysops Are Reaping the Benefits in the Wake of a BBS Explosion,” InfoWorld 16, no.
36 (September 5, 1994): 52,
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/science/docview/194279302/19A8896B22C4189PQ/183?
accountid=14749.
727Ibid.
372
with contempt; portrayed as the tools of pirates and pornographers. Even as political will
for national information infrastructure coalesced into the populist rhetoric of the
“information superhighway,” the already-running networks of popular BBSes were
scarcely mentioned. As far as many advocates of the privatized internet were concerned,
BBSes did not exist.
After attending BBSCON in 1992, Steve Cisler of Apple Computer published a
piece in the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) newsletter reflecting on the social
value of dial-up BBSing.
728
At the time, the EFF was a non-profit organizing advocating
for the rights of users of computer networks. In 1992, it sat on the border among
numerous computer networks in the process of converging and its newsletters addressed
the users of BBSes, commercial services, and the emerging internet alike. Cisler began
his report by acknowledging that, to many of his readers, the BBSing population was
made up of “outsiders.” Socially, politically, and economically, he argued, these users
were neither part of the academic research networks, the commercial online services, nor
the major time-sharing industries. And yet, BBSing thrived. Cisler's report depicted
BBSCON as ideologically diverse, accommodating both “mainstream” business
applications and more populist, democratic uses. BBSes, he argued, benefited users who
were systematically excluded from dominant visions of the future: “the fat, the
handicapped, the socially inept, the disenfranchised, the radical, the non-mainstream.”
729

Given the dynamism of BBSCON, Cisler lamented that “mainstream opinion makers”
remained “dismissive or even snobbish” about BBSes and seemed to wish that they
728Steve Cisler, “At Play in the Field of the Boards: Report on ONE BBSCON, August 13-16, 1992.,”
EFFector Online, August 24, 1992, http://textfiles.com/magazines/EFF/eff303.law.
729Ibid.
373
would “just go away.”
730
While tech visionaries labored away at their manifestos and
utopias, BBS users and operators had already built a working model.
For more than two decades, dial-up BBSes were the primary form of popular
networked personal computing in North America but today, these systems are almost
totally absent from the internet's origin story.
731
Instead of emphasizing the role of
popular innovation and amateur invention, the dominant myths in internet history focus
on the trajectory of a single military-funded experiment in computer networking: the
ARPANET. Though fascinating, the ARPANET story almost totally excludes the
everyday culture of personal computing, with its myriad networks. In truth, these
histories are interwoven—socially and materially—as the ideas, technologies, and people
in each flowed through the other. The history of the internet could be a thrilling tale
inclusive of many thousands of networks, big and small, urban and rural, commercial and
voluntary. But, instead, it is reduced to the story of the ARPANET.
This chapter concerns the stakes of forgetting and the promises of remembering
the North American dial-up BBS. As the diffusion of broadband internet access
approaches ubiquity in the United States, the history of the internet is more important
than ever. In popular and political discourse, the cast of individuals and organizations that
populate the dominant history of internet are granted authority to make normative claims
about the past, present, and future of data communications. Faced with political and
protocological crises such as censorship or surveillance, these figures may call on their
mythic pasts to anoint one or another solution as the most consistent with tradition.
732
As
730Ibid.
731For a discourse analysis of internet historiography, see Chapter 1.
732Several examples of this use of internet history are presented in the Introduction.
374
long as the history of BBSes is excised from the dominant history of the internet, then the
everyday personal computer user has no voice in these public controversies, she is
precluded from participation by a particular mythic telling of the past.
Re-calling the culture of dial-up BBSes produces an internet imaginary that
depicts 1980s modem enthusiasts as the vanguard of social computing. From the
shareware economy to the circulation of HIV/AIDS information, BBS users and sysops
adapted the simple notion of a computerized bulletin board to countless socially valuable
purposes. Their experiments with file-sharing, community-building, and entrepreneurship
provide the roots of the social network sites that have animated the global internet for the
better part of the last decade. This restored history, in turn, provides today's users with a
historical platform from which they may voice opposition to surveillance and the decline
of privacy, censorship and the destruction of the public domain, and the on-going
centralization of the internet's infrastructure.
Where did all the BBSes go?: Rhetorical closure in the naming of the Net
In the early 1990s, popular interest in computer networking drove BBSing activity
to its historical peak. The decentralized topology of BBSing resists easy quantification
but a modest estimate suggests that in 1993, there were more than 30,000 boards
operating in North America alone.
733
And, yet, by the end of the decade, BBSes had
almost wholly disappeared. The disappearance of the dial-up BBS from the popular
culture of networked personal computing was the outcome of two interrelated technical
733Jason Scott, “Statistics Generated by the BBS List,” Textfiles.com, December 15, 2001,
http://bbslist.textfiles.com/support/statistics.html.
375
and rhetorical processes. On one hand, regional BBSes were not replaced but rather
subsumed by the gradual process of interconnection that produced the modern-day
internet. In many cities and towns, local BBSes were transformed by their operators into
dial-up internet service providers.
On the other hand, the demographics of the modem world changed dramatically
during the 1990s. At the end of the decade, not only had the population of modem users
grown considerably larger, it had become more diverse along nearly every imaginable
dimension. Between 1994 and 2000, the number of US households with a computer—not
necessarily with a modem—rose from 24.1% to 51%.
734
During this same period, access
to the internet diffused even more quickly. During the same period, among all adults in
the US, internet use more than doubled from 14% in 1995 to 53% in 2000. The rise was
even more striking among users who were excluded, socially and structurally, from
participating fully in the modem world. Female-identified users rose from 10% to 53%,
Black-identified users from 11% to 42%, and among households with annual incomes
less than $50,000, usage rose from 11% to 50%.
735
In 1993, the modem world must have
seemed almost limitless with tens of thousands of systems and millions of daily callers.
But the growth of the modem world during the next ten years was so staggering, and
proceeded in so many different directions, as to almost entirely blot out the small,
regional networks that once blanketed the continent.
734National Telecommunications and Information Administration, A Nation Online: How Americans Are
Expanding Their Use of the Internet (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, February 5,
2002), http://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/ntiahome/dn/hhs/ChartH1.htm.
7351158 - Adult Computer and Adult Internet Users by Selected Characteristics, The 2012 Statistical
Abstract (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2012).
376
The sprawling socio-technical assemblage colloquially referred to as “the
internet” arose as a result of the on-going convergence of computer networks and
widespread adoption online services during the 1990s. Previously, the term “internet”
was more narrowly defined. “The Internet” of the 1980s referred to a set of
research-oriented computer networks originating in the United States. Tracing the popular
adoption of the term “internet” reveals an important part of the process through which the
history of BBSing was gradually forgotten.
A network of networks
The process of inter-networking, building networks of networks, began in the
early 1970s with the development of the TCP/IP, the “internet protocols,” by Vint Cerf
and Bob Kahn at ARPA.
736
The purpose of TCP/IP was to create a common set of
protocols for communicating among diverse computer networks. By the mid-1980s,
TCP/IP was included with the UNIX operating system and had become a de facto
standard among government and university networks in the United States.
737
The
protocols were not widely adopted by personal computer users until the early 1990s when
Trumpet Winsock, a shareware program by Peter Tattam, added TCP/IP support to
Microsoft Windows.
738
Later, Apple and Microsoft bundled the protocols with the new
versions of their operating systems and the de facto standard extended to PCs. The
736Abbate, Inventing the Internet., 128.
737Ibid., 148.
738Trumpet Winsock was widely pirated and Tattam received little compensation relative to the adoption
of his software. Recently, a group of former users organized a fund-raising campaign to, in their words,
“reward a man whose work let so many of us open the door, for the first time, to an important part of
our lives.” One contributor left a public note thanking Tattam and noted: “As a closeted gay teenager,
Trumpet was the software that got me in touch with the people who literally saved my life.” “Peter
Tattam Created Trumpet Winsock and Got Very Little: Let’s Set Things Right | Hacker News,” accessed
May 12, 2014, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875.
377
project of interconnecting diverse systems with TCP/IP was so successful that today,
most users do not realize that what they call “the internet” is really made up of countless
networks passing under oceans, through the ground, and into space.
By the end of the 1980s, engineers, journalists, and science fiction writers had
devised numerous terms for the growing complex of computer networks. They called it
Cyberspace, the Grid, the Matrix, the Metanet, the Metaverse, and the Net, among
countless other variations. Poetic names were necessary because the emerging internet
resisted any stable technical definition. Sure, it was a “network of networks,” but
depending on where and when you accessed the system, your data could take entirely
different pathways to the same destination. In the 1980s science fiction trilogy A Song
Called Youth, author John Shirley described “The Grid” as the global superset of all data
communication, inclusive of quotidian television broadcasts and financial networks as
well as more fantastical services like virtual worlds.
739
Shirley's vision reflected the
dynamism of the converging media networks of 1980s and 1990s. As the
network-of-networks added new users, systems, nations, and organizations daily, a notion
like “the Grid” or “the Net” was useful for communicating both the social and technical
implications of this period of change.
That “internet” would become the preferred generic term for this emerging
network-of-networks was hardly inevitable. In 1990, Digital Press, the publishing arm of
Digital Equipment Corporation, published a reference book by network engineer John S.
Quarterman on the global state of computer networking. The Matrix: Computer Networks
and Conferencing Systems Worldwide is an utterly unique document in the history of
739Shirley, A Song Called Youth.
378
computer networking. On the cusp of an explosion of interconnection, Quarterman
assembled the authoritative reference guide to nearly all of the known standards,
protocols, models, gateways, and networks in service at the time. The resulting tome
included thousands of references, dozens of maps, and fascinating first-hand details of the
unique cultures of various systems. Of the book's seven hundred pages, a chapter on “the
Internet” occupied approximately fifty. Quarterman defined the Internet as “an
internetwork of many networks” all running the TCP/IP protocol suite and sharing a
common set of naming and addressing conventions. In the chronology of The Matrix, the
Internet began in 1983; the year that the ARPANET adopted TCP/IP.
740
The purpose of
the Internet, in Quarterman's account, was to facilitate computer networking experiments
and other forms of resource sharing among researchers affiliated with government
agencies, educational institutions, and private corporations. Geographically, the Internet
was primarily a North American network, originating in the United States, with some
“component parts” extending to other continents.
At several points in The Matrix, Quarterman acknowledges the intellectual
contributions of science fiction writers such as William Gibson, Vernor Vinge, and Bruce
Sterling.
741
Neuromancer by Gibson, in particular, is thanked in the preface in as the
source of the book's title.
742
But whereas Gibson's use of the “the matrix” described a
possible future, Quarterman adapted the term to an unfolding present.
743
The Matrix,
wrote Quarterman, “is a worldwide metanetwork of connected computer networks and
740Quarterman, The Matrix, 278.
741For example, see the discussion of identity and anonymity: Ibid., 31–32.
742Gibson, Neuromancer.
743Quarterman, The Matrix, xxvi.
379
conferencing systems that provides unique services that are like, yet unlike, those of
telephones, post offices, and libraries.”
744
This definition much more closely matches the
colloquial use of “internet” that began in the mid-1990s and continues today. As a
“metanetwork,” Quartermans' Matrix encompassed networks with vastly different
capacity, throughput, and protocols. The Matrix, therefore, included the Internet,
commercial online services, and BBSes alike.
Popular accounts of computer networks similarly adopted the language of science
fiction to capture the structures of feeling that accompanied computer-mediated
communication. In his 1993 guidebook to online sociality, The Virtual Community:
Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Howard Rheingold chose “The Net” as a
generic term for all computer networks. Rheingold's description of the Net added a
complementary social dimension to Quarterman's technical definition. “The Net,” he
wrote, “is an informal term for the loosely interconnected computer networks that use
CMC technology to link people around the world into public discussions.”
745
Stacking
metaphors, Rheingold went on to compare The Net to the agar in a petri dish, the medium
out of which virtual communities might grow.
746
The Virtual Community reads like a friendly tour diary but it contained a subtle
argument regarding the future of networked personal computing. Rheingold hoped that
the stories of community-building and information sharing would communicate the social
value of computer networking to an audience of readers who had never dialed into The
WELL, logged onto a UNIX workstation, or fired up a Minitel terminal. In 1992, as
744Ibid., xxiii.
745Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 5.
746Ibid., 6.
380
Rheingold was no doubt typing up his final manuscript, the political value of computer
networking was on the rise. The future of Rheingold's community-oriented internet
imaginary was therefore in jeopardy. As he wrote, in the middle of a paragraph in the
middle of the introduction, “We need a clear citizens' vision of the way the Net ought to
grow, a firm idea of the kind of media environment we would like to see in the future.”
747

The Virtual Community depicted Rheingold's own vision of the future and the dial-up
BBS most closely matched his communitarian ideal. “All the high-speed,
government-financed internets in the world could turn to lime Jell-O tomorrow,” he
proclaimed, “and the BBS community would continue to thrive.”
748
Hope and fear in the rhetoric of the “information superhighway”
Whether from science fiction novels like Neuromancer, technical reference books
like The Matrix, or bestsellers like The Virtual Community, pithy terms for the emerging
network-of-networks were crucial discursive resources for the popularization of computer
networking. As BBSing was approaching the apex of its popularity, with hundreds of
thousands of users distributed throughout North American, Bill Clinton and Al Gore
successfully campaigned on a platform involving a vision of universal access to a
nationwide “information superhighway.” For an audience with little hands-on experience
of the modem world, the well-designed metaphor of the “superhighway” was at once
familiar and futuristic, evoking both the interstate highway system and the rapidly
growing matrix of computer networks.
749
As Clinton and Gore took office, the imaginary
747Ibid.
748Ibid., 131.
749In 2001, sociologist Patrice Flichy thoroughly mapped the circulation of the “information
superhighway” metaphor through popular, political, and industrial discourses. See: Flichy, The internet
381
of a nationwide “information superhighway” prompted a series of transformations in the
political and industrial arenas. The telecommunications industry was restructured through
several widely-publicized mergers among entrenched telephone and cable television
operators, a process of consolidation that has continued unabated in the decades since.
And, meanwhile, the White House convened an Information Infrastructure Task Force
with the purpose of planning the production of a “national information infrastructure”
(NII). The two arenas of activity were driven by a common vision of ubiquitous
broadband digital networking but they differed significantly on the means through which
such a vision could be realized.
Early descriptions of the “information superhighway” were quite different from
the broadband internet that was eventually assembled. Gore's vision of a public works
project in the spirit of the New Deal was anathema to the drive toward deregulation that
had animated the telecommunications industries for more than twenty years. The
break-up of the de facto AT&T monopoly offered a powerful example of the promises of
privatization. After all, the modem world was thriving in the wake of the break-up. By
1993, the pursuit of an information superhighway became the justification for further
liberalization of the telecommunications industries. Between 1991 and 1995, the
publicly-funded Internet “backbone” was gradually disaggregated into a set of
cooperative commercial networks and administrative oversight was transferred away
from the National Science Foundation.
750
In the place of a public works project, the
private sector was tasked with creating the nationwide network, a task that was shortly
imaginaire.
750For a detailed account of the privatization of NSFNET, see: Abbate, Inventing the Internet., 195–200,
205–208.
382
abandoned. Instead of the fiber-optic “superhighway” envisioned by Gore, the “last mile”
that connecting individuals, residences, schools, and places of business was conveyed by
telephone and cable television companies using their existing infrastructure: coaxial
cables and “twisted pair” copper wires.
For BBS users and sysops who were already in the practice of communicating via
modem, the early rhetoric of the “information superhighway” presented an opportunity to
re-shape their own network imaginaries. As Quarterman, Rheingold, and Gore touted the
socially progressive promises of networked computing in ever more visible venues,
BBSers could imagine themselves the vanguard of a high-tech social movement. In this
brief moment before “the Internet” had achieved rhetorical closure, BBSers were the
homesteaders, in Rheingold's terms, building the future that was now being broadcast to
the public at large from the highest office in the nation. Having spent more than a decade
experimenting with computer-mediated community and commerce, the amateur
telecommunications enthusiast could imagine themselves a reserve of lay experts, ready
to break ground on the information superhighway.
On-ramps and off-ramps to the information superhighway
From the mid-1980s, the Internet and the BBS world were like vines growing
toward one another. Some BBSers extended the metaphor of the information
superhighway by describing their systems as “on-ramps” and “off-ramps.” BBSes played
a crucial role in the popularization of internet access. In many towns and cities, BBSes
served as the first generation of Internet Service Providers (ISPs). E-mail gateways
provided the earliest points of interconnection among grassroots, commercial, and
383
research-oriented networks and by the end of the 1980s, e-mail flowed readily across a
variety of different systems.
751
As the Internet described by Quarterman was privatized,
however, it became easier for BBS operators to added a full-time connection to their
systems. In practice, accessing the Internet connection involved selecting an item from
the main menu of the BBS. The user would be transferred away from the BBS host
program and to a command-line “shell” where they could access the standard suite of
TCP/IP applications: FTP, telnet, finger, gopher., etc.
In the mid-1990s, BBSes “on-ramps” were often the best option for dial-up access
to the emerging internet. Internet how-to books aimed at the general public often
recommended that readers seek out a local BBS before turning to more widely-known
nationwide service providers.
752
Not only was a local BBS cheaper but its pre-existing
community structured offered social advantages that could not be matched by a
newly-formed nationwide services. BBSes featuring Internet access were likely staffed by
long-time participants in the technical culture of amateur telecommunications who
enjoyed sharing their experience with newcomers. As one writer put it, the BBS was
distinguished by its “warm atmosphere” and “friendly community spirit.”
753

The large-scale transition of local BBSes into local ISPs was prompted by the release of
the Mosaic web browser and the arrival of the graphical World Wide Web in l993 and
1994.Whereas dial-up BBSes offered visually arresting displayed of colorful art and
animation, and commercial service providers like America Online had re-built their
751LaQuey, The Internet Companion, 207–210.
752For a longer investigation of the “explosion of publishing” that accompanied the information
superhighway rhetoric of the 1990s, see Chapter 1.
753Mark, Internet BBSs, 318.
384
systems with point-and-click graphical interfaces, contemporary Internet services were
indistinguishable from the teletype systems engineered in the 1970s. Moving from an
ANSI-enabled BBS to an Internet “shell” account was like opening a portal to the
green-and-black world of monochrome display adapters that most PC owners had left
behind years earlier. The Web, however, with its simple mark-up language and in-line
graphics, marked a profound discontinuity, and modem enthusiasts were eager to explore
the promises of this accessible new medium.
In 1993 and 1994, accessing the World Wide Web from a home computer was
tricky. It required 1) a GUI operating system like Windows or Mac OS, 2) a graphical
web browser, 3) a TCP/IP “stack,” and 4) a fast connection—some users argued that the
graphical web was only tolerable at 9600 bits-per-second or faster.
754
Many users had
access to 1 and 4 but 2 and 3 were harder to come by. Fortunately, both the freeware
Mosaic web browser and the shareware Trumpet TCP/IP stack were licensed for free
re-distribution so BBSers could lawfully trade them through the same file-sharing
network that they had used for more than a decade.
755
In 1988, the Serial Line Internet
Protocol, or SLIP, was codified as a method for extending TCP/IP over a dial-up
connection.
756
As interest in the web blossomed during the winter of 1993, SLIP allowed
BBS operators with packet-switched Internet connections to advertise “full-blown
internet access” (which typically meant “access to the graphical web”) to users with fast
754Wolf and Stein, Aether Madness, 252–253.
755For a close examination of file-sharing via BBS, see Chapter 4, Part II.
756Rick Adams first implemented SLIP for UNIX systems in 1984. In 1988, a specification and example
implementation written in the C programming language was circulated by the Internet Engineering Task
Force as RFC 1055. See: J. L. Romkey, “RFC 1055: Nonstandard for Transmission of IP Datagrams
over Serial Lines: SLIP” (Network Working Group, June, l988), http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1055.
385
modems and newer computers.
757
To actually visit a web page, the user would first dial
into their local BBS, enter their login information, invoke the SLIP command on the
remote system, start up Trumpet Winsock on their local machine, wait for the connection
to be verified, start Mosaic, enter a URL, and wait fifteen minutes or more for the page to
load. The process was still exhausting and waiting for a site to load was tedious, but it
worked. A bridge was formed from the aging BBS to nascent Web.
As the Web attracted popular interest (and financial capital), BBSes were also
perceived as “off-ramps” on the information superhighway. For the veteran programmers
in the BBS world, building a website with HTML was considered a fun, if trivial, task.
Beginning in 1994, sysop began to expose parts of their BBSes to the Web. Initially, these
homepages were little more than electronic advertisements but soon they began to include
special links that would open a connection into the board itself. The telnet protocol
created a direct serial connection over TCP/IP not altogether unlike the connection made
between two modems over a telephone line. This small innovation meant that a multi-line
BBS might include both local users connected through a telephone call, and remote users
connected via telnet. Plus, while each dial-up user required their own dedicated phone
line, a single internet connection could be shared among dozens of telnet users. By the
end of the decade, with the rapid diffusion of internet access, BBSes that did not close
down entirely often closed down their telephone lines and transitioned to a telnet-only
architecture.
Several of the biggest BBSes went one step further and built wholly-new BBS
software using the technologies of the web. In October 1995, a headline on the cover
757Mark, Internet BBSs, 318–319.
386
Boardwatch magazine proclaimed, “The WELL Meets the Web: And a New Web BBS is
Born.” The article, penned by editor Jack Rickard,began with the premise that the Web of
1995 was about to “fad” about to lose its appeal. Rickard outlined the early explosion of
interest in the Web as a kind of infatuation. At first, the “stunning” graphics are enough to
keep you clicking around, but after a short time, “everyone...starts looking for a home,”
and, finding none on the Web, they return to e-mail, chartrooms, and bulletin boards.
758

Under new management as of 1994, the engineering team responsible for opening up the
Web to the The WELL endeavored to create such a “home.” Today, the legacy of these
efforts is evident in thousands of community-oriented websites that offer the same core
set of features as the dial-up BBS: file-sharing, community-building, and remote
computing.
The dominant form of internet history tells a story of insurgent new technologies
disrupting and replacing existing technologies in a linear progression. During the 1980s,
Phil Becker rose to prominence as the found of eSoft, makers of an unusually successful
commercial BBS program. In 1995, eSoft announced a new product called the IPAD that
promised to help BBSes become ISPs.
759
At an industry luncheon, Becker described the
decision to develop the IPAD as one of historical inevitability:
I realized in 1993 that the Internet was going to win the technology battle over
which format and what kind of technology was going to actually hook all the
computers in the world together over time. Everybody knew for some time that
this was the next logical step, but it was a heavily competitive world...As soon as
it broke out that the Internet was going to be it, the picture was clear to me that
this was going to be a big problem for small and medium sized businesses.
760
758Rickard, “The New BBS On The Web--Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link,” 41.
759Needless to say, the eSoft IPAD is not related to the tablet computer of the same name.
760Phil Becker, “What Is the IPAD and Why?” (eSoft, Inc., August 3, 1998),
http://www.ipadowners.org/about_ipad.htm.
387
Becker's portrayal of the early 1990s as a “battle” among different networking
technologies nicely positions him as an astute observer but it obliterates the social,
political, and technological processes through which BBSes became integrated with the
emerging internet. But Becker's narrative survives because the process of interconnection
made dial-up BBSes indistinguishable from any other internet service provider. Indeed, if
it provides access to the internet and it is accessible from the internet, it must be the
internet.
Memory work and narratives of decline among former BBSers
Faced with an almost total lack of representation in the dominant histories of the
internet, former BBSers are denied opportunities to participate in rituals of nostalgia that
would preserve their memories. With few reflections of their own personal experiences,
former BBSers must perform their own individual memory work to avoid oblivion. In
general, this constraint has lead to a collective silence, but small numbers of former
BBSers stubbornly resist being forgotten and proclaim their memories in various spaces
on the Web.
“Retrocomputing” is one name for a popular technical culture organized around
the material history of early computing. A small number of retrocomputing enthusiasts
have taken up the preservation of BBSing as their primary area of interest. In addition to
collecting, through yard sales, swap meets, and eBay auctions, retrocomputing culture
typically involves producing original websites. Textfiles and Break Into Chat by Jason
Scot and Josh Renaud represent two exceptionally rich examples of self-preservation by
388
former BBSers. Retrocomputing collections tend to be organized around the personal
experiences of the collector and, currently, retrocomputing culture seems to be
predominantly made up of men between the ages of the 30-60. As a result, the best
preserved aspects of BBS history are those that appealed to teenage boys in the 1980s.
The most thorough account of BBS history is a documentary series released on
DVD by Jason Scott in 2005. BBS: The Documentary unfolds across eight episodes
organized around dominant areas of activity within the BBSing world. Each episode is
assembled from interviews with hundreds of former BBS users, sysops, and engineers.
Since the release of the DVD, Scott has gradually been making the unedited footage of
these interviews available through the Internet Archive. To date, twenty-two interviews
have been added to the BBS collection.
761
For the most part, however, BBS memory work is carried out informally. In the
course of their everyday activities, former BBSers will occasionally inscribe their
memories in the ephemeral corners of the web. They may post a message to a social
network site, participate in web-based messageboards, comment on a blog, or contribute
to a wiki orientated around early computing. “I haven't found a decent interface for
communities,” wrote one former BBSer in 1999, “the BBS interface is still superior to
anything I've seen thus far.”
762
“The Web can't reproduce the regionality of it all,”
lamented another.
763
In these moments, BBSers reveal the extent to which their own
761Jason Scott, “BBS Documentaries,” Internet Archive, accessed February 3, 2014,
https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary.
762“Are BBS-Like Communities Dead? - Slashdot,” accessed May 13, 2014,
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2660&cid=1501117.
763“Sabby / Glorfindle,” accessed May 13, 2014, http://www.visualnoiz.com/BBS/Users/Sabby_Why.htm.
389
memories are structured by the very same linear narrative of technological progress that
exclude them.
The tremendous growth of the World Wide Web was fueled in large part by novice
modemers with no prior experience of either BBSes or commercial online services.
Among BBSers, however, reactions to the new technology were mixed. For veteran
modemers with years of experience participating in dial-up virtual communities, the Web
could seem plodding and impersonal, all flash, no substance. Narratives of decline first
appeared in the mid 1990s as the use of dial-up BBSes began to fall precipitously. In
1997, Rae Nelson the sysop of the Spun Crystal Web, a hybrid dial-up/internet BBS
housed in Chandler, AZ, posted a note on the BBS' homepage urging readers not to forget
about the BBS. “Some people claim [that BBSes] are dinosaurs in this age of internet
access,” Nelson admitted, “BUT, what a lot of people do not realize is they are very much
alive.”
764
In the 2000s, narratives of decline took a somewhat different form as they were
intermingled with nostalgia. Upon finding a record of his BBS listed on textfiles.com,
former sysop Paul Newman left a note that seeing so many familiar names reminded him
of “what's really missing” from the internet.
765
Narratives of decline among long-time BBSers tended to focus on the loss of
community that accompanied the adoption of the World Wide Web. Tim Weidman, the
former sysop of Wyld On-Line in Omaha, NE, wrote that BBSes enabled an “exchange of
cultures” among people from different backgrounds, something that he believed that
764Rae Nelson, “Spun Crystal Web, A People Place, about Choices,” Spuncrystal.com, November 29,
1997,
http://web.archive.org/web/20000603163243/http://www.spuncrystal.com/public/bbs/allaboutbbsing.ht
m.
765“Commented BBS List.”
390
“other areas of the Net” failed to do.”
766
Echoing Weidman, Santiago Mu, former sysop of
the ASERTEL BBS in Barcelona, argued that the Web felt impersonal when compared
with dial-up BBSes. “On BBSes, internet users can interact with each other,” he argued,
“Web pages are too anonymous.”
767
The notion that the Web stymied the development of virtual community was
occasionally accompanied by a sense of loss and disorientation. For many users, the
interconnection of networks in the 1990s resulted in a painful period of disconnection
from their previous virtual communities. Whereas proponents of the Web championed its
global reach, many BBSers missed the local cultures of their favorite systems. Brian
Miller, the sysop of Channel 1 BBS in Cambridge, MA, described BBSes as “the
grassroots of local connectivity.”
768
As modemers gradually began to participate more
frequently in large-scale networks like USENET and IRC, they traded away some of the
intimacy of a local dial-up service. It was difficult to have a picnic with friends who lived
across the continent.
A third dimension common to many narratives of decline concerned the role of
anonymity and etiquette on local BBSes. Unlike the early internet, where no one knew
you were a dog, the regular users on many local BBSes were personally acquainted with
one another. Through the organization of “get-togethers,” many also socialized outside of
the BBS. The sysops of the TARDIS in Indianapolis, IN, for example, created a positive,
welcoming culture for their users by taking a personal, hands-on approach to
766Mark, Internet BBSs, 311.
767Ibid., 98.
768Ibid., 115.
391
moderation.
769
On the TARDIS, as with many local boards, every user was “voice
verified” before being granted access to the system. This brief moment of contact by
telephone established an intimacy that was much less common in the sprawling
community spaces of the emerging internet. The intimacy and trust developed through
these community-building activities facilitated a different set of expectations than was
possible in wholly pseudonymous spaces.
Narratives of decline articulated by BBSers during the period of interconnection
contradict the dominant narrative of linear progress. Although the popularization of the
Internet enabled far greater and more diverse participation than was possible with BBSes,
former modemers nonetheless grieved for the loss of their local virtual communities. The
structure of feeling of a local dial-up BBS could not be replicated in a newsgroup or a
website. Since most dial-up bulletin-boards were operated by a hobbyist volunteer,
dialing in could feel like stepping into a backyard BBQ or meeting up with friends at the
neighborhood bar. Likewise, because the underlying technology remained stable for more
than a decade, users developed a comfort and familiarity with their favorite BBSes that
was not possible in the rapidly changing environment of the early internet.
Re-calling the dial-up history of social computing
The history of the dial-up BBS is the history of social computing. Beginning in
1978, hobbyists steeped in both the long tradition of amateur telecommunications and the
emerging technical culture of personal computing began to use the telephone network as
769For a detailed examination of the TARDIS BBS, see Chapter 4, Part III.
392
an infrastructure for building computer-mediated virtual communities. These
“computerized bulletin boards” provided a basic set of file-sharing, messaging, and
remote computing functions which could be endlessly modified and reconfigured. While
the makers of microcomputers competed through the production of expensive,
incompatible machines, dial-up BBSes facilitated interoperability through the use of
simple text-mode protocols. Dial-up BBSes thus served as a common meeting places
among local computer owners.
Dial-up BBSes provided an telecomputing infrastructure for popular cultures and
grassroots community organizing throughout North America. From the mid-1980s
through the 1990s, the technical expertise and financial burden required to participate in
BBSing continued to fall. As a result, the population of BBSers grew far beyond the
technical culture of microcomputer hobbyists to include myriad individuals and
organizations with widely varying social needs. From small software companies to
swingers groups, fantasy sports leagues to feminist collectives, queer communities to
third-party political campaigns, the decentralized network of BBSes reflected the diverse
personal and political affinities that were being ignored by the entrenched media
industries. The utopian vision of networked personal computing as a communitarian
technology was inspired by the practical, lived example of BBSes, rather than speculation
about what rather than commercial online services or research networks might someday
become. Each BBS was The Net and the Net was made up of BBSes.
Whereas early utopian visions of the internet emphasized deterritorialization and
disembodiment, dial-up BBSes were profoundly tied to a particular place. The spatial
393
imaginary the structured the BBSing movement reflected the peculiar ontology of the
telephone network. Users accessed BBSes through standard telephone calls that were
billed according to distance which meant that most BBSers limited their activities to a
local, toll-free calling area. On a broad scale, this financial constraint produced friendly,
familiar virtual communities that were integrated into the everyday lives of their users.
Like CB radio users in the 1970s, local BBS communities extended their on-line sociality
to off-line gatherings, parties, and picnics. Users of a local BBS visited one another's
homes, worked in the same industries, attended the same schools, worshiped in the same
religious spaces, and shopped in the same malls. Dial-up BBSes, like mobile
communication today, was an extension, rather than an alternative, to its users' existing
social world.
The peak of BBS activity in North America coincided with the privatization and
popularization of internet access. Conventional histories of the internet tend to either
dismiss BBSes as limited “stepping stones” toward “full-blown” internet access, or
ignore the BBS phenomenon altogether. In fact, BBSes were already exchanging e-mail
and files through vast transnational relay systems such as FidoNet and RIME. Not only
did these networks interconnect individual BBSes but they provided gateways through
which BBS users could exchange data with the users of contemporary networks such as
USENET and BITNET. In a very material sense, however, BBS operators had been
engaged in inter-networking projects since 1984. Further, BBS users and operators were
among the most eager to build gateways and “on-ramps” that would allow them to
explore the nascent World Wide Web from their personal computers. In thousands of
394
cities and towns throughout North America, this BBSing vanguard constructed the first
generation of internet service providers.
As mobile social computing approaches near-universal adoption, re-calling the
dial-up BBS provides a history for the everyday use of computer networks. The dominant
history of the internet tells the story of a handful of military-funded engineers laboring in
elite university and corporate research labs to work out the protocols that undergird the
global information infrastructure. The history of BBSes, in contrast, tells the stories of
thousands of people living and working in cities and towns throughout the continent who
collectively figured out why anyone would voluntarily spend time in front of a networked
personal computer. Their experiments in community-building and information-sharing
provided the foundation for the values and practices that ultimately compel so many
millions of us to our computers and mobile phones each day: love, learning, commerce,
community, and faith. In the words of one former sysop: the BBS was the original
cyberspace.
395
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