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archive:history:golnar

BBS Life in the 1980’s

by Mr. Pez (or GOLNAR, or Scott)

I honestly can’t remember when I first connected my computer to another via modem, so please bear with me while I start from the beginning.

My name is Scott, and I have been online for at least 15 years. I had been sharing an IBM Personal Computer with my dad for maybe two years when, at my urging, he bought a 1200 baud modem for some outrageous amount, like $500. The first thing I did with the modem was to use my father’s CompuServe account to access the CompuServe chat rooms. When you’re like 13, it’s totally hysterical to harass people in the chat areas, and so I spent way too much time doing this. I cringe upon recalling this, but I would actually have friends over, and we would sit in front of the computer, going to chat rooms to find a victim and hassle that person. My craftiest move was to turn on the CompuServe chat feature which would display a person’s CompuServe ID after their handle, so that when anyone took the bait, I could use the CIS directory to look up their real name (or, more likely, their parent’s real name) and use that to terrify them. Unlike AOL, CompuServe was very lax in monitoring the chat rooms, so this sort of behavior was rarely punished. Another popular CompuServe activity was to attempt to get members of the opposite sex to have CompuSex with you, which was to have a private chat wherein you would type in various acts that a 13-year-old boy would want to do with a 13-year-old girl. I think I had CompuSex once or twice. Another thing you could do on CompuServe was download programs from the file libraries. CompuServe charged based on your connection speed for this service. Eventually, the CompuServe bill came, and it turned out that it cost like $4 an hour + extra for the chat rooms + some amount for each file you downloaded, and I had spent many hours in CompuServe chat rooms and downloading files. I was forced to retire from the CompuServe chat rooms by my parents.

I then came across bulletin boards. While on CompuServe, I could find lists of BBS’s that you could call. I called a lot of BBS’s in my area code (914) until I learned that it cost a lot more to call upstate New York than the next town, even though the area codes were the same. I had to mow a lot of lawns before my debt to my parents for CompuServe and the phone bill was paid off. I was able to use the phone bill to determine which BBS’s were local calls, and narrowed my focus to them. At the time, the prevalent BBS software was RBBS, which was shareware that ran only under DOS. RBBS bulletin boards were generally totally boring, featuring various shareware utilities and some message boards. The good thing was that the bulletin board lists would occasionally include BBS’s that had slightly naughtier names than <town name> RBBS. Also, they didn’t require that your real name be used as your online identity (a common practice at the RBBS’s). I began to call myself Karl Marx, and registered at several BBSes with that name. I soon learned that this name was used by a fairly well-known early hacker, so I took on the name Mr. Pez. One BBS I frequented was called The Works!, and was located a few towns away, in Chappaqua, New York. It was only a free local call away, so it received much of my early BBS attention. It was not like the RBBS’s in that there were very few programs to download, it had active and interesting message boards (though many confusing messages were posted), and it had a large textfile archive containing stuff a 14-year-old boy should not be allowed to see. This included misguidedly pornographic fiction, recipes for explosives that probably would maim someone badly if followed in your kitchen, the insane and poorly written rants by the Neon Knights and/or Metal Communications (e.g. How To Card Shit When You Still Live With Your Parents, How To Fuck The Dead by Necrophiliac, How To Be A Real Drug User), schematics for fictional devices to make payphones do stuff for you, and just generally weird stuff by Anarchy Inc. Through this board, I found a strange community that I was close to for years.

Several people on The Works! found my tale of high phone bills and CompuServe changes sort of pathetic, but amusing. They introduced me to codez, illicit calling card codes which were stolen and then used to make free long distance phone calls. 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.

At some point in there, my dad got one of those then-newfangled 2400 baud modems. Ours was only $300, a bargain when compared to the 1200b from two years before. It was also much smaller than the 1200b, and didn’t make the room hotter like the 1200b did. It was still huge, like almost the size of a scanner but with all those lights on the front. Some BBS’s at this point were still 300 baud, so I began to frequent them less in favor of Jason Scott’s Works!. It was at this point that my friend Mike ran, part-time, his short-lived BBS Woodstock Nation. He had a Commodore 64 and a 300 baud modem, and his parents let him run the BBS on his and his brothers’ line at night. The cool thing about the Woodstock Nation (besides that I garnered my first co-sysop title there) was that the message board had a lot of funny fake hippie postings by Mike, my friends Mark and Zack, and I, but we also carried on an active dialogue with someone whose handle was Timothy Leary. I was kind of convinced that it was the real Timothy Leary replying to our asinine postings, like I took the blue acid last night and I swear I saw the face of Tiny Tim leering at me. In retrospect, I suppose we were pretty stupid. But I’d still like to hear from that Timothy Leary someday.

At one point, I went over to Jason Scott’s house. It was very different than my living experience: his parents were divorced, and he had three rooms in the attic of his father’s house in Chappaqua to himself. One room was barren but for an IBM Personal Computer with a 10MB hard drive and two others in the rarely-seen IBM Personal Computer Expansion Chassis. Also, he had one of those 80’s posture chairs, which had shin-pads at a right angle to the seat, and no back. I came to believe that he sat in that chair most of the day, looking at the computer screen. The middle room contained his bed and another monitor mounted on the wall, so he could watch the people dialed in to his BBS while he was in bed. The other room had like a couch and a TV, or something. At the time, my room had a closet with a two-foot-high trap door in the back, which led out to a weird half-attic. I used it to keep MAD Magazines and porn. I had a strange experience 10 years later when I went with my mother and her friend the real estate agent to that house, which was being sold by the people who bought it from the people who bought it from us, and I looked in the trap door to find my old MADs and porn.

Anyway, I became kind of friendly with Jason Scott, and spoke on the phone with him frequently. Other people in our online community had the ability to create conference calls, which were an (at the time) totally amazing technical feat which would allow many squeaky-voiced adolescents to carry on phone conversations at the same time. (Now, I work in a fairly high-tech office where I can make a conference call by dialing a number, pressing Transfer/Confer, dialing another number, pressing Transfer/Confer, etc. But it still seems really cool when I do it.) I had the opportunity to listen in on many conference calls, but I don’t actually recall saying a word. Not too long ago, Jason Scott called me at home from work, and proceeded to conference in various people from my past. It took me back.

During the later Works! days, I was invited to become co-sysop. This was kind of prestigious, and I have to admit that I began posting ridiculous stream-of-consciousness messages constantly to the Works!. I honestly thought I was hot shit for my position within the famous Works!. Other people who frequented the boards were Thomas Covenant, my eventual buddy in Michigan who worked at KFC and clued me in to the significant (at the time) online community comprised of central Michigan KFC employees, and The Cruiser, who was from Cleveland and, to his credit, clued me in to speed metal, and, even more significant in my life, sent me instructions for playing guitar in the speed metal style. It was around this time that, inspired by the writing of Jason and both TCs, I convinced my friends Zack and Mike to start writing textfiles under the auspices of Red Menace/Mephisto Madware (one group, two names to make us seem larger and more important). I wrote several horrible textfiles which are now available at http://www.textfiles.com/groups/OCTOTHORPE/ (and all other textfiles.com mirrors) so that I can be embarassed about them until they finally replace the Internet with something else. I recall that my friends Mike and Zack wrote a hilarious puzzle page called the Radiology Fun Pages.

When I was in 10th grade in 1986, my dad got a job in finance for IBM’s Great Lakes Area 4, headquartered in Southfield, MI. I learned that we would be moving to Bloomfield Hills, MI in the beginning of 1987. He took that job instead of one that would have moved us to Tokyo, which at the time seemed much less foreign than the state of Michigan. I had my friends over to my house in NY for a going-away party. My friend Andrew Swartz brought over some porn movies, which we watched after V: The Visitors was over. I unfortunately missed most of the porno, since Jason Scott came to the party with our BBS friend Frank Roberts, and brought a shoebox full of 5 ¼ floppy disks containing all 20MB of textfiles from The Works!. That’s like almost 60 floppy disks, and we proceeded to make floppy disk copies of all of them. It took hours - that’s why I missed most of the porno. But I was carrying the torch for the textfile revolution to a new state - Michigan - and I needed all the help I could get.

<warning, this paragraph has little to do with BBS’s> Soon after my going-away party, I moved with my family to a -subdivision- in suburban Detroit, and started school at Lahser High School. It was initially kind of shocking, because I had a -study hall- with a group of several rich, popular students who sat near me and discussed crazy drug shit that they or their friends had done. I was quickly assigned a group of friends by the conductor of the Lahser marching band. Ron was my age and lived in my subdivision, and Dave and Shawn were a year younger and lived nearby, in the -Fox Hills- subdivision. They introduced me to the music of the Beastie Boys and the Dead Milkmen, and I introduced them to Run-D.M.C. and Booker T. and the MG’s. We rode bikes a lot, and in fact started biking with flashlights at night. We would shine the flashlight into someone’s window to try and catch them doing something interesting. Usually we didn’t see anything. I was also active in the BBS community in Michigan, and found two friends from nearby Troy, MI. One, Mike, would remain important in my life as he was over 21 and could buy us beer. This really ingratiated me with my friends during my junior year of high school. Plus, he lived less than a quarter mile from my girlfriend at the time, Debbie So. Me and my BBS buddies at one point -visited- a CO in Troy late at night, and I got a Michigan Bell helmet and two rotary butt-phones. The butt-phone plus a 7/16" hex wrench served as the gateway to free 900-number phone calls, as the wrench opened neighborhood switch boxes and the butt-phone could be clamped to the contacts and used to call 900 numbers. Ron, Dave, Shawn, and I spent much of the summer of 1987 engaged in these pursuits.

Since my dad got a second line for the computer, I started running a BBS called the PUD, which stood for Progressive Underground Dissidents. I used software called Citadel-286, which was written by Frank Roberts. It was kind of free-form BBS software that centered on discussion areas. Since I had all of the textfiles from The Works!, I had more material than most textfile BBS’s, so my board was relatively popular. I also had a cool five-line logo thing that I would stick onto the bottom of all the textfiles, hyping the board. I am ashamed to admit that I don’t remember much about the PUD, except that once I chatted with Taran King, the publisher of Phrack magazine. I also used DoubleDOS occasionally, which was a primitive multitasking program for DOS. My users hated it because it would generally steal most of the modem’s interrupts, which would make using the PUD painfully slow while I was doing something in the other DOS session.

Eventually, my social life changed so that I no longer was particularly interested in my bulletin board or my online friends. This was the most significant change of my junior year of high school. I also got a girlfriend at this time, a psychotic woman by the name of Debbie. Debbie and I went on a lot of "dates" to the K-Café in the Auburn Hills K-Mart. At some point during this time, Sprint began harassing me because of some illicit calls made to the PUD by someone somewhere. I didn’t keep BBS logs, so I could be of no assistance to the nice people at Sprint, but they continued to hassle me enough that I eventually cancelled my second phone line and got out of BBS’ing altogether. I sort of explained my situation to my parents, who were pretty understanding. I dropped my band friends, then the next group of older band friends that I had, in favor of the people that I still hang out with from time to time - Brad, Jack, Jamie, etc. Eventually, my father donated my computer to the town public library. I’m not even sure that the textfiles were cleaned off it first, and I don’t think I thought to save the message board logs. Since the PUD ran on an Original IBM PC, I don’t think that library still has my PC, so I think that its contents are now officially lost to the ages. Somehow, it has long since ceased to bother me.

I went to the University of Michigan for Computer Engineering, during which time I discovered the World Wide Web. I was quite a novice user, and remember seeking out people’s bookmarks, because there were no search engines and thus you could only follow links from known sites to peruse WWW content. Adam Curry’s mtv.com was a particularly interesting site in those days: eventually, MTV forced him to turn it over to them, and now it is your typical corporate propaganda site. When I got out of school, I had no ISP or modem, so I took a long break from online services.

Now that I am on my second cable modem internet provider, I have been using the web nightly for two years. Before that, I was a regular Internet user over a 28.8, then 56k modem. Nowadays, I have registered the domain golnar.com, and use www.golnar.com as a place from which to provide the music of GOLNAR, along with fake platitudes regarding the superiority of the fictional "GOLNAR Industries".

Peace, and chicken grease.

–GOLNAR

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