It was in the summer 1990 or 1991 that I first got into calling BBSs. I was a student at Xavier High School in Middletown, CT. Before that, I had occasionally used the dial-up services of Prodigy and CompuServe, but I never really stuck with them. Then, my high school buddy Ed McGrath gave me a small pile of 5 1/4 disks with modem communications software on them, a list of BBS phone numbers, and walked me through how to call out on my dad's 1200 baud modem. Later on he helped me figure out the nitty gritty of init strings, and how to tweak more memory out of MS-DOS.
It didn't take long before I was hooked. I chatted on local BBS message boards with geeks that lived nearby. I played online games like The Pit, Solar Wars, Legend of the Red Dragon, Trade Wars, and I mostly sucked at them other than The Pit which I figured out how to exploit. I downloaded files, games, shareware, freeware, learned how to program in Pascal, and other stuff. Eventually this led me to ask my parents to buy me a newer more kick-ass computer, which they eventually did. I got a then-midrange 386 16 MHz system with a 2400 baud modem. It also had VGA graphics, which was a huge step up from my earlier computer.
Armed with my new PC, I started calling the local boards in the 203 area code. There were a lot of BBSs in Branford, Orange, New Haven, East Haven, Guilford, and I called a few in Meriden and Wallingford, but those were a long distance call. I wish I could remember all their names, but my memory is getting hazy.
Here's the ones I do remember - there was The Hippocampus, Alice's Restaurant, Off-the-Wall, Castle Anthrax, Equinox, Victory Mansions (run by my buddy VJ Villella), Dark Castles, Excalibur IV, The Twilight Zone, The Master's Domain (run by Ed McGrath I mentioned earlier), my own short lived BBS Erin's Keep, Arrakis, and well ... these things went up and down all the time. A lot of the operators were teenage boys or twenty somethings so they weren't real reliable. A lot of them were named after some kid's favorite D&D character, some fantasy or sci-fi reference, or a heavy metal song. It was the same with people's handles. Mine was Erin the Black, named after a character from an ancient game of D&D.
I remember users named Jubilex, Muad'Dib, Exocutioner (so named because someone else took the handle "Executioner"), Ivar the Boneless, The Trooper, Gandalf, Spirit in Black, Mr. Byte, The Master (like the villain from early Dr. Who), Ender, Chipper, Dances with Wolves, Clive, Valgemar, Cymoril, Rocketeer, Phoenix, Snowbunny, Death Raven, and there were a LOT more but those are the ones that come to mind.
I met a whole bunch of people, and we used to occasionally go see a movie together, go bowling, play pen and paper RPGs, or hang out at the local video game store. I see echoes of this social scene in internet message boards, but it's not like the people you meet on those things can just pop out to meet you for a night of bowling, so BBSs formed social networks differently.
I would spend hours a night just calling out to all the BBSs to check for new files, new messages, and to play all the games. After all, if you missed too many nights of Trade Wars you'd get left in the dust. I'd listen to WNHU, the radio station from New Haven University to listen to the then-hip radio stations. I mostly liked the punk rock radio shows, the metal ones, techno industrial and sometimes rap. A little later I started getting into ska, too. One of my most vivid recollections is sitting up by my computer late at night listening to the radio with the windows open. Usually, I'd be wearing shorts and a t-shirt, leaning back in my chair reading email and trying to stay cool in the muggy New England summer.
I got into the periphery of the computer and phone hacking scene back then. I met some people from the 2600 group and I got into reading that magazine, then hosting some hidden forums on my BBS. I ended up spending a lot of money at Radio Shack and making various boxes off designs I got through the BBS network. Amazingly, these designs were not too hard to make, and mostly worked the way they were supposed to. The one I got the most use out of was the red box, until 1996 or so when you could no longer find an old pay phone the damn thing would still work on.
The nerd lifestyle wasn't as cool back then as it is now. It was starting to hit the mainstream, but just barely. Cyberpunk writers and 'zines were trendy at the time, and that sort of fed into the "computer geeks are cool" meme. We had Wired magazine, which was actually worth reading when it first came out. There was Mondo 2000, which I absolutely loved when I was a teen. We read 2600, and various BBS-circulated text-file 'zines. Some of the ones I remember are Phrack (of course), Cult of the Dead Cow, ESLF, and LoD. If I recall correctly, ESLF stands for Eastern Seaboard Liberation Front and LoD was Legion of Doom. Lots of these groups liked making up arcane acronyms for themselves.
One of my fond memories was when an operator would catch me using a box on the phone, and try to talk with me. Sometimes I could fake them out to think I was using a manufacturing pay phone and they'd leave me alone to keep going. More often, they'd catch me and not let me continue using the phone. One time I told the operator "You know, if you cut me off here, I'm just going to go to another pay phone." and she actually called me sir "Sorry sir, this is company policy." She was awfully polite, considering.
I have not spoken to anyone but Snowbunny from the old CT scene in ages. She's living out in the sticks in Virginia with her husband now, if anyone's reading this who's interested.
BBS Nostalgia (716)
In 1993, I went to college in Rochester, New York. I got a new computer around this time, a blazing high end 486/66 with 16 megs of RAM and a 540 meg hard drive. That machine saw me through clear to my dual-proc Pentium 2 which I still have although I hardly ever use it except for trying out new linux distros.
It took me a little while, but when I got set up in my dorm room, I headed out on the internet of the day to locate a BBS list for the 716 area code. Then I looked through the exchange list in the phone book to look up which were local to me, and I started calling out.
The first board I got on back then was Necropolis, and I ended up chatting with the sysop, a kid named Sinister. From there, I looked through the BBS list on his system and started calling other boards. I remember back then, there were a lot more boards in Rochester that were populated by late teens / college kids. Back in CT, there were many more older hackers who ran boards where everyone used their real names instead of a handle, and if you asked a question about some program you were writing, someone could probably help you out. In a lot of the Rochester boards, either nobody'd know, or someone named L@m3_SmUrPH would probably just flame you for being a smart ass. So, for that kinda crap I went back to Usenet. Back in 1993 Usenet was not yet 85% spam.
Let's see ... I remember the Necropolis, Infinity BBS, Jolt Country, the Crystal Palace, the Dark Side, The Black Hole, the Holodeck, and others. A lot of people used WWIV or Oblivion to run their BBS in Rochester. Back in 203, you got a lot more Telegard / Illusion / Renegade variants. Matt Gracie emailed me about this page, and he added Bent Reality, Random Access, Biohazard, Astral Plane, Blue Darkness, House of Poo (how could I forget that one?), and Dead Zone.
There was Sinister, Silicon Surfer, Dominor, Damnation Army, Lupus Yonderboy, Narcoleptic, Femur, Evil, Vassago, Loafer Girl, The Croc, Liquid Blue, Target Master, Drizzt Do'Urden (however the hell you spell that, right-wing Kevin's old handle) - aka Digital Intruder, Gator, Nature Boy, Syrinx, and once again there must have been a lot more but thats all I got off the top of my head.
There was a bigger 2600 group in upstate New York, and we would have hacker picnics and go trashing together. It was a lot of fun, and only one person that I know of ever got an actual visit from the FBI. There were more people that got in trouble for trafficking in warez, but I was less into that anyway.
We'd frequently get together at the mall in Henrietta, which was the gathering site posted in 2600. A lot of the meetings would consist of us talking about politics, where to dig up money for stuff we wanted to buy from Radio Shack, trading usernames/passwords on various systems we found through wardialing, the latest music (Die Warzau, Front 242, any band Bill Leeb was in, Skinny Puppy, etc.), and the other miscellaneous things we obsessed over in our lives. A whole little clique of these hacker types went to McQuaid Jesuit school, so there was a lot of gossip about that.
As time went by, a lot of people from this group also went to RIT as computer majors. Some went to other schools, and so after that they were only around in the summer.
It was a drifting apart of the old crew, combined with the rise of the world wide web, that made the BBS scene irrelevant for me. For a while, I kept on using the BBSs to keep in touch with friends of mine, but once those old friends weren't around anymore, and there were fewer new users coming to the scene because they were all getting on the web instead, it wasn't fun anymore.
I've kept in touch with a lot more people from the 716 scene through the years. Last I heard Silicon Surfer was living in Holland in a commune, Lupus Yonderboy is working for a university in Buffalo as a professional computer nerd, Drizzt was in college pursuing a master's degree, Damnation Army and Dominor were in a band in Arizona, Narcoleptic had some soul-crushing job in Rochester in the computer field, and Femur works for MIT research engineering.