Exposes the lie that we have the Govt to thank for the advent of the internet.
Best, Michael
http://www.reason.com/0512/cr.js.the.shtml
The Prehistory of Cyberspace
How BBSes paved the way for the Web.
by Julian Sanchez
Reason, December 2005
In the antediluvian '80s, when mass participation in the Internet was
still but a gleam in Al Gore's eye, an enthusiastic network of
avant-garde geeks was exploring an embryonic cyberspace. By the hundreds
of thousands, they created in miniature the precursors of the vast
communication system that today envelops our social and professional lives.
They were called bulletin board systems, or BBSes: communities that
allowed users to dial in at crawling modem speeds--usually only one at a
time--and exchange private e-mails, public messages, and software files.
The first of the boards appeared in 1978, when a snowstorm provoked
hobbyists Ward Christensen and Randy Suess to hack together something
they called CBBS, the Computerized Bulletin Board System, for their
Chicago-area computer users group. By the mid-'90s, the BBS scene was
all but defunct: The Internet had siphoned off its early-adopter members
like a newborn insect devouring its mother.
The all-but-lost story of those early years is exhumed in Jason Scott's
BBS: The Documentary, an eight-part, five-and-a-half-hour, three-DVD
history cobbled together from some 200 interviews with the people who
ran, used, and covered the world of the boards. Rarely present in BBS
himself, Scott stitches together scraps of his subjects' recollections
into eight topical narrative collages focusing on different aspects of
BBS culture, from the quixotic struggle to make a buck off the boards to
the fierce rivalries between the BBS art groups, teams of graphically
gifted kids who competed to produce the most dazzling images working
from a palate of clunky colored blocks.
Among the more interesting tales is that of FidoNet and its frenetic
architect, Tom Jennings. In 1984, when only a handful of academic
computer scientists were aware of (let alone using) the Internet,
Jennings created software that allowed BBS users to send e-mail and
discussion board messages across the country and, later, around the
world. By modern standards, it was slow. At the time, it seemed pretty
rapid. Member boards--numbering more than 35,000 at the network's
peak--would dial in periodically to a regional hub, which would then
relay messages to other hubs and, finally, to their destinations.
“It really was written on explicitly anarchist principles,” explains
Jennings, who would later found the queer/anarchist/punk zine Homocore.
“We work better without top-down control; we work better cooperatively.”
Many assume that, because the Internet grew out of the Pentagon's
Advanced Research Projects Agency, it could only have been created by
government. Yet FidoNet--which still exists--proved that dedicated
amateurs, mostly working on shoestring budgets, could cobble together a
globe-spanning network in their spare time.
It's easy to forget, now that the vast majority of Americans are online
and the phrase “we met on the Internet” need not be uttered with a blush
and a mumble, how empowering it was suddenly to come upon a new world
untethered from geography. People have always found ways to exploit new
technologies to form communities, from science fiction aficionados
circulating mimeographed fanzines to early telegraph operators chatting
away in Morse code between official messages. But BBSes ratcheted up the
scale on which such communities could be organized.
For many in the '80s and early '90s--isolated gays, abashed alcoholics,
or just disaffected teenagers--finding that first board was a dial-in to
Damascus experience. It also afforded a first taste of the online
world's empowering anonymity. A shy kid could craft a new identity, even
become a respected system operator.
The episode of BBS that focuses on the darker side of the
scene--hackers, crackers, phone phreaks, and software pirates--opens
with a monologue from a portly aging biker called Bootleg with a great
frizzy white beard and long hair, who sits astride a great black Harley
taking drags from a cigarette. “Whether people are called bikers or
whether they're called hackers, it's the same type of freedom we're
talking about,” he explains.
The online world now feels a bit less like the open highway, a bit more
like a suburban street: For most people it is just another part of
ordinary life, not an escape from it. By reviving this nearly forgotten
history, BBS offers the vicarious thrill of that first discovery of
virgin territory--and hints that, behind the easy familiarity of
cyberspace, it may still be out there.
<For several years in his adolescence, Assistant Editor Julian Sanchez
administered a BBS called Surreality, where he answered to the name Lord
Cardboard.>