This New Internet Thing, Chapter 10

What’s a BBS?

I wrote a book. The publication date is May 29, 2024 (if you’d rather not deal with Amazon, your bookstore can also order it from the distributor Ingram Spark, or print-on-demand if they have the equipment). You can read it for free here, although it’ll be in serial form. My fond hope is that you’ll find it so compelling that you just buy the book instead of waiting 8 months to see what happens. There will be a chapter each week, 33 in all.

In Chapter 9, Dan and Janet went to the November, 1991 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force. In this chapter, Len is getting deeper into the online world. As a retired guy who’s gotten interested in investing, he’s learned there’s such a thing as a bulletin board system, and Usenet. This was really the Wild West back then, and Len braves it, with Cassie’s help. Janet, his daughter, doesn’t know much about herself.

Reading in serial form has a long and honorable history. My cover artist sent me this “Read Like a Victorian” website. Enjoy.

================ What’s a BBS? ===================

It was February, 1992, that part of winter when the weather in the Midwest has been crappy for months with no end in sight. Len had been living with it all his life, but somehow, now that he knew he could give it up and move to California, it became intolerable. Day after day after day it was the same shit: gray skies, temperature in the 40’s, and piles of dirty slush on the side of every street. The snow was definitely not a magic carpet of white on tree branches like on postcards.

He was having a good time on America Online, though. He’d started out on Prodigy, but that pretty quickly became too nanny-ish for him. They depended on advertising by big companies, and those people did not like paying for people to criticize them in mean ways. Once he made the mistake of saying something unfavorable about his modem, and he got a nastygram from Prodigy warning him that his account could be suspended if he kept that up. So he’d moved over to AOL, after getting a floppy from them in the mail almost every day. 

Those dark, cold, early nights were much more bearable when he could dial up AOL and explore things. He got absorbed in the chat rooms about investments, and now he spent hours in Lotus 1-2-3 typing formulas into his spreadsheets and computing the 90-day and 30-day moving averages of his favorite stocks and mutual funds. He knew one other financial analyst down in Florida (whom he’d never met in person, of course) whom he emailed with almost every day. 

Then it was baseball. There were so many statistics you could compute, and they were stats you’d never see in the papers. He bought the Bill James baseball books and found a community of people who were also into the stuff, and he spent hours arguing with them.

Janet had been living in the online world for almost 15 years now at Xerox and 3Com, and she didn’t see any reason to do it at home, too. The first time he’d asked her a question about Prodigy, he was dumbfounded that she knew absolutely nothing about it!

“Isn’t this what you do for a living, honey?” 

“It's totally different at work, Dad. We don’t use modems at all. It’s all Ethernet.”

“I don’t even know what that is, Is that better than a modem? Mine says it’s 1,200 baud. How many bauds is yours?”

Janet laughed. “Ethernet is ten million bits per second.”

Len did some math in his head. “Ten million versus twelve hundred. I guess I’m in the wrong business, huh?”

“Yeah, that’s why I don’t do it at home, I guess. That, plus the fact that it’s work!”

“Well, it’s a hobby for me, honey. At least it is when it works!”

She thought she should at least try to help him out, though, so she asked him some questions about what was going wrong. It turned out that Dad figured it out for himself as he was explaining it to her, which was what she hoped would happen. 

“So I should know more about all this, I guess. Have you gotten into Usenet yet?”

“Usenet?” he said. “Never heard of it. Is that something I should try?”

“Hmm. That’s what everyone seems to be doing at work. It seems like everyday, someone comes and complains about it to me. And it sucks up almost all our bandwidth, too!”

“Now that you mention it, people do mention stuff like that sometimes. It sure sounds like a big deal. How do I get on that?”

“Oh, jeez. I’ll have to ask Cassie about that. You remember her from the wedding, right?”

“Was she the cute little gal?”

“Dad gets a pass for language like that,” she thought. “Yeah, Cassie does lots of online stuff at home. She probably knows.”

After they hung up, Len asked some of his AOL buddies about this “Usenet” thing. They all said you couldn’t get to it through AOL, but maybe he could get on a BBS and do it that way.

“A ‘BBS’ ,” he thought. “One more rabbit hole to go down. It never ends!”

He shut the computer off for the night. “Who’s on Carson tonight?” he wondered. Johnny Carson was rumored to be retiring soon. He’d better enjoy it while he still could.

The next day he didn’t go online at all. “Screw that stuff,” he thought. No matter what you did, there was always some new mystery you had to solve by asking around. Whatever happened to the old days, when you went to the library and looked stuff up? Or maybe you bought a magazine about it. Or went to a bookstore and bought a book. This computer stuff — it wasn’t written down anywhere. And the worst thing was, as soon as you figured out how to do something, they changed it! There was no professionalism, none at all.

And that was if you could even find what you wanted in the first place! This game was rigged for teenagers or hippies with nothing better to do. Janet was going to find out the answer for him; how long should he wait before calling her and asking? He didn’t want to be a pest.

The next afternoon he went down to the Best Buy where he’d bought his PC, and asked Jerry, the salesman who sold it to him, if he knew anything about this “Usenet” thing. Jerry looked puzzled and asked him to repeat the word. Then he disappeared into the back of the store. Len walked around and checked out the computers on display. Finally, Jerry came back with a document with the words, “Horst Mann’s List” and a date at the top. It was nothing but a bunch of weird names and telephone numbers.

“What the hell’s this? Who is Horst Mann?” 

Jerry looked embarrassed. “Horst Mann is this guy who keeps track of all the bulletin board systems in the Detroit area. I’ve never used any of these, but someone there might know.”

“What am I supposed to do with these numbers?”

Jerry explained to him what a BBS was. He found a magazine on the rack that had an article about BBS’s, gave it to Len, thanked him for coming in, then went to help another customer.

When Len got home, he poured himself a glass of Scotch and sat down to read. This was going to be a chore.

“This is for high school kids, not for someone like me,” he kept thinking, and put the magazine down several times. “Where are the grownups in all this?” he wondered. At least Prodigy and AOL were run by actual companies, not a bunch of kids.

He didn’t touch the computer for the rest of the week. On Saturday morning he talked to Janet as usual, and she had some news for him. Cassie found the names and phone numbers of some bulletin boards that offered Usenet! It had taken her a lot of digging to find one in the Detroit area, but she even said Len could call her up if he needed help. How could he give up on it now, after she went to all that trouble for him?

On Saturday night, instead of going to bed he dialed up one of Cassie’s bulletin boards. The menu didn’t say anything about Usenet; it just said something about Internet. He thought that must be it, so he selected it. Now there were various menu choices he didn’t understand, like “ftp” and “telnet” but one of them said “newsgroups.” That looked promising.

But now what? There were a bunch of subheadings, like alt.* and rec.* and comp.* with numbers after them. What the hell did all that mean? He typed ‘h’ for Help, which seemed to be a common thing you could do online, and that was no help at all. This stuff was obviously written for people who already knew it. He shut the computer off. Tomorrow he’d call Cassie and plead for some assistance.

After Janet had told Len that Cassie might be able to help him, he dialed her and she picked up.

“Hello, Cassie? This is Len Saunders, Janet’s father. I hope I’m not bothering you?”

“Hi, Mr. Saunders! No, it’s fine, I’m just sitting around. We met at Janet and Walt’s wedding, right?”

“That’s right, I remember you. I hope you’re doing well!”

“Just great, Mr. Saunders. And you?”

“Great. Len, you can call me Len. Anyhow, I’m hoping you can get me straightened out on this Usenet thing. I got on that phone number you gave Janet, and I just got all confused.”

Cassie laughed. “You and everyone else, so don’t feel bad, Mr. Saunders. Anyhow, I tried it myself after I gave her the number, and I made some screenshots of it. Can I send you those and a document that explains it all a little better?”

“Oh, you’re an angel, Cassie.” He gave her his address.

She was still curious. “So Janet didn’t tell me much about what you wanted to do on Usenet. Did you have a particular group you wanted to follow?”

“Well, I don’t know if she told you I’m on America Online or not, but I follow the forums on investing pretty closely, since I used to be in Finance at Chrysler. People talk about something called misc.invest sometimes, so I thought I’d start with that.”

“OK, that’s not one I follow, but I guess I’ll start now! Maybe I’ll see you on there.”

He laughed. “It’ll probably be a while before I get up the nerve to say something! First I have to figure out how the thing works.”

“Oh, you’ll get it! Call me if I can help you out any more.”

“Thank you, Cassie dear, and I’ll be watching the mail for it!”

Cassie called Janet and told her about the call. Janet was amused. She dialed up Cassie’s bulletin board and tried getting on misc.invest herself, so she could help Dad directly.

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There! That wasn’t so bad, was it? There’s a companion “Notes” doc where I detail what really happened back then, who helped me with it, and answer any other questions you might have.

Yes, there’s no free lunch: you can read this for free, but going deeper into the history will cost you a modest $5 a month. The Paid section will also include all the chapters, whereas they age out of the Free section after a few months. If you like what you read, buy the book.

There will usually be a Notes post on each chapter, where you read the real story if there is one.