Mastodawn

Late as usual, though technically since tomorrow is still "weekend" for me, we can pretend I'm doing this on a timely Saturday morning! Yeah, that's the ticket.

So what #TalesOfAncientGeekery do we have in store? Can we get to M:tG yet? NO! Wait your turn! In fact, I think I added another predecessor. Maybe even one more more. We'll see. But it's getting close. Patience, my children.

We talked about my first computer already, right? Right. Well, the #Atari800 certainly meant #videogames to me for many years, but eventually with the #Atari830 it would mean something more. You see, that was the model of their 300 BAUD #modem and where I started to discover the #BBS of the time.

Yes, this got spun out of my RPG thread, since it came up. 😝

Quick side-tangent:

Atari had a very amusing model naming scheme back in those original home computer days. The 400 and 800 were computer models, but their peripherals took other numbers in the 8## range

The #Atari410 was a cassette drive.
(What we had first.) The #Atari810 was a floppy drive. (What we would get two of later for #DontCopyThatFloppy purposes) The #Atari825 was a dot-matrix printer. The #Atari830 was their direct acoustic modem. The #Atari850 was a weird interface module...

Amusing to check out

https://atariprojects.org/2019/04/20/purchase-an-atari-850-interface-module/
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/atari-coin-executive-the-1982-answer

I am not sure I've seen a similar model/naming scheme otherwise? Usually the "device types" are split into their own naming/numbering iteration.

...

ANYway...

Purchase an Atari 850 Interface Module (15-30 mins) – Atari Projects

The #modem was something my brother took interest in, for extremely geeky reasons. And let us be clear, this was probably the pinnacle of geekery for its time. It wasn't even for #BBS use specifically, he and a friend got to talking about it and thought it would be cool to chat with each other through their computers, and that is indeed what they did!

My dad's reaction, of course, was to remark "So you're writing a sentence, waiting a minute for a reply, and then pecking out another sentence, instead of just picking up the phone and talking to each other?"

Parents Just Don't Understand!

😝

At any rate, he also picked up computer magazines to drool over things, and among things advertised/listed there were #BBSes.

My brother would dive in, and I would eventually follow.

We are going to need another quick side-tangent to discuss concepts and vocabulary even more lost to time than the floppy drive, which at least still gets used as a Save icon in software. 😝 Perhaps I exaggerate, but... we shall see!

Area codes are still used, but much expanded from where they started. And from when I started, the state was still just under 201.

Also at the time, you had local calls which were free and long-distance calls which you paid per minute on. Phone companies competed viciously in that long-distance/toll region for years.

Your local/free exchange was determined by your township, and listed which other townships were free to call. Would be interesting to build a map, but it basically amounted to an approximate mileage "region," and this determined my BBS use.

Also associated with the phone carrier competition, they would add new features and advertise their use as well. "Call waiting" is pertinent to the BBS era, which was a feature that allowed the recipient to hear a "beep" during a live call, letting them know someone is trying to call them, and allow them to switch to the other "line" and answer. No missed calls! Well, fewer.

But this beep-in would confuse the crap out of modems and sever an active BBS connection, so for BBSes that rode on their parents' phone accounts and features, they gained the first computer vulnerability I abused. 😝

When we moved townships I had been a few years into BBSing, and it changed who I would connect to, gaining an important region, and keeping perhaps only one "constant" BBS through the switch.

That one would be run by the guy who brought me into his MERP/Rolemaster gaming which I went into last time, and has the strongest environment/social structure for me.

But let us return to what BBSing is, and what I started with.

Perhaps just best to skim the wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system) but what it effectively was for me was the first "social media" or any sort, and a place I'd play online games with other people. A "door" in BBS terms was like launching an application, but it basically became shorthand for the games you could access while logged in. Spinoffs of earlier turn-based/mail-based game concepts, and new ones that could take advantage of the quicker connectivity. (Usually with move/minute play limitations.)

Bulletin board system - Wikipedia

In fact, most BBSes had login limits on your account, so people couldn't camp there all day and hold up a BBS from other members. While some would involve multiple phone lines, in that day that was EXPEEEEENSIVE, and so most BBSes probably just had the one dedicated phone line as all they could manage. So you had to spend your time economically.

I mostly played videogames on the Atari, so I first mostly played the games on these things, since you could find a variety and log into multiple different BBSes and play many sessions between them of various common/unique offerings. TradeWars and Food Fight were possibly most-common, but the one I invested the most time in during this era was called "Power Struggle" and was really only on that one main BBS I'd center around.

Power Struggle was...

Actually, I should first get back into a technological item of this era.

Even though the "Graphical User Interface" has just started becoming a thing, (since 1984, and I think I started BBSing in 1985) it should be apparent that slow/phone communication this early on would be limited to text-only communication, or what rudimentary "graphics" could be made from the simple symbols in the ASCII character set (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII) and what extensions filtered in over time.

Moreover, while TVs of this time may have had 640x480 resolution, your 8-bit PCs were much more likely to have something along the line of 320x200 which amounted to even less "text space", something like 40x24 characters.

It is hard to convey how cramped that is, compared to now! 😝

ASCII - Wikipedia

Of course at the time even a 40x24 text field felt spacious, because my other experience with it was just with games with little text at all, excepting your Infocom text-based adventure games.

I mean, that was nearly 1000 characters on the screen at once! Ooooh!

However, one thing I mentioned at the beginning was the tech in the modem itself, which ran at 300 "baud," a measurement of symbol rate. Effectively it could communicate 300 characters per second through your phone line.

One-third of a screen draw.

Much of the time this didn't matter particularly, as you would be waiting to make decisions, wring messages, reading text at a much slower rate, but it did have a funny interaction with my favorite door, Power Struggle.

Power Struggle was played in a 10x10x10 space grid, which was interspersed with planets of different types. Mining, agriculture... You could extract resources from the planets and sell them for credits, or you could use them to refresh depleted planets to let you extract more in the future. There were three "Power Planets" (at far corners and dead-center) which you mined strictly for credits to be used to buy warships. Fighters, cruisers, land vehicles... You used them to protect your planets and attack others'.

Whoever held a power planet would gain a monetary advantage, but also become a target for all the other players.

There was no real "win state" so what would usually happen is just that someone would decide when one player was too dominant and then the SysOp would reset it.

The amusing reason to bring this to mind, however, was due to what I consider the "biggest technical leap" I have "witnessed."

You would only have a certain number of turns to play, but you could memorize a particular route and go "programmatically" in nature, because there was a good command buffer.

Turns would go something like:
+Z
-X
L
(moving up one on the Z axis, down one on the X axis, landing on the planet at the new X/Y/Z sector...)

But between each command it would redraw quite a lot of the screen to display information. So I would just mash away at memorized commands, then get up and go to the bathroom, get a drink, etc. while it took a few minutes to catch up. 😝

Yes, if you mistyped you'd be risking huge mess-ups, but I entertained myself with this.

At any rate, this game and that behavior would be the focus of our first major upgrade, from a 300 to a 2400 baud modem. There were 1200's as well, but we skipped that.

Eight times faster! EIGHT!!

Why, I couldn't even make out screen-drawing, it happened INSTANTLY!

I could jam away in Power Struggle and barely had any time to pee at all! 😝

While some tech leaps (getting your first 3D graphics are, or going from an LG Chocolate to an iPhone 3G, for instance) were more notable, this was the first and still-most-impressive witnessing of a direct technological SPEEEEEED upgrade. So much speed!

Also at some point only my brother, the SysOp and I played the game, the SysOp took him out, I dominated the rest and "won forever" because we all stopped playing after that point. 😝

My brother would use BBSes more "purposefully," to look for downloads, software... You know. More piracy. Of fun stuff!

I would start spending a lot more time on the message boards. It was fun to live-chat with users, but unless it was a multi-line BBS you didn't chat live with other members much, so it was usually the System Operator. They would break into your session and "force chat" on you as well, which was also amusing. Since I spent a lot of time on The Danger Zone, Rich and I would chat often enough. He'd see who was active and break in if he was bored.

But the message board services on BBSes let everyone leave comments, reply to threads... To do a lot of what phpBB systems still do today (even if much less-prevalent now).

I would spend LOOOOTS of time at this.

My brother would get out of the BBS habit, but I was already doing it a lot more, and would continue a whole lot longer. This developed some late-night habits, since we only had one phone line at home and no call-waiting to allow incoming calls to bump ME for many years, so I had restricted timing unless I could sneak it in after hours.

Sneaking downstairs at 2am to get your BBS time in was in no way bad-habit-forming, I swear! 😝

But you know. There were people to chat with!

My emoji-overuse these days was cemented back then, as emoticons existed to be used and abused in your general posting, and when I figured out how to use the Thorn character to make proper tongue-stickey-outey emoticons, it was some semblance of "coming home" for my sarcastic nature. 😝

I can't help it, anymore.

Certainly much of chat was generic and boring, but if you didn't have a bunch of classmates to share your geekiest of activities with (as was usually the case), basically EVERYONE on here was a self-sorted geek! So much chat was about books (fantasy and sci-fi), board games, war games, RPGs, etc. etc.

As well, and would eventually consume a lot of my time, message board games would also exist. Like playing Werewolf or other social games, or shared storytelling.

You'd get the occasional thread which was just a shared narrative, usually with people coming in with their own characters and sharing some sort of generic fantasy setting and storytelling.

This would introduce any number of "feels familiar" kind of personalities I'd run across in later RPG sessions. Fanfic-effects. Munchkining.

Or a person who didn't "share time" so much as post as often as they were able and not wait for others, claiming 50-75% of the narrative or more, and would usually discourage other posters and the thread would die out.

As much as I was a voracious reader, I enjoyed writing as well, so I had a habit of reading a long thread from the beginning, when 5+ people were active and more would join in, but eventually died out, and would spend time "jumpstarting" it with a new max-length post. Wrap a few of the early/most-dominant characters into a new experience rather than add my own, and see who I could get back in. (Sometimes just whoever the last "hyper poster" had been, who would seek to re-exert "their character"s power again.)

Of the "longest" I remember, I also remember taking the time to compile and print out the ENTIRE story, since there was no other way to make a backup. By the time it was over, I had a pile at least four inches thick. I wish I knew if that still existed in some unexplored box! There are a lot of things that I just hope I "run across unexpectedly" some day, and that's probably the weirdest of them.

I have only foggy memories of what went on, character names... it would be amusing to re-experience.

I don't think it would be terribly good, tho. 😝 But obviously its own kind of fun and rewarding.

(I mean, I have just expended many characters about all of this. A habit surely assisted from all my time BBSing, and where it led from there.)

For anyone particularly interested, and has a tendency to watch long-form videos/documentaries even about subjects they don't have personal experience with, this is the best that's out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO5vjmDFZaI

The website is unstable but still exists: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ And you can download/watch from links they push towards as well: https://archive.org/details/bbsdocumentary (But most-convenient on YouTube.)

Amusingly, I think this was the first thing I "kickstarted" as I remember contributing to its creation at the time, and getting the DVD when it was released. I should have it around here SOMEwhere...

This also looks like a helluva ride, which I should probably do now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0OwGSX2IiQ&list=PLop3s1hMlSJKXqmuFjK7gbJh2WAyllTTY

BBS the Documentary [Full HD]

The BBS (bulletin board system) scene of the 80s and 90s was a magical time. Long before the Internet escaped from the lab, connected the planet and redefine...

YouTube

This is the longest I've rambled about something for one of these #TalesOfAncientGeekery posts, so you can probably see how formative it was. And I guess we'll see all the various ways it's affected me going forward!

I am not sure I have a more "of its time" aspect to all of this. Certain games will achieve this as well, and probably run of similar length (such as Everquest, and certainly M:tG) and while "my time" in many of these things is effectively over, I COULD revisit them.

And yes, there are BBSes that exist in the modern era, but not of the same kind or in the same way. But one can say that about EQ/MMOs as well, and M:tG/CCGs, and...

Well. That's what getting old does. And why these fireside chats are so important!

(Ish. Is anyone even reading? 😝 )

I'll tag some resources to the end that I find amusing. Such as:

http://bbslist.textfiles.com/201/oldschool.html
http://bbslist.textfiles.com/973/oldschool.html
http://bbslist.textfiles.com/609/oldschool.html

Can remove the "oldschool" to see multiple list forms, but these include the ones I could have gone to back in those days, from one house to another.

It's interesting to see the BBS types, names, and expanded notes. As well as operational dates, as it lets you see from one era to another, and "when the music died" such as it were.

Some lasted into the 2000's even on archaic equipment!

201 BBS List