
I was given some old BBS session logs and I scanned them - salgernon
http://silent700.blogspot.com/2014/12/is-this-something.html?m=1
======
azinman2
Wow this is awesome. It takes me back to my own BBS days from when I was only
6 years old+!

What's a shame is how much people in the beginning created to share with
people -- it cost money to run these BBSes let alone call into others. The
Internet as a whole was built similarly where protocols like email allowed a
diversity of providers and people to talk regardless of
implementation/account.

Now I'm seeing a complete commercializations of all communication, from
Facebook owning a giant chunk of social to now even with slack I see on
product hunt some list of semi-public channels replicating what IRC has done
for years. Attempts as decentralized social networks haven't gone anywhere
because it's been protocol first, implementation & network effect later (not
to mention all trying to clone fb or Twitter versus having a differentiated
experience). Plus everyone in a mobile non-html world just wants to own the
next big thing.

We need more Mozillas out there doing things beyond the web to get
communication out of the hands of individual companies and into the greater
public. With blockchains, oauth, json, and cloud storage the tech is there to
do interesting stuff. We need now someone that already has the network to step
forward.

~~~
ghaff
In all fairness, there was also a lot of commercial BBS activity around that
same period--or at most a couple of years later: Compuserve, Delphi, AOL. And
some of the bigger non-corporate BBSs became commercial as well (and later
became some of the early regional ISPs).

It's interesting stuff though. I suspect that relatively little has been saved
from the BBS days in part because it was so decentralized--although I'm not
aware of Compuserve and the like ever having made archives public either. The
situation is a bit better on the early Internet side but even there Usenet
archives are incomplete--and were very nearly even more incomplete.

------
vermontdevil
You can watch the documentary about BBS

[http://www.bbsdocumentary.com](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com)

The documentary really brought back a lot of great memories about how one
dials in, some of the software used, what one does online, etc. Plus the
producers went out their way to make sure the set was captioned after I asked.
(I heard of this documentary prior to its release so I got lucky)

------
nl
Randomly flipping though, message 7811 is to John Gilmore[1] thanking him for
the pointer to this new thing called public-key encryption.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_(activist)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_\(activist\))

------
darklajid
Working for an OCR company. Dot Matrix is a pain..

That said, would it make sense to give it a try here? Would need to separate
the pages/create a TIF file, but I could send this through a good number of
engines, I assume. I cannot promise some miracles, but.. worth a try, perhaps.

~~~
Silent700
I attempted OCR with Acrobat, which you can inspect by downloading the PDF.
Then archive.org does their own OCR (I believe with ABBY?) which is what
you'll see if you look at their .txt version. I haven't had a chance to
compare them yet.

I wouldn't expect much from OCRing dot matrix, though I'd be happy for others
with access to other engines to give it a try.

 _Someday_ I'd like to get all the messages into a browsable form on a
website. Hell, we can crowd-source transcription if we have to.

------
SwellJoe
After reading a couple of pages of this, I had one of those moments where I
feel sort of like the earth is shifting beneath me, and everything feels
unreal for a moment. It struck me (hard) that in my lifetime, I have watched
technology go from these printouts, to what we have today. I used my first BBS
in around 1986, and it hadn't yet evolved terribly far from where it was when
these archives were produced.

It's both amazing and terrible (in the "extreme in extent or degree; intense"
sense) to think about. In 1980, that was a pretty impressive piece of
machinery, but it was not even in the same league as a smart watch today. But,
raw numbers (32k, 1.5MB disks) don't begin to express how different the world
we live in today is. At the time this BBS was almost unique. A few thousand
people in the _entire world_ used an online messaging system like this. Today
about 3 billion people are online somehow, and the majority of people under 30
in the developed world use some sort of online messaging every day. Long
distance telephone calls were expensive enough that few people made them more
than occasionally. International communication was an _extreme_ rarity except
for the richest and most powerful. (And, 12 year old me had to break the law
to communicate across the country, using stolen calling cards to call BBSes in
other states.)

The 8BBS software, unique and impressive for its time, was positively
simplistic by today's standards. The BBS I ran back then operated on a similar
system (BASIC plus an assembly communications core) called Color 64, and some
little games and tweaks were the first real independent programming I ever
did. Thinking back, I'm struck by how simple the system was--I printed out the
entire BASIC source code on a small stack of paper, to study it--compared to
the codebase I'm working on now (500,000 lines of code spanning four
programming languages and 15 years of development).

The world of computing was so small back then, and it is now probably the
single most important industry in the world, touching billions of people's
lives daily, in both good and bad ways (mostly good). I carry multiple
supercomputers with me almost everywhere I go; my phone dwarfs the power of
the first dozen, or more, computers I owned. And, equally importantly, it is
connected to the world via satellite and cell tower at speeds beyond imagining
in 1980. The first modem I used was 300 baud, and I could read the words as
they came down the line. Now I can download a 1080p movie in 30 minutes, and
when Google Fiber arrives, the same download will be almost instant.

All of this change has happened in _my lifetime_ ; heck, I was old enough to
participate in BBS culture a few short years after these archives began. And I
don't even feel that old. I've got a few grey hairs in my beard, but I'm not a
grey beard, yet.

Moore's law predicted (and maybe even drove) the increasing transistor count,
but couldn't have predicted the vast difference in what computers would become
and where they would reach. 12 year old me wouldn't have believed in the stuff
we have today.

It's not jet packs or personal space ships, but it's pretty neat. And, despite
the general silliness that seems to pervade our industry lately (so many toy
web apps consuming so much effort and brain power and investment), I suspect
the general trend is accelerating rather than decelerating. We are constantly
on the cusp of revolutionary change, and have been since most of us have been
alive.

It was suggested by some in the 19th (and 20th) century that invention had
peaked and that it would only be a process of improvement from then on. I
suspect people are still suggesting that, or thinking it. I even find myself
in that mindset now and then, and I _know_ better.

I know I'm rambling here...but, the history in this archive is fascinating. I
probably won't read more than a couple dozen more pages, as I feel vaguely
like the best thing I can be doing is getting back to figuring out what the
future is going to look like and figuring out how I can best be a part of it.
I may not have as many years left ahead of me as I have behind me...it would
be easy to let nostalgia win my mental bandwidth.

~~~
spydum
Just recently I had a chance to visit the Computer History Museum out in Santa
Clara. It was amazing to me to see so much of my childhood and so many areas
of the technology I grew up with sitting behind glass. I really didn't get
very heavy into computing till early 90s, but when you step back and realize
the progress from even that period until now, it is unimaginable. I truly
think those of us who grew up during the computing explosions of the 80s/90s
owe a great deal to that time period as it really seemed to breed a huge
hacker/tinkerer type of culture where nothing was unexploreable or off limits.
It feels nowadays so much is spoonfed, there just isn't that same opportunity.
Or maybe I'm just getting old and crotchety like the PDP/mainframe folks who
walked before us??

~~~
SwellJoe
The Computer History Museum is one of my favorite places. When I lived in
Mountain View (which is where it is located), it was the one place I would
_always_ take any family or friends who were visiting, and they always enjoyed
it, no matter how technically inclined they were.

Hearing about the technology _from the people who built it_ , is amazing, and
it's an opportunity we won't have much longer in the case of these original
systems. The guy who built the first computer game (Space War), and helped
restore the PDP/1 on which it runs, presented it on a couple of the occasions
when I went there. They have docents that can tell you, with deep personal
experience, about the Cray supercomputer, the PDP/1, PDP/8, UNIX, IBM
mainframes, etc. But, they're all getting up there in age, and many of the
founders of our field have passed away in the past couple of decades.

As for being spoonfed, I don't believe that's true. The depth of knowledge
required to truly innovate is much higher than ever. Making the early steps of
learning about technology easier doesn't make working with the _vastly_ more
complex systems any easier. I feel overwhelmed pretty much every day, when I
try to stay ahead of the curve in my field and try to stay at least abreast of
what's happening in other fields. Things are moving faster than ever, and it's
always going to require being at the front edge of that to actually innovate.

The people building the future today don't have it any easier than the people
who built the future we're living in now.

That's not to say we shouldn't teach kids about what came before. I believe
the Computer History Museum is really important in that regard. This is the
most amazing time in history to be alive, and it's because of the things a few
hundred people built 30-50 years ago. I just watched the American Experience
film on Silicon Valley (which chronicles the earliest days of the integrated
circuit). It's really incredible how far we've come in such a short time.
Seeing people who are still alive today telling the stories of the inventions
that have re-shaped our entire world in unbelievable ways is inspiring and
intimidating.

------
salgernon
The link to the pdf on archive.org:

[https://archive.org/details/8BBSArchiveP1V1](https://archive.org/details/8BBSArchiveP1V1)

But I like the narrative in the original link.

------
SwellJoe
Now that I've had a chance to read more, I see that casual misogyny in the
tech world is definitely not new. So far, I've seen a half dozen messages, and
multiple people, calling someone named "Susan Thunder" a whore, bitch, etc.
Example:

    
    
        Message number 7168 is 4 lines from John Billings
        To SUSAN THUNDER at 14:30:49 on 12-Mar-81.
        Subject: YOUR LAST MESSAE 
        YOU LEFT ONE THING OUT OF YOUR
        DESCRIPTION OF YOURSELF,
        WHETHER YOU CHARGE BY THE HOUR 
        OR THE EVENING?
    

And, I have seen no polite messages directed toward anyone with a female
sounding name.

Given that 90+% of the messages are from people with male-sounding names, and
every message, so far, that I've seen directed to a woman has been overtly
hateful, it puts some things in perspective about why there are so few women
in our industry today. I can't say that, as a 12 year old, I was treated with
respect by the BBS community at large, but at least I wasn't on the receiving
end of veiled rape threats.

I'm hoping I stumbled on the few really hostile messages in the bunch. But,
I've bounced around a bit...I fear further study will only be further
disheartening.

~~~
akira2501
You're missing the context.

Susan Thunder is
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Headley](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Headley).
She was a prostitute. She was an adversarial figure in the phreaking scene at
the time.

I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but this is a small slice of a much larger
scene.

~~~
SwellJoe
Interesting. But, still, the threats of violence and general dehumanization of
her by several people is pretty horrible (someone has suggested she got
someone arrested, but I don't see confirmation of that or an explanation for
why...if they threatened violence against her, as several messages in the
archive do, I wouldn't begrudge her for reporting those threats to police, for
example).

~~~
akira2501
Really it's a bunch of people trying to impress and out-do each other. "Dave
Starr", "Susan Thunder", and "Roscoe Dupran" tangled with each other through
almost any format available to them.

Here's more old-school sources of all this rivalry:
[http://www.flyingsnail.com/missingbbs/](http://www.flyingsnail.com/missingbbs/)
[http://phrack.org/issues/10/2.html](http://phrack.org/issues/10/2.html)

~~~
SwellJoe
It takes a truly epic troll to span decades...impressive, in a way.
Embarrassing, too.

~~~
walterbell
Could be reusable handle(s) in an extended psychology experiment. One person
could use multiple handles, or one handle could be used by multiple people.

~~~
digi_owl
[http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=5370](http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=5370)

A recent-ish example of someone using multiple handles...

------
toddkaufmann
Cool. I think I first posted here in 1979, found a lot of useful phreak info.

I don't see any of my posts, but do see my name (pseudo) mentioned by others a
couple times.

~~~
Silent700
You're the 8BBS first user to speak up. Any stories?

