With a Net: An Internet Memoir

With a Net

An Internet Memoir

J.A. Bell

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Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 J.A. Bell

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

In the Beginning

Wasted Youth

Hello Computer

Over the Wire

Into the Great Wide Open

Tiny Life

Without a Net

Superhighway

Citizen Journalism

Gadgets, Gadgets, Gadgets

Social Expansion

With a Net

Acknowledgments

This book wouldn’t exist without the technologies discussed and the people behind them. They contributed the backdrop for my childhood and early adult years. I’d like to thank the following:

Chris Seibold for sharing with me his concurrent experiences with the same stuff I did, Ron Greco for providing MT HED BBS, and many days and nights of entertainment, and Pavel Curtis and Roger Crew for continuing to keep LambdaMOO’s virtual doors open.

Support from my friends was also supremely important in keeping me going, especially with the simple yet painstaking task of not giving up. I’d like to thank my co-workers and friends who always had words of encouragement, especially when I felt like throwing in the towel. Writing a first book can easily become an exercise in futility, but it never felt that way with their support.

Lastly, I thank you, dear reader, for giving me a chance to tell a story.

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With a Net is dedicated to the memory of Corinne Inez Wolfe, January 18, 1983 - October 26, 2002.

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- J.A. Bell

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2012

Introduction

"The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone."

- Steve Jobs

The Playboy Interview, February 1985

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It feels like a lifetime ago that I first connected a phone line to the back of my computer and heard those iconic modem sounds—dial tones, static, and the screeching of data—and got online for the first time. In those days, online didn’t even mean the Internet; it simply meant you were networked with another computer. Those first ones that I would network with were bulletin board systems, but later my online life would move to the Internet.

In all fairness, it was almost a lifetime ago. Twenty-one years, to be exact, nearly two thirds of my life. I didn’t consider it a particularly big adventure, it was just what happened in my life. It was a thing I did every day when most people had no idea what BBSes were, or email, or telnet. You might have collected stamps, went out with friends, collected Magic: The Gathering cards… and I did this.

As I was waxing nostalgic for those days, it seemed like it might be an interesting story to some people, those who’ve been through these same kinds of experiences, or those who want to know how all of this got started. So I wrote a couple of essays about it, and I showed them to people. They liked the idea, and some even thought it might make an interesting book. I thought, no way, no one would read this. Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I thought it might actually interest someone. Now, dear reader, you’re holding the results in your hand.

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This is not a history of social networks, BBSes, or even the Internet itself. This is my personal history with those things. These days, many people consider online to mean only the Internet, the Internet to mean the Web, and social to mean Facebook. I have nostalgia for a time before the web and social networking, when it wasn’t so easy to take connectedness for granted. I look back now and marvel at how we got from then to now; it truly is a remarkable present day we live in.

I wrote an essay in 2010 about the leap from twenty years ago to today, and how astonishing the revolutions are that have come about because of the progress of technology. In fact, that essay is what made me finally decide to write this book:

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Ones and Zeroes and Twenty Years Gone By

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No hard drive.

That's right. I had no hard drive in my computer. It ran solely on a 5.25" floppy disk (and in those days, the disks were actually floppy), which contained the entire operating system.

Yeah. No hard drive.

You could run your entire computer on just a few kilobytes of RAM and the operating system would run completely within memory. You could take the OS disk out, and put something else in to run on the Commodore PC-10 III. Its little 8086 processor could handle the couple of games I had for it. My favorite was a table-top sports game that I would pretend I was at the championships for. Table tennis, air hockey, darts; I always walked away with the title.

Sometimes I would get bored with that game, and I ended up writing my own games. Nothing with graphics, because I wasn't that advanced yet in BASIC, but I did write a football game that worked entirely with text. It was actually pretty neat. The Zork-style adventure games I wrote were less exciting, because I always knew how they ended up. I did, after all, write them myself.

Today, we barely remember what a floppy disk is, and everything we used to fit inside those huge boxes now fits in something smaller than a DVD player. Getting from there to here has taken almost my whole life.

Granted, that whole life isn’t that long; really, the time span I’m talking about wasn’t more than twenty years. The rate of progress has certainly jumped (or so it seems) more in these past twenty years than the twenty before it.

The Internet itself seems like a good yardstick. Back in the ARPANET days, when the Internet was a Defense Department project, there were tons of protocols (telnet, ftp, Gopher systems, Archie and Veronica) that were accessed from dumb VAX/VMS terminals. That was in the 60’s. By the time I discovered the Internet, it wasn’t really different; in 1990, I accessed the Internet by dialing into the local university’s bank of VAX terminals and accessing my email via telnet. In those days, you had a monospaced font screen only 80 characters across, and everything was done with keystroke commands. A mouse? What the hell is that? My communications program was either Telex or, when I lost everything on that drive, I programmed something in QBASIC that was about ten lines long that did the same thing.

Entertainment was found on BBSes, or Bulletin Board Systems. Most of these were local dialup systems, but a few, like Grex Cyberspace, were on the actual Internet. It was there, and on a couple of groundbreaking new text-based virtual reality sites like LambdaMOO, that you really and truly understood how much the little ARPANET project had spread. Suddenly, you were chatting with people in real time as far away as Germany or Singapore.

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I remember the day America Online got email for the first time. All my own email slowed to a crawl. You see, email wasn’t available to hundreds of millions of people yet, and so there was no infrastructure to handle the volume AOL would soon unload. Before AOL getting email, if you wanted email, you had to be in somewhere. I was in with the sysop of the MT HED BBS, and he gave me, and a few other select members, access to email. He had to pay for these accounts out of his own pocket, and generously gave them to us.

I corresponded with people from all over the globe. Every day I would get about ten or twelve new messages from people in Canada, Singapore, Cleveland, and right down the street. I’m sure my dad couldn’t understand what I was doing until all hours of the night, but this was the cusp of a revolution, and if I was too young to understand how I could contribute to it myself, I could at least get a kick out of watching it.

But that day, when AOL unleashed its masses on to the world of real email, messages took almost a full day to get places, and I missed a few phone dates with people.

I hate AOL to this day.

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Macs were certainly a big deal when I was a kid, but I couldn’t wrap my head around them. I ignored them for most of my life, actually. That should be amusing to anyone who knows me now.

It was a fellow named Ken Walker who actually convinced me to see them in a new light after OS X came out. He took me to a CompUSA one day so I could get a Sony Clié, a really nice PalmOS PDA that he had and that I envied.

We walked past the Macs, and he extolled the virtues of the BSD subsystem, Darwin, and how elegant the OS was. He showed me all that, and I was pretty blown away, but I still loved the IBM ThinkPad that he sold me.

Ken and I shared an apartment (my first one away from home, actually), and we splurged on broadband Internet. It was, for both of us, our initial experience with consumer high-speed Internet. What did we spend our time doing? Of course, instant messaging each other over MSN while one hallway away from each other. And we also streamed music, and used the wonder that was Audiogalaxy. We watched the trailer for The Phantom Menace. We browsed the web at lightning fast speeds, which would be a joke today. But it was exciting. It was fast. And it was expensive. Luckily, we both had jobs which would afford us the luxury of broadband, and it was fun.

But as much fun as it was, and as much as I loved my ThinkPad, I wanted that Mac.

I had my own webpage then, something which I wanted to approximate a magazine. It had photos of friends, essays I had written, some papers I had written for school, and links. I didn’t have any content management system; everything was done in FrontPage, and managed by hand. It was horrible. But it was mine, and I was proud of it. That site underwent a ton of revisions over the years, essentially getting a makeover every year. Unfortunately, the content was often lost as I started over each time, but I didn’t care. Some of it is archived on the Wayback Machine. Some of it I simply don’t recall.

I also had a Livejournal, and was on some forums, and I had a presence on the web. The web really changed things in the late 90s, turning the connectedness of the Internet into something more than just a hobby for nerds. Amazon became a real player in commerce, and everyone had an email account thanks to Hotmail. I still visited the old text-based telnet haunts like LambdaMOO, but the world was getting bigger. I knew more people. I felt the boundaries of my little universe expanding. I guess in some ways, I felt it getting smaller as well.

Connectedness was becoming an amazing thing, though. With my Sony Clié, I could bring the web with me; I could download all the websites I wanted to read, and even do things like post to Livejournal, uploading new entries when I got home every day. I got my second cellphone, and had texting, which would send me scores and news. Like Lain, the animated heroine in Japan who felt the walls between the wired world and the real one crumbling, I, too, was blurring my own reality between the one I could see and touch and the boundless, fuzzy distinctions which kept new friends so far away.

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Today, we have unprecedented computing power on our laps and in our pockets—really, right in the palm of our hands. I have that Mac now—I've had several, actually—and also the iPhone and iPad. Mac vs. PCs aside, technology today is truly sophisticated. Our cellphones have far more computing power than that Commodore PC-10 III did. My MacBook Pro can do things in its small chassis that it would’ve taken rows of mainframes to do in the 70’s and 80’s. With it comes an increasing connectedness to the wired world—Twitter, Facebook, texting, instant messaging, email, blogs—we are always switched on, even when we’re not. It’s easier than ever, too. Unless you can’t afford a smartphone or a computer, you’re in some way connected to it all, even if only a little bit.

Now we take for granted the positively amazing things we can do with technology. We can talk over the phone virtually anywhere, and on those phones, we can send and receive email. We can capture motion picture memories in high definition on that same device. We can create incredible programs to do unbelievable and beautiful things in the space of a few hours on computers that fit in a backpack. We can spend hours or days learning just about anything a person would want to learn. We can find out news as it happens, and watch complete strangers do silly and funny things we could never have seen before.

For me, it all started with a huge white box that didn’t even have a hard drive. Getting from there to here... it’s been a real journey from that to things like the iPhone and iPad. Here’s to the next twenty years. I can’t even imagine what they’ll think of next.

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Being a socially awkward geek made it difficult for me to make—and keep—friends, but being social online made up for it. BBSes were a great way to make local (and sometimes not-so-local) friends, and then the Internet itself, through LambdaMOO and other sites, expanded my understanding of the world and the people in it, no matter where they were.

So, dear reader, I want to bring you on a trip down that old road—nostalgia—along with me, and show you the worlds I lived in… the ones that were real, not-so-real, and even half-real.

In the Beginning

The atmosphere of the late 70’s was a paradox that resembles the beginnings of