NO CARRIER: Notes from an Old Sysop

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NO CARRIER
notes from an old sysop
Second Story BBS · Columbus, Ohio · 1985-1996

CONNECT 2400

My name is Michael Hooper. These days I'm a network administrator at a hospital in Columbus, which means I keep about four hundred computers talking to each other and get paged when they stop. But for eleven years, from March of 1985 until the last Saturday in October 1996, I was a sysop. I ran a bulletin board system called Second Story, on one phone line, first from my bedroom at my parents' house, which was upstairs, hence the name, and later from the spare room of my apartment, which was on the ground floor, but by then the name had stuck.

If you never called a board, this page will tell you what you missed. If you did, you already know, and you can skip down to the part where I tell you what I think the Web should learn from us.

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[1] WHAT A BOARD WAS

A bulletin board was a computer with a modem, plugged into a phone line, waiting for somebody to call it. You dialed in with your own computer and your own modem, and for an hour a day it was yours: you read the messages people had left since you last called, left your own, downloaded a program or two, played a game, and hung up so the next person could get on. One line meant one caller at a time. Everybody else got a busy signal, and they set their software to redial, and redial, and redial.

It started on a Commodore 64 with a 300-baud modem and a box of floppy disks. By 1988 it was a PC clone with a twenty-megabyte hard drive and a 2400-baud modem, and that's the board most of my callers remember. A 2400-baud modem moves about 240 characters a second. You could read the messages as fast as they came in. A hundred-kilobyte program took about seven minutes to download, and you planned your evening around it.

The 2400-baud nights. Second Story was busiest from ten at night until two in the morning, when the long-distance rates didn't matter because nobody was calling long distance anyway. A board was local. Everyone who called mine lived within a local phone call of my bedroom, which turned out to be the most important thing about it. I'd lie in bed and listen to the modem answer, the squeal and the hiss, and know somebody I knew was on.

ANSI. The screens were text, but they didn't have to be plain. ANSI codes let you put sixteen colors on the screen and move the cursor around, and with the line-drawing characters built into every PC you could draw boxes, borders, shaded blocks, whole pictures. People made ANSI art the way people make background tiles now, and traded it, and a board's logon screen was its front door. Mine was magenta and cyan. So is this page.

Doors. A door was a game that ran on the board, one turn at a time. Legend of the Red Dragon, which came out in 1989, gave you so many forest fights a day, so everybody called once a day, every day, to use them up and see who'd killed whom in their sleep. Trade Wars was a space trading game where you built an empire one call at a time, and a caller who goes by Gearhead ran the whole universe on my board for two years straight. Doors are why people called every day. Remember that. I'll come back to it.

FidoNet. A one-line board was small, but it wasn't alone. FidoNet, which started in 1984, was a way for boards to pass mail to each other in the middle of the night, board to board, across the country and then the world. Every night around three my board dialed out to the hub, traded the day's mail, and hung up. The mail was organized into echoes, which were conferences on every subject you can name: ham radio, Star Trek, woodworking, diabetes, Ohio State football. A message left on my board in Columbus would show up on boards in Oregon and Florida a couple of days later, and the answers would come back the same way.

The sysop. That's the system operator, and that was me. I read every new user's application and called them back on the telephone, by voice, before I let them on. I read every message. I fixed the board at four in the morning when it hung, and when somebody paged me from the board and I was awake, I'd break into chat and we'd type at each other for an hour. A sysop wasn't a webmaster. A sysop was a host. It was my house, and they were my guests, and I knew every one of them by handle and most of them by name.

The GTs. Once a month we had a get-together, a GT, at a pizza place on the west side. You'd walk in and look around for people who looked like they might type a lot, and you'd say "Are you Moonpie?" and she'd say "Are you Hoop?" and that was that. Because everybody was local, everybody could come. I've been to a wedding of two people who met on my board, and I've been a pallbearer for a man I'd never seen in person until the GT where he told us he was sick.

[2] WHY I PULLED THE PLUG

It wasn't sudden and it wasn't anybody's fault. Around 1994 my callers started asking whether I'd heard about the Internet. By 1995 half of them had an Internet account through work or school or one of the new local providers, and they called less. You can't blame them. On the Internet there was no busy signal, the whole world was there, and you could see pictures. At the top, in 1993, Second Story had about 140 regular callers. By the summer of 1996 I had 23, and most of those were calling to say goodbye.

I left the board up for one last night, Saturday, October 26, 1996, and posted a bulletin saying so. The line was busy from seven at night until four in the morning. At the end I logged on myself, read every message, and typed the last one. Then I shut down the computer, unplugged the modem, and the house was very quiet.

Log on to Second Story one more time >>

[3] WHAT THE WEB GAVE US

I don't want to be the old man on the porch. The Web is a miracle, and I make my living keeping a corner of it running. Here's what it gave us that the boards never could:

+ No busy signal. Ever. A thousand people can read this page at the same moment, and none of them has to wait for anybody to hang up.
+ The whole world. Anyone, anywhere, for the price of a local call. A kid in Australia can read about my board tonight.
+ Pictures. I spent years trying to draw a lighthouse in ANSI. You can just put one on your page.
+ It stays up. Your page doesn't go down when your hard drive dies or your mom picks up the extension.
+ Anybody can have one. Running a board took a dedicated computer, a second phone line and a lot of nerve. A home page takes an evening.

[4] WHAT IT TOOK

- The host. Nobody's at home on most home pages. You knock, you look around, you leave. Nobody broke into chat.
- The regulars. On a board you knew who'd been on before you, because their handle was right there on the Last 10 Callers list. On the Web you're one of the numbers on a counter.
- The local. When the whole world can come, nobody's close enough for pizza.
- The reason to come back tomorrow. The boards changed every day because the callers changed them. Most pages change when the owner gets around to it, which is to say, not often.
- Patience. We waited seven minutes for a download and were grateful. Now people leave a page if the picture takes ten seconds. Maybe that's progress. I'm not sure.

[5] HOW TO MAKE A HOME PAGE FEEL LIKE A BOARD

You can't put a door game on a GeoCities.us page, and you wouldn't want a busy signal. But you can steal the parts that made people love the boards:

1. Answer your guestbook. Every entry, by e-mail, within a day. That's the sysop breaking into chat. People who get an answer come back. People who don't, don't.

2. Learn your regulars. After a while the same names turn up in your guestbook and your mail. Say hello to them by name on the page. Thank them for things. They're your callers now.

3. Change something every week. Not the whole page. Something. A new picture, a new paragraph, a question. Put the date on it. That's the door game: it's the reason to call tomorrow.

4. Keep a bulletins section at the top. Every board had bulletins, short dated notes from the sysop, newest first. "Board will be down Tuesday night for a new hard drive." "Congratulations to Moonpie and Thrasher." It told callers somebody was home.

5. Post your own Last 10 Callers. The last ten people to sign your guestbook, by first name or handle, right on your front page. You'll be surprised how many people come back to see their name.

6. If your regulars live near each other, buy them a pizza. I mean it. The best thing that ever happened on Second Story happened at a table with a pitcher of root beer on it.

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You are caller number

since this page went up in October 1998. No waiting.

Old callers, new callers, anybody: [email protected]
I answer every one. Sysop's habit.

Last updated Friday, September 24, 1999

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