I Get a Modem then Start a BBS

This is what I might call a “bridge episode” in a TV series.  Not a post that has a real story unto itself, but more a bunch of things that happen that ended up having a large impact later down the line… as in, my entire adult professional career.  Everything I have done in pretty much the last 35 years for work, and all the additional tales in the series, it all starts here.

I have related somewhere in the past here on a couple of occasions about how I ended up buying Potshot’s 1200bps Apple modem from him back in 1986 to connect to my Apple //e, then upgrading to a Zoom 2400bps modem.

Apple and Zoom modem pictures gleaned from the internet

You could only do so many things with a modem back in the day.  I played some expensive online games.  I called local the local BBS community.  I was able to do my mainframe assignments for school because I knew somebody in the lab who gave me the dial-in number.  I just had to go pick up my print outs.  But it didn’t add up to all that much.  I still spent the vast majority of my computer time offline.  In part that was because the closest phone where I was living was hung on the kitchen wall, so to get a line across the place to my room meant popping the phone off the wall, hooking up a line, and spooling it out of the kitchen, through the family room, into the room where my computer lay.  I actually bought a phone fifty foot line on a reel to make this more efficient.

Probably bought it at Fry’s no less

I actually still have that reel.  I plucked it out of the garage last weekend… it was sitting in an old milk crate we refer to as “the cable box” where I have tossed a bunch of cables I might need some day.  So when I was playing Stellar Emperor… even when I won Stellar Emperor… I was doing it over a phone line dragged across the house, mostly in the wee hours of the night.

It helped that I worked 3pm to midnight at Safeway most nights so my house mate was asleep and unlikely to pick up the extension that was in their room and screw up my connection.  But it was annoying for both of us when I was trying to log in during the day for something.

It wasn’t until I bought a Mac a year later that I really started dialing into things.

Dual floppies on day one

First of all, my Mac SE had a hard drive.  I actually bought the dual floppy SE model… as an Apple II user having dual floppies was seriously a baseline requirement… and then bought an external 70MB hard drive.

That was HUGE at the time.  Most internal drives were 10-20MB at the time, and having a 40MB was high living, so a 70MB drive, I had all the space in the world and clearly needed to fill it up. (And so begins a lifetime obsession with having enough hard drive space.  To me a half full drive means I need more space.)

Anyway, having hard drive space meant downloading things was very much more likely… certainly when compared to having to store things on 143KB 5.25″ Apple II floppies.  And I had been exposed to the internet at that point, though my university at the time was extremely stingy with access.  So I went by a company called Portal Information Network, which was being run out of a residential house a few blocks from the Apple campus on Mariani Drive in Cupertino.  They were one of the first places to sell access to a dial up internet shell account.

I had an email address @cup.portal.com at just about the very moment that such email addresses were being fully supported.  You could still find servers that needed a fully enumerated address… basically the user name then all the servers in between your email server and the destination so the message knew how to get there… when I was first logging in.

Also, if you had the cup.portal.com domain as your domain you were a bit of a pariah on UseNet because the educational institutional purists were incensed that somebody was letting randos onto their internet in exchange for cash.  It debased the whole thing in their minds.  You had to earn your right to be there, you have to be special and invited if you want to argue about whether or not elves had pointy ears on rec.arts.books.tolkien.

We were only pariahs for so long… in part because there were not so many of us, but mostly because more services started selling similar access, culminating in the Eternal September in 1993, when online services began offering and promoting internet connectivity.  That and the NSCA Mosiac web browser would suddenly make the internet a public place.

That was all kind of cool, but in 1988 I was more interested in BBSes and files and local message board and such.

At that point I called up Pacific Bell and got a separate phone line run into my room.  They came out and ran a box with punch downs for up to six lines, bolting it to the back of the house as part of their modular upgrade program, since the original line was pretty much hard wired from the pole.

My friend Bill and I ran a bundle of twisted pair that had 8 pairs in it from the box and up through the floor into my room.  We only needed one pair, but he happened to have enough of the 8 pair wire sitting around that we just used that rather than buying some new wire.  In fact, he left the box… one of those setups where the wire is on a spool inside the box so you can reel it out on a job site… and i suspect the box had been scavenged from a job site.

So now I had a dedicated data line and could use the modem whenever I wanted.  The 50 phone cable reel when into a milk crate I refer to as “the cable box” to await that time when I would next need it.  I still have that crate out in our garage today and it was there waiting for this moment.

So I spent a lot of time on local BBSes to the point that I wanted to run my own.  This was very much analogous to my spending a lot of time reading MMO blogs 18 years back and deciding to start my own blog.  I always feel a little bit self conscious on somebody else’s site, so wanted to have my own.

So in 1990 I found a Mac Plus and a 2400 bps modem… which were becoming cheap, which at the time meant sub-$150… and called up Pac Bell and had them pull another line down to the junction box on the back of the house.  As noted above, it was an upgraded the junction that could accommodate half a dozen lines, each with an RJ-11 jack so you could plug a phone in to determine if any line issues were on the phone company’s side of things or if it was related to the wiring in the house itself… because if it was the latter, it was your problem unless you bought the expensive home wiring coverage contract.

The phone company did that pretty quickly.  They were big on selling more lines at that point.  That monthly unlimited local dialing plan revenue was making them rich and as long as they had lines on the switch not being used, they might as well get money for them.  The average phone call was under a minute at that point.  That could never possibly come back to bite them in the ass.

After that it was easy enough for me to use one of the free pairs of wire in the cable we already ran under the house, connecting into the junction box and then an RJ-11 jack in my  office.  I had grabbed a copy of the Mac BBS software Second Site, formerly Red Ryder Host and got myself setup as a Sysop, the person who runs a BBS.

How do you get people to call your BBS?  Modems were pretty rare still, online services like CompuServe were relatively expensive, and the internet was almost exclusively academically focused.  How do you get the word out?

At the time somebody was maintaining and distributing a 408 area code BBS list.  It was a simple text file that they uploaded to various BBSes every month which addressed the user side of the problem; how do I even find a BBS to call?

So I put together a similar list with a kid (relative to me in age at least) named Adam for the 415 area code, focused on the peninsula from the SF county line to the boarder with 408 in Sunnyvale.  We updated it every month, uploaded it to every BBS we could find, and it was generally a success.  People began to call my BBS.

Then there was the problem of how to get them to call back again.

I had originally envisioned my BBS as being focused on sound files, and named it appropriately for that.  I had a Farallon Mac Recorder for my MacSE and had digitized many fun sounds from The Simpsons, Star Trek, and whatever, that being all the rage at the time.  It included a real sound editor software package, sophisticated stuff for the time. (The software later ended up being owned by Sony and I bought a copy of that maybe 15 years back.)

Mac Recorder back of box image scavenged from the internet

So I started with a selection of sounds.  But like every going concern, people want NEW stuff every time they visit.  So I did what most sysops did, I went looking at other BBSes to find updates and new things which I would turn around and upload to my site.  Must have new content.

The first thing was, of course, my monthly 415 BBS list, along with the 408 version of that.  I lived practically astride the 415/408 boarder, and could easily throw a rock from my front door in Mountain View into Sunnyvale and the 408 area code, something I was once admonished to stop as the point of proximity had been firmly established.

The next was a little Mac focused newsletter called TidBits.  I was on the email distribution list for it and would upload each edition to the BBS.  A couple of years back I ran across Tidbits on Twitter, still publishing regularly.  I also found out that its author, Adam Engst, was a couple years younger than me.

And I posted stuff to the forum on the BBS… what we would now call a BBS on the web was just a subset of what a BBS did back in the day.

This began to attract regulars and I ended up having a pretty active discussion form on the BBS. (I keep writing “on the site” and changing it to “on the BBS” because it was never a “site” on the internet.)

And, within a year one of my regulars asked if I was interested in a job.  I was working at in accounting at Koala… or the company that bought the Koala name and product line including the Apple II Koala Pad… which mostly involved calling up Ingram Micro to ask when they were going to pay us.  They were the largest software distributor in the US and treated small companies like us badly.  They would sign terms for net 30 payments, with a 5% discount if they paid within ten days, then pay us in 90 days with the discount deducted.  Their attitude was that we should be grateful then distributed our software at all.

I did spend some time calling up school districts as well.  A few ordered replacement Koala Pads for their aging Apple IIs directly from us… and they were generally late to pay as well.  We were in a minor recession.  It was early 1991, the cold war was winding down, the military was having a last hurrah in Kuwait before a massive draw down, the defense industry, which was a foundational element of Silicon Valley at the time, was laying off tons of people, and it was rippling across the country.  Also the state of Michigan kept calling, demanding we collect sales tax on items sold to their residents and send it to them, a clear violation of the interstate commerce section of the constitution, so I put those into the “ignore” basket… the one on the floor that the cleaning staff dealt with over night.

And during that time a user of my BBS named Larry sent me a message on the BBS asking if I wanted a job.  He was the support manager at a hard drive company… the same one that made my hard drive… and needed somebody to do support and repair on his team.  That sounded better than dealing with accounts receivable issues all day long, and I knew all about SCSI hard drive… I had three by then… so what could possibly go wrong?

Nothing underlines your absolute ignorance of a product and what end users want to do with it than working in tech support.  It turns out I knew about 5% of what I needed to know about SCSI hard drives.  But I learned quickly.  That lasted about eight months.

A lawsuit related to Rodime ended up forcing the company to shut down.  We got a last paycheck and were sent home.  My first Silicon Valley layoff!  But I had used my BBS and modem knowlegde while I was there and established myself a bit.  I had setup a special login on my BBS for our customers to go and download the latest driver updates.  But now that was through.

I went past ComputerWare on the way home and saw they were hiring.  I went in, told them about the company I had work at, but SCSI hard drive knowledge was something they had.  However, when I mentioned I knew about modems and also ran a BBS, that excited them.  I was hired.

That was a fun job, one of the few retail experiences I enjoyed.  And I was the modem guy in the Sunnyvale store, eventually becoming the service tech.  It was also an expensive job as I had access to all sorts of software and hardware at an employee discount.  It is possible I spent more than I earned at that job.  I wrote a tale from those days previously, centered around CD-ROM drives and the game Spaceship Warlock.

My boss there ended up getting a job at a company called Global Village, perhaps the premier modem company in the Macintosh world, and realized that his method of solving modem issues was to come and ask me.  So he immediately recommended me for a position in support there.  Once again, as the guy who actually ran a BBS and knew about modems on purpose, I was something of a standout and got the job.

That was in 1992 and was what I consider the end of my “having a bunch of random jobs” part of my life, with fast food and retail jobs, and the beginning of the “something that looks like a career when listed out on a resume” section, like I was a real adult or something.

It was also the anchor which tied me to telephony and telephone related technologies for at least the next 25 years.

As for the BBS, it ran from 1990 through to late 1995.  At its peak it had three phone lines attached to it, two for users, sporting high end “support all the protocols” US Robotics Courier modems, and a third line with a lesser modem dedicated to FidoNet communications.

Around 1992 I changed from Second Sight software to Hermes to run the BBS  (That Hermes article is a good timeline of BBSes in general) which had better support, including the ability to use the then Apple Modem Tool (later the Communications Toolbox) which showed up with System 7, which allowed IP connections.  That, technically, enabled a fourth line into the BBS over our home network, which ran on 5Base-T coax Ethernet, which sounds primitive today, but was crazy ahead of its time in 1992.

The end for the BBS came when my housing situation was upended and I moved into an apartment where I wasn’t going to be able to have more than one phone line.  The BBS was shut down.  But it had quite an impact on my life.  I met a bunch of people, some of whom I ended up working with.  I went to the BBS crew for hiring needs because, again, people who knew modem stuff.

It also gave me a few side gigs.  I ended up setting up BBSes for a couple of companies and a local beer brewing user group, the latter paying me for my services with two cases of extremely excellent ale.

I still have dreams every so often, to this day, where I am in one of the places I used to live but it is today and I open up a closet and the BBS is still sitting there, online and running, forgotten for years, patiently waiting for my return.  I have, over the years, reached way more people with this blog that I ever did with the old BBS.  That is the nature of the web and search engines.  But the interactions on the BBS were often much more personal.  It was like having a blog with file downloads and a couple dozen regulars who would drop in regularly to comment and ask how things were going.

That ends, to some extent, the random goof aspect of my times with the telephone and gets into my career with it and the foibles and silly times that ended up creating.

Past posts in the series:

• Hanging on the Telephone
• Calling the Mall
• Finding Friends with the Popcorn Lady
• Jenny and the FCC
• What your area code used to say about your location