I don’t remember how I initially got into modems. I know I always loved computers. That commodore 64 that we played with at elementary school. My best friend David Reese and I would play Oregon Trail or some silly other game where you dug for gold.
They had this sign-up sheet on the wall and every kid was supposed to have computer time in pairs, but I was the only one who ever actually looked at the sheet, and so on Tuesdays around 10AM Dave and I would go play computer games, and always stay waaaay longer then our allocated 30 minutes.
I can also remember the magic when we bought an IBM PS2 Model 25. It had some amazingly bad word processor called “first choice” that I cranked a lot of papers out on, and of course I installed Police Quest from Sierra and played the heck out of that game. along with some goofy “chopper commando” game – I remember the say day when something went wrong with the monitor and a blue filter showed up over everything. I still kept playing chopper commando, even with the blue screen.
It wasn’t till much later that I would get caught in some of the clutches of games like civilization and warcraft, simcity, and the first wing commander.
For right now it was all about chopper commando, until somehow one day, I got gifted a 1200 Baud modem by a neighbor for some random reason. It was black and silver and metal ….and it was magical. I didn’t even know what all the lights on it meant, but I knew you plugged a phone line into it (yes that was a thing) and then crazy magical stuff happened.
There was this idea back in the day of a BBS – or bulletin board system. Instead of logging into the internet as a whole, you basically used a modem and logged into SOMEONE ELSE’S COMPUTER. Their computer was basically like a website. But you could do all kinds of fun things: post messages, download files and games, play online games, and generally just goof off. There were no sports scores or cat videos or online banking portals at this point. The bummer of it was that you could normally only have one person log on to the BBS at one time. So if every person took an hour, you ended up with some serious bottleneck issues.
But it didn’t matter. It was amazing. There were multiple ideas that made it amazing. Once the coolness of logging onto other peoples BBS’s wore off, or logging into 8 person chat room BBS’s which were pretty crazy, this idea formed … maybe I could make my OWN BBS? That’s crazy!
I would need a better computer, a better modem and … the trickiest part … my OWN DEDICATED PHONE LINE?!!??!
This last part seemed impossible. Especially as a 14 year old. You want to run a 2nd phone line in your house for the express purpose of having random people log into your computer to play nerdy online games?
Yes … Yes I do.
And so Terminator’s House was born. Not like the Terminator from the movie, but Terminator X from Public Enemy. You know because I was a nerdy white kid growing up in Miami so I naturally spent most of my time on the computer while listening to NWA and Kool Mo De and De la Soul and Public Enemy.
At one point someone made me a title screen with a picture of Arnold from Terminator 2 and a house and stars and a moon with a big giant “Terminators House” title. Someone loved my BBS so much they took the time to create this. I was in love.
I used to leave my computer screen on and that way when people would log in at all crazy hours of the night my walls and ceilings would light up with the colors of the monitor and I would look over to see that beautiful intro screen that someone person I had never met customized for me. Of course this probably wasn’t good for my sleep habits, but who cares about such things when you were 15. The title screen would load slowly, line by beautifully crafted line.
The BBS software platform was called “Renegade” – how you could you not have wanted to be the SYSOP of a BBS running out of your bedroom computer with a phone line your mom made you pay 30 bucks a month for when the software was called “Renegade??”
So what would the “House’s” specialty be. That was easy … online games. We had a ton of them. You have to understand that calling something an “online game” was a bit of a misnomer … these things were all text and had very little actual game play. They were like online versions of the Hobbit (From 82) but with less graphics, because you were playing them over a phone line.
There were so many of them: Trade Wars, Fishing Sims, Pimp Wars (yes it was as bad as it sounds) and the greatest of all time: Operation Overkill 2. I spent so much time playing this game, and yet it was all text and hitting the spacebar. There was just something really well done about it. Call it Dungeons and Dragons in a post-apocalypse sci-fi setting. No wonder I fell in love with Fallout: New Vegas (aka my favorite video game of all time) – It was just an Xbox version of Operation Overkill.
But unlike Fallout, there were other random people logging in and playing Overkill at all hours of the day and night. Did someone stay home sick from school that day? They could sit around and watch the Price is Right and hope Plinko came on, or they could hop on the modem and play star traders and overkill and get a leg up on you. Or help you out and try and form a clan. Or just try and steal all your stuff.
Then the best part was that some random oracle spirit would wander around the wastelands, and once in a great while you would bump into them and just get a ton of XP points and money. How many people played the game for hours on end, just hoping to bump into this money oracle and win the overkill shortcut jackpot.
In a sense, the BBS was both the good and bad of what tech could always have been in a beta stage before the internet. If you really hit it off with someone, you could try and meet them offline (i.e. the real world). My first, and probably last meetup at a Social was fairly memorable. Two randoms dudes I had talked with a lot but never met before picked me up and then they went and smoked in the park, while I stood there asking them questions about how to make my BBS better. One dude had a butterfly knife so he could look cool, and was constantly whirling it around and smoking, which looked even cooler, except in whirling it around it actually slipped out of his hand and hit me in the arm (not with the blade).
Needless to say my mom did not know about this meetup with BBS land dudes.
But they had a car and they knew where the party was. So we went and it was … well … super boring. It was a bunch of random people in someones house eating hamburges and potato salad and just being happy nerds. I didn’t quite fit in, but it didn’t matter. The people there were in heaven.
I have seen that heaven again and again. I saw it when I took my daughter to a my little pony convention, and watched all the “bronies” trading cards and playing board games. I saw it again when I walked into comic book stores in Seattle, and saw groups of nerds huddled around Magic the Gathering cards, or meeting up in the park to play Pokemon and stumble around with their phones.
Its all the same.
Even back in 1990 it was all the same. People reaching out for something that has a commonality. Maybe you like operation overkill. Maybe you like D&D. Maybe you are cool, but I just don’t have enough confidence to talk to you in the real world…. I just don’t know where to start. But Maybe we can be friends …
Maybe you are like me…
Before there was world of warcraft and all of these massive games, or match.com, or apps and the app store, there was the BBS, and there was “OO2” and there was the friendly strangers and co-sysops who visited my “house” everyday.
My love for BBS land didn’t last forever. I had a few weird experiences after that first butterfly knife one, and then a few bad ones. One summer when I was on vacation someone hacked into a backdoor in the software and went in and formatted my hard drive and wiped out my whole computer. That was kind of a bummer, no backup to be had. A lot of starships and files and credits and magic weapons got lost that day.
Then the dude who did it kept calling me and taunting me and then started threatening to kill me and called me a bunch of not nice names – Needless to say the glitter of that Terminator’s House title screen wasn’t quite so appealing anymore.
And mom wasn’t too happy about having to open a file with the police. The detective didn’t really understand what a BBS was no matter how many times I tried to explain, but we traced the calls, and he got caught.
After that I stayed away from BBS land… I still loved computers, and Warcraft, and Civilization and playing games. But my days as a SYSOP were over. Besides there was this thing called AOL and it was way easier to goof off with.
But that creation of a spot where people could go to chill, and hang out, and be themselves, still stuck with me. That desire to create a “house” or a home away from home, with a name and a specialty, for some reason that always stuck with me.
I mostly stay off social media now. I will wander on Twitter once and a while, but there is just too much noise, too many comments, too many trolls.
I liked it better when you just plugged your phone line into that 1200 baud modem and the people stopped by, one phone call at a time.
Simpletition - Shawn D. Madden 