Remember War Games with Mathew Broderick? He had that modem with the couplers you put around the phone receiver. I remember reading ads in my magazines for modems. I knew the basic idea of how they worked, but didn't really know how I would get any use out of one.
I was 13 years old. The year was 1984. I had just started at an all-male Catholic High School (common in New Orleans) and was visiting a friend after school. We played Car-Wars and we used his Apple to do the die rolls. After a while he says he wants to show me something.
He gets on his computer and starts up a little program. I watch the numbers appear on the screen and hear them dial, 282-8270. I hear the mutual screeching of one modem saying ``hello'' to the other.
CONNECTED AT 300 BAUD
Welcome to the Assassin's Guild...
I read the words as they scrolled down the screen You can easily read a 300bps connection as it scrolls; it's sort of reminiscent of the old-speed readers they used to make kids do in grade school.
My friend logged onto the bulletin board system using a pseudonym. I was bewildered as he started reading through one of the message areas. Someone would ``post'' a message and others would reply. There were various message boards covering differing topics: General, Sci-Fi Fantasy, a continuing on-line story, books and movies, and my favorite one, the war board. Someone had actually taken a computer, purchased a second phone line, and dedicated it to answering calls from anonymous users exchanging messages.
It was fascinating. My friend was particularly enthralled with the war board section. The aliases would mercilessly assail one another. Some were clearly more clever than others. You won or lost, it seemed, by your wits and ability to write. And this board was not the only one. There were even some boards where you could get programs and games. The process was called ``downloading.''
It took some serious begging, but I got myself my own modem. It took me all day to come up with an impressive and ominous alias - Omegaman - after a song by the Police. I called the Guild myself and joined the fray. There was a complex series of alliances and independents. Some of the war groups had private message boards on BBS's, presumably to exchange strategy.
You never knew your how old your opponent was, whether it was man or woman for sure. Some aliases might even be the same person as another alias. You only knew them by their words.
I learned how to write on these BBS's. You had to be concise. Revision was rather hard on those limited BBS editors. And you had to be quick. Since the connection was so slow, you had a limited time to read and post. I had to be even quicker since call-waiting always threatened to bump me off the line. (My parents didn't allow me to block it) But you used that time you had because it was usually hell to get through to the BBS. The combination of slow connections, many users (opponents), and single phone lines necessitated a re-dialing assault against the busy signal.
I knew of Compuserve, the Point, UUCP and other larger on-line areas. But the notion of paying for logging on seemed silly. Besides, they wanted your name and address and I sure as hell wasn't giving mine out. Still, I came into contact with all manner of systems I might never have otherwise used: MS-DOS boxes, Xenix, Apple, you-name-it.
It didn't take too long for people to decide to meet off-line. We had gatherings. We'd go to showings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show and Sci-Fi conventions. There were even a few girls in the bunch. My best friend to this day is from that time. We started an on-line war group.
There was a ``dark side'' to all of this. There was plenty of software pirating going on, though the boards I called usually didn't even have file-transfer areas. There were a lot of ``phreaks,'' people who stole MCI and Sprint customer calling codes to call out-of-town BBSs. I knew a kid who managed to get his Commodore 64 confiscated and his parents fined by the FBI because of phreaking and credit-card theft. There was some fear of predatory types looking to meet kids through our off-line meetings. And, as you might expect in a world dominated by teen-aged males, there was a lot of pornography. It wasn't the photo-quality stuff you see nowadays but it was out there in force.
Eventually, it started to get stale. I was more interested in going out and meeting girls. I bought a guitar and devoted myself to learning that in much the same way I'd devoured the computer. I actually played in a few bands towards the end of my high school career. I listened to a lot of punk rock and ``underground'' music. I wanted to be cool and get away from the geek set. I left the BBS scene just before it exploded and was then eclipsed by the Internet.