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What have online communities looked like? A memoiresque journey through the rise of walled gardens, bulletin board systems and underground scenes.
A look at the history of the internet to provide context for today's technology ecosystem. From the birth of the internet to the evolution of the hellscape that is social media today.
I want to start by talking about a community that I was a part of as a teenager. We called it “the scene” other people called it “the underground.” I’m sure that other members of the scene had a completely different experience, but this my experience.
There are various subcultures on the internet, but long before Weird TikTok, there was the underground. The underground that I’m referring to started on bulletin board systems but members of this scene were early adopters of the internet, so the scene moved to Internet Relay Chat, better known as IRC.
My family had recently bought a computer with a modem. It was the early 1990s and the computer was called a 386. The CPU speed was 16 MHz, but it had a turbo button that when pressed would bump it up to 25. The modem had a speed of 2400 bits per second. To ground you in my reality, downloading a single song on a 2400 baud modem would take about 5 hours. It was slow.
I’m not sure how my family settled on Prodigy, but we did. Prodigy was a dialup service and it allowed you to access the internet, yet the reason you really paid a monthly subscription fee was for the content Prodigy itself offered. My brother, 4 years older than me, had a friend named Pete that also used Prodigy. He told my brother to tell me to find the A&E forum and say hello.
A&E stood for Anything and Everything. It was a group of people that enjoyed comic books, but liked talking about anything. It was really cool, and I had this real life older person that was introducing me to all kinds of cool things. The moment for true exploration came when Pete told me about bulletin boards.
Bulletin Board Systems were like a hobbyist version of Prodigy. Anyone could download the software and set it up. You just needed your computer, a modem, and a phone line. I was hooked.
It didn’t take long before I wanted to run a bulletin board of my own. By this point, I had been calling bulletin boards so often that my parents decided that our computer should have a dedicated phone line. I invited Pete and other local A&E people to call my board. It exploded. Pete and his friends were prolific talkers, and my board became their go-to hang out. The message boards always had fresh content.
One phone line. That means if someone is on my bulletin board, they’re connected to my phone line. It meant if someone else wanted to call my board while someone else was connected, they would get a busy signal. I also had to be careful about calling other bulletin boards, because if I called too many, no one would be able to get onto mine.
I didn’t mind slowing down checking in at other bulletin boards. My parents were less than thrilled about my habit. I had racked up expensive phone bills because I didn’t understand that just because a phone number had the same area code, the phone company still charged by the minute.
The best part of running your own board was that you could talk to the people that called in in real time. Why write long winded messages on the forum when I could just chat with a person in real time? And the games… I installed what are called Door Games, where people could call in and play a game. Multiplayer games were asynchronous. I could play with everyone.
The more that I explored the world of BBSes, the more I was drawn to the art that people used to advertise and customize their users’ experiences. A few BBSes that I called had artpacks that could be downloaded. The art was called ANSI. 80 by 25 characters and a 16 color palette.
ANSI artists formed groups and released packs of art monthly. Groups also had couriers, or people that would call as many bulletin boards as they could and upload their group’s latest pack. There were also ASCII artists that made art with a smaller character set and only used the default gray text color.
When I started making ANSI, I was pretty terrible. I wanted to get other artists to make art for my BBS, and that’s when I joined the scene. By this time, I had ditched Prodigy. The World Wide Web was much more interesting than what the walled garden of Prodigy or AOL had to offer. Our family switched to an internet provider called Digital Odyssey. Now we just connected straight to the internet. I learned about the channel where artists would hang out on IRC. I started making a lot of friends.
I practiced my craft, switching over to ASCII. I started a terrible group with a friend from my BBS. We tried to convince artists better than us to join our group. We actually snagged one that was on the rise. At some point, I became a regular on the IRC channel. It was kind of like Cheers, the TV Show Bar where everyone knows your name. You’d join the channel, greet your friends, and idle a bit while you did other things on your computer. I was invited to other groups and we had our own channels that we hung out in.
We enjoyed hijinx. We trolled people, although I didn’t understand it as trolling at the time. The people we trolled probably weren’t aware of the term at the time. It was just kids being stupid. I say kids because I pretty much assumed everyone else in the scene was a kid. A few people would give clues to their age, but it was safe to assume that if you were talking to someone on IRC in our channels, you were somewhere between 13 and 30. By this time, I was 15.
While I identified as part of the ANSI scene, there was a lot of crossover. The people that maintained our channel were hackers. Hackers, and more specifically crackers, had ties to artists because they wanted the bulletin boards that distributed their releases to look as awesome as possible.
By the way, when I say cracker, I’m talking about a person that finds vulnerabilities in software that allow the user to bypass licensing. Crackers find ways to make expensive software free. Cracked software is referred to as warez. Crackers work together in what are referred to as warez groups.
So at some point, I became an insider. Bulletin boards came in 3 flavors: public, semi public, and private. That bulletin board that I started? It was public. Anyone could create an account and have access to everything. Semi public bulletin boards had elite access, that gave certain people access to two things you couldn’t find elsewhere, mainly warez. Private bulletin boards only advertised on other private bulletin boards. Their numbers were secret and often required passwords just to create an account.
By this time, I had a faster modem. It was 28,800 bits per second. Still slow by today’s standards but better than 2400. On local bulletin boards, the operators began granting me elite status, giving me access to warez. On the internet, I had access to zero day FTP sites with leech access.
0 day? Leech? What? When almost everyone is using a phone line to transfer files, time is valuable. A leech is someone that only takes and never gives. Most elite boards implemented ratios. For every 2 files you download, you need to upload 1. While being called a leech is a bad thing, being given leech access is an insanely valuable gift. Zero Day refers to how old the cracked software is. Zero day means just released.
So here I am, a kid in high school, with access to Windows 95 before Windows 95 was even released. When I was online, I felt powerful. Offline, not so much. At the same time I was riding high on elite group affiliations, I was jumped at school.
This is the world that I was part of when I was growing up. It was the 1990s.