Lately I've been watching episodes of a film called BBS: The Documentary. BBSes were a form of communication that were around long before the World Wide Web, and after studying their history and culture for the past couple months or so I must say that this era of networking was really something special. A BBS was a Bulletin Board System, basically some software that was running on someone's modem-connected computer somewhere. People could call the computer and leave messages on the board, or chat with the person who ran the BBS (known as the sysop), or play games and read textfiles and all kinds of stuff. It was extremely primitive, but it was a magical thing. A BBS wasn't just some abstract construct of cyberspace; it was an actual place. A BBS was much like a club, or a little town. People grew up together and fell in love and made friends and lost friends and were saved through BBSes. This was back when you had a handle, and you stuck to it. Nowadays nobody does handles. There was a BBS for gays and lesbians in D.C. that allowed hundreds of homosexuals to finally come together in some way and realize that they were not alone in the world. The Homestead BBS provided a meeting place for recovering substance abusers. Numerous pirate BBSes were crowded with warez d00dz uploading and downloading cracked software. People would get into gang wars over who owned what hardware. There were places that wouldn't let you in if you had a Commodore, and people would taunt you for only having 1200 baud rather than 2400. In the budding stages of the personal computer era, computers were an extension of people's personalities and thoughts and feelings, not just ubiquitous hunks of metal, and this fact was reflected thoroughly in BBS-goers' behavior. You would sometimes meet up with the people from your BBS, and you would make lifelong friends that way. Through their computers, people found a way to connect in a way much more profound than what we see now with facebook and twitter. People really got to know one another, and that mattered, deeply.

Apparently BBSing was something one did at night, always. During the day real life was wont to bother you too much, and so the peace and quiet that came with a nocturnal cycle was better appreciated. Kids would rack up massive phone bills, and grades would dive, but who cared? Participating in this new dimension of life was much more important than grades or money. If you want to get a feel for what kind of content one would encounter on BBSes, I suggest browsing textfiles.com, preferably late at night. It's the equivalent of a BBS known as "The Works", and it contained thousands and thousands of textfiles, aiming to be the most complete archive of BBS culture in the world. If you like what you see, then head over to archive.org and peruse their collection of BBS Documentary episodes and content. It's worth it - seriously. The BBS is the symbol of an online era that was much deeper and more meaningful than the superficial (in comparison) communication that takes place through the World Wide Web.

For those of you not very interested in BBSes, I have something for you anyway: a fun poem for you to investigate. Enjoy, either way!