In the early 1980s, in my college days, I was totally into bulletin board systems (BBSes). Pick up the phone, dial a number you got from some sketchy list or a book, and put the phone in the cradle of the acoustic coupler. Cross your fingers and hope for a connection.
For a kid from Michigan, dialing into California BBSes was pretty exciting. Our lives were much more limited back then. Long distance was frickin' expensive. Most people tended to stay in their home state — and often, many had no real curiosity about what was happening on the other side of the country.
But _I_ was curious. I was an explorer — poking around the computers of strangers who gladly opened up their systems to others. I didn't know it yet, but the area was just becoming known as "Silicon Valley."
If you've never heard a 1980s modem connect, find a recording. Touch tones, then a screech, then a high steady tone that meant the carrier had locked. After that, if you were lucky, a menu would appear on the screen — usually in green or amber type, sometimes with a small piece of ASCII art at the top — and you'd be inside someone's bulletin board system. Their machine. Their files. Their rules.
The bulletin boards I dialed into were usually in California, and mostly in towns whose names didn't mean anything to most Michiganders yet: Palo Alto, Cupertino, Mountain View, Sunnyvale. The sysops — the people running these systems out of their houses — were engineers at Sun and Atari, and almost certainly Apple. They'd bought or built a computer, hooked it up to a modem, plugged the modem into a phone line, and opened the whole thing up to anyone who could find them. The 1983 movie War Games gave the rest of the country its first picture of what this hobby looked like: a kid in a bedroom, a modem, a list of phone numbers to dial. That was real. That was me! There were thousands of us.
I wasn't dialing local. I was paying long distance from Michigan to talk to people who would, over the next ten years, build companies whose names nearly every person on earth would know. I didn't realize that at the time. I just knew the most interesting computers in the country were in Northern California, and the people who lived around them were happy to share.
The phone bills hurt. Sometimes a sysop would let me in, then realize I was a stranger and kick me back off after a few minutes. I'd hang up, redial, hope to get further the next time. Other times I'd land in the public file area and just read — manuals, software, transcripts of conversations I hadn't been part of, technical documents organized around whatever the sysop happened to care about that month.
Then someone in the house would pick up another phone. The connection would die, the modem would scream, the screen would freeze. Another five-dollar redial. I'd yell, GET OFF THE PHONE! They'd ask what I was doing. I'd try to explain. They'd complain and walk away.
Two services took most of my time and most of my money in those years.
GEnie was the bigger one — General Electric's consumer online service, launched in 1985. I had a US Robotics modem that cost me real money and gave me real speed for the era. GEnie was where a few other geeks were starting to show up online. GEnie had forums, email, files, games. Remember: this was before the now-common practice of downloading. This was when you only had the files you had on your PC.
PAN was different. PAN was the Performing Artists Network — small, sparse, built for musicians, composers, songwriters, and lyricists. The community was a fraction the size of GEnie's. Most nights I went there to learn rather than to socialize. But it was the first place I'd ever been where the technical part of my life and the musical part of my life sat in the same room together. I'd been doing both since childhood and never seen them on the same screen.
By the end of the decade, I'd spent something like eight years and, easily, several thousand dollars in phone bills training myself in a hobby almost nobody around me understood. I had a handle. I had a set of habits. I knew how online communities formed and how they came apart. I was about to find out that this was an extremely useful thing to know.
In 1990, America Online opened its doors. I was one of the first people through them. I picked the handle @Weave, which I'd keep for the next twenty-five years. Within a few months, I'd convinced AOL to let me build a forum I'd been wanting to start since my PAN days — the AOL Composers' Coffeehouse, the first real consumer-facing place online where composers, songwriters, and lyricists could find each other and talk shop.
The decade that started with the screech of a phone connection ended with me running my own forum on AOL - the hottest online service in the country. Good times...