High School Chat
I would say the earliest exposure I had to what would become the internet is when I was attending Luck Public High School in the late 1970s. The science teacher brought in a timeshare computer terminal and put it into a soundproof room in the library. Besides using it to learn computer programming, there was a chat program that could send
messages back and forth between other public high schools in Wisconsin on the same network. What a cheap thrill for high school boys to chit-chat with girls from another town! Make note that output was printed on paper; there was no monitor.
Discovering the BBS
In the early 1980s, I worked for a company that had a 1200 baud Hayes SmartModem in the office. It was used for business, but I made a deal with the owner that I could use it after work hours for my own geek purposes. I learned there were sites where you can dial in called Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). You could download games and participate in discussion forums. Using an IBM PC, I ran an “interpreted BASIC” program called PCTalk that took care of cataloging a list of BBS sites, doing the modem connection and making it easy to download files. In those days, the transport mechanism was XMODEM, followed by YMODEM, and then ZMODEM. Each version downloaded files faster because of better compression techniques.
FidoNet Forums and ‘EmptyFest’
A man named Tom Jennings came up with software called FidoNet that allowed many BBS systems to network together as nodes. This was the beginning of what I consider the start of the known Internet. I had made friends with other on FidoNet that lived in the Detroit, Michigan area. One of them,Tony Bauman, ran a BBS out of his house. I got to know him very well. He asked me to administer some of the forums he was running at his site. Over time, people who participated in the forum decided to meet in person. For some reason, we called them EmptyFests. We joked as if we were too busy to attend, but everyone showed up on the day of the event. We were a very eclectic group. One time we met at the Tom Colby home. The;y had two girls they were home-schooling. I had never heard of that before. I traded computer games with a boy, Chip Joyce, who was still in high school. One day, I, a young man in my 20s, showed up at his house and met his mother. She made us sandwiches to eat while to swapped software and games. It was all innocent, but I can imagine it would be questionable behavior in these days! One time we held an EmptyFest at the home of a true hacker. I was overwhelmed with how many 5 1/4″ floppy disks were swapped that day! I even brought a girlfriend to an EmptyFest help at a park during the summer. So many of the single geeks were jealous!
And Then?
In 1988, I moved from Detroit, Michigan to St. Louis, Missouri. I started to use faster modems, such as the U. S. Robotics 9600 baud. I got a Compu-Serve account and eventually created my own personal web sites. I went from analog modems to digital ISDN lines and today, DSL through AT&T. But the most fun I had and best memories I forged were during my days being part of the start of social media and the beginnings of the internet while living in Detroit. I would still have the source code of PCTalk.bas if the 5 1/4″ floppy disk I saved it on did not crap out in the early 1990s.
