Secure Immaturity

Retrogasmic is a monthly column designed to educate you about all-but-forgotten geeky shit and why you should care about it today.

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Gather and listen, for now I will drink from the deep archives and utter the tale of how I came to walk among the tone talkers. I did not always keep the ASCII code and once the command prompt was merely a pixelized arrowhead.

As a child of seven summers, I would entreat my father to accompany him to the Apple store. A warm, sacred place, the store smelled of plastic and circuitry, but I called it magic and the aroma has never since failed to evoke thoughts of a new journey. Here I could stroke the keys of the wedge-shaped machines, beige but for the rainbow-colored Apple logo. Rows of computers, each displaying a new astonishment on their screen. In those days one had to pilgrimage to the Apple store to see these wonders. Perhaps there were magazines which recounted the features of the Apple II+, but to me such crude substitutes were as etchings of the moon. One had to be present before the glowing screen to hear its arcane promise, to feel the electric caress of data.

One day, as Excalibur came to Arthur, the Apple II+ came to me. To say that my father merely purchased a computer and brought it home would belittle the portentousness of that day when a path opened before me. I looked at the angled, almost altar-like shape and knew I had found my instrument. I knew that my fingers would learn mastery of those keys and no door would ever remain shut to me.

I devoted myself to studying its ways. I pored over every provided manual and inserted every floppy disk to know its contents. Making quick work of these, I sought out thicker tomes from the library. Soon I could speak BASIC and the true melding began. I spent hours entering program code, line by line, from books or magazines. As with most magic, the process demanded patience, faith and often luck. Typing RUN would many times result in a SYNTAX ERROR and an ensuing scrutiny of the code. But eventually the computer yielded to my efforts and a game appeared on screen, joy wrested from a series of arcane logical statements.

Time passed and my mastery grew, as did the popularity of home computers. I would visit the stores at the mall, replacing the bland demos with whimsical programs to interview potential buyers. At a friend’s slumber party I idly tapped out a short game on his Apple 2c. Another friend, eyebrows quizzical, asked me, “What are you doing?” I realized he did not mean “What kind of program are you writing?” or “Why are you using GOTO instead of GOSUB?”, but rather “Why are you pushing those buttons and making nonsensical phrases show up on that TV?” I realized that I was alone with my knowledge, the way he who understands the language of snakes is alone.

Eventually it was not so. The computers appeared in other homes and schools. I would gather with others who could speak to the machines and we would exchange electronic entertainment of questionable legality. We met in libraries, school gymnasiums, our parents’ offices, and our basements to swap our latest finds, spreading the beautiful code from hand to hand. Popular games created volatile currencies, and one had to move copies of King’s Quest as quickly as possible before the market saturated. Computer culture was communal. Sharing data involved face to face meetings. Knowledge passed by speaking it. All programs were wedded to a specific brand of computer, so certain experiences had to be sought out, often for the first and only time.

One day the modem appeared. Not an old model with a primitive acoustic coupler. No, this box mainlined the dial tone. A 300 baud modem, 73,000 times slower than my current connection. If you scoff at such speeds then you may as well scoff at the height of Neil Armstrong’s vertical leap, for this was my generation’s footprint on the moon. It was not accompanied by the sound of a man’s voice broadcast to thousands of television sets. It was the sound of alien warbling emanating from a small box of blinking lights as a previously invisible country lit up on our world map.

Suddenly, I was out there. The modem’s susurrus of static and bright electric bleats became a song I knew by heart. Phone numbers were the new currency and I collected all I could. In this new land there were no friendly-sounding web addresses. I would load up my terminal program, a crude raft of a front end, and paddle out into those uncertain waters with a hand scrawled list of ten digit numbers. I sought to connect to a server or a bulletin board system (BBS, in the parlance of the day). The most popular servers often presented a busy signal and one had to attempt again later, at odd hours, while the less ambitious slept.

Imagine if you were the only person in the world who could read this article at this moment. Anyone else attempting to load this web site would get an error message. A BBS could only handle as many users at a time as it had phone lines, which was most often one. I would log on to a site, watch as the menu slowly scrolled into view. I explored each possible option. I found my way into discussion forums, read the conversations of strangers, regardless of the subject. Other servers had news. News that wasn’t in a newspaper or on the television!

BBSes grew in sophistication and capacity. Phone lines were added. Now I could type in a chat box with another person who was connected to the same server. We passed electronic notes back and forth, in staggered bursts as typing speed and bandwidth would allow. Inspired by truckers and HAM radio operators, we adopted exotic handles like “DungeonMaster” or “LouCypher”. I often went by “Hawkmoon” or “Grey Death”. Certain names gained familiarity/notoriety across different boards. Drunk with this quasi-anonymity, personas appropriate to our handle yet bearing little resemblance to our actual demeanors bloomed effortlessly.

Clusters of walled gardens appeared, BBSes each offering something unique. Rising amidst the basement operations of the casual sysops were the fortresses of CompuServe and Delphi. These commercial services offered exclusive content and interaction with other users on a much larger scale, for a monthly fee, of course.

Like local saloons, certain boards became favored hangouts. For me, this BBS was called The Airliner, run by the aptly named “The Pilot.” The Airliner catered to role-players, offering up forum-based games of Dungeons & Dragons, Shadowrun and others. Here I rose from the rank of normal user/player through to the privileged access of gamemaster. Eventually I was upgraded to Co-Sysop status, the penultimate rank of the bulletin board world. Of all my BBS experiences, participating on The Airliner was unique as we also met in real life to socialize and game. Since the BBS was bound to a particular phone number in a particular area code, most of the users were local. Meeting face to face gave us accountability for our online interactions. One was less likely to lay down the smack talk knowing you might have to back it up in person.

It would not be until I attended college that I would encounter the Internet proper. But it was not via TELNET or GOPHER or FTP. It was through email. Up until this point, the notion of sending a message to an individual regardless of what BBS they were on, regardless of how they accessed the online world, did not exist. Handles and user names were limited to specific servers. My first email address was my official designation of Internet citizenship, a calling card that was mine alone. My email address granted me the privilege to participate in dialogues on a global level. There was a gravity to it.

The Internet was still an untamed frontier and the thrill of discovering new sources of information is something I cannot compare to the multi-tiered maze of my Firefox bookmarks menu. It was not better and it certainly was not simpler, but there was an appreciation of the journey, a mastery of tools and customs, and a sense of wonder which I feel is missing from my modern online life. The Internet felt more like a place to explore in a nearly tangible way rather than a “series of tubes” which delivers things to me through a spigot. There were even travel guides for explorers such as myself. I purchased a book which organized all of the useful sites on the Internet into categories, offering tips and recommendations on what to do and see at each one. Yes, at one time, the entire Internet fit into a single book. One of the appendices gave a brief overview of an experimental information distribution platform called the World Wide Web.

Apparently it had pictures.

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