My secret life as an 11-year-old BBS sysop (2022)

Ah, this brought a lot of memories back. I remember meeting the sysop of "Alternate Reality" because I needed an ISA IDE interface board, and he had one "somewhere" he said. I was a teen, 15 or 16, and when I went to his house I met a slovenly man in his 20's or 30's ("old" to then me) and he had the goods, and I paid him.

Later on I got into a 'l33t' BBS through a guy at work and I got the first 28.8k modem of anybody I knew, from him. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure it fell off a truck at some point before I got it.

And then there was the time I started my own BBS. The local paper (1995ish) published a technology column every Monday, and I wrote in about my BBS. I got one call from that, from somebody who figured out that they'd mixed up the last two numbers. sigh.

I never BBS'd after that, but the early days of Prodigy, AOL, and BBS's set me up for much of who I am and what I still do to this day.

For me being a bbs sysop is how I connected with the local tech community. Some of them were criminals, others were just other kids and teens. Back then there weren't many ways to find like-minded nerds if you were not in college, so I took what I could get.

I ran a BBS and Fidonet node (2:5077/7) from 1994 till 2001, I was 17 when I started. At that time I worked as an operator at local "computer centre" (вычислительный центр) and used their resources, namely multilined (8 lines) phone line, 8 US Robotics Courier modems and dedicated 386 PC. It ran OS/2, Binkley/2 mailer and Maximus/2 BBS. Also this box served as local file server (IBM LAN Server) and performed some remote file sharing for "work" purposes, to justify the need for BBS. :)

There were other BBSs in the area, but mine appeared to be the largest. I recall, there were 2000+ users which was quite a lot for the area. Some of them are still my good friends.

By running BBS, I learned telecom technology, TCP/IP and networking. I became sysadmin and worked for local ISPs, then as network architect and system/network software developer.

One of the impediments to BBS'ing was the extraordinarily high cost of connection. Luckily I go early access to arpanet, uucp, and bitnet as a middle school and high school student in the 80s.

AT&T phone rates were outrageously high in the 80s and early 90s. In todays money, calling a non-local BBS would cost ~20$ / hr. Personally I could not afford and my parents would have been aghast.

I think some got involved in the phreaking and hacking scene because of the usurious rates.

Previous Discussion from 12/05/22 (95 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33856942

shout out to ComputorEdge magazine, source of local BBS numbers when i was a kid. i rarely dialed a local prefix that wasn't toll-free, but man, the couple times that i did it sucked.

It’s crazy to me how many of us were sysops around age 11-13. I was also one of them. Great memories.

This reminded me why I build websites as a hobby today...

I once ran a WWIV BBS for a couple-three years.

My cousin got me started: We'd been on a camping trip a few hours away, and he spent the whole way back telling me all about how amazing BBSs were, and also how cool it was to play games like Trade Wars 2002 amongst other real people.

I liked computers, and I liked reading computer magazines, and I knew of things like Compuserve, but prior to that I didn't really know anything about how BBSs worked or that we had any that were local to us.

My 12th birthday was going to happen in a few weeks, so I politely requested a thing called a "modem" and...that actually happened. A 2400BPS internal ISA card that was around $100 at the local indy computer shop.

So I called my cousin up and he was kind of a dick. His original energy was gone, and it seemed that the BBS scene he was raving about wasn't really a thing he wanted to help me with, but he did give me one BBS phone number to get started with.

And from that singular BBS, I learned that we had about 5 BBSs in the local calling area.

And it was great. 12-year-old me met some cool people (many of whom are still good friends), and it was a lot of fun hanging out, downloading software, and sometimes using the message forums.

And it was also cool because my parents soon saw a need to get me my own phone line -- probably so my older sisters would stop being hateful about me using the regular phone line.

Except: It also sucked. Most of these boards were standalone, and I wanted more than that.

So, armed with the only computer I had (a 10MHz XT clone) and a phone line, I downloaded a copy of WWIV and made it work.

I got networked message subs working, so people from far-away places could have conversations through my own little BBS. I got my own door games (like my own copy of TW2002) working. I chatted with and met all kinds of new people, only one or two of whom ever got convicted of child molestation.

Weird times. And, generally, good times -- man, it was a lot of fun being a young sysop.

(And I won't drop a bomb like that without a description. My BBS's users were generally at least a decade older than I was. Maybe some of them saw that as an advantage. I met a bunch of them, and treated them all the same: We'd usually hang out, talk shop, and trade hardware and software. Sometimes I'd help them with their computer issues, and sometimes they'd help me with mine. Sometimes we'd chat about music or movies. It always seemed very platonic.

It wasn't until I became a lot older that I realized that some of my BBS users were treating me differently than my other users were; that some of them were very forthcoming with small unexpected gifts that weren't based on my actual BBS needs, for instance.

Because of my particular bent of autism, I soundly rejected all of these advances just as easily as I did when I had an age-appropriate college-girl girlfriend try to give me a key to her apartment a decade or so later (where I'd been spending about exactly as much time as I should have been spending, which was most of my time):

I mean, I remember a conversation that went something like this with that girlfriend, in her apartment: "What? Why do I need a key to your place? Listen, if I want to stop by I'll just stop by -- and if you're not home, then I'll try to call you on your cell phone or something. It's OK. I don't need this key -- why would I come over if you're not even home? But thanks? I think? Here, you look confused; why don't you just keep this key as a spare for yourself?" (And then I handed the key back for the last time, because I just didn't understand the concept of the thing she was literally trying to convey. She seemed upset, and I didn't understand why, but she got over it.)

And a lot of my BBS friends -- of all ages -- would stop by unannounced. It was the 90s; it wasn't always a thing to call first and texting didn't exist. It was normal to just show up at someone's house.

But the difference between the BBS friends who are still (30+ years later) and the BBS friends who went to prison is simple:

The BBS friends who are still friends today were real people, and we'd help eachother out with stuff just like we still do 30 years hence. Sometimes it'd be at their place or my place, but we just treated eachother as peers. We'd do things like go check on our other friends and run errands. These peers haven't ever come to me with unexpected gifts unless it was some windfall of disused hardware from an upgrade that we'd probably been planning for weeks or months. Sometimes, we'd get some food together or share a meal if it was time to eat, but that's not too dissimilar from how we still act together today. They treated me as a peer, and I them as a peer, despite the age gap. Nothing weird has ever happened with these folks. Not even a little bit.

But some BBS "friends" who sometimes stopped by were not real people: They never wanted anything from me, it didn't seem -- all they wanted to do was give me gifts, and it was never mutual. It was only sometimes even BBS- or computer- related. They'd show up with music on CD (which was not cheap), and be all like "Oh, you like it? Just go ahead and keep it." They'd bring gift certificates for ice cream or something. One time, a guy shoved a semi-proper porn magazine between ("Shaved", circa 1992 or 1993) in between the mattresses of my bed while I wasn't watching, which I found weeks later.

I rejected these gifts just because I did not earn these gifts: While I had no problem trading some computer work for a carton of Camel Filters at age 13, I definitely wasn't going to take a carton of Camels that I did not earn. My real-people BBS users did ever not give me anything unless it was obvious they owed me something, and the weird-fucker BBS users never wanted to do anything than give me gifts.

So, like that girlfriend's apartment key: I wasn't owed that key. It didn't feel mutual. I wasn't owed a key to her place, and I wasn't owed any free fucking ice cream or CDs or computer gear from random old men, either -- they all seemed like out-of-band constructs that should be avoided.

Rejected, and rejected.

(And not that I'm bitter or anything, Micheal; I just want to be fair. If you ever get out of prison for all of those six-year-old boys you were so fond of, I'd like to have one singular, lasting chat about that porn you left under my bed.)