Relics of the lost bulletin-board tribes
Text files preserve some of the vivacity of old-fashioned online conversation. Will Web-based discussions vanish from the historical record?
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Jan. 22, 2002 | For digital preservationists bent on rescuing relics of early online culture, the holy grail isn't an e-Rosetta Stone or some Web Pharaoh's tomb. It's a simple ASCII text file like this one, which offers practical advice on handling an encounter with a UFO.
"Do not stand under a hovering UFO at low altitude. There is a possibility of radiation danger," counsels the undated document, "The Following are Common Sense Warnings for Dealing with a UFO."
The file is just one of the 43,000 pieces of digital ephemera captured on textfiles.com, one of the Web's largest repositories of artifacts of early bulletin-board culture. Other useful treasures preserved on the site: "How to Get Really Soaring High on Gatorade" and "How to Become an Unsuccessful, Burned-Out SysOp."
In December 2001, when Google posted the archives of Usenet dating back to 1981, the recovery of the old postings touched off a misty-eyed nostalgia-fest about what it was like to be online way back in the day. But to grizzled geeks like Jason Scott, 31, who got online at age 11, Usenet wasn't the only way to get connected back in the early '80s.
While Usenet was populated by professional computer scientists and systems administrators at businesses and universities, freewheeling dial-up bulletin boards, or BBSes, were open to every yahoo with a modem. "Usenet was the intelligent place," says Scott, giving his online handle, not his real name. "You stepped into it like a fine restaurant. BBSs were the fast food. They were marketed to anybody who could afford a modem. There was a different feel to them," says Scott, who started a BBS called the Works in Chappaqua, N.Y., when he was 17.
Today, Scott is an Internet archivist of BBS culture: He maintains textfiles.com, which attempts to capture the tens of thousands of files on every imaginable subject that BBS denizens passed around to each other over the past couple of decades.
"There's an enormous amount lost, but there is an interesting amount saved. A lot of these files came from the mulch of the '70s," says Scott, who currently has another 103,000 text files in his in box sent in by old BBS-hands waiting to be sorted and added to the site. He also maintains a canonical list of some 96,000 BBSs with names like Electronic Toilet and Cyclops Realm. The list includes the years the bulletin boards existed and even the phone numbers dialed to access them. Scott's next project: a monster documentary film about BBS culture, for which he's lined up some 200 interviews in 20 states and four Canadian provinces beginning this year.
As obsessive as Scott's one-man-band historical preservation efforts are, he can't bring back everything from those tens of thousands of bulletin boards that are no longer online. The early bulletin boards were essentially separate dial-up islands, which eventually became able to share files through a system called FidoNet. The preservation of this slice of digital culture depends on whether tens of thousands of one-time BBS operators happened to keep backups, and whether those old-timers can be bothered to contribute them to an archive.
The millions of postings on Usenet were harder to lose because there were simply more copies: Its technical structure demanded that Usenet propagate files across many servers around the Net, so today, approximately 95 percent of all the messages ever posted on Usenet survive on the Web in the Google archive. BBSs, by contrast, were discrete systems; though individual files might have made the rounds from one BBS to another, each one's contents was essentially unique.
The loss of all that BBS talk and file-swapping should be a lesson to anyone wondering what will happen to all the digital files and conversations that are taking place today on the Web. Because the Web's repositories for discussion have more in common with the old BBSs than they do with Usenet. For that reason, it's unlikely we'll ever have an archive of today's Web conversation to rival the celebrated one of the Google Usenet archive.
Next page: "Having one copy is the wrong answer -- this is not going in the right direction"
