Before there was DSL, before there was Wi-Fi, before there was Firefox, before AOL gave it's legions of clueless users unfettered access to the internet, before, even, the eternal September, computer geeks were connecting at the community level in the dial-up scene. Occasionally ones to wax nostalgic for the good old days, we kind of miss the simplicity of those days; communicating with friends at 14.4kbps, engaging in rational, intelligent, correctly-spelled discourse...
The Twin Cities had a huge, thriving BBS community; back then, all you needed to run a BBS was a phone line and a spare computer with a modem. Advertising was by word-of-mouth, on other BBSes, and boards came and went frequently. One of the largest was called The Warehouse; the longest-running was almost certainly Benden Weyr, a Pern-themed, Anne McCaffrey-approved BBS so popular back in the days of the single 612 area code that it spawned a "sister" site, Fort Weyr; other long-lived ones were L'etoil du Nord and Bitstream Underground, which lasted close to a decade in one form or another, including on the world-wide web.
There was a seedier side, too - gay and swinger's boards, and a plethora of "Warez" and hacker/cracker/phreaker boards, the latter usually run by a group or "crew", with names like Ch33z3.
Existing, for the most part, in a virtual vacuum, completely unconnected to the internet, little remains from the heydey of BBSes, a hole in the historical record of computing felt by many. We've been mildly fortuitous in coming into possession of a couple of floppy disks of files (and philes) from the 612 BBS scene, circa 1993-1995. Some can already be found on the internet (Tron's "Timeless" audio-video demo, for example), and many of the screen-captures are relatively meaningless out of context. Too, a lot made use of ANSI and ASCII art, something we've not found a completely successful way of converting to HTML.
Posted here, though, is an October, 1994 zip file from a Minneapolis BBS called Dissent, a short-lived hacking/cracking/phreaking/anarchist BBS probably most noteworthy for it's early internet-to-BBS email gateway. When we posted this page, the only mention of this BBS online was a woefully incomplete website with a number of incomplete discussions saved from the system's later years, ca'96-'97. Dissent may not live again, but a collection of poetry and prose from it's users, entitled Eden, is available here for download. Created in October 1994, the anthology explores, somewhat obviously, the idea of "Eden", and appears to have been unavailable anywhere else, since.
The READ.ME file notes:
All matrial is copyright of the respective authors. You
are free to distribute it as you see fit, so long as you
do not make any money off of this material and give full
credit to the authors. In short, please have the courtesy
to respect our work. [sic]
One of our members was able to locate Daedalus Rising, Dissent's original SysOp, who no longer had a copy of the archive himself, but has reaffirmed our permission to redistribute the original. To comply with the terms of the READ.ME file, there are no ads on this page.
All files are plain old ASCII text files, without extensions, readable in Notepad, Wordpad, and similar editors, or with cat, more, (or less), depending on your operating system. (Back in the days of DOS, I believe the usual way to read these would have been print filename /p, if you want the authentic experience.) The "ASC" part of the filename presumably indicates "ASCII"; it's unknown if there was another version of the anthology produced, perhaps in an early Mac format.
We strongly doubt the few email addresses still work, and the phone number isn't a BBS any more.
If you've got any interesting "stuff" from Twin Cities BBSes that you'd be willing to share with us, get in touch.
Download the original anthology (40KB zip file) here, and enjoy this little piece of long-lost computing history.
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