The Modem World
Kevin Driscoll
- 17 minutes read - 3569 wordsAuthor: Kevin Driscoll
Rating: ★★★★
I heard a wonderful interview of Driscoll on “the Advent of Computing” podcast talking about Minitel, the French pre-web computer information service. He seemed to be doing the anthropology and electronic archaeology to help understand the early history of the connected age and so I picked up this book.
Driscoll’s fundamental insight is this:
[On BBS’] [y]ou were visiting a real place with real people, personality, and vibe. The web of 1994, by contrast, felt less like a place than a thing.
That’s right! The early web felt very much like an endless spinning magazine rack of brochures. Or maybe more like the rack of nearby tourist sight brochures that you’d find in the lobby of a Denny’s in Sacramento off of I-80.
But around us today on the internet, it feels like it’s always been social. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok all keep trying to bind people together in networks of content exchange. This outcome feels quite surprising given that the web started with a spinner rack of brochures. What made it social? What sort of DNA-scrambling nanobot came into the web and made it social?
Driscoll identifies this sea change’s locus as when BBS culture came onto the internet via:
- BBS users adopting web-based applications
- BBS SysOps receiving internet data services at BBS'
- BBS SysOps realizing their skillset would be the premiere skill portfolio for launching a nascent category of business: Internet Service Provider (ISP)
Writes Driscolll:
The standard folklore can tell us why our smartphones run TCP/IP, but it can’t tell us why we carry them. The histories we know aren’t wrong. They are incomplete.
It’s a well-researched and true to my lived experience story that unites CB-ing, homebrew computer clubs, early BBS, home publishing, etc. as the cultural precursors to the social web or social phone apps.
{
"title": "The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media",
"author": "Kevin Driscoll",
"highlightCount": 97,
"noteCount": 12,
"annotations": [
{
"highlight": "You were visiting a real place with real people, personality, and vibe. The web of 1994, by contrast, felt less like a place than a thing.",
"location": 48,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The modem world began in the late 1970s. Amateur technologists appropriated the residential telephone network as an infrastructure for data communications, trading electronic files and messages through circuits originally",
"location": 74,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "BBSs were local affairs, serving small numbers of people living in relative proximity. The administrators, known as “system operators” or “sysops,” were responsible for maintaining the tech, paying the bills, setting the rules, and resolving disputes. Regular users and sysops came to know each other personally, often meeting up to tinker with computers, trade software, party, or just hang out.",
"location": 82,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "each BBS represented an idiosyncratic dream of what cyberspace could be, a glimpse of the future written in code and accessible from your local telephone jack.",
"location": 94,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Like the notion of “the movies,” the internet is an invention of our social imagination, as much an idea or a feeling as a technology.",
"location": 107,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Longtime internet advocates such as Ed Krol, author of The Whole Internet: User’s Guide & Catalog, framed their microhistories as a bulwark against the ahistorical rush of the dot-com boom: “To most people, the Internet seems to have sprung fully formed on the world some time after 1990. That is not the case.”",
"location": 176,
"annotation": "It was from this book that *I* learned to use the nascent internet in @ 1993"
},
{
"highlight": "The Cold War “survivability” narrative has been the best-known story in internet history since the 1990s. Yet the focus on military strategy rankled some of those who were involved in the early internet. In 1996, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, by the journalists Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, gave voice to former ARPANET engineers who felt misunderstood.",
"location": 186,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "any regard for the potential military use of the network was a bureaucratic formality, required for the continuation of ARPA funding but not a meaningful influence on the research.",
"location": 192,
"annotation": "a nice nod to the anarchist/hippie roots behind SF bay area mindset: hippies, but also interested in binary code. The bomb-droppers needed the acid-droppers to build their networks, but in an abbie hoffman style culture-jam, the hippies were going to use the military-industrialists’ network to swap weed growing tips."
},
{
"highlight": "The standard folklore can tell us why our smartphones run TCP/IP, but it can’t tell us why we carry them. The histories we know aren’t wrong. They are incomplete.",
"location": 216,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The internet protocols were not designed for single-user PCs. Microsoft did not release an official version of TCP/IP until 1994.42",
"location": 219,
"annotation": "thus you were either dialing up for shell access or dialing up to a BBS. True to my experience."
},
{
"highlight": "the modem became a technology of distinction among computer enthusiasts of the 1980s. Modem owners knew themselves as a separate class of computer users, capable of traversing the emerging byways of cyberspace.",
"location": 226,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Yet, in the 1980s, small-scale PCs offered a new model of computing. Instead of an electronic brain to power a whole organization, firms like Apple and Microsoft marketed the PC as a single-user device. No longer displacing human beings, the personal computer was sold as a tool to empower individuals, foster creativity, and increase productivity.",
"location": 236,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the transition from mainframes to personal computers through two overlapping technical cultures of the 1960s and 1970s, time-sharing and hobby computing.",
"location": 239,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The modem world developed at the crossroads of these two cultures. Hosted on home-built micros and off-the-shelf PCs, the first bulletin board systems combined the cooperative sensibility of time-sharing with the accessible infrastructure of microcomputing.",
"location": 266,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Ward Christensen and Randy Suess created the Computerized Bulletin Board System, or CBBS,",
"location": 273,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "CBBS was the archetypal dial-up BBS.",
"location": 282,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "It was the first time that Hollywood had depicted computers and computer networks as tools of exploration, play, personal identity,",
"location": 308,
"annotation": "Wargames"
},
{
"highlight": "what did the middle-aged hobbyists and teen newcomers have to say to each other?",
"location": 310,
"annotation": "In my ezperience, plenty"
},
{
"highlight": "The founding of CBBS marked the beginning of the “modem world,” a period of time from roughly 1978 to 1998, during which the use of computers for communication remained a niche, peripheral activity in the broader culture of personal computing.",
"location": 624,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "must have seemed downright simple. Yet CBBS struck the right balance of accessibility and difficulty to inspire readers to break out their soldering irons.",
"location": 637,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Further development of the system was driven by the pleasure of technical mastery and pride of craftsmanship common to so many men’s hobbies of the US postwar period.",
"location": 653,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Between 1974 and 1976, 73 magazine ran a series of articles on the fundamentals of computer science: number systems, binary arithmetic, discrete logic, serial communications, and memory addressing.81 Behind the scenes, Wayne Green, editor of 73, was hard at work on a new magazine dedicated to the computer hobby: Byte.",
"location": 936,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Radio hobbyists saw the microcomputer as a device for communication, rather than information processing or automation.",
"location": 977,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "By incorporating microcomputer technology into their hobby, radio amateurs anticipated the diffusion of computers across the field of telecommunications.",
"location": 977,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Amateur radio enthusiasts were uniquely suited to the technical challenges of computer-mediated communication.",
"location": 983,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "As they continued to tinker with Fido and call each other’s boards, they began to discuss a new feature that would allow one Fido to automatically place a call to another Fido, quickly exchange new messages or files, and hang up.",
"location": 1059,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Overnight, every board running Fido had been transformed into an addressable node in an autonomous, grassroots messaging network.",
"location": 1079,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "While professional adults could afford to joke about the cost of getting online, similar usage by a teenager could result in significant intrafamily conflict.",
"location": 1103,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Instead of point-to-point networking, a single board would act as a gateway into the area code and redistribute mail locally. In this “store-and-forward” arrangement,",
"location": 1151,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "he characterized his refusal to exercise central control as an expression of his politics—radical, anarchist, queer, punk. Jennings regarded the decentralization of the preexisting modem world as a virtue:",
"location": 1182,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "With a copy of Fido, any two sysops could start a new network in parallel to, in competition with, or in defiance of the original.",
"location": 1187,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "FidoNet was a collective, participatory project, and Fido sysops were already beginning to identify with the network.",
"location": 1199,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "After two years and dozens of updates, Jennings was burning out.",
"location": 1307,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Compiled versions of Fido BBS were freely available for a range of platforms—FIDO_IBM.EXE, FIDO_DEC.EXE, and so on—but the source code was not.",
"location": 1329,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the future of FidoNet depended on its protocol.",
"location": 1342,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Wagner, a gay man,",
"location": 1372,
"annotation": "Turing, Jennings here, Wagner: no internet without gay culture"
},
{
"highlight": "The FidoNet standards were written by people who paid their own telephone bills.",
"location": 1408,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The defining feature of Echomail is the topical conference, or “echo.”",
"location": 1453,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "those who came seeking files were also exposed to the communication and community functions of BBS networks. Many file seekers became active participants in the messaging side of their local boards.",
"location": 1688,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Yet it was not access to other machines but access to other people that ultimately drove the adoption of telephone modems among microcomputer owners.",
"location": 1734,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The shortcomings of the textfile phenomenon—notably, the spread of racist conspiracy theories and the absence of women’s voices—reflect fundamental problems in US cyberculture that would reappear on a much larger scale in the decades to come. It should be instructive that the only systems to counter these biases involved active, hands-on moderation.",
"location": 1904,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "For approximately fifteen years, shareware was the dominant business model of the modem world,",
"location": 2035,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the defection of professional programmers from corporate positions to self-employment illustrates how the organization of the software industry was upset by microcomputing.",
"location": 2061,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Amateurs and professionals alike saw an opportunity to abandon conventional employment in favor of work that served the computing community.",
"location": 2062,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Doom was the first game designed from the ground up for the norms and values of the modem world.",
"location": 2165,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "To the editors’ surprise, seven of the top ten were categorized as “socially oriented” systems.",
"location": 2410,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“BBSland is not an information utility,” enthused Hakala; it is about “people communicating with people.”",
"location": 2415,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "In retrospect, the use of BBSs for community and communication might seem obvious.",
"location": 2417,
"annotation": "Loop back to start, the web ws not similarly social"
},
{
"highlight": "Modemers were in broad agreement that something new and important was happening, but they imagined wildly different futures for these grassroots systems.",
"location": 2449,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Keith Wade of New York City, a self-proclaimed “lover of freedom,” saw the promise of radical social change and described BBSs as “five hundred dollar anarchy machines.”",
"location": 2452,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "In the punctuated temporality of BBSing, relationships developed gradually over weeks, months, and years of asynchronous written communication. Communities did not snap into existence, fully formed, when a BBS came online. They required care and continuity on the part of BBS users and administrators. In the language of community moderators, gardening metaphors were common. Communities “grow” and require “tending.”",
"location": 2459,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Unlike a nation-state, belonging to a community is a matter of social classification rather than citizenship or taxation.",
"location": 2467,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "You may not even think of yourself as a member of a particular community until someone else hails you as one.",
"location": 2468,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "One explanation for the expanded meaning of community is that telecommunications media—from postcards to text messages—enable people to experience a sense of communion and affiliation with people living in faraway places.",
"location": 2475,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Yet falling barriers to participation and word of mouth spread awareness of the modem world among American computer owners, and by the early 1990s, millions of people were coming online specifically in search of community.",
"location": 2492,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Rheingold cautioned that state surveillance, corporate greed, or regulatory overreach could easily squash the utopian potential of the virtual communities he described.",
"location": 2505,
"annotation": "Didn't See that return of fascism eh?"
},
{
"highlight": "Despite the influence of bulletin board systems on the conceptualization of “virtual community,” relatively little systematic research was conducted on BBS communities during their heyday.",
"location": 2518,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the virtual communities that developed around dial-up BBSs were shaped by a different set of social, technical, and economic constraints from their counterparts on the internet.",
"location": 2522,
"annotation": "Versus Usenet or IRC. Relatively privileged"
},
{
"highlight": "BBS users were real people in real places.",
"location": 2526,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "individual BBS operators enjoyed near-total control over the governance of their systems.28 With the exception of pornography and piracy, which could attract the attention of state authorities, most BBSs existed in a state of benign neglect.",
"location": 2536,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The freedom to leave—so unusual in today’s social media—provided a sense of mutual accountability and identification between BBS users and sysops.",
"location": 2560,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Through this ongoing care work, sysops came to identify with their BBSs. “Sysoping” became a lifestyle.38 It was the first thing they did in the morning and the last thing at night.39",
"location": 2586,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "BBS sysops pioneered the difficult practice of community moderation.",
"location": 2600,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Bob Metcalfe observed that sysops were among the only specialists in the “art” of community building.",
"location": 2616,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“You have your finger on the pulse of the next wave of human progress,” enthused one anonymous sysop. “You’re one of the people making it happen.”",
"location": 2619,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the extent to which the intellectual discussions cherished by journalists and futurists were supported financially by the reliable subscription fees of a much larger population of Grateful Dead fans.",
"location": 2630,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "O’Nan recalls that in the 1980s, women experimenting with BBSs frequently experienced harassment from the men they encountered online.",
"location": 2759,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the TARDIS reached back much more clearly to the long tradition of amateur telecommunications. Whereas the founders of The WELL endeavored to create a profitable worldwide conferencing system,",
"location": 2824,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The story of The WELL stands alone.",
"location": 2828,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "It is hard to imagine The WELL existing anywhere other than the Bay Area, and it is hard to imagine that the Bay Area would not have hosted a system like The WELL—of course those hippies would have built a weird cybercommune!",
"location": 2830,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Communities defined by sexual interest and gender identity provide exemplary cases for thinking about the tactical use of community BBSs.",
"location": 2841,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The tacit acceptance of gender play on boards like Lifestyle Online reflected a broader acceptance of queer life across BBS culture.",
"location": 2929,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "In a 1995 guide to modeming, Gary Wolf and Michael Stein avoided characterizing queer BBSs as either hookup sites or information repositories; rather, they focused on the rich communities they encountered on these systems. Queer BBSs, they wrote, were among “the most vibrant electronic subcultures of the online world.”",
"location": 2965,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "connect directly to the board via telnet.",
"location": 3342,
"annotation": "So this Could be resurrected...."
},
{
"highlight": "the appeal of internet access wasn’t about particular files or services or communities—there were plenty of all of those in the modem world; rather, it was an infrastructural upgrade with social consequences,",
"location": 3357,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "anyone wishing to benefit from the boom eventually needed to shed their past associations with the modem world and embrace the internet.",
"location": 3367,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Too old, too weird, too commercial, and too small, BBSs were rejected, neglected, stigmatized, and forgotten.",
"location": 3371,
"annotation": "Sounds perfect to me"
},
{
"highlight": "When people accustomed to cable TV and console games heard terms like “cyberspace” and “virtual reality,” they were not imagining the blinking cursor of the UNIX shell.",
"location": 3378,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The graphical web, as seen through the Mosaic browser, represented the first internet application approaching the realization of interactive TV.",
"location": 3379,
"annotation": "Good insight: pitch of intersctive tv could only be met by a graphical internet"
},
{
"highlight": "As BBS networks converged with the internet, “BBS” became a vestigial category.",
"location": 3434,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the technical architecture of BBSs enforced a kind of local culture that was simply not a priority for the web. By the time former users realized the intimate relationships they had lost, most BBSs were already gone.",
"location": 3448,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "In cities and towns around North America, the internet was literally made of BBSs.",
"location": 3516,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "For them, the history of the social internet was one of decline: once it had been utopia; now it was just Facebook.",
"location": 3523,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Every BBS in North America operated within a cultural matrix of race and gender marking personal computers as the domain of white men.",
"location": 3542,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Though fascinating, the ARPANET story excludes the everyday culture of personal computing and grassroots internetworking.",
"location": 3551,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the histories of ARPANET and BBS networks were inter woven—socially and materially",
"location": 3552,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "As long as the modem world is excluded from the internet’s origin story, the everyday amateur will have no representation in debates over policy and technology, no opportunity to advocate for a different future.",
"location": 3565,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "This complexity was written into the architecture of the networks themselves.",
"location": 3568,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "In the days of USENET and BBSs and Minitel, cyberspace was defined by the interconnection of thousands of small-scale local systems, each with its own idiosyncratic culture and technical design, a dynamic assemblage of overlapping communication systems held together by digital duct tape and a handshake.",
"location": 3569,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The standard history of the internet jumps from ARPANET to the web, skipping right past the mess of the modem world.",
"location": 3572,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Today’s social media ecosystem functions more like the modem world of the late 1980s and early 1990s than like the open social web of the early twenty-first century. It is an archipelago of proprietary platforms, imperfectly connected at their borders. Any gateways that do exist are subject to change at a moment’s notice. Worse, users have little recourse, the platforms shirk accountability, and states are hesitant to intervene.",
"location": 3578,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Silicon Valley did not invent “social media.” Everyday people made the internet social. Time and again, users adapted networked computers for communication between people.",
"location": 3594,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Yet commercial social media failed to produce equitable, sustainable business models.",
"location": 3603,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "all major social media platforms depend on a revenue stream that has not changed for two decades: the exploitation of personal data for the purposes of advertising.",
"location": 3604,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "failure of the social media industry is in its disregard for the needs of the communities that rely on them.",
"location": 3615,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "If there is a future after Facebook, it will be led by a revival of the sysop, a reclamation of the social and economic value of community maintenance and moderation.",
"location": 3631,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the history of the modem world centers on the interests of everyday people, a reorganization of narrative resources from which to envision alternative futures.",
"location": 3636,
"annotation": ""
}
]
}