By MICHAEL FINLEY, St. Paul Pioneer Press
In the space of a few weeks, three online institutions (in my life at least) have boarded up their doors. Their names were Illusions, Backfence, and Last Call, Jr. You probably never heard of them, much less visited them.
They were a breed of computer bulletin board system (BBS) called Citadel, a conversation-oriented board developed and maintained by Chanhassen's Hue White, Jr.
Citadel provided pathetic graphics, a flinty DOS-based interface that scared off most newcomers, and a command set that no other software in the world came close to.
But for nearly ten years, these three boards were the office water cooler for this lonely home-based businessperson: a place to gather, gossip, titter, show off, lock horns and erupt into virtual fisticuffs, or sit and rock, reminisce and chew the digital fat.
I will tell you, I already miss those places. Like Norm in Cheers, people recognized me when I entered. Besides chatting online, we often met in the real world as well, for a walk around a lake, or an impromptu outing at a Mongolian restaurant, or a party at someone's house. We were all enormous gossips, and we had wonderful nasty fun.
I asked the sysops of the boards why they were turning off the juice. Jim Moore of White Bear Lake, a.k.a. Jimbo, became disillusioned with people. His board Backfence, the first Citadel BBS I ever logged onto, was by turns quarrelsome, obnoxious, and downright silly. But the people who called there loved it. His no-holds-barred system was up and running for just about forever. Then one day, he decided enough was enough, and powered down.
Mary Herman, a.k.a. mary mary, ran an opposite kind of board, with a determinedly civil atmosphere. She billed it "a gentle place," and I think she created it to find other souls like herself, and over the years she found many score. Toward the end though, the discourse had worn thin, and the bulk of people logging on were archetypes of cluelessness, the ultimate net-sin.
"I'd come back from a business trip and find less than ten messages really worth reading," she said. "Hue, Jr. always told me when it wasn't fun anymore it was time to stop. It wasn't fun anymore."
Last Call, Jr., run by Ty Konderoga, a.k.a. Steve Hallberg, of Richfield, was up for about five years. People gathered there and told tall tales about their experiences as pilots, rail aficionados, life on the river. We played a game of online hangman there that got so heated, some of us (i.e., me) had to retire our thesauri or risk ruining friendships. One popular feature was a room in which people posted one-line descriptions of what they ate for dinner. Turns out, a lot of computer users are Lean Cuisine two-baggers. Contemplating one another's victuals gave an eerie life-likeness to the cyberproceedings.
Ty finally pulled the plug because he didn't feel the board was unique enough, and because one day, a single loutish guest made him question the point of his years of hospitality.
In case you wonder, these boards are free. Anyone can drop in, sniff around, and return if the board seems like a good match. The sysops, on the other hand, pay for the phone line, for long-distance charges, and for maintaining the computer that runs night and day, logging calls. That's a formula for long term frustration, not to mention hard disk crashes. Particularly when a subset of mannerless customers knows no greater joy than flatulating in public.
Three boards shutting down in one month doesn't seem to bother
Citadel's resident sage, Hue White, Jr. He wants his system to succeed,
yet he gives the closures his trademark shrug. (He begins most replies to
online requests for software enhancements by typing "
Boards come, he says, they stay a while, and then they go. A good example is Nowhere Man's (St. Paulite Brian LaBounty's) Citadel board Nowhere Land, which he founded years ago as a teenager, and shut down this month because, as a husband and father of two, his life had become too full for his favorite hobby.
Does this spell the death of the mom-and-pop BBS? Has the Internet had the effect of a Wal-Mart, luring customers away from the little neighborhood shops and toward the worldwide web?
Hue, Jr. doubts it. Indeed, the huge faceless global newsgroups of the Internet should make his folksy BBSes seem terribly attractive, like the sudden proliferation of coffeehouses, places where people can drop by, hang out, and bide their time.
Meanwhile, I think Ty Konderoga was wrong about his board lacking uniqueness. All small boards are unique; the question is how long their dull periods last. Some drift for days or weeks until someone thinks of something to talk about. Some do nothing but drift, or are so unsure of themselves (I am thinking of some of the younger people boards) that they never stake out a strong identity.
But the best of the best, like Illusions, Backfence, and Last Call, were like a game of pepper, where everyone took turns keeping the ball of conversation from hitting the ground. People were serious one moment, silly the next, arguing one moment, consoling the next.
And when it's over, you realize that what was keeping the ball up all those years was affection.
Michael Finley's book Techno Crazed fits perfectly into stockings, saddlebags, and pantyhose. You can visit with him at http://www.skypoint.net/~mfinley.