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From: Steve Cisler <sac@apple.com>
Subject: Report on BBS Conference 8/13-16, Pt. 1 of 2

Part 1 of 2
At Play in the Field of the Boards: Report on ONE BBSCON

copyright 1992 by Steve Cisler, Apple Library. All or part of this document
may be redistributed free of charge in electronic format (disk, CD-ROM,
online) by any party. Print re-distribution is allowed for personal use as
well as  non-profit. educational and government newsletters and
journals. Please send email to the author when you do reprint or repost
or quote from this report. Internet: sac@apple.com

Denver, Colorado: August 13-16, 1992.

Our plane punched down through the low clouds a half hour late and
landed at Stapleton airport, just minutes from the Stouffer Hotel where
all the activities for the Online Networking Exposition and BBS
Convention were to take place. This was to be the first ecumenical
gathering of bulletin board system operators (sysops), hardware and
software vendors, and programmers that spanned the DOS, Unix, and
Macintosh worlds. There had been annual meetings of Fidonet sysops,
but the parent organization had folded even as the number of BBS
systems continued  to grow.

Jack Rickard, President of ONE, Inc. and publisher of Boardwatch
Magazine <jack.rickard@boardwatch.com> partnered up with Phil
Becker, author of TBBS software, to organize a trade show for BBS
operators that would be inexpensive enough to attract those running
their boards as hobbies but with tutorials and panels with subjects that
would attract the entrepreneurs who are working from their homes or
small offices and those who have mounted and maintained successful
business systems with four, eight, on up to 64 phone lines for their
clients.

Most of us in the online world are fairly stratified in our interests when it
comes to networking and communications. There are MIS shops
depending on minis and mainframes; there are the academic and
research networks where NREN and the Internet is of paramount
interest; there are consumer services which have been a continued failure
when promoted and maintained by the regional phone companies and
have been a mixed bag when we look at Prodigy, GEnie, CompuServe,
and America Online. The online industry of BRS, Dialog, and Mead Data
is trying to break out of its own mold and attract more than librarians and
devoted professionals who need the high priced information and are
willing to learn to tolerate difficult interfaces.

The world of BBS systems, users, and sysops has never been validated by
some of the mainstream opinion makers. Many of the operators and
users have been outsiders, socially, politically, and even economically.
ONE BBSCON brought many of these outsiders together for the first time,
but it also attracted mainstream users who have found BBSes to be cost
effective, easy to maintain (compared to other sorts of electronic systems),
and extremely useful. The show put the spotlight on the "Industry" as
Rickard and Becker hope it will become. BBS System vendors were on the
organizing board, and there were tracks for the major DOS/Intel systems:
Wildcat!, TBBS, PCBoard, MAJOR, and Searchlight as well as other
operating systems such as Unix and Macintosh (the latter comprised less
than 5% of the attendees). Other tracks were for legal and social issues,
corporate and business applications, how to make money with a BBS, the
Internet/NREN, Mail networks, and a technical track.

The opening reception included just a sprinkling of ties, making me feel
over-dressed in a sport coat. With the dress code set for the rest of the days
ahead, I thumbed through the program and spoke with BBS and
networking folks whom I had met online or at other conferences. Dave
Hughes of Old Colorado City Communications <dave@well.sf.ca.us> and
Frank Odasz of Big Sky Telegraph <frank@bigsky.dillon.mt.us> noted the
lack of education tracks in the program, but with their participation in the
program it became an important sub-theme.  The range of activities
people are involved in is indicative of the power and freedom to
experiment that goes with cheap hardware, BBS software, and a
reasonably priced public telephone network. A journalist from
Albuquerque is running his paper's 16 line system which provide news to
callers at no charge. Another team had just returned from Russia where
they were helping set up a country-wide system using low-orbiting
satellites for data transmission. An entrepreneur who had been sued by
Playboy enterprises for vending GIF images of Playmates (and using that
trademarked name in his BBS menus) without much thought of
copyright was present.

Day One At the opening session it was evident why this was going to be a
successful conference and why BBSes would become an industry that
would overshadow but not eliminate hobby uses of such systems: cheap
9600 bps modems, inexpensive 486 servers, and telephone systems that
are not charging by measured use (as is done in many other countries).
Phil Becker made a strong pitch for the BBS as a business tool for
mainstream activities and belittled what he called the 'stupid niches' like
Keith Wade's THE ANARCHIST GUIDE TO BBS. Clearly, Becker wanted
to encourage mainstream business uses of this technology. They were
impressive and diverse. Others like Tom Jennings (author of the
extremely cheap and popular Fido software) sees the technology
benefiting the outsiders: the fat, the handicapped, the socially inept, the
disenfranchised, the radical, the non-mainstream. And of course, BBS
technology can fill both Becker's and Jennings' very different visions, but
Becker's was the one emphasized here.

What I want to continue to emphasize in this report is the diversity of
users, of models, of software, and of business models. Boardwatch
estimates that there are 44,000 public systems (and many more private
and corporate ones) in the U.S. The four vendors sitting on ONE, Inc.
board claim to have an installed base of 50,000, and this excludes Fido, the
most popular of all systems.

The Keynote speech was given by John Dvorak who writes for many
computer magazines, has co-authored a successful book on telecomms,
and is often on the public speaker circuit. His columns are entertaining,
opinionated and as Art Kleiner said in an old S.F. Bay Guardian article, he
is a 'curmudgeon without a cause.'  People who like to rattle cages can be
good speakers and warm the crowd up for the ensuing events. However,
Dvorak devoted so much time to self advertisements and plugging his
books that it seemed he must have spent about 10 minutes thinking
about some of the issues that needed addressing with regards to BBSes. A
sprinkling of Dvorak comments: "get a fan for your 486 machines... OS/2
is fun! (Windows is not)...the BBS community needs a lobbyist in each
state; it's embarrassingly naive and should examine how it operates on
different levels...Al Gore is the Dan Quayle of the Democratic Party...The
porno boards are always under scrutiny by the govt. one way or another...
Playboy images on a BBS has to be called fair use... BBSes cannot continue
to allow slander on the boards. You have to clean up your act by
self-policing.

He also called for a constitutional amendment to protect electronic rights,
but he did not know that constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe had
proposed this in his keynote at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 1
eighteen months ago.  On the one hand Dvorak pandered to
anti-Congress sentiments in the crowd and then said to get involved in
politics;  yet he found the Perot candidacy a sham, including the electronic
element.

End of Part 1 of 2
Part 2 of 2
At Play in the Field of the Boards: Report on ONE BBSCON

copyright 1992 by Steve Cisler, Apple Library. All or part of this document
may be redistributed free of charge in electronic format (disk, CD-ROM,
online) by any party. Print re-distribution is allowed for personal use as
well as  non-profit. educational and government newsletters and
journals. Please send email to the author when you do reprint or repost
or quote from this report. Internet: sac@apple.com

Denver, Colorado: August 13-16, 1992.


A Few of the One Hundred + Panels and Presentations

I attended the Electronic Frontier Foundation program which filled up
with an overflow from the Legal track where Lance Rose addressed many
questions about the rights and responsibilities of sysops in an increasingly
litigious and regulated environment. Shari Steel, a lawyer in  the EFF
Washington office, explained their activities and then answered
questions which revealed the strong anti-Washington, anti-lawyer, anti
regulation sentiments in the audience. It is evident that many sysops
value the control they believe they have when they set up and run a
bulletin board. Hearing about the FCC and Congressional efforts to change
'their' world made some people angry and made others want to organize.
Steel handled their questions honestly and admitted when she did not
have clear cut answers.

Midway through the conference a group of software developers decided to
organize to try and learn about existing standards before setting ones that
would benefit their own developers and users. The three main areas
include interface, messaging and document structure, and graphics.
Surprisingly, some did not want to give up the diversity that is so evident
in the many interfaces and message protocols, but most agreed to try and
set an agenda via electronic mail and plan for other actions at the next
conference.  The Internet Engineering Task Force use of RFCs (Request for
Comment) was held up as a model they would emulate. Few had patience
and resources to set up a very slow-moving mechanism such as the ISO
committees.

Jim Warren moderated the panel on electronic democracy where most
members were excited about the power of the tools. Gary Stryker of
Galacticom proposed a system called SuperDemocracy which would
include continuous electronic voting on issues in a hierarchy by
geographical region.  Shari Steel reminded the group how many did not
have computers or modems, and that electronic democracy would
exclude many potential voters. Gary Nakarado, a PUC commissioner in
Colorado started a BBS to learn more about the medium and to be in
touch with the interesting people in his community. Unfortunately, they
have not been logging in. PUC activities attract very little attention and
he has very few calls and questions from the general public. He is
interested in having more input on issues such as ISDN service, BBSes,
and other issues affecting Colorado utility users.

Bernard Aboba, author of BBSes and Beyond , talked about the software
for connecting Macs to the global mail networks (RIME, Fido, Internet,
uucp) and it was evident that the Mac is a terrific front end for many
systems, but as a server it needs more power and more tools from third
parties. Developers from ResNova 714 840 6082 showed how their Mac
BBS software could fill the gaps, as did a rep. from SoftArc 416 299 4723.
SoftArc's FirstClass server and client software looked very powerful and
full of features that would allow a FirstClass BBS to serve many
concurrent users on LAN, dialup and TCP/IP access.  All of the
companies are quite small, and the wish lists of new features grows faster
than the staff to work on them, but I was amazed at the power and
sophistication of the DOS and Mac BBS systems. Event Horizons, the BBS
vending adult GIF images south of Portland, Oregon, has a  64 line  80486
system running on TBBS! Other systems running multiple cpus have a
hundred or more lines coming in. Clearly, these are not basement run,
part time operations.

Diversity
One morning I went down to comb the literature tables and read the cork
bulletin board where a variety of fascinating notes had been posted. They
will give you a sense of the diversity in this community:

-Monterey Gaming System 408 655 5555 (free)

-Black Cat Information Service in Rochester NY 716 262 3680 (Visa/MC
accepted!) Games, Society for Creative Anachronism files and Adult Info

-the Zoo...an electric safari. your tour guide: Chuck 2. 312 907 1831 to 1839.

-The OU BBS, University of Oklahoma (telnet oubbs,telecom.uoknor.edu)

-Power Windows! BBS (also for OS/2 users) Huntsville, AL 205 881 8619

-The Invention Factory, (NY, NY) 212 274 8110

-The Online Diver (Brooklyn Center, MN) 566 5267 No area code must
indicate that it's for local Minnesota divers primarily.

-Nautilus Commercial Data System with 250,000 public domain files, 200
incoming data lines (!), 28 gigabytes of storage, satellite weather images,
hourly news updates, games, dBase templates, GIF images---all out of Iola,
Kansas  316 365 7631.

-Infinity Complex "a wickedly addictive Science Fiction game for MAJOR
BBS systems. Infinity Complex puts your users in a bizarre arena of the
future, where they must battle for their very lives...and use up a lot of
online hours in the process!" 403 476 8369 (voice)

-an ad for the first annual Puget Sound (WA) BBS convention (no phone
contact)

-ads for serial port boards, new BBS software, consulting services, and
calls for source code for data compression.

-BAWIT Bay Area Women in Telecom for working women in
telecommunications in the San Francisco area. Contact
bawitrequest@igc.apc.org.

-Make your own custom CD-ROM for $199. Up to 640 mb. ISO 9660. 800 762.

Internet and NREN There was a lot of interest in Internet/NREN issues,
but only a few people knew much about them. The panels on Internet
connectivity, legislation, and interfaces drew good sized crowds but
needed more basic information in a standard presentation format before
having Q&A. BBSes can be a good interface for people going on to the
Internet. It provides a way of formatting and filtering the anarchy of the
Internet, even as it offers occasion for excess control of what a caller can
see and use. I spent more time showing resources using Mac-based
interfaces than talking about the intricacies of the growth of NREN in my
session which was included in the small Macintosh track rather than the
larger Internet track. I also participated in a graphics discussion where the
panelists discussed GIF (the CompuServe standard so popular on BBSes
and the Internet), NAPLPS (which is good for multi-lingual
communications and small vector-based images), JPEG (the compression
du jour that may displace GIF and the one that the Smithsonian and
Apple are touting for Project Chapman), and FIF (fractal image format
which is a more efficient proprietary algorithm than JPEG but which takes
a long time to compress).

Summary The  BBS world is changing, growing, exploding. Jack Rickard
has provided good coverage in his magazine, and his conference was a big
success and and a very good value considering the amount of fine food
that was included with the conference activities. If you are not in the BBS
world, and even if you are, it's hard to be aware of the activity because  it
is so distributed. This conference helped immensely. I think that Rickard
will have to face a problem of success: will he continue to be the lively
and opinionated journalist when his magazine and his conference
become the focus of the whole industry and a possible industry
association? He may have to defend actions when he should be exposing
them, but that is looking a couple of years ahead. Right now, there is no
way to go but up and out because of the growing interest in this medium
of information dissemination and of personal communication. A BBS
provides both sysops and users an enormous amount of leverage, and the
library world should take notice more than it does. One prominent public
librarian who is quite involved in electronic dissemination of
information remarked to me a few years ago that it would be great if
BBSes just went away. I have heard other dismissive or even snobbish
comments about BBSes, but the four librarians whom I met at ONE
BBSCON all realized this is foolish. It's not the only tool to use, but it can
be a very important one.

Contacts mentioned in the text: people and products

Gary Nakarado, Colorado Public Utilities commissioner
<nakarado@well.sf.ca.us> 303 526 5505 is his BBS number.
NAPLPS: North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax. Dave
Hughes <dave@oldcolo.com or dave@well.sf.ca.us>
Fractal compression: Fracterm, Inc. in Richmond, BC 800-676-3111
GIF: CompuServe Art Gallery and various browsers at ftp sites
JPEG: mail jpeg-info@uunet.uu.net or contact sac@apple.com
Boardwatch Magazine: 303 973 6038 or jack.rickard@boardwatch.com
TBBS software: eSoft 303 699 6565
SuperDemocracy Foundation: 305 583 5990
Bernard Aboba: BMUG, Inc., 510 547 0345
Jim Warren (electronic democracy): jwarren@well.sf.ca.us
Electronic Frontier Foundation: eff@eff.org
Lance Rose (legal issues):  author of Syslaw a legal guide to the rights and
responsibilities of sysops.
Laurence H. Tribe, "The Constitution in Cyberspace" anonymous ftp from
ftp.apple.com in the /ftp/alug/rights directory 49 kb.

End of part 2 of 2