Bulletin Boards  − 1 May, 1992

There was another poor kid I knew in middle school besides myself, named Jeremy. Since I lived way far away from him, and because I was very much not even remotely popular in my middle school, I didn't get to know Jeremy until my last few months there. Somehow following my experience getting into a foster home and returning to school, I had developed a minor celebrity status in my school, and I made new friends. Jeremy was one of them.

As school was about to come to a close for the summer, I went over and hung out at his house with other people a few times. One time early on, I was over by myself, and we went into his room, where I discovered, like me, he had a computer. It was an older computer, with a 1200 baud modem installed, but he showed me the coolest thing I had seen all year: he turned the computer on, went to a DOS program I had never seen before, dialed a number and connected to...a bulletin board.

Bulletin Boards (abbreviated to BBS) were little online hubs run by individuals living in town who had hooked their computers up to phone lines. Other friends or whomever would call into these boards, become users, and do all sorts of different things, usually talking to each other, playing games and sharing files. Maybe that's not all that exciting now, but in 1992, it was gobshit brilliant! Not to mention designed for geeky teenage boys developing their social skills.

I took to it immediately, getting hold of a phone list of BBSes, a dot matrix printout of lists of obscure names like "MR. Wizards BBS" and "Apple Hide-A-Way" accompanied by phone numbers, went home to my computer with a diskette of the stolen phone dialing software (PC PLUS, baby!), and started calling.

I spent the next three years on BBSes, honing my online persona with the alias "Vendaz the Disturbed", an homage to The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Everyone online had an alias and an opinion, and we argued and argued. My friend Donovan's parentally-inherited right-wing politics rubbed off on my impressionable 14-year-old self, and I started espousing Rush Limbaugh-ish opinions online.

Although I was of course dead wrong in my opinions, I discovered then that I could actually be a persuasive debater, leading me to my first high school activity later, Debate. I also made a good number of online friends at the time, building my confidence. I downloaded games, software, and my first pornography ever using my 2400-baud modem, all the way through high school.

By 1996, the BBS scene was definitely in decline-- the World Wide Web had despatched its first rival.