When Newsgroups Ruled the Net [4]

Fourth in a multi-part series

Part One, Part Two, Part Three

Me too

Sometime during the summer of '94, we kicked the high-cost, low-speed Prodigy service to the curb and set out to find a better replacement. By this time, I had bought several games, several of which didn't want to run. I needed information, but the only place to get it was online and Prodigy had failed to live up to its promise.

We happened upon a CompuServe box at the BX, so I bought it and installed it. I was largely unimpressed. It was somewhat faster than Prodigy, but its user interface and navigation scheme got in the way of what I needed to do. All I wanted was to find what I was looking for, but I had to click around through various folders to see if what I needed was there, usually to find that it wasn't and start over again -- if I wasn't disconnected (yet again) and managed to find a phone number that actually worked so I could log back into the service. Considering that every click regularly resulted in a 30 second wait to see the next list of choices, this method of searching was not only time consuming, but expensive as well.

I stuck with CompuServe, but was unhappy with it. After tons of time wasted searching, I finally found a couple of boards where I learned about IRQs, EMM386, and TSRs. I figured out how to create alternate config.sys and autoexec.bat files to boot up the computer in different ways, allowing me to play the games I'd bought. Still, even though I found a lot of useful technical information, I really wasn't satisfied with the community. I figured out how to get Microprose's F-14 Fleet Defender to run, but I would've liked to talk about it or found some tips and tricks from other players.

It was while I was looking for Day of the Tentacle at the BX that I found a box for America Online. Yes, it's true: AOL used to be sold in boxes, just like any other piece of software. I know it's hard to believe, living in a world barely recovered from the decade-long deluge of AOL CD's, but America Online was just another box competing for shelf space. It wasn't expensive, so I decided to give it a whirl to see what it was all about.

I opened the massive box to find a single 3.5" disk and instruction manual. I installed it and was pleased to find hundreds of local access numbers. I connected on the first try, registered and beheld the Future -- only the Future looked a lot like Outlook. This was AOL 1.5, before it was revamped with all the graphics and glitz. It was completely text-based and looked like a modern Email program. It was also very easy to navigate and it had chat. Oh yes, the chat -- more on that in a minute.

What I liked a lot about AOL was the community feel. Remember, this was still 1994: the large, unwashed masses had yet to descend upon the online world, so people were still relatively polite and friendly. The place policed itself. If someone was being a jerk, they'd get flagged for a TOS violation and their account would be suspended. It was on AOL that I first started participating in discussions about Star Trek, Star Wars, music, computers, and UFOs.

I also started participating in chats as well, but I treated those differently than I did the message boards. On the message boards, I was friendly and earnest, yet I approached the chats differently. I don't know why. There was something about the format and the way people communicated that really brought out the aggressive and sarcastic side of me.

I initially took to observing different chat rooms, yet rarely participating. The discussions were usually vacuous and forgetful, but I observed the patterns of speech employed, the emoticons people used, and the ebb and flow of conversation. I decided to see if I could effectively have fun with them without getting into trouble. I learned how to go right up to the TOS violation line and remain there without going over.

I would regularly go into Christian chats and claim to be an atheist, then go into an atheist chat as a fundamentalist Christian. The key was knowing a chat was not conducive to intelligent discussion, so everyone always employed the same stock phrases for the same tired arguments. If you threw out a couple of statements as bait, someone would predictably respond. It was like chumming for sharks in South Africa -- I was always guaranteed a hit. For me, the fun wasn't in the argument, it was playing a role and pushing someone's buttons. They would continually try to "win" the argument, yet not a single person ever figured out that by simply taking the bait, they had already lost.

I never directly insulted anyone -- at least, not at this time and place. That would come far later, when I focused my fun on the random internet idiots who started cropping up all over the place. What I learned, by honing my trolling into a satisfying form of entertainment, was that people treated the chat and the participants as if there were really people standing around, watching us argue. If they were to simply give up and stop responding, they would be seen to "lose" by the other participants. This meant they could never stop. Their honor demanded it or something.

Mind you, this is a chat room we're talking about. People would enter and leave at whim, and most other people couldn't care less about what was going on. Everything would be forgotten in two minutes, or you could just go into another chat room where none of the participants had any idea of what just transpired. Still, I rarely encountered a person who could just let it go and not take the bait. They really thought something was at stake.

I eventually took things a step further, sometimes employing friends to join me as ringers in the crowd. I found that a person in a one-on-one confrontation usually felt emboldened if one of the other chatters lent a line of support. It meant, in his mind, that people really were watching and they really were on his side. So, I started fixing things so that if someone else did pipe up, I would suddenly see a surge of support from the crowd. The advantages were twofold: One, it tended to mute dissenting voices, as most people are herd animals and will go along with whatever they perceive to be popular opinion. Two, the mark would think popular support was against him, leaving him isolated and alone. This would normally be enough for the person to croak some weak insult and resign from the chat. I never really liked going that route, but it was always interesting from a behavioral standpoint.

I always found it odd that hardly anyone couldn't just ignore the ringers and simply focus on me and what I was saying. I never once appealed to the crowd's support in an argument. I actually ignored them and continued my focus on the mark. My opponents never seemed to realize none of it was real and there was nothing on the line, no matter what they said.

I learned more from those AOL chats than I realized at the time. As I said, I didn't mess around with people on the message boards, because they were genuinely interesting and worthwhile. However, my experiences in the chats gave me a lot of insight into how people behaved online. It's where I learned my fundamentals of flaming:

1. Always stay on the offensive. Never seriously answer your opponents questions/charges. Simply toss them aside and continue hammering away at them. Use their answers as ammunition.
   
2. Develop a theme and stick with it. If you want to question their intelligence, stay on that theme by finding different and funny ways to say the same thing. Don't go scattershot and try different things. Find one thing and keep at it.
3. Be funny and brief. It's one thing to be mean. It's quite another to be mean and funny. People don't like to think they're being laughed at. Also, try to say something in six words or less, using consonant/letter combinations that have the most impact. Never use an insult verbatim that you heard somewhere else.
4. If you get bored or tired of it, then stop and leave. This is merely for your own entertainment. Nothing is at stake and sometimes you just get tapped-out and don't feel like continuing the thing.
   
5. Keep them off-balance. The whole point is to control the argument, making them perform the way you want so you can explore different creative avenues. Once they're on the defensive, you own them and can guide the argument to wherever you like.

It was the AOL chats that prepared me for the hostility I would sometimes receive on the newsgroups because of my "@aol.com" address. The newsgroups were a bit more rough and tumble than the friendly confines of AOL, but they were also eminently more interesting. But that's a story for another post.

When Newsgroups Ruled the Net [3]

Third in a multi-post series

Part One, Part Two

The Firestarter

It was February 18, 1994 and I was disconnected both socially and electronically -- that is, until I met this girl. It started out innocently enough. She would wave and say "Hi!" to me in the hallway and I would ignore her. It's not that I didn't like her or anything, but I always had trouble speaking to girls, mainly because I couldn't figure them out. I didn't know what made them tick, so I had no idea how to speak to them. I'm very good at taking things apart and finding out how they work, and I could do that with everything except women. I always felt like Charlton Heston on the Planet of the Apes when I was around them.

It wasn't until I was in an altered state that I asked her out. I'd just returned from getting my wisdom teeth pulled and was still in a drug-induced stupor when I bumped into her in the hallway and asked her if she wanted to go out. She said yes. I was surprised. I didn't know what to say. I hadn't anticipated that reaction and my mind was still in a fog. I honestly don't really remember what happened next. All I know is I awoke hours later and had to peel the pillow case off my face, because I'd drooled blood all over it.

As I washed the dried blood from my face and removed the massive wads of cotton that were meant to absorb the various juices emitted from my mouth, the terror gripped me. Did I just ask that chick out on a date? Or was it some sort of dream? It all seemed a little unreal. After going back and forth in my mind a bit, I decided that it most likely was real and I was well and truly screwed. I finished cleaning myself up and wondered how I was going to make her like me.

A couple of days later, I started the walk down the hallway. Her door was down at the end of the hall, on the right. With each step, my stomach tightened and my pulse quickened. By the time I'd walked the 30 feet feet to her door, I was in a shambles. Me heart felt like a trapped miner desperately pounding away at the wall with a sledgehammer. My guts were all twisted up, as if clumsily tied by an amateur practicing his square knots and sheepshanks. As I knocked on her door, the tenuous connections of coherent thought exploded into a cascade of confusion and fear. When I left my room, I was a reasonably intelligent young man. Over the course of 30 feet I had devolved into a jibbering creature not too far removed from our chimpanzee cousins. In fact, I think a chimp would've given a better account of himself that evening. Or he would've flung his poo. Who can say when it comes to chimps?

She opened the door and sheer panic washed over me. I was in full-on Fight or Flight mode, but as my legs responded sluggishly to the shrieking commands of my brain, Flight couldn't get off the ground. She greeted me. I think I got out a monosyllabic response. Right there, at that moment, I wanted to be anywhere else in the world than that spot.

And then I stepped past the threshold and looked around her room. The terror drained out of me, never to be seen again. Over to the left was a computer. To the right, a complete set of all six Star Trek movies. And over there was a Sega Genesis. I was home. I was in love. As we talked, I felt as if I'd known her my entire life. She was, and still is, the most beautiful, funny, smart, and interesting woman I've ever known. I've yet to meet her equal and I doubt I ever will.

That wasn't the only love affair begun that night. There was also the matter of the unassuming beige box sitting atop a desk next to the wall. It was an AST 486SX/27 MHz with 4 megs of RAM, a 9600 baud modem, CD-ROM, Windows 3.1.1, and a 12" monitor. She even had a cool little Star Trek screensaver with the flying pancakes of doom from Operation: Annihilate!. My wife likes to claim that I loved her for her computer, but I'd like to note that while the computer has long since disappeared into memory, I've yet to replace her with the latest bleeding edge model. I've had six computers, so far, and only one wife. When I hit my mid-life crisis, I'll be more likely to dump everything into a cluster of Falcon Northwest Mach V's than dump her for some skeletal, Cheetoh-skinned airhead.

At any rate, she did show me around her computer that night, including something called Prodigy, an online service featuring news, message boards, and games. It was a massive step-up from the BBS's, but it was also extremely slow. I remember clicking on a link, going to bathroom, coming back and finding the screen just starting to load. If I recall correctly, they also charged by the hour for message boards, so it really wasn't worth the time. She also had another cool little DOS program called "The ImagiNation Network", an online service focused on games. I remember staying up to 3:00 in the morning playing spades and chatting with people, or participating in the nightly trivia contests.

INN had a friendly atmosphere with interesting people. You could play an online RPG or try your hand at a virtual blackjack table. It also had messageboards, email, and a bullet-proof interface. What I found cool about the whole thing is that I wasn't just talking to people from my area, I was interacting with folks from all over the US. We could chat up any number of things, or tell jokes about arcane crap that most of the general population wouldn't even know about. It was the fist place where I established an online identity, which may or may not have coincided with my real identity.

I learned how to communicate more effectively, especially in an electronic medium, where people don't like to read a lot of words on a computer screen. In fact, if you're still reading this, congratulations: you're in the minority and quite a trooper. The format also demanded shorter, concise sentences, and it also forced you to be more witty with an economy of words. This was a little bit before emoticons and acronyms became popular, so you really had to think (and think fast) about what you were going to write. The ability to write fast and think quickly became invaluable later on when I started moonlighting as a troll in chat rooms and some newsgroups -- but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Alas, INN upped their fees and we deleted the program from the computer. We shopped around for something related and found CompuServe at the BX, but that's a story for next time.

When Newsgroups Ruled the Net [2]

Second in a multi-part posting. Part One.

Disconnected

My first brush with networked goodness was brief, but informative. While the idea of talking with people outside of my immediate area was intriguing, I could never completely shake the feeling that all of it was a bit creepy. Oh sure, downloading games and files was great, but the chats (and I use that term very loosely) tended to be very insular and often raunchy. My friend often bragged about having sex with a couple of the women on the BBS and how the husbands could never catch on. I soon found out that sex was the main topic of conversation on the board -- coordinating, describing, reacting, wishing -- it was really all they talked about. The hyper-focus on hooking-up, coupled with the dorky subculture mentality, made the whole thing seem like a digital version of the SCA.

Still, the experience stayed with me, especially as I thought about the paltry conditions for interesting conversation surrounding me. Don't get me wrong, I was no loner or emo kid. It's just that sometimes I would've liked to have talked about Star Trek, or philosophy, or history, or anything outside the normal workaday experience. Of course, there were history buffs, techno-geeks, sci-fi nerds, and the rest, but the problem was population density. There just weren't enough of us around in the numbers necessary to ensure that we'd all bump into each other in the kinds of combinations needed to make things interesting. Geeks come in many flavors, but on a military base, the variety was more akin to the soft-serve machine at McDonald's than Baskin-Robbins.

For example, I used to have great conversations with a friend about baseball statistics. We'd spend hours covering different rosters, arguing whether Ruth would've ever become a legend if he had stayed with the Red Sox, and pitting teams of different eras against each other using nothing but their stats. All of this was fun, but that's all we could talk about. Averse to any hint of sentiment, he avoided any talk of baseball movies, especially the twisted hero mythos of The Natural. He had a very narrowly defined area of interest and would never move beyond it.

It was illustrative of the larger problem. You could bump into someone who was into Star Trek, only to find out that they were really, really, into it -- to the point of fearing they'd stab you in the neck with their Commemorative Mr. Spock Space Pen should you get an episode title wrong or suggest there may not have been much to it beyond the retro kitsch. On the other hand, I could be just as kooky to someone who only dabbled in fandom. In fact, the whole thing tended to be uncomfortable for all involved, so it was best to feign ignorance and say something like, "Star Track? Isn't that the one with Luke Skywalker?" and tell someone that their favorite band sucked.

As the months went by, my brief flirtation with the online world soon faded into another half-forgotten novelty, until I met a girl with a computer and a 2400 baud modem.

When Newsgroups Ruled the Net - Part 1

First in a multi-part posting

I decided to take some time during the long holiday weekend to go back to the beginning (at least for me) of the internet: the myriad newsgroups with their constant bickering and endless flame wars. I didn't quite know what to expect, as I haven't read a newsgroup since I lived in Japan during the '90s. I moved on to web-based message boards and finally to blogs, mostly because I grew tired of the insular world of the newsgroups and wanted to read new perspectives from fresh voices. Still, I've been suddenly gripped with a desire to see the old places and what's become of them, because the very thing that drove me away then appeals to me now. Over the last several years, I've learned one important lesson: the larger the crowd, the dumber the conversation.

I wanted to see my old haunts partly out of nostalgia, but mostly out of a sense of curiosity. Are they still active or have they been run over by spam? Everyone knows the binaries are still popular, because it's the easiest way to pirate stuff without getting caught, but what about the discussion groups themselves? Would I still find a vibrant and intellectually engaging community, or the last remaining holdouts of a long-forgotten and little-mourned flame war? I decided to go take a look, but I didn't know whether it would be a quick drive down an old street or if I would stop and have a nice walk around the old neighborhood. But before I could do any of that, I had to remember how to get there.

In the Beginning...

I suppose it's time for my first confession: I was an AOL'er. I didn't really get into newsgroups until AOL made them easily accessible and unleashed a massive flood of "me too's" on an unsuspecting internet. Now, I'd been aware of newsgroups for some time before that momentous event, but I couldn't easily access them. These were the days when a majority of people on the internet were in colleges or research labs. If you weren't amongst that group, you might've been lucky and had a local ISP providing access to a news server. Unfortunately, I wasn't so lucky. I lived in Delaware and while there were a few BBS's around, there wasn't an ISP that I could dial into without incurring long distance charges.

I had a few other challenges in the beginning as well, and these were the same barriers to entry that prevented the mob from storming the net and laying waste to it. First, I needed a computer, which was no small thing. At that time, a modest Intel 486 with a monitor and other accoutrements cost about as much as a crappy used car. Now, I'm a 19 year old kid living in Dover, Delaware. Do you think I'm going to take out a loan for a car or a computer? But even if I did have a computer, what would I do with it? The only other computer I ever had was an old Apple IIe clone that our family used for writing papers, playing games, and programming. I really never thought of it being useful beyond that. Besides, Wargames taught me that if you tried connecting it to other computers, you were likely to start WWIII, and no one really wanted that.

It wasn't until I happened upon a friend's room during a night of drinking that the scales fell from my eyes and I beheld the promise of a new world. I had stumbled and fallen against his wall locker and he shot-up like a bolt from the blue to keep me from knocking it over. As one of the doors slowly opened, I caught a glimpse not of clothes and uniforms, but of a monitor and a beige box. Intrigued, I asked him what the hell he had in there. He sheepishly opened both doors and I beheld two monitors, an old Mac and another old Apple II, a dot matrix printer, and a power strip illuminating the interior with a soft red glow. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Who would've guessed that just down the hall in Room 206 sat the Holy of Holies?

He powered everything up, entered a few commands and my ears were greeted by a strange electronic screech. Seconds later, a simple 16-color graphic announcing itself as the PlayPen BBS appeared on the screen. I asked him what the program did, and he replied that it wasn't a program, but a Bulletin Board System: a place where you could download games and stuff, chat with other people in the local area and have some fun. I was hooked, but he moved a few weeks later and I was disconnected from the electronic community before I really had a chance to understand and appreciate it.