BW Online | August 14, 2001 | The Secret History

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AUGUST 14, 2001

SECURITY FOCUS

The Secret History
The IBM PC may be 20 years old, but for cyber-historian Jason Scott, the really important stuff started happening even earlier

STORY TOOLS

Sunday marked the twentieth anniversary of the introduction of the first IBM Personal Computer, the architecture that today dominates the global computing landscape. Without question, it's an important date, and I'm happy to circle it on my calendar.

But IBM Day is important in the austere and passionless way of George Washington's birthday-- a date ready-made for a clunky fourth grade text book. History's most important turns are always darker, touched by scandal and blood, and peopled by as many unshaved rogues and tricksters as square-jawed heroes and blue suits.

By the early 80's, there was already a diverse pool of home computers in American homes, many of them in teenagers' bedrooms. The Apple II had debuted years earlier in 1977. Then there was the Commodore, the Atari, Heathkit, Texas Instrument's TI-99/4. I was a proud owner of a TRS-80 Color Computer. They all had their charms and quirks, and were each utterly incompatible with one another in every regard but one: with an obscure peripheral called a 'modem', they could talk to each other over the phone.

When, decades before the World Wide Web, early hobbyists established electronic bulletin board systems (BBSs) for exchanging public and private messages with other geeks, the history that Jason Scott is concerned with begins.

Scott is the volunteer curator of an unusual web museum called Textfiles.com, where he collects and displays the artifacts of the forgotten online culture of the 1980's, specifically textfiles: manifestos, philosophical discourses, technological recipes and endless volumes of forbidden knowledge authored by the early settlers of the information superhighway back when it was an unmapped vista of bumpy dirt roads.

"What's so important about the 80s, is that it was the first time that everybody could interact with everybody else, in a way that allowed that interaction to persist," Scott tells me.

During what Scott calls the "Golden Age" of BBSs, textfiles migrated from one bulletin board to the next like geese making their way up the Pacific coast. Browsing though Scott's collection today, the textfiles seem as much a reflection of the times as a Depeche Mode album.

With early modems lucky to squeeze 300 or 1200 bits-per-second through a phone line, textfiles were short and devoid of colorful graphics. Writers were limited to the 128 characters of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), roughly the keys on a manual typewriter keyboard.

Subjects varied-- some textfiles were short science fiction stories, episode guides to T.V. shows, or tutorials on computer languages and concepts. Others discussed religion or sex. The FAQ was born here. "The thing that didn't really exist before the 80's... was the frequently asked questions list," says Scott. "A publicly contributed error checked document that answer everything you want to know about a given subject... It's the equivalent of the Talmud."

But the dark and true secret of the early history of personal networking, is that most of the prose was dedicated to the illicit. Among the files in Scott's collection you can find Kracowicz's guide to cracking Apple II software copy protection schemes. You can read Darkness' 'Hacking on the Compuserve Information Service', or get a list of MCI Mail dial-up numbers collected by The Swamp. If you're just a beginner, try starting with the 'Hacker Acronym List' written by Max Headroom.

According to Scott, more than half of the textfiles relate to hacking, or other subjects that today would fall squarely under the heading "computer fraud and abuse." He hesitates to pick a personal favorite textfile -- "it's like picking a favorite book," he says -- but when he does settle on one, it comes from that part of his collection, a text describing how to build a device that allows people to phone you long distance for free (provided you're served by a 1970's-era electromechanical telephone switch). It comes in at seven-hundred-and-fifty words, including an electrical schematic drawn in ASCII characters.

"It's called 'To All Who Dare --- The Black Box'," says Scott, with the enthusiasm of a Palentologist discussing a prized Parasaurolophus fossil. "That file has to be '82, '83. It's in forty columns, and it's written in the form of, 'with just a few simple things, and following these directions, an incredible thing is going to happen,'" says Scott. "If you had this file, you had something you could trade. You had this secret ingredient."

Scott, a 30-year old network administrator, launched Textfiles.com in 1999 with 9,000 files. His collection has grown to 35,000 files on ten mirror sites. In a textfile of his own, a statement of purpose, he explains why he's dedicated to preserving this particular part of computing's past.

"A wonderful thing happened in the 1980s: Life started to go online. And as the world continues this trend, everyone finding themselves drawn online should know what happened before, to see where it all really started to come together and to know what went on, before it's forgotten," writes Scott.

Scott is now in the research phase of a documentary on the 1980's bulletin board scene -- a project that has him doing his best to track down the pseudonymous authors of the classic textfiles. "You can find them in the strangest places, involved with the strangest things still," says Scott. But given the contents of most of those files, it seems likely that some of the authors will be reluctant to discuss their cultural contribution on camera.

Scott says he'll be sensitive.

"I'm certainly not going to show up at someone's house and say, 'Hi, back in the old days you were known as The Ninja,'" says Scott. "There probably are people who don't want to think of those times."

by Kevin Poulsen

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