34C3 - BBSs and early Internet access in the 1990ies

34C3 preroll music

Herald: Back in time, back to the 1990's
where the internet actually made sounds,

and you could annoy the whole family while
blocking the phone line. He was actually

heavily involved in these early days of
the internet. He operated and participated

in these early structures, namely Bulletin
Board Systems and the UseNet. And he now

takes us back in time, to tell us all
about the time when the internet made

sounds. Thank you very much LaForge.

applause

LaForge: Thank you very much for the
introduction.This is a quite unusual

setting for me. Typically I give talks
about deeply technical topics. Protocoll

level details and telecom specs and so on.
Now the first time I speak in the Art and

Culture track. That is definitely
something new for me. So, why am I here

and why am I talking about this topic.
First of all, I was involved to some

extent yes, but for sure I was not
somebody who had any significant role in

that universe. Neither in the BBS scene or
in the early internet days. I was just

basically a youngster, a teenager, who had
fun playing with technology and was

helping others to communicate using
technology. There are many more people who

have, who are much more qualified than me
to talk about that subject but I ... and

that's the reason why I'm here and why I
submitted this talk is, you don't really

see many people speaking about these days
or about those topics anymore. And even if

you want to research it, I think there's
like one or two books in German on that

subject, they're very hard to get and also
not very complete. So, I think we have to

sort of document the history of it for
those people, who have not been around at

the time. So, this talk will not have as
many acronyms as you are used to from

talks that I usually give. Still you have
typos in the slides, as you can see in the

second line already, so that didn't
change. I didn't invent any of the

technologies covered here. I didn't write
any of the software covered. I was just a

user and operator or sysadmin. And that's
the world I grew up in from 11 onwards.

As I said many people lack that history and
to start with that, maybe a quick poll in

the audience. Who has ever dialed into a
BBS using a modem? Raise your hands. Okay.

So, I'm preaching to the converted. Okay,
maybe I should invite all of you up to the

stage and we should make a discussion-
round instead. Anyway. So, circuit switch

telephony. Well, this is the telephony
from 1876 until about 1988 with

analog voice circuits over copper wires
and dial-up connections between A and B.

I guess everybody still remembers these.
Even if you're young, you should have seen

a classic telephone, I think. And yeah,
you have analog amplifiers possibly in the

path, but actually the copper wires are
physically switched at telephone

exchanges. So, this structure looks a bit
like this: We have a telephone at one end,

we have a telephone at another end, and we
have telephone exchanges or switches,

which actually switch the circuit - hence
the term circuit switched telephony -

between A and B. So, you have a copper
wire from your phone to the office, the

exchange, to which you are connected and
then that exchange again has copper wires

to other exchanges and so on. And based on
the phone number you dial the call is

switched to the destination subscriber.
That's sort of the foundation in terms of

technology that we're using here. Also
something to document for the

international audience in Germany at that
time even local calls were metered and

charged by the minute, flat rates didn't
exist and we had multiple zones so there's

not just local calls and long-distance
calls but different depending on your

distance so like up to 50 kilometers or
more than 50 kilometers and so on. And

given on that and the steep pricing and
not so many people could afford long-

distance BBSing at least not for a long
time. All of this started with a device

called the acoustic coupler. It's actually
also how I started even though I'm young

and I only started in I think about 90 or
91. At 10 or 11 years of age you don't

have the latest and greatest in
technology. I got a used second hand or

third hand Olivetti acoustic coupler from
my uncle it had even a battery it could be

operated mobile it had a battery
compartment with eight Mignon (AA) cells.

Actually I still own it and I still own
related telephone I just thought: yeah

don't have to bring it here. But it
still exists. So anyway, here you have to

dial using your normal phone. You dial the
digits of the phone number and once the

other side picks up the phone and they put
their receiver onto the acoustic coupler

and you put your receiver onto the
acoustic coupler, then data can be

transmitted over the telephone line as
said with manual, dial manual pickup and

rather extremely low speed. This all looks
like this and the next step in the logical

progression then was modems, which is sort of you can
think of an automatized method of acoustic

couplers, where you don't have an air gap
anymore. So in the acoustic coupler you

literally have a couple of centimeters of
air between the speaker and the microphone

in the receiver of your phone, versus the
acoustic coupler. So with the modem

there's a direct connection and also you
have automatic facilities to dial the

telephone number and to answer the line
and so on. So you don't need a manual

operator anymore to pick up a phone or
dial numbers. And this thing gets

transmitted over the telephone
line. This is a stack of various different

modems – we will see some others here,
some of you will remember the brands or

the shapes or even the specific models of
those modems. But that's too much level of

detail for the moment. So let's look a bit
at the speed, or lack of speed, that was

available. It started with 300 bps. I
actually used 300 bps a couple of times.

In fact, in like around 1990 of course it
was extremely slow but still it was what I

could start with at the time. Then the
1200 bps; so this is still rather slow and

you can slowly read and follow the
text as it's being printed. Unfortunately

I don't have an animation or something
like that. I'm not such a multimedia savvy

guy. So yes, then the speeds progressed,
you see the years in which they were

created. The lines with the asterisk mark
years that I found some secondary sources

that originally it had been specified
then. But actually the oldest spec

document for all these earlier ones was
from 1988. So if you go to the ITU

website, the earliest documents you can
find are from 1988 and none of those

earlier documents could – at least on the
internet – be found anywhere. Maybe you

can go to a library or something like
that. Yeah so speeds progressed, different

modulation schemes were introduced to
squeeze ever more bits into these

3 kilohertz analog circuit over the
telephone line. And every couple of years

a new, especially in the 90s, if you
follow this 91 14.400 bps, 93 19.200

to 1994 28.000 bits per second. And there
were of course also proprietary protocols,

then you had to have the same manufacturer
of modem that the other side whom you're

calling and so on, but these are the
official standardized protocols and speeds

that were used. Which brings us... so okay
we have a telephone system; we can dial

numbers; we have a modem that can dial
numbers; we have modems that can send bits

in exceptionally fast speed. What do we do
with this? And this brings us to be BBSs:

where could you actually dial, and what
could you do there? So what's the BBS?

Fundamentally, it's some computer – any
hardware, any operating system, any

software. Some computer that accepts
incoming calls attached to a modem and

offers some kind of interactive service to
the people who dial into that BBS. And if

you wanted to operate a BBS, you had to
have a separate dedicated computer for

that. Because, at the time, most of the
BBS software – and most of the software

that people used in general – predated
multitasking operating systems. So when

you ran the BBS, the computer was busy
running the BBS; you couldn't do anything

else at the same time. So you had to
invest quite a bit into a separate second

computer, or third or fourth, to actually
operate that BBS. You had to have a

separate telephone line. Because if you
operate the BBS into which people dial

into, of course any time of the day or
night people will dial in there, so you

cannot use your normal phone line that you
use to make phone calls but you had to

have a separate dedicated phone line. And
of course the system had to run more or

less 24/7 so people could dial in and
reach it. Luckily, on the user side there

was not so many requirements in terms of
technology that you needed. Your computer

of course you only power when you use it,
and you can share the regular phone line –

with the side effect, as in the
introduction has been mentioned, that your

family might have gone angry if you
occupied it too long – but otherwise no

additional infrastructure other than a
modem required. Now you dial into the BBS

– what kind of content do you get? What do
you do in that BBS? And the name BBS in

English is a Bulletin Board Service,
that's actually the acronym expansion. So

there were Bulletin Boards, message boards
where you could exchange messages and

texts with other people, other users of
that BBS or the so-called sysop, the

system operator, the guy running that BBS.
You could also chat with the system

operator, which, well, didn't exist before
– the ability to chat with somebody else

remotely over a text-based terminal. There
were also multi-user games, text-based, as

well as so called file areas where you
could download files. And downloading

files, given the speeds back then and so
on and so on, of course it was primarily

text documents or small programs or
something like that. Mp3 didn't exist of

course, at least until 95 or whenever it
came out, so maybe some mod files for your

module tracker, something like that. And
of course, last but not least, ASCII and

ANSI artwork, which basically is an entire
subculture and scene and community in

itself, creating artworks and drawings
using the character set that was used by

ANSI.sys, which was the DOS, you could say
display driver, in quotes, in a certain

character set and you could draw graphics
like this. We will see some more. And

people were putting a lot of effort into
this, and sort of competing who could who

could make the best representation or the
most expressive artwork given the limited

resolution and the limited characters and
colors available in this domain. So, what

kind of software did one use? Or what kind
of technology was used? Well, we already

had the computer and modem, you needed
some software. So on the BBS side, BBS

software, there's an unlimited number of
different BBS software programmes, and

extensions, and modifications thereof, a
lot of them are freeware or shareware.

Some of them are public domain, some
actual free software, some are

proprietary. For any operating system, for
any computer architecture, people were

writing BBS software. Whether you had an
Amiga or Atari or you had Apple or DOS PCs

or you name it, software was written, by
hobbyists primarily. One concept that you

will find in BBSs is the concept of so-
called doors. You can think of it as

similar to CGIs in web. So basically, the
BBS software could call an external

programme, which would then take over the
input and output to and from the user. So

you could have sort of plugins to your BBS
software which would add additional new

games or add chat software or messaging or
whatever. On the user side you had a

primarily so-called terminal program. It's
called terminal program because actually

it emulates a serial terminal, which is a
dedicated hardware device with a keyboard

and a screen and a serial line, but not a
general-purpose computer and in order to

make a general-purpose computer behave
like a terminal you had a terminal program

on dos which I was using at the time. It's
primarily telex and telemate I think were

the favorite ones at least on this side of
the planet and you started that program,

you had a serial port, the serial port
attached to your modem and from there you

dialed and the terminal program then was
responsible for displaying the texts and

the ANSI graphics and so on and exchanging
files of a variety of different protocols,

which we will also cover later but before
we go on let's do a quick demo of how this

looks like. Now as a note I don't have a
modem here I'm not emulating a modem I'm

not emulating a serial port, these days
you can get the same experience by using

telnet over the internet but you can
actually telnet into BBSs, I just want to

basically show how it looks like. So this
is the terminal program and we have now

connected to the BBS this is sort of a
introductory graphic that we see before

even logging into the the box yeah some...
of course the scrolling was much slower

back then, so now we can scroll back up to
actually see what was there. Yes, some

more graphics. You still haven't seen the
login prompt yet, as you can see a fairly

graphics heavy BBS. Then you can choose
the theme of the BBS, a user interface,

I'm going to go for the classic ANSI here.
Finally, I come to a login screen and I

can log into the system where I have to
enter my handle and the password which is

now in clear-text over telnet. For those
of you interested in this, not that

there's anything useful I just registered
this morning at the BBS so there's nothing

associated with this account. Yeah some
more graphics. Finally, we are at a

message board and we see as I said I just
logged in or registered this BBS today. We

see there is a message number one from
Hawk Hubbard, "Welcome", so if I want to

look at that message I could basically say
"I want to read it now". This is the

message reader I go in here, then here,
"Welcome to forge" and so on.. So he

welcomes me to the BBS now let's go to the
main menu of the BBS, which in this case

looks like that and you have different...
the file areas, where you can download

files, you have the door games that I
mentioned, you have an ANSI gallery, a BBS

list, you can look at the last callers who
has called this mailbox and you can see

this... Well, yeah three test calls from
me this morning, but you can see actually

other people are still logging into this
BBS and it's 2017, so it's not... to me

this is mostly history but during the
preparation of this talk I discovered that

some people, for some people it is still
the present and I'm very happy to see

there's still such an active community
around BBSs and which enables me to show

all of this without firing up some
emulators and so on. So yeah, we also can

look at one-liners, here's some messages
that people can leave to other people,

other users in the BBS, again with some
quite a graphical... We don't want to

leave any additional words here, but what for
example we can look at the ANSI gallery

just very quickly, can try to select
something here, I have no idea what I'm

looking at so... Ok... so here you have a
sort of a viewer that, yeah... So it will

show you the sections of a sort of longer
artwork in this particular case... Yeah...

well... And the artwork... to me there
always was a lot of similarity between the

sort of, between the ANSI art artists and
the people doing... Now I'm lacking the

word, street art basically I think there's
a lot of similarity between that. Okay

good, that was just a very quick demo of
course I could now look at more messages

and write messages and play blackjack and
do whatever I want, which I don't in this

case, so we will log off. And again some
more graphics and you can leave a comment

to the sysop if you want or you can just
basically... Log of... Ok, that for a very

quick demo of the look and feel. Now since
I'm such a technical person and looking at

protocol stacks, I tried to draw a
protocol stack diagram for BBSs, which

ended up at this. So basically at the
lower layers we have the pots, the plain

old telephony system or ISDN, which we
will get to in a few slides. We had modems

on the analogue telephone system, we had
other things on ISDN. In the end at some

point you always have rs-232, a serial
port, either emulated or real, and then

either you had a terminal program directly
on top of that or, for example to transfer

files, you have used X modem or Y modem or
Z modem, which added error correction and

retransmission and block transmission so
you could safely transfer files without,

or at least with less, corruption. The
checksum algorithms were not so scientific

in many cases. Here we then have well some
other things, FTN, Point what does that,

UUCP we will cover that later. Basically
you could run different protocols and

different systems on top of that. One
curiosity that I still want to mention is

that, which I actually I forgot until on
Twitter somebody reminded me a couple of

days ago that this existed, and I went "oh
yes, RIPterm, I used that quite some time

ago", so instead of having these text-
based user interfaces some people, company

called TeleGrafix came up with a language
called RIPscript which was a fairly

compact language of textual commands, by
which the BTS could control a vector

graphic renderer on the client side in
your terminal program, and you could

actually draw VGA resolution graphics like
the one that's presented here on the slide

from the VBS on the screen of the user,
which was quite a big change compared to

the ASCII art or ANSI art that you've seen
before. Yeah, so we're still at BBSs and

BBSs that are isolated, so you can
participate in those bulletin boards and

you can read and write messages and
exchange ideas and recipes and thoughts

and cheat codes and whatever you want to
exchange. Users log in at different times,

the BBS is busy if it has only a single
line while it's being used by some other

user. Of course you can add as a BBS
operator, as the sysop, you can add more

modems and more phone lines, which is of
course expensive, together with the multi-

port serial cards and and everything that
was required. You can have time limits for

each user, but in the end it's sort of,
there's a limit to how far you can scale a

single BTS sort of - not a BTS, a BBS,
jeez, a single BBS... Well also there's a

scalability limit for BTSs, but that's
another talk, so, yeah. Which brings us to

one method of more efficiently engaging
with BBSs for exchanging messages which is

a concept of points or offline message
reading. So as we have just seen in this

example we log in to the VP... the BBS and we
have an online interactive session with

the BBS while we read and write the
messages and of course it means we occupy

the telephone line for an extended period
of time and it's not used very efficiently

because humans typically read slower than
at least a fourteen point four or twenty

eight kilobits per second. So people
invented something called points or

offline message reading and different
concepts different systems different

standards different technologies. What
they did in the end is they compressed and

batched all the messages for you into
files and you on your client-side you were

writing your messages offline and also
compressing and batching the messages that

you've written and then you make a call,
you quickly exchange those files in both

directions even in full duplex if the
system supports it and then you terminate

the connection again. So during a very
short call you can exchange much more, many

more messages and you have all the time to
read through those messages without having

to look at the phone meter or your phone
bill all the time. So, more scalability,

more users, shorter connection time, lower
cost for everyone involved. Definitely an

interesting technology, but still sort of
scalability is limited of a single BTS

which, eh, BBS which brings us to BBS
networks, store-and-forward networks which

basically extended the ability to exchange
messages beyond a single BBS, but so

basically the bulletin boards or the
message groups that you had at a BBS were

replicated over different protocols that
were invented by various different people

over time, so not only one BBS had all the
messages of a given bulletin board but all

the other BBSs participating also were
receiving these messages and replicating

them all over the network. Also for
personal mail, which is like email, right,

between two participants, you could route
those messages across the network. The two

users exchanging messages didn't have to
connect to the same BBS anymore. So much

more scalability and also you could use it
efficiently for message routing to reduce

the need for long distance calls and so
on. So let's look at a couple of these BBS

networks and the technologies they used.
One large and very popular example of

course is the Fido Network which consists
of two parts, net mail and echo mail.

Net mail is the private personal mail and echo
mail are public message boards or message

groups. Fido had some, the technology used
by Fido called FTN Fido technology

networks were used also by other networks.
They were using the same protocols, but

they were not the same group of BBSs or
the same content and so on. Treknet for

Star Trek fans was one, Gernet in Germany
was an example for that. And there also

were other technologies and other networks
such as Z-Netz, where they called it

"Bretter" actually, so boards, the
individual message groups. And again they

had other offsprings that used the same
technology but have different groups and

different policies and different
structures such as T-Netz or CL-Netz. And

then there was the big faction of people
who did UUCP, the UNIX to UNIX copy, which

we will look at a little bit. And MausNet
is another german example here originating

from the city of Muenster, which was used
to up to 120 BBSs here. Let's look at Fido

a little bit more. Started allegedly in
1984. Of course I was not involved at that

time at the age of 5. It reached a limit
of 250 nodes in 1985 because apparently, I

suppose probably, a single integer UINT8
was used for the node number or something

like that and then about 250 should be
sufficient for everyone. I don't know what

the other 5 are for. And then they
introduced in '86 hierarchic regional

routing and addressing that was more
scalable and in the end at the peak of the

Fido net propagation it was 39,000 nodes;
that's BBSs not individual users but

39,000 BBSs were interconnected with an
estimated 2 million users worldwide and

that's for a you know hobbyist amateur
network is I think quite impressive.

The addresses looked like this. That's
actually a node number that I used around

'95 in Nuremberg at the time. Z-Netz
started as Zerberus-Netz - and I'm not

sure if padeluun or Rena or any of the
people involved in the audience if then I

hope I represent the history correctly -
which is a network technology created in

Germany. The standards are inspired but
different than the Usenet and UUCP

protocols and there were all kinds of
flame war about who understood the specs

wrong and whether there's an improvement
between ZConnect compared to the Usenet

standards or not. But anyway it was
different and there was one program called

CrossPoint which was the most popular
point software at the time I think at

least on DOS for Z-Netz and also for other
technologies. The screenshot here at the

bottom actually is a cross point
screenshot. And cross point in the early

90s already had features that I'm still
missing today in any email client that I

have found. Right? Imagine you have a
thread that crosses multiple folders,

multiple news groups, multiple whatever
and you have threading like the tree of

the thread across folders and news groups
and so on. I mean that's something that

you cannot do with any of the
software still today. Maybe you have you

have an answer which software today
supports this but for sure nothing I have

found has the kind of features and
functionality. Unfortunately it was

written in Pascal and it had a line length
limit of 255 characters per line which

made it not very compatible to Usenet
standards where lines could have different

lengths so one couldn't continue to use it
in today's time and age at least not

easily. Usenet is another network of these
BBS days where messages were exchanged by

a system called UNIX to UNIX copy. UNIX to
UNIX copy predates the Usenet it was used,

well as the name implies, to copy
something between UNIX machines - file

copying - and some of those files that
people were copying were internet mail at

the time. And then the Usenet news format
was invented. The format is quite similar

to internet mail, which we still know
today, but it's not a personal mail

between person A and person B, but it, you
could post it to a so-called news group

and there was a hierarchy of news groups
which replicated and flooded messages

across the entire network, across the
globe. And it was a flooding mechanism

involve to make sure that the messages get
replicated and the duplicates get detected

and duplicates are not basically
transmitted again or rather shown again

and so on. The routing was originally
defined in route maps in UUCP which is a

quite a bit odd over time because it's
basically a static source based routing

for the UUCP mails. News as I said
they were flooding anyway. Usenet was

quite popular until well into the 90s. I
was news master of two news servers for

some time basically doing system
administration of those boxes. And just to

give you an anecdote again; into this
context we will get to Kommunikationsnetz

Franken, which is a nonprofit organization
in the area of Franconia in southern

Germany, where I was active. And at the
time internet - like when we actually got

to IP, at some point, IP traffic was so
expensive that it was rather difficult to

get a full newsfeed over IP because you've
wasted a lot of your expensive bandwidth -

wasted in quotes - but you used it for
news and so what we did actually is, we

put up a satellite dish at a building in
Nuremberg and we had satellite feeds from

the US. So there were US companies that
were streaming compressed Usenet batches

up to a geostationary satellite which has
a downlink over Europe and then we got two

megabits of compressed batched news net
news in, I would say, let's say 95ish or

something like that, so that was
definitely a big improvement. So we we had

a full news feed coming directly from the
US without having to pay for all the

International data transfer. Another
curiosity is the Floppy Poll/Point. Now

nobody is laughing yet. Well not everyone
had phone lines in the 90s, particularly

in eastern Germany. Phone lines were still
a rare commodity after reunification

happened in 90. It took some time until
people could get connected to the

telephone network. And so what people did
is actually they exchanged daily floppies

by postal mail. So basically rather than
sending your compressed batches of

messages over modems, because well for a
modem you need phone lines, you put a

floppy - I would assume 3.5 inch at the
time, not so much four and a quarter inch

- but you put a floppy in an envelope you
send it to your BBS and the guy

opens the envelope and puts it in the BBS
and he sends you a floppy in return. So

you add one day or something to your
transmission but then well the

transmission speed of messages in those
networks at the time was sort of one to

two days or maybe even three days anyway
so if you add another day what does it

matter? It was such a big advantage that
you could get messages like worldwide

messages at all in such a short time and
for basically no cost whatsoever. Okay

getting to the internet, yeah. How did I
start to access Internet, how did people

start to access the Internet at the time?
Well mail and news was sort of the

Internet in the beginning via UUCP, which
is nice and fine, but it's not IP, yet. So

what you could do is you could, instead of
dialing into a BBS, you could of course

use your modem to dial to the serial port
of the TTY of any UNIX machine that's

somewhere else. If you have a UNIX
workstation somewhere, that's connected to

an IP network using 10base2 or whatever
was the network technology at the time or

FDDI or whatever, x21... then you could
attach a modem to a serial part of such a

UNIX box and you just get the login prompt
when you connect with the modem to that

box. Like you sit in front of your Linux
system today, you have your login prompt.

And then on that workstation you basically
you could remotely use that workstation

and then you could run FTP clients or IRC
clients or telnet, gopher, whatever on the

text console. That was mostly available to
people in the academic sector of course

because they had some UNIX machines at
universities. I was too young to be at

university, so I had to use FTP mailers
for quite some time. So what's an FTP

mailer? Well it's basically some FTP
client that runs on a remote machine

somewhere that's connected to the Internet
and that has email access and you can use

input/output over email. So if you want to
FTP to some FTP server you send an email.

It says "ftp ftp." and an "ls" and
then some hours later you get a response

with the list of the files, yeah? And then
after you've got the list of the files you

do the first CD to change into a directory
and then you get again the response. And

then finally you know which file you want
so you issue a get command over the file

and then you get this long series of
UUencoded mails. UUencode is a method of

sending binary 8-bit messages over mails
before MIME existed. The MIME format which

we use today for email attachments and so
on. That didn't exist at the time, so it

was UUencode before, so yeah. So hours or
days later you got that and it

worked perfectly fine, I mean, I was quite
happy to be able to use that at the time.

Now, then, if you had dial-up access to
UNIX boxes, you could also do something

called SLIP, which is a serial line IP. So
you could transport IP over the modem line

and as a result you have IP at home in
your apartment! Unbelievable! it was later

superseded by PPP which introduced
features such as auto-configuration,

authentication, compression and so on -
well there was a compressed SLIP, but yeah

not quite as compressed as PPP - and
popular software stack at the time - and

I'm talking about early 90s, mid-90s - is
basically Trumpet Winsock on Windows with

NCSA Mosaic as a browser, because Windows
back then didn't have TCP/IP, so you had

to install another package to actually
have TCP/IP on Windows at the time. If

you didn't have Windows, I will get to
that, and I'm talking about the pre-Linux

days here. So what did you do if you
wanted to do internet on a PC before Linux

was around? I didn't have a 386 initially,
I had a 286. And on a 286 of course you

couldn't run any multitasking operating
system because it doesn't have a real

protected mode. So no Linux, no BSD, but
there was something called KA9Q NOS. And

now I want to see hands: who has ever
heard of or used KA9Q NOS? Yeah! Ok...

laughs
Audience member shouts: It is a person's

callsign.
LaForge: Yes, "It's a person's callsign"

was the comment from the audience, this is
correct. KA9Q is Phil Karn in the US and

he wrote a network operating system the
KA9Q NOS, the network operating system.

And it is an implementation of - he
started actually in the 80s with this on

CPM and then later ported it to DOS - and
it implements TCP/IP, SLIP, PPP including

POP3 server, SMTP server + client, IP
routing, telnet, ARP and so on. And you

could do all this on DOS. I used it quite
a lot at my home. You could do routing and

you had multiple applications at the same
time all on top of DOS. It was a fantastic

piece of software. And then you could
build a router to ethernet and you could

have multiple other machines in your home
and you have more and more cable in your

home. And more and more connected machines,
yeah, actually, yeah we will get to that, ok.

PPP superseded that. At some point ISDN
came around, particularly in Germany. ISDN

is the digital version of telephony
system, so instead of having analog

circuits you now transfer digital bits.
That could be audio, digitized audio, but

of course it could be any other
transparent digital data. In Germany ISDN

was first put in operation in 1989. Until
'93 it used a German protocol standard

called 1TR6, and from '94 onwards the
European E-DSS1 protocol standard was

available. It was hugely popularized from
1995 onwards by subsidies. So at the time

if you actually ordered an ISDN connection
and at the same time you bought a, let's

say a small PBX or a phone or a modem or
something like that, you could [get]

subsidies from Deutsche Telekom. So, I
think it went up to 700 marks - not sure

if somebody remembers the exact figures -
and so you've got quite a bit of money to

buy equipment to switch to this new
technology. So when ISDN you don't have a

modem because there's nothing to modulate
or demodulate, it's digital, so it's

called a terminal adapter, and it adapts
the bitstream, the synchronous serial

bitstream of the ISDN to your operating
system or your computer and there was

something called V.110 as a rate
adaptation to do asynchronous serial like

RS-232, sort of, over a synchronous ISDN.
Okay and how did we get internet access?

Well, it was, if you were not in academia
or something like that, there were a few

commercial ISPs like XLink or EUnet. They
were very expensive and of course you

didn't have local dial-in in all the
different cities around Germany, but you

had grassroot groups of enthusiasts that
established themselves in some

associations to make sure the members can
get internet access. In my region in

Nuremberg Kommunikationsnetz Franken was
particularly active. They started with

dial-up UUCP services and later IP for
non-commercial users - and I have to say

with an extremely high technical standard
which I'm still fascinated by today.

Kommunikationsnetz Franken had points of
presence in various different cities in

the region because not everybody could
call to Nuremberg as a local call and

every user got six static IP addresses,
routed to wherever he dialed in. The use of

OSPF in the mid-1990s to make sure you
have static IP addresses wherever you dial

in. Some people still don't have that in
2017 and I'm not even talking about the

static IP addresses, but anyway. So about
800 users peak at that association at the

time. And there was an umbrella
organization called "Individual Network

e.V." (IN). This was established.
Individuals could not become members in

that association so it's - the name is a
bit interesting - it's called Individual

Network, because it's about networking for
individuals, but the members were the

regional associations such as
Kommunikationsnetz Franken, who then

basically used this umbrella entity to
negotiate decent rates to get internet

connectivity and so on. And apparently the
IN members served more than three hundred

thousand users at some point - so it
scaled quite a bit - was dissolved in 2000

when lots of commercialized ISPs were
around and also when the remaining member

entities, which many of which still exist
today such as Kommunikationsnetz Franken,

they didn't need this umbrella entity to
get decent internet rates or tariffs

again. So, with packets which TCP/IP we
just need one number that we call at some

point We're not dialing into hundreds of
different BBS's anymore but we're actually

connecting always to the same number which
is our ISP, and then when we have that

connection we exchange packet data with
systems worldwide which brought new

purpose to lease lines. Analog leased
lines were basically telephone lines that

were permanently switched, or actually
permanently wired at the exchange. So you

had two wires of copper between one
location and another location and they

were physically connected you could apply
a DC voltage and the DC voltage would come

out at the other end. You could get this
from Deutsche Post or Telekom at the time.

When I could finally afford one in '98 for
900 marks installation cost and in my case

180 marks per month, was sixty marks
per hop. Hop means: telephone exchange. So

if between the other end where you want to
connect to and where you are, are three

telephone exchanges, you had three times
sixty marks or 180 marks per month. And

then I connected to a system that looked
like this, which is called the Hub

Nuremburg of this Kommunikationsnetz
Franken, which is in the basement of one

of the members. You have basically a PC
running Linux of FreeBSD, no it was BSD

actually, with like a 16-port serial card
and various modems stacked on various

shelves to interconnect all these
different leased lines and which then had

one ISDN leased line with 128 kilobits to
some internet uplink. Yeah that's the

obligatory ISDN network termination and
telephone sockets, which brings us to ISDN

leased lines. There was a product called
SPV "Semi-Permanente Festverbindung",

which is not really a leased line - it's
semi-permanent - and it's basically a

flat-rate call to one specific destination
telephone number, which you could get in

national 1TR6 ISDN and which was rather
inexpensive and what many people used who

wanted more than the ISDN speeds. Okay I
have to speed up a bit, time is running

out! The first step of abusing analog
lines, which we did, is by deploying a

device called an ICU-T, which is the
inverse of an ISDN NTBA. So in ISDN you

still have the telephone exchange and you
have a network termination, the NTBA, on

your line. And basically the the ICU-T was
a single line telephone exchange side of

this protocol. So you could use an analog
line which you normally used for analog

modems but you remove the two analog
modems you put an NTBA on one end, you put

the ICU-T on the other end and suddenly we
can get 128 kilobits over that line which

previously you could only do 33.6 without
having to pay any additional cents or

money to Deutsche Telekom, of course. And
then there was some special ISDN routers

which could use the signaling channel, the
16 kbps signaling D-channel on ISDN also

for data, so you get 128 + 16 kilobytes of
data, because well, there's no signaling,

you're not dialling anyone so you can as
well use that. Now this is sort of the

hierarchy of the leased line
infrastructure at this entity. I'm not

showing every leased line here, but
basically I was at the upper left corner

here connecting with 33.6 kbps to this hub
Nuremburg, which connects to 128K to a

machine in a Nuremberg building of the
University of Erlangen, which then

connects over X21 to the University of
Erlangen, where then all kinds of other

leased lines come together. That was the
the architecture of what we deployed

there. Some more pictures: this is in
Fürth, a neighbor city of Nuremberg. The

collection of telephone outlets and the
collection of modems and the machine - oh

there was, I'm missing one picture sorry
for that - anyway you can see a pile of

modems here and some more modems here and
the machine over there. And then we went

into phase two of abusing analog telephone
lines, when the first DSL modems came out.

So we imported some Ascend DSLpipes in '99
from the US and with some firmwares you

could operate them back to back without
the DSLAM so basically you operate one DSL

modem at one end of the leased line and
another DSL modem at the other end, and if

you are close enough like with a single
hop at the single telephone exchange you

could get up to 2.3 megabits symmetric
over your analog line. And that in 1999

was quite a lot of speed, especially if
you're not paying for traffic or anything

like that. Some less alternative, less
expensive one alternatives came out. Okay!

Before I wrap up, a short detour or one
thing still to mention. Another phenomenon

back then - I'm not sure if this happened
in other cities too - and in my area in

Fürth we had an entity called Falcons
Maze, which was called an online bistro.

I became a regular there around '94. They
initially had four DOS PCs, each of them

with a modem and with a dedicated call-
charge meter. And you could basically go

there, it's a cafe, you can have, you know
you can eat and drink and so on, and you

can sit at the PC and you can then from
there dial into BBSs and basically do

things if you didn't have a modem or a PC
at home. But the interesting part of

course was that there all the other peoples
were hanging out, the other BBS users,

sysops and so on. At some point the PCs
were networked with 10base2, so people

could play doom when it came out, I think
in - not sure when it reached us in

Germany - '94 maybe or so, and yeah. The
internet became more popular. It started

subsidiaries and we set up ISDN SPVs, the
"semi-permanente Verbindung" as an

internet uplink from there, so that also,
I mean, you can find some sources that

this apparently, allegedly was the first
internet cafe. I'm not sure if anyone else

has contested that. Something like that.
Anyway, after lots of anecdotes I want to

give you some time for Q&A. To summarize:
the first decades of wide area

communications were powered by a community
of enthusiasts or rather communities that

were disjunct and not connected, largely
motivated by non-commercial motives. Of

course there were commercial BBSs but by
far not without much corporate or

government influence, right? There was no
Google and there was no ministry that was

putting censorship or something like that.
And the BBS community is a distinct

subculture so it has different norms and
it has different values, different from

the ham radio guys, different from free
software guys, of course some overlap, but

still a separate community with separate
norms. What I personally think is the big

loss, other than the loss of picture on
the screen, is that back then the networks

were distributed. There was no single
point of failure. The infrastructure was

owned and operated by its users, by
individuals. The connection speeds were

symmetric and there was no, like, data
center versus consumer separation that we

have in the internet day and age of today.
And that's, yes, I really think this

autonomy and decentralization is a big
loss to society or the community as a

whole. Ok, some pointers: if you want to
read up more or look at some ANSI artwork

or log into BBSs, the telnet BBS guide I
can highly recommend that. You can also

find the BBS I looked into. Ok, good.
Which brings us to the point where we can

have some questions.

Applause

Herald: The microphones here in, 3, 1, 2
and 4, but first we have questions from

the signal angel. So what's the question for?

Signal Angel: The internet wants to know,
"What was the highest phone bill you ever

got back then?"
LaForge: To be honest, I don't remember

but for sure it was four digits. I'm quite
sure it was. It was quite devastating,

yes.
Hearld: There is another question from the

internet.
Signal Angel: And there's another

question, "You mentioned that there are
very few books around those topics. Which

ones would you recommend regarding BBS,
Usenet and so on?"

LaForge: I cannot respond to this directly
I don't remember that. I can put it

together and people can reach out to me
or I put it in the slides when I submit

them into the frap system, sorry for that.
Herald: So we have a question from the

microphone number two please.
Mic 2: Yes, back in the 90s most of the

voice was uncompressed and actually
direct. Modern technologies usually, I

think, voice always compressed transferred
over IP. Do you know for any modern

modulation formats the text can survive
several codecs voice codecs or data

transmission?
LaForge: I'm not the expert on that

subject. I know there are some codecs,
yes, but they are extremely slow. So you

are happy if you get something like 1200
or maybe 2400 bps of data through a modem

that survives multiple codecs and then of
course always the question of which

codecs.
Herald: Okay microphone number four

please.
Mic 4: Okay I don't have a question to

Herald actually, but thanks for the talk.
I would like to ask the audience because

many, I think, users and operators of BBSs
are here. Who wants to meet this evening,

at I would say nine o'clock, in one of the
seminar rooms for talk about the back old

times? Yeah, so I will try to lock a self-
organized session at the seminar room

1415, I think it's called, at 9 o'clock.
LaForge: Ok, thank you very much.

Mic 4: So, see you there and talk about
the good days of and some more stories I

think.
Herald: There are still more people

queuing up. Microphone number 4, please.
Mic 4: I've got a question about the

political bulletin board systems. Could
you tell us a bit about the CL-Net and the

fascist clone the Thule-Net? What was the
dynamics back then and the fights? What

were the conflicts in those boxes?
LaForge: I have to admit I cannot say too

much about it. I know, of course, CL-Netz
was a network mainly for left-wing

political activists and groups and yes
there was Thule-Netz, a right-wing

Network, and I knew there was discussions
and so on and there were people trying to

hack each other's mailboxes and so on,
but I was not participating or involved

in these discussions to an extent that I
can really comment on it sorry.

Herald: Microphone number one, please.
Mic 1: Hi Harald. I still remember when I

started with an acoustic coupler. I did
that because there was a severe threat of

punishment if you used an illegal modem at
the time from the Deutsche Bundespost. So

I was actually never aware that a little
bit later you could actually do an end,

back to back DSL modem connection over an
analogue exchange. So at that time you did

that, what was the the punishment
situation from the Bundespost or whatever

it was called at the time if they would
have ever caught you doing that? Do you

remember?
LaForge: I have no clue. Yes, it sort of,

and I mean the... How can I say? The the
criminal offense, I think, stopped in '92

when Deutsche Post was privatized. So
until '92 it was a criminal offence to

operate a non-approved modem at the German
telephone network, because was government

owned. It was a crime, not a minor
offence. But afterwards I don't really

know to be honest. I don't think anyone
bothered at the time and nobody, I mean

the, we never had any trouble with these
DSL things and so on, that we did over

analog circuits.
Herald: Microphone number two, please.

Mic 2: Okay, hello I'm from Taiwan and I
just want to share something interesting

for everyone. In Taiwan is a small country
in Asia. We are still using BBS. The

largest is named PTT and exported to use
SSH or WebSocket you can edit, and the

source code is open available on GitHub.
Everybody can search it. Thank you.

LaForge: Thank you very much. It's
actually not just for Taiwan, but you can

find many, I mean maybe it's more popular
there still, but you can find many BBSs

that are still in operation today in many
different countries even also with BBS

software that's free software that's
maintained now on GitHub or on other

repositories with contributors and so on.
So the community still lives, but I think

at least internationally it's very small
and I'm happy to hear if it's larger in

some countries.
Herald: You have still time for questions.

Microphone number four, please.
Mic 4: So you talked about restoring

decentralization. So, what old systems
would you like to see coming back?

Something like the Usenet? I mean it's
still there, but you can't access it

without paying a lot of money to some big
gateway. So, which technologies would you

like to revive or do you think are
realistic to revive to have

decentralization again?
LaForge: I don't think the technologies

necessarily need to be revived because
they are, to a large extent, old and

people are smarter and the, how can I say,
the capacity and the computational

complexity of what you can do today and so
on is much better. So we can have much

better technology. But the thing that I
would like to see revived is more

decentralization and more people operating
their own technology and that's just, I

think, I don't really have a plan and I'm
not saying I have a vision I'm just saying

it has a problem, this development, that
basically it's a consumer / producer model

and especially with content delivery
networks and with attacks on network

neutrality and and all these topics, it's
always moving in one direction. It's

basically turning the user into a stupid
consumer and and making sure all the

control and all the content, and so on, is
in the hand of large corporations.

Applause
By the way, one interesting anecdote about

the... I talked about the asymmetry of the
speed, right? And with DSL at this ADSL

and the popular technology is always the
downlink is bigger than the uplink. I know

in Brazil a lot of people, basically in
small, like small size ISPs, they did it

the opposite way around! So they did one
modem with basically a large downstream

and small upstream and then they, on
another line next to it, they inverted it

by using a master modem on one side and a
slave modem on the other so then again he

had symmetric speed. So, some people had
creative ideas to work around some of the

technological restrictions.
Herald: So microphone number two, please.

Mic 2: I also from Taiwan and I want to
add something for my friend. Like, there

are still like half million people come
here to BBS called PTT, yeah, today. And

like, there's a, there are 100,000 people
online now, yeah. So, I think the

community is now like...
Herald: What ist your question? Can you

please phrase the question?
Mic 2: I just want to add something for my

friend, yeah.
LaForge: Okay, thank you.

Herald: Microphone number one, please.
Mic 1: cough You talked about content of

these mailboxes. Isn't it that the
Freifunk community today is a possible way

to get this freedom back from what you had
in your mailboxes? The services they were

offered there, the Freifunk could do the
same today with user own structures and so

on.
LaForge: That's very correct yes. Freifunk

definitely is much more in the spirit of
the community owned and community run

systems, and I see lots of similarities
between the BBS community and what

Freifunk is doing today. It's correct.
Mic 1: Are you are you doing something

with Freifunk?
LaForge: Me personally? No, I'm not

involved.
Mic 1: Okay.

Herald: I think microphone number two is
waiting way too long.

Mic 2: Hello, thanks for the talk. You
mentioned that most people didn't have a

TCP/IP capable operating system at this
time and I started to read recently about

an operating system called Xenix, X-E-N-
I-X, that was actually developed by

Microsoft and published in 1983 that could
run on IBM PC compatible machines on the

x86 processors, and I hear that in the
Russian BBS systems at least it was very

popular. Did you encounter any Xenix
operating systems at that time?

LaForge: No I personally did not encounter
Xenix. I read about it, yes, and I know it

I could have possibly run it on my 286
machine, but I mean, I don't think it was

something that was readily available for
affordable price to individuals, but maybe

I'm wrong. No, certainly not, okay, some
people are heavily shaking their heads.

Mic 2: I think this is why it was popular
in Russia...

Laughs
LaForge: Possibly. I do not want to

comment on that...
Herald: We have time for one more

question. Microphone number 4.
Mic 4: I just wanted to note, in the wiki

the meeting is up. Search for BBS and this
evening at 9 o'clock I think we can talk

about all the details of running DSL on
modem lines. I've also got some more

details on that and a lot of these modems
left if you need some. But I think, so see

you Harold at 9 o'clock
LaForge: Yeah definitely! Thanks!

Mic 4: Ok, everybody welcome.
LaForge: Thank you!

Applause

Herald: Thank you very much for the talk.

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