12 ms·

A 1985 Essay from a Bulletin Board System Admin Foretold Our Future

65 points by buserror 11y ago

buserror 11y ago
It's entirely possible the rest of the essay predicted flying cars, but the published bits are good...
jgrahamc 11y ago
I think people overplay stuff like this because they think that before widespread Internet none of the issues being faced had been talked about. For them the 1980s (or earlier) are a dark age. The reality is that by 1985 the UK already had the Data Protection Act, the US had computer crime acts in place, high profile hacks had occurred (notably the hacking of the Duke of Edinburgh's email in the UK), 2600 was being published, and WarGames far from being a 'hokey hacking movie' actually showed the reality of the sort of hacking that someone would undertake (dialing through phone number after phone number and accessing systems that were largely unprotected). If you were immersed in the BBS scene or Usenet at this time these things were being openly discussed. This essay feels like a very basic summary of some of what was going on.
- scholia 11y ago
  For most people, "online" means "the web", so roughly two decades of online services (1975-95) have ceased to exist. This includes FidoNet, Usenet, Prestel, Teletel, CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy and too many others to mention. Of those, only AOL still seems to have any mind-share, and that's probably because it eventually provided internet email and browser-based web connections.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    For a lot of people, AOL was their original ISP given how ubiquitous their disks were pre-broadband. It's interesting that pre-web, you really had a number of largely non-overlapping online communities (which didn't even intersect all that much within the broad groups). I'm not sure that most people appreciate how fragmented the entire thing was. There was no real universal email for a long time. Individual BBSs - which also had some shared boards through systems like PCRelay Commercial "BBSs" like Compuserve, AOL, Delphi, etc. Usenet which was the only one which was actually part of the Internet.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      > I'm not sure that most people appreciate how fragmented the entire thing was. There was no real universal email for a long time. Nor how expensive it was. http://imgur.com/xz3k9OC http://imgur.com/xz3k9OC Compuserve was $11 per hour. Delphi was $6 per hour. $11 in 1998 is $22 now.
      - ghaff 11y ago
        And that's not even counting the fact that even intra-state dialing outside of the local calling area was metered per minute at non-trivial rate. When I was BBSing and had a subscription to a service in a nearby city (which was still an intra-state long distance call), I used software that sucked down BBS content and let me read and reply offline.
        gscott 11y ago
        Cellphones used to include unlimited forwarding so I would set my cell phone to forward to the BBS I wanted to call and then I would call my cell phone with my terminal software. Cell phone companies figure that out and limited the number of minutes allowed for forwarding.
      - sixothree 11y ago
        When I was getting started Compuserve was $6 per hour for 300 baud and $11 for 1200 baud. I was in 6th grade at the time and caused a number of rather large monthly bills to the point my family cancelled the service. I did later go on to run a BBS which included FidoNet. That was incredibly fun stuff.
  - fractallyte 11y ago
    Hey, I still use my CompuServe email daily! (Same address since 1997!)
    - ghaff 11y ago
      I was a Compuserve subscriber for a long time starting sometime in the early eighties. Not sure exactly when I stopped using it entirely. I used it for various things and I was reasonably active in the shareware scene for a time which used CIS as their main member discussion forum. As I recall, CIS was also my gateway to Internet email for a time before I got my own email through my BBS (which became an ISP like other commercial BBSs at the time).
    - chrisBob 11y ago
      I occasionally see @aol.com addresses and cringe to think that people might still be paying $20/month for it. Is a compuserve account free at least?
      - fractallyte 11y ago
        AOL acquired CompuServe, but still maintains the mail servers - for now. People go all wide-eyed when they hear my '@csi.com' address, associating it with the TV series. But, yes, it's free ;-)
- fit2rule 11y ago
  I agree with you that we tend to ignore our immediate history and not see things for how they were - but, how do we fix this, exactly? By telling each other about these articles .. I was around in those days, my eyes have been rolling and rolling over the years as we see Hot New Stuff get released that is really just Old Stuff Ignored, Re-invented. There are definitely cycles of insomnia in our culture. So for me anyway its great to see these predictions coming out of the woodwork, and to recall some of the great, fine essays that were produced in the early years of electronic media consumption. So much great stuff, lost to the electrons of time..
  - simonh 11y ago
    Yep. Of course this guy's post didn't exist in a vacuum, but most people aren't aware of how back online culture goes. Most hacker kids nowadays haven't even heard of Clifford Stoll or "The Cucko's Egg"(1). (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - chipsy 11y ago
      It took me a moment to realize why I was stuck in the internet revisionist mindset even though I know many of the early computer crime stories. It's because the security game has played out generationally - the publically known techniques used to break into systems in 1995 were less sophisticated than those seen now. This a war that has quietly been fought since the first secret messages, on a battlefield that is now shifting with increasing speed and is tilted heavily in favor of offense. The common advice one had to take control of one's information in the 90's just isn't any good now - there are critically failing holes in the infrastructure that make individual defense a Sisyphiean task. But relative to now, gaining unauthorized access to a valuable system in the 80's or 90's would still be challenging, as the bag of tricks would be different, less widely known, and you might need more expensive equipment.
- protomyth 11y ago
  It seem like a bit of a reach or modern reinterpretation. I think you could write an article based on Byte Magazine Volume 10 Number 13 - Computer Conferencing[1] very much like this one predicting social networks. 1) https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-12 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-12
- guelo 11y ago
  It's kind of like how people keep pretending there wasn't a decade of pocket computers before the iPhone.
bitJericho 11y ago
The scanned essay: http://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/article/no-id/1441400395211305.jpg http://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/article/no...
- scrrr 11y ago
  Is there a text-version of this?
  - i336_ 11y ago
    I'd like to know this too. I get this impression the "research" conducted in the article involved actual printed material and not something like textfiles.org. I quote-searched a couple of sentences from the article on Google, and got the article back as the sole result.
rubidium 11y ago
A bit off topic, but this line stuck out: "I did some googling and couldn’t find any information on Inman, except for some mentions in lists of BBSes of times gone by." It's a pretty self-damning statement by the author that the extent of their research is confined to "googling". Motherboard Vice's about page says it's "With in-depth blogging, longform reporting, and video journalism, Motherboard investigates the news and events that are already affecting the years to come." This article falls short of any of that.
- acheron 11y ago
  vice.com is the same kind of clickbait trash as a Gawker site or Vox or whatever. But this is what journalism has become now.
  - ulkesh 11y ago
    This is the sad reality. The last bastion of true journalism now exists within NPR (at least to a degree) or outside the United States. Sensationalist media with only a surface approach to journalism has become the rule and no longer just the exception.
    - elros 11y ago
      I think both parent and grand-parent just haven't seen Vice enough to get the full picture. While I'll grant the fact that some of their channels err on the side of fluff, I do consider the fact that they routinely send journalists to war areas (ISIS, Ukraine) and report from there, or other inhospitable places (e.g. North Korea, central Africa, the Amazon) a display of something more than just a "surface approach to journalism". Or clickbait trash :-) Edit: Tried to make my comment less harsh.
      - Sideshow_Boob 11y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLmkec_4Rfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLmkec_4Rfo
    - 11y ago
CIPHERSTONE 11y ago
I loved the BBS era. For those of us kids who saw Wargames at the movie theater it was almost like magic. My first modem was 300 baud. You haven't lived until your mom ruined your 5 hour download of a sweet 300-500k game because she picked up the phone. Good times.
- bedhead 11y ago
  I would also add that you haven't lived until your mom burst into your room holding a phone bill for hundreds of dollars and demanding an explanation.
  - jlgaddis 11y ago
    Now that brings back memories! "Who were you talking to in Pennsylvania for four hours in the middle of the night for a week!?"
  - cromwellian 11y ago
    That's when you start phreaking. Then you learn to deal with your mom bursting in the room when you get a letter from the phone company investigating wire fraud.
    - strictnein 11y ago
      Took me a while to convince my mother that the credit card generator that I used for "free" accounts was actually just part of a video game I was playing. She found a print out of some fake AMEX numbers and was not pleased.
      - wil421 11y ago
        Brings back memories of using CC generators to call 1-900 numbers for free or pay for random services online. I still dont know how I never got in trouble. We also used keygens so we could play online games online for free with a burned disc (or to play over LAN).
  - 11y ago
at-fates-hands 11y ago
While this is interesting, most of the facts were openly being discussed and are not huge leaps of faith to see coming. Underground Economies - You had a huge recession in the 1980's. People were not happy with the government and employment spiked to 9%. This idea wasn't a huge stretch considering the political and economic environments at the time. Computer Hacking - Security was non-existent in those days and a myriad of high profile attacks had already occurred: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_security_hacker_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_security_... It's a not a huge leap to see that security would always be a few steps behind well organized hackers. Privacy - People have been talking about the loss of privacy going back to the 1950's and 60's with the Watergate break in. Nothing really big here, only that computers would make it easier to keep tabs on the general public, not harder. Hell, people were already talking about Orwell's "1984" which supposedly predicted a lot of what was going in 1985 - in 1949!!

65 points by buserror 11y ago

It's entirely possible the rest of the essay predicted flying cars, but the published bits are good...

I think people overplay stuff like this because they think that before widespread Internet none of the issues being faced had been talked about. For them the 1980s (or earlier) are a dark age. The reality is that by 1985 the UK already had the Data Protection Act, the US had computer crime acts in place, high profile hacks had occurred (notably the hacking of the Duke of Edinburgh's email in the UK), 2600 was being published, and WarGames far from being a 'hokey hacking movie' actually showed the reality of the sort of hacking that someone would undertake (dialing through phone number after phone number and accessing systems that were largely unprotected). If you were immersed in the BBS scene or Usenet at this time these things were being openly discussed. This essay feels like a very basic summary of some of what was going on.

scholia 11y ago
For most people, "online" means "the web", so roughly two decades of online services (1975-95) have ceased to exist. This includes FidoNet, Usenet, Prestel, Teletel, CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy and too many others to mention. Of those, only AOL still seems to have any mind-share, and that's probably because it eventually provided internet email and browser-based web connections.
- ghaff 11y ago
  For a lot of people, AOL was their original ISP given how ubiquitous their disks were pre-broadband. It's interesting that pre-web, you really had a number of largely non-overlapping online communities (which didn't even intersect all that much within the broad groups). I'm not sure that most people appreciate how fragmented the entire thing was. There was no real universal email for a long time. Individual BBSs - which also had some shared boards through systems like PCRelay Commercial "BBSs" like Compuserve, AOL, Delphi, etc. Usenet which was the only one which was actually part of the Internet.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    > I'm not sure that most people appreciate how fragmented the entire thing was. There was no real universal email for a long time. Nor how expensive it was. http://imgur.com/xz3k9OC http://imgur.com/xz3k9OC Compuserve was $11 per hour. Delphi was $6 per hour. $11 in 1998 is $22 now.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      And that's not even counting the fact that even intra-state dialing outside of the local calling area was metered per minute at non-trivial rate. When I was BBSing and had a subscription to a service in a nearby city (which was still an intra-state long distance call), I used software that sucked down BBS content and let me read and reply offline.
      - gscott 11y ago
        Cellphones used to include unlimited forwarding so I would set my cell phone to forward to the BBS I wanted to call and then I would call my cell phone with my terminal software. Cell phone companies figure that out and limited the number of minutes allowed for forwarding.
    - sixothree 11y ago
      When I was getting started Compuserve was $6 per hour for 300 baud and $11 for 1200 baud. I was in 6th grade at the time and caused a number of rather large monthly bills to the point my family cancelled the service. I did later go on to run a BBS which included FidoNet. That was incredibly fun stuff.
- fractallyte 11y ago
  Hey, I still use my CompuServe email daily! (Same address since 1997!)
  - ghaff 11y ago
    I was a Compuserve subscriber for a long time starting sometime in the early eighties. Not sure exactly when I stopped using it entirely. I used it for various things and I was reasonably active in the shareware scene for a time which used CIS as their main member discussion forum. As I recall, CIS was also my gateway to Internet email for a time before I got my own email through my BBS (which became an ISP like other commercial BBSs at the time).
  - chrisBob 11y ago
    I occasionally see @aol.com addresses and cringe to think that people might still be paying $20/month for it. Is a compuserve account free at least?
    - fractallyte 11y ago
      AOL acquired CompuServe, but still maintains the mail servers - for now. People go all wide-eyed when they hear my '@csi.com' address, associating it with the TV series. But, yes, it's free ;-)
fit2rule 11y ago
I agree with you that we tend to ignore our immediate history and not see things for how they were - but, how do we fix this, exactly? By telling each other about these articles .. I was around in those days, my eyes have been rolling and rolling over the years as we see Hot New Stuff get released that is really just Old Stuff Ignored, Re-invented. There are definitely cycles of insomnia in our culture. So for me anyway its great to see these predictions coming out of the woodwork, and to recall some of the great, fine essays that were produced in the early years of electronic media consumption. So much great stuff, lost to the electrons of time..
- simonh 11y ago
  Yep. Of course this guy's post didn't exist in a vacuum, but most people aren't aware of how back online culture goes. Most hacker kids nowadays haven't even heard of Clifford Stoll or "The Cucko's Egg"(1). (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - chipsy 11y ago
    It took me a moment to realize why I was stuck in the internet revisionist mindset even though I know many of the early computer crime stories. It's because the security game has played out generationally - the publically known techniques used to break into systems in 1995 were less sophisticated than those seen now. This a war that has quietly been fought since the first secret messages, on a battlefield that is now shifting with increasing speed and is tilted heavily in favor of offense. The common advice one had to take control of one's information in the 90's just isn't any good now - there are critically failing holes in the infrastructure that make individual defense a Sisyphiean task. But relative to now, gaining unauthorized access to a valuable system in the 80's or 90's would still be challenging, as the bag of tricks would be different, less widely known, and you might need more expensive equipment.
protomyth 11y ago
It seem like a bit of a reach or modern reinterpretation. I think you could write an article based on Byte Magazine Volume 10 Number 13 - Computer Conferencing[1] very much like this one predicting social networks. 1) https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-12 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-12
guelo 11y ago
It's kind of like how people keep pretending there wasn't a decade of pocket computers before the iPhone.

bitJericho 11y ago

The scanned essay: http://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/article/no-id/1441400395211305.jpg http://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/article/no...

scrrr 11y ago
Is there a text-version of this?
- i336_ 11y ago
  I'd like to know this too. I get this impression the "research" conducted in the article involved actual printed material and not something like textfiles.org. I quote-searched a couple of sentences from the article on Google, and got the article back as the sole result.

rubidium 11y ago

A bit off topic, but this line stuck out: "I did some googling and couldn’t find any information on Inman, except for some mentions in lists of BBSes of times gone by." It's a pretty self-damning statement by the author that the extent of their research is confined to "googling". Motherboard Vice's about page says it's "With in-depth blogging, longform reporting, and video journalism, Motherboard investigates the news and events that are already affecting the years to come." This article falls short of any of that.

acheron 11y ago
vice.com is the same kind of clickbait trash as a Gawker site or Vox or whatever. But this is what journalism has become now.
- ulkesh 11y ago
  This is the sad reality. The last bastion of true journalism now exists within NPR (at least to a degree) or outside the United States. Sensationalist media with only a surface approach to journalism has become the rule and no longer just the exception.
  - elros 11y ago
    I think both parent and grand-parent just haven't seen Vice enough to get the full picture. While I'll grant the fact that some of their channels err on the side of fluff, I do consider the fact that they routinely send journalists to war areas (ISIS, Ukraine) and report from there, or other inhospitable places (e.g. North Korea, central Africa, the Amazon) a display of something more than just a "surface approach to journalism". Or clickbait trash :-) Edit: Tried to make my comment less harsh.
    - Sideshow_Boob 11y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLmkec_4Rfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLmkec_4Rfo
  - 11y ago

CIPHERSTONE 11y ago

I loved the BBS era. For those of us kids who saw Wargames at the movie theater it was almost like magic. My first modem was 300 baud. You haven't lived until your mom ruined your 5 hour download of a sweet 300-500k game because she picked up the phone. Good times.

bedhead 11y ago
I would also add that you haven't lived until your mom burst into your room holding a phone bill for hundreds of dollars and demanding an explanation.
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  Now that brings back memories! "Who were you talking to in Pennsylvania for four hours in the middle of the night for a week!?"
- cromwellian 11y ago
  That's when you start phreaking. Then you learn to deal with your mom bursting in the room when you get a letter from the phone company investigating wire fraud.
  - strictnein 11y ago
    Took me a while to convince my mother that the credit card generator that I used for "free" accounts was actually just part of a video game I was playing. She found a print out of some fake AMEX numbers and was not pleased.
    - wil421 11y ago
      Brings back memories of using CC generators to call 1-900 numbers for free or pay for random services online. I still dont know how I never got in trouble. We also used keygens so we could play online games online for free with a burned disc (or to play over LAN).
- 11y ago

at-fates-hands 11y ago

While this is interesting, most of the facts were openly being discussed and are not huge leaps of faith to see coming. Underground Economies - You had a huge recession in the 1980's. People were not happy with the government and employment spiked to 9%. This idea wasn't a huge stretch considering the political and economic environments at the time. Computer Hacking - Security was non-existent in those days and a myriad of high profile attacks had already occurred: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_security_hacker_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_security_... It's a not a huge leap to see that security would always be a few steps behind well organized hackers. Privacy - People have been talking about the loss of privacy going back to the 1950's and 60's with the Watergate break in. Nothing really big here, only that computers would make it easier to keep tabs on the general public, not harder. Hell, people were already talking about Orwell's "1984" which supposedly predicted a lot of what was going in 1985 - in 1949!!