Two years ago, Kevin Behrens of west suburban Aurora was an electrician scrabbling to make a living between layoffs. Now Behrens makes his living with a modem card plugged into his computer instead of a union card tucked in his wallet.
Behrens is a full-time ”sysop” (system operator) in one of the computer business` hottest new areas, the home-grown bulletin board system, or BBS. He and his wife, Kristy, operate the Aquila bulletin board out of their house in Aurora.
The newly minted entrepreneur turned nearly beet red when asked whether he`s a millionaire.
”Not yet, but it`s a definite possibility soon,” Behrens said during a break at the blooming cottage industry`s first major convention, held recently at an airport hotel here.
These newly prosperous technocrats swapped accounts of how they have hooked a modem and phone line to a computer in their homes and sell services such as low-cost software downloads, ”online” games, electronic mail,
”chat” forums, recipes, hobby tips, news wires, weather reports and even quality pornographic pictures.
The Behrenses now operate 25 phone lines out of their Aurora house. Their computers field roughly 600 calls a day from thousands of customers scattered about the U.S. who pay between $45 and $97 a year as subscribers.
Aquila, considered a particularly good source for software that runs on the Microsoft Windows system, is dwarfed by operations like EXEC-PC in Elm Grove, Wis., with more than 200 lines, and Channel 1 in Cambridge, Mass., with 125-plus lines.
Other big-time bulletin board operations range from Pleasure Dome in Norfolk, Va., which features sizzling X-rated online chat sessions, to Comm Post in Denver, where hobbyist astronomers from around the world swap data from their latest celestial observations.
These thriving home-grown ”boards” draw their customers from the 9 million Americans who own home computers with attached telephone modems. These devices allow them to enter the on-line world the computer-inclined like to call cyberspace.
As computer technology enters more and more homes, more Americans are rushing to link up to cyberspace on their IBMs, Macintoshes, Apples, Ataris and Amigas.
On commercial coattails
Jack Rickard, editor of Boardwatch Magazine, estimated that there now are just under 60,000 private bulletin board systems operating out of the spare bedrooms, basements and garages of America. The number of boards has tripled in the past 18 months, he said.
Boardwatch, with a circulation of 37,000, makes its money offering up-to- date coverage of a constantly changing landscape where phone numbers are connected and disconnected by the thousands as hobbyists go online and shut down.
Today, with many new computers being sold with modems included and with popular and commercial mass-produced bulletin board services such as Prodigy, CompuServe, America Online and Genie signing up customers in the millions, the home-based bulletin board systems are hitching a ride on a major national trend.
The home systems amount to smaller and substantially more specialized versions of the popular commercial services. The smaller boards tend to be much looser, however, as sysops operate with fewer constraints than big-time mass-market businesses.
For example, Dave Hughes, a pioneer in cyberspace who calls himself the
”Cursor Cowboy,” retired as base commander of the Army`s Ft. Carson near Pueblo, Colo., in the early 1980s and quickly won a reputation for promoting controversial and innovative boards beyond the mainstream.
Hughes operates out of a booth in a tavern on the edge of Colorado Springs using a laptop computer, a modem and a cellular telephone. Hughes said he is working on a saddle for his horse that will have a keyboard near the pommel and a solar-powered modem in the saddle bags.
His current passion has been to set up a series of bulletin board operations on the Indian reservations of Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota, where tribal artists produce drawings using ancient symbols and then transmit them to other computers with a new system called NAPLPS (North American Presentation Level Protocol).
Their stunning ”Share-Art” is sold by home-brewed computer links in places such as Hobson, Mont., population 100, where hobbyist Cynthia Denton runs the Russell Country bulletin board named for the famous Western artist Charles M. Russell. Another board with the Indian NAPLPS art calls itself the Big Sky Telegraph.
An unseen community
The bulletin board subculture is one whose members rarely lay eyes on one another but who know each other very well indeed. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and a modem line have eased the way to many a long-distance love affair much as trysting pen pals linked up via postage stamps in the past.
Rickard and his friend, Phil Becker, author of the popular Bread Board System software that many use to run their moneymaking boards, brought slightly more than 1,000 computerists, including more than 700 bulletin board operators, to Denver for the trade show they called Online Networking Exposition and BBS Convention.
It may have been the biggest gathering of wallflowers since Renoir stopped hanging pictures.
”These are folk accustomed to sitting in front of a screen with a keyboard,” Rickard said. ”They don`t gather easily.”
Gimmicks are the wave of the bulletin board future, partisans say. While a few hundred general-interest boards like Aquila, EXEC-PC and Channel 1 succeed, most of the online universe consists of special interest boards. These are amazingly eclectic and each appears to thrive by forging worldwide links among people with common pursuits.
A number of the exhibits at the convention were operated by businesses that specialize in setting up deals where system operators can allow their callers to subscribe online using credit cards.
As Rickard put it, ”There may be only 200 people in all of Chicago interested in cockatoos. But if you add the 150 cockatoo nuts in Seattle and the 300 in New York and the 75 in Denver and the 20 bird nuts in Moscow, then you`ve got an audience.”
Enter people like Terry Rune of Arvada, Colo., whose Bird Info bulletin board serves several thousand hobbyists nationwide.
About one-fifth the size of the Behrenses` Aquila board, Bird Info operates five modem lines and focuses exclusively on the problems and joys of bird keeping with questions such as how to stop one`s African gray baby parrot from demanding to be hand fed.
Small hobbyists
Other boards focus on topics as rare as scuba diving in deep caves and the use of hot air balloons, Rickard said. In most of these smaller boards, the people who call in are more motivated by the hobby in question than by the idea of playing with their computers.
The specialization even reaches to systems that are for people affected by specific diseases, including diabetes, cancer, AIDS and chronic fatigue syndrome.
John F. Kossowan, an Augusta, Maine, man who has chronic fatigue syndrome, runs the USA CFIDS/CFS system, where patients with the disease and their families can learn about new medical developments and discuss ways to cope with the malady in which people are robbed of their energy to the point that they cannot work.
Kossowan, who said that his own fatigue makes it hard to run his board, said in a recent letter to subscribers that a system of daily electronic mail exchanges among patients on the board has hundreds of participants.
Then there is politics. At the Denver bulletin board convention`s opening session, Hughes told the assembled operators that they are just the modern version of an old tradition.
”I think that Benjamin Franklin would have been the first owner of a microcomputer,” Hughes said.
”I think that the Declaration of Independence would have been written on a word processor, most likely WordPerfect 5.1. And I think that Tom Paine would have made `Common Sense` available on the electronic bulletin board.”
It seems there`s a board for everyone. There`s the Virginia-based Gay/
Lesbian Information Bureau; the Chicago Aryan Nations Network for Ku Klux Klan members; the American Peace Network in Las Vegas for anti-war activists; and the Well, run by the folks who used to publish Whole Earth Catalog.
Some boards offer vast listings of hard-core pornography, including clips from films like ”Deep Throat” rendered into files that can be read by computer.
On the other side, many boards offer programs that bring the full text of the Old and New Testaments to computer screens.
Software for writing church newsletters often are available alongside hard-core pictures of Linda Lovelace and Marilyn Chambers.
”The thing to remember,” Rickard said, ”is that the BBS world is no more or no less, no better and no worse than the rest of the world. We are part of the world. We may soon be the world.”