C00LeS WaReZ UNiON MeMOiRS: cHApTER #0x9F

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0x9F  -  Kiuruvesi  -  wArlord  -  2000-03  -  193 lines
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The turn of the millennium came and went, and no apocalypse happened. Jyri apparently spent a week wallowing in some hole he'd dug before venturing back into the world -- well, at least he got a taste of what traitors like him will get in wartime. I read that in the States, some moron had sued a bunker manufacturer because the promised end of the world didn't happen. The world is so full of morons of all kinds these days.

Kassu, on the other hand, was the complete opposite, totally consumed by the millennium psychosis (even though he always spelled it with only one "n"). He was counting down the days, then the hours, then the minutes until the big moment, and after the millennium turned, he started counting how many minutes, hours, and days we'd been in the "future." He got tired of it after about a week. Apparently, seeing "2000" on the calendar every day started to feel a little too mundane.

Even though the Y2K bug didn't hit any critical systems, it did hit one piece of software that was important to me -- PCBoard. After the new year, new messages stopped finding their way into QWK packages because their year fields said "00". I fixed it pretty quickly by switching to a different QWK door, but it still dealt a pretty serious blow to the little bit of activity left on the board.

Messaging had been dwindling since autumn. Jyri had stopped logging in after the army discussions in the CWU meetup, and he took a good chunk of the board's vitality with him. A few other guys stopped logging in around that time, like one guy from Kuopio who got the same Komeetta cable modem as Jyri. Add the Y2K bug on top of that, and the situation of Frontline BBS was pretty bleak by January.

Sometimes days would go by without anyone logging in, and when someone did, the message packages were pretty thin. I'd been considering shutting down Frontline for good earlier, but now the idea started to really sink in. Did bulletin boards even have a chance in this new world?

One evening, when Anna was out, I started looking for an answer to that question. I wanted to find at least one Finnish BBS that was still properly thriving, but after dozens of calls, I was convinced of the situation's hopelessness. Every board was like the aftermath of a neutron bomb: the structures were still standing, but there weren't many signs of life. Even on multilines, I was often the only user online. And if there had been new files recently, they were usually porn images downloaded from the Internet.

I even dialed into MBnet -- one of the usernames Jyri once stole still worked. There were people in the chat, but almost no one was saying anything, even though it was evening, prime chat time. Most of the lines I saw were "left the chat" and "joined the chat". It felt like I'd arrived in a ghost town, with just some vague wanderer occasionally drifting down the streets -- whereas just a few years earlier, the streets were full of life, people milling around, and kids yelling.

I left the chat and went to the message areas. I found lots of random postings, many of which no one had bothered to respond to, and others had only one or two replies. The most responses were to postings reminiscing about MBnet's golden age. The longest-living threads were usually free-flowing exchanges between two people, where even within the same message, the topics could jump from pot-smoking to mental health issues and nostalgia to current politics. The general atmosphere was somehow similar to the feeling I got at Lietevesi downtown sometime around 1996, when the signs of the municipial death were already strong.

I disconnected, feeling pretty sad. If even the biggest Finnish board, with its hundreds of nodes, was in that state, it looked like the end of the BBS days, and it would be pointless to try to revive Frontline. After thinking it over all night, I told the manufacturing company that I was canceling my contract with them and would be taking the server off their premises by the end of March. After that, Frontline would just be a lifeless clump of data on a hard drive, some kind of relic of a lost civilization.

I launched a text editor and started writing a long, heartfelt outpouring about the death of bulletin boards. I reminisced about the good old days when Frontline used to get a couple of hundred messages a day, and how those days weren't coming back, no matter how hard we tried to revive the activity. Even the hardcore BBS evangelists had lost so much faith and enthusiasm that boards couldn't be kept alive. It was better to shut down Frontline for good and declare the age of bulletin board systems over. It was now the time of the singular reign of the Internet.

First, I dialled into Frontline and sent my text to its message areas as an ASCII upload. I did the same on MBnet and a few other boards that seemed to have a little life left. All the while, I had a lump in my throat and my emotions were running high. When Anna came home, I told her about my decision and the feeling of loss that came with it. It also felt like she finally got some kind of inkling of how much the BBS had meant to me and my life.

My message got responses from almost everyone still reading the Frontline messages. Many were really emotional. Even the last time I was in the machine room, a few new responses had come in, which I read with a lump in my throat before giving the board my final "goodbye" command and turning off the modem and the computer. Then I sat there for a good quarter of an hour, staring at the blank screen before starting to unplug the cables from the walls and carrying the equipment to the back seat of my Fiat.

When the CWU crew moved out of Lietevesi in the summer of 1997, we promised each other we'd stay connected as long as we had breath in our bodies. Even if the world fell apart, CWU would always remain forever.

Frontline was kind of a physical embodiment of that promise. Some kind of a virtual Hönttölä, where CWU could gather and stay in touch even if we were physically scattered around Finland. And as the CWU members started to disappear from the user base and the lights on the BBS servers started to go out, I started to see Frontline more and more as the last beacon in a darkening world.

Our modem history basically started in the spring of fifth grade, in 1992. I think Meka had seen modem usage before at his cousin's place in Helsinki, but for the rest of us, Osmo's 2400-baud modem was the first one we'd ever seen.

Back then, those "electronic mailboxes" (as Osmo called them) seemed like some kind of fascinating data repositories, and especially the idea of downloading porn was captivating. So we started with porn and we ended with porn, and everything else was in the between.

During sixth grade, Samppa got Osmo's modem on loan and really got into the BBS world. None of us knew about his activities until we noticed his board, Dark Man SBBS, which we called in the summer, and which became CWU's first WHQ board.

In December, I got a modem too, as did many other CWU members. In the spring, everyone except Masa had their own BBS, and Masa started to distance himself from the group because he couldn't be part of that enthusiasm. The name for my board was originally going to be Rintamalinja, but thanks to Meka's grumpiness (he said Finnish names sucked and everything had to be in English), it ended up being Frontline. I ran it from home as a nighttime board at first, but then we decided to move it to Hönttölä so we could have it running 24/7.

Then came the LAN and Internet stuff in eighth and ninth grade. We ran copper wire through the forests with Osmo, and whe even connected the junior high school to the network with a municipally-funded microwave link. And thanks to Osmo's magic antenna, we could even connect that LAN to the Internet. Now, in retrospect, maybe it was a mistake, especially connecting the junior high school to the same network. We should have just massively trained all the school kids of Lietevesi to be BBS users. BBSes are kind of like the countryside; young people grow up honest and upright there, unlike in the Internet metropolises.

During junior high, we still had a lot in common. We went to the same school, boozed kilju, logged into boards, traded warez, rode mopeds, played the same games on computers, went to demoparties together, and all that stuff. But times have changed, we've grown irrevocably apart.

Our worlds are completely different now: one of us scams people with GSM "services", another is aimlessly drifting around Europe, a third spends his days playing online shooters, a fourth is stuck in all kinds of imaginary worlds, and a fifth has completely abandoned computers and is planning to become a car mechanic. What do we have in common anymore? Apart from those childhood memories we've rehashed way too many times?

If you ask me, it might be time to stop dwelling on memories altogether and focus on adult life. Next up are my high school exams, which I've been studying for pretty diligently. After that, it's the entrance exams for the University of Kuopio's computer science program and the military service at Vekaranjärvi. And after that, it's studies, a job, a mortgage, starting a family, and all those other phases that make up a normal adult life. CWU and all that computer playground crowd can stay in the past as far as I'm concerned! And the IRC and all that. I'll use email, but I'll definitely stay away from all those pointless Internet bullshit chatter services!

It's possible I'll run into my old school friends sometime in my life. But I probably won't be seeing them in the military or at the university. Jyri mentioned he was planning to go to study in Jyväskylä or Tampere, maybe better that way. That'd at least prevent any temptation to go back to the old ways since we would be in different towns.

But whatever happened, if I ever run into the CWU crew, it won't be under CWU colors, but as adult people in the adult world, without any of that scene or group crap! Maybe we can reminisce a bit, but it'll just stay a memory!