Newsgroups: bit.listserv.pacs-l
Date:         Tue, 18 Aug 1992 08:08:22 CDT
From:         Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <LIBPACS@UHUPVM1.BITNET>
Subject:      Report on BBs Conference, Pt. 1 of 2

From: Steve Cisler <sac@apple.com>
Subject: Report on BBS Conference 8/13-16, Pt. 1 of 2

Part 1 of 2
At Play in the Field of the Boards: Report on ONE BBSCON

copyright 1992 by Steve Cisler, Apple Library. All or part of this document
may be redistributed free of charge in electronic format (disk, CD-ROM,
online) by any party. Print re-distribution is allowed for personal use as
well as  non-profit. educational and government newsletters and
journals. Please send email to the author when you do reprint or repost
or quote from this report. Internet: sac@apple.com

Denver, Colorado: August 13-16, 1992.

Our plane punched down through the low clouds a half hour late and
landed at Stapleton airport, just minutes from the Stouffer Hotel where
all the activities for the Online Networking Exposition and BBS
Convention were to take place. This was to be the first ecumenical
gathering of bulletin board system operators (sysops), hardware and
software vendors, and programmers that spanned the DOS, Unix, and
Macintosh worlds. There had been annual meetings of Fidonet sysops,
but the parent organization had folded even as the number of BBS
systems continued  to grow.

Jack Rickard, President of ONE, Inc. and publisher of Boardwatch
Magazine <jack.rickard@boardwatch.com> partnered up with Phil
Becker, author of TBBS software, to organize a trade show for BBS
operators that would be inexpensive enough to attract those running
their boards as hobbies but with tutorials and panels with subjects that
would attract the entrepreneurs who are working from their homes or
small offices and those who have mounted and maintained successful
business systems with four, eight, on up to 64 phone lines for their
clients.

Most of us in the online world are fairly stratified in our interests when it
comes to networking and communications. There are MIS shops
depending on minis and mainframes; there are the academic and
research networks where NREN and the Internet is of paramount
interest; there are consumer services which have been a continued failure
when promoted and maintained by the regional phone companies and
have been a mixed bag when we look at Prodigy, GEnie, CompuServe,
and America Online. The online industry of BRS, Dialog, and Mead Data
is trying to break out of its own mold and attract more than librarians and
devoted professionals who need the high priced information and are
willing to learn to tolerate difficult interfaces.

The world of BBS systems, users, and sysops has never been validated by
some of the mainstream opinion makers. Many of the operators and
users have been outsiders, socially, politically, and even economically.
ONE BBSCON brought many of these outsiders together for the first time,
but it also attracted mainstream users who have found BBSes to be cost
effective, easy to maintain (compared to other sorts of electronic systems),
and extremely useful. The show put the spotlight on the "Industry" as
Rickard and Becker hope it will become. BBS System vendors were on the
organizing board, and there were tracks for the major DOS/Intel systems:
Wildcat!, TBBS, PCBoard, MAJOR, and Searchlight as well as other
operating systems such as Unix and Macintosh (the latter comprised less
than 5% of the attendees). Other tracks were for legal and social issues,
corporate and business applications, how to make money with a BBS, the
Internet/NREN, Mail networks, and a technical track.

The opening reception included just a sprinkling of ties, making me feel
over-dressed in a sport coat. With the dress code set for the rest of the days
ahead, I thumbed through the program and spoke with BBS and
networking folks whom I had met online or at other conferences. Dave
Hughes of Old Colorado City Communications <dave@well.sf.ca.us> and
Frank Odasz of Big Sky Telegraph <frank@bigsky.dillon.mt.us> noted the
lack of education tracks in the program, but with their participation in the
program it became an important sub-theme.  The range of activities
people are involved in is indicative of the power and freedom to
experiment that goes with cheap hardware, BBS software, and a
reasonably priced public telephone network. A journalist from
Albuquerque is running his paper's 16 line system which provide news to
callers at no charge. Another team had just returned from Russia where
they were helping set up a country-wide system using low-orbiting
satellites for data transmission. An entrepreneur who had been sued by
Playboy enterprises for vending GIF images of Playmates (and using that
trademarked name in his BBS menus) without much thought of
copyright was present.

Day One At the opening session it was evident why this was going to be a
successful conference and why BBSes would become an industry that
would overshadow but not eliminate hobby uses of such systems: cheap
9600 bps modems, inexpensive 486 servers, and telephone systems that
are not charging by measured use (as is done in many other countries).
Phil Becker made a strong pitch for the BBS as a business tool for
mainstream activities and belittled what he called the 'stupid niches' like
Keith Wade's THE ANARCHIST GUIDE TO BBS. Clearly, Becker wanted
to encourage mainstream business uses of this technology. They were
impressive and diverse. Others like Tom Jennings (author of the
extremely cheap and popular Fido software) sees the technology
benefiting the outsiders: the fat, the handicapped, the socially inept, the
disenfranchised, the radical, the non-mainstream. And of course, BBS
technology can fill both Becker's and Jennings' very different visions, but
Becker's was the one emphasized here.

What I want to continue to emphasize in this report is the diversity of
users, of models, of software, and of business models. Boardwatch
estimates that there are 44,000 public systems (and many more private
and corporate ones) in the U.S. The four vendors sitting on ONE, Inc.
board claim to have an installed base of 50,000, and this excludes Fido, the
most popular of all systems.

The Keynote speech was given by John Dvorak who writes for many
computer magazines, has co-authored a successful book on telecomms,
and is often on the public speaker circuit. His columns are entertaining,
opinionated and as Art Kleiner said in an old S.F. Bay Guardian article, he
is a 'curmudgeon without a cause.'  People who like to rattle cages can be
good speakers and warm the crowd up for the ensuing events. However,
Dvorak devoted so much time to self advertisements and plugging his
books that it seemed he must have spent about 10 minutes thinking
about some of the issues that needed addressing with regards to BBSes. A
sprinkling of Dvorak comments: "get a fan for your 486 machines... OS/2
is fun! (Windows is not)...the BBS community needs a lobbyist in each
state; it's embarrassingly naive and should examine how it operates on
different levels...Al Gore is the Dan Quayle of the Democratic Party...The
porno boards are always under scrutiny by the govt. one way or another...
Playboy images on a BBS has to be called fair use... BBSes cannot continue
to allow slander on the boards. You have to clean up your act by
self-policing.

He also called for a constitutional amendment to protect electronic rights,
but he did not know that constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe had
proposed this in his keynote at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 1
eighteen months ago.  On the one hand Dvorak pandered to
anti-Congress sentiments in the crowd and then said to get involved in
politics;  yet he found the Perot candidacy a sham, including the electronic
element.

End of Part 1 of 2
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