Editorial

• Death of a Viking
• BBS of the Future?

Death of a Viking
Doug Myers

I lost a friend this week. Saturday morning at about 3AM, Phil Anderson, known in BBS circles as The Viking, died of heart failure. Phil didn't participate much in Fidonet, but I'd like to remember him here because he was an integral part of the BBS scene from which Fido grew.

Phil's Viking Board was a fixture in the Harrisburg PA area even before Fidonet was introduced by George Peace. His original board was a modest affair run on a Commodore using only floppy disk drives. Though he ran it as "The Viking," he insisted on real names from his users feeling that the anonymity of handles led to abuses in messaging. I don't know that I agreed with his viewpoint, but his message areas were always filled with conversation from the local callers.

Of course, the BBS moved to better machines as they became available, but the nature of the board seemed tied always to the personality of The Viking - a persona who had a political opinion on just about everything, rumbled through the chat bases like a bumbling Hagar the Horrible, and with a Garden set up for his Goddesses who delighted in zapping him for his transgressions.

Though some of the older BBSes in the area grew big with lots of networked message bases and tons of files, the Viking Board remained the same. Even in this millennium, he still maintained the original collection of Commodore files he'd offered through the decades "because no one else does."

Phil did more than run a BBS, though. He was active in most of the computer groups which once proliferated in the area, and still served as President of The Harrisburg Area Computer Group until his recent death. His home was a gathering place for BBSers and other computer users, and he always had a pot of coffee on when I dropped by :)

His connection with Fido was brief. I'd dropped over for coffee and the usual bull session one time, and we talked about Fido. So I set him up with a mailer and some batch files to integrate to the TriBBS system he was running, had him exchange netmail with the local NC so he'd qualify for a node number, and downloaded the Echolist from my board so he could select message bases. But he changed his mind, feeling that he didn't want to change the "local" nature of his board.

At that point, I almost agreed with him. Though I heavily favor Fidonet, his BBS was still going strong long after most of the local boards had folded. Why mess with a good thing?

So Phil's death won't affect Fidonet much, but a little piece of BBSing is gone forever...

BBS of the Future?
Doug Myers

Ed Koon advertises Doc's Place, an online BBS, in this issue. Though it's not the first BBS accessible through the Internet, the advertisement stirs some hope in me. In introducing the advertisement, Ed points out that there's just him and the NEC left in the old net. Unsaid, but implied, is that Doc's Place isn't going to fold despite the trend with dial-up BBSes.

It doesn't take a mental giant to figure out that the combination of Internet access and the availability of much more sophisticated computers has outmoded the traditional dial-up BBS. And it's not unjustified - the range of abilities to a user on the Web is much greater than ever dreamed with any BBS. But, in this exodus to the Web, there seems to be something missing...

It's hard to define, but let me take a stab. When BBSing was at it's peak, I could log onto fifty-two boards within my local calling area. While quality varied, each of these BBSes was an individual community. With the Web, I suppose there is some kind of community, but it's a world-wide community... not at all like the limitless variety possible with individual sysops creating their own little world.

What may have been the strength of BBSing was that one didn't need to be a SERIOUS PLAYER to set up a board. All it took was enough money to afford a phone line (though some of the young folks avoided this and used the family line... usually with disastrous results), and the computer you were using to call out anyway. In the past, the Internet was only for SERIOUS PLAYERS - the costs of setting up an operation on the Web other than a simple home page pretty much ruled out hobbyists.

But have we progressed to a time when an individual hobbyist can connect his computer to the Web full time? Can we capture the seeming endless variety of the BBS scene once again?