Internet Tales— From Arpanet to BBS

Internet and its Stories

Maybe some of you have seen War Games, a 1983 film. For its time, the film was really well made, but above all it shows how connections worked 45 years ago.

Let's watch a movie

The main character is David Lightman, played by Matthew Broderick, a 17-year-old boy who, using a connection to a BBS, manages to enter a computer of the United States armed forces believing he has connected to an online game server. In reality, it is a simulation system that has among its games one called Global Thermonuclear War, a name that an American boy of the 80s could not help but play.

The computer started the game, but in the Army's control room they thought there was a real attack by the Soviet Union and a risk of a nuclear escalation, then stopped by the boy with the help of the creator of the program, Doctor Faulkner, played by John Wood.

I made just a quick summary of the movie, but the point is that this is the real starting point to talk about computer networks in the early 80s, that is BBS, Bulletin Board Systems. It wasn't actually a real network, users had to connect to a server where all the data and programs resided, and if you wanted to connect to another server, you had to dial a different phone number. In short, each server, each server or mainframe where the data resided had a phone number, there was a sort of switchboard and this gave the possibility of having in input more than one connection at the same time.

Computer chatting like friends

These servers were initially large calculators that contained programs and archives that could be shared between users, they were actually mainframe. Users could connect only by knowing that phone number. It was like to chat with friends: every friend, a different phone number. Internet didn't exist, there was only one network, Arpanet, which connected the computers of the armed forces and those of the universities (read my previous post). To connect to your home computer to these mainframes you needed a telephone line and a modem, with speeds that initially reached 300 bits/second, and only in the 80s were 1200 bits/second possible, until 54 Kbits/s. And computers were really expensive, few people could afford one.

As I was saying, each mainframe had multiple telephone numbers available, like when you call a company switchboard today, and each telephone line was in turn connected to a modem that was then in turn connected to these servers. To connect to these computers and be able to access the so-called public area, where there was the software or informations or news that interested you, you simply dialed a telephone number.

The user's modem connected itself to another modem on the mainframe side; they exchanged a bit of information, the so-called handshacking, and the connection was established. All the information was, we are talking about the late 70s, strictly in text format.

What could be found inside these public servers (not military ones)? Well, they offered a variety of services, and users could find message bases for public virtual discussions, download files, exchange private email, play online games, and utilize other features.

Let's call this computer

Behind the BBSs there're thousands of people defining services, software and communication protocols; a certain type of network philosophy was being born, at least until the advent of social media. In the movie you also see something particular, when David dials a number and then places the telephone receiver on an object that is in turn connected to the computer on the table.

That was the so-called acoustic coupler: data did not actually pass through the telephone wire, from David's house to the telephone exchange and then from there to the computer, but sounds were emitted that were then transformed into bytes, sequences of 0 and 1, by the acoustic coupler in reception.

Image there's no pictures

The computer could only show text characters on the screen, and therefore even the games were practically in text format, there were no images but thanks to the 256 ASCII characters it was possible, in some way, to make drawings. Monitors were of course CRTs, a cathode ray tube with green phosphors, so no color. In one of the first scenes, Davide enters the school calculator to change the grades of a class test, both his and his girlfriend's. It was simple; in addition to knowing the telephone number of the school calculator, which was public, you had to know the login name and password to access the reserved contents, the grade register, in fact.

In the movie the password was taken from a professor who wrote it down on a piece of paper in his drawer, something that after 40 years sometimes does not seem to have changed, but generally the passwords were quite simple, and this also seems to be something that after 40 years does not seem to have changed. There were no confirmations that arrived by email. Email had existed since 1971 but only within the Arpanet network.

It was all very primitive, looking to with nowadays eyes, but in the 80's was a revolutionary way to communicate, new jobs born, innovative companies like Dell Computers, Cisco, Oracle, Novell. But, how did BBS' work?

Sources:

• Science Media Museum — A Short Story of Internet
• Computer History Museum — Internet History of 1980s
• VintageComputer — Hobbyst Computerized Bullettin Board

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