Online Origins, Part the first

The game went off as planned last night, well not as I planned, but right now I’m still tired and I’m planning to spend a couple hours talking to my daughter so no time to write it up just now so we’ll just go with one I was working on for the time being and get to the gory details of last night a bit later. After all, I'll have plenty of time, I don't suckup for invites.

Between my trip to get jerky, the time of the year and Jordan mentioning a trip to Chicago it brought to mind my LaPub picnics. Most of you probably don’t know what LaPub was though it is possible some of my friends made at that time read this. It dates back to my earliest forays in to the online world and I made a lot of friends through it though many factors, mainly the development of the Web brought about its demise. So I decided to get a bit maudlin here and reminisce for a bit.

My online dicking around dates back to the days of the old electronic bulletin boards, usually run on DOS platforms. Still have a book listing the old BBS services and their modem numbers. Damn thing ran to about 250 pages give or take. There were no graphics, no chat, not a whole lot of anything but one could leave messages and download files. They were good places to go if you needed a small app to tweak something you were working on. It’s where the geeks and dabblers went to share, and show off, their abilities. The Internet consisted of the newsgroups and you needed a government or university account to access it and the Web, what everyone surfs these days, might have been a gleam in its inventors’ eye but I can’t really say for sure. The only comprehensive online service I knew about was CompuServe and it was about $15 an hour to access. I stuck with the BBS as most were free. I later found out about a service called Prodigy or P* as users called it. Prodigy had been around for a few years and had a graphic interface and charged a monthly fee which made it sound reasonable to check out.

Got my subscription to P* in the early 90s and it was decent. Lots of info at your finger tips and some of the first online shopping. Didn’t take advantage of the shopping but I did the info. In addition to all the standard info out there the message boards were the bomb. Need to know something, just post in the appropriate forum and you got dozens of responses within hours. (America Online had similar features but not quite as user friendly but more on that later.) Was a dedicated P* user for a year or two but then they slit their own throats by changing their pricing structure. They decided to start charging an hourly rate for access to certain areas, one of those being the most popular feature, the message boards. It’s tough to start charging for something people have had free for years. In addition America Online started to make its move and while they charged an hourly fee they offered all that P* had plus a bonus, real time chat. They are the two things missing from the current Internet. Search engines aren’t bad but the message boards on Prodigy and AOL were much better as the answers were always on point and hardly ever had to be sifted through as with search engines because keywords can be interpreted in many ways. And though there are chat features on the Net I’ve never seen any work as smoothly as those on AOL even though the bandwidth was a minor fraction of todays.

So on I moved and installed America Online, it wasn’t AOL just yet. Still have my America Online DOS floppy and my AOL for Windows floppy, they’re history. AOL was great but at $7.95 an hour I didn’t spend a whole lot of time there. Basically just buzzed around until one day I saw a banner flash for LaPub. LaPub, what’s a LaPub? Clicked on the link and was taken to a chat room, a virtual pub. I found out later that it was the first online chat room, developed when the forerunner of AOL was a Mac service and later moved to AOL. All the geeks behind it were dedicated Mac users and I found myself in a distinct minority as a PC user when I showed up at my first gathering but I get ahead of myself. I was welcomed by the host and made to feel at home by him and the 5-6 others in the room. It was a Tuesday night as I remember and the host changed on the hour. The chat went on for 3 hours, 9 to 12 Eastern I think, and then the room closed down. Not that you couldn’t get there but the hosts weren’t there and no one ever took advantage of the empty room. Of course you never really needed to as AOL gave you the ability to set up private chat rooms where you could invite those you wanted to speak with and keep out the riff raff. Also, anything went in private rooms but in the public chat there were rules of behavior and enforcing them was another of the hosts’ duties. Violators of the rules would be tossed from the room for a first offense. In fact it was called getting TOSsed as it happened for violating the Terms Of Service. If they came back and persisted subsequent offenses carried account suspensions with them, anywhere from an hour to a week. I mainly lurked my first couple times there not saying much (ain’t that a laugh) but went back on a couple subsequent Tuesdays. As it was $7.95 and hour I wasn’t spending a whole hell of a lot of time there as I had just gotten a new job and my pay wasn’t a hell of a lot more than that at the time. Be that as it may it was here that Wolfshead was born. I had registered my AOL account under my real name but I noticed that those in the chat room used non de plumes so I figured I needed one. I had been reading a series of books by Leigh Brackett featuring Eric John Stark, a wolfshead, a man without a place or people. Well I didn’t exactly have a whole lot of local friends as I had not gone to the local high schools as did my friends from younger days and then I left for college in Michigan and had started spending my break times out there and eventually lived out there for about 10 years. After I came back and started work in this area I picked up a bunch of drinking buddies but after I was laid off from there you kind of lose touch. My new place of employment was mainly old men and women in the office so no one there to pal around with and I had just bought a place in a semi country area so you weren’t running across neighbors sitting on the porch in the evenings. So I decided yea, Wolfshead was probably an appropriate moniker for the chat room. Needless to say most never understood the term and thought it referred to the animal itself and it usually just got shortened to Wolf but Wolfshead it was and Wolfshead it’s been for nigh on 20 years now. So I started spending Tuesday evenings in LaPub, a cyber version of Cheers. The people were friendly and the only thing missing was the alcohol and while the cost of it wasn’t really cheap it was probably no more expensive than my forays to real bars were running me and a hell of a lot cheaper than they used to run a few years earlier. And so it went for awhile until I attended my first get together of LaPub regulars out in the western suburbs of Chicago. And what an experience that was.

But it seems this missive is running on, I do tend to ramble, so I think I’ll finish it a bit later so as not to bore you too much at once. Thanks for the listen.