Runet'96: White Bear BBS

I have already sat down at this story several times, but every time I could not finish it. It pushed me to this discovery of our company blog, although the story has nothing to do with NetCat. This story is about the legendary, in its own way unique and, not afraid of this word, cult phenomenon: White Bear BBS. Place: Moscow, time: beginning of 1996.

Introduction

When I wrote this article, I caught myself thinking that it would be difficult for me to convey to the readers the atmosphere of that time, primarily because it seems to me and myself to be something far away and unreal. Now, when there are several tens of millions of Internet users in the country, there are broadband networks, laptops with Wi-FI, millions of Russian-language sites - what can I say, and almost every first mobile phone - it's hard to imagine that 15 years ago it’s just that did not have. So let's try to imagine 1996 based on dry facts.

In Russia - 4 large Internet service providers: GlasNet, Relcom, Demos and Russia-On-Line. The number of Russian-language sites with a domain in the ru zone is a couple hundred (the domain itself is less than two years old). There are about a hundred thousand Russian Internet users (mostly those whose work is somehow connected to the Network). Mobile phone users are about the same, because the pleasure is not cheap. Yes, and you cannot just buy a mobile phone, you need to get a personal permission of the State Committee on Communications (yes, until 2000, without such permission, it was impossible to use a mobile phone).
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Art. Lebedev Studios for six months, ICQ is only in the project, there is no Yandex with Google even in the project. The cost of Internet access is about $ 3 per hour, which was too heavy for ordinary lovers to surf (you sit an hour a day - pay $ 150 a month; for example, I then earned an average of $ 200 a month, which was considered very good for 17 summer guy).

The current (and the first, approved as the standard of this language, from six months already) version of HTML is 2.0. Prior to the first W3C recommendations on CSS1, it was almost a year. PHP1 already exists, but very few people know about it. Internet Explorer 2 only began to support JavaScript, but it didn’t help him much in the unequal fight with Netscape Navigator’s Firefox grandfather, although IE, unlike NN, was a free browser.

Submitted? That's about this time and will be discussed.

Then FIDO was the only computer network available to happy owners of computers with modems. I was one of them. My computer with a Pentium 66 megahertz processor was certainly not the most sophisticated, but quite modern.

So, I am a sophomore and happy, as mentioned above, the owner of the USR modem (US Robotics) Sportster 14400. Who does not know - this figure meant the data transfer rate, measured in bits per second (for example: now in our office channel of 10 megabits, that is, almost 1000 times more). However, it was not always possible to connect at 14400, it was more often 9600 or 4800. When I bought the Courier 33600 modem, the situation changed, but not much.

I will not talk in detail about Fido and BBS, who do not know what it is -
read for example here and here . I spent almost every night on BBS-kah, shook something, poured something. And once stumbled upon White Bear BBS. This acquaintance literally turned my ideas about the possibilities available to me with my modem.

Meet the White Bear

BBS-ok in Moscow was a lot, but Mishka had two key features. First, it was multichannel. 4, then 16, then 32, and then 64 modems were connected to the server on which he lived, (I can be wrong in numbers, because it was a long time ago; the same goes for other facts - if you find inaccuracies, do not judge strictly). All modems were manufactured by ZyXEL, at that time the main competitor of US Robotics. This is not surprising, since Mishka was owned by Data Express On-Line (DEOL), the official distributor of ZyXEL products (in common “Zuhel”) and one of the country's first private Internet providers. Initially, the Bear was meant to support Zuhel users: drivers, utilities, manuals, etc. However, the DEOL management made one serious “mistake” (this was the second key feature): they installed a program on the BBS that allowed legitimate users to communicate with each other online mode, chat. Not in DOS text mode, but in a full-fledged windows-client.

Why a mistake? Because all the available modem lines were instantly taken up by lovers of exotic pleasure: real-time communication via computer. And thus deprived the owners of zuhels (usually non-poor people, because the ZyXEL modems cost much more than others) the pleasure of downloading a new firmware. In addition, commercial subscribers of Deola used the same phones to access the Internet — our activity also affected them.

Why "error" in quotes? Because it was she who gave many, including me, a start in life. Or on the Internet.

The program was primitive - from a modern point of view. Any user of ICQ and other QIP-s will laugh at the sight of that program. She was an ordinary chat, but then she seemed like manna from heaven and the top of communication. In the daytime, it sometimes turned out to ring Mishka the first time, but at night it happened that it took more than an hour to dial. Subsequently, the Deola administration imposed a limit on a one-time connection (45 minutes - after this time the subscriber was dropped, they had to call again), and then for the time spent by the subscriber on the BBS per day, as well as the number of phrases in the chat. We came out of this situation simply: we registered similar nicknames. Extra underscore character, and you are already another subscriber. For example, I had the nickname DedVasilych, as well as Vasilych, DedVasilych_, Ded_Vasilych, etc. In total, I had 6-8 subspecies of the nickname. 3-4 hours a day I usually had enough, and if not, I registered a new user.

Contingent

Mishka has hundreds of users, fifty people are quite active. Mostly they were teenagers, from 12 to 20 years old, but they came across as very small, seven years old, and fully grown up guys. The female sex on Mishka was in a tough minority. We talked ... yes about everything. Music, computers, girls, bill-gates-mast-dai, studies, alcohol, computer games and so on. Material wealth (not so much our as parents) average and above average. It is understandable, not every parent has the opportunity and desire to buy such an expensive set of toys to the family: a computer and a modem (on average, thousands and a half dollars, which for most Muscovites were very much).

People from other cities were waiting for us. Such, however, usually lived no more than a month when parents received a bill for long-distance communication, after which the modem was either tightly controlled by their elders or simply sold (don't forget: no broadband connections and home networks were even in the project, only the telephone network connection ).

Now it is difficult to explain why we spent almost every night in the chat for several hours (and if we need to sleep, we would go in for ten minutes to check in). It was unusual and cool. We didn’t feel connected, we didn’t drag ourselves from belonging to the avant-garde, because we all knew about the existence of the Internet with much greater capabilities, and some of us even visited it. We just enjoyed the fact that it is possible just like that, sitting at home, chatting with fifty people, sometimes separated by dozens and sometimes hundreds of kilometers.

Well, of course, I'm cunning. The feeling of being attached to something sacred, not accessible to mere mortals, was very much the case.

Offline meetings

If you live in the same city, constantly communicate and you have very little - it's a sin not to meet in person. We met every week on Thursdays (sometimes on other days). The meetings were held in a public garden at the intersection of Maly Levshinsky Lane and Prechistenka, not far from Arbat. Why it is there - I do not know, it began even before my acquaintance with Mishka. We called the meeting place a sandbox, because in the center of the square there was a fenced place with sand, where in the indefinite future were supposed to erect a monument to Surikov, as clearly indicated by a stone hoisted in the center of the sandbox with a corresponding inscription. Or did a stone appear later? I do not remember.

What did we do there? Yes, all the same things that ordinary young people do: they drank alcohol, they discussed everything, especially if it was connected with computers, sang songs, ran away from the police called by local residents, and so on. There have been fights, both with local and among themselves. Somehow even a native aborigine was shooting at us from the window. Not fighting, of course.

The sandbox ended after opening the Tamerlan restaurant in the nearest house. Our gatherings, five meters from the entrance to a very expensive establishment, did not arouse enthusiasm among the owners and guards of the said establishment. And the meetings from the sandbox moved to the Neolithic Club, opened by one of the Bears, from those who were heavily “above average”. I have been there only a few times. One time I remembered a meeting of eminent fidoshnikov, among whom was “personally Exler” (I was so introduced to him, only then I found out who this is, after all, I was not a fidoshnik).

Either I did not like the place, or work and study began to take more time — I don’t remember — but I didn’t take root in Neolithic. The meetings of the Deolivtsi took several more years, but most of us, including myself, gradually stopped visiting them. However, it was already after the end of the Bear.

Sunset of the White Bear

White Bear BBS closed in the winter of 1997. Several factors contributed to this event. Firstly, the Internet access service became popular, and the Deola administration was forced to release modem lines for commercial users occupied by freeloaders. Secondly, access to the Internet has become more accessible, and the beauty of ordinary chat eclipsed the much more serious possibilities of the Network.

The closing of the Bear caused many people to break up, including me. Most of those of us who have not yet had access to the Internet, found the opportunity to connect to it, legally or not (this is a separate story). The community partially recovered on the #deol IRC channel on Undernet. As part of former users of White Bear BBS, the channel has lived for some time, but the process of growing up and changing interests is unstoppable. The community gradually disintegrated, the Deolovites dissolved in new get-togethers or lost interest in the hobbies of adolescence. In the process of writing this article, I tortured Yandex with Google in search of traces of past glory. Little trace left.

Afterword

For me, White Bear meant a lot. In addition to the above-mentioned ticket to the Internet, he gave me a second job (the first was the position of the seller of the reference system "Consultant Plus"). I don’t remember how I went to the Deola administration, but in 1997 I was accepted to work on an Internet customizer for users of this provider. At the user's request, I came to his home or work and set up access (despite detailed instructions, it was not such a simple procedure, sometimes I had to dance with a tambourine), for which I received as much as $ 20. During one of these visits, I was asked if I could make a website, to which I without hesitation answered in the affirmative, although I had no idea what kind of animal it was. We agreed on $ 100, on the way home, I bought a book “HTML in action”, and soon the site of four pages was ready with bold and italics on a colorful background. This case marked the beginning of my passion for web development, from which by the end of 1999 the first version of NetCat had grown.

Wonderful people worked in Deole, for example, Yevgeny Soldatov and Elena Gubareva, but I wasn’t particularly like the company’s staff, because communicated with them mainly by phone. In addition, by the time I graduated from the university (1999) I was already interested in my business and gradually moved away from the community of businesses and from my work in Deola. And over time, the channel #deol and the provider itself closed.

In the form described by me, Mishka lived only a few months, but what were these months! I don’t know how my fate would have happened without Misha, but it would definitely have turned out quite differently.

PS Once again, I apologize if I mistook something in chronology or facts, so I will be happy with the amendments. Over the years I have lost touch with almost all the Deolovs. If they are among the readers of this article - I will be very happy to get together again. It is possible and in the sandbox area :)

PPS I thank the archive.org project for its invaluable help in correcting the gaps in my memory. If this article is accepted favorably by the habrasoobshchestvo, I will write another one or two stories from the nineties.