Now, this BBS was a regular BBS like you'd see in the day; it had a UUCP (the earliest Unix computers could copy files to any computer with "uucp/uucico" and other programs) mail and news feed back then, as well as a text-based interface that let you send an email or read Usenet without knowing Unix, the first time that happened from what I can tell. I had just left university doing, well, Unix stuff - troff.

In '85 or so, my boss gave me a modem and said to call his BBS. His name was Greg Laskin, and he had a BBS called PNET02 running on Xenix on PC hardware. It was an 80286 Intel development system and was called Gryphon. Initially, our address was ...nosc!crash!pnet01!pnet02 and changed almost weekly. Next, it was ...crash!pnet!gryphon then crash.cts.com%gryphon, then finally gryphon.cts.com, and in the UUCP maps, the Organization was listed as Trailing Edge Technologies.

Now, at the time, the net, such as it was (and I'm told around 1000 people on it, and Richard Wolff had just liberated the ARPANET from the NSF, but not everybody got that memo), my recollection of those early years was if somebody posted an FTP link to pick up something, then some people would freak out and bring up the AUP. Of course, you could safely ignore that; it's their problem, not yours. Or at a time when bblue got a free feed from NOSC (nobody charged for UUCP connections; this operated on the "I'll pass your messages if you pass mine" principle, and pay-for UUCP connections did not happen until 1987 when Rick Adams started UUNET in Falls Church, Virginia. It wasn't hard to get a connection; you called up and asked for one. If you knew what it was, they loved talking to you as nobody else had ever heard of it. The idea at the time was more connections are better, and to be honest, I never heard of somebody who said no to a connection request. Literally, all one had to do was call and ask.

Commensurate with the loss of the AUP, the serious tone of the net also drifted to something between Monty Python and modern Crackbook. However, the good bits were good. Dennis Ritchie posted in comp.lang.c. You could ask him questions or give him comments. It was quite a thing, in any day.

I got a call one day at work, Greg again (I was in Baldwin Park at a client site). He told me somebody was amused by something I said and gave us a feed from NASA JPL. We were still talking to bblue's system, which talked to NOSC, and it turned out NASA's feed was faster (it was one hop from DECWRL - genuflects) so we ended up feeding news to bblue instead of taking it. Also, a lowly PC was now a UUCP backbone site, and the powers that be, mostly in uni admin, seemed to cause the backbone cabal that ran things to dissolve in favor of a combination of voting on important things (newsgroup creation) and rough consensus on administrivia. The breakup of the backbone cabal and birth of alt has been written up by Henry Hardy as his master's thesis. The newsgroup creation stuff deserves a book too, plus it's infinitely funnier. You can see shreds of it in various old FAQs. net.legends is one.

People that had accounts on Bill's system in San Diego: Brock Meeks, Dan Gookin, Morgan, and of course, Bill Blue, who was very clever and quite the gentleman. Those who wish pointers in managing people online would do well to look at what Greg and Bill did back then. They're around (in spirit, Greg passed away in 1989) on Google Groups, usually in news.admin.

In LA, there was me, Oleg, Miriam, Jeff Winslow, Greg Nowak, Wee Willy Wisner, Patricia O'Tama, and Teri Flynn. If you know any two of them, you can relate when I ask, "Can you imagine being the news admin for THAT bunch?" Let's just say it was a character-building exercise all the way around. After Greg died, Wisner sold the Gryphon domain, but by that time, net connections were easy to get, and a few years later, dial-up PPP was available en masse. That would have been '93-'94, and by 1996, the TCP/IP internet was finally larger than the other, UUCP network, and they had effectively merged. That's when it stopped being the ARPANET and was now the Internet. What network you were on didn't matter anymore as long as you could talk to other TCP hosts.

This put CompuServe, cup.portal.com, and AOL on the net, and BANG, it's September all the time now.

Ironically, 40 years later, people are trying to figure out how to undo that last move to get some of the old internet back, cf. The Gemini Project.