Driscoll’s project in The Modem World has an economic purpose as well: to praise the blend of small-scale capitalism and volunteerism that animated the world of bulletin-board systems (BBSes), operated by hobbyists and entrepreneurs to host conversations and the exchange of files between personal computer users in the same geographic area. These systems came into being in 1978 and disappeared quickly after the advent of the World Wide Web, but Driscoll argues that they had a powerful influence on computing culture during those twenty or so years, when they opened networked computing to people outside of university computer science departments.
Some of Driscoll’s best arguments come early in his book, tracing the spirit of BBSes back to amateur radio. Citizens Band (CB) radio, in particular, introduced a culture of talking with strangers that was depicted in movies like Convoy and Smokey and the Bandit. This culture helped energize the chat rooms of BBSes and later Internet service providers (ISPs) like America Online and CompuServe, which offered their own “walled garden” sites and services separate from the wider Internet, promising a safer and friendlier introduction to life online. The world of ham radio, with its need for operators to prove their fluency in Morse code, has a nerdier history, and Driscoll finds the roots of the personal computer hobby in the esoteric world of radio repeaters, who rebroadcasted one another’s signals in order to reach larger audiences than they could on their own.
The legendary Chicago-based Computerized Bulletin Board System, created by the hardware hacker Randy Suess and the programmer Ward Christensen in 1978 during a snowy winter, shows the sheer imagination and audacity necessary to establish a novel form of digital interaction. Personal computers were extremely uncommon in the late 1970s, and modems—specialized pieces of hardware that translate data into audible tones for transmission over phone lines—even more so. That the members of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange, to which Suess and Christensen belonged, would want a virtual space to converse between in-person meetings wasn’t obvious. More creative—and transgressive—was the idea that Ma Bell’s sacrosanct telephone lines could be commandeered by ordinary citizens and used to facilitate often playful text-based conversations among geeks.
Other developments are more challenging for Driscoll to make lively. FidoNet was an ambitious effort to transmit messages between BBSes using a method called “store and forward”: one system would wait until another one closer to the recipient synchronized files and passed the message along to it. Driscoll is fascinated by the ways in which hyperlocal systems, accustomed to serving users who shared a telephone area code, attempted to become a global network. Readers, however, may not share his passion for the minutiae of global addressing schemes.
Still, Driscoll’s overall argument—that BBS culture helped shape contemporary Internet culture—is a persuasive one. The Modem World dedicates significant attention to text files, with which often pseudonymous users developed jokes, ideas, and short essays designed to circulate online. (Curious readers can find a large cache of these files, maintained as part of the Internet Archive, at textfiles.com.) Most histories of the social Web look backward from contemporary platforms like Reddit and 4chan to Usenet, the distributed discussion system that operated on university networks in the 1980s and 1990s. Driscoll points to groups like Cult of the Dead Cow, a loose organization of BBS operators and users whose activism can be credited with shaping the mythos of the rebellious, antisocial, political computer hacker that dominated media depictions until it was displaced by the hacker entrepreneur backed by venture capital.