Ben Ruset

Ben Ruset May 16th, 2008

I think a lot of us thirty-somethings look back to our teen years and reminisce about how we used to get online before the Internet became prevalent. At least to me there’s something special about the sound of two modems handshaking before falling silent and the ANSI characters of the BBS began flowing across a terminal. That’s something that’s entirely alien in today’s world of instant-on connections. QModem Pro has been replaced by Firefox. The local BBS has been replaced by message boards. Now the friends you have online are just as likely to be on another continent as they are being down the street.

I remember the day I got my first modem. I was a freshman in high school and somehow I managed to save up enough money for a Best Data 14.4 ISA modem. I installed it in my ALR 486SX/20 and loaded the floppy disk for Prodigy. I signed up for an account and used it for a few times, not really knowing what I was doing. A classmate then told me about another online service… a BBS. Unlike the primitive graphics of Prodigy, this was totally text based, but it was easier to navigate and understand. I fired up whatever the terminal emulator was in Windows 3.1 and dialed the number that he gave, and connected to The HoT SpoT BBS in Long Branch.

I signed up for an account using my real name - a terribly newbie mistake, and navigated around the BBS for a little while before my “time limit” expired and I was kicked off for the day. The HoT SpoT was a multi-line BBS running MajorBBS, which allowed it to multitask and hence let callers interact with each other. The sysop of THS was Terry Perkas, a Monmouth University student who’s parents owned a diner somewhere up in North Jersey. To get more time on THS you would have to buy credits — N number of credits was equal to X number of minutes. From THS I branched out to other local boards - The Twilight Zone, Ironhorse BBS, and a host of other boards.

The best part about the BBS’s was that the people you’d meet were local. I was one of the very few people from my school who went online, but I met a number of kids from Ocean Township High, Wall Township High, and Long Branch High. We were all the usual socially awkward computer nerds, but it amazed me to see how these people acted online. What we take for granted today - the concept of people’s online persona being radically different than their real life persona - was something new (to me, at least) then.

Being a broke kid, it was hard to afford credits for the site. I eventually became friends with (read: kissed the ass of) Terry, and would pester him for free credits. I befriended a lot of the other sysops — I got “elite” access on a few of the local pirate boards. On other sites, I had unlimited downloads of shareware. One site let me become co-sysop, and I was responsible for validating all of the new uploads, scanning them for viruses, and adding the board’s FILE_ID.DIZ file to each of them. There was a connection between all of us online — something that’s hard pressed to be found in most web boards or chat rooms.

Then, in late ‘95 the Internet hit Monmouth County. Monmouth Internet (now Monmouth Telecom) opened, and offered shell and SLIP access on their BSD box. I found them by seeing an ad in the Asbury Park Press. I signed up for an account (I was bruset@monmouth.com) and through some fluke of their billing system was never charged for more than 3 years. Around the same time, the Asbury Park Press opened up InJersey.com. This was a combination BBS/PPP internet gateway. Many of the kids from THS and the other boards flocked over to InJersey, which was free. I loaded Trumpet Winsock on my PC (now a home built 486 DX2/66) and fired up Netscape Navigator .99N and was transported to an entirely new world.

Web 1.0 killed the local BBS. For a time the local BBS’s resisted the change by claiming the same things that I now think were great but previously thought were dumb — a sense of community, speed of communications, friendships, etc. Boards either had to change or die, and sadly most of them did the latter. THS, feeling the squeeze, bought the module that would allow for incoming telnet requests to be handled by MajorBBS (later upgraded to Worldcomm), email (username@bbs.hspot.com), and I think even newsgroup access.

By the end of 1996 I was mixing my time on Monmouth Internets shell (shell.monmouth.com) and their PPP connection. I also surripticiously used a router at Monmouth University that was set to allow dial in access to telnet out to other sites (the odd BBS, MUDs, etc.) I befriended a girl, Meredith Borakove, who went to school at UPenn, who taught me rudamentary HTML. (She was also the first person I met who used a Mac outside of the writing lab at Monmouth Regional.) Meredith had a personal website (Meredith’s World of Queso), the concept of which absolutely fascinated me. Here was the ability to inexpensively make a presence online. Fortunately, Monmouth Internet offered a whopping 10MB worth of space for web pages on their shell box, and I quickly took advantage of it.

Web 1.0 — maybe this all predates Web 1.0 — was an interesting time. For the first time people from disparate geographic regions were able to talk to one another freely (as in beer.) The barrier to entry was still very high - connections were hard to find, and most people on the ‘net at that time were from academia, so the collective IQ of the bunch was higher. Things would affect the community as a whole. If Mae East was having problems (and when was it not?) the Internet was insufferable. When the Communications Decency Act passed in 1996, everybody turned their homepages black in protest. Everbody had the EFF’s Blue Ribbon Campaign logo on their site. We all bult sites for Netscape browsers, listening to MP3’s on Winamp.

I’m not really sure what killed Web 1.0. Maybe it was when AOL allowed their userbase to go on the internet at large and post in USENET. Maybe it was when Windows 95 hit, and the Internet Browser Wars took off. The more people that went online, the less of a personable place the web became. By the late 1990s, high speed internet had taken off. Wired Magazine was the hottest thing out there. The revolution happened. And then the tech bubble burst. All of the kids who grew up on BBS’s and were in the right places with the right startups made (and mostly lost) their fortunes. The web became a darker, more cynical place as corporations took over.

The web of today is sterile and clean. AJAX has taken over, and the personal homepage has been replaced by the blog or Twitter feed. I never ran a BBS (although I set many of them up locally on my PC), but today I run a fairly large (larger than The HoT SpoT BBS was) online community.

There are days when I look at my PuTTY window and dream:

[bruset@atsion ~]$ telnet bbs.hspot.com
Trying 216.35.197.68…
telnet: connect to address 216.35.197.68: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused

*sigh*

Here’s to The HoT Spot, InJersey, Terry, Meredith, the kids who ran the pirate Oblivion/2 boards, and everyone who made Web 1.0 possible. Godspeed.

• Ben , Internet , Online Communities
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Ben Ruset May 5th, 2008

No new pictures. Besides taking Dana to the Claws-N-Paws Zoo, I pretty much did nothing but hide in the hotel room and sit on my laptop.

I’m sure I could have found some adventures taking the Jeep out by myself, but with Laura and Dana in tow it would have just been ugly.

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Ben Ruset January 15th, 2008

I just finished reading “Great Plains” by Ian Frazier. After pretty much reading, and reviewing, Jersey history for the last few years, I wanted to broaden my horizon. The mini review on the front of the book compares the author to John McPhee, who wrote a really good book on the Pine Barrens, so I figured it was an omen that I would like this book. It did not disappoint.

Now, of course, I want to get in my Jeep and drive across the plains. I want to visit the site of Sitting Bull’s cabin. I want to go back to Keota and Buckingham, in the Pawnee National Grassland in Colorado, and take in the surroundings again. There is something incredibly powerful when you look across the plains and see nothing - just miles and miles of grass blowing out to the horizon. When you’re the only person around for miles. As much as I love the Pine Barrens, you can never get that far away from everything. Even in the middle of a cedar swamp, surrounded by hummocks and briers so fierce that you need a machete to cut through them, there’s always something to remind you of humanities presence. A mylar balloon or a long abandoned tree stand loudly exclaims to the “explorer” that there’s no uncharted territory to be found.

Frazier explains that the land and resources in the plains were so abundant - and cheap - that it didn’t make sense to tear down the old and replace with the new. Unlike Manhattan, where buildings go up, live their lives, become obsolete, and get demolished, the plains holds structures, towns, that outlived their usefulness years ago and now just bake, unused, under the sun. In Jersey, the ghost towns we have only still exist because they’re on protected land. If the Pines weren’t protected, Harrisville or Martha would probably house a Wal-Mart and a Super Stop & Shop. In Jersey we force our conservation - in the plains it happens because it’s just not worth it to build.

Some people may only see the plains as a lonely stretch of land between New York and San Francisco. From Google Earth, the Oklahoma Panhandle is wormwood, defined by thousands of green circles made by center pivot irrigation.  It’s a landscape so unlike what I’m used to in Jersey. It’s an amazing place. This book makes me want to see more of it.

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Ben Ruset December 28th, 2007

I’ve been thinking a lot about archives.

I’m an amateur historian, so I spend a lot of time looking into the past. Part of looking into the past is field work - in my case, going out into the Pine Barrens and exploring where these ghost towns were. Another big part of that is doing research. What was this town? Who lived there? How does that place fit into the broader context of the region?

The Pine Barrens historian is lucky in some ways, and unlucky in others. From the 1920’s through the 1960’s, a historian and folklorist named Henry Charlton Beck spent a lot of time in the region, documenting the history and culture of the Pine Barrens. He saw things that don’t exist anymore, and in a lot of ways, he paved the way for other historians through the ages (myself included) to follow on through his research. We’re lucky because of all of the places in the United States, how many have had generations of historians doing research? I’m sure there are dozens of cellar holes and half-hidden clearings in the wilds of Pennsylvania, or Oregon, or wherever that nobody knows about. The people who lived there are long dead, and nobody cared much to archive the knowledge of the place.

The thing is, we only know the history of the Pine Barrens through the context of those who documented things. So while Beck was a great folklorist, he didn’t spend a lot of time describing cellar holes, or what he found at his forgotten towns. He described the people who lived there, maybe a short anecdote or two, and not much else. Historians who have followed since have documented things better or worse depending on their own interests. Right off the bat we don’t have an accurate historical record anymore.

Maybe that’s the problem with history? How faithful are our archives - our history - of things when we gloss over the mundane and the humdrum and focus on the more exciting things? Are they intrinsically worth more? Of our past, what is worth saving? Will there be some future relative, two centuries from now, who will wonder what I ate for breakfast today, December 28, 2007?

I also wonder about the trend towards digital archives. My website is a pretty useful research tool for those interested in the history of the Pine Barrens. There’s a lot documented there that isn’t mentioned in any book. Personal stories that are fascinating, but would never be published. How do you go about archiving a website for scholarly use five centuries down the road? Sure, you can say that the Internet Archive project spiders sites and saves them, but the IA has problems fetching old versions of my site from 2002 — can we trust it to be useful in five hundred years? Would anybody have a HTML browser in five hundred years? Will people even know the HTML specification then? If the answer is no, then what we have is a lot of history held in a very transient medium, that will likely not be accessible to anybody in the future. The problem is, however, that websites generally don’t translate well into other mediums. So, what do you do?

One of the things I want to do is research my family tree some more. I’ve not really been able to trace my ancestry back further than 1860 or so, which in my opinion is terribly recent. Is my family information gone forever? What about the lives of my ancestors in the 1600’s? If there is no record of them, what of their lives? Were they spent in vain, only to serve as breeding stock for the next generation? What about their hopes, dreams, and fears?

I’ve been meaning to sit down and document my life for Dana. Not to be pretentious, but because there’s so many experiences that I’ve had - good and bad - that it might be good to write them down, and maybe after I’m gone, some ancestor of mine will come along and be interested in my life. The question I wrestle with, though, is what medium do I use? I would love to install a copy of Wordpress on a local server and blog my way through my life. The problem is, of course, the transient nature of web published data, as well as the danger of hard drive failures, fire, etc. I could write, but again, a fire could come along and destroy my journal. Plus, handwriting is not really in a friendly format for future researchers. I could make up a bunch of Word files, get a Mozy account, and back them up somewhere — and maybe that’s the best idea, although who knows if MS Word will be readable in the future, and I can’t stand writing in a plain text editor under Windows.

I like to think that I’m not alone here. We all, in a way, live our lives in bubbles. If people wrote more, documented more, left more for their future, it not only would put our lives in the best context of all - our own - but preserves what we all do, what we live for, for future generations. I don’t want to be a name and a date on a family tree in five hundred years. I want someone to know about my experiences growing up, my impressions of things, my mode of thinking.

• Ben , Family
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