An incredible series of tweets between Sean Bonner and Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin about the Great Friendster Diaspora got me thinking about the death of virtual worlds, in particular the bulletin board systems that made my isolated youth in Ridgefield, Washington, way out next to the cows at the end of a gravel road where all I had was Wired Magazine and a 14.4 modem, a little more bearable.

In those days, I used to religiously dial-in to Keith Buckbee’s Country Computing, where I posted messages, played Legend of the Red Dragon, and generally whiled away valuable time I could have spent reading Wittgenstein or something. I even went to a barbecue once, escorted by my mother, to meet the denizens of Country Computing in real-life. They were as shocked as I was to discover that suddenly, out in the physical world, I was still 11 and 30 years their junior.

Then, one day a year or two later, Pacifier Online came along and my early-adopter dad purchased access to the Real Internet. The same hisses-and-pops that once connected me to a computer in La Center, Washington suddenly connected me to the world. As if it was a Christmas toy in February, I forgot all about Country Computing.

I wasn’t there to see its numbers of dials-ins dwindling. Board messages going unreplied to.  The community withering and dying. Keith, an old ham radio operator, sitting in his basement, trying to decide when he’d pull the plug. Was one single user a day enough to keep the BBS alive? Two? Ten? Where did he draw the line, take the dog out back, and put it out of its misery. I’m reminded of Clive Thompson piece from a few years ago detailing the end of massively multiplayer online game, Asheron’s Call 2. He writes, “At one point, a non-player character assigned me a quest of killing all the burrowing beasts in a nearby canyon, to save her town. I’m like, save the town? Lady, the whole damn world is about to end!”

While people from AC2 saved screenshots and probably posted them to Flickr along with tributes and memorials, the ruins from my first virtual town have been washed away, lost like all the other electronic communities from the pre-Internet era.

Unindexed, they must wander the phone lines like ghosts, knocking packets astray, crashing your browser just when your post was finished, shutting down Twitter, all because they are caught between the old, tangible world of books and things, where legacy systems kept on keeping records in that Dewey Decimal, county records way and the new Internet indexed world where anything that is typed can be found. They flowered for a brief moment in the space between in real life and on the Internet, letting us see that there was something in-between. Now, only this tiny community of people know they existed. They are kept alive by the weak force of occasional remembrance, flickering into and out of existence like Marty’s parents in the Polaroid from Back to the Future.

Only a single webpage will testify that the Country Kitchen was real. Appropriately enough, all the “BBSes through history” page gives you is a pay-by-the-letter obituary of each board, an electronic headstone in a foggy graveyard that always extends to just beyond the short distance the eye can see.

Rest in Peace, Country Computing. Rest in Peace.

  • Country Computing
  • 360-263-1117
  • Keith Buckbee
  • 1990-1996
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