The early 1990s, when internet services were only beginning to become available, were the peak years for bulletin board activity in Ireland. For hundreds of people, especially younger people who would have regarded internet subscriptions as prohibitively expensive, the boards provided a low-cost way of using their computers online. For a time, they also looked like an economical and practical solution to provide communities with information services.
I had always had an interest in technology from an early age, the stereotypical “pulling things apart to see how they work”, putting an intruder alarm in my bedroom and the like. My first contact with computers was at school where I immediately felt some kind of connection. I combined this newly found interest in “logical processing” with my interest in electronics by working with one of the teachers after school building a simple robot.
I also ended up as a teaching assistant for the school’s computing classes before I left in 1985. That interest in technology led me to an AnCO course in electronic equipment servicing. Modems were starting to appear at around this time. I bought one and was hooked.
By 1988 I was working for the SAS Group, building PCs for their customers. The company manufactured PCs for its bespoke business systems and later on introduced its own range of general PC systems under the Enigma Technologies brand name. Some of the customised models were shipped with Novell NetWare or the Xenix version of Unix instead of MS-DOS. Others contained “industrial” hard drives with a capacity of 800MB at a time when “normal” drives held 32MB – hard to imagine when today’s mobile phones have around 1000 times that amount. After SAS, I moved through a succession of field service and technical support jobs.
That was during the day. At night I became a “sysop”.
I learned from accessing other people’s systems that the bulletin board system (BBS) culture revolved around sysops. I had begun talking with the people who ran the BBSes as I was interested in the background mechanisms that made them work rather than just using them. Most of these sysops were students. Marc Whisker, for example, was still at school when he ran NiteLine, later renamed to “The Electric Ice Cube” when a dedicated line was installed. I also got to know Eddy Carroll, the co-sysop of Infomatique – run by Liam Murphy, who was studying electronics at Trinity.
In 1987 I installed a second phone line at home and started Nemesis’ Dungeon – my own bulletin board system. It ran on an Amiga A3000 computer, a machine ahead of its time with a graphical user interface at a time that PCs were still only text based. It also featured pre-emptive multitasking; this allowed the BBS to run in the background while I used the machine normally. At a time when standard PC systems were only able to show lines of text and supported just 8 or 16 colours (or 256 on high end “workstations” with custom graphics, the Amiga system was able to display images, video and computer animation in thousands of colours.
Nemesis’ Dungeon got its name from my interest in fantasy novels – a combination of a 2000 AD comic character and the Greek goddess of retribution. Nemesis the sysop who was also the “Dungeon Master”, a tie-in to my interest in role playing games. The name set the tone for the BBS; its atmosphere was relaxed and slightly quirky. Users could discuss anything and everything: cooking, motorcycles, computer games and yes, lots of tech talk.
Different bulletin boards had different rules, characteristics, goals and themes. Some were very strict about what users were allowed to do, others very relaxed.
Examples include the Irish College of General Practitioners which was mainly run for doctors, while SystemHouse Technologies’ “DUBBS” focused on business and support for their customers. At the peak of the BBS movement, there were around 15 popular public bulletin boards in Ireland, predominantly used by hobbyists, as well as dozens of private systems that companies set up for internal use.
In addition to supporting discussions on any topic, Nemesis’ Dungeon made shareware and public domain files available for download, provided multi-player online games such as “Risk”, some were live and others turn-based so people did not have to be connected at the same time.
The Dungeon also gave users access to the international FidoNet network. That enabled them to exchange views with people in other countries.
The BBS evolved in stages from 1987 to 1995, depending on how much money I had available to spend on it at any time. I soon found it necessary to add a third phone line and to upgrade the Amiga to an A3000 tower (for storage capacity) and later to an A4000 which I put into a custom case for additional speed and storage. I used a second computer in my home as a terminal. After the addition of the phone lines, five people at a time could connect to the system and take part in its discussions; three externally and two locally via the terminal and local console.
At its peak the service had more than 100 users. Many of them paid a voluntary subscription/donation of £5 a year. Non-subscribers were limited to 15 or 20 minutes of access a day and subject to restrictions on the number of messages that they could send or files they could download.
Trolling and online bullying were a concern in the BBS years, just as they are today. Sysops tried to prevent these abuses by establishing the users’ real identities. I usually asked them for a copy of a driving licence or a student ID. I also tried to develop face to face social interaction among the users by arranging at least one pizza party a year. O’Dwyers in Mount Street ran a “Pizza Cellar” which seemed to be a fitting venue for techies who hung out in a dungeon!
The BBS always operated at a loss, even with the help of subscriber donations. This was mostly due to the costs of renting phone lines and dialling into FidoNet. In the 1990s I became the region co-ordinator for FidoNet, which meant making regular calls to a hub in the UK. These calls were very expensive at the time.
Ireland was Region 26 on FidoNet. What we exchanged was “private mail” (personal messages) and also “groups” which were like the modern internet forums. These were passed along a chain from system to system to system; all the FidoNet-connected BBSes around the country would call mine every night, sending messages from their users and picking up anything inbound that was waiting for them. Then I would call the FidoNet hub in the same way, sending the collected data out to the rest of the world and picking up anything inbound.
Some of us saw a real potential to expand this store-and-forward communications model far beyond the bulletin boards, reaching out to people who did not own computers. In 1992 I started working on a plan to set up a distributed network of local nodes for community access to the online world.
My partner on this project was Tomás MacGabhann who, I believe, had been one of the founders of the credit union movement or at least very involved in its development. We envisaged organisations such as libraries, GAA clubs, cattle marts and town halls installing terminals and encouraging locals to drop in and get connected as well as providing useful information.
The network would switch messages country-wide, including Northern Ireland, bridging the rural/urban divide as well as straddling the border. We presented our proposal to Bord na Gaeilge, pointing out that we could run BBSes through both English and Irish. We never got to implement the plan. If it had gone ahead, its services would have been similar to those that internet cafés introduced in later years and the usage model could have easily moved over to an internet connection when the price made it viable.
Many BBS users became early internet adopters. I signed up with an ISP, Club Internet, for the first time in around 1995. That subscription was not just for my own use. It also enabled me (with permission from the ISP) to provide internet e-mail to the BBS users. For people who only wanted to send occasional messages it was cheaper at that time to sign up to Nemesis’ Dungeon and route their messages through the bulletin board, than to pay a monthly fee for internet access.
My day job became more demanding after I joined IBM in 1997. I worked on its point-of-sale systems for retailers and on Y2K systems auditing for a financial institution. Traffic through the BBS declined until it was only used by a few old-faithfuls. I tried to introduce connections into Nemesis’ Dungeon from the internet via Telnet, but the software platform that had this functionality was showing its age and was no longer being actively developed so it never really worked well.
I finally powered the system down in 2000 or 2001.
Dedicated to Kevin Phair, my co-sysop and friend, who died in December 2015 aged 45
Last edit: May 2016
© Andy Mowatt 2015-2016