BBS IN THE 313
a short history of the Detroit board scene
Before the web, southeast Michigan ran on dial-up boards.
One modem, one phone line, usually one caller at a time.
Your community was whoever you could reach without a toll
charge, which meant the scene had a shape you could draw
on a map.
The area code
313 was one of the original 86 area codes assigned in
1947, covering the southeast quadrant of Michigan
including Metro Detroit, Flint, and the southern Thumb.
It shrank as demand grew, splitting off 810 in 1993 and
734 in 1997. During the boom years, though, 313 was the
whole scene, and a phone number was an address.
1980: the first ones
The earliest local boards on record date to 1980. SEMCO
CBBS ran nodes in Macomb County, Westland and Grosse
Pointe. One answered at 110 baud only. Another took 300.
They turn up in a January 1980 issue of S-100 Micro
Systems Magazine, barely two years after Ward Christensen
and Randy Suess built the first CBBS in Chicago.
Keith Petersen, callsign W8SDZ, was running Royal Oak
CP/M around 1980 and 1981, and later a long-lived RCP/M
system with Bob Clyne. Petersen became central to the
SIMTEL software archive, one of the great pre-web file
collections. Dave Hardy ran Technical CBBS out of
Dearborn starting in 1980, and years later ran Detroit
Download Central, which carried a SIMTEL mirror.
Michael Wesley ran Schooner Cove in Ypsilanti on a Xerox
820 running CP/M, from 1983 to 1985, and traded messages
with Christensen himself about the state of XMODEM.
The Club
Terry Conklin brought The Club up around 1981 on a TRS-80
Model I, running software he wrote himself. The modem
could not auto-answer, so at first he picked up the calls
by hand. When he left for East Lansing in 1983 the board
went with him, and a second system kept the Detroit
number alive. He ran a board on that same number for
roughly twenty-five years, eventually reachable by
telnet. By his own account the original TRS-80 still
runs, overclocked, though the floppies are finally losing
sectors to age.
MACE and the Atari machines
Michigan Atari Computer Enthusiasts released AMIS in 1983,
the Atari Message Information System, written in Atari
BASIC and put in the public domain. It spread through the
local scene and turned a home Atari into a board.
Don Peruski ran Diskwiz out of Utica from about 1983,
and says he had the first BBS on an Atari 835 modem
anywhere. 300 baud.
Jim Samples took AMIS apart and rebuilt it for V.O.I.C.E.
in Redford Township. It grew from a ten kilobyte program
to something that had to be split into loadable modules,
ran multiple lines with chat and online games off three
Atari machines with RAM disks, and stayed up from 1983 to
1997.
Anton Malje started Tari Tech on an Atari 800XL in
Plymouth Township, moved it to Dearborn, and by the end
it was running four boards in one, covering Atari 8-bit,
Atari ST, IBM and Amiga.
Doug Geiss ran The Cutting Board out of Taylor from 1984
on an Atari 800XL, then one of the first IBM PC-ATs. He
shut it down in 1986 because he started dating. He was
making short films at the time, and his film teacher was
working with Michael Moore on Roger and Me.
Getting off the island
FidoNet arrived in 1984 and let boards trade mail
overnight when long distance was cheap. Detroit nodes
joined early, including PCUTILboard, which held FidoNet
node number 92.
Merit, the state research network founded in 1966 by
Michigan State, Michigan and Wayne State, had dial-out
modems in Ann Arbor. Callers from anywhere could reach
them and then dial a local Michigan number. Sysops
noticed: a board in the western 313 could suddenly have
users from other countries.
M-Net in Ann Arbor came up in 1983 on PicoSpan, written
by Marcus Watts for the Altos 68000. It was a real
multi-user conferencing system rather than a single-line
board, ran something like fifteen dial-ins at its height,
and it is still alive today at arbornet.org.
How big they got
The successful boards got serious. Burt LeSarge ran The
Praise Board out of Livonia with four incoming lines, a
satellite dish pulling FidoNet echoes, automated weather
reports, and two dozen CD-ROMs in changers, all on five
networked DOS machines on his closet floor. Around a
hundred calls a day.
Raymond Roney ran Computers Inc out of Warren on a
Commodore 64 with a twenty megabyte Lt. Kernal drive,
which everyone assumed would never fill up. It competed
with the multi-line systems.
Victor Volkman ran HAL 9000 in Ann Arbor from 1988 on
PCBoard, ten lines, with Usenet mail and newsgroups by
the mid nineties.
The other side of it
There were boards you could not call. Private systems
traded cracked software and hosted the local elite scene.
Scott Sabo ran Enterprise out of Farmington Hills and
watched it end the day federal agents and local police
arrived at the door. Scott Rogers ran Tower of High
Sorcery out of Livonia behind a chain of call-forwarding
numbers, with maybe seventy-five accounts.
Harold Willison ran In The Flesh in Detroit, a board
mainly for other sysops, and kept a database of the names
and numbers callers registered with across the scene.
They used it to work out that a local news figure had
stood up a hacking board as a sting.
Eric Kimminau ran Utility City, became a regional hub for
ITCNet and FidoNet, and was first to push out the
documents from the Masters of Deception bust.
The record keeper
Horst Mann kept the Detroit-area BBS list. Getting on it
meant something: he compiled it by actually dialing in,
so if he could log on and off your board, you were on the
list.
What it felt like
The recollections left behind by these sysops circle the
same thing. Every board carried the personality of
whoever ran it. People held parties and met the strangers
they had been typing at. Kitty, who ran The Cat's Meow in
Lake Orion, still counts some of them as friends. John
Kupel, who ran One Way out of Detroit on a Commodore 64,
met his wife through his board.
Not every ending was dramatic. Rich Weinkauf ran The
Nervous System off a modem in his office at Parke-Davis
in Ann Arbor until a security audit found the line, and
he was told to unplug it or be walked to his car.
The end, mostly
The internet took the callers, and college took the
sysops. The boards thinned out through the late nineties.
Some hung on a long time. Metro Detroit BBS ran until
2002. Mike Ryan kept Hartland Pride going until 2003,
and remembers when Livingston County alone had thirty
boards running. The Robot Factory, started by a father
and son in Inkster in 1982, made it to 2004.
Why this page exists
This node is like a bulletin board with no phone line.
It is not particularly reliable, or I guess only as about
as reliable as the power and connectivity in my Detroit home.
Sources
Historical BBS list for the 313 area code, with
recollections submitted by the sysops themselves.
This is the main source for everything above.
http://bbslist.textfiles.com/313/oldschool.html
http://bbslist.textfiles.com/313/313.txt
The wider textfiles.com BBS archive, area code by
area code.
http://bbslist.textfiles.com
Background on area code splits, CBBS, FidoNet,
AMIS, PicoSpan and Merit Network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_codes_313_and_679
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Message_Information_System
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PicoSpan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_Network
M-Net, still running.
https://arbornet.org
By Mr. Heresy