*34C3 preroll music*
Herald: Back in time, back to the 1990's where the internet actually made sounds,
and you could annoy the whole family while blocking the phone line. He was actually
heavily involved in these early days of the internet. He operated and participated
in these early structures, namely Bulletin Board Systems and the UseNet. And he now
takes us back in time, to tell us all about the time when the internet made
sounds. Thank you very much LaForge.
*applause*
LaForge: Thank you very much for the introduction.This is a quite unusual
setting for me. Typically I give talks about deeply technical topics. Protocoll
level details and telecom specs and so on. Now the first time I speak in the Art and
Culture track. That is definitely something new for me. So, why am I here
and why am I talking about this topic. First of all, I was involved to some
extent yes, but for sure I was not somebody who had any significant role in
that universe. Neither in the BBS scene or in the early internet days. I was just
basically a youngster, a teenager, who had fun playing with technology and was
helping others to communicate using technology. There are many more people who
have, who are much more qualified than me to talk about that subject but I ... and
that's the reason why I'm here and why I submitted this talk is, you don't really
see many people speaking about these days or about those topics anymore. And even if
you want to research it, I think there's like one or two books in German on that
subject, they're very hard to get and also not very complete. So, I think we have to
sort of document the history of it for those people, who have not been around at
the time. So, this talk will not have as many acronyms as you are used to from
talks that I usually give. Still you have typos in the slides, as you can see in the
second line already, so that didn't change. I didn't invent any of the
technologies covered here. I didn't write any of the software covered. I was just a
user and operator or sysadmin. And that's the world I grew up in from 11 onwards.
As I said many people lack that history and to start with that, maybe a quick poll in
the audience. Who has ever dialed into a BBS using a modem? Raise your hands. Okay.
So, I'm preaching to the converted. Okay, maybe I should invite all of you up to the
stage and we should make a discussion- round instead. Anyway. So, circuit switch
telephony. Well, this is the telephony from 1876 until about 1988 with
analog voice circuits over copper wires and dial-up connections between A and B.
I guess everybody still remembers these. Even if you're young, you should have seen
a classic telephone, I think. And yeah, you have analog amplifiers possibly in the
path, but actually the copper wires are physically switched at telephone
exchanges. So, this structure looks a bit like this: We have a telephone at one end,
we have a telephone at another end, and we have telephone exchanges or switches,
which actually switch the circuit - hence the term circuit switched telephony -
between A and B. So, you have a copper wire from your phone to the office, the
exchange, to which you are connected and then that exchange again has copper wires
to other exchanges and so on. And based on the phone number you dial the call is
switched to the destination subscriber. That's sort of the foundation in terms of
technology that we're using here. Also something to document for the
international audience in Germany at that time even local calls were metered and
charged by the minute, flat rates didn't exist and we had multiple zones so there's
not just local calls and long-distance calls but different depending on your
distance so like up to 50 kilometers or more than 50 kilometers and so on. And
given on that and the steep pricing and not so many people could afford long-
distance BBSing at least not for a long time. All of this started with a device
called the acoustic coupler. It's actually also how I started even though I'm young
and I only started in I think about 90 or 91. At 10 or 11 years of age you don't
have the latest and greatest in technology. I got a used second hand or
third hand Olivetti acoustic coupler from my uncle it had even a battery it could be
operated mobile it had a battery compartment with eight Mignon (AA) cells.
Actually I still own it and I still own related telephone I just thought: yeah
don't have to bring it here. But it still exists. So anyway, here you have to
dial using your normal phone. You dial the digits of the phone number and once the
other side picks up the phone and they put their receiver onto the acoustic coupler
and you put your receiver onto the acoustic coupler, then data can be
transmitted over the telephone line as said with manual, dial manual pickup and
rather extremely low speed. This all looks like this and the next step in the logical
progression then was modems, which is sort of you can think of an automatized method of acoustic
couplers, where you don't have an air gap anymore. So in the acoustic coupler you
literally have a couple of centimeters of air between the speaker and the microphone
in the receiver of your phone, versus the acoustic coupler. So with the modem
there's a direct connection and also you have automatic facilities to dial the
telephone number and to answer the line and so on. So you don't need a manual
operator anymore to pick up a phone or dial numbers. And this thing gets
transmitted over the telephone line. This is a stack of various different
modems – we will see some others here, some of you will remember the brands or
the shapes or even the specific models of those modems. But that's too much level of
detail for the moment. So let's look a bit at the speed, or lack of speed, that was
available. It started with 300 bps. I actually used 300 bps a couple of times.
In fact, in like around 1990 of course it was extremely slow but still it was what I
could start with at the time. Then the 1200 bps; so this is still rather slow and
you can slowly read and follow the text as it's being printed. Unfortunately
I don't have an animation or something like that. I'm not such a multimedia savvy
guy. So yes, then the speeds progressed, you see the years in which they were
created. The lines with the asterisk mark years that I found some secondary sources
that originally it had been specified then. But actually the oldest spec
document for all these earlier ones was from 1988. So if you go to the ITU
website, the earliest documents you can find are from 1988 and none of those
earlier documents could – at least on the internet – be found anywhere. Maybe you
can go to a library or something like that. Yeah so speeds progressed, different
modulation schemes were introduced to squeeze ever more bits into these
3 kilohertz analog circuit over the telephone line. And every couple of years
a new, especially in the 90s, if you follow this 91 14.400 bps, 93 19.200
to 1994 28.000 bits per second. And there were of course also proprietary protocols,
then you had to have the same manufacturer of modem that the other side whom you're
calling and so on, but these are the official standardized protocols and speeds
that were used. Which brings us... so okay we have a telephone system; we can dial
numbers; we have a modem that can dial numbers; we have modems that can send bits
in exceptionally fast speed. What do we do with this? And this brings us to be BBSs:
where could you actually dial, and what could you do there? So what's the BBS?
Fundamentally, it's some computer – any hardware, any operating system, any
software. Some computer that accepts incoming calls attached to a modem and
offers some kind of interactive service to the people who dial into that BBS. And if
you wanted to operate a BBS, you had to have a separate dedicated computer for
that. Because, at the time, most of the BBS software – and most of the software
that people used in general – predated multitasking operating systems. So when
you ran the BBS, the computer was busy running the BBS; you couldn't do anything
else at the same time. So you had to invest quite a bit into a separate second
computer, or third or fourth, to actually operate that BBS. You had to have a
separate telephone line. Because if you operate the BBS into which people dial
into, of course any time of the day or night people will dial in there, so you
cannot use your normal phone line that you use to make phone calls but you had to
have a separate dedicated phone line. And of course the system had to run more or
less 24/7 so people could dial in and reach it. Luckily, on the user side there
was not so many requirements in terms of technology that you needed. Your computer
of course you only power when you use it, and you can share the regular phone line –
with the side effect, as in the introduction has been mentioned, that your
family might have gone angry if you occupied it too long – but otherwise no
additional infrastructure other than a modem required. Now you dial into the BBS
– what kind of content do you get? What do you do in that BBS? And the name BBS in
English is a Bulletin Board Service, that's actually the acronym expansion. So
there were Bulletin Boards, message boards where you could exchange messages and
texts with other people, other users of that BBS or the so-called sysop, the
system operator, the guy running that BBS. You could also chat with the system
operator, which, well, didn't exist before – the ability to chat with somebody else
remotely over a text-based terminal. There were also multi-user games, text-based, as
well as so called file areas where you could download files. And downloading
files, given the speeds back then and so on and so on, of course it was primarily
text documents or small programs or something like that. Mp3 didn't exist of
course, at least until 95 or whenever it came out, so maybe some mod files for your
module tracker, something like that. And of course, last but not least, ASCII and
ANSI artwork, which basically is an entire subculture and scene and community in
itself, creating artworks and drawings using the character set that was used by
ANSI.sys, which was the DOS, you could say display driver, in quotes, in a certain
character set and you could draw graphics like this. We will see some more. And
people were putting a lot of effort into this, and sort of competing who could who
could make the best representation or the most expressive artwork given the limited
resolution and the limited characters and colors available in this domain. So, what
kind of software did one use? Or what kind of technology was used? Well, we already
had the computer and modem, you needed some software. So on the BBS side, BBS
software, there's an unlimited number of different BBS software programmes, and
extensions, and modifications thereof, a lot of them are freeware or shareware.
Some of them are public domain, some actual free software, some are
proprietary. For any operating system, for any computer architecture, people were
writing BBS software. Whether you had an Amiga or Atari or you had Apple or DOS PCs
or you name it, software was written, by hobbyists primarily. One concept that you
will find in BBSs is the concept of so- called doors. You can think of it as
similar to CGIs in web. So basically, the BBS software could call an external
programme, which would then take over the input and output to and from the user. So
you could have sort of plugins to your BBS software which would add additional new
games or add chat software or messaging or whatever. On the user side you had a
primarily so-called terminal program. It's called terminal program because actually
it emulates a serial terminal, which is a dedicated hardware device with a keyboard
and a screen and a serial line, but not a general-purpose computer and in order to
make a general-purpose computer behave like a terminal you had a terminal program
on dos which I was using at the time. It's primarily telex and telemate I think were
the favorite ones at least on this side of the planet and you started that program,
you had a serial port, the serial port attached to your modem and from there you
dialed and the terminal program then was responsible for displaying the texts and
the ANSI graphics and so on and exchanging files of a variety of different protocols,
which we will also cover later but before we go on let's do a quick demo of how this
looks like. Now as a note I don't have a modem here I'm not emulating a modem I'm
not emulating a serial port, these days you can get the same experience by using
telnet over the internet but you can actually telnet into BBSs, I just want to
basically show how it looks like. So this is the terminal program and we have now
connected to the BBS this is sort of a introductory graphic that we see before
even logging into the the box yeah some... of course the scrolling was much slower
back then, so now we can scroll back up to actually see what was there. Yes, some
more graphics. You still haven't seen the login prompt yet, as you can see a fairly
graphics heavy BBS. Then you can choose the theme of the BBS, a user interface,
I'm going to go for the classic ANSI here. Finally, I come to a login screen and I
can log into the system where I have to enter my handle and the password which is
now in clear-text over telnet. For those of you interested in this, not that
there's anything useful I just registered this morning at the BBS so there's nothing
associated with this account. Yeah some more graphics. Finally, we are at a
message board and we see as I said I just logged in or registered this BBS today. We
see there is a message number one from Hawk Hubbard, "Welcome", so if I want to
look at that message I could basically say "I want to read it now". This is the
message reader I go in here, then here, "Welcome to forge" and so on.. So he
welcomes me to the BBS now let's go to the main menu of the BBS, which in this case
looks like that and you have different... the file areas, where you can download
files, you have the door games that I mentioned, you have an ANSI gallery, a BBS
list, you can look at the last callers who has called this mailbox and you can see
this... Well, yeah three test calls from me this morning, but you can see actually
other people are still logging into this BBS and it's 2017, so it's not... to me
this is mostly history but during the preparation of this talk I discovered that
some people, for some people it is still the present and I'm very happy to see
there's still such an active community around BBSs and which enables me to show
all of this without firing up some emulators and so on. So yeah, we also can
look at one-liners, here's some messages that people can leave to other people,
other users in the BBS, again with some quite a graphical... We don't want to
leave any additional words here, but what for example we can look at the ANSI gallery
just very quickly, can try to select something here, I have no idea what I'm
looking at so... Ok... so here you have a sort of a viewer that, yeah... So it will
show you the sections of a sort of longer artwork in this particular case... Yeah...
well... And the artwork... to me there always was a lot of similarity between the
sort of, between the ANSI art artists and the people doing... Now I'm lacking the
word, street art basically I think there's a lot of similarity between that. Okay
good, that was just a very quick demo of course I could now look at more messages
and write messages and play blackjack and do whatever I want, which I don't in this
case, so we will log off. And again some more graphics and you can leave a comment
to the sysop if you want or you can just basically... Log of... Ok, that for a very
quick demo of the look and feel. Now since I'm such a technical person and looking at
protocol stacks, I tried to draw a protocol stack diagram for BBSs, which
ended up at this. So basically at the lower layers we have the pots, the plain
old telephony system or ISDN, which we will get to in a few slides. We had modems
on the analogue telephone system, we had other things on ISDN. In the end at some
point you always have rs-232, a serial port, either emulated or real, and then
either you had a terminal program directly on top of that or, for example to transfer
files, you have used X modem or Y modem or Z modem, which added error correction and
retransmission and block transmission so you could safely transfer files without,
or at least with less, corruption. The checksum algorithms were not so scientific
in many cases. Here we then have well some other things, FTN, Point what does that,
UUCP we will cover that later. Basically you could run different protocols and
different systems on top of that. One curiosity that I still want to mention is
that, which I actually I forgot until on Twitter somebody reminded me a couple of
days ago that this existed, and I went "oh yes, RIPterm, I used that quite some time
ago", so instead of having these text- based user interfaces some people, company
called TeleGrafix came up with a language called RIPscript which was a fairly
compact language of textual commands, by which the BTS could control a vector
graphic renderer on the client side in your terminal program, and you could
actually draw VGA resolution graphics like the one that's presented here on the slide
from the VBS on the screen of the user, which was quite a big change compared to
the ASCII art or ANSI art that you've seen before. Yeah, so we're still at BBSs and
BBSs that are isolated, so you can participate in those bulletin boards and
you can read and write messages and exchange ideas and recipes and thoughts
and cheat codes and whatever you want to exchange. Users log in at different times,
the BBS is busy if it has only a single line while it's being used by some other
user. Of course you can add as a BBS operator, as the sysop, you can add more
modems and more phone lines, which is of course expensive, together with the multi-
port serial cards and and everything that was required. You can have time limits for
each user, but in the end it's sort of, there's a limit to how far you can scale a
single BTS sort of - not a BTS, a BBS, jeez, a single BBS... Well also there's a
scalability limit for BTSs, but that's another talk, so, yeah. Which brings us to
one method of more efficiently engaging with BBSs for exchanging messages which is
a concept of points or offline message reading. So as we have just seen in this
example we log in to the VP... the BBS and we have an online interactive session with
the BBS while we read and write the messages and of course it means we occupy
the telephone line for an extended period of time and it's not used very efficiently
because humans typically read slower than at least a fourteen point four or twenty
eight kilobits per second. So people invented something called points or
offline message reading and different concepts different systems different
standards different technologies. What they did in the end is they compressed and
batched all the messages for you into files and you on your client-side you were
writing your messages offline and also compressing and batching the messages that
you've written and then you make a call, you quickly exchange those files in both
directions even in full duplex if the system supports it and then you terminate
the connection again. So during a very short call you can exchange much more, many
more messages and you have all the time to read through those messages without having
to look at the phone meter or your phone bill all the time. So, more scalability,
more users, shorter connection time, lower cost for everyone involved. Definitely an
interesting technology, but still sort of scalability is limited of a single BTS
which, eh, BBS which brings us to BBS networks, store-and-forward networks which
basically extended the ability to exchange messages beyond a single BBS, but so
basically the bulletin boards or the message groups that you had at a BBS were
replicated over different protocols that were invented by various different people
over time, so not only one BBS had all the messages of a given bulletin board but all
the other BBSs participating also were receiving these messages and replicating
them all over the network. Also for personal mail, which is like email, right,
between two participants, you could route those messages across the network. The two
users exchanging messages didn't have to connect to the same BBS anymore. So much
more scalability and also you could use it efficiently for message routing to reduce
the need for long distance calls and so on. So let's look at a couple of these BBS
networks and the technologies they used. One large and very popular example of
course is the Fido Network which consists of two parts, net mail and echo mail.
Net mail is the private personal mail and echo mail are public message boards or message
groups. Fido had some, the technology used by Fido called FTN Fido technology
networks were used also by other networks. They were using the same protocols, but
they were not the same group of BBSs or the same content and so on. Treknet for
Star Trek fans was one, Gernet in Germany was an example for that. And there also
were other technologies and other networks such as Z-Netz, where they called it
"Bretter" actually, so boards, the individual message groups. And again they
had other offsprings that used the same technology but have different groups and
different policies and different structures such as T-Netz or CL-Netz. And
then there was the big faction of people who did UUCP, the UNIX to UNIX copy, which
we will look at a little bit. And MausNet is another german example here originating
from the city of Muenster, which was used to up to 120 BBSs here. Let's look at Fido
a little bit more. Started allegedly in 1984. Of course I was not involved at that
time at the age of 5. It reached a limit of 250 nodes in 1985 because apparently, I
suppose probably, a single integer UINT8 was used for the node number or something
like that and then about 250 should be sufficient for everyone. I don't know what
the other 5 are for. And then they introduced in '86 hierarchic regional
routing and addressing that was more scalable and in the end at the peak of the
Fido net propagation it was 39,000 nodes; that's BBSs not individual users but
39,000 BBSs were interconnected with an estimated 2 million users worldwide and
that's for a you know hobbyist amateur network is I think quite impressive.
The addresses looked like this. That's actually a node number that I used around
'95 in Nuremberg at the time. Z-Netz started as Zerberus-Netz - and I'm not
sure if padeluun or Rena or any of the people involved in the audience if then I
hope I represent the history correctly - which is a network technology created in
Germany. The standards are inspired but different than the Usenet and UUCP
protocols and there were all kinds of flame war about who understood the specs
wrong and whether there's an improvement between ZConnect compared to the Usenet
standards or not. But anyway it was different and there was one program called
CrossPoint which was the most popular point software at the time I think at
least on DOS for Z-Netz and also for other technologies. The screenshot here at the
bottom actually is a cross point screenshot. And cross point in the early
90s already had features that I'm still missing today in any email client that I
have found. Right? Imagine you have a thread that crosses multiple folders,
multiple news groups, multiple whatever and you have threading like the tree of
the thread across folders and news groups and so on. I mean that's something that
you cannot do with any of the software still today. Maybe you have you
have an answer which software today supports this but for sure nothing I have
found has the kind of features and functionality. Unfortunately it was
written in Pascal and it had a line length limit of 255 characters per line which
made it not very compatible to Usenet standards where lines could have different
lengths so one couldn't continue to use it in today's time and age at least not
easily. Usenet is another network of these BBS days where messages were exchanged by
a system called UNIX to UNIX copy. UNIX to UNIX copy predates the Usenet it was used,
well as the name implies, to copy something between UNIX machines - file
copying - and some of those files that people were copying were internet mail at
the time. And then the Usenet news format was invented. The format is quite similar
to internet mail, which we still know today, but it's not a personal mail
between person A and person B, but it, you could post it to a so-called news group
and there was a hierarchy of news groups which replicated and flooded messages
across the entire network, across the globe. And it was a flooding mechanism
involve to make sure that the messages get replicated and the duplicates get detected
and duplicates are not basically transmitted again or rather shown again
and so on. The routing was originally defined in route maps in UUCP which is a
quite a bit odd over time because it's basically a static source based routing
for the UUCP mails. News as I said they were flooding anyway. Usenet was
quite popular until well into the 90s. I was news master of two news servers for
some time basically doing system administration of those boxes. And just to
give you an anecdote again; into this context we will get to Kommunikationsnetz
Franken, which is a nonprofit organization in the area of Franconia in southern
Germany, where I was active. And at the time internet - like when we actually got
to IP, at some point, IP traffic was so expensive that it was rather difficult to
get a full newsfeed over IP because you've wasted a lot of your expensive bandwidth -
wasted in quotes - but you used it for news and so what we did actually is, we
put up a satellite dish at a building in Nuremberg and we had satellite feeds from
the US. So there were US companies that were streaming compressed Usenet batches
up to a geostationary satellite which has a downlink over Europe and then we got two
megabits of compressed batched news net news in, I would say, let's say 95ish or
something like that, so that was definitely a big improvement. So we we had
a full news feed coming directly from the US without having to pay for all the
International data transfer. Another curiosity is the Floppy Poll/Point. Now
nobody is laughing yet. Well not everyone had phone lines in the 90s, particularly
in eastern Germany. Phone lines were still a rare commodity after reunification
happened in 90. It took some time until people could get connected to the
telephone network. And so what people did is actually they exchanged daily floppies
by postal mail. So basically rather than sending your compressed batches of
messages over modems, because well for a modem you need phone lines, you put a
floppy - I would assume 3.5 inch at the time, not so much four and a quarter inch
- but you put a floppy in an envelope you send it to your BBS and the guy
opens the envelope and puts it in the BBS and he sends you a floppy in return. So
you add one day or something to your transmission but then well the
transmission speed of messages in those networks at the time was sort of one to
two days or maybe even three days anyway so if you add another day what does it
matter? It was such a big advantage that you could get messages like worldwide
messages at all in such a short time and for basically no cost whatsoever. Okay
getting to the internet, yeah. How did I start to access Internet, how did people
start to access the Internet at the time? Well mail and news was sort of the
Internet in the beginning via UUCP, which is nice and fine, but it's not IP, yet. So
what you could do is you could, instead of dialing into a BBS, you could of course
use your modem to dial to the serial port of the TTY of any UNIX machine that's
somewhere else. If you have a UNIX workstation somewhere, that's connected to
an IP network using 10base2 or whatever was the network technology at the time or
FDDI or whatever, x21... then you could attach a modem to a serial part of such a
UNIX box and you just get the login prompt when you connect with the modem to that
box. Like you sit in front of your Linux system today, you have your login prompt.
And then on that workstation you basically you could remotely use that workstation
and then you could run FTP clients or IRC clients or telnet, gopher, whatever on the
text console. That was mostly available to people in the academic sector of course
because they had some UNIX machines at universities. I was too young to be at
university, so I had to use FTP mailers for quite some time. So what's an FTP
mailer? Well it's basically some FTP client that runs on a remote machine
somewhere that's connected to the Internet and that has email access and you can use
input/output over email. So if you want to FTP to some FTP server you send an email.
It says "ftp ftp." and an "ls" and then some hours later you get a response
with the list of the files, yeah? And then after you've got the list of the files you
do the first CD to change into a directory and then you get again the response. And
then finally you know which file you want so you issue a get command over the file
and then you get this long series of UUencoded mails. UUencode is a method of
sending binary 8-bit messages over mails before MIME existed. The MIME format which
we use today for email attachments and so on. That didn't exist at the time, so it
was UUencode before, so yeah. So hours or days later you got that and it
worked perfectly fine, I mean, I was quite happy to be able to use that at the time.
Now, then, if you had dial-up access to UNIX boxes, you could also do something
called SLIP, which is a serial line IP. So you could transport IP over the modem line
and as a result you have IP at home in your apartment! Unbelievable! it was later
superseded by PPP which introduced features such as auto-configuration,
authentication, compression and so on - well there was a compressed SLIP, but yeah
not quite as compressed as PPP - and popular software stack at the time - and
I'm talking about early 90s, mid-90s - is basically Trumpet Winsock on Windows with
NCSA Mosaic as a browser, because Windows back then didn't have TCP/IP, so you had
to install another package to actually have TCP/IP on Windows at the time. If
you didn't have Windows, I will get to that, and I'm talking about the pre-Linux
days here. So what did you do if you wanted to do internet on a PC before Linux
was around? I didn't have a 386 initially, I had a 286. And on a 286 of course you
couldn't run any multitasking operating system because it doesn't have a real
protected mode. So no Linux, no BSD, but there was something called KA9Q NOS. And
now I want to see hands: who has ever heard of or used KA9Q NOS? Yeah! Ok...
*laughs* Audience member shouts: It is a person's
callsign. LaForge: Yes, "It's a person's callsign"
was the comment from the audience, this is correct. KA9Q is Phil Karn in the US and
he wrote a network operating system the KA9Q NOS, the network operating system.
And it is an implementation of - he started actually in the 80s with this on
CPM and then later ported it to DOS - and it implements TCP/IP, SLIP, PPP including
POP3 server, SMTP server + client, IP routing, telnet, ARP and so on. And you
could do all this on DOS. I used it quite a lot at my home. You could do routing and
you had multiple applications at the same time all on top of DOS. It was a fantastic
piece of software. And then you could build a router to ethernet and you could
have multiple other machines in your home and you have more and more cable in your
home. And more and more connected machines, yeah, actually, yeah we will get to that, ok.
PPP superseded that. At some point ISDN came around, particularly in Germany. ISDN
is the digital version of telephony system, so instead of having analog
circuits you now transfer digital bits. That could be audio, digitized audio, but
of course it could be any other transparent digital data. In Germany ISDN
was first put in operation in 1989. Until '93 it used a German protocol standard
called 1TR6, and from '94 onwards the European E-DSS1 protocol standard was
available. It was hugely popularized from 1995 onwards by subsidies. So at the time
if you actually ordered an ISDN connection and at the same time you bought a, let's
say a small PBX or a phone or a modem or something like that, you could [get]
subsidies from Deutsche Telekom. So, I think it went up to 700 marks - not sure
if somebody remembers the exact figures - and so you've got quite a bit of money to
buy equipment to switch to this new technology. So when ISDN you don't have a
modem because there's nothing to modulate or demodulate, it's digital, so it's
called a terminal adapter, and it adapts the bitstream, the synchronous serial
bitstream of the ISDN to your operating system or your computer and there was
something called V.110 as a rate adaptation to do asynchronous serial like
RS-232, sort of, over a synchronous ISDN. Okay and how did we get internet access?
Well, it was, if you were not in academia or something like that, there were a few
commercial ISPs like XLink or EUnet. They were very expensive and of course you
didn't have local dial-in in all the different cities around Germany, but you
had grassroot groups of enthusiasts that established themselves in some
associations to make sure the members can get internet access. In my region in
Nuremberg Kommunikationsnetz Franken was particularly active. They started with
dial-up UUCP services and later IP for non-commercial users - and I have to say
with an extremely high technical standard which I'm still fascinated by today.
Kommunikationsnetz Franken had points of presence in various different cities in
the region because not everybody could call to Nuremberg as a local call and
every user got six static IP addresses, routed to wherever he dialed in. The use of
OSPF in the mid-1990s to make sure you have static IP addresses wherever you dial
in. Some people still don't have that in 2017 and I'm not even talking about the
static IP addresses, but anyway. So about 800 users peak at that association at the
time. And there was an umbrella organization called "Individual Network
e.V." (IN). This was established. Individuals could not become members in
that association so it's - the name is a bit interesting - it's called Individual
Network, because it's about networking for individuals, but the members were the
regional associations such as Kommunikationsnetz Franken, who then
basically used this umbrella entity to negotiate decent rates to get internet
connectivity and so on. And apparently the IN members served more than three hundred
thousand users at some point - so it scaled quite a bit - was dissolved in 2000
when lots of commercialized ISPs were around and also when the remaining member
entities, which many of which still exist today such as Kommunikationsnetz Franken,
they didn't need this umbrella entity to get decent internet rates or tariffs
again. So, with packets which TCP/IP we just need one number that we call at some
point We're not dialing into hundreds of different BBS's anymore but we're actually
connecting always to the same number which is our ISP, and then when we have that
connection we exchange packet data with systems worldwide which brought new
purpose to lease lines. Analog leased lines were basically telephone lines that
were permanently switched, or actually permanently wired at the exchange. So you
had two wires of copper between one location and another location and they
were physically connected you could apply a DC voltage and the DC voltage would come
out at the other end. You could get this from Deutsche Post or Telekom at the time.
When I could finally afford one in '98 for 900 marks installation cost and in my case
180 marks per month, was sixty marks per hop. Hop means: telephone exchange. So
if between the other end where you want to connect to and where you are, are three
telephone exchanges, you had three times sixty marks or 180 marks per month. And
then I connected to a system that looked like this, which is called the Hub
Nuremburg of this Kommunikationsnetz Franken, which is in the basement of one
of the members. You have basically a PC running Linux of FreeBSD, no it was BSD
actually, with like a 16-port serial card and various modems stacked on various
shelves to interconnect all these different leased lines and which then had
one ISDN leased line with 128 kilobits to some internet uplink. Yeah that's the
obligatory ISDN network termination and telephone sockets, which brings us to ISDN
leased lines. There was a product called SPV "Semi-Permanente Festverbindung",
which is not really a leased line - it's semi-permanent - and it's basically a
flat-rate call to one specific destination telephone number, which you could get in
national 1TR6 ISDN and which was rather inexpensive and what many people used who
wanted more than the ISDN speeds. Okay I have to speed up a bit, time is running
out! The first step of abusing analog lines, which we did, is by deploying a
device called an ICU-T, which is the inverse of an ISDN NTBA. So in ISDN you
still have the telephone exchange and you have a network termination, the NTBA, on
your line. And basically the the ICU-T was a single line telephone exchange side of
this protocol. So you could use an analog line which you normally used for analog
modems but you remove the two analog modems you put an NTBA on one end, you put
the ICU-T on the other end and suddenly we can get 128 kilobits over that line which
previously you could only do 33.6 without having to pay any additional cents or
money to Deutsche Telekom, of course. And then there was some special ISDN routers
which could use the signaling channel, the 16 kbps signaling D-channel on ISDN also
for data, so you get 128 + 16 kilobytes of data, because well, there's no signaling,
you're not dialling anyone so you can as well use that. Now this is sort of the
hierarchy of the leased line infrastructure at this entity. I'm not
showing every leased line here, but basically I was at the upper left corner
here connecting with 33.6 kbps to this hub Nuremburg, which connects to 128K to a
machine in a Nuremberg building of the University of Erlangen, which then
connects over X21 to the University of Erlangen, where then all kinds of other
leased lines come together. That was the the architecture of what we deployed
there. Some more pictures: this is in Fürth, a neighbor city of Nuremberg. The
collection of telephone outlets and the collection of modems and the machine - oh
there was, I'm missing one picture sorry for that - anyway you can see a pile of
modems here and some more modems here and the machine over there. And then we went
into phase two of abusing analog telephone lines, when the first DSL modems came out.
So we imported some Ascend DSLpipes in '99 from the US and with some firmwares you
could operate them back to back without the DSLAM so basically you operate one DSL
modem at one end of the leased line and another DSL modem at the other end, and if
you are close enough like with a single hop at the single telephone exchange you
could get up to 2.3 megabits symmetric over your analog line. And that in 1999
was quite a lot of speed, especially if you're not paying for traffic or anything
like that. Some less alternative, less expensive one alternatives came out. Okay!
Before I wrap up, a short detour or one thing still to mention. Another phenomenon
back then - I'm not sure if this happened in other cities too - and in my area in
Fürth we had an entity called Falcons Maze, which was called an online bistro.
I became a regular there around '94. They initially had four DOS PCs, each of them
with a modem and with a dedicated call- charge meter. And you could basically go
there, it's a cafe, you can have, you know you can eat and drink and so on, and you
can sit at the PC and you can then from there dial into BBSs and basically do
things if you didn't have a modem or a PC at home. But the interesting part of
course was that there all the other peoples were hanging out, the other BBS users,
sysops and so on. At some point the PCs were networked with 10base2, so people
could play doom when it came out, I think in - not sure when it reached us in
Germany - '94 maybe or so, and yeah. The internet became more popular. It started
subsidiaries and we set up ISDN SPVs, the "semi-permanente Verbindung" as an
internet uplink from there, so that also, I mean, you can find some sources that
this apparently, allegedly was the first internet cafe. I'm not sure if anyone else
has contested that. Something like that. Anyway, after lots of anecdotes I want to
give you some time for Q&A. To summarize: the first decades of wide area
communications were powered by a community of enthusiasts or rather communities that
were disjunct and not connected, largely motivated by non-commercial motives. Of
course there were commercial BBSs but by far not without much corporate or
government influence, right? There was no Google and there was no ministry that was
putting censorship or something like that. And the BBS community is a distinct
subculture so it has different norms and it has different values, different from
the ham radio guys, different from free software guys, of course some overlap, but
still a separate community with separate norms. What I personally think is the big
loss, other than the loss of picture on the screen, is that back then the networks
were distributed. There was no single point of failure. The infrastructure was
owned and operated by its users, by individuals. The connection speeds were
symmetric and there was no, like, data center versus consumer separation that we
have in the internet day and age of today. And that's, yes, I really think this
autonomy and decentralization is a big loss to society or the community as a
whole. Ok, some pointers: if you want to read up more or look at some ANSI artwork
or log into BBSs, the telnet BBS guide I can highly recommend that. You can also
find the BBS I looked into. Ok, good. Which brings us to the point where we can
have some questions.
*Applause*
Herald: The microphones here in, 3, 1, 2 and 4, but first we have questions from
the signal angel. So what's the question for?
Signal Angel: The internet wants to know, "What was the highest phone bill you ever
got back then?" LaForge: To be honest, I don't remember
but for sure it was four digits. I'm quite sure it was. It was quite devastating,
yes. Hearld: There is another question from the
internet. Signal Angel: And there's another
question, "You mentioned that there are very few books around those topics. Which
ones would you recommend regarding BBS, Usenet and so on?"
LaForge: I cannot respond to this directly I don't remember that. I can put it
together and people can reach out to me or I put it in the slides when I submit
them into the frap system, sorry for that. Herald: So we have a question from the
microphone number two please. Mic 2: Yes, back in the 90s most of the
voice was uncompressed and actually direct. Modern technologies usually, I
think, voice always compressed transferred over IP. Do you know for any modern
modulation formats the text can survive several codecs voice codecs or data
transmission? LaForge: I'm not the expert on that
subject. I know there are some codecs, yes, but they are extremely slow. So you
are happy if you get something like 1200 or maybe 2400 bps of data through a modem
that survives multiple codecs and then of course always the question of which
codecs. Herald: Okay microphone number four
please. Mic 4: Okay I don't have a question to
Herald actually, but thanks for the talk. I would like to ask the audience because
many, I think, users and operators of BBSs are here. Who wants to meet this evening,
at I would say nine o'clock, in one of the seminar rooms for talk about the back old
times? Yeah, so I will try to lock a self- organized session at the seminar room
1415, I think it's called, at 9 o'clock. LaForge: Ok, thank you very much.
Mic 4: So, see you there and talk about the good days of and some more stories I
think. Herald: There are still more people
queuing up. Microphone number 4, please. Mic 4: I've got a question about the
political bulletin board systems. Could you tell us a bit about the CL-Net and the
fascist clone the Thule-Net? What was the dynamics back then and the fights? What
were the conflicts in those boxes? LaForge: I have to admit I cannot say too
much about it. I know, of course, CL-Netz was a network mainly for left-wing
political activists and groups and yes there was Thule-Netz, a right-wing
Network, and I knew there was discussions and so on and there were people trying to
hack each other's mailboxes and so on, but I was not participating or involved
in these discussions to an extent that I can really comment on it sorry.
Herald: Microphone number one, please. Mic 1: Hi Harald. I still remember when I
started with an acoustic coupler. I did that because there was a severe threat of
punishment if you used an illegal modem at the time from the Deutsche Bundespost. So
I was actually never aware that a little bit later you could actually do an end,
back to back DSL modem connection over an analogue exchange. So at that time you did
that, what was the the punishment situation from the Bundespost or whatever
it was called at the time if they would have ever caught you doing that? Do you
remember? LaForge: I have no clue. Yes, it sort of,
and I mean the... How can I say? The the criminal offense, I think, stopped in '92
when Deutsche Post was privatized. So until '92 it was a criminal offence to
operate a non-approved modem at the German telephone network, because was government
owned. It was a crime, not a minor offence. But afterwards I don't really
know to be honest. I don't think anyone bothered at the time and nobody, I mean
the, we never had any trouble with these DSL things and so on, that we did over
analog circuits. Herald: Microphone number two, please.
Mic 2: Okay, hello I'm from Taiwan and I just want to share something interesting
for everyone. In Taiwan is a small country in Asia. We are still using BBS. The
largest is named PTT and exported to use SSH or WebSocket you can edit, and the
source code is open available on GitHub. Everybody can search it. Thank you.
LaForge: Thank you very much. It's actually not just for Taiwan, but you can
find many, I mean maybe it's more popular there still, but you can find many BBSs
that are still in operation today in many different countries even also with BBS
software that's free software that's maintained now on GitHub or on other
repositories with contributors and so on. So the community still lives, but I think
at least internationally it's very small and I'm happy to hear if it's larger in
some countries. Herald: You have still time for questions.
Microphone number four, please. Mic 4: So you talked about restoring
decentralization. So, what old systems would you like to see coming back?
Something like the Usenet? I mean it's still there, but you can't access it
without paying a lot of money to some big gateway. So, which technologies would you
like to revive or do you think are realistic to revive to have
decentralization again? LaForge: I don't think the technologies
necessarily need to be revived because they are, to a large extent, old and
people are smarter and the, how can I say, the capacity and the computational
complexity of what you can do today and so on is much better. So we can have much
better technology. But the thing that I would like to see revived is more
decentralization and more people operating their own technology and that's just, I
think, I don't really have a plan and I'm not saying I have a vision I'm just saying
it has a problem, this development, that basically it's a consumer / producer model
and especially with content delivery networks and with attacks on network
neutrality and and all these topics, it's always moving in one direction. It's
basically turning the user into a stupid consumer and and making sure all the
control and all the content, and so on, is in the hand of large corporations.
*Applause* By the way, one interesting anecdote about
the... I talked about the asymmetry of the speed, right? And with DSL at this ADSL
and the popular technology is always the downlink is bigger than the uplink. I know
in Brazil a lot of people, basically in small, like small size ISPs, they did it
the opposite way around! So they did one modem with basically a large downstream
and small upstream and then they, on another line next to it, they inverted it
by using a master modem on one side and a slave modem on the other so then again he
had symmetric speed. So, some people had creative ideas to work around some of the
technological restrictions. Herald: So microphone number two, please.
Mic 2: I also from Taiwan and I want to add something for my friend. Like, there
are still like half million people come here to BBS called PTT, yeah, today. And
like, there's a, there are 100,000 people online now, yeah. So, I think the
community is now like... Herald: What ist your question? Can you
please phrase the question? Mic 2: I just want to add something for my
friend, yeah. LaForge: Okay, thank you.
Herald: Microphone number one, please. Mic 1: *cough* You talked about content of
these mailboxes. Isn't it that the Freifunk community today is a possible way
to get this freedom back from what you had in your mailboxes? The services they were
offered there, the Freifunk could do the same today with user own structures and so
on. LaForge: That's very correct yes. Freifunk
definitely is much more in the spirit of the community owned and community run
systems, and I see lots of similarities between the BBS community and what
Freifunk is doing today. It's correct. Mic 1: Are you are you doing something
with Freifunk? LaForge: Me personally? No, I'm not
involved. Mic 1: Okay.
Herald: I think microphone number two is waiting way too long.
Mic 2: Hello, thanks for the talk. You mentioned that most people didn't have a
TCP/IP capable operating system at this time and I started to read recently about
an operating system called Xenix, X-E-N- I-X, that was actually developed by
Microsoft and published in 1983 that could run on IBM PC compatible machines on the
x86 processors, and I hear that in the Russian BBS systems at least it was very
popular. Did you encounter any Xenix operating systems at that time?
LaForge: No I personally did not encounter Xenix. I read about it, yes, and I know it
I could have possibly run it on my 286 machine, but I mean, I don't think it was
something that was readily available for affordable price to individuals, but maybe
I'm wrong. No, certainly not, okay, some people are heavily shaking their heads.
Mic 2: I think this is why it was popular in Russia...
*Laughs* LaForge: Possibly. I do not want to
comment on that... Herald: We have time for one more
question. Microphone number 4. Mic 4: I just wanted to note, in the wiki
the meeting is up. Search for BBS and this evening at 9 o'clock I think we can talk
about all the details of running DSL on modem lines. I've also got some more
details on that and a lot of these modems left if you need some. But I think, so see
you Harold at 9 o'clock LaForge: Yeah definitely! Thanks!
Mic 4: Ok, everybody welcome. LaForge: Thank you!
*Applause*
Herald: Thank you very much for the talk.
*34C3 Music*
subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2020. Join, and help us!