Is it so so hard to understand

“He’s a magic man” – Heart

Time ago, time ago it was, a long time ago, so it seems. The early-towards-mid 1980s, when the very first IBM PCs were brand new, and far too expensive for commoners, and the tiny collection of machines that would become the Internet didn’t even register on the scope.

We were running TRS-80s, then, and Apple IIs, mostly. CP/M machines, and the odd Commodore. Our Internet was the phone line, with a modem running all of (often) 300 bits per second… you could watch the text scroll across the screen.

Bulletin Boards, they called them. Computerized Bulletin Board Systems, or BBSes. Meeting places for the technologically inclined. Many of them were run by, and for, kids, because the older folks weren’t likely to be hip to the computer revolution. The kids knew what the tech was for. It was for contacting people.

Al Gore once laid claims to having had a hand in inventing the Internet, because he helped sponsor some of the military projects that became the current Internet. Laughable, that. We were in the process of inventing it anyway, without any taxpayers’ funds… but, that’s perhaps best left for another rant.

The BBSes came about in the bad old days of The Phone Company. They (BBSes) did come to support international forums and graphical interfaces but, for the most part, you were dealing with serious location tariffs. The phone company would charge you an arm and a leg if you were dialing outside your local region, even though the causes for the charges had long since evaporated. Still, there were the charges, so you tended to dial locally.

A BBS was a collection of mostly local people with similar interests. Although we mostly posted stories and rants, and boasts and cut-downs, without ever actually meeting each other, there were times when the folks would get together in a genuine, physical meeting. These were often surprising.

The kid I imagined as a big black guy turned out to be a weaselly little white fellow. His friend, whom I’d imagined as a nerdy white guy, turned out to be a tiny black kid. The bully of the system, with whom I’d been trading taunts for some months… never showed up. I have no idea whether he was a ninja or a little girl in a wheelchair.

On that particular BBS, we all had pseudonyms, as a matter of course. Most of them were unimaginative and boastful. Think “SuperDo0D”, and you won’t be far off. I was Zephyr Aardvark, to be sure, and so I remain.

Ben was “Magic Man”. I met him, once, at an outdoor get-together with volleyball. It was late Spring, and I took the opportunity to take my shirt off, hoping it might start a trend. On the whole, it didn’t, but Ben did invite me back to meet one of his friends… a creepy fat thieving bastard, unfortunately. It never went further than that.

In retrospect, I think Ben was interested in me, and I should have pushed that opportunity harder. He seemed to be a nice guy, and was not at all unpleasant to look at. Nice frame, brown eyes, brown hair in that kind of slightly shaggy style guys wore at that time, the jeans and flannel shirt thing that still winds my crank.

The trouble with being young is, you really don’t get much of anything unless it whacks you over the head with a two-by-four, and even then, you’re lucky.

Just contemplating, I am. Integrating odd memories is a hobby that appeals more, as I get older.