By Chris Condon

Part 1 - A Discovery

I was talking online with a BITNET friend of mine a while back, when she said to me, "I laughed when I saw your name in the book."

"What book?" I asked?

"Didn't you know? You're in E-Mail Addresses of the Rich and Famous!"

Now, I am neither rich, nor famous. Naturally, I ended the conversation rather quickly, drove down to the nearest bookstore, and bought myself a copy. There I was on page 53 of the book by Seth Godin, in the section entitled "Internet Denizens." On the same page as Vinton G. Cerf, "Father of the Internet" no less!

How my name got to be included with such distinguished company is a story that goes back to the spring of 1984. I was a freshman Computer Science major at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. At that time Sacred Heart didn't have it's own mainframe. Instead they had a room full of terminals and a leased line to the mainframe at Yale University. This was actually an academic advantage, as we had access to the full resources on this seemingly massive IBM system.

I was awestruck by the number of programs and resources on the mainframe, and I began exploring in earnest. Somewhere along the way I stumbled onto the fact that Yale was connected to (indeed, a founding member of) an educational computer network known as BITNET. This network had thousands of mainframe nodes all around the country -- indeed, all around the world.

Suddenly that Yale mainframe was dwarfed by this massive network. My whole perspective changed. There were people there... people who wanted to talk online (BITNET supports real-time interactive messages to and from individuals) and services with files on all kinds of subjects, and electronic newsletters that you could receive through electronic mail."

I would spend hours on the network, searching for new services and information. My methods were crude -- query a remote system in Texas or Israel, see who is logged on, and send an interactive message to a hopefully bored system operator who felt like talking about what was new. Sometimes I would log on to the "Chats" (interactive conferencing systems similar in function to the Internet's IRC services) and get information there. These systems allowed you to sign on with a nickname, and since I was growing a beard at the time, I picked "Fuzzyman." The beard has come and gone several times since then, but the nickname has stayed.

Every time I found out about a new system, I would print the documentation and include it in a large yellow binder named "BITBOOK" (still in my possession to this day). The problem with BITNET was that there was no central information center. No one had a list of all of the servers and services that were available. Finally, in my quest to find out what was out there, I compiled a list of what I knew existed and e-mailed it to some of my new friends on the network, with the request that they send me updates if they knew of something that should be added, changed or deleted. Soon more and more people asked to be added to my mailing list, and a weekly electronic newsletter named BITLIST was born.

Working on BITLIST was a lot of fun, but my Yale userid was paid for by Sacred Heart and ran on "virtual money" -- and my gas tank was running dry. I sent e-mail to the head of Yale Computer Center, suggesting that perhaps if they sanctioned my activities and provided me with a userid, it would be good for the network and good publicity for them. I, for one, would do the work for free since it would allow me to stay online -- and not being online was virtually unthinkable for me at that point. It would have been like cutting myself off from the world.

I was put in contact with a Computer Center staffer named Gary Moss. Not only did he arrange for me to have a userid with almost unlimited "virtual money" -- he taught me Yale's version of the IBM VM/CMS HELP system. The deal was that in return for my account, I would organize the information into help files that Yale users could access online. This library of information became known as BITLIB. Later, when Yale began using the standard IBM VM/CMS help system, I was able to make BITLIB available to other schools. About forty schools were using BITLIB at one point. Remember, this was all before the Web.

Armed with a new userid and a mission to keep the system up to date, I distributed weekly issues of BITLIST for a year. In the absence of anything else, it became the de facto standard list of BITNET servers and services. The number of subscribers grew steadily. As time went on I began adding short editorials (Bitnotes) to the bottom of BITLIST. Later, at the reader's request, I moved them to the top.

Inspired by the readers response (and by the ambitious VM/COM monthly newsletter, distributed by my friends at University of Maine), I moved the editorials into a full-blown monthly online magazine named NetMonth, with contributions from people all over the network. BITLIST became BITNET SERVERS -- the list of services with no editorials, a companion piece to NetMonth. A later addition was BITNET USERHELP, a tutorial document for new network users which (as with everything else) became the standard because there was nothing else. I also experimented later with a weekly update that I cunningly called NetWeek.

I worked on NetMonth until July of 1991, totaling 38 issues. At its peak there were more than 8000 subscribers worldwide (which was a big thing back then). While I was aware of the Internet, I tried to keep NetMonth and it's companion documents focused on BITNET and geared toward a BITNET audience. As time went on, the demands of my day job (I had graduated in 1987) forced me to spend less and less time working on NetMonth. In it's last year and a half, it should have been titled Net Whenever I Get Around To It." A contributing factor was that working on the newsletter from home (dialing into the Yale mainframe at 2400 baud) was painfully slow, and a drive to New Haven to use their lightning-fast 9600 baud terminals was inconvenient at best. Typically, I would drive up on a Saturday or Sunday and spend the whole day at the Yale Computer Center once a month and compile the whole newsletter in a day. The effects of this could be seen in the quality of my typing and spelling at the time.

Eventually I realized that if I wasn't going to work on NetMonth and BITNET SERVERS regularly and people were depending on it, then I had better pass the reins on to someone else. Over the years I had made fleeting attempts to find a successor, but no one seemed willing. In 1992 Philip Baczewski from the University of North Texas volunteered to take over. Philip continued working on NetMonth until the end of 1992, when it ceased publication. I didn't notice -- I faded from the network while I concentrated on hot projects at work, thinking that I had done my best to keep things going.

Flash forward to 1995. When I saw my name in E-Mail Addresses of the Rich and Famous I was thrilled -- and a little sad. The fact was that I hadn't used the e-mail address in the book for some time -- the address I used when editing NetMonth. On occasion I would log on to talk to my network friends, but I was no longer really an active BITNET participant. In retrospect, this is probably one of the stupider things I have ever done. Somehow I got distracted and forgot how much I loved being on the network.

Part 2 - The Beginnings of the Virtual Community

In my writings about BITNET, I stressed time and again that the network was not just a collection of hardware and high-speed links, but a group of people. As people are finding out now with the Internet, the people on the network and their personal contributions are the real reason we use it. Without them, we might as well be staring at blank screens.

In those early days of networking, before personal computers were common and long before the term "Information Superhighway" was coined, we had discovered a new frontier. We found a way to reach beyond the physical limitations that constrained others (though they didn't know it) and share information, viewpoints, and form friendships. We were bound together not just by common interests in computers or certain fields of study, but by the knowledge that we had stumbled upon a new world -- a virtual world.

For this brief moment in time we were privy something special that others would discover only years later. Computers were not just for crunching numbers and spitting out documents. They were powerful communication tools, and those of us who used them could build communities that bypassed the normal barriers of time and space. We had daily interaction with people living thousands of miles away, whose faces we had never seen and voices we had never heard.

Now that everybody and their mother can get access to the Internet, some of that is lost to us. Because anybody can do it now, the experience is somehow less magical. Some of us may wax nostalgic for the old days, not because we begrudge anyone the same joys that we have had, but because that moment in time is gone. We had the secret and we saw the future... and now the future is here. Some of that feeling of community is lost, because the thing that made us a community was the fact that we shared the secret of BITNET.

Virtual communities have formed / are forming / will form on the Internet around people with common interests. As more individuals gain access to the network, they will find places on the network to hang their hats and call home. They won't just be from New York, or Hong Kong or London. They will be from talk.origins or bit.listserv.banyan-l, and their corner bar or coffee house will be the #philosophy channel on IRC. They won't be just citizens of the United States or France or Mexico -- they will be citizens of the Internet.