Before many of you knew anything about the Internet there was a on-line community that dialed into community Bulletin Board Systems. A little history review is needed before I go into the above headline. I initially launched my dial-up BBS in 1987 it ran on a Commodore Colt with a 8088 processor with a 47 meg RLL hard drive. It had one of the best modems of the time which maxed out at 2400 bps. At the time I was king of the hill in my community. It had one dial in line and could handle around 250 callers a day. Most called locally but may called from all over the United States. They logged in and stayed a few minutes to download mail/file’s or play a game.. My system was like thousands of other small hobby boards. We featured shareware, forums and on-line games through a text colorized ANSI interface.
My system grew and just prior to the revolution known as the WWW we had 14 dial-up lines running on a several 486 machines using desqview to multitask the command windows via Dos 5.0 We had nearly 5000 users of which nearly 500 payed a monthly fee to have access to premium sections of the site. We actually made money :)
This is where Boardwatch magazine comes in. This publication which in it’s hay day had nearly 100 pages of color content. Kept BBS sysops all over the world connected and up to date on the latest happenings and new technologies. We all chased faster connection speeds and craved to learn the more on the latest and greatest software packages, tools, games and resources.
For our primitive beginnings we offered 5 minute delayed stock feeds for free as early as 1990. CNN acknowledges today that there stock feed is 15 minutes delayed isn’t technology grand. We were in effect community AOL’s as many of us offered a large number of services. I was one of the first to offer e-mail when most had no idea what e-mail was.
Companies such as US Robotics, Hayes, 3com owed much of there financial success to Boardwatch and BBS operators. People who dial-up today at 56k can thank BBS Sysops. They were the driving force behind faster modems. Heck the modem companies catered to the BBS Sysop and had special programs in place to entice us to purchase the latest models heavily discounted which in turn fueled our dial-up users to upgrade to the latest standard.
When the WWW revolution hit most small BBS systems folded or went off-line as they failed to go the next step and migrate to the web. I and a number of people I have known for nearly 15 years migrated to the web and our Net based BBS are still thriving. There were a few bleak years but then people started looking for communities of users again that refrained from spamming and actually could have intelligent conversations in forums. So today BBS Networks has nearly 25,000 users.
Well Boardwatch changed it’s BBS focus early into the www revolution and went after the ISP crowd. The ISP owners who subscribed were not so surprisingly were in a large extent Ex-Bulletin Board Operators. The magazine was sold a number of years ago to Penton and the longtime Editor Jack Rickard quit and fell of the face of the earth. Thus the demise of the magazine began. He was the foundation to why that magazine was a success.
Penton changed the format and it has been downhill ever sense. The magazine has been sold again to a company I have never heard of called Light Reading. Boardwatch will now cease being a published magazine and become a net based publication. We will see what happens now but the good ol days are definitely gone. I imagine my collection of Boardwatch magazines that go a long way back will probably be a collectors item someday.
[www.boardwatch.com]
I do agree that the magazine contributed more to the development of the current online world prior to what most people recoginze as the birth of the Internet as most average people know it.
Boardwatch was the main publication for system operators all over the world and helped pioneer modem technology improvements and various other sundry items that people who never knew the online world till the www will never ever understand.
I do hope they just didnt want the domain name as that will only carry them so far. They will need meaningful orginal content no rss feeds of other sites news.
The following is the letter I sent to lightreading.com just before finding your site:
An open letter to lightreading.com (new owner operators of Boardwatch Magazine)
You pompas asses. It’s one thing to take over a company and make changes to it. We expect that. I can even live with you eliminating the print publication in order to save money.
What I do not understand is why you bought the thing in the first place. You are only keeping the name. Not the rich history. Not the focus. Your announcements do not even acknowledge it while tooting your own horn.
Lightreading …. seems more like light weight to me.
A “service provider game”? Are you kidding? Since you obviously have no clue who read (past tense) the REAL Boardwatch, I’ll tell you. People who are too busy BEING service providers to play a “fantasy provider” game. People who were running BBS’s when you didn’t know enough to get your knickers in a bunch over your dot com dreams. The ones who are fantasizing are you if you think the readers of Boardwatch will bother with your dribble.
Tell me I’m wrong, tell me you actually have respect for the long history of Boardwatch & its contributions to the creation of an online world far before there was a World Wide Web. Tell me you intend to work to continue a fine tradition, because I have heard NONE of that from you.
Mourning the loss of a pioneering publication,
Kenny
As one of the founders of Light Reading, I really appreciate the history lesson.
As you say, Boardwatch was of immense use to early ISPs but things have moved on a lot since then. The challenges nowadays are higher level ones – how to provide services over IP infrastructure that’s pretty much a given.
You should check out http://www.lightreading.com. We have 850,000 readers – 17 times as many as Boardwatch – and we cover IP infrastructure issues.
We’ve acquired Boardwatch because we want to resurrect its original ethos – address the challenges now facing ISPs at Levels 6 and 7 of the OSI model.
And of course, we’re moving the print magazine online – which only seems appropriate for an audience of Internet service providers .
Peter Heywood
Founding Editor