In middle school and high school in the late 80's / early 90's, I spent an inordinate amount of time hanging out on BBS's (Bulletin Board Systems), which I'd dial up on a 2400-baud modem and block up my family's phone line for hours on end. My high school friends weren't at my high school... one lived 10 miles north of me, and the other 20 miles south of me. We'd talk every day on the BBS's but only occasionally on the phone. We'd see each other in person maybe once a month. Without the BBS's, I might not have had any friends in high school.
Most BBS's of that era were single-line, running off a PC with a modem connected to a single dedicated phone line. When you dialed in, there was an unwritten rule that you should read messages, post whatever messages you wanted to post, upload/download pirated games, and then get off so that the next user wouldn't get a busy signal. Any interaction between users was strictly store-and-forward, either "bulletin boards" (public forums) or mail (private messages).
There were a few multi-line boards in Orange County, however, and these were the few places where users could interact in real-time. I spent a lot of time on one called Morrison Hotel (MoHo). It had 10 lines and unlike most BBS's which ran on software like PCBoard or WWIV on a IBM PC running MS-DOS, MoHo was running custom BBS software built on SCO UNIX. It was written by two Unix wizards, Mike Cantu and Eric Pederson (@sourcedelica), who worked for a company called US CAD. (US CAD appears to still be around; see http://www.uscad.com)
The system was called "Skynet." It was text mode and menu-driven, like
everything online in that era, but it was surprisingly usable and
aesthetically pleasing. One of the components of the system was a chat line
called Unix-CB. Unix-CB had a CB metaphor with numbered channels to
separate conversations, although 99% of the time people just hung out
on Channel 1. It had a number of nice touches... all commands started
with / and were one character, and you didn't have to hit Enter after
typing the command you wanted. Little things like that made it fast and
a pleasure to use.
I still remember many of the commands:
/awould show you the active users online./pwould send a private message to another user; after typing/pyou could immediately type the username of the user you wanted to PM./qlogged you off ... but/glet you slip away silently, which was useful more frequently than you'd think./5would turn on the Jive filter, a gag text filtering program, written with the lex lexical analyzer generator, which floated around Unix sites in those days. It's definitely not politically correct.
One of the best features was /e which showed you the list of
other users who were typing at that very moment. This was a distant
ancestor of the feature in iMessage and other modern messaging clients
that indicates graphically that the person you're chatting with is
typing.
There were also secret features like /. which let operators slip into
'lurk mode' and watch conversations without showing up as online.
MoHo was a paid site that charged $10/month. Users on MoHo had a character
indicating their subscription status:
#meant you were unpaid and would be disconnected after 10 minutes. As a 13-year old kid with no money, I had this status for all but a month or two of my time on MoHo. At some point, US CAD changed the timeout for unpaid users to 3 minutes, after which I just started calling back every 3 minutes. Probably I should've gotten the hint that the site was troubled financially at that point and ponied up the $10/month.$meant you were a paid subscriber.%meant you were a co-sysop, one of a select group that could enter lurk mode, "kill" (disconnect) problem users with the/kcommand, or just "boot" a troublesome user back to the MoHo Lobby with the/bcommand.@was the Godlike status reserved for the sysops, Mike and Eric.
My first computer was an Apple ][, followed by a 512K "Fat Mac." I'd often put in hours on my parents' PC clones as well. But I desperately wanted to learn Unix, and this was a few years before Linus Torvalds democratized access to Unix-like operating systems. At one point, my friend Steve (another MoHo user) and I learned about a guy who was giving away an old Unix box for free. We drove over in his car and picked it up, and it probably weighed 100 pounds. On the way to get it home, we got in a car accident in Tustin and his car was totaled. We were unhurt, but we never did get that Unix box... it probably got thrown in the dump.
When I was 16, an uncle passed on a discarded Sun 2 workstation to me.
I knew that Unix-CB was written as multiple processes coordinating via
System V IPC message queues. Another user on MoHo, Brett J. Vickers, now
lead programmer at ArenaNet, had written a game for the site called
Quest for Mordor. His first version of the game also used System V IPC,
but the second version was a single process that multiplexed all I/O via
BSD select(), partly because it was a simpler approach with less
concurrency challenges, and mostly because he'd moved the game to a
UCI server running on BSD which had BSD sockets and no System V IPC.
Inspired by Brett, I decided I wanted to learn BSD socket programming,
so I started duplicating Unix-CB using sockets and a select() loop at
the core, with every interaction handled using state transitions via
function pointers. I was working from memory to reincarnate the slick
UI of MoHo's Unix-CB; US CAD had pulled the plug on MoHo in 1989 over
a year before I started this work.
When I got to UC Berkeley, the CSUA (Computer Science Undergraduate
Association) ran a machine called soda.berkeley.edu. (The CS building
at Cal, which opened my junior year, is called Soda Hall.) As a
CS freshman, I immediately started collecting as many Unix accounts
as possible. When I learned that the CSUA handed out free (LIFETIME!)
Unix accounts on soda.berkeley.edu, I immediately joined the CSUA.
I started running my chat server on soda just to try it out.
The soda machine was, however, a very collaborative environment.
Students were constantly communicating with each other using wall
broadcast messages, to the point where someone wrote a CSUA-specific
wallall utility which had more configuration options than default
wall. On soda, anything you did was being watched by every other
CS major on the box. Several other students saw the open port
(I used 5492, the last four digits of my parents' phone number)
and telnet-ed to it.
One of them was named Brian Behlendorf, nickname Vitamin B. He
expressed interest in the chat server and asked if he could have the
code. I happily gave it to him. He was a leader in the San Francisco
rave scene centered at the 1015 Folsom club and set up a "virtual
rave" server using the Unix-CB code. "Vrave" would often be set up at
raves as a desktop computer and you could communicate with ravers at
OTHER raves. They added features to the server like the string BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM being printed occasionally to give a techno feel.
Brian and his fellow developers also undoubtedly fixed numerous bugs
and actually got the software to be stable production code, which
it probably wasn't when I gave it to him.
Even though we were both at Cal at the same time, I never met Brian in person or even traded more than a few e-mails with him. He, of course, went on to become one of the founders of the Apache Server and a leading figure in the open source movement.
His future wife, Laura La Gassa, contacted me at one point and offered $100 to license the Unix-CB software. I replied that I didn't want any money but that they were free to use the code for any purpose as long as my name remained on the copyright. I also wrote that credit should be given to Skynet since I had basically written an imitation of that original software. Laura agreed, and they kept that promise and inserted a note about Skynet, although probably most people had no idea who this "Gary Grossman" person was.
Vrave ran for 6 years at hyperreal.org. There is still a page up about it here: http://hyperreal.org/raves/vrave/
I wasn't paying much attention to Vrave except in the first few months that it was up. I've never even been to a rave. But I was amazed that marriages were conducted over it. And unfortunately, it sounds like there was some serious misbehavior by some bad actors that led to its demise.
I forget what year this happened, but Eric Pederson, the real original author of the first Unix-CB software, actually logged into Vrave at some point and was floored that the UI was more or less identical to something he had written 10+ years earlier. Through Vrave we reconnected briefly and he set up an instance of the original Unix-CB and we both logged into it and chatted.
After posting this code, I reached out to Eric Pederson. He was intrigued and posted the code to the original Unix-CB to Github. It's available at https://github.com/sourcedelica/unix-cb. This was just amazing to me because I thought I'd never see that code. It also compiled and worked on a modern Linux box with only a bit of hackery. Regrettably, it sounds like the rest of the Skynet source code may be forever lost.
Back in 2000, I wondered whether my code had ever made it into any
open source project. I found a project called telechat-ng on the Web,
and I downloaded the tarball and saved it away. The Russian site
that hosted telechat-ng is now down, so I've checked that into
https://github.com/ggrossman/telechat-ng for posterity. Since I'm no
longer the sole author of that code, I didn't modify the LICENSE file.
I also realized that the maintainer of telechat-ng was
Constantin Kaplinsky, best known as the
author of TightVNC. So, this Unix-CB code has been worked on by some
notable developers.
That version of the code has been through many hands since I touched it, but it's still recognizably the crap I wrote in high school. That version of the code is probably more stable and well-organized than this code, which is more or less the original code I handed off to Brian Behlendorf.
I'm also delighted to report that there's still a server out there, Enormous Trousers Chat. You can reach it by typing this in a terminal window:
telnet chat.f4.ca 6623
That server is maintained by Skye Nott (@skyepn), who has also written telechat-py, a Python version of the chat server. I'm not sure whether Enormous Trousers Chat is running code based on the original C code, or this Python port.
Surprisingly, the code still runs and works on Ubuntu 14.04, even though
I probably last ran it on soda.berkeley.edu in 1992 when that was a
Sequent DYNIX box. Usage:
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
./cb
telnet localhost 5492
With a bit of futzing, I was also able to get the code to compile on MacOS X Yosemite.
Of course, at this point, it's probably rife with security holes
(char buf[256] was a common and acceptable coding pattern back
in those days) and is little more than a historical amusement.
-Gary Grossman, 11/28/14
Some history of MoHo from http://bbslist.textfiles.com/714/oldschool.html:
Morrison Hotel (MoHo) was started in 1986 as a way to learn Unix and meet girls. It was a 10-line multi-user BBS offering Chat, Message Boards, Email, Games, File Transfers, Voting, and much more. "The sysops were Mike Cantu and myself, both 19 year old (in 1986) college students going to California State University Long Beach.
Mike and I spent a number of years as interns administering a IBM mainframe system used by students in our high school district. On that system we wrote some of the predecessors of MoHo features (in Fortran!). We also spent a lot of time online during high school on different BBSes around the country and in Orange County.
The software for the MoHo was developed from scratch by us in C, running Unix System V/3 on a Convergent Technologies miniframe (first) and then SCO Unix on a 386 tower. We had ten 2400 baud US Robotics Sportsters.
The users of the board were primarily college kids and teenagers. It was a prime place to meet the opposite sex via Chat :) The users got together for parties all the time.
Because 10 phone lines weren't cheap (neither was the $10,000 Convergent Miniframe), we charged a $10/month flat rate subscription (we also had a "credits" plan where you were charged for online usage). Access to the message boards and email were free, as was limited access to chat. We strongly believed that the basic features of our bulletin board should always be free.
The chat system we developed was heavily influenced by Diversidial. Lots of cool and unique features (like Jive mode, if you remember the old Unix jive filter). A clone of the MoHo chat system (same UI, different code base) was used by Vrave based at hyperreal.org
The message boards we developed were very heavily influenced by PicoSpan (the original software that the Well ran). Featuring threaded topics, etc.
The email system and the menuing system we developed were heavily influenced by Forum-PC (probably the best DOS PC BBS software there was, followed by WWIV)
Among the many games (there were lots of freeware games for Unix) was a game we wrote called TAC - Tactical Armored Command. This was a real-time, multiuser tank battle game. People spent hours and hours playing that game!
File transfers used gz, a freeware Unix file transfer program that supported x/y/zmodem.
We did not advertise because the phone lines were always busy (tho we had a 30 minute timeout after which you were hung up on to let someone else get a chance to get in). We had numerous phone numbers, so that MoHo would be local dialing to the widest area.
A company called US CAD hired us, and adopted Morrison Hotel to try to turn it into a profitable business (both from subscriptions and from developing the software to sell to other sysops). The business never panned out though, for a number of reasons. We were eventually laid off from US CAD in 1989 and Morrison Hotel was shut down. We did not have the motivation to start it back up again.
That is the story of Morrison Hotel." - Eric Pederson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericacm)