MODEM STUD //

“But if I can sell subscriptions. Imagine how many people subscribe to…What’s something everybody subscribes to? No, not the New York Times because not everybody lives in New York. People buy local newspapers. Magazines, Time. There is also Newsweek.”

“What does everybody do, well almost everybody?” Gershom asked. He hoped his brother had an answer, and would shut up.

“They watch T.V.”

Colt continued, “Imagine selling subscriptions to be able to watch T.V. Not like ON/TV or Selec/TV, or some service you can buy if you feel like it, but a service you have to buy in order to watch T.V. How many households are there?”

“One very simple reason Silly Harry Legs. **The Lemur Connection** will be running on an Apple II+ with a 300 baud modem. Only one user can call in at a time.”

“I am still going to sell a lot of subscriptions. Nobody has to know what you just said.”

The life of the party was **The Tigress**. Colt placed her age at eleven, maybe close to twelve. She wore a half black glove, a leotard top, and a sweater in order to conceal her lack of chest development. She tried to flirt her way into the party.

I hit Control-G, only one time, to page the **sysop**. He popped into chat and said ‘Stop hitting your cock against the keyboard you fucking Lemur.’ I said to him, ‘I hear you keep Vaseline by the computer and your keyboard is all slippery from Vaseline because you spend all day rubbing your cock across the keyboard.’ He became very irate and told me he was twenty-five and had a job at Radio Shack. I said he was a loser and a pervert.

With the noise of his Galaga game in the background, in order to prevent eavesdroppers, he explained the plot.

“The anonymity of the bulletin board system creates an environment ripe for child molesters posing as users,” Colt briefed the task force, in person.

“Many of the users are very young,” Gershom Goodman said from the Tandy speakerphone that sat in front of his suited brother. “They are impressionable. Generally kids who do not have a lot of friends.”

“Consider an essay recently posted on **The Lemur Connection** by **Alpha Synturian**,” Colt said. “The essay is on lying for status versus lying to mislead. A bulletin board system exists in a fantasy environment. Sometimes, fantasies express themselves as reality and fantasy becomes reality on a bulletin board system. The BBS is a perfect opportunity for, as they say…Coming out.”

“We are in the middle of the microcomputer revolution,” Simmonser told his sons. He crossed his legs and continued. “I have been saying microcomputers are the future of computing since I first learned how to program, in BASIC, back when I taught a social science statistics computing course during the early 1970s.”

“I have earned a great deal from my advice and stock in Novell, now AST too. But now I shall tell you where the future of computing is. Give the progression of technology another ten years. Nobody has heard of what I am going to say. It is called the Internet.”

Dr. Goodman rose from the bed... “Imagine a day when all computers are connected. Instead of video tapes, you will be able to see a movie on your monitor! Everybody will do business electronically... Whoever owns the portal to connect through the **Internet** is the next robber baron... The **Internet** will be bigger than television. Homes and businesses, everything will be connected through the Internet twenty-four hours a day."

Before Thanksgiving vacation, Colt was in store for a C in English and B in history. Because he refused to learn how to count pica in journalism, and protested any further attendance in that class, he tinkered on failing journalism.

“If you want to amass, that’s your business. You wear the shoes of the oppressor, and you will have to live with that. But if you believe you have a voice, you have to ask yourself, what media is the message?”

Throughout the day, hundreds of people called Gershom’s computers. The users were inside of a program he wrote, out of nowhere. Colt provided a lot of ideas about content and formatting, but he did not write a single code. Gershom pieced everything together, and he created a world the public knocked down the walls to enter. Never before had so many people given Gershom their names, addresses, and phone numbers. The users trusted him and they wanted to be part of his system. He knew sooner or later there had to be an exchange between himself and the users.

Never before had Gershom held a fresh list of pledges... He sat down at an IBM keyboard in his bedroom, and punched the 10 Key Punch...

“$3,978.00,” Gershom said. “Are you fucking making this up? Sitting in your room and talking to Lisa all day?”

Gershom escorted his brother into the inner sanctum of the **Speak Easy**. He shut the door behind him, turned the lock inside of the doorknob, locked the dead bolt, and then used a series of chains and latches to secure the paint grade door... Seated behind the massive piece of computer furniture, he typed something into the IBM and then turned up an external speaker that emitted white noise. Beside the color monitor, the only light in the room was a red glow from the ceiling...

“There’s $24,018 here.”

Colt had to say something. “Our weekly total is more than Simmonser made when we moved here in 1977.”

By late September, computers, modems, and phone lines were added to the original system design. Gershom ordered the hardware by mail. Colt unpacked the goods, occasionally made pickups at freight forwarding locations near airports, and called the phone company to add telephone lines. Gershom configured and modified the system when he was not spying on the users, or in chat. The increased system capacity led to revenue increases, and Colt considered adding a third validation shift.

Each employee was guaranteed thirty square feet of, “Sound proof” work space. The rooms were broken down by partitions held up by aluminum legs... Approximately thirty telemarketers were on shift at any time... Finally, there was a white haired woman who wore long acrylic nails... Colt was so impressed by the noise **Grandma Peggy’s** adding machine made, he recently raised her pay to $2,500.00 a month.

“I am five foot four, have blonde hair, and have to wear front opening bras because I can’t get my hands behind my back,” a Filipina high school senior said into the phone.

I, **Gershom Goodman**, otherwise known as **Moonshine**, feel the need to chronicle these events because I am the **sysop** of the **Speak Easy**. One day, users of the system who are now teenagers will read this account when they are middle-aged. At that moment in the future, twelve-year-olds who have never seen LP records, cassette tapes, or floppy disks will read this record... This recordation of **BBS** history will not be printed on chemical pulp. My chronicle herein will be delivered simultaneously by sound and character delivery, on an eighty column monitor capable of being divided into multiple screens most likely accessible by a joystick or mouse...