Before the web: the bulletin boards

1984 — 1996 · THE FIRST ONLINE PUBLIC

South Bend was online before the web existed — by telephone, one caller at a time: the surviving registry of the 219 area code's bulletin-board systems — South Bend was 219 country until the 574 split of 2002 — documents a local scene that ran for more than a decade before the first browser. The registry names them with their operators and their years. SouthWinds ran the longest of the early boards, 1984 to 1996. Gerry Opperman's River City Network appears on two numbers across 1985 to 1994, on PCBoard and then TBBS software. Marlin Sheffield's Access, also listed as The Link, ran 1986 to 1989; John Herod's Indiana Data Managers, a PCBoard system, 1987 to 1991; Mark Lynch's MARDUK, 1987 to 1988; Tim Brewer's Vector 6, 1988 to 1989; Herb Summersgill's ADN's Rookery, also Capt'n Jacks Rookery, 1988 to 1991; and in the single year 1989 the registry holds AmberSoft on Wildcat! software, MacCHEG on a Macintosh host, the Michiana Technical System, and Larry Snyder's Northern Star, which appears on three numbers in that one year, one of them shared with a board listed as Michiana Net, a FidoNet echo coordinator's node. Fifteen South Bend numbers stand in the registry in all. Across the city line, a Mishawaka number carried a board calling itself RBBS IBM PC South Bend as early as 1984 — the scene, like the region, never much respected the boundary, and it is printed here at the boundary's size.

One board outlived the era entire. Flag Net BBS began on a Commodore 64 in Niles, Michigan, moved to South Bend, and kept its message bases intact; its operator Carey Treesh's own registry note — the document this entry rests on — records that in 1999 the board added a telnet port by way of a local internet provider named Quantum Connections, that modem access was later terminated to hold costs down, and that the board remains online by telnet, running its original C-Net Amiga software, "a bit buggy, but still up and running," in the operator's words. These were businesses only in embryo — hobbies with phone bills — but they were the city's first online public, and the registry is the document that proves they existed. When the web arrived, it arrived to a city that already had a decade of sysops.

Sources:

1. The 219 area-code BBS registry (textfiles.com archive) — the South Bend boards, their operators, software and years: SouthWinds (1984–1996), River City Network (1985–1994, Gerry Opperman), Access / The Link (1986–1989, Marlin Sheffield), Indiana Data Managers (1987–1991, John Herod), MARDUK (1987–1988, Mark Lynch), Vector 6 (1988–1989, Tim Brewer), ADN's Rookery (1988–1991, Herb Summersgill), AmberSoft, MacCHEG, Michiana Technical System, The Northern Star and Michiana Net (1989), Flag Net BBS (1987–present) with operator Carey Treesh's own retrospective note, including the 1999 telnet port via Quantum Connections; the Mishawaka-numbered RBBS IBM PC South Bend (1984). bbslist.textfiles.com