picture-2Sherman, set the wayback machine to November 19, 1994.  The Internet still hadn’t made its way into more than  a handful of homes in the US.  BBSs, electronic bulletin board systems, were where geeks pointed their modems when they wanted to chat or share files.  It was easy to rack up hundreds of dollars’ worth of phone charges while you called all your virtual hang-outs and caught up.

Offline readers were a popular way to keep your phone bills low, and Blue Wave was the most popular offline reader on the boards I frequented.  Blue Wave worked like an electronic special forces unit — you connected to the board, downloaded a Blue Wave file of all your unread mail and messages, and disconnected.  You’d only be online for a few minutes, but you could read & respond to messages in Blue Wave at your leisure.  The next time you downloaded your messages, you’d also upload your responses to the last batch.

I got my first real Internet account around the same time, a dial-up UNIX shell from Ripco.  I loved how Internet mail programs let you add signatures to your messages, and I spent hours getting my signature just right.  But, I couldn’t include a cool signature in my messages to my BBS buddies.  How lame!  So, I booted up Borland Turbo C++ 2.01 and wrote BWSiggy.

Users would go into Blue Wave’s setup and add a call to BWSiggy at the front of the editor command line (“C:\BW\BWSIGGY.BAT C:\DOS\EDIT.COM @F”).  Then, when they saved a new message or a reply, BWSiggy would add the contents of BWSIGGY.SIG to the end of their message before passing control back to Blue Wave.

The whole thing would be unremarkable except for a few interesting things:

  1. I still have it, including the source code to version 1.0.  It’s 51 lines of ANSI C code, including comments and whitespace.
  2. I was 17 when I wrote it, and the changelog shows I worked on this for a month.  Now, 51 lines of code is nothing to me.  Back then, it was cause for celebration.
  3. I called myself Compton Q. Groundhog.  I changed aliases about as often as I changed my underwear back then, switching to a new one as soon as the old one started feeling lame.
  4. BBS downloads were kind of weird back then.  The docs would commonly include such uselessness as what music the programmer listened to, “greets” to their online friends, and unenforceable licenses asking for things like postcards or “go to the zoo and shave a yak if you like this program”.  My musical inspiration was apparently:

    5. KMFDM – “A Drug Against War” (CD-Single)

    MY LIFE WITH THE THRILL KILL KULT – “Confessions of a Knife” (CD)

    MEAT LOAF – “Bat Out of Hell II” (CD)

    NEW ORDER – “Power, Corruption & Lies” (CD)

    DEEP PURPLE – “Deepest Purple” (CASS)

    DEE LITE – “Infinity Within” (CD)

  5. The FILE_ID.DIZ file.  Most BBS programs looked for this file in a .zip archive and used the contents as a description for the file in the downloads area.  These started out simple enough, but then people starting putting in ASCII art and these became productions in their own right.  Mine just had a crude ASCII border.