Kevin Driscoll

Modem World is another history and analysis of FIDO and the network that grew to service it. I was looking for the social histories that grew around CompuServe, BIX, The Source, The Well, Prodigy, AOL and so on. "BBS The Documentary" is a nicely done series of video interviews about the origins of computer bulletin boards. It continues into several episodes about FIDO. While no one got rich from FIDO and FIDOnet, the same is true about the commercial products that served the 'modem world'. (One could argue about Steve Case and AOL.) The forums on CompuServe have both technical and social histories. I was hoping to find some of that in this book. There is some brief analysis of 'The WELL' which the book claims to be a super-sized BBS.
The transition to the commercial Internet is presented as a tragedy for the modem world. BBS operators anticipated becoming gateways to the "online super highway". The web removed the need to help the user deal with the most fundamental level of the Internet - the UNIX shell account. Users still look at a shell account as a return to DOS.
As a history of FIDO, the book could not hold my interest.

As a research source, the book is extremely well footnoted. End notes fill 60 pages with another 33 pages of bibliography, and a 16-page index. This amounts to one-third of the book!… (altro)

Driscoll presents an alternative history of the internet's beginnings, exploring the role that computer bulletin boards had in equipping their users to create online communities when (as he says) ARPANET became commercial. In truth, though, this book's more about the culture that lived on the BBSs than about anything else--and for that it's extremely valuable. The author explores the culture's strengths and its weaknesses. He shows how the typical board evolved from a place to share programs and other files into a place where folks hung out to discuss technical topics at first, before evolving to engage other interests. All in all he presents these things very well.

This book apparently began life as Driscoll's doctoral dissertation, though it reads better than most such conversions. It's extremely well-sourced, especially considering that the actual conversations that took place on your typical BBS typically aged off the screen--and the system--in a few days (if not hours), with little effort at preservation. I had nearly as much fun reading his footnotes--some of which are essays--as the main text, and found references to several books I might also track down for further reading.

And he kept sending me back after forty-year-old memories, of friends made on local BBSs, of technical issues I'd mastered (and long forgotten), of discussions about music and science fiction and baseball and politics and computer interfaces (M8N1E, f'rinstance). For me that justified reading the book even if I'd not learned anything.… (altro)