JouniHeikniemi

You know, this is a really good question. I was already going to bed as it is midnight here, but read this one off my phone and had to come back.

Because, I think, the problem is that I don't really tell young kids about BBSes. It has happened every now and then, but it's very rare, and it is amazing how hard it is to explain the concept.

First of all, kids of today have grown up in a world where connectivity is not an issue. You are always online, and you can access all the services wherever you go. If you want to check out Reddit, you use your cell phone. You do it while waiting for a bus, or when you're bored in school. There is no waiting, there is no anticipation of getting connected.

Even if I could convey the concept of a BBS, truly understanding its value would require the recipient to understand the silence around it. Why would somebody want to use a 80x25 character terminal to write non-instantaneous plaintext messages to somebody else? The concept only makes sense in a world where there is no ubiquitous email, SMSes and everpresent Internet.

If modern-day electronic services were like BBSes, I'm not sure we would be so jazzed about them. They were great because they were the vanguard of a new era, the first reasonably fast way to communicate with big groups of likeminded people across geographical regions. We feel that when we look at 16-color blocky ANSI graphics presenting a menu - my daughter would just be confused as to where are the touch points she could use for navigation.

So... Myths and stories? Certainly. But it is amazing how 15-year old things can be so totally out of their world.

I don't think anything beats the Internet feature-wise - everything is on the net. I think the most important differentiator is the fact that you used a terminal program to connect to a single service, and did only a single thing at a time. It may not sound like much, but consider this for a moment: What if you could only connect to one web site at a time? Changing the site would involve a reconnection cost - and possibly at least a few minutes of idle delay while you queued for access to the next site. Add to that some scarcity: there weren't that many electronic ways to encounter other people back then.

What would happen is that you would - and did - concentrate far more on what you were actually doing. I think this is most obvious in the case of discussions: There are few discussion boards on the web that consistently match the quality of the best BBSes - or even usenet at its early days. So in a sense, Internet is more of everything with less quality and touch.

Functionally, I think the only thing really missing in the present-day Internet is personality of the sites, perhaps best illustrated by the "Yell" option commonly available in BBSes. Using that made the BBS computer beep out some tune, calling for the system operator to come and chat with the user online.

This was absolutely great for single-node home BBSes where the operator's personality oozed through every text and menu graphic, and Sysops were quite proud to have any user browse their creation. You really could develop friendships with the system operators that way. You rarely get such a "live" contact with a website admin! Of course, we didn't have a Yell option available in MBnet either - it really wouldn't have scaled to hundreds of nodes.

I knew it would come to this :-) Your question is really about why the publishing company shifted the magazine's strategy in a way you don't like. You're not really talking about MBnet the BBS, you're talking about a national trauma somehow caused by dilution of a previously hardcore-packed enthusiast magazine.

I'll take a shot at answering that, but you probably already know I can't answer it properly without disclosing information that doesn't belong into the public. You can figure out a lot from the Skrolli article already mentioned and linked. The author Markku Alanen is my former long-time boss and mentor, and he shares much of the same experience - even though I don't agree with all his assessments.

That having been said:

Building online services in the media sector in 1990s was hard. Management focused on old style of measuring results, and our success with MBnet certainly had quite an impact, even if it wasn't realized immediately. Combined with the IT boom and Sanoma's sudden money-laden focus on digital media (except that the money never really came our way), there were suddenly quite a few cooks stirring the pot.

MBnet the BBS lost its drive simply because BBSes lost their drive, and no editorial action would have changed that. I doubt that even our best technical efforts, e.g. replicating the message forums on the web, would have had an impact beyond a few years delay. In that sense, MBnet the BBS was a lost cause once over the late 90s hump.

The fates of MBnet the Website and MikroBitti magazine are more entwined, and their destinies were shaped by editorial decisions, which were in turn guided by strategy (admittedly dictated by non-editorial management). It isn't a state secret that I left in 2004 in part because I couldn't see a positive trend continuing. Markku's nearly simultaneous exit wasn't a coincidence either.

My personal feeling about the whole affair: The blazing success of the MB product family was based on an organically grown team with an unbeatable spirit. We were really doing most thing rather cheap (including our own salaries), and we focused on the best attitudes instead of good credentials. Positive coincidences occur under those conditions, and they make all the difference. Such factors are impossible to replicate in a technical, business-like management style, and trying to coerce them onto the team led to happy coincidences disappearing, and you're seeing the results.

In later life, I have consulted dozens of organizations, mostly with software development issues. Same principles apply surprisingly often.

Heh. Somewhat paradoxically, I never really played much of them in a multiplayer setting. Before I worked with MBnet, I liked LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon) and especially its advanced competitor, Usurper. TW was cool as well (for a while at least!), and VGA Planets even more so, but it wasn't really a door game like the others.

For MBnet, LORD was the most popular game of all time. We tried getting Usurper to work for months, and even launched it at one point... But it just wasn't designed to work in an environment with that many users, so MBnettians were forced to stick with LORD and play Usurper in smaller BBSes.

I think you actually touched on another important topic there: Meeting people live.

While you still come across people on the Internet and then perhaps meet them live, the process is rather different. First, you have Google. Once you get a name, you can often get an overview of who they are. Second, people have profiles (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Github, whathaveyou).

In the BBS world, people typically were very unfindable, and few really made any effort to publish information about themselves. Given the complexity of even sharing photos (few even had a jpeg image of themselves before the advent of digital cameras!), people very rarely had any idea about each other's looks prior to actually meeting them.

Your mental image of a person was based on their deeds, forum posts and chat mannerisms, and boy were you in for some surprises. In some ways, that was also more fair - you were getting judged by your actions, not by your status or looks.