I've decided to post a few anecdotal blogs to capture some of Neoseeker's history before I forget too much of it. This will be one of several posts I will make that I'll tag with neohistory.

I'm no writing guru and I can't promise to entertain or bewitch you with quirky stories and witty remarks - that's why I surround myself with great writers like our news crew (now there's a bunch that can delight with skilled wordsmithing) ;). Hopefully these posts amuse you, or perhaps they might serve as nice Neo Trivia in some distant future, but mostly I want to jot these down so that I can enjoy them for myself. Memories might be cherished for a lifetime, but they don't stay in your head forever you know :P.

Modems, Dial tones, and busy signals, oh my!

My fascination with "online" interactivity and communities really began with the BBS (Bulletin Board Service) movement predating the modern internet. I forget the year I started, it could have been between 1988 and sometime around 1992, which is the stone age, really, in Internet years. These were mostly home run services that would allow one or more modems to dial in and connect to a BBS server which hosted such goodies as files, usenet posts, and even real time chat with the server operator and possibly other users. The number of connections per service was limited by how many phone lines the operator had, typically 1-3 depending on how much they were willing to spend - How archaic! After my first experience on a BBS, I remember thinking to myself... "This is the future", and I knew I wanted to be part of that future.

The limitations of BBSes... drove me to obsession

Back then of course any popular service worth visiting had strict time restrictions and you mostly had to dial in continuously to get through all the busy phone signals ("war dialing"). It could take 1 minute to get a connection or 2hours, but nothing was so sweet as the sound of a connection (or so bitter as that of a connection dropped, allowing someone to swoop in on the line you were using). Some services I would give up on because they were too unstable or dropped my connection too much. And others were too slow, or were down at inconvenient times. These frustrations threaten the users of ANY service, and if you ask any person who has worked with me, I am deeply obsessed with fighting these problems on Neoseeker, which we have been plagued with since we started this whole thing.

Modem speed was also a huge limitation and reality. A single 60kb jpeg could take some 15 minutes to download so while file sharing was very popular, it was also quite limited. Today you download a 60kb jpeg faster than the average person can flip you the bird. I can still remember how someone would post up an image and I would queue it up for download, and finish a shower and breakfast before even getting to check it out. The speed issue was the basis of the rise and fall of communications giants like US Robotics. My dad even had USR stock at $12 and sold it at $16 - ironically it skyrocketed to some $100+ price within a year of that. Timing never was our thing -_-, and this would hold true throughout the history of Neoseeker.

Later, DEViATE, fellow founder of Neoseeker, actually ran his own BBS and I was absolutely fascinated. That was around the 1993 timeframe. Here we were, sitting beside an aging piano in this small room and we watched as visitors logged into his BBS and began to interact with it! I was completely hooked and dreamed of running my own, maybe 2 line BBS service :D. Because speed was such a problem with BBSes it became a near obsession for me - the limitations of BBSes: speed, and concurrency (allowing many users on at once), would later become driving priorities in our development of Neoseeker.

ASCII/ANSI and the Beauty of Text

I think part of my appreciation of FAQs also has its roots in the BBS days. Back then images took so long to download that the services were pure text - ASCII (or its more advanced brethren, ANSI) art became the defacto welcome screens to good BBSes and good written information was the KING. Both these things later resonated strongly with me in game faqs, many of which feature awesome ASCII art and clever organisation techniques which made FAQs far more effective than straight text had any right to be.

Gaming Addiction Can Be Good for Something

The BBSes also introduced me to my love of online gaming. Text games were abundant, with your high scores pitted against those of other visitors, but so were actual turn based style multiplayer games like Trader Wars (or some such game), where you were not playing a game separate from others and competing for high scores, but you were playing AGAINST others in a bid to dominate entire worlds, or universes. The thrill of challenging and besting another human at these games are the foundation of some of the most successful game franchises - from the adrenaline rush of Quake to the life sucking addition of WOW.

Just before the Internet really started taking off I got involved in a huge multi-line persistent RPG BBS service, Ice Online - nowadays you'd call it a MUD, but at the time I had no familiarity with such a concept and just thought of it as "the really addictive, really fun, and highly interactive game that cost me all of my money". At the time this sort of thing was absolutely amazing - some 16 lines (later up to 60 or more) allowed many players to log in together and adventure in a purely text environment, but with real time combat. It was hugely addictive. For the first time ever I was playing a game with dozens of people all around the game world. We could help each other out to complete quests, form parties to kill large enemies (precursor to "Raids" perhaps?), form guilds, and even have PVP! I swear Ice Online darn near invented the concept of nearly invincible NPC guards that opened up a can of WhoopAss! if you dared break the peace in the main cities.

This addiction lead me to believe I had to run my own, multi line BBS with real time chat capabilities and real time text based combat. I never got anyone to go along with this of course, and eventually Ice Online would slowly fade out of prominence as it was outcompeted by the internet (their business model was based on the number of hours you stay logged into their lines) as well as more sophisticated, higher concurrency graphical RPG titles that were coming out. Even though my passion to start a multi line chat system was never borne out, between Ice Online and DEViATE's simple BBS, the seed of starting some sort of service where visitors would come and interact together, and with us, was born.

Not Everything is Learned, Some is Imprinted Into Your Psyche by Life's Fond Moments

What made Ice Online so great too was that the people who ran the service understood that people love to personalise not only their experience (ie what they see), but the expression of their individuality (ie how they look to you). When you looked at players you could read a custom description of their appearance, and certain in-game characters had unique items or even tattoos that were completely unique to them. I won a special event that allowed me to pay for a totally unique magic scimitar and I had a custom snake tattoo on my character's swordarm. How does this inter-relate to Ice Online's influence on Neo? The custom title concept was directly influenced by how much I loved that custom tattoo on my character (remember, this "tattoo" was really just a string of text shown to users in a different colour when you read their description). Seriously.

This also extends to other little things like forum ranks and changing icon sets as you change ranks, like earning XP and levels in an RPG. I know many sites now use such concepts, and others did it better and before we did, but those sites were not our influence. Our life experiences were what shaped some of these decisions, whether consciously, or less consciously as a reaction to the best things we loved about youth or the most frustrating limitations of our young passions.

neoseeker related neohistory