textfiles/bbs/polaris.txt

The following text was captured from POLARIS Citadel 10/30/84:

.Help HISTORY
 
 <J>ump <P>ause <S>top 
  
  This is the Polaris message system. It is running on a 
kaypro 10 with a hayes 1200 modem. The name Polaris was 
chosen from the computer that this bbs was originally 
set up on - a Northstar Horizon with a pair of double 
density floppies. (Polaris = the north star...) 
  The program that this system is running is called Citadel.  
Citadel is a program that was conceived and written locally 
at the end of 1981 by an individual who chose to use 
the pseudonym "Cynbe ru Taren" - the name taken from Poul 
Andersons book "Star Fox", and chosen from the plot of the 
book. The creature Cynbe is an individual in a hive 
culture... 
  Citadel was written to allow conversations to flow more 
naturally, and evenly. To allow people to group the 
conversations as they saw fit, and to generally make the 
media more useful. The first room system in the country was 
Cynbe's ODD-DATA, and it proved to be much more popular 
than other systems of the time.   
  As he thought about the idea of the board and coded it, 
Cynbe and another local, Glenn Gorman, spent a lot of 
time together working out the details and polishing the 
design. But they disagreed on whether a room system >could< 
be written in BASIC. Cynbe thought it couldn't , Glenn 
thought it could, and finally wrote the second major room 
system in the area - Minibin. 
  ODD-DATA lasted almost six months, before a hardware 
failure forced it offline, much to the dismay of it's 
userbase. Glenn's system became the only room system in 
the area, and it thrived. After a short interval, David 
Mitchell, another local, heard of a bulletin board written 
in C, and was intrigued. So much so that he convinced Rich 
 Knox and Jerry George to host the second incarnation of 
Citadel - ICS.   
  ICS was long distance from most of the eastside, as it 
was located on Bainbridge Island, and this was seen as a 
blessing. Most of the twits of that era were reluctant to 
host the long distance charges, and so the system 
went relatively unabused for a period of 9 months.   
  Cynbe kept thinking about the system and how it ran, and 
found that having a remote site was a blessing - it 
served as a beta test site, and tended not to be too much 
trouble.   
  As the bulletin boards proliferated, we saw a variety 
of systems come and go, and the userbase swell. Gradually 
the userbase became less technical and more humanities 
oriented. Boards that failed form lack of use now 
flourished, and a rather lively discussion on virtually 
every topic was to be found on any one of 30 local boards.  
  Several minor squabbles showed up during this time, 
but got generally ignored - "300 baud misunderstandings" 
was coined by Cynbe, and came to mean any problem that would 
>never< happen in person, but for some reason seemed to 
thrive on the bulletin boards.   
  One squabble in particular began to show up on every 
board. It's rather a famous episode now, and had to do 
with the uses and abuses of pseudonyms. Many people got 
hurt, and a few felt themselves affected 
drastically. When this squabble spread to ICS, it was 
tolerated for six months, and then code was written to 
delete messages. 
 Cynbe, seeing a thing that he'd had a major hand in used 
to hurl hate messages between one pseudonym and another, 
withdrew from the bulletin board community, and from the 
people in it specifically.   
  ICS went down from the sysops' unwillingness to host 
a series of petty arguments. Arcade went down due to 
apathy. Minbin and Seacom both got embroiled in the 
controversy, and finally both banned any mention of it.   
  T'an T'u put up Polaris on the day that ICS went down, 
and ran it as an open system. This system proved to be a 
very busy one, and rapidly proved to be very difficult to 
get onto.   
  T'an also supplied the C source code to David Bonn, who 
implemented CKMCMS and ESI, maher masu who implemented 
Gates of Mordecai, and helped disseminate the code even 
further, and Anchor Computers, who he then worked for, as 
well as SIG/M and the BDS C Users Group - Citadel having 
been written with the BDC C compiler.   
  CKMCMS came up, ESI came up, Anchor Citadel came up, 
Polaris stayed up.   
  As time went by, T'an noticed that callers who had better 
things to do tended not to call polaris. They didn't 
have the time to spend calling a system for an hour 
only to read a few messages, and so the old userbase 
dropped off, one by one. As this happened, the amount of 
thought put into each message dropped, and this helped the  
process - as the busier callers finally managed to 
beat the busy signal, they tended to be greeted by 20 
"Van Halen rules" type messages, and some of them 
started to scratch Polaris off of the list.   
  The final straw for T'an was the original large squabble 
resurfacing on several of the major boards. The decision 
was made to go to a limited access system, and in 
september, 1983, polaris became the first system to go 
to a limited access system.   
  Anchor's technicians took Anchors' Citadel down. ESI 
went down when David Bonn stopped working for them.  
Gates of Mordecai was up, but quietly so. The number was 
never published, and it soon gained a rather good 
reputation as a place to go for quiet conversation.   
CKMCMS remained up and fairly trouble free. Minibin cloned, 
and Eskimo North came into existence. 
  This remained fairly stable for about six months... 
Gates of Mordecai went down - Maher moved to Dallas. CKM 
tottered on the edge of solvency. Minibin and Polaris 
both stayed up and popular. Eskimo North gained a 
reputation for having a userbase consisting of under-13 
year old pirates. The Hermitage was founded, as was 
Screaming Eagle and Insomnia. LIDS Citadel came and went in 
less than a month, as well as a host of others.  

  And so it remains today...