The early 1990s was a cacophony of musical genres. Synthesizer pop mingled with fledgling grunge rock, which competed for alternative radio airwaves with rap and hip-hop. But for early geeks, the best music back then was the sound of their modem when it connected to their favorite BBS. Little did they know then that these message boards foreshadowed the Internet of the 2000s…
Many a geek learned at that time of the existence of cyan and magenta colors, used without parsimony by pixel artists who created at the time what was called ANSI art (from the name of the main mode of d encoding of alphanumeric and other characters at the time). In the pre-internet era of only sixteen-color monitors, and long before the advent of the JPEG file and the first NFTs, these digital works of art were worth their weight in gold. Or, in any case, a happy mixture of yellow and brown…
Magenta, by the way, is not a “natural” color. It is an illusion created by the brain to fill the gap between red and purple. To draw an effective parallel, let’s say that BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) are the magenta of the computer age. They filled the gap between the first computerized networks used in the most serious way since the 1970s by the major North American universities (including those in Montreal) and the World Wide Web, which was to take the planet by storm a few years later.
For a younger generation of future geeks (who in those days were sometimes and not very nicely called ” nerd “), the BBS have filled a certain void that separated their basement or their room from the rest of the world.
budding artist
Having just arrived in Montreal from Saguenay at the end of primary school, Olivier Niquet came across his “2400 baud” modem like Obélix in the magic potion. “My first thought at the mention of the letters BBS is for their meaning. It’s also a lot of my adolescence, says the host and humorist. At a time when cyberaddiction didn’t yet exist, let’s say I spent a lot of time on it. »
The experience was transformative for the man who was recognized, in his early days, for his shyness behind the microphone of ICI Radio-Canada Première. “It brought me a lot as an introverted person. I had difficulty speaking, but on my computer I was able to express myself better. »
The co-creator in 2007 of Sportnographer, a podcast born long before podcasts became ubiquitous, was decidedly an artist ahead of his time. He was part, during these “four or five years” of his life, of a handful of creators of these ANSI drawings which were, at the time, the ne plus ultra of the geek cool assumed.
“When I started doing ANSI graphics, drawings with big squares, I asked for a phone line to have my own BBS. We got together and took part in contests every month. These groups which published drawings were called ACiD, iCE or any other combination of large consonants and more or less small vowels.
It was also the time of the L33t Sp34k, a way of writing combining numbers and letters whose more or less good understanding determined whether or not you were a real geek.
“It was my world, says Olivier Niquet. I had many friends, but they remained far away. »
Global village… or almost
We owe the emergence of hackers. Cyberpirates tampered with software (nicknamed “Warez”, a pun that is best explained in English) to distribute them not always for free. Transferring documents by modem took forever, so the first compression algorithms had to be developed, which later gave rise to Zip files.
Other PC inconveniences illicitly exchanged the numbers and access codes of company telephone systems from which they could make long distance calls without paying. The high cost of telephony in Canada is not that new…
Finally, computer scientists, not always so young but with much brighter intentions, were creating ” doors ”, games with futuristic names like Trade Wars 2002(2002!) or applications which were accessed over the network, but in turn, depending on the availability of the telephone lines through which one connected to the BBS which hosted them. By the way, yes, Franglais existed on the networks long before Snapchat and TikTok…
In fact, each not-yet-planetary village had its own expressions, notes Carl Frédéric De Celles, president and associate of the digital agency iXmédia, in Quebec, who recalls his summer rounds on the “bulletin boards”. “At first, I only had access to a modem in the summer,” he says. It allowed me to develop my writing, I learned to manage my social communications, to launch a war and to “troll” on social networks. It all comes from there. »
“Facebook is a bit of a democratization of that, for better, but probably more for worse,” he says amusedly.
Today a Montreal entrepreneur and creator of the AI application Waverly, Philippe Beaudoin also has nostalgia for his adolescence, which happened in Trois-Rivières in his case. This is where he got hooked on programming, which was to become his job.
“My parents bought me a TRS-80 because they wanted me to program, not play. And the TRS-80 offered very few games — it ran from audio cassettes. Then I created a BBS that fit on two 5.25 inch floppies. There were no hard drives in the first personal computers…”
There weren’t too many girls on the BBS either. But a teacher at a private school for girls in Nicolet, on the other side of the river, had the avant-garde idea at the time of encouraging correspondence between his pupils and those of the school of Philippe Beaudoin .
“There were all sorts of people there, including pretty crazy teachers,” recalls the former Trifluvien.
“Flyés” in the good sense of the term, of course. A shade that, in 2023, must be done absolutely and that confirms how much things have changed since the time when sixteen colors and a telephone line were enough for the first geeks to start dreaming of a new world…