Awhile back, perhaps a long time ago in the digital age I used to run a BBS. I used the Telegard BBS software and ran it with a 9600 baud modem, rocking a 386sx (the sx was for slow xtreme) cpu.

Doing some research for command line game mechanics I was trying to recall some of the earlier games that one would play on the boards; Yankee Trader and such. These game mechanics tend to be the basis for the popular Mafia Wars and Farmville that we see today trending within the social communities; some things never change perhaps.

Interestingly enough a quick search of "Telegard BBS" within Google landed me in a frozen moment in time. Most of these sites were last updated in 1999. Some of them claiming, soon to be released, y2k updates (oh yes remember this? Cobol guys are still lamenting the end of the gold rush I suppose). There was / is something almost eerily depressing about it all. The Telegard main homepage, last updated on Christmas of 1999, talks about the newly redesigned website and how the creator, Tim Strike, will be releasing new software shortly. Yet there it is, hasn't been touched since and a historical Wikipedia article probably usurped its top ranking on Google a few years back.

Again I trolled Google trying to remember the name of a maintenance RPG that I had installed on my BBS (Which BTW was called Prophets of Rage; a friend of mine tried to convince me to rename it to Profits of Wage at the time. I didn't see the humor/cleverness in this until many years later). So I entered in the search terms "Telegard BBS games cyborg"; I was thinking the game had "cy" or "sy" in it, just can't remember...still don't. The results came back, so many phreakers and sysops named cyborg brought up usenet entries for random BBS's; their names, phone numbers, endless chatter. Large elite BBS phone lists came back promoting Lunatic Fringe and Yankee Clipper, ones that I personally used to belong to (zero day warez people). All frozen moments, seemingly petrifying right before the new millennium; we can only glance in and see the artifacts left over. Perhaps a search or some field work within Google will bring to the surface more of these ruins.

So I ask, somewhat lamely I admit, will we soon have a major for digital archeologists? In theory I guess we have already experienced a bit of this with data. The Rosetta Stone is still able to be translated yet a floppy and or punch card from the 1900's is perhaps almost lost, as the media erodes over time. But what about all this information, content now being liquid will soak into the tubes (cheers to Alaska) and get stuck in the corners like the fat within the arteries of a middle aged American. Who will explore this? Scrape it out and paste it on a wall as artwork?

"Look at this late 1900's artifact from the early Arpanet period. So beautiful." She said.

Fire Escape's 314 Area Code BBS Directory - July 1995