Boardwatch

» see boardwatch.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A bulletin board system had no index. You could not search for one, because searching required being connected, and being connected required already knowing the number to dial. That is the gap Jack Rickard started printing into in 1987 from Lakewood, Colorado. Boardwatch was a monthly magazine about a network you reached through the phone book, and for years part of its value was that it functioned as the phone book.

Rickard wrote it in his own voice, at length, with opinions, which is not how trade publishing usually goes. The magazine took the BBS scene seriously as an industry years before anyone outside it agreed there was one, and covered modem hardware and sysop economics with the same weight a business paper gives to quarterly results. Circulation got to 110,000, on a subject that most newsstand computer magazines treated as a hobby footnote.

Then the dial-up world turned into the internet service provider world, and Boardwatch turned with it. The annual Directory of Internet Service Providers became the reference for a business that was, for a few years, thousands of small companies with a rack of modems and a leased line. The magazine ran the conference circuit for that industry too, and ISPcon was for a while where the people building American internet access went to meet each other.

None of it exported. A printed list of dial-up numbers is only useful inside the telephone system that made those numbers free to call, and from Turkey an American BBS directory was a catalog of things you could not afford to ring. I got online in 1998, on TTNet, at the point where the web had already made the whole question moot, and the layer Boardwatch had spent eleven years documenting was closing behind me as I arrived.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what really happened ~

Rickard sold his majority stake in 1998 to an east coast multimedia company, and Penton Media picked up those assets in 1999. That is the standard shape of a boom: an owner-operator publication that knew a market intimately gets bought by a publisher that owns forty other titles and treats it as a category. The magazine stopped printing in 2002. Its assets were later bought by the telecom site Light Reading, and the ISPcon show that came out of it kept running until its last event in November 2008.

The real cause was underneath the ownership changes. Boardwatch's whole subject was the independent provider, and by 2002 the independents had been bought up or driven out by cable and telephone companies who did not need a trade paper to find each other. When the directory got short enough to fit on a page, there was no directory business left.

~ the long tail ~

Scanned issues are on archive.org, and they are a better record of what the pre-web online world actually looked like than almost anything written since. The advertisements are the useful part. Page after page of modem manufacturers and board software vendors, most of them with no Wikipedia article now, every one convinced in print that it was early rather than brief.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »