Canada Remote Systems

~ the goodbye ~

In 1979 Jud Newell put one phone line on a CP/M machine in Mississauga and called it Mississauga RCP/M. It became Toronto RCP/M when he moved, and it became Canada Remote Systems in 1985 when he quit everything else to do it full time, which also meant moving to MS-DOS and to PCBoard, the commercial board software everybody serious was buying. By 1989 CRS answered on 87 lines, plus three more for callers coming in over DATAPAC and Telenet from far enough away that the long-distance charge mattered.

Three years later it was the largest PCBoard system anywhere, with over 250 lines and about 10,000 people paying to be members, reading a file library spread across networked servers that no basement board could match. It won the Boardwatch readers' choice award in 1992. Its only real competitor in Canada was Rose Media, another Toronto PCBoard shop that topped out around 50 lines. CRS also ran a RelayNet hub called NAnet for other PCBoard operators across North America and put a 1-800 number on it, an oddly generous act from a company that charged for everything else.

The growth was expensive and it caught up first in August 1990, when the company went into receivership owing most of the money to Bell Canada. Private investors bought it and restarted it. Newell was gone by 1991; he turned up briefly in the founding of the Toronto Free-Net and then left the industry entirely, which meant the system outlived its founder's involvement by five years and his name was already off it when the interesting part happened.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the middle ground ~

What CRS sold was a position on a price list. At one end was the free local board, one modem in somebody's bedroom and a dozen people you could already have phoned. At the other were CompuServe and The Source, which had everything and billed by the hour at a rate that made you watch the clock. CRS put itself between them: enough lines that you got through and enough files that you stopped looking elsewhere, all on a flat membership instead of a meter.

The slot held for about a decade and then evaporated, because an internet account was the same offer at a better price. Everything CRS had assembled at great cost was a local approximation of something that now arrived over a single dial-up login with the whole world attached. In late 1994 the company read the room and shipped Frontier, a Windows internet service that put mail and gopher on top of its own file library, with FTP and Telnet added after, which was the right move made about eighteen months late.

~ the sale chain ~

In March 1995 Delrina bought CRS to be the foundation of its push into online services. Delrina was a Toronto software company best known for WinFax, and within months it was itself bought by Symantec, which wanted WinFax and had no interest whatsoever in running a bulletin board in another country. In January 1996 Symantec sold CRS to iStar Internet in Ottawa. Three owners in ten months, none of whom had set out to buy it.

iStar was buying subscribers, and it had been buying them elsewhere too: Mindlink and Wimsey in Vancouver went the same way. Alan Zisman wrote the obituary in his Business in Vancouver column on 28 May 1996 without quite calling it one. CRS Online, he noted, had been around for nearly twenty years as one of Canada's best known bulletin boards, and now it had been turned into yet another internet access service with the local chat and information areas shut down. Nobody at iStar's Vancouver office would comment on what happened to the local operations.

~ what the lines were worth ~

CRS sold a middle tier, and in Turkey I never saw one of those. By the time a TTNet dial-up account turned up in our house at the end of the nineties, the entire layer this grave belongs to had been cleared away, and what you bought instead was an ISP login with the whole web sitting behind it, which was cheaper and also a different product. Turkey's own boards had run earlier in the decade while I was a child, so the BBS era is something I know from archives rather than from a dial tone.

A BBS death usually looks like a disconnected number. This one looked like an account migration, which is worse in a specific way. The customers kept paying and the modems kept answering, and the thing they had been members of was simply not there anymore. The file library had no equivalent on a 1996 consumer internet account and nobody pretended otherwise. The conferences had no equivalent either. What transferred was the billing relationship.

Twenty years of Canadian online culture ran through those lines, and what ended it was not failure. CRS was the biggest of its kind in the world when the market it had built a middle for disappeared out from under it. Jud Newell had been out of the company for five years by then, out of the industry altogether, and he never came back to it.

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