Event Horizons BBS

~ the obit ~

The wall between me and this one is a phone bill. Event Horizons billed by the hour, the top rate reported was twenty four dollars of it, and that was before the call itself, which from anywhere outside the Portland area code was long distance and metered on its own. My first modem was a 14.4k in 1998, in Turkey, on a line where even a local call to an Ankara dial-up pool was a thing you watched the clock over. Paying an American company by the hour, over an international call, to pull down images at that speed is not something I missed. It is something that could not have happened.

So this is reconstruction from the outside. Jim Maxey put the board online in late 1983 out of Lake Oswego, Oregon, as a hobby, before he went off to work as a television news reporter. It ran on TBBS, and when eSoft shipped a version that could handle more than one caller at a time in 1987, it stopped being a hobby fairly quickly.

There is also a claim from 1984 worth recording without endorsing. Maxey built something he called Elsa, a conversational personality assembled out of TBBS and dBase with its state held in eight-bit flags, and he described it as the first of its kind on a board anywhere. Whether that holds up is not really checkable now. What is checkable is the money.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the money was actually for ~

By 1993 Event Horizons was grossing more than 3.2 million dollars a year. In 1994 it had 128 phone lines and over 34,000 members, run by eighteen employees. Ten of the eighteen did one job, which was scanning photographs and getting them into the download directories fast enough to keep the callers coming back.

The board also carried forums and a real astronomy image collection, and Maxey wrote an interactive space exploration game called Voyager III that ran on it. None of that is what 34,000 people were paying by the hour to reach. It was softcore adult images and video, and the honest reading of the early commercial internet is that this was true of most of the places that made money on it.

There was even a mail-order option for people who did not want to pull megabytes down a modem at all. You paid, and copies arrived at your house in the post. A bulletin board with a fulfillment operation attached to it.

~ playboy against event horizons ~

Playboy Enterprises sued in 1992. The claim was not complicated: scanned pages out of the magazine were sitting in a directory that people were paying by the hour to reach. Maxey settled out of court in 1993, reportedly for something around half a million dollars, and agreed to police the files himself going forward.

How that policing actually worked is the part worth keeping. One of the owners later described the rule as looking at a photograph and pulling it if the woman was too beautiful and the photography was too good, on the reasoning that no amateur with a camera had produced it. That is a copyright compliance regime built entirely on aesthetic judgment, run by hand, in 1993. It is also roughly what every platform on earth still falls back to when the automated version fails.

~ the year it stopped making sense ~

Maxey closed the board in 1996. Nothing in the record suggests he was forced into it and the revenue figures do not suggest he was cornered.

1996 is the answer by itself. The web had arrived, it was free at the point of use, it was unmetered past whatever you already paid your ISP, and it was reachable from any country rather than from one area code. A business whose only moat was that images were hard to obtain could not survive images becoming easy to obtain. Every dial-up service with a meter attached died somewhere in this window, and the ones that did not die turned themselves into ISPs.

~ what carried over ~

The 128 lines are the detail that stays with me. That is 128 modems in a rack in a building in Oregon, and the hard constraint that caller number 129 got a busy signal. Scarcity was a physical object you could walk up to and count. Nothing since has had that property.

Maxey went on to write science fiction and to run a security business in Vietnam, which is a more interesting third act than most of the people in this graveyard managed. The board itself left nothing that can be visited, which is normal for the whole medium. Bulletin boards did not archive. They answered the phone, and when the phone stopped being answered everything on the other end of it went too.

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