MBnet

» see mbnet.fi as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

MBnet was the bulletin board system that the Finnish computer magazine MikroBitti ran for its readers. It opened on 1 December 1994 with 20 phone lines, and an account came with the magazine subscription. Finns called a BBS a purkki, a jar, and this was the biggest jar in the country.

The main menu was in Finnish and ran on typed keywords: APAJA opened the file areas and HALOO the discussions. A time bank tracked the minutes each caller had left for the day. One surviving screenshot shows a session 19 minutes in with 220 to go, above the line "Sinulla ei ole aikaa pankissa", you have no time in the bank.

In 1996 it added internet email, run on an American package called KSPMail that the staff had to patch by hand because delivery was slow. At its widest the board answered on 250 lines at once. The magazine Skrolli calls it the largest BBS in the world by one estimate, and Finnish Wikipedia repeats the claim with a citation-needed mark beside it.

~ the case file ~

~ one thousand nodes ~

The hardware started as AST 486 machines in Pitäjänmäki, Helsinki, one computer per phone line, and later one computer for every four. The software was PCBoard, picked over the Finnish SBBS because it was commercial and came with support. MikroBitti held a 1,000-node license for it, the only one of that size in the world according to sysop Jouni Heikniemi, and the staff wrote several megabytes of their own code on top, so the menus looked like no other PCBoard system. Clark Development, the company behind PCBoard, collapsed in the summer of 1997. MBnet ran the orphaned package for five more years.

~ a helsinki number ~

I went online in Turkey in 1998. Heikniemi, asked when the callers began to leave, could not give an exact window but said it started in earnest late that same year, as the internet rolled over the boards. The first dent had come earlier, when the Helsinki phone company HPY ended its flat rate for local calls.

So the two of us never overlapped, and would not have anyway. MBnet was a Helsinki phone number with a Finnish menu behind it, tied to a subscription to a magazine sold in Finland. In 2001 a few regulars were still posting in the message areas, and they were gone before the end.

~ kuukauden kotimainen ~

In the middle of the 1990s Finnish hobbyists uploaded shareware and freeware games to MBnet in large numbers. Jukka O. Kauppinen edited the MBnet games column in the print magazine and gave the best one each month a "kuukauden kotimainen" mention, the domestic game of the month. These games circulated almost only inside Finland and seldom reached even the biggest international shareware archives.

Skrolli made the larger point in 2022. MikroBitti had been printing reader listings since the 1980s and recruiting writers from the same crowd, and MBnet carried that habit onto a modem. Around the turn of the millennium its web form became a real distribution channel for beginning Finnish programmers.

~ the red switch ~

The BBS closed on 6 June 2002 at 23:09. By then five four-node machines and a big rack of modems were holding it up. A group of former administrators came for the closing evening, and the story ended, in the interviewer's words, with the ceremonial press of a red switch among familiar faces. Heikniemi had been sysop since 1995 and went back to his day job as head of MikroBitti's electronic services.

The name moved to the web. Subscribers got space for home pages under koti.mbnet.fi and an mbnet.fi email address. The Apaja file library ran from 2002 to 2010, and a price tracker followed components across Finnish computer shops. A later relaunch named the subscriber benefit MBnet Kamu, with 1000 MB of space and five mailboxes.

~ koti.mbnet.fi ~

The subscriber web space had its last working day on 12 October 2022, and on the 13th the final piece of MBnet was switched off. Archive Team had already crawled the home pages with ArchiveBot, so a good part of koti.mbnet.fi can still be read in the Wayback Machine. www.mbnet.fi forwards to iltalehti.fi/bitti now, the tech section of a tabloid.

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