Plover-NET

~ the obit ~

At some point in 1984 a long distance company began blocking every call placed to 516-935-2481. That was the number of a bulletin board running on an Apple in a house on Long Island, and the carrier had worked out that an unusual share of the calls reaching it were not being paid for. Blocking a single residential phone number is not a thing telephone companies do casually. It is the clearest surviving measure of how big Plover-NET got.

The board came out of a meeting rather than a plan. Quasi-Moto and Lex Luthor had been writing to each other on local phreak boards while both lived in Florida, met in person in the fall of 1983, and Quasi-Moto mentioned he was about to move to New York and was thinking about starting a board of his own. Plover-NET went up in the 516 area code around the turn of the year, and Lex came along as remote co-sysop.

The hardware was ordinary for the moment and worth writing down anyway, because the scale is the point. An Apple running GBBS software, with three disk drives holding 143 KB each. Later came a RANA Elite III that held 600 KB and must have felt like an enormous upgrade. On the phone side there was one Hayes Micromodem at 300 baud. That is the entire machine that over six hundred people were fighting to get a busy signal from.

A board like this was a local phone call, and the local phone call is the whole geography of it. Plover-NET was a New York board because it was in New York, and every user outside 516 was either paying long distance or arranging not to. There was no version of this that reached Turkey at any price. Even the American side of it was a toll question first and a computer question second, which is why the carrier could kill a community by making a decision about billing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ six hundred users on one line ~

Six hundred registered users on a single 300 baud modem means almost nobody was getting on. You dialed and got a busy signal, then dialed again, and when you finally connected you read fast because somebody else was redialing behind you. Time on the board was the scarce thing, and that scarcity is what made a login worth having.

What was on it was the material of the moment: switching system documentation and dialup numbers, plus the working theory of how the phone network was put together, assembled by people who had figured it out by poking at it. Eric Corley, who published 2600 under the name Emmanuel Goldstein, was invited on and ran it for a stretch. Plover-NET became an official 2600 board, printing subscription details on the way out the door at logout.

~ what got built out of it ~

Lex Luthor was admitted to the Knights of Shadow in early 1984. He put forward some names for membership and had them turned down, and his response was to start his own thing. Around May 1984 he began running an invitation-only board and going through the users he already had access to, picking the ones who knew something. The group he assembled out of that was the Legion of Doom.

So the most consequential American hacking group of the 1980s was recruited off a friend's bulletin board by somebody who had been rejected from a different group a few months earlier. The Legion of Doom went on to be the subject of federal investigations and a decent shelf of books. It started as a membership dispute settled by walking away and taking the good users with you.

~ the number that got blocked ~

Phrack's own history of the Legion of Doom, written a few years afterward by people who were on the board, describes Plover-NET as one of the most popular systems of the day and puts the carrier block in as a plain fact rather than a boast. It reads like a footnote and it is not one. A telephone company deciding your house is not reachable is a shutdown notice issued by somebody who does not know they are issuing one.

It also tells you what the security model of the whole scene was. Everything ran on one number in one house belonging to one person, protected by nothing except that number not being widely known. Once it was widely known, the board's survival was somebody else's decision.

~ when the sysop moved ~

Plover-NET ended in early 1985 because Quasi-Moto moved back to Florida and could not get it running again there. That is the whole cause of death. There was no raid and no announcement. The computer went into boxes and the phone line was disconnected and the community it held did not survive being unplugged.

Boards of this era were furniture in somebody's bedroom, and their entire existence sat on that person's living arrangements staying the same. When they did not, six hundred people lost the place they had been going. What replaced it was other boards, then other boards after those, until the thing that made a board possible stopped being a phone number in a specific house.

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