Sezam

» see sezampro.rs as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Zoran Životić bought the modems in mid-1989 and wrote the software himself. Dejan Ristanović, who six years earlier had written the magazine special that taught Yugoslavia to build a Galaksija, wrote the documentation and the surrounding programs. They set themselves a deadline of 11 November because it looked comfortably far away, and on that date Sezam was already running in Belgrade on one phone line, taking calls at every hour. In the first fifteen days it logged 1,007 calls from 95 users and 165 hours of connect time.

The design decision that separated it from most boards of the period was what it was for. The majority of bulletin boards existed to move files. Sezam was built around conferences, meaning long written threads about computers and schooling, and before very long about politics. It went subscription on 15 October 1990 at 800 dinars a year, about a hundred German marks, and over 300 people paid immediately. A contract with the publisher BIGZ in June 1990 got it to three lines. Ten lines went in for the Chess Olympiad at Novi Sad that November, ten again in October 1991, and by February 1993 it answered on fifteen.

Yugoslavia reached me through the Turkish evening news, which is how a child in Turkey learned anything about the neighbors in those years. That there had been a modem layer running underneath all of it I found out a very long time afterward. The geography is brutally simple too: a dial-up board is a local phone call. Sezam was local from Belgrade and international from anywhere else, which is why the tens of thousands of people on it were nearly all dialing from inside the former Yugoslavia.

~ the record ~

~ what the line carried ~

By 1991 Sezam was running a subsystem called Sezam-Tanjug that distributed the national wire service to embassies and to foreign and domestic journalists, which put a dial-up board in the middle of how information left the country. English Wikipedia puts the political weight plainly: during the media blockade imposed by the Milošević government, Sezam was one of very few free media in Serbia. The political conferences were the heated ones from early on, and the people on them were the professional and student class with access to a computer and a phone, which in Belgrade in 1992 was a small and specific group that nonetheless included most of the people writing things down.

In April 1997 Wired gave twelve pages to David S. Bennahum on the part Sezam's users played in the protests against the stolen 1996 elections. A foreign magazine spending twelve pages on a Serbian bulletin board says plainly enough what it had become. The hobby framing had stopped applying somewhere around 1992.

~ the numbers after five years ~

Sezam counted itself carefully, and the five-year tally is on the record: 1,212,710 calls, 271,471 hours of connect time, roughly 394,000 messages across about twenty public conferences, and 418,530,350 characters of text, which is about 400 megabytes of typing plus another 180 of attached files, out of a country that spent most of those five years under sanctions.

The end of the board itself was an administrative matter. Ristanović's own account says Sezam BBS ran until the end of 1995, when the situation at BIGZ became too complicated for it to keep functioning. There was no final post worth quoting. The operation moved into the next thing instead: a test system went up on 16 April 1995, and SezamPro began commercial service as an internet provider on Tuesday 19 December 1995. Full internet access followed on 1 November 1996.

~ what still answers ~

SezamPro ran fourteen more years as a well known Serbian provider and then, on 23 December 2009, became part of the Orion Telekom holding. Nobody printed a farewell for that either. Today sezampro.rs issues a redirect to oriontelekom.rs, and the product no longer carries the name.

The archive is the strange part. Wikipedia describes the old board, with more than a million messages in its database, as still existing at telnet.sezampro.rs, a monument to the stormy 1990s in Yugoslavia, and the PC Press retrospective from December 2019 says the same thing: the material is still there and you reach it the old way. That host still resolves today and the telnet port still accepts a connection.

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