The Wires Barely Reach

Hey all, last week’s piece about planned obsolescence—and some of the response it drew—got me thinking about connections to the internet, or lack thereof. With that in mind, I pulled this old piece out of the archive and updated it some. It’s a reminder that globalization of the internet wasn’t always a given.

Today in Tedium: We take so much of our online connections for granted. You probably visit hundreds of pages a day on a device fast enough to melt fabric, gobbling up gigabytes of data without even thinking about it. And there’s a good chance that if you didn’t have a connection, you would be mildly annoyed. But those connections were not a given in many parts of the world for years after the internet became commonplace in developed countries. Part of it was limited resources; part of it was shaky diplomatic standing. The BBS, in many cases, played an able stand-in. In today’s Tedium, we talk about the challenges covering the world in online access. — Ernie @ Tedium

A damaged building in Belgrade, Serbia. (David Holt/Flickr)

The BBS that kept Serbia informed while NATO was lobbing bombs all over the place

When the bombs started falling in Belgrade in March of 1999, NATO was trying to force Yugoslav forces out of Kosovo. For 78 days, the country was bombed and its infrastructure damaged, all while media outlets were muffled from reporting on the war by the Yugoslavian government.

One piece of infrastructure that didn’t fall apart during the spate of bombings was SezamPro, a bulletin board system that helped create an ad-hoc way for people on the ground to get an understanding of what was happening in their country.

SezamPro was an outgrowth of one of the country’s most popular BBS systems, Sezam. While not the first BBS in Yugoslavia, the chatline-style conversation approach proved popular with users, and quickly, the service gained numerous fans. People were willing to pay $80 per year for the service despite the slim wages in the country.

While Serbs got an early opportunity to use email during the ’80s, that setup was eventually cut off in the midst of the Yugoslav wars starting in the 1990s, a period in which Serbia was seen as the “bad guy” internationally.

“We lived in a country under a blockade and had to do all the work ourselves,” noted Dejan Ristanovic, Sezam’s co-founder, in a 2016 speech at a Hackaday conference in Belgrade.

Sezam, which was founded in 1989, played this role for years, but eventually the service required a major upgrade to support faster modems and eventually, internet access. The Sezam service evolved into SezamPro, which for more than a decade, was the primary way that Serbians got online.

(“We lost all of the wars, so we were still the bad guys. But we were defeated bad guys, and defeated bad guys could have internet access … but it has to be slow,” Ristanovic, who is a prominent technology journalist in Serbia, said of the access they received.)

In the end, SezamPro’s breakout moment came not because it had the internet, but when NATO started bombing Serbia, in an effort to convince the military to leave Kosovo. SezamPro’s much stronger capabilities for holding people—it could handle up to 100 users in its chat room at once—made it a valuable tool for Serbians who were simply trying to figure out what was happening.

According to a report from the online peer-reviewed journal First Monday, SezamPro effectively became a media outlet itself. An excerpt:

This role of the SezamPro chat lasted during the entire War. Night after night, the chat brought together a number of members of the system, up to one hundred of them, which was the highest number of participants the service could technically support. They chatted during the night, since that was the time when NATO attacks were predominantly performed. Chat sessions usually started just after the air raid alarms and together with the first explosions the number of participants increased. As soon as an explosion was heard, new chatters would join, asking: “What did they hit?” The Sezam’s “alternative net of reporters” would then try to identify what had been hit. The participants from different parts of the city were giving eyewitness reports. An internal scale on the intensity of explosion was established, so the mark 10 meant that the window glass broke, 9 that the window glass shook, 8 that the explosion was very strong but with no obvious consequences and down to mark 1, which meant the situation was peaceful.

Political conversations weren’t uncommon on SezamPro and its predecessor (as can be seen from this lengthy list of comments taken immediately before Yugoslavia fell apart), but the bombings took things to a whole new level.

These days, the network is still active, but not in the form you would expect: If you load up http://sezampro.rs/ in your browser, you’ll get a page for Orion Telekom, the firm whose parent company bought SezamPro in 2009. But if you telnet in to telnet.sezampro.rs, you get a login screen. The old network still exists. It’s not the same, but it’s there.

Yeah, it’s primitive. But it was primitive in 1999. Those messages, hiding behind the login screen, deserve to be preserved: They helped keep a semblance of normalcy for those in Serbia affected by the decisions of leadership but with no say in how those decisions were made.

How Peter Gabriel helped the internet gain its global reputation

Here’s a fun fact about the internet that you probably aren’t aware of, until you really think about it: Its global, online nature wasn’t a given for decades after its launch. In fact, it took a lot of time for the internet to reach many of the world’s developing nations.

And we arguably have Peter Gabriel to thank for fixing that situation. At the height of his success in 1986, the man whose voice launched a million boomboxes thought it would be a great idea to launch a charity event with the goal of funding a global peace network.

Not that anyone remembers Japan Aid, the festival Gabriel put on in the waning days of 1986. Part of the obscurity was by design: Gabriel and his fellow organizers chose not to accept sponsorship deals that would have put the show on television, out of the interest of integrity.

“Of all the charity events and causes in the eighties, this is perhaps the most obscure,” noted Collectors Music Reviews. “A video featuring some performances from the event was released in 1987 but quickly went out of print and the entire festival has lapsed into obscurity.”

So yes, the festival—featuring Lou Reed, Jackson Browne, and Howard Jones among numerous other acts—was no Live Aid. But it was a money-maker, and its fundraising helped launch an organization that has had a much broader impact than the actual show did.

(Also, let’s be fair: A Peter Gabriel concert in 1986 was probably a freaking treat.)

The Association for Progressive Communications (APC), a group that was literally named in Gabriel’s hotel room, brought together a few peace-oriented networks that were running active BBSes at a time when the technology was relatively rare, and helped offer email to far-flung parts of the world through Fidonet, a relay system that helped BBS systems support email using a series of nodes. (Fidonet worked like a series of waystations, passing messages from one BBS to the next.)

The approach was built from a number of disparate parts—a handful of advocacy-focused nongovernmental organizations getting their start around this time were launching with missions intended to help bring the world a little bit closer together. A total of seven networks joined the group at the time of its 1990 launch: The U.K.‘s GreenNet, the United States’ PeaceNet (also known as the Institute of Global Communications), Nicaragua’s Nicaro, Sweden’s NordNet, Canada’s Web, Brazil’s iBase, and Australia’s Pegasus.

In a 1987 paper, APC cofounders Mitra Ardron of GreenNet and IGC’s Deborah L. Miller saw a lot of potential for the networks as a tool for citizen action—something enabled by digital communication offerings like those offered by their networks.

“Our commitment is to truly global communication—communication available to the social inventors, the grassroots activists, and the organizational leaders creating a future that works for everyone. That’s the difference that makes a difference,” they wrote.

(Not that it was cheap: According to the document, both networks at the time had an hourly fee for use that topped $10.)

Ultimately, the network grew and blossomed into something amazing to behold, and provided many developing nations their first online connections—among them Cuba, which received its first online connection via APC in 1990.

(Additionally, the network’s influence had impacts on other parts of internet culture—for example, the current director of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, Mark Graham, is an APC cofounder. Graham is featured in this video about the concert.)

In 2015, APC’s unsung work in combining the internet with activism worldwide helped the group win an Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award.

Gabriel was one of the first to applaud them—and he took as little credit as possible.