NULL Interview! (Part 1)

In what will hopefully stay this blog’s ultimate monument to my ego for quite some time, Xqtr has graciously allowed me to re-post this interview that I did for NULL emag, originally appearing in issue #6. I went a little overboard on answering and editing all of this together, so I’m happy to be able to use it here as well. Besides, writing all of this was part of what inspired me to start this blog, and it touches on quite a lot of the topics that I hope to eventually cover in more detail in future articles.

Haven’t heard of NULL? It’s a modern effort to revive the more or less extinct emag format. It’s filled to the brim with personal thoughts about the BBS scene, interviews with sceners, and some very handy modding and coding howtos and snippets too. The whole thing feels very old school, and it’s awesome to see something like this being released in 2019. Speaking of which, Xqtr just released issue #7 a few days ago. Run it in your browser via 16colo.rs and/or download it and all of the previous issues over at NULL’s github.

NULL font by Alpha King

Anyway, this interview is so epically massive that I’ve decided to chop it up into three parts to keep each one more inline with my typical article size. This first part talks a lot about my origins in the scene, including my involvement in the BBS modding and art scenes, programming and “real life”, H/P antics, and Zer0net!

When did you begin to use BBSes and how did you enter the scene?

My brother bought me my first modem in spring of 1995 as an early birthday present (somewhat selfishly, he wanted to use it as much as I did!) and we started BBSing heavily right away. I had been pining for a modem since long before I ever had a decent PC of my own, so I wasted no time jumping into the deep end. Not having AOL or the like, my brother and I started out favoring graphical PD boards – we had a pretty nice Excalibur BBS system in our local scene, as well as a nifty ROBOboard/FX system, both of which were much easier to digest than the seemingly esoteric world of the text based boards. Soon though, I found those other boards to be much more alluring and started calling them almost exclusively, while my brother stayed in PD easy-mode land outside of the occasional game of LORD.

By the end of 1995 I’d learned quite a lot about the scene, from calling countless local (and not so local) systems, somehow surviving the traditional rite of passage of racking up massive phone bills, participating heavily in message bases including my first forays into Fido, playing plenty of door games, leaching a ton of files, starting playing with numerous BBS software in an attempt to learn how to setup my own board, checking out numerous art packs, reading zines and emags, and of course countless text files, etc.

It quickly became clear to me that to make a name for yourself and really be a part of the scene you had to contribute in one way or another. In all of my playing with BBS software something clicked for me with creation of simple animated graphical mods (replacement screen templates, etc.) so I set out to join the modding scene in an attempt to exploit my newly discovered “skill”. As a side note, this is also around the same time I started drawing ASCII, even though I had no idea what I was doing. 😉

Unfortunately, by the end of 1995 I’d also witnessed my local BBS scene go from what I can imagine was close to its peak activity, to being almost entirely dead. 1995-1996 was an extremely dramatic (traumatic?) time for the BBS scene in the United States, with almost everyone jumping ship to the Internet and more modern iterations of online services (CompuServe, America Online, Prodigy, etc.) with wild abandon. It was incredibly weird for me – seemingly as soon as I’d fallen in love with the BBS scene, it was just… gone. I couldn’t help but to be left a little heartbroken, and with a lingering infatuation at that.

I knew from some of the zines and emags I had been reading that the scene had a major crossroads, as it were, on something called “Internet Relay Chat”. Again, financed by my brother’s selfish interests, I got my first ISP account in early 1996 and jumped on to IRC pretty much day 1. That was when I truly joined the underground scene.

What were your first steps once you actually got into the scene?

I joined TRiC as a modder because they were a highly respected modding crew (though mostly focused on Renegade BBS) with a strong semi-local presence in my area code in the form of senior member King Jamez and his BBS, Zyklon B, which was one of the last truly nice underground systems around there. Still, I don’t remember exactly why now, but it seemed pretty clear to me that TRiC was dying, or at least slowing down, so I also joined the Iniquity focused modding crew Thought Surfers shortly thereafter, as I was mostly working on mods for Iniquity.

Once I got on IRC I hooked up with a scene people, some of whom were artists, and some of whom encouraged me to continue the weird ASCII stuff I was playing around with at the time, which led me to briefly crank out some terrible stuff with the Brazilian art group iNSOMNiA. This was strictly a learning period for me – I was figuring out how to convert my weird style of post-oldschool ASCII into stuff more closely resembling the cool warez scene file_id.diz and info headers I saw (and liked!) and also drawing a lot of newschool ASCII based on TheDraw fonts and other people’s artwork. The latter was strictly lame stuff, in other words, but it led me to develop the skills I needed to move on from there.

Getting on IRC back then was really pivotal to my further involvement in the scene, since it let me “network” with tons of people from all over the world, and actually feel like a part of a bigger scene rather than some distant, outside observer, which I definitely felt like by the end of 1995.

It seems that you were a busy guy. 🙂 What groups and/or projects you were involved in?

Well, I don’t think anyone wants to read the entire list as it goes on and on, but some highlights starting from where we left off with my last answer: I soon got accepted to the legendary CiA, which was a total validation of potential as an ASCII artist and introduced me to a lot of other awesome artists. From there I dabbled with other groups, including helping run CiA’s breakaway ASCII division, Hazmat. I also participated in Serial, and later joined Impure. Still, more recently I’ve drawn for Break (though continuing to participate in Impure!)

The whole time I tried in vain to draw ANSI too, but it never really clicked. I finally started putting out some stuff I liked in the 2000s. You can see some of my more recent stuff in Crisis, Roots, and now Blocktronics packs.

My modding “career” is more ridiculous. I bounced around between a lot of groups, such as a Project/X, FSW, Sinister, and Taura. Some of these groups were putting out stuff I considered much nicer than anything I was capable of. Whether it being nice art or impressive code, I saw value in a lot of this stuff. More value than the template style work I was doing. Sinister was one of the most important experiences I had, since I ended up being a senior member of that group and learning a bit about running things. The aftermath of that group’s implosion soon led to me start Demonic Productions in 1997, using my experience and numerous modding scene contacts to attempt to build somewhat of a supergroup, as I saw it.

The rest is more muddled. I coded and later compiled Gutter, an art scene emag with my long time friend and collaborator, the amazing ANSI artist Filth. I co-founded Zer0net, an underground scene focused echomail network that is still around today, somehow. I began working on an epic project in the form of Darkness, my Legend of the Red Dragon style door game. I was involved in testing and developing numerous BBS software of the era, most notably Iniquity. I’ve also been a supporter of Mystic since the early days and like to think my involvement highly influenced it in the old days. I was heavily involved in trying to collect (and share!) rare BBS scene related files, though eventually these efforts got overshadowed by other, better managed projects. Of course, near the center of all this is that I’ve also been running my BBS, Distortion, since the late 90s as well.

Did you feel overwhelmed by all these projects at times?

Interestingly enough, not really! It always felt like I had an almost limitless amount of free time back then. In fact, I was bored as hell a lot of the time, which, more than ambition, is probably what led me to dabble in so many areas. Maybe that was a case of undiagnosed ADHD though. 😉 Even when I was in college, juggling school, a part time job, and heavy involvement my local punk scene, I still had time to work on Darkness and spend too much time on IRC.

Of course, that all changed when I got my first full time job. I’ve been pretty overwhelmed by my drive to dedicate free time to my various hobbies, including anything and everything BBS related, since then.

So, do you consider yourself to be a coder, an artist, an organizer/manager, maybe all of those? 🙂

I’d have to say all of the above, with some caveats. For instance, I don’t necessarily feel like a true artist, not like someone like Filth or a lot of the other guys still around today. It takes me a lot of effort to try ANSI and my focus is still far more on the technical than the expressive. ASCII comes a lot more naturally for me though. As a coder, I’ve never been an amazing programmer, but it is something I really enjoy to this day. For most of the 90s I was still very much figuring out WTF I was doing, but I had plenty of awesome people to be inspired by and to learn from. As an organizer/leader/facilitator, I’d say that this is something that comes naturally to me because of some aspects of my personality more than it is a role I usually seek to fill. I’m someone that’s just compelled to try to bring order to chaos and make shit happen, I guess. On top of all of that I seem to have a strong urge to “create.”

From what I’ve seen in your projects/mods you are a Pascal guy, correct? Do you know other languages? What is your background in computer technology?

I started dabbling a bit in BASIC and Batch (who didn’t back then?) but didn’t really dig into trying to learn to code until I joined the scene and saw all of the awesome stuff a lot of modders and coders were working on. I mean, just like seeing my first ACiD ANSIs and being completely bewildered by how what I was seeing was even possible, learning that some of my favorite BBS programs and demos were made by people around my age blew me away, as did the seemingly limitless possibilities. I’d say the aforementioned King Jamez was a big influence to me starting out, as were less approachable people like Fiend, the author of Iniquity, and Seth Robinson, the author of LORD. All of these guys had one thing in common: Pascal.

So yeah, like I mentioned, I was really still learning about coding in the 90s. I mostly learned by finding source code and ripping the shit out of it, and just trying to figure it all out on my own. It was a different world, with a lot less documentation and tutorials available, a lot fewer examples to learn from, etc. I started out working on simple utilities like scene group application programs, then moved on to doors and BBS scripts, then things like readers and e-mags. I was lucky to have a lot of friends in the scene who were far better programmers than I who could give me tips when I got stuck or simply couldn’t wrap my head around certain concepts. I owe Natedogg from Demonic in particular a whole lot of credit in that respect. This all finally culminated with Darkness, which, outside of the door library I used for communications (created by Natedogg, actually!) was almost entirely my own creation. I was pretty damn proud of myself for figuring things like multinode and IGM support out on my own.

At around the same time, I graduated High School and started working on an AAS degree in Computer Science. I ended up taking a lot of programming electives since it was something I was into leaning more about – I took a couple of Visual Basic classes as part of my degree and several extra C++ classes. I also taught myself PHP and SQL at around the same time while pursuing a job opportunity. I was just a couple of credits shy of graduating with a second programming focused degree, actually.

I was doing a lot of PHP work for awhile, and had a brief foray into professional programming mostly working on ASP Classic and Java. I’ve worked as a sysadmin and network engineer since then, which means my coding is mostly centered around automation scripting, when I get a chance to dust it off, and Python is my language of choice these days. Pascal is still my first love, however. There’s just something so simple and natural about coding in good old procedural Pascal to me. Of course, given how I learned it, a lot of my old, bad habits tend to come back out when working with Pascal, but whatever. It’s a hell of a lot of fun!

So yeah, I went on to get a BS in Information Technology and have something like 10 active certifications related to system administration and networking, and I’ve worked in and around IT since all the way when I was a high schooler back in the Demonic days of 1997. I definitely owe a lot to my time in the scene. I mean, the discipline required for self-studying for a challenging technical certification goes back to my days trying to figure out how to setup BBSes, or some random Internet servers, dabbling with Linux, or figure out how to code some tricky routine in Pascal, all in relative isolation, and I don’t question that my management style (at times in my career when I’ve been a manager) owes a lot to lessons learned running or helping run groups and projects in the scene.

Were you involved with the HPAVC scene?

I would say I’ve always been interested in the scene, but not really an active participant. Like most of us curious kids, I was naturally drawn to those “forbidden” subjects. As soon as I started calling boards, I started collecting old text files and zines. Of course, I quickly discovered that hacking was a lot less glamorous than movies and TV shows made it look, but I was introduced to phreaking, which felt more accessible, actually useful, and less risky. In fact, my scene alias, Jack Phlash, is very much inspired by those kinds of classic, cheesy hacker handles of old like “Captain Crunch” and yes, the “Ph” is fully intentional. 🙂

Over the years I dabbled in setting up confs and toll frees, running prank calls, voicemail hacking, war dialing, red boxing, and a variety of relatively mundane phreaking related shenanigans. I had some local friends who did some of this stuff with me, which was always a ton of fun. We also had some little text zines we’d put out, but nothing that ever went very far. Most of my h/p energies were spent keeping up with numerous zines and text files over the years, and sometimes providing ASCII art for them.

It’s funny, because at times, a big part of my aforementioned career in Information Technology has been working with telephony, including old school, big iron PBX phone switches and more modern SIP based VOIP systems alike. The 16 year old phreak in me would sometimes get inappropriately excited to have root access and the opportunity to do relatively deep dives into these systems. I mean, the power at my fingertips was the type of shit I’d fantasize back then, though of course in an entirely different scenario. I suppose I could make similar statements about the security aspects of my job, though that has always felt far more practical and less exciting than working with phones.

What about Zeronet? it was a very cool HPAVC network and very popular back then. How things going today?

Zer0net’s heyday as the one of the most active “othernets” out there, and a premier one at that, has likely come and gone. Still, even to this day we often have strong spurts of good conversation, and still maintain and add to a respectable nodelist – I think we have over 30 awesome, active nodes currently. There have been times over the years that I’d considered closing the doors, handing the reins to someone else, maybe another network op, but as it stands right now, I feel pretty good about the whole thing. In fact, the 20th anniversary of our first public infopack release is coming out soon, and with it I’ll be releasing a long overdue, newly revised “living” infopack that I intend to maintain from here on out.

We’ve always had competition from other networks, including some that seem to be straight up rip offs of Zer0net, but they’ve always come and gone. Occasionally some cool ones show up that I’ll even throw support behind myself, but Zer0net just keeps trucking along!

Continued in Part 2!

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1. ak67-null.ans by Alpha King from Blocktronics: Dark Side of the Block (2019)

About Zer0net

Zer0net font by Knocturnal

Zer0net (AKA The Zer0 Network) is a small, private FTN-based message network (“othernet”) that caters to underground bulletin board systems.

Zer0net was founded in the late 1990s during a desperate time when the last few great dial-up systems were folding and, due to lack of good solutions, telnet hadn’t quite taken hold outside of the odd “public domain” Wildcat and Worldgroup board. Times were changing and while others struggled to come up with ways to move our technology forward or to shift away from the BBS scene entirely, we dedicated this echomail network to the idea of keeping the underground scene and its various areas of interest a part of active conversation on what few “elite” bulletin board systems remained.

With that in mind, Zer0net was built upon 3 principles which have guided it since its inception:

  1. We feature casual conversation revolving around the underground art scenes, the h/p scenes, warez, programming, demos and tracking, and of course all things related to BBSing itself. Many of Zer0net’s regular contributors are influential members of the BBS scene, past and present, and we have official and unofficial affiliations to a wide array of scene groups and software.
  2. As far as that conversation is concerned, we value free speech. The network features open, unmoderated discussion. We never ban topics, never prune messages, and only ban or filter specific users in cases of extreme abusive or disruptive behavior.
  3. Traditionally, membership to The Zero Network has been highly selective. Specifically, systems with beautiful custom artwork, large amounts of modification, an authentic old school, underground feel, and/or an active, quality local community are what we were most looking for, and even today, we’re only interested in serious SysOps who plan on sticking it out for a while. There are many other networks out there for the innumerable SysOps who get nostalgic and put up boards with default setups and no active users. This is not one of them! Likewise, if your only goal is to add yet another network name to your conference list without ever actually participating, please don’t bother.

That said, if you think your system will add some value to the network, whether it’s the kind of elite system described above, or if that just means you posting a ton yourself, please download our latest infopack (always available here) and fill out the application. Update 7/1/2024: After a very long pause, Zer0net is once again accepting applications!

Download the current Zer0net infopack! (updated 12/2024)

Other notable articles related to the network:

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1. Included in k1-lg23.ans by Knocturnal from Fuel #23 (2017)

Zer0net’s Big Two-Oh!

In celebration of its 20th birthday this August, I wanted to write about some of the largely untold history of Zer0net.

Prehistory

Most of my direct exposure to echomail networks came from the few networks the local PD boards in my area carried, including Fidonet itself. Beyond that, most of what I knew about them was observed from a distance – seeing reference to them in zines and emags, on BBS ads, and coming across the occasional network application or infopack archive. Mostly networks associated with BBS software and underground groups, such as WWIVNet, IQS, and TRiCNet, in other words, along with a few of the more infamous networks such as FelonyNet that were sometimes mentioned in old hacking text files. I also recall there being vestiges of some old underground message networks in my local 615/423 scene, but I can’t seem to remember a single detail about them. Anyway, the point is, I’d used networks here and there, and I knew of tons of seemingly awesome networks, but being an ignorant kid who was still quite new to all of this stuff, I never actually tried to join one myself.

SuckNET Banner

It wasn’t until sometime in mid 1997 during an otherwise unremarkable session of vegging out on IRC that my friend and frequent co-conspirator Immortal Being (AKA, the one and only “m1cah” of kracked.com fame!) randomly decided he wanted to setup a small echomail network with me in an exercise in getting our asses off of the Internet and having some old school dial-up fun. My increasingly deep involvement in the scene was rubbing off on him, I suppose, and he was missing the good old days.

Working mostly from hazy memories of the last time he setup a network years earlier, we struggled our way through configuring our tossers and mailers (Gecho and Intermail) as well as our respective BBS software of choice. I was running Iniquity 1.00 a25r2 and he was running PCBoard 15.22, I believe. Through brutal recall exercises on his part and mind numbing trial and error on mine, we eventually got basic echomail working, dubbed our new, terrible network “SuckNET”, threw a little newschool ASCII banner we got a friend to crank out for us onto the login routines of both of our boards, and called it a success.

Inspiration

My BBS had gone “sort of” up and “definitely” back down in various incarnations since I first got into the scene in 1995, but by the late 90s I had finally gotten enough art to build a setup I was pretty satisfied with. More importantly, like practically all of us IRC junkies at the time, I was rarely offline long enough to accept calls anyway. That changed when I entered the workforce during my senior year of high school. Not being constantly on the Internet anymore meant that I could actually start leaving my board up a somewhat acceptable amount of time every day. An unexpected upside to responsibility!

Cybercrime International by Maestro

Running a dial-up BBS at a time when dial-up scene boards were more or less extinct meant that I had relatively few callers and even less messages. Joining a message network seemed like a logical solution to the latter problem. At the very least, it might help me feel a little less isolated if I could correspond with some of the other diehard SysOps still out there. Of all of the operational “othernets” I knew of, the most appealing was, without any doubt whatsoever, Cybercrime International.

Billing itself as the premium underground echomail network, with a history dating back to the late 80s and all kinds of notable scene associations, including the art scene legends ICE. CCi had made a comeback in the mid to late 90s and, by Midnight Sorrow’s own admission, had made a major effort to absolutely assault the scene with its infopack. I was mostly familiar CCi for being the official Iniquity support network for a time during the period that Comatose’s IDT (Iniquity Development Team, responsible for the notable post-Fiend releases of Iniquity) was active.

So, I downloaded the latest infopack and loved what I found. A network devoted to preserving the dial-up boards and focused on the underground scene with message areas relating to things like hacking, phreaking, the art scene, and the demo scene. Not only that, but CCi had boasted some truly impressive statistics, with over 100 nodes and thousands of messages sent each month. Sign me up!

No, really. Please sign me up! You see, I applied for Cybercrime International and, well, I never heard anything back. I waited days, weeks, and eventually months. After chatting with a few people, browsing CCi’s echos on a board or two that carried it, and even calling the hub, Infinite Darkness, I determined that CCi had seemingly been on autopilot for a few months and its activity had been steadily dwindling as a result. Depressing. 🙁 Having already totally convinced myself of the merit of what CCi was going for, the idea of starting my own, similarly themed network was born.

This is the latest version of CCI’s infopack I could locate anywhere which, oddly enough, I found on 16color.es of all places. Released in December 1998, it’s likely the very same pack I used when I applied for membership. I highly encourage you to check it out, as Midnight Sorrow had the same sort of overly verbose, slightly self-centered obsession with documenting his network that I myself had in starting this blog. Particularly of interest is the history file.

Update: I originally had a small side note here about how I’d like to track him down to interview him about Cybercrime International’s final demise, but I guess we’ll never know. After posting a link to this article on Zer0net, Digital Avatar informed me that he believed that Mitch Waas AKA Midnight Sorrow had, in fact, passed away back in 2008. As such, I’d like to dedicate this article, and indeed Zer0net’s 20th birthday, to Midnight Sorrow. Here is a bizarre little autobiographical piece he wrote about his brush with actual cybercrime.

It was around the same time (spring 1999) that I bumped into a fellow calling himself Marlon Brando who had recently put out a new emag by the name of Mercenary that was, in part, dedicated to covering BBS scene revival. I actually don’t recall how he and I got together, but I’m going to guess it had something to do with Mercenary #1 featuring an interview with Midnight Sorrow himself, in which they briefly discuss the revival and future of Cybercrime International. Likely in my desperation to get my application to CCi accepted, I tracked down Marlon Brando on IRC and bugged him about the status of the network. Yeah, I was utterly shameless back then…

Black Hole Cafe by Tetanus and Tainted-X

It turned out that MB, his board Black Hole Cafe being the CCi hub for Chicago, had also been observing CCi’s steady decline and apparent abandonment in recent months and wasn’t super happy about it. Having a similar love for the scene and views on BBS revival, he and I started chatting on IRC a bit. I honestly don’t recall who brought up the idea first, but MB seemed like the perfect partner to start a new network with and his board would definitely make an impressive second node. Once we’d agreed to work on the effort together, MB took the whole idea very seriously and, with that, we set out to make our very own underground echomail network.

You can run or read the text version of the one and only issue of Mercenary here, by the way. Yes, 16color.es allows you to execute emags in-browser! How awesome is that? Oh, and before you ask, no, I don’t recall why there was only ever one issue!

Founding

You might not get that impression today, but all of the ground work and the initial founding of Zer0net was entirely a joint effort between Marlon Brando and I, and we quickly set to work on defining what we wanted our new network to be.

First and foremost, and this will be obvious to you if you just looked at the above link to their last infopack, we were exceedingly “inspired” by Cybercrime International. Oddly, we seemed to be more inspired by the version of CCi from the mid 90s when it was first revived (when membership was only granted to proven, “quality” underground scene related systems and there was absolutely no moderation of conversation) than the one that eventually came to be by the end of 1998 (when they’d accept almost any system and echos were highly moderated to remove garbage posts and flames.)

Regardless of all of that, the basic theme of catering to topics related to the underground scenes was very similar, and large parts of our echolist (and the rest of our infopack) admittedly stunk just a bit of plagiarism. Still, an absolutely massive difference between CCi and what we were doing was that we had no grand ambitions for our network’s size, reach, and continued growth – we were fine with being a relatively small network. In fact, in launching an echomail network in 1999, and one with strict recruitment criteria at that, it seemed kind of inevitable, don’t you think?

I don’t remember exactly where we got the name Zer0net from, though I feel like I was probably the one who suggested it given that I had released a fairly trash oneliners/wall door with Demonic in the not too distant past with the very familiar name of “zer0liners”. In any case, we liked it – it was simple, catchy, vaguely edgy in that way that was so crucial to a good scene name, but also completely meaningless and ambiguous. I started working up some art for it immediately, discovering that is was also fun and easy to draw for to boot.

For the node numbering scheme we consulted a web based network zone database which someone was dutifully maintaining (and seems to have completely disappeared now, sadly) and picked a number that both looked “cool” and apparently wasn’t in use. Of course, most of the obvious ones like “666” and “69” were taken, but hey, “911” (the number you dial for emergencies in the United States) seemed pretty cool. Well, at least for a couple of years. 😐 We decided to go with country+area codes for individual net numbers as a throwback to the localized scene days when you repped what area code you were from. Of course, it turns out that giving away entire nets to individual nodes isn’t actually a smart idea, but neither of us were Fido Technology Networking gurus. Luckily that hasn’t caused us too many headaches over the years.

So with that, we were off. MB and I worked through setting up our respective tossers, mailers, and BBS software (we were both running relatively early versions of Mystic at the time) in much the same way m1cah and I had done with SuckNET years before, only this time I had at least a little more experience with echomail and MB, luckily, brought a not insignificant amount of experience to the table himself.

Notably, MB and I, despite running dial-up boards, had decided to use the Internet for mailing exclusively. I had stumbled across a little utility called “Fidonet 2 Internet Mailer” that I was eager to try. At the same time, CCi had been moving in the same direction in recent years, so MB had some knowledge of Fido2Int himself, which turned out to be handy since it was a poorly documented and fairly quirky program. Fido2Int worked by leveraging SMTP and POP3 servers to send and receive echomail packet bundles via Internet email of all things. Goodness, what times to live in.

We did most of this work in July, 1999 and went public, releasing our first infopack, in August 1999, with the first version of our setup guide releasing the following month. Without many dial-up boards still kicking, and telnet boards still being incredibly rare, Zer0net initially grew quite slowly. Of course, keeping things underground, we never really made any effort to advertise or otherwise “market” the network and, for reasons I honestly don’t quite recall, the network wasn’t ever the Demonic network or, actually, all that strongly affiliated any of our other related groups or projects. Had I launched a Demonic related network at the height of our popularity, just a year or two earlier, we would have surely grown a lot more quickly than Zer0net ever did. I suppose we simply wanted to keep it its own thing. Quite odd, in reflection.

Evolution

Of course, nothing ever stays the same, not even crotchety old FTN networks, and over the next few years Zer0net saw some notable changes.

First, Marlon Brando decided he didn’t want to be involved in running the network anymore, and handed his half of control of the network to me. Not too long after he ended up closing down Black Hole Cafe and dropping out of the scene entirely. No hard feelings, it was just his time to move on. He actually stopped by as recently as 2017 to say hello, so he’s still alive and kicking, if you were wondering!

Original Zer0net Text Header by Jack Phlash

Second, we quickly moved away from Fidonet 2 Internet to the venerable Internet Rex, which stayed a central part of Zer0net’s operations for many years to come. At first, we continued using email to pass mail, but then made a move over to FTP. Sending and receiving our mail bundles via a common directory on demonic.net’s host server at first, we eventually we moved to individually secured directories, then to having them hosted on the same box as Distortion itself. Today the network runs almost entirely on Binkp and thanks to the magic of semaphore driven events, mailing is close to real time across most nodes rather than being batched every so many hours.

The next significant change was a concerted effort to consolidate and reduce the overall number of echo areas we had. I was constantly annoyed by the way certain echos were almost entirely deserted while others got a fair amount of action, so, like a restaurant reducing the size of its menu to focus on the quality of just a handful of menu items, we cut our echo list nearly in half, combining different areas wherever it (mostly) made sense to do so.

The most significant change that happened to Zer0net, and indeed the entire BBS scene, was the spread of telnet BBSes. I believe a lot of people forget this fact, but for years running a telnet bulletin board simply wasn’t an easy task. You could run something like Daydream or Waffle under Linux, or you could run a board under OS/2 with SIO’s virtual fossil driver fairly effectively, but beyond running one of a small number of commercial BBS software packages that featured their own proprietary telnet daemons, Wildcat 5 or Worldgroup most notably, running a telnet BBS under Windows was, at best, suboptimal. With the releases of Synchronet 3.00 and Mystic 1.06, both in 2000, telnet was finally freely and quickly available to the vast majority of us who ran Windows, and a not insignificant number of us even leveraged its excellent com port and fossil emulation (intended for door game support) to use Synchronet as a front-end to host our favorite DOS BBS software. Add in the fact that broadband was finally starting to become available residentially, and the scene quickly transformed.

The classic Zer0net banner by Grymmjack

In fact, the early to mid 2000s was probably the “golden era” of Zer0net, with so many amazing boards like Grymmjack’s Sector 7, Sociopath’s Elixir, Tracker1’s The Roughnecks, Skatter’s Black Thursday, Lord Scarlet’s Idle Dreams, Sinister-X’s Outzone, Jinx’s Tir Tairngire, Smooth’s Dungeon 3, Mercyful Fate’s Haunting the Chapel, Access Denied’s Pharcyde, and Captain Hood’s Piranha, to name but a few favorites, either transitioning to or being purpose built to run on telnet. It seemed like practically every one of the best, most active scene related boards was on Zer0net at the time. Given that it was a time when the underground BBS scene was experiencing a real paradigm shift, it’s nice to look back and remember Zer0net being a part of it, even if it wasn’t necessarily a pivotal part of it.

One more recent change is that I’ve been transitioning away from the name “Zeronet”, instead branding it specifically as “Zer0net”. This is largely due to the appearance and popularization of this admittedly pretty cool thing. I wish they’d Google’d for the name before deciding on it, but hey, maybe they did and just assumed what they were doing was way more important than us, and they were probably right. 😉 It’s less annoying than being confused with NetZero and getting random emails from obviously extremely confused people trying to sign up for free dial-up Internet accounts back in the day, at least. Yes, that happened. Besides, unbeknownst to us back in 1999, it’s not like no one else had ever used the name before.

Beyond

Zer0net is somehow still here, still fairly active despite wild swings in activity that tend to defy obvious logic or pattern, and still operating under its original mission statement of providing open, largely unmoderated conversation around a variety of underground scene related topics (and Metallica) hosted by some of the scene’s very best bulletin board systems.

Of course, I have to give a big shout out to all friends of the network past and present: our close to 100 node SysOps, our innumerable users over the years, the scene artists who helped keep our image oh so elite, and all of those who greatly contributed to the network by helping other new nodes get setup or even stay up, or helped with the administration of the network in various other ways. Also, a special shoutout to our oldest nodes: Hax0r’s stalwart Synchronet 3.x system Hax0r’s Palace, Dream Master’s (himself running an even older othernet, DoRENet) Dreamland BBS, and g00r00’s Sector 7 (formerly Pulse before inheriting Grymmjack’s setup, which itself was one of our original nodes!) Those old bastards have been with us since near the beginning.

Zer0net Big 20 by Jack Phlash

So what’s next? Well, in August I’ll be replacing Zer0net’s old statically released, numbered infopacks, which haven’t been updated since nearly the beginning, with a constantly iterated on, unnumbered, single pack, which is a more modern and, honestly, much better way to handle minor changes like node and nodelist file updates. As long time node ops can attest, this new infopack has been a long time coming and it feels only too appropriate to be releasing it on our 20th birthday.

Beyond that? Perhaps one day we’ll move to mailing via Binkp exclusively, and encrypted Binkp connections at that. I’ve also been tossing around the idea of finally adding file gating to the network for hatching nodelist updates and sharing relevant scene related releases with our nodes. Most importantly, Zer0net isn’t going anywhere as long as I’m still around, and if I’m no longer around? Well, I hope someone will pick up the pieces and keep it going then too.

For posterity, here is a quick and dirty archive of our old, official releases:

ZN-001.ZIP – Zer0net Infopack #1 (1999) ZN-002.ZIP – Zer0net Infopack #2 (2000) ZN-003.ZIP – Zer0net Infopack #3 (2001) ZN-004.ZIP – Zer0net Infopack #4 (2002) ZN-HELP.TXT – Zer0net Setup Guide 1.0 (1999) ZN-HELP2.TXT – Zer0net Setup Guide 2.1 (2001) ZN-HELP3.TXT – Zer0net Setup Guide 3.0 (2002)

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1. Untitled SuckNET Banner by Julian Stardawn (I think?) Unreleased. (1997)
2. te-bhc1.ice by Tetanus and Tainted-X from ICE 9811 (1998)
3. mae-cci3.ans by Maestro from Legion #1 (1998)
4. Included in jp-col17.asc by Jack Phlash from Hazmat #6 (1999)
5. gj-0net.ans by Grymmjack from Warlock #1 / Glue #36 (2001)
6. jp!-zn20.ans by Jack Phlash from Blocktronics: Dark Side of the Block (2019)