He'd developed into one of the skate rats that made up much of my circle of friends. Gnarly hair, shoes torn from doing runs down the hills so fast that they developed a new term for the oscillations that would rack their boards as they sped down the slope: speed wobbles.

Scott was into making his own smoke bombs and allegedly smoke cloves, which everyone knew was tantamount to smoking pot. People who smoked cloves were the dangerous sort, though would could not truly envision burning cooking spices.

Scott had one of the first Commodore 64s and all the peripherals. We lived in that suburban boredom where everything is kind of flat and there's nothing to do and the parents are really rather detached from their children but MONEY sometimes does solve everything.

To an extent, anyways.

Scott had the year before created a sprite editor for the sixth-grade science fair. The fact that such a thing existed and that a kid his age could rightfully claim credit for it without anyone disbelieving him is mind-blowing to me now. Here's this kid who is maybe 11, 12 tops. I think maybe he'd been kept back a year at school at some point, or else he was just naturally kinda big. And what has he created?

Lemme see. Ok, lets try grid-based character editor. Lets try frame-by-frame sequential editing. How about in-program realtime preview and animation?

Yeah, a kid made that.

I think I may have been one of the only other kids interested in computers who also happened to have access one from home. The Commodore amazed me. In my house, we had the original IBM-PC, no AT/XT bullshit. The IBM had come with a $3,000 pricetag, nearly as much as a car back in those days. My dad was an engineer bred in the early days of the computer fantasy when people still considered them something of a mystical form deserving of praise and worship.

Children were not allowed for the IBM.

The Commodore, on the other hand, screamed "toy". It came in a one-piece box with that same happy clunk of electronics one got from the Atari. You had no idea what was inside, but whatever it might have been, it was solid. Kid-proof.

The very notion begged experimentation.

It was late one afternoon that he kicked on the modem for the first time. His rig took up one corner of his crowded bedroom, looking more like the early-80s make-out pad than a little-kids room.

The modem lights kicked on, there was this magical dialing sound and this horrific screech and then...

There was another computer.

And here's the thing. My father had been bringing home portable typing terminals since '77 or so. They were these huge clunking things that acoustically coupled with your telephone (read: you put the handset in the machine) and thermally ejected paper.

They were connected to Important Machines over the telephone and that seemed pretty magical. My dad would occasionally indulge is in playing the computer in online football or something, but there was this belief that computing time was expensive and to be used to the maximum.

Kids dorking around with the system just wasn't done.

In this other computing world, however, dorking around with the system was the whole name of the game. And it had been set up by plain old bozos like he and me.

The idea burned in me. And, as it turned out, it lurked at our soon-to-be Jr. High school in some teacher's classroom. He'd apparently set it up and then turned the asylum over to the inmates.

This was one of the first computer bulletin boards in the region like this. A social area. People would go and type words and they would appear on somebody else's screen. Perhaps somebody you would never, ever meet would read those words.

What a novel concept.

And this is how it was, how we connected back in the early days. The state-of-the-art developed into monstrous multi-line boards, small "services" really. You could log on and buy transaction time which you could use to do any number of things. Write email to friends. Post on any number of local or national message boards. Realtime chat with people. Realtime instant-message people.

All this ran off some PC in some knucklehead's house. Maybe, if they were bigtime, some corner of some office with a shitload of wires draining out the back.

All this happened years before HTML. Years before the Internet. Lifetimes from the idea that you could have a wire running into your house that gave you realtime connection to the Internet.

Years before anybody had even heard of the Internet.

The Internet killed all that shit because it put the power of publishing and ultimate control over their content in the hands of the users, the creators themselves.

That and you could incorporate everything you'd done before, or nearly so.

By the time HTML hit large, b-boards had all gone away. IRC and Usenet had slowly drained the brain-trust out of the smaller holes that they had previously inhabited, leaving a drying wasteland in their absence.

The terminal-based One Day In The US experience was programmed in August 2003 starting on a Thursday and continuing on blindly until the program was released on Saturday. It attempts to recreate and preserve the terminal-based experience for those who have perhaps never experienced it.

This is what the world was like once, kids. I hope you find things that secretly interest you as much. Things that perhaps itch and burn under your skin for years until one day when you are older and tirer and things perhaps don't interest you as much you will realize that any idiot can now write server software.

And I'm just the idiot who always wanted to.