So I was at the Berkman/Corante SSA meetings and this Legion of Doom guy, Lex Luthor was sitting in the back and he sez to me, he sez…
"BBSes, no BS… that’s where the social software thing took root. just thinking back, there were a few that stood out in the world of phreaking…
Plovernet: That BBS was crazy. Constantly busy since it had hundreds of active users and Quasi Moto let everyone post whatever they wanted and never deleted messages unless there was no disk space left. We helped start the "philes" trend there also. It was easy to spot who knew what they were talking about so I invited them onto the LOD BBS. Some of the people on the LOD BBS were then asked to join the now infamous LOD group.
Although I knew the guys in the group were good hacks/phreaks, I had no clue of where it was leading. Since we did not tolerate destructive/malicious behavior nor things like credit card fraud I did not think there was much risk in the group as a whole getting any real attention. Of course, all that changed with time.
Metal Shop Private: The users were idealistic and good natured which was refreshing. I liked it most because it was a good source of information/files and we were the first to see new Phrack issues.
Farmers Of Doom: Mark Tabas did a fantastic job with this one. It was quite busy, but did not remain up very long.
Phoenix Project: Again, another fantastic job. The Mentor had some rather unconventional ideas like letting security people on, which I thought was a good idea.
RACS III: Tuc didn’t give me the time of day at first, but eventually I got on. Then he took it down.
Pirates Cove: The board in 516 (Long Island, NY). One of the classics. It’s where I met Emmanuel Goldstein and invited him onto Plovernet to help sell 2600 subscriptions.
Catch-22: Absolutely positively the most secure BBS I ever encountered. Besides passwording subboards along with requiring users to have a high enough security level to access them, it made use of many concepts from the "basic security model" introduced by Lampson and later augmented by Graham and Dorothy Denning. Of course Silver Spy and I had no clue what an access matrix was and things of that nature. A duress password was implemented so if someone got nailed they could enter the password, not compromise the system, yet appear as to be cooperating with the authorities who we presumably thought would ask the hacker to call. It was never used but nice to have.
BlottoLand: Good board for a while, but he let too many of his "loyal subjects" on the system who were locals and they eventually overran it.
