This is a time capsule – written in 2003 to describe how my online life had evolved up to that point. Looking back in 2026, it all feels like ancient history.
When I was in high school, in the late 1980’s, a friend introduced me to the world of computer bulletin board systems (BBS’s). These were computer discussion and file-transfer systems which you would connect to using a modem over a telephone line (typically 1200 or 2400 bps in those days). For the most part, these were single-user and non-multitasking, so only one person could be online at a time, but a few were multi-user. I mainly participated in the discussion areas, and did not upload or download files very often. These BBS’s were not networked together the way the Internet is today, so their users were usually limited to people for whom the BBS was a local phone call away. I was living in the area of Santa Cruz, California at the time, so I used Santa Cruz BBS’s exclusively.
My favorite BBS’s at the time were XBBS and Pyrzqxgl. These were tree-structured BBS’s, consisting of a single tree of messages, like one very very large thread in a modern email or Usenet forum. Neither system had an upload/download section; both were strictly discussion forums. XBBS was run by Jon Shemitz. Pyrzqxgl’s “sysop” was Tané Tachyon. The two of them live together with their two sons in Santa Cruz to this day. Jon’s company, Midnight Beach, got its name from the old XBBS tradition of having a midnight beach bonfire party on the night of the full moon each month. Each user had to have a login name, and I picked “Zarkoff.”
Why Zarkoff? My usage of that name dates back to my elementary school years (around age 10) when I used to pretend that I was a Martian (which is indicative of how welcomed I felt among my peers, but that’s a different story) named “Zarkoff Aplevz”. I even forged an identity card from the Martian equivalent of the INS. This was not a popular move among my classmates… I used the name “Zarkoff” for years as a D&D character name, computer game username, etc. I later realized I had not made up the name: Dr. Zarkov was a character in the 1970’s Flash Gordon movie. I had seen that movie as a child, and though I didn’t remember the character, the name (if not the spelling) stuck in my mind somehow, and it wasn’t until years later that I became aware that the name wasn’t original.
But I digress. Anyway, I eventually decided to start my own BBS. I wanted to pick a username that fit my personality, and also to pick a name for the BBS that went with the username. I stumbled upon the combination of “The Hermit” for my new name, and “The Hermitage” for the BBS. As I’d always been a recluse I thought it was quite appropriate. I had a vision of a hermit sitting in a cave and having people make the electronic pilgrimage to visit me for my sage wisdom. (Don’t laugh – I was just a nerdy high school kid after all…)
At first, I ran my BBS on a Commodore 128 computer using a C-64 BBS program called “C-Net” (no relation to the current cnet.com, that I know of). But as I was unhappy with C-Net’s Commodore-centrism and “flat” message base structure, I wanted to write my own tree system. When I started college in fall of 1988 (overlapping my senior year of high school) at University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), my parents gave me my first PC (a 33 MHz 80386 running MS-DOS 3.3). I developed a tree-structured message system first as a set of macros for Telix (an MS-DOS terminal emulator), and later as a stand-alone C program. I continued this for a few years, but in the early 1990’s, as the popularity of the Internet grew and BBS’s started dying out, I decided to stop running it.
Also in 1988, I started using Unix. I had a friend in high school whose mom worked at SCO (the Santa Cruz Operation, at the time the main vendor for Unix on a PC platform). He had SCO XENIX running on an 80286 PC at his home, and he gave me an account on it with the username “hermit”. I used the same username when I went to UCSC. There was a whole “geek social scene” at UCSC based around an open-access computer that any student could get an account on, called “ucscb”. On that machine there was a BBS-like program called “forum”, where people chatted about all manner of subjects and social events were organized. I was known in that community by my login name, “hermit”. I also continued my participation in XBBS and Pyrzqxgl. But true to my login name, I was still pretty antisocial.
I lived with my parents until the end of my freshman year in college, and moved into the dorm on campus for my sophomore year (Parrington Dorm, Cowell College). After my sophomore year I moved into a “geek house” called The Armory. I ran a long serial cable from my computer in my bedroom to the house server and logged in using a terminal emulator. I got my e-mail using UUPC (a PC version of the uucp protocol – get it?). My email address at that time was hermit@thinkum.santa-cruz.ca.us or hermit@thinkum.armory.com or …!ucbvax!ucscc!armory!thinkum!hermit.
I continued to use “hermit” as my Unix login for many years after discontinuing The Hermitage BBS. But as I became less and less of a recluse and more self-confident, “hermit” became an increasingly less accurate description. So in 2001, I changed my Unix login to my given name, Bill.
Now in 2026, I live in Richmond, CA with my partner Rosa. The days of BBSes are long ago, and the rest of the world joined the Internet around the time that I wrote the above text. Since then it no longer feels like a special thing to be online, it’s just part of ordinary life…
Migrated from bill.wards.net/blosxom with some light editing on 2026-04-12