I have already sat down for this story several times, but each time I could not finish it. The discovery of our company's blog prompted me to do this, although the story has nothing to do with NetCat. This story is about the legendary, in its own way unique and, I'm not afraid of the word, cult phenomenon: White Bear BBS. Location: Moscow, time: early 1996.

Introduction

When I was writing this article, I caught myself thinking that it would be difficult for me to convey to the readers the atmosphere of that time, primarily because it seems to me and myself something distant and unreal. Now, when there are several tens of millions of Internet users in the country, there are broadband networks, laptops with Wi-FI, millions of Russian-language sites - what can I say, and almost every first one has mobile phones - it's hard to imagine that 15 years ago nothing like this was just did not have. So let's try to imagine the year 1996 on the basis of dry facts.

There are 4 large Internet providers in Russia: GlasNet, Relcom, Demos and Russia-On-Line. The number of Russian-language sites with a domain in the .ru zone is a couple of hundred (the domain itself is less than two years old). There are about a hundred thousand Russian Internet users (mostly those whose work is connected in one way or another with the Web). There are about the same number of mobile phone users, because the pleasure is not cheap. Yes, and you can’t just buy a mobile phone, you need to get a personal permission from the State Committee for Communications (yes, until 2000, without such permission, use mobile phone was impossible).

Artemy Lebedev's studio is half a year old, ICQ is only in the project, Yandex and Google are not even in the project. The cost of Internet access is about $ 3 per hour, which was unaffordable for ordinary surfers (you sit for an hour a day - pay $ 150 per month; for example, I then earned an average of $ 200 per month, which was considered very good for 17- summer boy).

Current (and the first, approved as the standard of this language, already for half a year) HTML version- 2.0. It's almost a year before the first W3C recommendations on CSS1 appear. PHP1 already exists, but few people know about it. Internet Explorer 2 just started supporting JavaScript, but this did not help him much in the unequal struggle with Firefox's grandfather Netscape Navigator, although IE, unlike NN, was free browser.

Represented? This is the time we are talking about.

Then FIDO was the only one computer network available to happy owners of computers with modems. I was one of them. My computer with a Pentium 66 megahertz processor was certainly not the most sophisticated, but quite modern.

So, I am a sophomore student and happy, as mentioned above, the owner of the USR (US Robotics) Sportster 14400 modem. Who does not know - this figure meant the data transfer rate, measured in bits per second (for example: now in our office a channel of 10 megabits, that is, almost 1000 times more). However, it was not always possible to connect to 14400, more often it was 9600 or 4800. When I bought the Courier 33600 modem, the situation changed, but not much.

I will not talk in detail about Fido and BBS-s, who does not know what it is -
read for example and. I spent almost every night on BBSs, downloading something, uploading something. And one day I came across White Bear BBS. This acquaintance literally turned my ideas about the possibilities available to me with my modem.

Meet White Bear

There were many BBSs in Moscow, but Mishka had two key features. First, it was multichannel. First 4, then 16, then 32, and then 64 modems were connected to the server on which he lived judge strictly). All modems were manufactured by ZyXEL, at that time the main competitor of US Robotics. This is not surprising, since Mishka was owned by Data Express On-Line (abbreviated as DEOL), the official distributor of ZyXEL products (in the common people "Zukhel") and one of the first private Internet providers in the country. Initially, Mishka was intended to support Zuhel users: drivers, utilities, manuals, etc. However, the DEOL management made one serious "mistake" (this was the second key feature): they installed a program on the BBS that allowed legitimate users to communicate with each other online, in a chat. Not in DOS text mode, but in a full-fledged windows client.

Why mistake? Because all the available modem lines were instantly occupied by lovers of exotic pleasure: real-time communication through a computer. And thus deprived the owners of zuhels (usually non-poor people, because ZyXEL modems cost much more than others) fun download new firmware. In addition, Deol's commercial subscribers accessed the Internet using the same phones - our activity also affected them.

Why is "error" in quotation marks? Because it was she who gave many, including me, a start in life. Or on the Internet.

The program was primitive - from a modern point of view. Any user of ICQ and other QIPs will laugh at the sight of that program. She was an ordinary chat, but then she seemed like manna from heaven and the height of communication possibilities. During the day, sometimes it was possible to call Mishka the first time, but at night, it happened, it took more than an hour to dial. Subsequently, the Deol administration introduced a limit on a one-time connection (45 minutes - after this time, the subscriber was dropped, they had to call again), and then on the time spent by the subscriber on BBS per day, as well as on the number of phrases in the chat. We got out of this situation simply: we registered similar nicknames. An extra underscore and you're already a different subscriber. For example, I had the nickname DedVasilych, as well as Vasilych, DedVasilych_, Ded_Vasilych, etc. In total, I had 6-8 subspecies of the nickname. 3-4 hours a day was usually enough for me, and if not, I registered a new user.

Contingent

Mishka had hundreds of users, and fifty people were completely active. Mostly they were teenagers, from 12 to 20 years old, but there were both very small ones, about seven years old, and quite adult guys. The female gender on Mishka was in a strict minority. We talked ... yes, about everything. Music, computers, girls, bill gates-must-daily, study, alcohol, computer games and so on. Material wealth (not so much ours as parents) is average and above average. This is understandable, not every parent has the ability and desire to buy such an expensive set of toys for the family: a computer and a modem (an average of a thousand and a half dollars, which was very much for most Muscovites).

Residents of other cities also visited us. Such, however, usually lived no more than a month, when the parents received a bill for long-distance communication, after which the modem was either tightly controlled by the elders, or simply sold (don't forget: there were no broadband connections and home networks even in the project, only a telephone connection ).

Now it is difficult to explain why we spent almost every night chatting for several hours (and if we needed to sleep, we stopped by for ten minutes to check in). It was weird and cool. We didn’t feel like we belonged, we didn’t trudge from belonging to the avant-garde, because we all knew about the existence of the Internet with much more possibilities, and some of us even visited it. We just enjoyed the fact that you can just sit at home and chat with fifty people, sometimes separated by tens, and sometimes hundreds of kilometers.

Okay, of course I'm lying. The feeling of belonging to something sacred, not accessible to mere mortals, was very strong.

Offline meetings

If you live in the same city, constantly communicate and there are very few of you, it’s a sin not to meet in person. We met every week on Thursdays (sometimes on other days). The meetings were held in a public garden at the intersection of Maly Levshinsky Lane and Prechistenka, not far from the Arbat. Why exactly there - I don’t know, it started even before I met Mishka. We called the meeting place a sandbox, because in the center of the square there was a fenced-off place with sand, where in the indefinite future a monument to Surikov was to be erected, as was clearly evidenced by a stone placed in the center of the sandbox with a corresponding inscription. Or did the stone appear later? I don't remember anymore.

What were we doing there? Yes, everything that ordinary young people do: they drank alcoholic beverages, discussed anything, especially if it was connected with computers, sang songs, ran away from the police called by local residents, and so on. There were also fights, both with locals and among themselves. Somehow, even an aboriginal, awakened by us, shot at us from the window. Not combat, of course.

The sandbox ended after the opening of the Tamerlan restaurant in the nearest house. Our gatherings five meters from the entrance to a very expensive establishment did not inspire enthusiasm among the owners and security guards of the said establishment. And the meetings from the sandbox moved to the Neolit ​​club, opened by one of Mishka's users, from those who were very "above average". I have only been there a few times. One of the times I remember a meeting of eminent fidoshniks, among whom was “personally Exler himself” (this is how he was introduced to me, only later I found out who he was at all, because I was not a fidoshnik).

Either I didn’t like the place, or work and study began to take more time - I don’t remember - but I didn’t get accustomed to Neolit. The meetings of the Deolites continued for several more years, but most of us, including myself, gradually stopped attending them. However, this was already after the end of Mishka.

Polar Bear Sunset

White Bear BBS closed in the winter of 1997. Several factors contributed to this event. First, the Internet access service became popular, and the Deol administration was forced to release freeloader-occupied modem lines for commercial users. Secondly, Internet access has become more accessible, and the charm of ordinary chat has been overshadowed by the much more serious possibilities of the Web.

Mishka's closure caused a breakdown in many, including me. Most of those of us who have not yet had access to the Internet have found the opportunity to connect to it, legally or not (more on this in a separate story). The community has partially recovered on the #deol IRC channel on the Undernet. As part of former users The White Bear BBS channel lived for some time, but the process of growing up and changing interests cannot be stopped. The community was gradually disintegrating, deolovtsy dissolved in new parties or lost interest in the hobbies of youth. In the process of writing this article, I tortured Yandex with Google in search of traces of past glory. There are few traces left.

Afterword

The White Bear meant a lot to me. In addition to the above-mentioned trip to the Internet, he gave me a second job (the first was the position of a seller of the legal reference system "ConsultantPlus"). I don't remember how I got involved with Deol's administration, but in 1997 I was hired as a piece job as an Internet adjuster for users of this provider. At the request of the user, I came to his home or work and set up access (despite detailed instructions, it was not such a simple procedure, sometimes I had to dance with a tambourine), for which I received as much as 20 dollars. On one of these visits, I was asked if I could make a website, to which I answered yes without hesitation, although I had no idea what kind of animal it was. We agreed on $100, on the way home I bought the book "HTML in action", and soon the site of four pages in bold and italic on a colorful background was ready. This incident marked the beginning of my passion for site building, from which, by the end of 1999, the first version of NetCat grew.

Remarkable people worked in Deol, for example, Evgeny Soldatov and Elena Gubareva, but I was not particularly well-disposed to the company's team, because communicated with them mainly by phone. In addition, by the time I graduated from high school (1999), I was already carried away by my work and gradually moved away from both the Deol community and work in Deol. And over time, both the #deol channel and the provider itself closed.

In the form I described, Mishka lived only a few months, but what months they were! I don’t know how my fate would have turned out without Mishka, but for sure it would have turned out quite differently.

P.S. Once again I apologize if I messed up something in the chronology or facts, so I will be glad for corrections. Over the years, I have lost contact with almost all the Deolists. If there are any among the readers of this article, I will be very glad to meet again. You can also in the sandbox area :)

P.P.S. I express my gratitude to the archive.org project for their invaluable help in correcting the gaps in my memory. If this article is accepted favorably by the habra community, I will write one or two more stories from the nineties.

(book). Keep complete silence, do not say a word.

Explanatory Dictionary of Ushakov. D.N. Ushakov. 1935-1940.

See what "SILENT" is in other dictionaries:

Cm … Synonym dictionary

SILENT, yours, yours; incompatibility (book). The same as being silent (in 1 value). The crowd is silent. Explanatory dictionary of Ozhegov. S.I. Ozhegov, N.Yu. Shvedova. 1949 1992 ... Explanatory dictionary of Ozhegov

Nesov. neperekh. 1. Do not utter a word, keep complete silence; be silent. ott. To be silent [silent 2.], immersed in silence. 2. trans. Do not make yourself known; not show up. Explanatory Dictionary of Ephraim. T. F. Efremova. 2000... Modern dictionary Russian language Efremova

Silent, silent, silent, silent, silent, silent, silent, silent, silent, silent, silent, silent, silent, silent, silent, ... ... Forms of words

keep silent- to be silent, yours, yours ... Russian spelling dictionary

keep silent- (I), I am silent / lion, you howl, howl ... Spelling Dictionary of the Russian Language

Stvoyu, stvoesh; nsv. High 1. Keep complete silence; be silent. The hall is silent. * The people are silent (the last remark from the tragedy of A. S. Pushkin, Boris Godunov). 2. Be silent (2 characters). Nature was silent... encyclopedic Dictionary

keep silent- I'm moving, you're moving; nsv.; high 1) Keep complete silence; be silent. The hall is silent. * The people are silent (the last remark from the tragedy of A. S. Pushkin Boris Godunov) 2) to be silent 2) Nature was silent ... Dictionary of many expressions

keep silent- without / rumors / stv / ova / t ... Morphemic spelling dictionary

Be silent, be silent; to remain silent, to remain silent, to remain silent, to keep one's mouth shut (on a leash, on a string); shut up, shut up, shut up, bite (bite, hold) the tongue. He was numb with fear, lost his tongue, he had ... ... Synonym dictionary

Books

• Poetry and Revolution, Maximilian Voloshin. “There is a scholastic question, about which Russian literature likes to argue from time to time: is the poet obliged to respond to current historical events or should his lips go numb to him ...