Fear, Loathing And Anal Sex… On A Dial-Up: The Other Side Of CPCN’s First Philly Internet Community
AS TOLD BY JEN OLIVER, CPCN USER FROM 1995-1996: I remember CPCN a little differently: While it carried the City Paper name, the telnet site seemed disconnected from the paper entirely. A bunch of people, though, remember it as one of the first Philly-based online communities.
I wasted many hours (and a shitload of money in long distance charges) telnetting to the BBS from Rutgers in Camden. The site was extremely bare bones. There were no photos, no search function, no fancy hyperlinks, or user profiles. There were only a few commands: press “W” to see Who was online, “C” for Chat, and so on. There was access to Usenet Groups and other locally stored newsgroups/bulletin boards. What was most striking to me, though, was how unpopular the site was, even though CP took out full-page ads beckoning people to the the site. At any given time, there were never more than maybe 15 people online. By comparison, PhillyBlog claims 26,189 members as of this afternoon.
When CPCN launched in 1995, it was ok, even encouraged, to use a pseudonym. Usernames took one of several forms: informational (newsman, sysop), cutesy (mandapanda), music-based (mansized), obtusely literary (sirin, queequeg), or just plain sexy (assfuck jones, 12incher). FULL DISCLOSURE: I was “beekeepr” and” anon,” among other names. People had numerous “handles” because there was a 15-minute per-day max on chat time for free accounts, but there was no real limitation on the number of accounts people could create. (CP’s Terms of Service threatened to “call and verify account information,” but they almost never did.) So people would get booted off the site, re-telnet, and sign back on under another name.
That small, mostly anonymous community of bored nerds lead to some interesting events: A young girl once threatened suicide in the chat room, claiming she swallowed a bunch of Tylenol. Those there to witness her threat promptly contacted CP staff, who looked up her account info and sent an ambulance to her house. There were two people by the names Rachel and Stephanie, who totally convinced us they were 21-year-old med students, when in actuality they were 13-year-old prep school/city girls. There were several meet ups, including an inaugural gathering at Xero’s on 4th (now the Latest Dish) and a softball game in Fairmount Park. You think that Twitter meet-up in Rittenhouse was awkward? Then you, my friend, have never met Spengo. Or Fred8. Or “Mike.”
The Blizzard of ‘96 was a period of heavy use on the site for obvious reasons, and that’s when the shit started to hit. The aforementioned Assfuck Jones (still don’t know who he actually was) started harassing users and posting personal info, such as family member names, phone numbers and home addressees. He (or she) flooded the chat room and bulletin boards with nonsense like fish sandwich recipes and pleas for anal sex. Presumably, dealing with these headaches was not something the CP staff signed up for, and they pulled the plug on the tenet site, effectively disconnecting the CPCN community.
August 29th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
I was one of the first users on CPCN. I signed up the second that I spotted an ad in the back of a CityPaper in either late winter or spring of 1994. (So it actually was a little older than stated above.)
Yes, it was very bare bones, but then again, I was one of the original Prodigy users, so it wasn’t that bad, just another BBS. I was hoping that at least this one would maybe be less nerdy because it was advertised in the back of the City Paper. And I was right (by comparison, mind you…)
I met a lot of people through that site, some of which I still keep in touch with today, or were future Dummytown members. So it wasn’t all bad. Afterall, this was a site where Jen (the author above) met her husband. Yes, some of the people’s morals were questionable – after all, her future husband was my boyfriend at the time…
But as Jen wrote, on CPCN there weren’t any rules, but would rules have stopped any of the bad behavior? Probably not. People will do horrible things to each other, like post each other’s addresses or bitch each other out in a flame war that never dies down. No, that takes a moderator or two, and CPCN didn’t have those resources as far as we could tell.
But that is exactly what made CPCN so special. I was friends with some of the most troublesome online personalities (not the address posting scumwad). They did it for “shits and giggles” and to rile people up, and because they could. Also, because CPCN didn’t put any measures in place to keep them from doing so. Essentially they were testing the limits of a BBS that was set up with absolutely no foresight or control measures.
Remember, you’re in hacker territory … and there is no internet yet. A lack of a firewall and a wealth of knowledge was a beautiful thing in the winter of 1995-1996. A few keystrokes is all it would take for these computer-savvy wonders and all of a sudden, we could see entire conversations scroll on the screen before our eyes.
And after all, CPCN became one of the many influences for starting up Dummytown and for that – I am very thankful. Knowing what and what not to do, who should and who shouldn’t be in the same place at the same time, and above all else – that there should be at least one moderator watching and making sure that people are at the very least decent and respectful of each other while voicing their opinions instead of just shitting all over each other for fun.
Megan