Deathrow BBS. The following content I wrote covers some of what I think happened during the time the BBS was named that, but there are some hard parts to this. The Sarlacc -> TIT0rS -> Imperial City -> Deathrow -> Goldfish transitions aren’t absolute in my memory. Goldfish having the biggest time in between other BBSs is kind of the easiest to figure out, but there is a chance of story overlap. That being said, I think the tail end of this with the Boxing matches might be Goldfish BBS, but the SysOp chat’s and all that are definitely Imperial City or Deathrow BBS time.
The IC/TiT0rS time was a lot of learning with the BBSs. Once we got through the summer of 1993 though somehow, the part of the story that is blank to me, Marty and I got a real itch to try and make a bigger, better, BBS.
This probably comes from that school year us both having the fifth period Turbo Pascal class at the High School. Marty also spent the prior year at a school called Midtown with what essentially seemed like a custom curriculum that allowed him to play on the computer.
His mother had recently got their first in house PC, and J.F. now had some variant of a PC made by Packard Bell. Everywhere he went he had a computer. Since 9th grade feature Chris M. more, Marty spent his time on those computers and feel in the sink hole of the warez idea. This came through in IC, which he was involved in as well. But it was this new post summer of 93 BBS that he would “partner” up with me like we did with Sarlacc Software and that BBS.
The name, Deathrow, for the uniformed or uncaring, comes directly from the gangster rap label he was very into. The BBS would also feature a lot of new things, Marty’s start up warez “group” DGZ, or Digital Gangster(z) along with the handle Kurupt. Now he had started some of this with IC, looking at one of the old ANSi’s I can see Gat distribution site. Gat was another attempt at getting on the inside, but DGz was going to be a group, with warez, and art packs, he had a plan, sort of. All of this would fall under this same gangster rap BBS theme.
Now I covered the background, we had a large amount of hard drive space for kids at the time and a couple of phone lines to put the BBS on. My plan though wasn’t as specific. I just had a fun summer with the BBS scene and wanted to get a BBS back up. A BBS is what us kids had instead of phones with the internet on them, it was the early to mid-90s way to chat covertly with mainly other kids, but some of those kids were college kids.
And it came with a cost, no matter which friend I was co-running it with or not. It was a hard investment time. Between setup, maintenance, and the social aspect of it, it was another world within regular reality. And that is hard to express in a retelling of times. But Deathrow was going to be me doing all of that, keeping up with the users and then for some reason being willing to humor the stuff Marty wanted to inject into the BBS. We would also get some more people involved in the BBS.
Jake, who lived at the house for some of the BBSs life would be on. Jake’s whole duty was managing the descriptions of the dirty pictures on Deathrow BBS. He was sixteen, so legally not even allowed to have it in the first place, here he is maintaining it for distribution. And we are but one little city in California, so then the mind has to wrap itself around the fact that what people now call “internet” porn was at one point heavily maintained by children. Hope you don’t have kids to contemplate that one with, because we weren’t even actual delinquents. In fact I could also say in retrospect a lot of us were just normal kids, who happened to find it fun to run a BBS out of their bedroom.
Jake loved his job too. He would come in my room whenever there was a section of new uploads and take an excruciatingly long time to give descriptions to each picture. Because there were no thumbnails in a text-based environment. You just had a file name, the size and a description of the picture you selected. With download speeds what they were, for some deviants the description was the way to decide whether or not you wanted to waste you online time with a certain picture or not.
So this brings me back to the embarrassing stuff about poo humor. Poop humor comes and goes during elementary school. It was pretty much gone by Junior High in my world then something weird happened. So, to fill our archives with files, even the image files I mentioned we would go around and collect up highlights from other BBS, a lot of the time, sharing files between those local small BBSs I’ve mentioned. Our college friend that ran one of the BBSs always had a more extensive image collection than we did if you catch my drift, so getting on there to peel files down was a routine.
So, it was one day that we saw a file listing in his archives called feces.gif. We looked at the description for the file and it was listed thus, woman enjoys man’s feces. At 14, in 1992 this was prime shock content. That filename, not the file itself, but that file name became an inside joke, it became the quintessential model for absurdity, and we were getting into a lot of absurdist humor at that age. This sparked the rabbit hole for what could be more appalling, and eventually was the breeding ground for usenet groups and exploration of the internet.
It also mainstreamed poop jokes again. Which without I would have never heard my mother use a swear word in her exhaustion of hearing the word poop. It was the breakdown of witty humor instead leading to a world wherein we knew of Raymond Burr’s alleged obsessions, and extended our slang vocabulary to words like Grogan, which later in live was the fake girlfriend Jim told me Brendan had met while I lived in San Diego, of course her first name, Bertha.
I’ve painted a disappointing picture of the world, it wasn’t just poop jokes and Jake describing dirty pictures to other kids. The ANSi art that came of it was always fun, same as always. This should really be in the art section but here we go. ANSI which was used to display “graphics” on the BBS were sometimes so elaborate that people shared those like software and dirty images, so much so that some of the bigger “art” groups distributed monthly art packages advertising various BBSs around the country... world.
There were two major groups I remember, ACiD and iCE, spelled with lowercase I’s. These groups boasted what at the time felt like top tier art and advertised what at the time felt like the most underground BBSs. Of course, years later, most of the art was lifted from Comic Books, and how underground is your warez BBS when 30 years later we can still pull your advertisements off the internet. No, they were more the most popular, underground BBSs. Which meant they carried clout. Think of them as streamers in the 2020s that have huge followings but pretend to still be degenerate gamers.
It was this world we all liked, but if I were to be honest, Marty liked most of all. And it was wanting to be part of it became his contributions to Deathrow BBS. Locally there were some kids getting involved in a group called Alive, while never terribly big, their art packs have made the archive on the internet to this day. Now I don’t know the background, but somehow Marty had a dislike for the group. I will never forget his “alive, a lamer, a loser” quote just like I remember his ATV Christmas quote. It’s just always there in my brain.
So then whether in response to wanting to be in the big well-known groups, and or whatever went on with him and the Alive group, Marty used Deathrow to launch his own group DGZ. The group was him, someone I remember always hearing about and never meeting, and then us on the BBS. So, Marty would collect what he could, I made him a few ANSi’s and I know what he had at least one of his “packs” on the file base for Deathrow. I think it only ever had the one official release, it was also supposed to be on the other BBS from the one other member I never met, but his number was a secret and like I said we never met. Decades later you can’t find it on the list of art pacts that have been collected from that era, whereas the Alive ones are available, so take that as you may. I’m not trying to tear Marty down, but I even at the time remembering that he held some possible delusions on what exactly DGz was compared to what the groups that had monthly packs were.
Art packs were something that would come out every month and be exciting even without Marty’s group ever really taking of. One of the two big groups also had a high resolution ANSi “viewer” called Krystal View which would take our little ANSI text pictures and display them as though the characters were pixel sized, making our creations seem cooler, like legitimate graphics. This program was essential as some of the images became bigger and longer to watch load as text.
A feature that was used at home a lot on the small BBS was the Sysop chat mode. Especially in the early, Sarlacc/TiT0rs BBS days, when the only line in was 756 7559, there was no chat feature like the bigger BBSs in town that had multimode support, so the only real time chatting was with usually me and someone I pulled into an administrator chat from the PC the BBS was running on. A lot of the time someone would come on specifically requesting to do so, and we would talk, but sometimes the chat was more of a surprise thing for users maybe not using the board as that much of a social outlet like us kids.
There could be serious reasons to do so, someone was uploading files and we needed to talk and so on, but there was also the kid’s sense of humor reasons. So notably I remember one time Marty used the sysop chat to mess with Joe’s little brother, Jake, not the Jake that lived at the L street house another one. Now I don’t know all the backstory on this, but I’ll try it the best I can.
Little Jake, or little j, as I will call him now was a younger brother to Joe, who himself was in Chris K.’s class, thus making him a year younger than the average already, then as a little brother little j was what we considered a little boy. However, even more so than Joe he wanted to get on the BBSs and do the BBS stuff. This made him the little kid in a world of what started out as like 14-year-olds. Sharing the same first name with Jake, Jake renamed him Dirt, for his dirty appearance. As things do the nickname stuck. He did not carry that name online. In fact I don’t remember what his online name was since we hit him so hard with the Dirt nick name.
Anyway, overtime somehow J.F. took a shine to him and so he interacted with Marty and J.F. a lot. He also was hanging out a lot with another younger girl that frequented Graham’s BBS named Jen, also not the same Jen that I will know. I think she was also in the same class as Joe but might have been even one more down. To me they were all little kids and other than allowing Jake his fancy on the Dirt nickname, I didn’t have a lot of cross over involvement with the daily comings and goings. But as I said since J.F. started to, and he was Marty’s ride everywhere there was some cross over.
Thus, we lead up to a sysop chat that occurred probably in 1995. Marty decided to mess around with little J while he was on whatever iteration of the BBS it was at the time. And we get to another moment in time where there were thousands of Sysop chats over the years, but for some reason this one dumb one Marty had with little J was the one that stuck. During this conversation money came up as a subject. I believe Marty was essentially shaking him down for some spending cash as was something that the BBS would get used for. Marty claimed some sort of financial independence through working with Radioactive isotopes in the basement of some building at UCD. I remember this because this was the point when the conversation became absurd.
But it was oddly little J’s response that took the cake. Earlier he hit us with “Whin is Jen gnoing to pay me my paperroot mooney.” Which stayed in the quotable L street for a long time, but in response to Marty’s bullshit about isotopes we got a scarry look into a 11 year olds psyche. I wont remember it all word for word, but it somehow started of with “Im so embarrassed. I wak(wake) up in the morning with a wady(woody).” He then had a short sentence about the difficulties that entails, and then ended with how it all reminds him of how much he hates “been” 11.
An admission of sexual frustration in a young boy is enough to gain scorn from your older peers, the crazy misspelled words and shame he carried in the statement iced it as something that would get referenced a lot. See I wasn’t the only boy there when Marty got him to spew this information out, but so were a lot more of the boys involved with the BBS at the time, so the statement snowballed into a teasing frenzy for a while. It’s not easy being the younger sibling.
I also remember what his online name was, it was Jake the Genious, I think I spelled it the way he did, I can’t believe I forgot that because saying Ge-ne-ose at him was another thing that happened a lot. It was never good to be the nerd in a group of nerds on the outside. Jake luckily wasn’t the only one, as time passed he got into the Alive group and Marty’s wrath toned down a bit, and big Jake just didn’t care nor hang out with Joe enough anymore for it to matter. Thus came another Chris into the BBS scene.
This was now later on in High School, but this Chris would start logging onto the BBSs under the name Your Master. What I remember from him was a snarky attitude and some tales of martial arts prowess that were not to be believed. I never got that point to the martial arts stuff. Marty was intense with it for a while, and I think almost all the boys from the K street apartments did Tae Kwon Do at some point during junior high. I think because of SF2 to an extent the conversation about it stayed around, and since Marty always had to have the last word in any jargon battle eventually Your Master and him clashed.
Now Marty wasn’t free from scorn, Chris M and I gave him his fair share back, but YM was new and somehow couldn’t endear himself to anyone, so the downhill slope began. He quickly gained the nickname of Yiddish Masturbator and was dunked on pretty regularly in the message boards as nothing but a bullshitter. Until we organized a BBS fighting tournament. Now we had a actual outlet to show who was the better boxer.
I think I have gone on about this a bit already, I got stuck with Marty as a partner because he came out with a strict rule of no shots to the head and no one else was really going to play around all Marty’s attempts at adding stipulations. So somehow YM got his bout with Joe. I actually remember us all getting into the fight itself. However, it ended either side didn’t seem too happy with it, and so the two continued chirping at each other post fight. So we ended up with a cartoon moment were YM showed up how well he could High kick, and so Joe making fun of him mimicked the move, and had the seam on the back of his pants split wide open for everyone to see immediately on doing so.
Then there was Kim. Tailing off ninth grade I spent a lot of time on the telephone with her. The BBS wouldn’t change that, I would just have to use the house main line instead of my personal line. Somehow to be impressive I gave her some sort of jurisdiction on the BBS, to what end I don’t remember. She was a school over achiever so all of this was new to her, but for some reason she seemed into it and I went over duties and the like. In the end it was probably a waste of a SysOp for the BBS, I don’t think she did anything but log in to do the SysOp chat, maybe post on the forums, but it is what it is I guess. I think she got one friend to make an account, so maybe she was the marketing manager. We were boys, she was a girl, so we gave her more power than she needed.
The weirdest part about Deathrow is it sits in between IC and Goldfish and so it’s identity beyond letting Marty try and run his thing on it is pretty clouded. There is a break during the time I went to Germany in the summer and before Goldfish started up senior year, just like the little transition between IC and Deathrow. But was Deathrow really anything more than me letting someone be a co-system administrator on IC? Not really. Therefore this jumble of not well defined BBS memories really can get lost in which BBS it goes with.
Technically I guess the 1994 gap is bigger than I am thinking. In fact Jake did live at the house while working on it, so perhaps the transition between IC and Deathrow was the Germany trip. That would seem to make more sense and add to what I am talking about. Which is that I cant tell the difference between the two thirty years later.
It was then probably the summer of 1995 when Deathrow would go down, waiting for the next BBS setup in the house to take its place. The other key point here is Deathrow would be the end of trying to be in line with the warez sites and all of that. Through multiple friend drama’s Marty would get a bit of pariah status for the next few months, or year maybe. From Deathrows ashes will come a BBS that sort of is the opposite of what it, and to some extent IC was trying to do.
Addendum #1
A crazy addon to everything else I have stated so far. Deathrow BBS which start date is somewhat unknown does have a paper trial from Marty of a school write up he did on it. There are a couple things to note. One, I believe the following was written to get school credit for setting up Deathrow BBS. Two, he is going to refer to it all as his, even though all the hardware was mine and I probably did, well since I don’t have an exact memory, ill say 50 percent of the setup. Third, he never mentions the name of the BBS, presumably because he is worried telling a teacher his project was named Deathrow might count against him as it being a serious technological endeavor. This itself is kind of funny because I don’t think I would have cared back then and it does show a line Marty was scared to cross with adults at the time, well adults that didn’t run the 7-11 and that he needed something from, like grades.
There are another couple interesting things, I forgot I used the name LinT for this BBS. Kim using the name Smozy I do remember. Also notably Jake’s name is left out of the adult files section, which I was surprised to see he mentioned but obviously didn’t elaborate upon. Also now that I have a list of hardware for the PC’s I had back then, the modem and large hard drive I got for my birthday will stick out as being mentioned in his write up. I don’t care that he wrote them as his, I just find it funny, I don’t remember if at the time I was aware of this project or found out about it later. But I obviously didn’t get upset so much so that I kept a copy of the write up.
The phone number and, well, possibly serial number writing in pencil at the top of the write up are a mystery to me. The phone number even more so because there is no area code on it, but it doesn’t match the local number prefixes of the time.
Oh, and look at this. So, the Deathrow "poster"/flyer at the top of the section is misspelled. I noticed this. Recently when putting the section together. I just thought I had missed something as a kid and was mildly embarrassed but just went with it. Then I found the copies we used as flyers. And look there the error was caught and fixed before distribution. nice!
