Freelancin' Roundtable
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Roundtable (RT) was a modem-based text chat system located in the Pasadena, Texas area near Houston in the early and mid-1980’s frequented by local Bulletin Board System (BBS) users. Roundtable was created, owned, and operated by Jim Penny and his son Bruce. Roundtable was officially known as the Freelancin’ Roundtable, as it was the chat counterpart to the Freelancin’ BBS. RT was the first of its kind in the Houston area.
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[edit] Technology
Roundtable was not a BBS, but simply a chat system that was independent from the BBS. One used a personal computer with a modem and analog phone line to place a phone call to the chat system. Once connected, you logged in with username and password and typed messages to the other users who were also connected at the time. The user interface was totally text-based and used no graphics.
Roundtable existed on a TRS-80 running custom-written software. The modems were 300 baud and later 1200 baud. To support 8 and later 16 modems on a 2 MHz Z80 the software ran in a continuous loop polling each port 30 times a second, in that time it read a byte from the modem, write one pending byte of output to the modem, and performed any user-requests including the few simple single-character commands available. To make login faster, a user's account and password was a haxadecimal address in the program code and the four bytes found at that address. Whenever a new version of the code was installed, Jim Penny had to mail out new passwords to everyone ahead of time.
The user interface was remarkably clean and clutter-free. Text appeared in real-time, and was displayed line-by-line on the screen similar to IRC. New text would appear at the bottom of the screen and move up as more new text appeared.
A notable feature of the system was the scroll. The scroll was simply a log of previous text conversation that one could read when first logging on, or any time. This enabled a person to catch up on what people were writinging. At any time while logged on, a user could hit the left arrow key to re-list the previous lines of text. Pressing the arrow key once yielded the most recent message. Two press of the arrow yielded the two previous messages, etc. Repeated presses of the left arrow would take you further and further back in the scroll until you hit the beginning of the buffered conversation. This was dangerous, there were long-standing bugs that could trigger an infinitely scrolling (scrooling) never-ending repetition of the scrolled text... the dreaded "scrool monster"... and the only defense was to log out. When a user logged on while numerous users were chatting, they would commonly type "scroolin'" to let the user users know they were reading the scroll. You could type a message while the system was scrolling.
There were two channels/rooms and an additional area called Sanctuary that was reserved for privileged users.
Each user’s username was prefaced by a a capital letter and a ) character. The <> symbol was used to log off. There were other commands as well, but they were simple and fit with the elegant, clean interface of the system.
[edit] Fees
Roundtable was not free. Usage was billed on a per-minute basis. The fee was 3 cents per minute. After using $50 of time in a month, the user incurred no more fees that month. This was referred to as ‘maxing’ or being ‘maxed’. After spending $500, the user was considered to be ‘super maxed’ and could continue to use the system for free forever.
Some time after Roundtable gained a large number of users, Jim and Bruce created Penny Net (PN). PN was targeted to younger users, and the cost was a penny a minute. The idea was to keep the kids in a separate area, and offer a lower fee to encourage them to go there.
[edit] Users
There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of users that came and went over the years. Some of the more memorable users were: Bourbon Cowboy, Cheshire Cat, Liz, The Edge, Travelerwayne, GL, Drkilljoy, Max, Angel, Tim Leary, Airman, Clash, Half Carbon-based Android, Zombie, Lil'Red, Dusty, Cosmos, Ces, Randy, Field Engineer/Giraffe, Arielle, Miroc, Honda, RCMP, Phoenix/Armchair Thief, Kahula WanderMaui, and Denny. Jim, the sysop, was known as Jimpen and Bruce was known as Guido.
[edit] Parties
There were several real-life gatherings of RT users. Many of the parties centered around the bay area southeast of Houston because many of the users lived near there, but some parties did take place in the southwest side of Houston and possibly other areas as well.
[edit] RT hacks and add-ons
One hack that was successfully used on RT was to type a message of some general comment or statement, but before hitting the Enter key, you could then type in the appropriate text to spoof another user's name and comments. This could be used to spoof messages from the "System Administrator" which could be used to trick users into revealing their passwords. This was not necessarily a flaw in the software, but because the whole system was text-based, any user could make any text appear on the screen, even text that was normally only output by the system itself such as the (> characters and any user's username. New users were the main ones fooled by this trick, however; it did not seem to be a widespread problem.
Another short-lived hack was to exchange encrypted messages in open chat. One user (Jay Maynard) had written a customized terminal program OERTERM ("obnoxious elitist rude terminal program") which encrypted messages on send and decrypted messages on receive. When this method was in use all users would see something similar to:
<A wpdi2dk wpskdll qpowo lsdo woqppqpq, wosidl ele!>
OERTERM and the competing Captain Midnight Secret Encoder Term used a simple caesar cipher. This was adequate for the mostly humorous use of the program, similar to ROT13 on Usenet.
[edit] The end
The downfall of RT was due, at least in part, to the phone company levying business-class rates on the phone lines used by RT. Previously RT (and other chat systems and BBSs) had been paying standard residential phone line rates but was suddenly faced with business rates. This essentially doubled their cost of operation. A Usenet post dated October 1988 states, "Bruce Penny (Sysop of the now defunct Freelancin' Sanctuary and Roundtable) has been working on a lawsuit against SW Bell for some time..."
[edit] Other chat systems
After the success of RT and Penny Net, others created their own chat systems for fun and profit. One popular system was Houston Chat Channel (HCC). Also, RT user Randy created a sy system called Rendezvous which was eventually sold to a user named Dusty. This system was created using hand-built 1200 baud modems, as modems were the most expensive components of a chat system like this and money could be saved by building them from scratch which is an amazing concept in today's world of almost disposable computer hardware.
[edit] Roundtable emulator project
There is currently an RT emulator under development and in use (November 2006), spearheaded by a genuine former RT user and backed by documentation from the era including original end-user instruction pages and dot matrix printouts of live RT chat sessions.
The emulator attempts to reproduce the original experience as closely as possible, substituting a telnet session for the original dialup connection. The emulator is up and running and is currently undergoing authenticity refinement and testing. Please email admin@lurker.rt2.us to get more information about the emulator project. Former RT users, enthusiasts from the era, and other interested people are encouraged to make contact and request a login! The emulator is located via telnet at rt2.us:9000
[edit] External links
- Freelancin' Roundtable Emulator (RT2): www.rt2.us - This site is the home for RT2, the Roundtable Emulator, and contains a great deal of original source material and photos from the 1980's.
