TWO WAYS OF FINDING A BOARD THAT BECAME A WEBSITE Recoveries 002 - the BBS list ------------------------------------------------------------------ Before the web there were boards: a telephone number, a modem, one caller at a time, a computer in somebody's spare room. I keep coming back to them because they are the part of this history with nowhere to return to. When the modem was unplugged, that was the end of it, and nothing in the way we archive the internet was ever going to catch them. None of it is in the Wayback Machine, and not because the archive failed. These have telephone numbers, not addresses. There was never a URL to crawl. What survives of the boards survives because people sat down and typed it out. Jason Scott has been compiling the TEXTFILES.COM Historical BBS List since 2001, with a great many contributors. Boards recovered 108,078 Area codes swept 268 Pages whose own total matched my parse 268 of 268 With a named sysop 80,433 Carrying notes or magazine excerpts 4,257 Every area-code page states its own total, so the parse could be checked page by page. It agreed 268 times out of 268. Otherwise 108,078 is a number I assert rather than one I verified. WHICH OF THEM BECAME WEBSITES ------------------------------------------------------------------ Mirroring the list would be copying someone else's page. The question I wanted was a different one. Did a sysop who went online keep the board's name? Did the board become the company, or did the company want the board forgotten? And can you tell which, from outside, thirty years later? I have now done it twice, by two methods that share no machinery. The first infers a crossing by matching names. The second reads what the sysops said about themselves. They disagree, and this entry is really about the disagreement, because the two methods are blind in opposite directions and neither of them knows it. THE FIRST WAY: MATCH THE NAMES ------------------------------------------------------------------ Board and sysop names against the 30,164 early websites catalogued here gave 947 candidates. Almost all were wrong. "Gateway", "Echo" and "The Connection" match hundreds of site titles and mean nothing. Three filters fixed it, and each was added only after it broke. Nine characters for a one-word name threw away MindVox: a real 1992 board, a real early web presence, seven letters. "Gateway" is in 121 of those titles, "mindvox" in one. So the test is frequency, not length. Counting records was wrong. One generic name produced 4,292 matches by itself, and ten Invention Factory nodes on ten Manhattan numbers are one board. Count distinct area codes. "M.I.T." tokenises to three words and never faced the length test, which matched a board in Fortuna, California to mit.edu. The same hole gave me cpb.org, cts.com and Merrill Lynch. Initialisms refused. Strings cannot settle M.I.T. in Fortuna, because they genuinely match. So I read each candidate's earliest archived homepage for three signals: bulletin board, town, sysop. Geography kills the false positives. execpc.com should mention Wisconsin; mit.edu will never mention Fortuna. Distinct domains checked against the archive 856 No evidence at all 526 Could not be checked 196 Some supporting evidence, short of the bar 126 Cleared the bar automatically 8 Still standing after a check by hand 7 Seven, from 947. "Could not be checked" is kept apart from "refuted", and the distinction is the whole discipline: a missing capture means I do not know, which is not the same as knowing it is false. Cleveland Public Library cpl.org Seattle Community Net scn.org Eugene Free Community efn.org Greater New Orleans Free-Net gnofn.org NY WEBB webb.com Shade's Landing shadeslanding.com CyberComm Online Services raven.cybercom.com Shade's Landing is the best of them. The board's number was 612-431-6733, and across the top of the company's 1997 home page, next to the new number, sits FAX (612) 431-6733. The dial-up line became the fax line. Same copper, new job. NY WEBB prints BBS: 212-647-8660 on its own page, the number in the list. An eighth passed automatically: nursing boards matched to nightingale.con.utk.edu. By hand it collapsed. Two boards, in San Francisco and in Meriden, Connecticut, both matching a University of Tennessee site. Three nursing organisations, three states, one Florence Nightingale. A collision by theme rather than by name, which I had not anticipated. WHAT SEVEN IS A NUMBER OF ------------------------------------------------------------------ A public library, three community Free-Nets and three small firms - of which CyberComm of Toms River was a commercial internet provider, so this is not quite the clean institutional sweep it first looks like. Exec-PC of New Berlin, Wisconsin, hundreds of telephone lines and widely called the largest bulletin board anywhere, is not here. It plainly became execpc.com, but its archived page scored one point of the three, so it sits in the 126. Seven is not the number of BBSes that became websites. It is the number this test can prove. What I believed at this point, and said so, was that the test was biased towards institutions: that libraries and community networks kept their names because the name was their civic identity, while commercial boards rebranded, which was the point of going commercial. Hold on to that. It is wrong, and it took the second method to show me why. THE SECOND WAY: ASK THE SYSOPS ------------------------------------------------------------------ 4,257 of the records carry notes - a sysop writing in years later, a former caller, an excerpt from Boardwatch. Some of them state the board's web address outright. That is testimony rather than inference. Micro-Net micro-net.com "once the internet came about, i became an internet ISP" Ten Forward tenforward.com "stopped being a BBS in 1996 when we went to a full ISP" Computer Ans. inet2000.com "migrate from the BBS to the ISP World" Bit Stream bitstream.net "Now an ISP" ExecNet execnet.com "Continues to run in present day as an ISP" Cloud 9 Online cloud9.net "Continues to Run as an ISP in White Plains" Every one of those is a commercial provider, and the first method found none of them. Addresses are pulled out in four passes, strongest first, each one blanking its own matches before the next runs: scheme, then www., then an email domain, then a bare domain. The bare-domain pass has an obvious hazard once you see it and none before. These notes are full of file names, and PKZIP.COM looks exactly like a website to a regular expression. Two independent signals catch it: a known utility name, or the token written in capitals. Files were shouted in these notes and addresses were not. Flagged, never dropped. It caught two rows in 240 and missed at least one. A sysop lists the software he had bought licences for: "PKZIP, Qmodem Pro, FrontDoor Pro and LIST.com". LIST.com is Vernon Buerg's file viewer, which half the boards in this list shipped, and it is sitting in my results as a website because "list" was not on my list. A WEB ADDRESS IN A NOTE IS AT LEAST FIVE DIFFERENT THINGS ------------------------------------------------------------------ A the board's own web address the crossing B the board surviving by telnet a continuation C the sysop's later, unrelated site a person carried on D a citation, archive or memorial someone writing about it E email and access infrastructure not a crossing at all No regular expression can tell those apart. The sentence around the address can, so every row is scored against the phrases that fired and keeps its full context, and a tie goes to a human rather than being resolved quietly. My cue lists were written from the corpus, not from imagination, after reading 139 claims by hand: twelve new phrases for A, nine for C. I could not have guessed "relaunched as a group of web sites", or "created to take place of the BBS when it went offline". And "can be found at" sat in the crossing list until I noticed the corpus uses it overwhelmingly as "SYSOP NAME can now be found at", which is a man, not a board. Then a plainer fault. Cues were being matched against the 140 characters surrounding the address, and 53 claims fired no cue at all - not because the evidence was absent but because it was out of frame. Sysops write three hundred words of history and drop the address at the end. Matching against the whole note, with a near phrase still outscoring a far one, halved that to 26 and moved sixteen claims into A. It also moved nine into C, and that number matters as much. Category C is the commonest thing in the whole pile and it is a real phenomenon rather than noise: the sysop's computer shop, his internet radio station, his design firm, in one case his wife's website. People carried on. NINETY CLAIMS, AND THEN SOMEBODY HAD TO READ THEM ------------------------------------------------------------------ 445 claims survive de-duplication; 90 of them are strong-tier and classified as the board's own address. I had read 74. Sixteen had moved into that bucket on the strength of the change above, and no human had looked at them. So I read all ninety again, and moved sixteen out - not the same sixteen, and there is no way to tell whether they overlap, because the audit file records which bucket a claim ended in and not which phrases put it there. Of the sixteen, ten were the sysop's later life, three were the board continuing over telnet, and three were somebody writing about the board rather than the board itself. Rabbits Foot BBS C "Operated by the now owner of rabbitsfootmeadery.com" - a meadery Mac For The Mind C "Visit my internet radio station" Magrathea C "Today, I have my own consulting firm" Blood's Bizarre C the sysop's brother's employer Panasia BBS C "Panasia BBS is gone now, but I did maintain the domain name" The Packer Place C "I also run a hosting company" SLASHER BBS B the address begins telnet:// Milliways IIN D "a web page... sort of in effigy" Airspace D "some reference of the old organization ... but no mention of the BBS" Two of them embarrassed me. telnet:// addresses were reaching the top tier automatically, because the extractor treats any scheme as strong evidence - so bucket B's own signature was being admitted to bucket A. And github.com was not on the list of infrastructure hosts to ignore, the way archive.org is, so a sysop archiving his old DOS utilities read as a board that became a website. The best of the sixteen is M-Net, of Ann Arbor. Its note contains two addresses. One is an article about the history of online conferencing in Ann Arbor; the other is m-net.arbornet.org, where the board itself is still reachable after a merger with Arbornet. The citation was classified as the crossing. I assumed the crossing had simply been missed - that an address written without http:// and without www. was invisible to the extractor. I went and looked, and that is not what happened. m-net.arbornet.org WAS extracted. It was classified as bucket A. It even carries a name echo. The machine got it right. It never appeared in any audit file because the export filters to the two strongest tiers, and a bare hostname is not one of them. So for weeks I counted a citation as a crossing while the real crossing sat correctly filed, one function call away, in a file I had told myself was noise. The fault was never in the understanding. It was in what got printed. Then I read it, and it is not a crossing either. The note says m-net is "reachable to this day" after merging with Arbornet. Reachable is not the same as became a website. That is a continuation. So M-Net has no crossing in it at all: a citation counted as one, and the address I went looking for turned out to be the board simply surviving. Three passes at one row, wrong each time, in a different way each time. I have left the whole sequence here rather than only the answer, because the answer took three goes and a reader is entitled to know that. Four of those sixteen did not need a human at all. Three were telnet addresses, which the classifier now refuses to put in bucket A on principle rather than on evidence: the sysop typed the protocol, and no phrase in the sentence should be able to argue with it. The fourth was github.com, a citation host in exactly the way archive.org is, simply missing from the list. With those two repairs the classifier returns 86 rather than 90, and the twelve it still gets wrong are the twelve no cue list could have caught - a meadery, a radio station, a consulting firm, a man's signature. 86 minus 12 is 74, which is where the hand audit had already arrived. That the two routes meet is the only reason I trust either. A NUMBER I DO NOT WANT TO GIVE YOU ON ITS OWN ------------------------------------------------------------------ Removing sixteen leaves 74. But eight more are ones I would move if the decision were only mine, and they are not errors. They are judgements, and a reasonable person reading the same sentence could go the other way. So I will not give you one number. A single figure hides the part you need in order to disagree with me. Classified as the board's own web address 90 Moved out on the note's own words - 16 The figure I publish 74 Further moves I would make - 8 The strict reading 66 74 is the headline because those eight are judgement calls rather than identified faults, and because there is no principled place to stop if the rule becomes "remove anything anyone might quibble with". 66 is the honest floor. The eight are GweepNet, United Alliance, Sherwood Forest, PowerHouse Point, Bee Line, Barnyard, and both Keep rows. A further nineteen of the 74 I could not settle in either direction. They are not a separate pool; they are inside both figures above, which means neither 74 nor 66 is as solid as a number looks on a page. 6 a live board reachable over the web as well as by dial-up or telnet - the boundary between crossing and continuation 6 the address appears only as a gloss, or in a signature 2 the crossing is promised in the future tense 2 the community crossed over but the board did not 2 the sysop's later web business, carrying the board's name 1 testimony from a caller rather than from the operator BELOW THE TIER LINE, WHERE I EXPECTED THE MOST ------------------------------------------------------------------ Below the two strong tiers sit 240 more claims - bare hostnames and email domains - of which the classifier calls 97 the board's own address, 79 of them carrying a name echo. Ninety-seven looked like more crossings than the 74 above it. I read all 97. 44 the board continuing by telnet or another protocol 18 an email or UUCP domain, or a domain merely registered 14 a genuine crossing - one duplicating a strong-tier row 11 the sysop's later venture 5 a different entity altogether 5 unresolved Thirteen new crossings out of ninety-seven candidates. The bucket was wrong six times out of seven, and it was wrong in one direction, for one reason. Why would a telnet address be written bare, and a website be written with http:// in front of it? Because that is how people write them. You type telnet and then a hostname; you do not type a scheme. But a web address in 1997 arrived with http:// or www. attached, because that is how it was printed on everything. The shape of the address predicts what kind of address it is. The strong tier is where the web lives. The weak tier is where telnet and email live. I built the tiers to rank confidence and they turned out to sort by protocol. Which exposes something worse in my own scoring. A name echo adds 3. A telnet cue beside the address adds 2. And a telnet hostname is nearly always built out of the board's name - bandit.synchro.net, bbs.darkforce.org, fame.darktech.org. So the echo fires hardest exactly where it means least, and outvotes the evidence sitting next to it. That is why 79 of the 97 carry an echo, and why the bucket is wrong. THE BUCKET MARKED "NO CUE FIRED AT ALL" ------------------------------------------------------------------ That left 78 weak-tier rows the classifier could not place: REVIEW, where the cues tied, and UNSORTED, where nothing fired. UNSORTED is not a verdict. It is silence. I read all 78 expecting the dregs. The Comfy Chair dalton.net 1996-12-24 "Now an Internet Service Provider: dalton.net" Wally World Hackers bmi.net 1997-02-16 "morphed in to Blue Mountain Internet... a nationwide ISP" ZOOiD io.org 1996-12-22 "merged into Internex Online, Toronto's first IAP" The Thieves Market awod.com 1997-04-20 "moved services into A World of Difference, the first ISP in Charleston" Real Time Access twonline.com 1997-04-18 "also known as Tidewater Online during the begining of the Internet" Ranch and Cattle bunkhouse.com 1996-10-19 "bunkhouse.com was born... still active, the oldest adult website still in operation" Six crossings. All six captured before 1998, which makes them among the best-evidenced claims anywhere in this study - and every one had been sitting in the bucket that means the machine had nothing to say. So why did the clearest sentences score zero? Look at the verbs. Morphed into. Merged into. Moved services into. Now an Internet Service Provider. My cue list has became, evolved into, turned into, moved to. It does not have any of theirs, and there is a reason for that which took me until now to see. I built the cue list by reading bucket A and REVIEW. Those are the places where cues had already fired. So the list could only ever learn more ways of saying what it already recognised. The one bucket that could have taught it new vocabulary is the one bucket defined by the fact that it uses words the list has never seen - and that was the bucket I never opened. Seven words are all it took. "Now an Internet Service Provider: dalton.net". A man told me exactly what happened to his board, in the plainest sentence in the entire corpus, and my classifier scored it zero. ASKING THE ARCHIVE, AND A MISTAKE ABOUT LANDLORDS ------------------------------------------------------------------ Take the 74. Each names a host, and the Wayback Machine can be asked whether that host was ever crawled and when. Then I found that I had been asking the wrong question about eight of the ninety - four of them among these 74, four among the sixteen I had just moved out. Where the declared address is a page rather than a bare host - www.webcom.com/-greeting/homes_online.html - asking about the host returns the history of webcom.com, a hosting company captured in thirty-one separate calendar years, and files it against a real-estate BBS in Cleveland that rented a page there. A per-host query attributes the landlord's dates to the tenant. I re-asked all eight about the full address instead. claim host said page said verdict webcom.com 1996-12-30 never the landlord's github.com 2008-05-14 2021-12-23 inherited 13y ravenwood.com 1999-08-23 2003-10-02 inherited 4y emergency.com 1996-12-21 1997-07-20 inherited 1y thenewhouse.org 1998-12-03 1999-01-27 inherited 1y pcmicro.com 1997-03-27 1997-04-27 owns the host pccfa.org 1998-02-18 1998-02-18 owns the host unixpapa.com 2002-02-20 2002-08-06 owns the host Three agreed to the year, which is the control working. Four had inherited an earlier date than their own. One page had never been captured at all. I should be exact here. The table reads more dramatically than the truth. Those intervals are differences between calendar-year labels, not elapsed time. thenewhouse.org is 3 December 1998 against 27 January 1999. That is fifty-five days, and it reads as a year only because it crosses a new year. Just two of them, ravenwood.com and github.com, inherited a real stretch of somebody else's history. 74 published 66 strict Archive queries completed 74 of 74 66 of 66 Host or page ever captured 73 98.6% 65 98.5% First captured before 2000 30 40.5% 27 40.9% First captured before 1998 17 23.0% 16 24.2% Declared, but never captured 1 1 Seventeen claims are corroborated by a capture that predates 1998, or sixteen on the strict reading - a crawl made while the board was still within living memory of its own operation, independent of the note written about it years later. The single board with no capture of its own is Homes OnLine of Cleveland, and I only know that because I asked about the page instead of the host. Before that it looked like one of the best-evidenced rows in the file. The seventeen did not change, and for a moment I thought that meant the repair had achieved nothing. It is not the same seventeen. Homes OnLine left it, because its page was never captured. The Snake Pit of Lenoir, North Carolina joined it at 1997-04-06, because its query had failed the first time and a failed query had been silently recorded as a fact. Two errors in opposite directions, cancelling exactly. Had I only compared the totals I would have concluded, wrongly, that neither fault mattered. THE GAP BETWEEN THE TWO NUMBERS IS THE FINDING ------------------------------------------------------------------ Seven boards, by matching names. By reading what the sysops wrote, 74 claims in the strong tiers - 73 boards - and 19 more from the weak tiers below them. Proved by matching names against a catalogue 7 Declared by a sysop, strong tiers, audited twice 74 Declared by a sysop, weak tier, read once 13 Declared by a sysop, unclassifiable, read once 6 Of those 19, first captured before 1998 10 I am keeping those on separate lines rather than adding them up, because they were not established to the same standard. The 74 have been through two readings and a re-query; the 19 below them have been read once. Note the rate, though. Ten of nineteen from the tiers I had written off, against seventeen of seventy-four from the tier I trusted. The material I was least confident in turned out to be the better evidenced, because a man who types a bare hostname mid-sentence is usually naming a company that still exists. The two methods share no code and no assumptions. The honest reading is not that one of them is right. I had an explanation ready for the gap. Writing this entry destroyed it. The explanation was that name matching can only find an organisation that kept its name. Libraries and Free-Nets kept theirs, because the name was the institution. Commercial boards rebranded, because rebranding was the point of going commercial. It is a tidy story and all seven results fit it. Then I looked at the boards the second method found. Ten Forward became tenforward.com. ExecNet became execnet.com. Cloud 9 Online became cloud9.net, Bit Stream Underground became bitstream.net. They all kept their names. The rebranding thesis does not survive its own evidence. So I tested the other possibility, which is duller and turns out to be the real one. Method one matches board names against a catalogue of 30,164 early websites. I asked how many of the 74 declared addresses appear in that catalogue at all. Declared addresses in the 30,164-site catalogue 3 Declared addresses absent from it entirely 71 95.9% Seventy-one of the seventy-four sites were never in the corpus method one searches. It could not have found them under any name. And of the three that were, one is webcom.com, the hosting company, which is not the board's site at all - so in practice two boards out of seventy-four were visible to both methods, and neither of them cleared the verification bar. A join can only find what both collections already contain. That is the whole of it. It is not a fact about bulletin boards at all. Method one asks a question that requires the board's website to have been catalogued by somebody else first, and 96% of the time it had not been. Self-declaration escapes this because it needs only one side of the join. The address is inside the note, and the note is the evidence. I liked the rebranding story better. It was the more interesting answer, and it may still be true - I do suspect institutions keep their names more faithfully than companies do. But it is not what these seven results measure. I would have gone on saying it was, in print, for as long as nobody checked. Self-declaration has its own blindness, in the opposite direction. It can only find a board someone wrote in about, which is 3.9% of the list, and it favours the sysop who is proud of what happened next, still alive, and inclined to write to an archivist. The quiet boards are missing from both counts. So neither number is the answer, and I do not think there is going to be one. 108,078 boards, and between the two methods I can evidence fewer than a hundred crossings - not because few boards became websites, but because proof requires that somebody, at some point, wrote it down. And reading the weak tiers did not change that. They added nineteen. What they mostly found was forty-four boards that never crossed over at all and are still answering a telnet port thirty years later, which is a different and in some ways better thing to have found. What they also found is that I have been reading my own filters rather than the corpus. Every bucket I opened, I opened because the machine had already told me something was in it. The six best-evidenced crossings in this entry were in the bucket that means the machine had nothing to say, and they stayed there until somebody looked. CORRECTIONS, AND WHAT DID NOT WORK ------------------------------------------------------------------ The list came from many 1990s BBS lists, each with its own typing errors, and those errors say which source an entry came from. I never overwrite them: 995 names carry a corrected spelling with the original beside it, marked "listed as", corrected one word at a time. Inveriont Factory Node #3 becomes Invention Factory Node #3, not Invention Factory, which would lose the node. I threw a first pass away after it decided that a sysop's four boards, Beyond Paradise #1 through #4, consecutive, one man, 93% identical strings, were three misspellings of the fourth. A typo does not politely increment. The same run gave me Clones R Us to Clone R Us, Great Escapes to Great Escape and Blues' Image to Blue's Image. Plurals and possessives, not typos, and the frequency test cannot see the difference: "clone" outnumbers "clones" among board names, so the plural looks like a rare misspelling of a common word. It is not a misspelling at all. The rule now refuses any pair differing only by an apostrophe or a plural ending, which removed 228 and took the total from 1,223 to 995. It probably still gets some wrong, which is why the original spelling is always shown, and why I would rather have your corrections than your patience. Reporting was wrong before it was slow. Exec-PC appeared thirty times, once per customer home page, which counts the evidence as the result and buries every smaller crossing under it. Grouped properly, the page count is the most interesting figure in the file: one hosted page means a website, 435 means an internet service provider. And one fault this project's scripts have now committed six separate times, which I record here because the pattern is more useful than any single instance. A query that fails is not a query that returned nothing. When the archive could not be reached for ten of these claims, my summary counted those ten as boards with no captures and reported eighty of ninety, when the truth was that every claim I had managed to check was in the archive. An error must be excluded from the denominator, never counted as a zero. It reads as a small bookkeeping matter and it is not: it turns silence into a finding, and it always makes the world look emptier than it is. Twice it was printed in a sweep summary; twice it was sitting in the code that produced one; once it decided how an audit file reported its own bucket. The sixth was in the script I wrote to repair the fifth. That one taught me the most. One more thing is counting rather than classification: 90 claims are 89 distinct domains and 87 distinct boards. One board in Richmond, British Columbia accounts for three of the rows, because its sysop named three different websites in a single note; one board in North Hollywood accounts for two, for the same reason. Separately, one domain serves two different boards run by the same man in neighbouring towns. A claim is not a board. Something is worth saying plainly here. Every crossing in this entry exists because a man sat down years afterwards and typed out what had happened to his board, for a list, for nobody in particular. That is the entire evidential base. Ninety-six per cent of these sites were in no catalogue at all, and without those notes there would be nothing to count. So the counting is not really the point. The notes are. If you ran one of these boards, or called one, or know the person who did, you know things no parser will ever recover from a list of telephone numbers. I would like to hear from you. Some of these addresses are ones I have judged against their author's own words, and I would rather be told I got it wrong. None of this survives because an institution decided it should. It survives because people wrote it down, and the rest of us have to keep it somewhere. That is the whole arrangement, and it is not a secure one. METHOD ------------------------------------------------------------------ 268 area-code pages, one every 1.5 seconds, saved as raw HTML before parsing, which let me fix two parser faults without going back to the server. One split names on commas, turning Digital Techniques, Inc. into two boards and inventing 525 boards named "the" and 220 named "inc." I saw it only because the corpus report prints the most repeated names before any analysis runs. Archive queries go to the CDX index at roughly ten a minute, each retried three times before a failure is recorded, after a first attempt lost sixteen queries in one unbroken block and I misread a server shedding load as a problem with my own name resolution. An empty result means never crawled, excluded by robots, or removed on request, and from outside those are indistinguishable. Years here record when a number appeared in a source, not when a board lived: Seattle Community Network shows 2004-2016 and began in 1992. CORRECTIONS, FEBRUARY 2026 ------------------------------------------------------------------ Three numbers above this line have moved since it was written. I have left every one of them where it stands, because the reasoning that produced them is the point of the entry and a correction that quietly rewrites its own sum teaches nobody anything. 108,078 IS A COUNT OF LISTINGS, NOT OF BOARDS The check still holds: all 268 area code pages state their own totals and all 268 agree with what was scraped. But in the 1990s the telephone companies split area codes. Detroit was 313 until 810 was carved out of it. The same machine on the same line kept ringing with a new number in front of it, and the lists of the period recorded both. Isle Net in New Jersey appears at 201-495-6996, 908-495-6996 and 732-495-6996. Three entries. One modem. Measured: 4,947 telephone numbers appear more than once under area codes that really split, accounting for 5,041 duplicate records. That leaves roughly 103,110 distinct boards. My first attempt at this was worse than the error it was fixing. I wrote the list of area code splits from memory, got 53 of them, and came out low by about half. The corpus can be asked directly instead - a real split leaves hundreds of identical seven-digit numbers whose board names match, and a coincidence leaves a handful with names that do not. Asked that way it returns 94 pairs, including whole states I had forgotten. One of the 94 is not a split at all. 313 and 314 share 209 numbers and the names match on 177 of them - George's Fido, Terminal Services, Mega Board, The World of Sanctum - but 313 is Detroit and 314 is St. Louis. That is a mistake in the 2001 source list rather than in my copy of it, and it files 245 Detroit boards under Missouri. I have counted them separately and left the records exactly as they are. SEVENTY-FOUR IS SEVENTY-SIX This entry says three audit files were written and never read. Some months later I read one of them. It contained two crossings. Abingdon Online, of Virginia: "Moved to the web in 1996 and eventually disconnected our phone lines. Now at www.abol.com." The classifier had scored it two-all and sent it to review, because a rule for the sysop's other website fired on the next sentence, where he mentions he also runs Ford-Diesel.Com. Two rules, both working correctly, cancelling over a sentence that says exactly what happened. Adult Fantasy BBS, of Washington DC, from the January 1996 issue of Boardwatch: "See our home page at http://www.adf.com or Telnet to adf.com." The word telnet fired the rule for a board that survived rather than crossed, and outvoted the words "our home page" eight words earlier. The board was doing both at once, which the rules had no way to say. That second one is better evidenced than most of the seventy-four, and not because anyone tried harder. It is a trade magazine printing a company's web address in January 1996, while the board was still running sixty-eight lines - a published fact with a date on it, rather than a memory recalled in 2001. Every seventy-four above this line still reads seventy-four. The argument that seventy-one of them were in no catalogue at all does not change, and neither does the conclusion it supports. FORTY-FOUR STILL ANSWERING IS NINE This entry says forty-four boards never crossed over and are still answering a telnet port thirty years later. On 12 August 2026 I dialled them. One connection to every address of that kind in the list - no login, no keystrokes, read whatever the far end sent unprompted, then hang up. Real addresses settled 173 Answered 9 boards Connection refused 20 Hostname no longer resolves 142 No answer either way ~105 Nine. And of the boards this entry names, Sursum Corda and Bandit are gone - their hostnames do not resolve at all. The Basement Underworld is still there, on port 9000, and still funny: the first thing it says is that corporate says your call is very important. The Keep has been running since 1983 and greets callers with "Auto-sensing...". The 13th Floor answers on two addresses at once, from a Commodore 64 in Nashville. Christian Fellowship moved hosts and survived when its old address died. The hundred and five that gave no answer either way are not deaths and are not counted as such. Modern firewalls drop packets in silence rather than refusing them, so a machine behind one looks exactly like a machine that no longer exists. I know this because SDF - a public-access UNIX system that began answering in 1990 and is certainly running as you read this - timed out when I dialled it. Had I counted timeouts as deaths I would have buried the most famous survivor in the field inside my own statistic. The first time I dialled, I got four rather than nine. I had selected the boards to call by asking which bucket my own classifier had put them in, instead of asking which addresses in the list look like a board you can still reach. SDF was not in that sample. Neither was Part-Time, nor The 13th Floor, nor The Basement Underworld. Three of the nine were invisible to the first attempt because I let a tool decide where to look - which is the same mistake, in a new costume, as the one this entry is otherwise about. What I got wrong was not the arithmetic. Forty-four is what sysops wrote between 2001 and 2008, and I published it as though it described today. A sentence in the present tense has a date on it whether you write one or not. If you want to argue with any of these, I would rather have the argument than the number. Source: the TEXTFILES.COM Historical BBS List by Jason Scott, bbslist.textfiles.com, retrieved 4 August 2026. The notes and magazine excerpts belong to the people who wrote them. The searchable directory is at https://ge97.com/bbslist.html Khalid Alshaikh, 7Z1FP https://ge97.com/ .