This is EBENEZER in Letchworth

 

During the time of my GCSEs and A-levels (this would be 1989 to 1992-ish, I suppose) a charity called Education 2000 was trying to increase the usage of computers in schools; they'd picked on our area to experiment in. The practical upshot of this was buying each school a hundred or so rather crappy PCs. But then, suddenly... oh glory... then, there was Ebby.

Ebby. Two VAXen in Letchworth Town Hall, named EBENEZER and HOWARD after the founder of the town, a high-capacity network between there and all the secondary schools in Letchworth, Baldock and (for a while) Hitchin and Royston too... four or five terminals for each school (two for the library, one in the staffroom, one in the sixth-form area as a special privilege, one in a quiet room somewhere else)... a conferencing system running on them called Caucus... two dialup lines for students who were lucky enough to have machines with 2400 or even 9600 baud modems at home... all these were Ebby.

Yet Ebby was more. It was the people who used it...

...it was the bizarre screen names, that the admin eventually clamped down with a few weeks' grace period until they barred the change-name command... the announcements of this in school assemblies (who needs MOTDs?)... the people, such as the ever-vivacious Helen Priestley, who never got around to changing and so were stuck with names like "THE HASH SMASH POT!!!!!" all the rest of their Ebby lives...

...it was a few thousand teachers and students learning how to exist in cyberspace for the first time, the "Ebbyverse" as we called it, the disembodiment of minds...

...it was the culture of emailing your friends who you'd see next period anyway...

...it was remembering people by their Ebby logins...

...it was the conferences, discussion boards with grand purposes and strong names... SCHOLAR2 the quiet hive of no activity... CHRISTIAN the atheist-versus-Christian flamewar where both sides were as indignant and insensitive as sixth-formers can get... PRATCHETT (was it?) where we discussed the writings of the great one, and someone worked out an address, fertile with percentage signs, which would send email out of Ebby onto another network that would forward to some sort of Internet gateway that would somehow get mail to Terry Pratchett's Demon account... APHYSHELP, AMATHSHELP, ACHEMHELP, the forums where staff and students were supposed to discuss A-level difficulties and find solutions, and which were supposed to justify Ebby's existence, but in practice were so empty that your nervous exploring footsteps echoed around you when you ventured in from the bustling world outside...

...it was the PHONE command, instant messaging in real time, which was banned and unbanned as regularly as clockwork...

...it was INTRO files, descriptions of a user, which usually ran to several tens of kilobytes and had pictures and pages of blank lines, every so often dropping in another random nugget of information...

...it was meeting up with people you knew from the same area and talking about Ebby even when you were offline...

...it was meeting people who wanted to know how to hack around with the registers of an EGA card to get the colour addressing properly which led to the assembler animation routines in Avalot working at all-- specifically, meeting one Cameron Grant from another school in the computer forums, who was a mentor to me in writing games, and collaborated with me on mailshotting US bulletin boards and magazines with the programs we'd written...

...it was sharing our poetry...

...it was laughing together at every joke in The Mary Whitehouse Experience...

...it was being part of it all.

I'm blessed to have been a part of Ebby. May its memory be ever cherished.

-- THURMANTS3