Why “Scribbles”?

This article was originally published on Cache Up NB. It has been mirrored here for archive purposes only.

Although it’s not really geocaching related, I got a little nostalgic today and was reminded of something from a day gone by. Our “shoutbox” is called “Scribbles”. Ever wonder why? Well, there’s actually a very interesting (to me anyway) story as to where that came from. If you can tolerate a little tech-talk, here’s a little story about why I chose to call it that.

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In the years that preceded the wide-spread use of the now common internet, there were individual little systems you could connect to via dial-up. They were known as Bulletin Board Systems, or BBS’s. These were incredible primitive to what we have today but it was indeed similar in some ways.

You would dial into a BBS, log in, and be able to post messages, read messages, chat with the SysOP (system operator), and on some systems even play very basic text based games. In even more advanced BBS environments, more than one person could dial in at the same time. That was considered high tech at the time. Imagine if we were all still on dial-up internet and only one person at a time could dial in? That’s kind of what it was like but on a smaller scale.

BBSs were very popular to those who used them. In fact, it is through the early BBS days I met my long time friend Chris, known to you guys as EvulC. Back then he was known as Master_C. We were both members of several BBSs from the Moncton area including MUG, Riverfront, Ouija Board, Bob’s Room (my own) and The Dungeon.

Now each BBS was powered by someone’s own personal computer which was left on all the time and connected to a dedicated phone line (usually). Back then it wasn’t just PC computers and Macs. Amiga and Commodore were also quite popular so many folks ran BBS environments on those systems as well. One such BBS run on a Commodore 64 was The Dungeon.

The Dungeon was run by a guy named Martin Horseman. There were common BBS platforms but Marty opted to use something called The Blue Board BBS. Blue Board was a Canadian BBS application written by a guy named Martin Sykes. Compared to other BBS software at the time, it was miles apart. It did some really cool disk access stuff and was incredibly fast compared to others.

Like most BBS apps, it did pretty much all of the same things just faster. It did have one unique feature though. It had it’s own unique little “one-liner” message system it called “Scribbles”. Instead of posting a full length message to the message board, you could post a one-liner message to the Scribbles. This became a running gag on The Dungeon as people would have sort of mini-conversations in the Scribbles.

Sound familiar?

When putting together the features for Cache Up NB (which is nearing it’s 4 yr birthday btw), I knew we had to have a chat pod of some kind but didn’t want to call it the Shoutbox. As a throwback to something from so long ago, I opted for Scribbles. I’m not sure of anyone other than me and EvulC would remember it, but if you ever spent time on The Dungeon, you might remember them.