Boardwatch

Boardwatch Magazine, May 1993

SFNET - COIN OPERATED BULLETIN BOARD INVADES COFFEE HOUSE CULTURE 

After a career as a produce distributor, general contractor, and real estate sales- man, Wayne Gregori had yet to find his place in the world. He did dabble in computer consulting, and so encountered the world of bulletin boards. In 1990, he started an interesting, but unprofitable BBS called the Compact Disk Exchange in San Francisco. The system allowed callers to swap and trade Compact Audio Discs and did gain some popularity. But the procedures to transfer funds and discs were awkward, and the system evolved to become lots of work and little cash flow. 

In the summer of 1991, Gregori hit on a different approach to make operating a bulletin board profitable. He designed and built a coin-operated terminal and placed it in a San Francisco coffee house. Today, he operates SFnet, a 30 line 

TBBS system offering a mix of features to callers in the San Francisco area, including patrons of some 18 coffee houses. 

San Francisco features dozens of cof- fee houses offering pastries, ginger- bread, cappuccino, coffee, and latte of industrial strength. Patrons use the coffee houses to meet, relax, and often just to read a book and have a cup of coffee. The culture vaguely resembles the coffee house culture of the late 'sixties, with poetry, occasional musi- cal performances on a small scale, and a general underground feel. Today's culture includes "slackers" - young people who have basically avoided the rigors of school and work, working just enough to survive on the edge of society, and hanging out. 

Gregori designed a reasonably vandal-proof terminal table constructed largely of plywood painted with Zolotone - a fibrous paint mixture used to coat the interior of automobile trunks. The table serves admirably as a coffee house table, but features a monochrome monitor shining directly up through a glass inset set in the center of the table. An ordinary PC keyboard, covered with a "keyboard condom" plastic shield is mounted on the edge of the table. A coin box allows coffee house habitues to swap quarters for time. 

The terminal, which Gregori has termed an "RJ11 Table", consists of a power supply, a very small- ish XT motherboard with two serial ports, a 3.5-inch floppy drive, the mono- chrome monitor, and a mo- dem. The coin box is connected to one serial port while a modem is connected to the other. A specially written terminal program monitors the coin box and keeps the time meter inter- nally, while allowing users to connect to the SFNet BBS. The device resembles nothing so much as the old PAC-MAN tables that became common in bars and night clubs in the mid-eighties. 

Users can view an information file about SFNet, a help file on how to use it, and by putting in a couple of quarters, logon to the BBS without any technical knowledge or even the telephone num- ber. Additional time can be purchased in quarter increments essentially the equivalent of about $3 per hour. 

The system automatically dials the SFnet BBS and each table has its own dedicated port on the BBS. After an incident where hackers wardialed to determine the telephone numbers of these ports, Gregori, and his program- ming assistant Dave Lahti, modified the proprietary terminal software so that it did a little handshake between the table and the BBS before allowing access. 

The system features a number of mes- sage conferences covering politics, so- cial issues, and so forth, an Internet mail function, and some interactive games like Chat Chess and Chat Poker. Indeed, the multiline chat func-- tion seems to be the most popular activity among the coffee house crowd - though many do maintain personal mail boxes on the system. With the Internet mail function, people who do not even own a computer can receive and send e-mail world wide for the price of a quarter - from a local coffee house. 

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And there are plenty to choose from. Gregori has persuaded some 18 coffeehouses in the area to feature his table. Basically, they get a free piece of furniture perfectly suitable for noshing on a bran muffin with double latte, along with 10 to 15% of the monthly haul of quarters. According to Gregori, some of the less active sites generate as little as $150 per month, while the better spots generate as much as $600 monthly. Gregori supplies the tele- phone line necessary to connect the table. 

Since we have a bit of a weakness for coffee anyway, we visited several of these clubs during a recent visit to San Francisco. We found the coffee a bit strong for our tastes, but the RJ11 tables in more or less constant use. Curiously, one of the main features of all of these coffee houses is a conventional cork bulletin board on the wall - plastered with layers of notices for roomates wanted, places to rent wanted, various music and poetry festivals and events, One of the side effects of the RJ11 tables is that at any given time in the evening, as many as 18 people in coffee houses are actually talking to each other via this multiline chat network. They can be as anonymous, or as intimate as they wish. And if they do decide they want to meet, they can usually travel over to the other coffee house to consummate the face-to-face portion of the meeting. 

The BBS itself is located in a very pleasant house on Noe street in San Francisco where Gregori lives with his wife, Jill, and two sons Ben, age two, and Devin, age four. The BBS is actually in their kitchen. And this has to be one of the neatest BBS installations we've seen. Two monitors and keyboards occupy a counter at one end of the kitchen. The PC and all the modems are held in a rollout box Gregori designed that has RJ-11jacks, serial port connectors, power supplies, etc. all on a unified rack mounted on wheels. The unit sits under the counter, but slides out easily for maintenance. 

The system uses eSoft's TBBS soft- ware, and the entire rack is filled with US Robotics Sportster 2400 bps modems. File downloading doesn't seem to be a big draw on the system, with most of the usage given to mail conferences, Internet mail, and chat. Gregori does have one dedicated V.32bis port for those using offline QWK mail readers. Table manufacture occurs in a room over the garage. 

Aside from the 18 lines for the RJ11 Tables, the system does sport an addi- tional 12 lines for a regular clientel of people dialing from home. They ac- cess the system at a modest $7 per month. The primary access number is (415)824-8747 but there are local ac- cess numbers in South San Francisco, Sausalito, Burlingame, San Leandro, and Oakland. 

SFNet is innovative in several ways, but most notably in that it brings the activity and culture of bulletin boards to a group that wouldn't ordinarily encounter it. With coffee as high as $4 a cup, the 50 cents needed to access the system doesn't seem too high a price to pay. Coffee house patrons are drawn to the activity of the BBS call- ers, and BBS callers likewise seem attracted to a BBS with users scattered among San Francisco's coffee houses. They do seem to be two distinctly different groups. 

Gregori also plans on extending the concept to other cities. He views it as a community building project and this summer he intends to manufacture the RJ11 tables and sell them to BBS operators around the country at about $2600 each. We hear from BBS operators with this type of concept continually, but all seem stymied by the lack of availability of a rugged, coin operated terminal. It would seem there finally is one. SF NET, PO Box 460693, San Francisco, CA 94146; (415)695- 9824 voice.