Bark: The Toll-Free BBS for 90s Teens

The other day I was thinking about the first communities I found online and, perhaps tangentially, to what degree they influenced the amount of therapy I now require to function normally as an adult. Our family's second computer came from Sam's Club. It was a 386DX with Windows 3.0 but my inner nerd would have nothing to do with cheerful bit-mapped color schemes, preferring instead to exit to MS-DOS and do all necessary computing and gaming from a command prompt and text-based GUIs. Hardware-wise, it looked and felt cheap. The machine was less reliable than the cardboard box it came in. It was a Packard Bell and if you were to read this paragraph to anyone who was into computers in the 1990's, they will hear that name and then simply close their eyes and nod quietly in sympathetic understanding.

Most importantly, it came with a dial-up modem. My mom's series of reactions when I told her I had plugged our new computer into the telephone line were as follows:

Now in my defense, as a semi-rebellious teenager eager to experience literally anything outside languid rural Midwest life, I often leaned hard into the practice of begging forgiveness in lieu of asking permission. Sometimes I even got away with it.

To give a better idea of the timeline and circumstances, the Internet as we know today it only kind of existed in the early 90's. There was email, there were message boards, file exchange programs, remote login to other systems, real-time chat (IRC) and so on. The web was new and promising and free of ads but not at all the main attraction just yet. And unless you lived in a city or attended a university with a well-funded technology department, the Internet was probably not yet accessible to you. Or for the purposes of this article, me.

But bulletin board systems (BBSes) had been around since at least the early 80's. Maybe earlier, I'm not sure. These were computers connected to phone lines. When you called a number with your computer, the other computer answered, and you could interact with whatever software the sysop (system operator) had set up. Usually these contained at least public and private message boards, but many also had places where you could download and upload files, chat in real time with others (if the BBS had multiple lines), or play games.

How I came upon the early essentials necessary to connect our computer to other computers is a complete mystery to me at this point. I didn't know anyone else with a modem and my school's computer situation was about a decade behind: "computer" classes were really typing classes taught by a cartoon cat named PAWS on Apple IIs. Back at home, at a bare minimum, I would have needed a terminal program to dial up and interact with another computer. So did I have one already or did I grab one off a shareware floppy that came in some magazine? Where did I even find the number of the first BBS (bulletin-board system) to call?

What happened next is easier to remember. I racked up quite the collection of informative text files from that first handful of BBSes I found, which generally included programming guides, hacking e-zines (Phrack!), some anarchy-type content, and rather entertaining but unhinged conspiracy theories. And of course, where to find more BBSes. I also clearly remember downloading as much software as I could get my hands on. Plenty of development tools, different modem terminal programs, and scads of DOS utilities. I learned a lot in a very short amount of time about BBS software, doors, Kermit, X/Y/Zmodem and ZIP files. It took about two hours to download enough data to fill up a 1.44MB floppy disk over a 2400 baud modem. (Eventually I managed to con my mom into buying a 14.4kbps modem a little bit later. I still have no idea how. Maybe because we had a free trial of Prodigy and that needed a faster modem to draw all the fancy vector graphics?)

But that all came to a swift end when my mom got the phone bill at the end of the month. In those days, local calls were free, long distance calls cost money. You paid by the minute and it was not especially cheap. The problem was, we lived in a town so small you could just about trip over it on your way to somewhere interesting, so everything outside a 1.5-mile radius was long distance. I never heard what the monetary damage was, but she did state in no uncertain terms that it would not be allowed to happen again.

(Don't actually call this, I don't know where it goes.)

One of the files I happened to grab was a list of toll-free BBSes. Or as we'd say back before more toll-free codes were added, "1-800 numbers." I didn't know exactly what I would find at these numbers, but that was a big part of the appeal. The first list I downloaded was TB01-94.TXT by Doug Schneider. Here are some others that I have in my collection from around that time frame:

I have a very clear memory of trying numbers in some semi-random order, crossing off the ones that never answered and highlighting interesting ones to come back to later. I wrote notes next to some. The crossed-off lines outnumbered the highlighted lines 10-to-1 at least. If I ran into a busy signal, it would sometimes be quite a while before I came back to it. It turned out that these toll-free computer systems came and went faster than people could update and pass around the text files. The vast majority of the numbers I called responded with any of:

When a modem answered, there was still a fair chance that it wasn't anything useful to me. Many did not automatically detect your modem speed, so good ol' "2400 8-N-1" was not always a given and the listings were not always super accurate or up to date. Lots of these toll-free numbers required a pre-arranged login to get anywhere fun. I couldn't even tell what many of them were. Either just a prompt that didn't respond to anything sensible like help or dir, or acronyms/names that I couldn't decipher. (I wish I had kept logs of my terminal sessions, figuring them out would be a lot easier now!) A few numbers would let you register an account, but the content inside tended to be extremely boring to a teenager without disposable income. Very little about computers, music, video games, or chatting with other random people.

It turns out BARK was a toll-free electronic message board where teenagers were encouraged to hop on and gab about teenage things. It was a little hard to believe that something like this existed among the sea of non-profit and government-related toll-free BBSes. To the point that when I woke up the next morning, I was beyond 100% positive it was just another one of those crazy dreams you have where you accidentally luck into something amazing that changes your life forever, only to then wake up to the cold gray reality of your previous existence. But I sat down at the computer again later in the day to resume my computing activities and found that this time my own brain was not actively trying to crush my hopes and dreams. For a change.

Unfortunately I kept little evidence of my time on BARK so most of this is from memory, corroborated by the remarkably few sources I could find on the modern web. These are some things that I do remember. Some with a high degree of resolute certainty and some not.

When you signed up, you had to answer a few basic questions such as how old are you, what kind of music you listened to, what was your favorite TV show, etc. Afterward, BARK would "verify" you by calling you back on the number you provided. I had to quickly figure out how to configure my computer to answer the call and make sure nobody else in the house answered the phone before the modem did. And come up with a good explanation for my mom as to why she shouldn't answer the phone, which was by far the bigger of the two concerns.

A lot of the users had signatures with funny sayings (taglines) in them. Writing and collecting funny taglines became something of a brief sub-hobby for me at one point.

I feel like BARK only had message boards. Maybe a file section. I don't remember there being any games to play, real-time chat, or anything other typical bonus features of BBSes at the time.

I think I found BARK while it was popular, but it got more popular soon after. Eventually, it got to a point where it would take hours of re-dialing until I connected (if I connected) and even then, there was a time limit before they booted you off to free up the line for someone else. This wasn't nearly enough time to catch up on popular boards and compose replies, so you were more or less forced to use QWK. When you connected, you could download a file containing all of the new messages that were posted since you last logged in. You would then disconnect, read the messages offline, maybe write some replies, and then upload those replies the next time you logged in.

The admins did their best to keep behaviour in line with the rules, but there was just entirely too many messages to proactively police. I encountered flame wars for the first time. Bans and deleted threads were very common. I tended to avoid the busiest boards (and their weird drama) and mostly stuck to ones related to computers and video games.

At some point, the admins posted an announcement that funding for BARK was being withdrawn and the BBS would shut down soon. A lot of us were understandably very upset by this. This was actually the first time I learned that BARK was run by PolyGram, the record company.

For a few months after BARK closed, I kept in touch with a couple other BARK users and we would snail-mail each other floppy disks back and forth to share games, fonts, misc software, wallpapers, and whatnot.

While trying to piece together BARK's history, it became apparent that there is very, very little information about its existence left on the modern web. Pretty much just a few Reddit threads and very brief mentions of it from Parker Reilly, the guy who created and managed it. The Internet archive has a well-OCR'd collection of Boardwatch Magazine that doesn't have anything about it. Even the fact that there were even toll-free BBSes at all seems to have been largely forgotten. But here's what I've able to piece together.

The BARK BBS was conceived as a market research tool by the record company PolyGram. Someone with the authority to spend money at Polygram theorized that the current generation of teenagers with access to computers likely also had disposable income to spend on music. Instead of placing random bets on which invidual artists or genres would be popular, why not ask the kids themselves? Or better yet, set up some place where they can gather and discuss their musical tastes with each other and chat about upcoming indie bands. Then simply read what they said to discover the hot new trends in pop culture and music. Or at least that was the idea.

Oh, and since long-distance calls were fairly expensive, why not give it a toll-free number?

This Reddit post is a fairly personal first-hand account from Max, the guy who was the BARK sysop for a good percentage of the time it was online. It's well worth reading the whole thing but here are a couple highlights:

Bark BBS was some executive’s idea at Polygram Records for which we ultimately worked. Of course, I knew Polygram as they were publishers of many of my favorite rock artists. But what was the idea behind Bark? Parker explained that Polygram wanted to do marketing research through Bark and find out what young kids of high-school age wanted to listen to and what kind of music they were going to buy, so that Polygram could produce such artists and sell the records. At the moment the strategy was not very well defined and Parker was the chief editor with the job of running Bark and another guy was joining soon to be the marketing director.

So what did I do initially? We had an 800 dial-in number and four modem lines anyone could dial into. Parker had previously created relationships with many high schools across the country and in each