— in pencil, on graph paper, folded twice —

To whoever picks up this line after me,

I want it written down what we are doing here, because nobody else is going to say it plainly. We are building the most genuinely democratic communication infrastructure the continent has had since the rural mail route. Every node on every loop is somebody who paid for the second phone line themselves, soldered the null-modem cable themselves, sits up until three in the morning answering questions from a kid in Lewiston, Idaho about why his term program is dropping characters in column eighty.

This is not a hobby for people who could not afford a real hobby. This is real infrastructure. When the Carolinas got hit by Hugo last fall it was BBS nodes — not the phone company, not the wire services — that carried 'I am alive, the house is gone, here is where we are' across the seaboard before the sun came up. The networks we are putting together right now will carry the next one too, and the one after that.

The phone monopoly does not own this. The wire services do not own this. The university gateways do not own this. Twelve thousand sysops own one twelve-thousandth of it each, and we hand it off freely to anybody who can dial in. A kid with a Tandy and a 300-baud modem can reach the same files a programmer in Palo Alto can reach. Say that again to yourself. That is what we have built.

Keep the line clean. Keep the file echoes flowing. If a new caller seems lost, walk them through the menus the way somebody walked you through them. Answer the late-night messages. The whole continent is held up by people who answer the late-night messages.

It matters. It matters right now.

— M. Garreau, sysop, The Copper Wire (Butte, MT)
14 May 1989, 02:47 local