DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

You might call David Perrussel a purist, but you would only be half right. A purist is preoccupied with tradition, as Perrussel surely is. But purists protect their traditional interests from the influences of change. Perrussel embraces change — particularly the high-tech variety — while preserving a particular tradition once threatened with extinction by the Internet: the bulletin board system, or BBS.

You might also call him as a traditionalist, but that falls short for the same reasons. So just call him Diamond Dave, as he is known in the BBS community he helps preserve.

The BBS was the only online community of choice for early users of personal computers. It was typically a single PC operated by a system operator, or “sysop,” who managed the direct dial-in connections and provided content, a message board and usually a slew of text-based interactive games for a like-minded, and usually local, group of friends. But when the Internet hit the mainstream, the BBS hit the skids.

Now BBSs are making a comeback, thanks in large part to broadband, which has allowed BBSers to expand their communities.

“You're not limited to a local community like you were with the old BBSs because of long-distance charges,” said Perrussel, Webmaster of the dmine.com (short for Diamond Mine) Web site, which includes pages called “BBS Corner,” “Telnet BBS Guide,” “Telephone World” and, yes, even one that pays tribute to the late, great Jack Benny.

“A lot of what you see on the Web is eye candy,” Perrussel said, “but people are coming back because they like the interactive online system you can't get with a Web site.”

One would think there was a revenue base to be had here, but Perrussel — who uses his “Double E” from Penn State to do computer network R&D for the Navy as a civilian living in Fredericksburg, Va. — does it solely for the public good. “I do it because I feel the technology needs a push. There are a lot of people that still like the kind of online community the bulletin board system started out as.”

He also does it because he can't help himself. Diamond Dave, like others in his BBS community, likes to tinker. “A lot of these people are experimenters. They're hobbyists for the most part, out there for the sake of the technology, to see what it can do,” Perrussel said. “They are tinkerers. They just like to experiment. And that's the thing about bulletin boards — it's one large experimental system.”

Perrussel guesses that the BBS will never be as popular as it was before the Internet, but the niche audience won't go away. And as long as there are people looking to tinker, Diamond Dave is willing to cater.