The Zirve: When Handles Became Faces

On a BBS, nobody knew what you looked like. You had a handle. A screen name. Maybe a signature at the bottom of your messages. People knew you by what you wrote, how you argued, which file areas you uploaded to, how you treated newcomers. That was your entire identity. You built a picture of every person in your head. From the words. From the tone. From how they described things. You decided someone was tall. Someone was serious. Someone was probably older. Someone was probably heavy. You were almost always wrong. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The gathering ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── In Turkey, BBS meetups were called Zirve. Summit. The word was perfect. It felt like you were climbing toward something. These were not frequent. Maybe once a year. But when one was announced in the message bases, it was the event of the season. In the United States they called them GTs (get- togethers) or SysOp meets. In Germany they were Usertreffen. Every BBS scene had its own word for the same thing: the day the handles became faces. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── What I imagined vs what I found ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── I was in my early teens. I assumed everybody was older than me. Most of them were. But I also learned there were kids younger than me. Twelve-year-olds who had been writing messages that read like they came from adults. I had imagined one person as heavy, maybe stocky, because his writing had a kind of weight to it. He was lean. I had imagined someone tall because his messages were confident and expansive. He was short. Every single mental image I had built from text was wrong. That was the first lesson of the Zirve. Text carries no body. You project everything onto it. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Getting there ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── I was a kid. Convincing my family to let me travel to a gathering of people I had met on a computer was not easy. These were strangers. I knew them by handles. My family did not know them at all. Kemal Abi made it possible. He ran the computer store in town. An engineer by training, overqualified for the place, but deeply into computers and software. I bought my hardware from him. We started using BBSes around the same time, exchanging information, learning together. A friend who shared the obsession. He was excited about the Zirve too. He had studied in Ankara and it was a good excuse to see old friends in the big city. So he volunteered to chaperone me. Told my family he would look after me. And that was enough. We later built a BBS together. Became SysOps. Years after that, Kemal Abi became a cofounder of my first startup. That relationship started in a computer store in a small town, grew over modem lines, and survived the real world. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The room ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Picture a university theatre. Rows of seats. A stage. And in that room, every person you had been talking to for months. All at once. All real. People wore their handles on name tags. You would walk up to someone and say the handle out loud and they would say yours and then you would just stand there for a second, recalibrating everything you had imagined. We exchanged things. Floppy disks, mostly. Shareware collections, ANSI art packs, utilities, door games. We ate together. We talked about hardware and software and the things we had only ever discussed in text. Conversations that had taken days over message bases happened in minutes face to face. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Why it mattered ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The internet killed the BBS meetup by making online interaction constant and effortless. You did not need a yearly gathering when you had IRC, then forums, then social media, then video calls. But something was lost. On a BBS, text was all you had. You read carefully. You wrote carefully. When you finally met the person behind the handle, it meant something. You had already done the hard work of knowing them by their ideas. Modern social media gives you the face first and the ideas maybe never. We had it the other way around. I think our way was better. --- END OF MESSAGE ---