The Death of Rusty n Edie’s, One of the Horniest Places on the 90s Internet

Russell and Edwina Hardenburgh ran the “Friendliest BBS in the World.” For $89 a year, callers to the Ohio couple’s bulletin board system could upload and download freeware or shareware programs, converse with its 14,000 other subscribers, and peruse downloadable nudes, on offer from other members’ magazines scans or amateur pornography endeavors.   

Being the “friendliest BBS in the world” would end with FBI agents hauling dozens of servers out of their basement and a lawsuit from Playboy. This week marks the 19th anniversary of special agents walking into the Hardenburghs’ home, and walking out with everything they’d built over six years.

In the late 1980s and into the 90s, before the World Wide Web, posting to text-based BBSes was what most people did on the internet—or at least, those lucky enough to have a PC and a dial-up modem at home. Some of the biggest BBSes were devoted to swapping downloadable porn image files, including scanned-in photos from magazines, pictures copied from floppies, and homemade amateur smut. If you were running a BBS at the time, and allowing people to upload their own files, you were likely hosting at least some porn. Other BBS systems operators, or sysops, turned this into their entire business, charging annual subscription fees and placing ads for their BBSes in sex shops and magazines. 

Russell, who went by Rusty, was an insurance man; he didn’t really intend to get into the pornography business, according to archived accounts that are attributed to him. Rusty allegedly wrote down the BBS’s origin story at some point before the FBI raid in January 1993, and this entry has been preserved on BBS history websites and archives:  

In ironic foreshadowing for his own fate, according to this account, Rusty seemed most excited about the concept of “shareware,” software made to be swapped between users for free (or a small copying fee). He downloaded PC-TALK, one of the earliest pieces of shareware, to access his local BBSes. 

“Now at least I could have millions of programs, and all free!” the archived piece says. He dialed in to his local BBS that night. “I was so excited! It was a great moment!” 

But in this new world of endless potential, he soon ran into limits. Most systems operators were hobbyist tech nerds, like Rusty himself, running boards out of their living rooms and paying the cost of electricity, hardware, and internet service out of pocket. Some were hesitant to charge callers for subscriptions, for fear of being seen as sellouts or greedy capitalists, or monetizing what was meant to be a fun hobby. Many sysops tried to throttle the demand on their servers by making new callers answer absurd questionnaires, or call them on the phone before giving them login credentials. Owners of adult-themed BBSes, like the Virginia Beach-based Pleasure Dome, made new callers pick up the phone and verify their ages verbally; if they sounded too young, the administrator would make them come to his office in person to show ID. 

All of this rigamarole frustrated Rusty. He didn’t understand what questionnaires asking about the name of his cat or his grandparents’ political affiliations had to do with wanting to access a BBS, and got tired of waiting in line for over-capacity systems to open up a new caller slot. So, he started his own, determined to make it easily accessible to everyone. 

“I was going to open a ‘NO rules’ BBS, and I asked [his wife, Edie] if she wanted me to name it after both of us.” Rusty wrote. “Our callers were greeted with our motto: No Censorship! No Rules! No Hassle! And our rules: Have fun, End of rules.” The Hardenburghs opened Rusty n Edie’s BBS on May 11, 1987. 

Predictably, a “no rules” BBS became wildly popular, and soon the Hardenburghs had to buy more servers, more modems, and a whole new house to keep it all to meet the demand of thousands of callers trying to access their BBS. Baby, their cat, lounged on the overheating hardware, “frying his brains on the monitors,” Rusty is credited as writing. Three huge humidifiers attempted to keep static down, and a four ton air conditioner unit battled the heat from these machines. 

Being the “friendliest” meant being available by phone to callers anytime someone needed anything, and working themselves ragged trying to keep pace with demand so that no one had to wait for access. “That motto has almost killed Edie and I,” wrote Rusty. “Even so, no matter what we do, we hear the deadly ‘I thought you were friendly.’” 

Meanwhile, big software companies were mounting a war against BBS operators who allowed users to share pirated works. In October 1992, Congress—lobbied by software companies like Microsoft and Adobe who saw their software spreading online under the guise of “shareware”—raised the crime of software piracy from a misdemeanor to a felony. Making 10 or more copies within a six month period would be punishable by five years in prison and a fine of $250,000, and a second offense would be punishable by up to 10 years in prison. This was the era of warez, and hackers who made cracking pirated software and passwords an art form. 

Months later, Rusty and Edie were the first test subjects for this new law.

A report in Boardwatch Magazine claims that this all started because of a tip from a small-time software developer named Bob Fairburn, whose pastoral life (literally, he was renovating a farm) was threatened by shareware stealing meager royalties that kept his family afloat. Fairburn found his CAD program, “Expert Home Design,” available for free on a Wisconsin-based BBS called Exec-PC. He called the sysop and demanded his program be removed, and then found a file within that shareware package advertising that it originally came from Rusty n Edie’s. 

Fairburn told Boardwatch that when he contacted Rusty, he received a rather rude reply: that he wasn’t responsible for every one of the megabytes of files uploaded to the system every day, and would get around to removing it when he felt like it. A week went by, and Expert Home Design was still available on Rusty n Edie’s, he claimed. So Fairburn called the FBI. 

Armed with this new felony law, and the blessing of the Software Publishers’ Association (which was already mounting hundreds of audits and lawsuits against corporations and BBS operators for stolen software), special agents showed up at the Hardenburghs’ home on Jan. 30, 1993, and hauled away an estimated $200,000 worth of equipment, taking down a 14,000 caller BBS in one day. At its height, it was taking 3.4 million calls, at over 4,000 per day, with over 100,000 files available for download. A lot of this, according to anecdotal reports, was porn. But porn wasn’t what the FBI was after; it was the allegedly stolen software.  

"The SPA applauds the FBI's action today," Ilene Rosenthal, general counsel for the SPA, said in a press release that was shared around via email and Usenet. "This shows that the FBI recognizes the harm that theft of intellectual property causes to one of the U.S.'s most vibrant industries. It clearly demonstrates a trend that the government understands the seriousness of software piracy." The SPA didn’t just applaud the FBI; it claimed to be actively working with it.

Technology trade magazines were some of the only outlets to cover the downfall of Rusty n Edie’s, and even those eulogized the legendary BBS with mixed feelings. The news was reported in the February 1993 issue of Computerworld, under the news item “FBI Shutters Ohio Bulletin Board,” reporting that the fourth-largest bulletin board in the U.S. was shuttered by the FBI in collaboration with the Software Publishers’ Association and accused of allowing and encouraging “illegal copying of numerous copyrighted business and entertainment software packages by the board’s 14,000 subscribers.” A longer piece in the March issue quoted a few Rusty n Edie’s callers as saying they’d never seen pirated non-shareware software on the board, and if copyrighted stuff did appear, it seemed to be removed quickly. 

No one who covered the BBS’s downfall tried to pretend that the pair didn’t have it coming—some said they played fast and loose with their reposts of copyrighted content, even going as far as reposting images with their own watermarks or ad files attached. 

Earlier this month, people remembered Rusty n Edie’s in a thread on the tech forum Hacker News. “95% of the porn I downloaded when I was 12 was watermarked with these two names,” one commenter wrote. ​​On Reddit, someone remembering the BBS era wrote that they didn’t even subscribe to Rusty n Edie’s, but they were big enough that their reputation preceded them in the form of porn posted to other boards: “People would post porn pictures on local boards far away from them that were watermarked by Rusty n Edie's with their name and telephone number.” 

In a fiery PC Magazine editorial about the bust, columnist John Dvorak theorized that the feds were making an example of Rusty and Edie as shareware hosts, but that the mom-and-pop pair wouldn’t find many allies to stand with them because of these shady practices, around nudes in particular. He wrote: 

Ultimately, this wasn’t about one couple’s run-in with the feds but a sign of things to come for other sysops. “Shareware is a legitimate threat to the software companies that sponsor the SPA,” Dvorak wrote. “There are about six huge BBSs in the U.S., and they all promote shareware. Rusty's reputation for having commercial software on the board for downloading made it the easy first-strike target in a long-term campaign to put shareware authors and small-time operators back into the underground, where they won't affect sales of the big boys.” 

“The SPA is doing a lot of damage to the reputation of BBSs through its coordinated witchhunts of late,” one Usenet poster wrote about the news in February 1993. “I've tried calling the folks at Rusty and Edie's all day to see if I can get their side of the story, but the board line just rings and rings, and the voice line has been constantly busy.” 

At the same time, the old guards of erotic media were playing catchup to the BBS systems administrators who were beating them to the web. Playboy.com launched in 1994, and the company prepped for its arrival on the web by seeking out and suing anyone posting scans of the magazine’s photographs online. The company had an employee on this task full-time, posing as a regular subscriber to access bulletin boards and check them for Playboy’s pictures. The Event Horizons BBS, started in 1983, began as a nerdy space game that grew into one of the most profitable BBSes in the world thanks to its expansion into softcore porn offerings; Playboy sued its operators in 1993, and settled out of court for half a million dollars. 

Playboy filed its complaint against Rusty n Edie’s in 1993, alleging copyright and trademark infringement. They settled in 1998. 

This was all happening before the Communications Decency Act of 1996, and Section 230 within, which might have protected Rusty and Edie from liability for what their users uploaded. Companies could sue small websites and platform operators out of existence for hosting user-generated content they didn’t like—including copyrighted content, but also libel and defamation. The feds could go after any operator disseminating “obscene” materials, as well, using local community standards of obscenity; in 1993, California couple Robert and Carleen Thomas, who ran the Amateur Action BBS (another of the most popular BBSes of the time) were targeted in a federal investigation after being accused of disseminating child sexual abuse materials. In the effort led by a Memphis assistant U.S. attorney, a postal inspector logged on, downloaded explicit images, ordered videotapes to be sent through the mail, and sent unsolicited child pornography to the BBS. In January 1994, the Thomases were indicted by a federal grand jury in Tennessee on 12 counts of violations of obscenity laws and one count of child pornography (but were later acquitted of that charge). Robert was sentenced to serve 37 in a federal penitentiary; Carleen got 30.

Fear of being shut down by major publishers like Playboy over copyright infringement often led BBS sysops to some weird moderation decisions. Many were already checking every file uploaded to make sure no child sexual abuse imagery made its way onto their servers, and after Event Horizons’ and Rusty’s run-ins with Playboy, they started checking for potentially stolen or copyrighted material, too. This they did using varying rubrics and gut hunches—long before digital rights management software or automated moderation tools were invented to speed up the process.

The operator of the Exec-PC BBS, which itself hosted a huge library of adult material, said in the late 90s that he took an “I know it when I see it” approach to spotting copyrighted content: “If the photos showed beautiful women that were so absolutely gorgeous and that the photography was so beautiful, and you know, there were no blemishes on their skin and the lighting was perfect, we just took it off.” 

As for Rusty’s fate, he tried cobbling the system back together and vowed it would return, and even set up a website on the World Wide Web. But Rusty n Edie’s never returned to its full glory. The couple remain local legends in their hometown, however; a sign at the R&E Centre shopping plaza in Boardman, Ohio, at the same address where they hosted the servers, still declares it the “Home of Rusty & Edie’s BBS.”