Hello, and, in some cases, welcome back.
This is the official beginning of my own dedicated weblog, covering everything from essays I write about subjects I need to work out, to information about advances across my historical websites, to the occasional BBS Documentary gossip and discussion. While a number of locations have existed for this information before, I finally decided that I might as well try this out for the time being, and see if the interface is compatible with my writing and working style.
I should state for the record that Weblogs, and their counterparts in livejournals, deadjournals, bloggers, userland and what-have-you slipped quite happily under my radar; My attention was focused elsewhere, and the nature of the whole process seemed somewhat un-new to me. When describing them to people, I tended to call them "BBSes where the only message topic is the Sysop". This is generally true for a mass of them, but not all.
I found that a lot of weblogs lack, in any meaningful fashion, content; they are simply an additional layer of gatekeeper, pulling data from various sources which you have equivalent access to, and then adding a short pithy comment and pasted paragraph before sending you on your way. It didn't seem worth it to have to slog through a couple dozen of the things every single day in the hope that they would reveal some interesting nugget of linkage I might have stumbled into my own way. And I certainly didn't want to be yet another voice shouting over the cacaphony.
Things have achieved a better sort of clarity now that I understand RSS and News Aggregators and so on; then the whole paradigm shifts and we have a number of folks providing content channels that my little feedreader program can slog through and pick out the newest entries. Essentially, websites become Usenet again, but the mid 1980s Usenet, which was quite the little intellectual parlor for a while.
My intention with this weblog, then, is to add content; to create information, to add my thoughts and embryonic ideas into a discernable web-based location, allowing syndication and feedback. I am not interested in starting a community at the moment so I will not add comment links to the essays. I welcome e-mail, of course, and will do my best to respond intelligently to them and bring particularly helpful/insightful missives to the log itself.
Expect extremely spotty posting, as little as once every two or three months, but who knows, maybe I'll surprise everyone and become a daily poster.
Weblogs, more than most writing mediums, reflect the flaws and advantages of their owners; I hope you enjoy the latter and live with the former. And thank you for browsing.
Advances in technology, software or hardware or whatever, come from a lot of locations. More importantly, the version of the advance that becomes the most well known is both lauded as that person or group's accomplishment, and criticized as a lightweight rehash of a previous technology that existed before it. This happens over and over; we use the web but forget Gopher, we use XBOX Live and forget Starpath, we laud photoblogging and forget Pixelvision. Yet none of those earlier technologies are really even the same as their antecedents; they just have that eerie sense of coming from the same place in our collective brains.
Invention mostly comes of interest in Patents and awards. Being the first in and of itself is not generally profitable, but could potentially be in the right hands, with the right marketing and shark-like attempts to quash anything similar. It also, along the way, has a lot of pride with having made those first baby steps into something bigger than the person who created it. This pride can turn into anger and shock when someone after you announces that they themselves have discovered what's only an incremental change from your discovery.
I'm all about history, so let's use some recent history.
In the 1980's Mark Herring created .QWK Packets. This is one of those "of course" discoveries that changed the face of BBSes forever. Not everyone partook of them, and the need for them went away with the Internet (sort of), but they stand as a real example of going about a problem and "fixing" it. If you want a self-contained lesson in advance of an experience, this is it.
The problem with single-line BBSes is that very thing, the single line. When someone is online with the BBS, nobody else can be on. If that person is sitting at the prompt, they are by some standards taking away time from other people. On a BBS that is particularly popular, time that someone isn't logged on could be measured in minutes out of a day. So, if you want to respond to messages, check your mail, consider it, and reply, you're suddenly running up against things like imposed time limits, and your own typing speed. This is a problem, and it needs fixing. And Mark Herring fixed it.
Basically, he created a format and a client that would take all the messages that were unread on a BBS, and all the private messages/mail that came addressed to you, and enable you to download them as one big clump. This format, .QWK, would send down these changes to your client. Then, you could immediately disconnect from the BBS (you'd only be on for a few minutes), read all your new messages, read all your mail, and then compose your answers, right there, in a nice text editor, with instantaneous response (instead of the subtle but noticeable delay through a modem). Having composed these messages to your complete satisfaction, it was simply a matter of auto-dialing the BBS again until you connected, and all your responses and replies were uploaded to the system along the same .QWK packets and sprayed across all the message boards.
This changed everything; now BBSes could stop being mostly single-point terminals with folks waiting a person to conduct their business before everyone tried to get on again. Now they were drop-off centers, with people able to connect and drop off their "pack" and pick up another "pack" and disconnect. This fundamental change of the BBS experience can't be discounted; and once this technology was added, nobody who used it really wanted to go back.
Mark told me of one unintended artifact of .QWK: People who were unable to type with their hands, (for example paraplegics with sip-and-puff typing software) could write out long and intense messages and responses with nary a care about the BBS time limit and other users waiting; they could come across exactly the same as everyone else on the BBS, since their messages would look exactly the same as if they could type at 100 words per minute. He was very proud he wrote something that would facilitate that, as he should be.
I interviewed Mark for the Documentary, so I spent some time learning how the packets worked, including the fact that saved .QWK packets on floppies and old hard drives are inadvertent archives of BBSes. So they were pretty fresh in my mind when I started paying attention VERY recently to RSS feeds.
Sorry that I'm so late to the RSS party; I hope there's some cake left. I got my hands on feedreader, started looking for the secret handshake on all these weblogs and news sites I'd been browsing rather fervently, and finally figured out how all you maniacs can keep track of 100+ weblog sites at once with actual time left for eating and sleeping. It also solves the problem of getting to someone's site to pick out the newest information from stuff you've already read, and trying to remember which site had an essay you wanted to read (thanks to the search function). I was delighted when I finally understood what was going on.
But did Mark discover this "first"? Is he the father of the concept of News Aggregators? And did what Mark create rate as the "first"? What about Usenet? Does a newsreader count as more of a "first" than Mark's first, even though they weren't used for BBSes? And what happens when you figure out who was "first"? Do they get a prize? (Well, they get interviews by a guy like me, but you can ask them if they think this is a prize). This is what I've come to call "The Game of Firsts", where people lay claim to a discovery or a creation and then someone comes along and argues that another technology, lacking some features but having others, was "first" before them.
This expresses itself BBS-wise with, in time order, Ward Christensen's CBBS, Community Memory, PLATO, and Telegraph Operators. Each one can lay claim to being the "first" BBS, but you have to play some games with what comprises that term. Do computers need to be involved? There goes Telegraph Operators. Is the dialing of a phone line vital to the experience? There goes PLATO. Is it important that anyone in the country be able to dial in? There goes Community Memory. My documentary will only glance upon the first few of these "proto-BBSes" before settling on Ward, simply because I had to declare an arbitrary point of the story. But in doing so, I am setting myself up for quite the fight. There's nothing I can easily do about that, other than make sure that I don't dismiss these earlier technologies as feeble or irrelevant to the story.
It is the most unavoidable and yet most wasteful of debates; which technology came first, which was better, which one "should" have won. I understand advocacy as an expression of joy and of spreading information, but not as a tool of harassment and jingoism. It's been around so long (Apple vs. IBM vs. Commodore vs. Atari, or even Ford vs. Chevy) that I guess it's part of being human. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.
It's hard not to browse over the attendee list for Foo Camp and not feel sad that I couldn't dip in and out of crowds of those folks. Some of them I heavily disagree with, some of them I worship from afar, but there's no question that a goulash of them in a non-commercialized space is likely a wonder to behold. What great ideas might be reverberating from that event as we speak!
It reminds me a lot of another great party I wasn't invited to, the Apple II Reunion hosted by John Romero in October of 1998. Information about this party is mostly buried away, but the attendees included Chuckles, The Fat Man, Lord British, Jordan Mechner, Bill Budge, Dan Gorlin, and The Woz. Just knowing these folks got to spend an evening together makes me happy indeed, on principle.
These sorts of events happen a lot, actually, depending on who you look up to and what floats your nostalgic/cutting-edge boat. For example, anyone who has ever lost a weekend with an Atari Joystick or hit their head against a particularly difficult puzzle in an adventure game would likely be in heaven at the Classic Gaming Expo. The Vintage Computer Festivals bring along their share of luminaries and infamy, as do the myriad hacker conventions that pepper the landscape. I'll leave the debate about the purpose and concept behind "hacker conventions" for some other time, but I can say that I happen to enjoy attending (and speaking at) them very much. Here's a hint: treat them like parties instead of paradigm-changing resume-boosters.
What really confuses me is the perception that people who own computers or at least delve into them intensively eschew parties, meetings or other social gatherings for the percieved safety and distance of online. Even the most extreme cases want a place where they belong and where they can ask things rapid-fire of a group of others like themselves, so any announced gathering interests them. And those extreme cases are just that: extreme. You can't discount the importance of reality to the inhabitants of the online world, and shoving people into some sort of freak box does nobody a favor, including yourself.
Having an event be invitation-only and then not getting invited is always a downer. It's probably not you; it's just that invitations depend by nature on the right webs of knowledge and trust, and if you're not in the one that drives the event, then you're not getting in no matter how much you might deserve to. The solution is simple: Build your own massive web of trust, and then wait for the cross-links to make your world a richer place.
I was lucky enough to get over to NAID (North American International Demoparty) in 1996, but missed Pilgrimage in 2003. Demoparties, those insane gatherings of computer people and what-have-you over a weekend are rather rare in the United States, mostly owing to insurance concerns. They're not invitation-only, but that's not important; the goal is that anyone with some talent, knowledge or ability throws their hat into the ring, maybe they compete at something, and otherwise make a name for themselves. I am hoping that with BBS Documentary DVDs in hand and knapsack, I will make my way across a bunch of them in the coming year or two and meet a lot of people and see a lot of wonderous things.
Many times, when you're at an event, you don't really feel like it's anything special other than a good time (or a not so good time). It's only with the addition of years that you start to look back and get that perspective to realize that the folks who were starting out at those get-togethers have gone on to great things. You never know where the next mad geniuses and media-gravitating superstars will come from; that's the magic of it. Maybe you'll be with friends or your children years from now, mentioning you sat at a bar next to the guy who made the next big thing. In other words, don't despair at your position on the arbitrary totem pole of now; if you truly care about such things (knowing you're friends with the best and brightest, as opposed to the most visible) then energy expended meeting people and communicating with them will come back ten-fold.
People, after all, are what make the whole thing memorable. Machines are machines, but it's the people who turn a LAN into a LAN Party.
BoingBoing, as a print magazine, was a part of a universe of small-press publications, hatched in apartments and off-hours and tons of sneaking around being able to afford the next issue. There were lots of names for this sort of creation, but the closest is "the zine movement", which essentially came into a golden period when the cost of printing or at least photocopying dropped to affordable levels. With this came a massive influx of leaflets, booklets, rants, and other such creations on actual, from-an-unsuspecting-tree paper.
This may sound like it's not all that related to computer history, but in many ways it is, because the same type of fertile minds that seized the (to them) obvious opportunity of zines did the same with websites, and many of those creative forces blast across the Internet in the present day, using the same excitement and skills they had to make the web a very interesting place indeed.
There were so many figures I remember from that part of my life, the people whose creations I sent money or stamps or my own art to get a copy of, most of which I still have, packed away in actual space here in my home just like I keep so much online history packed on my hard drives. There were so many of them....
And then there was Gunderloy.
Gunderloy is my often-forgotten creative mentor, one forgotten by me because his star shone so brightly and so intensively and then disappeared. My memories of him and others are casualties of my aging and moving on; sometimes I forget how many people contributed to what I am, and it's efforts like my web projects that help me to bring them back.
Most people who know anything of Mike Gunderloy know his creation even better: Factsheet Five held for a number of years the uncontested crown in keeping track of "small-press" publications, and by small press I mean a guy stealing time on the office copier. This isn't to say Mike didn't take non-independent materials; it just worked out that among the hundreds of individual creations and writings that Mike reviewed, it wasn't the latest bestseller or even the accepted "alternative" book that was sold in the same chain stores as the "mainstream" ones. This was the stuff in the pile next to the magazine section in your small record store, the stuff with the black and white cover with the hand-drawn date and issue number, the one where you opened it up and you could just tell, looking at the lettering, that they didn't use QuarkXpress or Print Shop, they used some tape and glue and hoped it would all hold together down at the library when they ran it through for 20 copies.
Factsheet Five produced an issue about once every two months, the central repository of reviews about zines, records, and other creations firing out of homes and apartments all over the country. Throughout the issue were neat little cartoons, tons of writing, and about every crank advertisement for every bizarro publication and project you might want to find. I even remember the many ads from Boing-Boing, featuring a little character I thought of as "The Ornament Girl" (Sorry, couldn't find an image of her online).
I discovered Factsheet Five during my first days of college in Boston. It was on the magazine shelf at Tower Records of all places, with a cover by Gaither, which caught my eye immediately. It was issue #27, so I was definitely a late-comer to the party.
What struck me was how many zines were listed, all of them having come out in just the last couple of months, and only later, after many bathroom and subway reads, did I come to realize that most of these reviews, these quick little paragraphs summarizing the content of these hundreds of zines, were written by one person.
If nothing else comes out of your reading this entry, let it be this: for years, a 100-200 page magazine showed up six times a year featuring hundreds of thoughtful reviews written by a single individual. He had to do 90 hour weeks to do it, and he crashed against the rocks when it ultimately caught up to his life, but he did it. And if someone can accomplish such a thing, you can accomplish anything. The pure herculean aspects of this astounds me, even now; he had to get a zine, indicate what type of printing was used to make it, say how many pages there were, list the subscription information, read it through, and then create a review. And then do it again. Hundreds of times. To produce one issue. And then he'd put that issue to bed and start on the next one.
Now, I rush to clarify that Mike wasn't the sole individual involved with the magazine and its sole staff member. Many dozens of people assisted, wrote columns, helped get Factsheet Five out, contributed artwork, and wrote many, many reviews themselves. But it can't be discounted how central to the whole experience and endeavor Mike was, and how, even glancing through the pages of these issues today (I kept them; they're all treasures) you see how he stands out from nearly every page, a strong influence and voice that doesn't crush the personality of the people he works with or whose work he reviews, ending the paragraph with a little (MG) to let you know who had read it. There's so much to learn from him in these pages.
They age wonderfully; and they still inspire.
I only actually met Mike on two occasions. Once during a party held in his home, and the other in New York City, when he spoke at a small political meeting. Both are memorable for entirely different reasons.
I went to the New York City meeting simply because Mike mentioned in Factsheet Five that he would speak there. I had no interest in the politics or anything else. I was happy to be there, although at the time I had a very terrifying phobia of NYC and it says how much I wanted to see him in person, because the entire experience was like someone afraid of heights getting dinner in a revolving restaurant. I bought up some issues of Factsheet Five, got Mike to autograph them, acquired some weird pamphlets and stickers, and quickly ran home to the suburbs, thinking I'd not get to see him again.
However, the second time came to be when Mike announced a small Factsheet Five party being held at his home in Rensselaer, NY, just outside Albany. I immediately resolved to go, although I didn't know how to drive at the time. I'm sort of fuzzy on who I conned to drive me all the way up there, to drop me off in front of Mike's house and let me hang out for hours... whoever you are, thanks again.
I remember another attendee looking like I did over Mike's massive wall of books, pamphlets, stories and volumes along his living room wall, and saying "This... this is the most amazing collection of alternative thinking and revolutionary thought I've ever seen." I felt the same way; Mike didn't just acquire, he collected and cared about what he was reading. The house had cats, strange mailed-in items, stacks of paper, and was a real amazing collection of the power of the written word overpowering nearly everything else. I had a fantastic time.
Like all things, Mike's time with Factsheet Five hit a major wall when the amount of himself that he had been pouring years into finally caught up with him, and he took the whole magazine down. He donated his zine collection to a library, closed up shop, and basically disappeared. Myself and other lifetime subscribers got a small, tiny tiny "zine" from Mike that he put out some months later, more like a "get it finally out of my system" project than anything else, and then he was gone.
Factsheet Five went on for a while without him, and it's more sad to me than anything else, although the people who worked on them sweat just as hard as any normal editor in trying to put together the magazine. But computers were becoming a bigger part of the process and they got to do a ground-up reboot of the production, and so I myself drifted away after a few issues. I don't diminish their work; they just weren't the heroic figure I saw in Mike, burning himself to the bone to bring us so many fascinating works.
Imagine my delight when a couple years ago, I discovered Mike Gunderloy's websites. He runs a number of them from Lark Farm, raising his family, working on his current computer-related projects and living a good life. To be honest, his writings show a guy comfortable with his world, loving his wife and children, and living out where the air is fresh. It's like a little slice of heaven, and if anyone deserves heaven on earth, it's Mike Gunderloy.
People occasionally ask why I don't run my own blog or my own BBS or message bases on textfiles.com. My answer, in a basic sense, is I don't have the time to run things correctly, as I think it should be. To ask me what my definition of "should be" is gets to the heart of the matter.
The online environment suffers from the same problems a lot of communities suffer from: power issues, political infighting, and a wavering sense of the sanctity and baselessness of the entire endeavor. These issues are human, not electronic; they happen in spelling bees, book adaptation efforts, and quilting. Trying to solve human problems with electronic solutions is hit or miss at best, but shouldn't be considered a huge surprise if it fails to do so.
About all I can do to contribute something helpful to this discussion is point out two rules I've encountered in studying this history. Community breeds controversy, and communication breeds contempt.
Descending even further into theoretics, and summarizing what some people fill their college careers studying, the core goals of most communication technologies are not to foster conversation, but to prevent controversy and conflict. Phones are designed for end-to-end communication over the same wires as millions of other calls without a conflict. Phone conferencing, an incremental change in the experience from a person-to-person call, requires a heap of added features to allow the "conference operator" to function and maintain order. Ethernet, I probably don't have to go into much detail about, but the same issues apply: avoid conflicts, avoid things interrupting other things.
From the first moment a "Sysop" decides what's going to be discussed or what the name of their BBS or blog is going to be, there's a steady set of restrictions, rules, goals and mores that get placed upon the forum. And with all of that imposed order, the natural process of decay begins. I'd compare it, in some way, to swimming; you land in the water and begin paddling. Paddle (maintain) at the same rate, and you'll stay afloat. Stop pouring energy in, and you sink. Pour too much energy in and you end up with an out-of-control splashing maniac. It is that ability to balance and to be a part of things while not overdominating them that's so difficult to keep around.
And again, it's not the controversy-of-the-moment that causes the problem. From about five feet away or further, many of the controversies are distinctly entertaining, but they're far from it for the people involved. That's because the controversy is besides the point; it's the group mind-set that's being fought for, the way things will be for the group at large. If you truly believe there's a "there" there, then you've got to buy into every aspect of it, leaving you in some amazing positions to defend.
The unspoken words are the ones that define a place, even an electronic one, but they're never clearly stated: we are all alike of a way, we are all huddled against the darkness, we are here for this moment but that moment may end in an instant. That's what keeps us coming back, and if we find those feelings betrayed, based on whatever internal scale we measure them by, then we feel the place is "lost".
Throughout the interviews I've had with people about their experiences with BBSes and related discussion groups, I've gotten a very wide spectrum of thoughts on the art of online conversation. Some ruled their boards with an iron fist, while others remember logging onto a BBS where the sysop hadn't logged on in years. (There are still a handful of BBSes out there, still up, still having their phone bills paid, just running alone, on autopilot. Bless them.) And in many cases, the BBS software itself (or the blog software or the discussion software) contributes or hinders the style of order that the community will express. The reason that I have over 700 BBS programs listed on the documentary site is not just because there were so many platforms to program them, but because the balance of the software and the hardware against the very root of humanity's nature is a problem, a difficulty, far deeper and greater than any specific issues of the moment.
The cycle is often stated as "birth, flourish, death" for a community, but it's almost always "birth, flourish, change, change, change (...) death". With each change comes nostalgia for how things were and comparison between now and then, when perhaps the best thing to do is consider how things are now compared to how they'll eventually be.
Instead of filling up this bar with some very long, very intensive descriptions of events and things that not everyone would have an interest in, let me quickly give you a handful of informational tokens, flush with links and left as an exercise to learn about if it interests you.
PLATO. It doesn't stand for anything, although they tried to back-tack some acronyms on it. To some, it's the first BBS. At the very least, it's an impressive technological feat, allowing a thousand users to connect to the same computer space, starting back in the late 1960's. You can trace Lotus Notes, Castle Wolfenstein, Tradewars, Hack, and a bunch of other concepts to this system. Brian Dear has absolutely, unequivocably risen as the Mack Daddy of PLATO knowledge, and is working on what will probably be the best book that will ever be written on the subject. Update: Brian Dear wrote in that in fact it has always stood for "Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations" and did from the very beginning. The "Tacked-on" myth is just that. Schooled!
Infocom. From its inception to well into its existence, Infocom was the best game company in all of history. They produced a world-class product from day one, ensured it could be released instantaneously on over a dozen platforms (with no change in the quality of the experience), and brought to the world a cascade of worlds and memories that are still shared by many, many thousands. If Floyd still makes you cry and darkness makes you think of Grues, you're in the club. If not, it's pretty easy to join.
New Old School Hackery. It's understandable if there's a lot of interest in the video game systems of yore, and that the original games might find themselves copied from cartridges to transferrable images, but when you first find out that people are absolutely knocking themselves silly shoehorning games into these very old platforms, you just have to marvel. People have ripped the technical specifications as far as they can possibly go and that doesn't slow them a bit. Right now, you can buy new Atari 2600 game cartridges. How cool is that?
The Technological Assistance Party (TAP). Before 2600 Magazine and definitely before Phrack magazine, TAP magazine rose from the Youth International Party and for well over a decade gave you some of the most subversive, strange, and hackerish information around. Maybe it all seems quaint now or maybe even irrelevant, but that magazine had everything going for it before the editor's apartment was firebombed. To be honest, a good solid website will accomplish the same goals of the original magazine, but if you don't learn how it was done back then it's much harder to avoid the same mistakes now. And wave to Abbie Hoffman as you go by.
Steven K. Roberts, The All-Time Classic Journeyman Hacker. So let's get this straight. Steven Roberts sold all his stuff, built a recumbent bicycle loaded over with the best gear he could get at the time, went out on the road, and started to send out missive after missive to Compuserve from all over the country. He travelled thousands of miles, wrote about all his experiences as they happened, and lived a dream that many have had, and lived it well. Yes, he's real. Yes, it happened, and he wrote a book about it, a book floating around the top space in my collection. Steven K. Roberts, I hope everyone learns your story.
There's the usual layer of nostalgia: you played an Atari game or two or perhaps owned a 2600 and some cartridges. Then there's the layer below: you check on ebay for cartridges and collect them, maybe even pick up the occasional full-sized game to burn through some ready cash. And there's a layer beyond that, where you pick up old vintage Atari posters or a t-shirt or maybe even the occasional obscure artifact like an Atari Asteroids Halloween costume.
Even there, you'd have nothing on Curt Vendel.
One of the things I do once I get my hands on a new subject to research is working my best to exhaust all the available data sources, then going after more obscure indirect sources that might reveal more: knocking up shareware CDs for sale on ebay to get additional versions of a BBS program, for example. Or finding a website that posts information that isn't related to the subject, but mentions it indirectly, which gives me some vital name or event which I can search for and find even more interesting. Once I get into one of these runs it takes me pretty far, pretty fast. Naturally, this would occasionally put me into contact with Atari, which has not only a long history (Williams/Midway and Gottlieb do as well) but had such interesting amounts of employee and idea churn over its decades that people correlate all over the history of computer games and computers at large. And the thing is, wherever I went, Curt got there first.
I'd find what I thought were golden, obscure internal Atari VAX message postings, and Curt had been involved in the project. I'd find some neat old articles on bulletin boards and it was Curt had the original magazines. And it was Curt who had access to the golden stuff, the neatest of the items, the ones I thought didn't exist. If the term "Atari 1450 XLD" has any meaning for you, Curt's Ownership of one should come as a bit of a surprise. In fact, Curt has what seems on all fronts to be the largest private collection of Atari Memorabilia, information and documents in the world.
I interviewed Curt for my documentary because I wanted people representing as many of the major platforms of the early 1980's as possible. (Atari, Commodore, Tandy, IBM, Texas Instruments, and so on.) Who better to discuss the draw of Atari than someone with so many examples of it?
(The interview went very well, by the way.)
It turns out that in fact I'd met Curt at the Vintage Computer Festival East, where he had a number of Atari artifacts I'd never seen or heard of, including oddly colored joysticks and a light pen. We talked a bit then, but the documentary wasn't full in my mind then, just an idea being kicked around, and I was a pure tourist, someone delighted that so many interesting items were around so close to my home.
Curt is not just a mere warehouser of Atari; he is truly a curator. His website, Atarimuseum.com, is completely packed with information, pictures and documents covering pretty much all aspects of Atari. Curt understands more than most the magic this company built up in marketing, engineering, and all-around approach to the concept of "computing for the masses". That's a very etherial thing to grasp onto enough to present to folks, and I think he's captured it.
So here's what I'm getting at. Having collected nearly everything there is to find about Atari (although I'm sure Curt personally feels he hasn't), having amassed a collection reaching into the thousands of individual items, Curt's natural and distinct goal is to digitize and present as much of it for the public's consumption as possible. To give it historical meaning, to get it saved for posterity, and, through his attendance of computer festivals and conventions, give people who grew up so influenced by Atari the chance to see how many incredible things this company had to offer. Instead of locking it away to covet on his personal time or show to a few arbitrary individuals, he's opened it to the most folks he can on a physical level and provided (through his website) the opportunity for anyone who didn't know until five seconds ago they needed to see it, the chance to see all of it.
I can't think how it gets better than that.
By request, I'm going to write a little bit about the concept of "Cracking".
Like any good computer-related term, it has gone through many different meanings, all of them hotly fought over in certain tiny corners. Many of these uses are correct, as long as you take into consideration the time being spoken of. In my case, let's go back again to those late 1970's and early 1980's.
One of the lost qualities of the online experience is the pure factor of time, where the amount of minutes required to download just one side of a floppy disk (between 100k and 300k) could be excruciating. While in today's world of 800-1000 megabyte bittorrent collections might seem similar, at least you can do other things with your machine at the same time; play a video game, read your e-mail, even be downloading via other methods at the same time. With an Apple II or Commodore 64 or Atari 800, that was it; you just got yourself a plastic-cased Floppy Disk Transfer Machine that could do nothing else.
While this would normally be a small nod to the potential for exercise, in fact it was one of the factors towards the goal of "cracking" a program, to remove the copy protection and potentially shrink the amount of data by turning an entire disk side into a singular file. This file would be much smaller than the original, and could be transferred in a fraction of the time.
The piracy of today often involves the use of .ISO or similarly-named and formed images; basically exact copies of the entire data range of a CD or DVD, compressed with today's much-faster compression routines like .ZIP or .RAR or .ACE, and then sent along its merry way while the game companies curse your name. Outside of the fundamental issue of acquiring the pirateable data before anyone else and having access to a method of distribution, this is not a challenging or intellectually stimulating endeavor. You are generally not changing one whit of the data and you are, essentially, a glorified photocopier.
Not so in the days of the Crackers, when a program contained incredible tricks and traps to make sure that it was on an honest-to-goodness floppy disk and hadn't had some sort of unauthorized duplication set upon it. To be able to wrest it into a file, you had to step through the actual assembly language of the programs, decipher what was trying to be accomplished, and remember that in many cases the program was trying to fool you. You had to really know your stuff to be one of this tier of software pirate; Cat Burglars where others were smash-and-grab thugs. As a result, talented and quick crackers were few and far between and prized by the groups that had them.
Ah, groups. In a phenomenon that exists to the present day, those involved in the duplication of items have often decided to give themselves handles, and refer to their set of friends or acquaintances as a team, or pirate group. Even from the beginning the names were colorful: Black Bag, 202 Alliance, 6502 Crew, Apple Mafia, West Coast Pirates' Exchange... and a few dozen others. All of them battling to crack the protection, get the ware out, and keep the glory.
I can tell you with very strong belief that the term WAREZ arises out of "Wares", itself a shortened version of "Softwares". I have message bases caught by my own computer from 1984, so I know that the term definitely stretches back that far. Going through those message bases, I see terms that are very hard to pick up on their face. Terms like "Catsend", "G-Sections", "AE Line". While I think a lot of these files are vital history, I am very concerned that the terms will have no meaning by the time others come to them for any learning.
Concerned about this, I created a very large, very thorough file called The Annotated Pirate's Guide, an exhaustive research of terms and meanings from Apple Pirate days, based off the original file, called The Real Pirate's Guide by Rabid Rasta. You could lose an afternoon on that file, so beware.
We wouldn't have any idea of the involved processes of cracking where it not for a select group of crackers who chose not only to crack games but write informative guides about how to do it. The most prominent of these is Krakowicz, who wrote "The Kraking Korner" in the early 1980's and lays out the whole process with a talent for writing and a sense of the magic in the process. Krakowicz is also officially my Last Great Unfound Hacker, so if you're Krakowicz, please write in. Other guides by Buckaroo Banzai and The Red Pirate are also excellent insights into the Cracking life.
But if the actual nuts and bolts of the Crackers doesn't interest you, perhaps the crack screens will. For not only were Crackers able to turn a disk into a file for easy transfer, but they would often modify that file so that the title screen would have a special little shout-out from the cracking group, letting you know who did the work. This sense of pride coupled with ability enabled groups to get their name out to people who were copying the disks as fast as they could. After a while, you knew you were seeing a Black Bag release or another disk from the Apple Mafia. And after a while, these crack screens grew more and more elaborate, including animation, sound (and music on platforms like the Atari and Commodore 64 computers), and multi-screen thank-yous and membership lists.
After a while, these opening screens became so elaborate that separate divisions of pirate groups had to be formed just to program them. And after a while, these programmers said "why do I need to be associated with a pirate group to make really great-looking programs?"
And they went by themselves, into the darkness.
And so were born demos.
As it stands, I recently did some work taking the Crack Screens of over 350 Apple II programs and putting them online. If you're feeling like giving your machine a workout, try looking at the thumbnail gallery. If you were brought up looking at pirated Apple II programs, like I was, it's like someone grabbed the Memories Hose and turned it full blast upon you. Wear a raincoat.
A significant period of time before a pissed-off Richard Stallman arc-welded politics into programming, for-pay and for-free software makers co-existed relatively peacefully. The general needs for each type of computer user were handled by their type of company or individual. There were the occasional blips here and there, but the type of people who were selling software were generally selling consulting services as well, and the type of people giving away software didn't think of it that way, or didn't think much of doing it.
Around this time (let's call it the 1977-1981 period, but it's a little more fluid than that) there was this golden situation where one person or an entire company with dozens of employees could create similar packaging and to the casual observer, there would be little difference. This time is the golden age of the Baggie.
The last I checked, little tiny cardboard boxes with fold-out covers and CDs inside are the current method of getting your attention. They've come along with some really kick-ass printing methods where parts of the box are conversely shiny and dull, and the art covers every square millimeter of the outside-facing surface. This is a change from the earlier (now seemingly) massive cardboard box with CDs or floppy disks inside. Before that and all throughout the time that software has sold, we've had some completely out-of-sanity packaging ideas and innovative "oh please mister, pick me up" boxes. But the "industry" tends to move in packs and this is how it's been. Small shiny boxes descended from large shiny boxes, descended from cardboard boxes, descended from.... baggies.
The baggie (or the zip-loc bag, depending on your term for it) was the first and primary way for a software company (including individuals) to sell their package with its floppy disk or cassette tape in a store, a way that you could stack it against the wall and get people's attention. Baggies sealed easily, with a small piece of tape or a sticker holding it closed, and the clear plastic let you put an insert inside that would give you all of the front to tout your title and ware. On the back you might get additional information but you might actually get a view of the floppy and nothing else.
It was in a baggie that Richard Garriott became Lord British and built a pretty large empire and a really neat house. It was in a baggie that you could find all of the original Penguin Software graphics programs. And it was in a baggie that a little place in the mountains called On-line Systems sold the all-text Softporn Adventure, before becoming Sierra On-Line and growing into a company the size of a medium-sized galaxy. A quick browse through a Video Game Museum shows some of the many packages back then, simple on the front, simpler on the back. You picked it up, and more than ever after you could tell that it was put together on some table somewhere, by a person working for a little company in some room somewhere, stuffing a little treat for you to take home. It felt good buying software.
Because all it took was a dream, a lot of late nights coding, and a drive through all the nearby towns to put your baggies on the shelf, some really neat companies flourished where now they would be swallowed up or ignored like so many gnats. Some just put some great little square ads in computer magazines and sat back for the orders. One that comes to mind are the Beagle Brothers, which I might humbly make a suggestion as being one of the all-time great software houses. A quick jog through the Beagle Brothers Museum shows that it was a very small number of people behind it, but whose energy and humor (and a lot of copyright-free clip art) made them a must-have for your Apple II.
These little one-offs lived for many years, some staying as one-man operations and some getting along quite nicely as the industry moved into slicker and slicker graphics, marketing and packaging. While time has turned many of these old grand houses such as Broderbund and Sierra On-line into shells of their former selves, gutted and resold many times, we can still look back on their glory days with full digital clarity.
We've had this sort of period in the past with the World Wide Web; certainly between 1993 and 1995 it was difficult to see major differences between websites run by A Guy and websites run by A Company, with a few notable exceptions. Nowadays, you can kind of tell that Amazon and Dell aren't just somebody's weekday tinkering, and that your usual weblog is.
This will happen again, and we should enjoy each time it happens; it's when once again the power of a person shines as bright as any other force, before fading into a part of a chorus. And to be honest, the chorus doesn't sound all that bad.
My previous discussion of experiences with Psygnosis neglected to mention Henk Nieborg. By the 1990's, Psygnosis was generally more like a record company bringing in outside talent rather than a software house producing everything from within. This meant that there were a bunch of people who would just grind away at a game for a year or two and then present it to the firm, ready to be published after a few "tweaks" from producers and other folks. (The winner of the all-time "incubation" award was Andrew Spencer and his astounding six years to produce Ecstatica, but I digress...) As it were, there were a couple of developers who actually rode this wave of develop-refine-produce a couple of times, where most would develop a game and get out of that into some sort of independent deal. Among these special few were Henk Nieborg and Erwin Kloibhofer.
They produced two similar programs for Psygnosis, Flink and Lomax. They are what are called "Platform" games. They are simple on one level: land in a place, and head towards another place, generally blowing up or removing obstacles in your path. Eventually you fight a very big guy and you win.
However, they are breathtakingly beautiful.
There is something truly magical and wonderous about someone's ability to create an alternate world just by hand-creating a bunch of graphics. And hand-created his work is; his website allows you to browse them very closely and see how he worked. You don't look at them and see a picture; you just see a fully-formed drawing, not lacking any perspective or angle that makes you think something's "wrong", and yet not like reality in the least. So when you're playing, you're truly immersed, in a way that the latest attempts to make a bunch of triangles appear like a roving tank don't quite accomplish.
And his animations... now you're talking. While at Psygnosis I saw some prototype animations Henk did for a possible Lemmings game, and those little guys moved! Their little robes swayed, every hair on their heads went back and forth in time to their steps, and yet the whole thing was pixellated, drawn by hand but capturing their movements perfectly. Lomax has some remnants of that work, when someone deep with Psygnosis (was it you, Greg?) indicated that it would be a better idea to turn the "Lomax" character into a Lemming, to push the property a little further.
I had the good luck to see the breathtaking prototype of Lomax, back when it could only run on the Blue Playstation. Quick mention of that; the Blue playstation had 8 megabytes of memory where the regular ones only had 2. During the wild and wooly early days of playstation development at Psygnosis, a few products and prototypes took full advantage of the 8 megabytes, only to find they wouldn't play on regular Playstations! This means there's intense versions of a few games (like the secret development version of Darkstalkers that Psygnosis did that nobody's supposed to know they did... oops) that just don't exist outside of a few CDRs. The version of Lomax that I saw in that prototype had many more backgrounds drawn, as well as much more intense animation. They had to remove frames for the production version!
My point of going into all this about Henk is that Psygnosis was, and the world is, full of guys like him, intense, talented folks (Henk is only about 35 now; he did Lomax when he was 26 and was already a veteran) who slave away at their craft, quietly producing these works with true quality that are thought by the buying public to be "throwaway". Hello, Tim Wright. Hello, Andrew Spencer. Hello, Yak. Hello, Mark Hosler and Don Joyce.
So don't get me started on the saga and miracle of Psy-Q.
One of the big responses out of people when they visit my historical sites are the incredulity that the data still exists at all. Certainly, that was my own response when Google Groups started pulling in data from 1982, and when I first stumbled upon the ever-fluctuating Asimov Archive of Apple II disk images. (I'll save a debate about the legitimacy of such an archive for a later time.)
But the cool part about digital data is, all it takes is one person, saving their copy, and putting it aside somewhere safe, and then yanking it out 10 or 20 years hence. Unlike, say, antiques, they really don't take up a lot of space and assuming it can be brought back, the copies (now imbused with the artificial values of rarity and time) spread like wildfire. Especially now in a time of the Bittorrent archives, which I call the master method of "you didn't know you needed it until you glanced upon the title".
Recently, a group of researchers did some work with weblogs where they happened to pull about an enormous amount of entries from them, creating some sort of multi-gigabyte monster of a MYSQL database. Naturally, I grabbed a copy; I haven't even glanced at it, I'm just going to shove it onto a DLT tape and forget about it. Say what you want about weblogs, pro or con; I consider them as close to BBSes as we tend to get on the Internet, what with their day-to-day subject matter and reactions to current events in a distinct, flavorful manner. By saving them, they end up being a great time capsule for a given time. People a century from now will appreciate them quite a bit.
Along that line, I am a very big proponent of saving archival copies of one's livejournal. Livejournal makes it very easy to archive off a copy, which can then be stored away. People drop hours a day writing into these things and then they don't care in the least if the stuff is teetering on the edge of disaster if the livejournal servers have a problem. A small amount of effort now and all your work is that much safer.
Sprinkle a little rsync into your life and keep copies of your most precious data in at least two locations. Blow stuff into a tar or zip (or ace or rar) archive and throw it onto a CDR. Nothing's worse than losing your stuff, and you never know what it'll be worth to history at large a decade or two down the line. The best way to ensure history knows a fuller story is to keep around the data that formed the story in the first place.
For about a year in 1994 I had the pleasure of working for a video game company called Psygnosis, based in Liverpool but with offices all around, including Cambridge, MA. I was called in for a temp job, and the temp job was doing tech support for Psygnosis. I worked with a fellow named Chris Caprio and for a guy named Jim Drewry. My job was to be one of two people who would take phone calls from the tech support number for Psygnosis USA and help people with their problems. I remember the first time Chris sat with me by the phone and let me answer the call. If I ran into problems, he'd be there to help. The woman was quiet but not yelling or screaming, and I knew it'd be a breeze.
"Why are there satanic symbols in Lemmings?" she asked.
I went on hold and went "Ha ha, she wants to know about the satanic symbols in Lemmings. She's kidding right?"
Chris said "Well, no, there are in fact satanic symbols in Lemmings. Offer to exchange it for Creepers."
And so it began! I was employed there for about a year, before Sony (who at that point had already purchased Psygnosis) came in and closed the office, laying a lot of people off, spreading a few to California and England, and bringing a chapter to a close way sooner than I'd hoped. The development guy at Psygnosis USA, Mark Tsai, offered me a job as art director at his new video game start up, Focus Studios, and I took it. That too lasted about a year and I got out of the video game business entirely at that point.
But here's the thing. Working at Psygnosis, from the inside, was the capstone of a relationship with Psygnosis Games, and with video games on the whole, throughout my young life. Like a lot of kids my age, I played video games. A lot. A scary lot. Like, farther and further and over the top than probably was healthy for anyone. I was blessed with the advantage of being there right at the beginning, when concepts were truly new, and games like Centipede and Pac-Man and Crazy Climber were the first of their kind, before they were nailed into genres and classifications and all that sort of post-partum garbage that happens to an industry as it matures. In my mind, I can still remember those first times walking into the arcade, with the newest offering of video games, and going "What the hell is Zaxxon? And why is the up and down reversed on the joystick?"
When the Amiga showed up and we were all huddling around our friends' screens to see this amazing thing (Hi, Jiro!) What blew me away personally was that first time witnessing Shadow of the Beast II. The music, the sound, that opening theme with the scrolling background with multiple levels.... this made me crumble inside that I had seen it all in video games. Here was this incredible graphics and sound explosion coming out of a home computer! And there was that weird name, Psygnosis, right at the front, with that strange owl and unusual letters. The work, by the way, of none other than Roger Dean, he of the Yes Album covers and many other great art.
Psygnosis got and continued to get my attention. As luck would have it, I somehow magically avoided their lemons and saw only the best of the best from their people: The Killing Game Show, Infestation, Lemmings... people would complain later that the gameplay took a back seat to the beauty and the look, but you know what? I was a teenager, I didn't care. There was just something about those otherworldly logos and box artwork and feel... you just were somewhere else with these people.
So by the time I'd found out the company that needed me for a temp job with friggin' Psygnosis, oh man, you could imagine how I felt. And on the whole, I had an absolutely fantastic time! There were little fights here and there and there were the usual conflicts, but we were truly a team, a company aimed towards a goal and bent on getting these games out to people. I was there when the first Playstation (we got a blue one) showed up, and we were watching all the protoype Wipeout and Destruction Derby and Lemmings 3D games. I was an insider, at least feeling like I was.
I learned the video game industry (on the management and inter-company level) took a look at the ruthlessness and backstabbing of the Record and Movie industries and said "We can optimize that process." But down on the level we were at, we just had a great time. Also, I'm sure the experience of working with/for Psygnosis over in England was entirely different from those of us in the Colonies; there's even a support group out there for ex-employees and I've heard some pretty wild stories.
One of my colleagues was a young artist, really depressed at the end, named Daniel Robbins, who first got himself hired when he saw a Psygnosis employee playing frisbee wearing an Owl shirt. He went over and introduced himself, and joined up. By the end of our time together, he was so depressed... I assumed when he moved away to the southwest he'd just end his own life and that'd be the end of it and I'd miss him. Boy, was I ever wrong.
Sony, being the rat bastards they are, wanted to kill the Psygnosis Mystique as fast as they could, and wanted to rename them to Sony Psygnosis and then later Sony Computer Entertainment of Europe (SCEE). And get rid of the damn owl. This was eventually accomplished, but years and years after I was gone, thank goodness.
It's always poor hyperbole to call a year or two of your life "the best time of your life" but I can definitely vouch that an awful lot else that has happened to me couldn't come close. It was like the finishing school for my years spent in video games; I came away not so much embittered and cynical but able to put it into a part of my life, not overriding everything else. I saw a lot that made me feel sad at how those who Didn't Understand could tarnish beautiful work, but on the other hand I saw how all it could take was a few people with intense energy to accomplish anything. It was worth it.
I liked my time there so much I couldn't stand to see the Psygnosis name disappear forever. So I registered Psygnosis.org and started putting up all I could about the company. It's woefully inadequate and incomplete, but I had to do something. It's a low priority, of course, but over time I've tried to stock it up with artifacts, information and anything else I could find.
I really do miss that damn owl.
The documentary has made me do an awful lot of research, not just on hardware and events, but on people as well. Along the way I've met and researched a lot of interesting people, but even better yet, I've researched people I thought were interesting and found that, in fact, they're even more interesting and deep than I could have imagined. A perfect example is Tom Jennings.
For myself (and probably many others), he's "The Fidonet Guy", the fellow who created a BBS program called Fido that included a feature of sending along messages to other connected Fidos, enabling them to pass messages and e-mail between themselves. Sure, you say, Arpanet and all that, but unlike Arpanet, Jennings' program just required a modem and a PC and a phone line, and suddenly you had a personal node on the network, right there. This was the "ah hah" that brought many more people in to keep this dream going, folks who didn't have the opportunity of working on DARPA research projects or cradled in the hands of an academic institution. This was something you could pull down, crank around it, and (after some effort) be onto a functioning, real network within a very short time.
A large group of folks circled around Tom when he started working on Fido, taking the fidonet network and making it more scalable and robust, improving the "fidonet protocol" and, even cooler, writing third-party modules that would allow you to bootstrap a ton of other BBS programs into the Fidonet network as well. Suddenly you didn't even need to be running the original Fido program and you could get on there, like everyone else. Then came Echomail and the IFNA and, well... this is why an entire episode of my documentary is dedicated to Fidonet.
But here's the thing... by the time Tom comes out with Fido and Fidonet in 1984, he's already a solid veteran of the computing industry. He'd worked at Ocean Research Equipment. He did engineering for Bose. He did the preliminary BIOS work for what eventually becomes the Phoenix BIOS. A little bit of Tom is in a lot of home computers.
He slaves away at Fidonet for a good number of years before finally drifting away from it in the early 1990s. But where for most people the story would slow down (or end), Tom's actually speeds up. He founds a skaters' rights group called "Shred of Dignity". He becomes Wired Magazine's first webmaster. He throws his heart and soul into creating a ground-breaking ISP called The Little Garden. And oh yes, he founds a Queer/Punk zine called HOMOCORE.
Not enough for you, you say. Well, besides his ongoing work with the up2us software package, Tom is also the force behind World Power Systems, his personal artistic and creative entity that he discusses and displays his artwork and research on. Here he coincides with work I am doing, as he has done a lot of effort to keep track of old Character systems. It's not just ASCII and EBCDIC, after all. This interest of his in old text has also led to his assistance with rescuing some RTTY art from the middle of the 20th century. In fact, he has a whole host of projects and historical research projects he's been kind enough to share with us.
When interviewing Tom, I'd have been hard pressed to put his age above 30. His energy and dedication shows in everything he's done, and like many renaissance men, he's capable of being both charming and intimidating depending on what he speaks of. Talents like this walk through our lives and the lives of many, affecting them profoundly in ways we never completely grasp. Personally, I think it's important to recognize them before they're gone.
The most interesting statement I get from people when they tell me about their history is how "it's all gone now" and "everything is different now". I find it interesting because it's entirely untrue, but it belies another related issue: finding content, and finding relevant content.
My secret trick for dealing with search engines is to find the "secret word", a strange spell of words and terms that, when together, indicate that very thing you're looking for, without naming that thing. If finding hidden and lost locations is your thing, it's not obvious on the face that you actually might want to use the words Urban Exploration" which will give you a variety of sites of startling complexity about the art of Urban Speleology. But for all that easy work, there are a thousand other amazing related nuggets that you have much less chance of stumbling onto.
And such it is with historical stuff. While I may be (relatively) prominent for what I've done so far, there are now hundreds of people doing the exact same thing I'm doing, on a smaller or different scale. They're providing collections and directories and very-hard-to-negotiate or misguidedly-HTML-converted libraries. (Oh, and I should point out that a bunch of these were doing this collecting before textfiles.com arrived in 1998, so I'm no pioneer.)
Which is why I'm sending you a warning shot about my own idea of what will become the future: TOSEC.
It's not important that TOSEC stands for The Old School Emulation Center any more than Coleco stood for Connecticut Leather Company. What's important is that TOSEC, in trying to keep track of thousands of game ROMS, ended up creating this great naming convention for the games in question. They ended up creating a program called TUGID (The Ultimate Game Information Database) to keep track of the resulting ROM lists. Other programs also have risen do use those databases and keep distribution in check. Over time, this naming convention has been taken in by an awful lot of people to keep track of what can be tens of thousands of little, mysterious programs gotten from all over the place.
Through their use of a unified name setup and the MD5 hash of the resultant named file, TOSEC has removed a lot of the need for specific clearinghouses of available programs and ROMs, making it that you can just download a few hundred megs of what-have-you from the internet at large, shove it through these programs, and out on the end comes the 5 percent you didn't have and the 95 percent you did goes quietly away. Now, when a database is brand spanking new, you might not want that, but down the line, the database grows and starts to envelop a given known quantity, like Atari Magazines or Commodore Demos. And it provides that important line in the sand for anything resembling a standard to come out of collecting.
What I'm getting at, is that over time it allows a lot of incoming digital data, whether it be songs, screenshots, digitized articles, CD-ROM images, captured video, or what have you to get a standard name and an associate MD5. It allows the often sewer-pile-like collections that show up on some peer-to-peer networks to have a field day with renaming files or bathing them in misclassifcation, because ultimately your TOSEC program will make them squeaky clean. Sure, between now and then there might be some naming convention besides TOSEC, and it might seem different, but this is it, this will take collections away from specific websites and set them loose, floating, on a hundred thousand hard drives and passing from person to person like a treasured book or a special memento. It's very exciting.
Well, for people like me.
Like most people, I started out just "fooling around" on documentaries. I thought I could handle it, keep it under control. When it came to seeing them in the theaters, it was by mistake or unintentionally, like the time I found myself watching The Thin Blue Line or Roger and Me. I enjoyed myself, but didn't really see why they were better or worse than any of the other hundreds of films I was watching during my teenage years and film school.
Now it's out of control. You can find me at the local independent theatres (the Brattle and the Coolidge) seeing such films as Capturing the Friedmans, Dogtown and Z-Boys, and Step into Liquid. I've tracked down and bought the DVDs of Grey Gardens, Endless Summer and Genghis Blues. But the thing is, all these films are generally "big" and have pretty nice budgets or have achieved success. For a true junkie, it's like picking up over-the-counter stuff. Enjoyable, but not a rush. It's too simple.
Tougher, then, are the documentaries that I've been hunting down, ones where they're made by just a few people, with little or no "big sell" dreams, just trying to tell a story. I mean, if you didn't hunt, how else would you know about documentaries about The Pixelvision Camera (The Art of Pixelvision), Laser Tag and Photon (Lightsport), and, of course, First Person Shooters (Gamers: A Documentary).
I love nothing more than tracking down these little obscure projects with their non-wide marketing, tiny budgets and intense, fanatical commitment to getting the story out. And when I see a film that's trying its best to take on the same sort of difficuly, hard-to-grasp and hard-to-film subject like I am, then they really get my attention. Like Avatars Offline, which is a documentary dealing with Everquest and Ultima Online and the related situations and people to that. And when I originally heard about the Demo DVD Project, well, it was just a matter of waiting, and when it came out, I pounced.
Sometimes, you hear about a documentary and then, like some sort of animal, it skitters away, never to be found. A good example is Bang the Machine, a documentary made in 2002 about competitors in Street Fighter 2.
There have been articles and writeups on it, even a little bit of TV coverage. It is possible, with some effort, to download the trailer. And if you were lucky enough to be at the right festivals you might have seen it. But what if you want to see it, like I did? Sorry, the officially listed site has been down for a year (believe me, I've checked) and good luck finding much about the makers, who billed themselves "JabStrongFierce Productions". Oh, look! Another link!
I found out about The Joystick Generation and I've been waiting outside his door for over a year now as well, breathing on my hands and shifting back and forth on my feet like the little addict I am. Just one more hit, just one more...
Well, not quite, but close to my original dream. As I gave in a speech at DEFCON 9 a couple years back, it was my hope that eventually the collection of textfiles.com would become just another "ware", a singular, tradeable "thing" that people could pass back and forth. By building it up into a multi-gigabyte collection, it got on the radar of people who were trading CD images with nary a care. Well those times have come and are spreading like wildfire, thanks in no small part to programs like Bittorrent.
Like any other file-trading mechanism, Bittorrent has its share of fanatics and detractors; file me in under the fanatics. It's rotten for files under 2-3mb, but files like that can be sent as e-mail attachments without causing any problems. It's those big files, those massive collections of data that Bittorrent shines for. Yes, it's good for movies and albums, but it's also good for sending, oh, say, all of textfiles.com. Additionally, its demand that it get the whole file at once means the original file stays pristine, and the the model it puts forth for uploading and downloading means that the more people interested in it, the easier it tends to be to download. Is it perfect? Heck no! But what is?
I used to joke about "I'll trade you textfiles.com for etext.org, but those times are here. Now! I've bought so much into it, I created a site that allowed you to download all of textfiles.com:
torrent.textfiles.com.
If you were looking (and hey, you might have been) for an excuse to download Bittorrent from Bram Cohen's site, now you have one. Grab it, go to torrent.textfiles.com and begin pulling down a roughly 700mb-900mb file of many thousands of texts, more than you're likely to ever read.
It's natural to ask if I myself run some example of this very thing I collect so much information on. You'd be suspicious of a critic that doesn't "like" movies or a music historian who never at least tried to pick up an instrument.
When I was 12 and first getting into modems and collecting textfiles, I dreamed, like most kids dream of owning a car, of running my own BBS. I knew that I would name it after a prototype computer graphics film being done at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) called "The Works". Even by the time I'd heard of it, the project had been languishing and eventually collapsed, but there was something about the small amount of information I'd seen on it and the captivating images of strange robotic bugs that made me decide this was what my dream BBS would be named.
I was so sure that the BBS would be named "The Works" that I started pre-labelling my floppy disks that held textfiles with "The Works Disk #10" and so on. This went on for years, until 1986, when my BBS finally got its own phone line and joined the somewhat exclusive club of 914 BBSes. I tried running every bit of software I could, from Colossus to Fidonet to PC-Board, and more. Eventually, however, I decided that there was no better choice than "Waffle". Only problem was, Waffle BBS was written for the Apple II and I owned an IBM PC. So, I started writing my own version, which I called Ferret BBS, or FBBS.
Like any piece of software written by a sixteen-year-old, Ferret BBS was a mish-mash of weird ideas and bizzare implementations. If you typed "Control-V", it removed all the vowels in the line. When people logged in and it sat at the password prompt, it would play the "Jeopardy" theme... but only for me.
I ran the BBS from 1986 to 1988, when the move to college and a massive phone bill took The Works down. But while in college, I was contacted by a young sprite named Dave, who offered to bring the BBS back up at his house. I wasn't sure he'd do it, but he did, and from 1989 to about 1994, Dave ran the BBS during its most popular period. He messed up the Ferret BBS code really badly, but he also got it to be a Cult of the Dead Cow node and earned it a reputation as one of the places to go to for textfiles. Keeping my principles, the BBS continued to be "Textfiles Only". He also had the opportunity I never had, to run Waffle as written by the original author. When he asked if we should turn our back on years of our own code, I said "We were trying to duplicate Waffle, and here it is! Put it up!"
After Dave went off to College and himself lost track of the BBS, it was taken over by Grendel/Iskra, a user of the original Works and the later Dave Works. He ran it on and off for a good number of years, insisting that the Works be online for its 10th anniversary.
The Works, believe it or not, lives on, and is a fully connectable ssh-only BBS. Just ssh over to "works.org" and log in as "waffle". It's now run by a nice kid named Owen (Autojack) who holds his mantle as the Fourth Works Sysop with pride.
The thing is, there's all sorts of stories like this for the many thousands of BBSes that rose and fell in the last 25 years. Many of them are lost forever, but others are taking up the torch and are writing their stories down. I've collected some of them but others are spread throughout webpages out there.
In case anyone's wondering, the documentary will have a affiliated BBS, but if the way of recent message boards are any example (here and elsewhere), I am not overflowing with anticipation as to what it will end up like. But this is the way of things now, no sense hiding from them.
One of the nice side-effects of an online life (and for some of us, childhood) is that almost all of the output of your efforts and experiences are digital, ready and waiting to be brought back in full binary clarity. With textfiles.com, this is especially the case, since people can go and find the exact file, with exactly the same formatting and phrasing, that they remember from a decade or more before. This is probably the biggest "jolt" that folks get from the site (and similar ones) because the stuff seems "pristine".
There are a few people who I would call "of my ilk" who have this insatiable need to save everything, anything, whatever they can get their hands on. Of all the like-minded folks I have heard of or dealt with, only one of us has an enormous amount of money, and that would be Brewster Kahle.
In case anyone cares, other equivalent spirits that I've interacted with, met, or otherwise know of are Paul Southworth, Michael Hart, Jim Leonard (Trixter), Christian Wirth (RaD Man), Curt Vendel, and a host of some whose names escape me this Saturday afternoon.
Some of the collections of these associates and friends are huge indeed, but Brewster's archive.org (which is, I hasten to add, not just run by Brewster alone) is incredibly friggin' huge. So big, that when I've occasionally gotten my urge to "back up" a site, attacking archive.org is like trying to use the Moon as a jawbreaker. Kahle's site is breathtakingly massive: just browse for a couple seconds in the
movies section and you realize how much data they have, in so many easy-to-grab formats. These people are barrelling down on a petabyte of stuff. For you. For free.
Obviously, at this point, a massive amount of volunteers and paid members are doing this project, and they're sending it into wider and deeper waters. They also have enabled it to do some amazing projects that a lot of us single-person websites simply can't do. The Internet Bookmobile is a personal favorite, just for its "you have no idea how far we've come" demonstration ability. A van pulls up and just starts handing out books, any book you need from a million texts. Amazing.
Except for the occasional whack-ass who doesn't get it, people are generally amazed and delighted at these collections, because it puts everything that once was right there in a way you can immediately copy for yourself and yet still leave. There is, by its nature, no need for an "original" in the most common sense, and the "duplicates" are just as good.
Here's some examples I think show how neat this can be: The Beagle Brothers Online Museum, the Atari Coin-Op Specification Stash, the Youth International Party Line, and of course, the one my tax dollars pay for (and it's money well spent), American Memory.
Of course, beyond all these basically legal and above-board digitizations are the hundreds, likely thousands of people who are digitizing anything they can find, be it comic books, movies, recordings, flyers, photographs.... compiling them into archives, and trading them on Peer to Peer networks as if they were some sort of 'Ware'. Which, I suppose, they are, but it's pretty shocking to see "Every Spiderman Comic" or "The entire run of Red Dwarf" or "20,000 Science Fiction Books" being traded where once there was "Choplifter". It strikes me how people are doing this, bringing all this stuff online, and some of them are doing it with all the care and process of art restorers. Where this is going, I don't know, but I'm making my best effort to collect the artifacts.
I've spent many nights answering e-mails to people who tell me about their memories with BBSes as they experienced them. In fact, it was the hundreds of responses that I originally got from posting the world's largest BBS list that told me there were some serious holes in most computer history.
Of course, the easiest story to tell is that of hacking into computers and occasionally BBSes would be mentioned as "electronic meeting places" but kind of drop off the map. So they're kind of there and not there, one of those things where people say "Yeah, I remember hearing on my local BBS about (event)" but they don't go into too much detail about the BBS they were on themselves.
Which is why so much of this "blogging" "phenomenon" holds interest to me, since it is to BBSes what the X Games are to Dynamite Magazine and skateboarding in pools. However, when I'm put in the position of having to explain them to BBS types who don't see the draw, I say "Think of them as BBSes where the only topic is the Sysop". But of course it's much more than that to people as they're experiencing it, and they will be in the same position as "BBS people" are, 20 years from now, when they try to explain to teenagers what the draw in constant, unending discussion about a world-wide influx of occasionally profound but often minimal events and actions was.
So I decided this was a cool thing, to go ahead and film a documentary where I would track down those names that were like stars to me, to get them on video talking about this subject that formed so much of my childhood. And, generally, that's come very true. I'll mention some of the folks in future postings, but on a pure holy-crap-I-can't-believe-it level would have to be Ward Christensen, who essentially invents what we consider to be the canonical dial-up Bulletin Board System, and even XMODEM to boot. Not a bad set of accomplishments. Ward and I have spent no small time on the phone and we filmed five hours of footage of him, where he goes off on wonderful, insightful tangents about his programming, his life, and of course CBBS, the Computerized Bulletin Board System. When you're doing a documentary, the holy grail is to get time with the guy who invents the thing you're doing the documentary on.
Just that, those moments spent with a man whose work so profoundly touched my own life, is worth more than any sort of payment or profit from the final product. I have to encourage you, before your eyes shift to other parts of other websites, to think that all I did was buy a camera (Canon XL-1), a lighting kit, a couple suitcases, and then started doing it. Maybe there's some subject that you wonder about as to why no one's done a film on it... maybe that subject is waiting for you to do it.
