This essay is not much about textfiles at all, though perhaps it's entirely about textfiles.
My work on my sites and documentary stem from several major drives: The desire to save a history I'm afraid is disappearing, the need to explain this history to folks who did not live through or personally experience the events surrounding this history, and, in some small way, to personally leave a mark upon this world.
I've been working on textfiles.com for six years, and I have a lot to show for it: many thousands of textfiles saved and categorized, entire series of BBS-related text restored or sorted, and a huge amount of side projects that have made themselves a part of the whole, such as the universal BBS list and the BBS Documentary. This should be a happy time for me, and I should feel like I've really done something.
Buy my symphony of good fortune has a sour note in it; a steady blaring, blatting noise aimed at me that sometimes can drown out all the good even though it itself is of the weakest strength. If you care what others think (and I do), then if someone is less than pleased with your work, you want to know what you can do to fix it. You want to inquire further to understand their discontent and perhaps bring in their ideas to make your work on your projects better.
Some of these folks turn out to be the sort of Internet user who thinks that anyone with a half-decently designed website must naturally maintain that website full-time, and that any flaws in the HTML, project downloads, or images must be their top priority in life. They blurt out some sort of demand from you, and get angry and demanding if you do not respond immediately. We call that sort of person "Spoiled", but at least they're addressing an improveable aspect of your site, and when time, bandwidth and money permits, the fix can be applied.
But what if the person has no such suggestions? What if the message they bring is that you are worthless, misguided, in some way ugly, or suffering from a core delusion? What if you pursue them for an opinion and the only response you get is a deep, personal insult each time?
Bear with me a moment as I correlate my experience with a somewhat related but more controversial subculture: The emulation scene.
Not that this was entirely hard to accomplish, but I was there at the "beginning" of the timeline for emulation. You could play the historical game and say that emulation has existed in various forms from before the 1970's to make certain chips function, but I would mark things as beginning from the IBM PC Emulator "SoftPC" for the Macintosh by Insignia Solutions in 1988 (they also released an IBM PC emulator for Sun Workstations that same year). One or two other such programs were available as the years went on that allowed one personal computer to run the programs of another (DOS programs on a Commodore Amiga, for example), and this was all fine and good, but mostly a convenience and the province of commerical software firms.
In 1995, a Williams Electronics emulator appeared for the Sony Playstation, called "Arcade's Greatest Hits". This proved a very important thing: That it was possible to emulate arcade games on present-day machines.
To emulate an arcade game, you need to have a copy of the game's ROM chips (ROMs), which contain the actual program that the machine is running on whatever bizzare architecture comprises the "computer" for that game. To get a copy of a ROM, you need to physically yank the chips out of a working game and read them using a ROM reader, to a computer file which you can then download through the Internet or from friends via a disk or what have you. Once you have ti8file, you can burn it onto a "Write Once, Read Many" sort of chip and install this repaired chip into your machine. This is time consuming and bothersome, but as it turns out, there was for many years an active group of folks who collected physical arcade games and would provide each other copies of the ROM images so if a machine were damaged in some fashion, new ROMs could be burned and the machine could function again. No harm, no foul; everyone had a physical machine and they were just helping each other to repair these wonderful toys.
All this changed in the Spring of 1996 with the release of the first widely-available arcade game emulator, Sparcade, created by Dave Spicer. This program allowed an Intel Box to run perfect quality arcade games, functioning just as one remembered them, because it used these somewhat-available ROM images to program themselves. It was like an explosion shot across the gaming world; if you grew up on these games, Mr. Spicer and friends had dropped into your lap your entire childhood in perfect 8-bit color and vector graphics. The sound was there, the gameplay was there (and by this time, gameplay was precious stuff indeed) and it was FREE. The only thing was, he only emulated a handful of the thousands of games that had been produced in the last 20 years.... And the race to emulate everything was on.
Fast forward to today, when emulators of all sorts are everywhere and nearly every platform, arcade, home system, and even 1970's-era hand-held LED games are emulated or "simulated" (a program perfectly imitates the logic of a game that has no CPU). You now have a situation with three strata of people in the sub-culture: A small handful of emulator programers, a somewhat larger base of support and media-related folks (running websites dedicated to the emulators and contributing supporting artwork or sounds) and, finally, hundreds of thousands of people collecting both the emulators and the ROMs necessary to play the old games.
Two of these groups produce what could be considered content. The emulator programmers are deep into development of the fastest and most versatile emulators they can, and the process is often a tedious reverse-engineering of hardware that often lacks documentation. They are like solid gold, comparatively, as there are only a couple dozen of them around at any given time (although some go out of their way to write tutorials of their work to encourage others to join). The media-related folks go through the effort of trying to both report on advances in emulation (and for a long time there was near-exponential work being done) and to collect screenshots, reviews, and sounds from the resultant emulated games.
As one of the hundreds of thousands of others (not counting the extremely short time I helped with the "Stella" Atari 2600 Emulator), I would spend my time browsing different sites, finding out what new games and machines had been emulated, and reading up on different interviews and news about what people were accomplishing. I thought it all very neat, and an interesting way to bring history back.
But within a short time, things got ugly for the content creators.
You see, ROMs were no longer backups of actual physical machines that people owned; they were now playable software that only needed a readily-available program to be available, free, on a home computer. What were previously archives of backup images were now potential dens of software piracy. These sites dried up very quickly, now being overloaded with download requests where previously there had been none. This was a bit of a blow, but things adjusted and ROMs are still available to shifting degrees, although nearly anyone associated with emulation in any context is asked constantly to supply ROMs for emulators they code and review. This is evident in the many, many "Please do not ask for ROMs" admonitions that appear before any e-mail address.
This "gimmie the ROMs" issue is just the surface of a deep, deep problem that until recently I considered a bit of a myth: Some emulator authors claimed to have been forced out from working on their projects due to a continuing pattern of abuse and harassment! From the users of their programs! I would watch this website or that project talk about shutting down because they couldn't take the threats anymore, or the personal attacks, or the hacking attempts on their servers. This made no logical sense to me; how could someone try to damage, destroy or harass someone creating interesting things for free?
In fact, for a while I didn't actually believe it. I watched as people updating their project logs left messages like "I'm sick of all the backbiting, the bullshit, the idiots ruining it for me, and I am ceasing work." and I would naturally think the person had found other things to do and was just getting out with a cheap excuse. If you can't take the heat in your e-mail, get out of the website, and all that. I figured if someone could show the intelligence to emulate arcade games and home entertainment systems, which I personally considered a sort of magic, then there was no reason they couldn't manage to ignore or not be bothered by the occasional less-than-positive e-mail.
That is, until I started getting them.
I see it more and more; there is a small but vocal backlash against aspects of my sites that means that I am receiving a rising amount of hate mail to my mailbox. Mail that degrades me, calls me names, insults my purpose, dismisses my enthusiasm. Written by people that obviously have a grip on the construction of language but see my amount of success at my endeavors and let loose with all the hate they have inside. In other words, I am seeing why people would turn and drop the whole mess, focusing on pursuits no longer a few browser clicks away. I can see why they would change their e-mail addresses to something unrelated, abandoning their old embattled addresses like a sinking ship.
This isn't to say that I am giving up; far from it. Textfiles.com is something like the fourth or fifth major "project" I've been a part of, and it's the first that's so big and so encompassing that it has a long way to go to lose my fascination. But I have thought about how angry these attacks have made me and how for flickering seconds I wanted to walk away, and I want to warn others who might get this pressure.
If you put your energy and tears into something you firmly believe in, something that opens for public consumption, focus on the people who are grateful, who write you and tell you what your project means to them. Even if it's a few words, those words were written by someone who thought you should know about them, and that means something. Focus on these lights; and when the darkness comes from the one or two energetic folks who think you owe them something, that you were endentured to them by default the moment they downloaded you work, that a flaw in the program that they see is automatically a flaw in you, it won't have the same effect.
Rap calls them "The Haters", the folks who, lacking much talent or drive of their own, attack others who've risen above and accomplished something. They do nothing but bring each other down, say that it's all useless or that you have no talent or your dreams are unobtainable and you should just give up. They preach death; death of creativity, death of goals, and want to just rain down failure on you, until you too are as drowned as they.
You never hear of the haters in history because by the very nature of what they do, they do not persist; they simply slip into the oblivion they seem to crave.
The solution to this onslaught of hate, failure and despair is not to jump into it yourself, guns blazing and flames flying, but instead do what you do best; keep building what it is you build or continue being a part of whatever projects you are assisting, and direct all your anger into a positive, or at least creative manner.
Which is what I've just done.
In a move to allow people who are interested in my BBS Documentary to get news about it in a timely fashion without constantly hitting the website, I will be cross-posting news stories from the BBS Documentary site on this weblog. Updates happen once a month or less, so I don't expect it to be that disruptive, and the ability of people to use RSS to get news is worth the trouble of posting it twice.
With great happiness, the interview phase of the documentary is finished. There are actually a couple more interviews to happen, but they're all planned now and will happen piecemeal, while editing and other production work is done. While it would be nice to have them, the documentary does not rest on them, so basically, the load is off my shoulders.
The final number of people interviewed for the documentary is about 200. This is almost beyond reckoning. There are few productions of any size that interview that number of people on camera, about a single subject. This translates to over 250 hours of footage, also a little out of control by most standards. My reasoning at the beginning of the production was that to really tell the story, you would want to get as many opinions of people as possible, not just "famous figures" and a few pundits. This theory (and it really was just a theory) has worked out to be accurate. While many people might only get a line or two in the final episodes, they're really good lines and represent the cream of an hour or two of interview time. That's pretty valuable, and makes the whole production better.
There's also an interesting situation where people in different parts of the continent, with different ages, and different platforms, say entirely complimentary things. There'll be a lot of that in the final work.
Editing began in earnest months ago, mostly consisting of "clip culling", where I take each hour of footage, and from that pull multiple minutes of clips usable for the final film. They might be a description of a favorite board, a thought or statement on a subject, or a reaction to a question posed by someone else that I've brought up. I then have all these clips sorted into general folders and sub-folders, where I.....
You know what? Not everyone wants to hear about this process, while others want even more detail than a few paragraphs could give them. So, I've started work on the first of several explanatory pages. How I Did It: Editing explains in quite heavy detail about how I've gone about setting up an editing station, and the hardware and software concerns, as well as how much space this works out to. I think you'll like it if you came to this documentary site to get tips for your own project or are amazingly voyeuristic. There will be a bunch of pages, ultimately, linked from the front page when they're done, which people can take inspiration and knowledge from, and go on their way. When people with professional pedigrees called or wrote in offering help, I asked a lot of them the same question: What are the 10 biggest mistakes you've made? From that simple question I can't imagine how many pitfalls I've avoided. I hope my informative pages will do the same. See, it's not just about BBSes, it's about learning.
To celebrate the ending of the interview phase, I have edited together the first teaser trailer for the documentary. Entitled "Heroes", it shows a collection of some of the more "famous" nam{bÒn my interview list (though not all of them) and invites you to come hear from them. It's worth checking out if you're interested in the documentary, if for no other reason than to see exactly what my style is. (In trailers, anyway, which is an entirely different art than moviemaking or documentary-ing...)
People who would like more information about what I'm up to and who want the bonus of my rants and thoughts on long-gone historical subjects will want to look at a weblog I am currently using, called ASCII.TEXTFILES.COM. This weblog includes an RSS Feed, which a number of people have asked for with the documentary site. With my crossposting of new documentary news in both the weblog and the documentary site, this will probably be the closest I can get to it. So download your news aggregator software and go grab the RSS feed off the weblog. If it sounds like I'm just blowing out a bunch of buzzwords, I'm sorry for that, it's just a new thing people like. It used to be hard to explain BBSes as well. To help you get a leg up, here's a webpage about RSS. It turns dozens of websites into feeds on your desktop. It's nice.
Whole-scale digitization of artifacts, articles, magazines, photos, and even audio and video-tape is now at full bore. These will show up in the documentary to balance off the "head shots", which a lot of industry folks think are inherently boring (hence you have such odd sets and backgrounds in a lot of "professional" documentaries, with flowers and a streak of light or some such). Personally, I find the wide variance of folks in these many shots to be fascinating in itself; the way people live, the way their environments are set up, the whole deal is still of great interest to me. But along with these thoughts, you'll see a lot of information go by visually, too. Might as well cover all the bases...
Additionally, some of the artifacts I've been digitizing are rare or one of a kind, and I intend to make them generally available. So the documentary will have that secondary effect as well. As one person who lent me stuff said, "Finally, someone cares."
The site is slowly shifting over to "Here's what's in the documentary" from "Here's what I hope will be in the documentary". Promotional and Informational instead of speculative... and it feels great. Was it worth three years? It's worth twice that.
Sometimes, there are aspects of history that are so obscure, so unusual, that they are forgotten even by people who were a part of that history. In the sphere of technology, you will often have the case of people being faced with a problem so easily overcome in later years that the fact that the problem ever existed will be buried in distant memory. An easy example is modem speed; in a world where the entire contents of an Apple Floppy Disk can be downloaded in one second, more and more people will forget how truly slow and time-consuming the process of downloading text at 300 baud was. And, sadly, many people will not have learned the art of compressing thoughts and communication to make that 300 baud relate the most information in the shortest amount of time.
But as the world barrels forward and we move to hazy memory the times of dedicated telephone lines running dial-up Bulletin Board Systems, with their single-user capability and their local, town or county-based reach, let us not forget the most weak, the most easily-missed and perhaps bravest of all of them.
I speak of the part-time BBS.
Consider this list of Bulletin Board Systems scattered throughout the country. Lacking a proper date stamp, it's hard to discern when this list was created. BBSes running at 2400 baud co-mingle with a "38.4k" BBS, which is very likely a misprint or an unbackable brag. More likely, there are 19.2k BBSes, which puts the date somewhere in the range of 1989-1990. In this list, you see a nice cross-section of the types of BBSes from that period. I could spend an entire day describing all the small social quirks being shown in this list, from the illiterate youth of the "Blak Sabbath BBS!" to the staid, no doubt for-pay online service-wannabe of "John's House" with its 300-meg drive and "PC relayed" "Adult" aspects. But look closer at three of these listed systems: The
"Spider's Web", the "Master Powers", and the "Fantasy Zone".
These three systems have a datum that does not even warrant its own column: Their hours of operation.
Buying a home computer was an extremely expensive proposition by most standards in the 1980's. While for some folks the choice to buy a computer could be done with the same cavalier attitude of buying, say, a cross-country plane ticket, the fact remained that it was often a long-fought battle by a young member of the family convincing his or her parents that this large amount of money was worth it for the piece of plastic and wire it got them. Having won that battle and perhaps having earned the purchase of an inexpensive modem sometime afterwards, it was that more unlikely parents would shell out the extra money for a second phone line. This would mean that the young BBSer would have to use the family phone line starting late into the
night, after everyone else had gone to sleep, staying up and typing as quietly as possible so as not to wake anyone. In many ways, this was a good situation: the BBSes weren't so busy that late, and the BBSer was free to write and interact on the boards with a gusto and profanity-laden robustness they wouldn't otherwise achieve with parents or siblings nosing in.
But as anyone who spent a lot of time cruising the BBSes knows, the real power didn't belong to those who just dialed in and posted messages, or even those who uploaded many files and earned higher user levels or greater respect. The true power lay with the SysOps, the System Operators who ran the BBSes themselves off dedicated phone lines and who could grant access to whatever sections they wished, not to mention take it away on a whim. If you were a SysOp, the world came to you, not the other way around, and you could lie back and take it easy while the messages, files, and respect came pouring in. Of course, if you didn't put any work into your BBS, were unusually cruel, or simply lacked the fundamental temperament to run a BBS properly, then no one would call you. But that's a fact you would have plenty of time to learn about after you became a SysOp.
Unlike today, where competition and innovation towards the use of the telephone system means that getting a second phone line is neither a major difficulty or a social aberration (and, in fact, might even be considered a necessity), it was an unusual thing to have multiple telephone lines in a house, and seemingly expensive. Again, the same parents who didn't think twice about dropping $1200 for a home computer wouldn't blink at the additional expense of a second telephone line, but for some kids it was a battle they simply
could not win.
So what was left to you if you wanted the power of being a BBS SysOp, wanted so badly to run a board and be the master of your own user list, but didn't have the required dedicated telephone line to run it? Well, you could wait until everyone was asleep, turn on the BBS program on your computer, and then wake up before everyone else did to turn off the computer. Thus, the era of
the part-time BBS began.
It burned brightly and quickly and soon began to fade. Eventually, as the 1980's went on, there were simply too many BBSes available for people to want to put up with the trouble of going near BBSes with hours; much the same situation that BBSes themselves would encounter as the Internet became more popularly available. The Part-Time BBSes were a quick casualty of these BBS boom times, shutting down and disappearing forever. Their disappearance was a sign of technology eclipsing desparate solutions, a theme that continues today. Precious resources become ubiquitous and hoarded information becomes freely passed.
Say a prayer for the part-time BBS, but also be thankful the reason for them existing has passed on as well.
As might be expected, running a high-profile site like textfiles.com earns me a lot of grief and attacks from a number of quarters, legitimate and not so legitimate. It's not a big deal, usually, just the price of existing in such a networked world. The most common reason is that in the course of adding a few thousand files, one with a strange pedigree gets on and the creator or victim of the file comes calling.
While most of these would provide no joy or interest to outside parties, a six-year saga continuing to unfold just might provide some entertainment. I speak of Paul Andrew Mitchell and the Supreme Law Firm.
Mitchell is currently suing myself and a number of other folks, named and unnamed, for two billion dollars. That's actually not an exaggeration, although it is a rounding off; the current amount is $2,880,696,000.00 as of January of 2003.
Without filling this space with my opinions and characterizations of the entire event, I can at least leave this helpful torch before you descend... If you take enjoyment in going through page after page of legally tenuous material, gaining whiplash through fluctuating legal arguments and bizzare claims, and find particularly outlandish constitutional cross-networking and decontextualization to be a joy, you're in for a treat.
Prepare yourself, set aside some time, and descend into the world of Paul Andrew Mitchell.
One of the nice benefits of studying a lot of history is that you start to see inevitable trends and patterns going across decades or centuries. This is in many ways comforting, because instead of feeling sad and forlorn that an apparently unique situation has passed, you know it will likely happen again.
One such pattern is one of my favorites, and produces some of my favorite artifacts. I suppose I could compose a cutesy name for it, but I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader.
Companies form all the time, built around a Big Idea. This Big Idea may in fact be an Old Idea dressed in new clothing, or maybe a Pretty Okay Idea presented with a few new twists or turns. Success or Failure happens to these companies, with Failure happening a lot more than success. There's lots of reasons why success happens, although it's somewhat nebulous. More often than not, it's an actual Big Idea presented at just the right time and in the right place.
Money comes in. Streaming in. Pouring in. Now the company can afford a massive building, maybe several with a green space between them, or to build an entirely new campus with a big sign out front. Assuming the company doesn't screw up this flow of money, they end up with a massive nest egg and they start hiring. Often, they end up overhiring, because the more people they get, the bigger they are. And the bigger they are, the better they must be!
Eventually, the company is very big and very well-known and either popular or at least respectably feared. It has not yet begun to be ruined. Every company is eventually ruined, but there is a nadir, a period of time spanning months or years when it is established, happy, and the people in it are generally content. Flaws in the business model haven't appeared with any strength yet, and the also-ran knockoff companies aren't on the stage in any force. It's a good time to be there.
At some point, you have people in the firm whose job is to perpetuate this good feeling within the firm, and to keep the sense of the "place" the company exists in as real as possible. The folks assigned to this job have probably not got the tightest grip on what got the company its success and they almost certainly don't do anything that makes the products better. Instead, they show up in the morning, and work at something until the night, and then go home. And a big part of their work is trying to do something, anything, for the "team" and to impress the customers with the "team".
This is the precious era of the company artifact.
It can start out simple, with a t-shirt with a slogan. But within no time, it can mutate into items like knapsacks, flashlights, knives, decals, and calculators. Items which don't actually better the work being done at the company or improve the product, but just get the name into strange places where it didn't go before. This is a separate concept from company branding, wherein they place the logo or product line title across a series of things they sell to make them all seem unified. These artifacts do nothing but perpetuate the concept of the "place" the company inhabits.
Of course, what interests me the most are the weird, offbeat examples that arise up. International Business Machines, which employed my father for 30 years, has some of the strangest, owing to their long history. For example, they ran (and continue to run) a series of recreational centers throughout the country where IBM employees could play tennis, swim, and do all those things you'd do at a gym. With shrinkage, many of them have gone away, but I still remember my time at IBM's equivalent of Day Camp. IBM also had many company songs, and therefore produced a beautiful song book filled with them. You can even listen to it, or to others.
Atari, even though it lost its founding father within a relatively short time, also produced buckets of artifacts, many of which are treasured collectibles among those of us who care about such things. Apple has had similar artifacts as well.
It really does take a major upset, a bankruptcy or closure, and to see a company evacuate and disappear like a dying herdbeast, to understand the impermanence of it all. Cubicles and office walls that you thought would never move and shift are removed and stowed, piles of paper and folders you thought must have been precious and in need of sorting are tossed out with the trash, and the people scatter like ants under an errant boot. Once this happens to you, and I've had it happen a number of times in this modern era, you realize a lot of life's experiences are bubbles rising in soda water, heading towards the light, never to reach it.
History makes you appreciate the present.
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