ASCII by Jason Scott

Where am I

People who have been enjoying the cool, refreshing, and steady stream of intelligent postings from me over this past year are probably now concerned that I am dead, depressed, or yet another mummified corpse piled on top of the realm of the Defunct Weblog.

Well, have no fear. I'm simply doing an enormous amount of traveling related to work, hobbies and projects, and have not had a chance to truly sit down and do the quality entries I think people deserve. It's nice to have a life this busy, but not so nice to leave an audience wondering. So be aware I arrive back home on the 2nd of September and I will snap back into shape by then.

Until then, see you.

Your News in Full-Color GIF

A person seeking a real sense of innovation vertigo could not do much better than to browse issues of GIF News, an online distributed newsletter edited and maintained by Eric Hsiao from 1988 to 1993.

For example, it is worth noting that this is the full resolution of the earlier issues, 320 by 200 pixels. There's no larger size available because there was simply no larger size made! As time went on, the average capabilities of systems were considered raised enough to make issues 640 by 480 pixels. (Here's an example of this greater expansion in screen real estate.)

As for the content of this newsletter itself, it's important to note that the content was not about the GIF format itself (the Graphics Interchange Format is described in excruciating detail here), but simply used the GIF format to provide something that in 1988 was pretty unique for a person working out of upstate New York: a full-color, easily transmittable, completely static presentation of computer news. Because he had the 256 color palette to work from, Hsiao could intersperse color screen shots, artwork, and all range of unusual fonts. While not preceding the era of vector-based formats like Postscript, GIF News could produce a relatively low-size file (almost none exceed 100k in size) that could then be archived with other pages and transferred throughout the world.

This vertigo I speak of is evident in just browsing the set on Flickr that I have collected from various sources: in an instant, we see the result of years of work by Hsiao, all presented in a quilt of bright colors and (to our current eyes) incomprehensible text with barely-readable contrast issues. At one point, however, these images would be displayed in such a manner as to cover the entire screen, bringing the view up to anywhere from 9 to 16 inch monitors that were the standard of the time. That we now would not blink or be astounded at a near-instantaneous download of a 72k JPEG that utterly dwarfs this tiny GIF is a sign of how far we've come.

Beyond the transport mechanism, of course, is the content being discussed. The GIF News would only arrive every 60 days or so, and each issue would be at most four pages/images, so the ability to devour the content in a world with RSS feeds and news shooting at us by the bucketful blows through a given posting in no time. It would be unfair, again, to sit here in 2008 and compare what tools rest in our hands for generating an image-and-text newsletter and berate or sneer at Eric's seemingly glacial release pace; every one of these pages could have been hours of painful adjustments and drawing, writing the articles and then carefully placing pixels or groupings around captured artwork. Imagine, for a moment, the creation of a page such as this with no advanced Photoshop or layout software:

This was, after all, a hand-crafted creation in a world that would soon turn even the most difficult of printing tricks into a double-click action. That he started to turn away to other concerns and put the newsletter on hiatus is hardly surprising.

The articles themselves range wildly but reveal another unexpected treasure: they show the pervasive effects of the BBS and its slow disintegration when faced with the Internet. A profile of the Channel 1 BBS reveals that the system is "huge - about 100 new messages in the main area a day". Each day would also bring upwards of 40 uploads to the file directories. At one point the newsletter announces a new distribution system consisting of five bulletin board systems - an internet aspect is not to be found anywhere. Yet by 1992, addresses for Prodigy, Internet, Bitnet and BBS all share space in the contact area. Articles focus on modems but over time it is obvious there's a new force on the horizon.

Technology long past, be it a type of soundcard or lists of the most popular software give us insight into what was popular at the time and where the thinking was. (Note also that the graph in the article was culled from a USENET newsgroup.) We are told that Laserdiscs are the future, and that Nintendo sent out threatening letters to every PC-Board operator because one specific pirate happened to use the software for a BBS that hosted Nintendo ROMs.

The full collection of what I could recover is here; I only could find issues from 1990 to 1993. Every once in a while an issue was missed, so there are apparent gaps but I'm pretty sure I've gotten all the released issues between those years.

This is one of those collections that's both difficult and easy to provide: easy, because our fast systems are all able to show images at amazing speeds and collate and tag the resulting items quickly. But difficult, because these were all locked away in ZIP files and in some cases rather anonymous as to their contents. It's certainly the first web access to the amount of issues in one place with such an easy interface. I hope I find more.

If you have a moment, leaf through the pages of this newsletter (after all, there are only 72 pages for 3 years) and enjoy a little insight into how people lived a mere 17 years ago.

CD.TEXTFILES.COM returns

CD.TEXTFILES.COM has been up and down for the last few weeks while I've been moving it to a new server. The old server that textfiles runs on seems to crash or stop doing networking under specific heavy load (and randomly, too), so a new server is being populated. Every other textfiles.com site is already active under the new server and should be running fine.

The site is many hundreds of gigabytes now, so this is taking time. The irony is that I need to keep rebooting the old server because it dies during the synchronization. I'd synch through my home connection but obviously a 100mbit local connection trumps a constant uploading through the internet. This is going to take days, which is both great that I have so much data, but also frustrating, because I want people to get access to this stuff when they want/need it.

In the future, I'm likely to just have USB drives that are shipped to my provider should I have catastrophic failures or otherwise need to populate.

(Speaking of this site; there appears to simply be no way to make a web-browsable version of a Mac (HFS)-based CD-ROM. This is a shame, since I have 30 of them ready to go when I do figure out what to do.)

Keep those CD-ROMs coming! Another pile just came in, and will join the constantly growing site soon. The yields from this collection are churning up some amazing results indeed....

The Worldgroup Underground

I got a nice letter from someone discussing how the BBS Documentary missed a subject. For the record, it missed it because I didn't cover contemporary BBS issues, and the shooting for the film was done in 2004, so even if it had done contemporary issues, they would be contemporary issues from a half-decade ago.

The subject being discussed was Worldgroup software. Here's some excerpts from the letter, stripped of identifying details for obvious reasons.

HI Jason, I saw the BBS Documentary and have used Textfiles as a resource for some of the material I have on my own BBS. There was something not mentioned in the movie, which should have been mentioned about the underground movements to bring WG BBS and its games back online. There are two camps which are divided. One is led by the majorbbs restoration project, which is called the legit ones. They are not gaining, but they are very valuable to gain resources from. The other is the editors and hackers who understand the code and work with it make their own individual boards, mostly to host majormud, but some are starting to run full BBS systems again. This group has made allot of gains and has an extremely strong following with some boards having over 60 people logged in at one time. I am one of those in the editing/hacking group who has a full running BBS, as well as a handful of others. I am helping on a daily basis now to help people set boards up and get them off the ground. These boards mostly sponsor majormud, farwest, tradewars as well as a few other games. Some of these boards are full ANSI and very graphical while others are plain stock look. However, each have their own personality based on who plays on them and with the custom edits within their majormud. These boards are starting to turn into full running Free-BBS systems.

Unfortunately those on both sides of the aisle are split, with the people who want to keep everything stock are void of users or a following but have the software versus those who know how to edit and hack that have a very strong following and very strong user base. The same cannot be said for other BBS systems. Synchronet Wildcat, GAP, as well as many others have fallen by the wayside. To top this off the text game community itself is splitting due to the introduction of using GMUD to now handle software that was intended for use with WG.

In many aspects the WG BBS community has lost a lot due to METRO Entertainment's failure to produce and live up to its promises to the majormud community. This has causes a quick collapse in so called Legit BBS's. However, it created a spark which is igniting flames in the hackers' community because they are moving forward with everything Metro and Worldgroupware has failed to produce and promise.

I can't speak to the accuracy of this characterization, but I can say that the whole situation does interest me.

Naturally, a question that comes to mind is who the fuck cares? but that's a question that comes from anyone observing something they don't particularly care about. Since everyone involved in this is involved, basically, in BBS culture and outcroppings of that culture, it's easy for someone not involved in said culture to wonder what the big huzzah is about and why any amount of this would have people at each other's throats, or, as the case may be, emotionally disoriented over the actions of people who are basically the same.

Oh, but we're so good at this, this quibbling over minor points, and turning them into distinct battles, and "camps", and "parties". I've seen it in many different places, and events, and so I think it's just part of the territory, and perhaps it's a landmine that an open heart and mind might be able to avoid. Or not.

We long passed the line where some people consider themselves keepers or at least big fans of the Legacy of certain pieces of software. The idea, perhaps strange if you're thinking of these things as mere code, is that there is a mythos or honor or any of a dozen aspects of this software that should be kept alive, improved on, or at least not ruined by the march of time, commercialism, or obsolescence. I know that the default reaction by people when they see something important or influential in previous years presented in sequel or new version format is oh no, and this reaction has been justifiably earned many, many times. This is frequently the case with movies, but I've seen it happen with games, parks, logos, cars, and candy. We think of change as an assault, and we think of needless change as an insult. And yet, none of these things are "ours" in the sense of ownership. It's an interesting situation.

So here we see a case where there are still active, commercial maintainers of software and another set of people who think this software is being wrongly trapped and maintained, like a hostage or an abused child. Matters have been taken into their own hands by some, while others feel they can't legally or morally interfere, as much as they might not agree with the direction.

The problem is inherent, involved, and, ultimately, intractable. I watch from afar and observe the fireworks, and am glad, at least, that in some realms the BBS fire burns.