But I was a poor note taker in school and for the “important” things like my BBS life as well. I have five notebooks sprawled with names, aliases, phone numbers, codes, loop lines, a seven page list of “wares” and everything in between. I remember leafing through them endlessly trying to recall where I put “vital” information. However, if it weren’t “vital”, it wouldn’t have been put in the notebook to begin with!

Now, most of the pages I had used pencil on are unreadable, and even the blue lines have faded with time and the oils from my fingers. Phone numbers have no names, names have no aliases, and aliases have no phone numbers. It’s just as chaotic as I remember the “scene” being.

A few years ago, I discovered a C64 site that has the stated goal of chronicling the C64 scene from its origin to today, including handles, groups, BBSes and game/demo releases worldwide. It is a very ambitious project, and quite entertaining to read through. However, it made everything smaller. What was once chaotic and larger than life was made orderly. It seems as though everything is only separated by four or five degrees.

That is until I leafed through the photographs of O’Hara’s notebook. Aside from a few games and groups, NOTHING is familiar. I thought I had made sense of it all, and that the CSDb was like a hyper-huge and super organized filing cabinet. It clearly isn’t as large and complete as I had thought.

If Mr. O’Hara has any more of these notebooks, I’d love to have access to JPEGS of them. If that’s not possible, thanks for sharing what you have!

Jon