It was made by people trying to fundamentally change how this internet thing works, in ways that it can’t possibly. Granted, a lot of people have given up internet for internet-like things, but bear in mind that a single cellphone, that is, one individual’s cellphone, running 4G, has greater bandwidth than the Internet Backbone did in the early 1990s, and you see how far we’ve gone in so short a time.

A lot of people are talking about how the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is a piece of crap, and it is crap. I don’t have the interest or the taste in going deeply into that, because people who are much better at being all legal-wrangly-nutty can do it. No, I only want to speak to one thing, and even that is mostly in the realm of preservation, my big passion these days, and by “these days” I mean “that I’ve been alive”.

When what we think of as “Domain Names” started up, it was a volunteer side-effort of registering names, one done by hand and totally unreliable in terms of turnaround. You can say what you want related to what came next, but they were kind of Bad Old Days. If a domain was offensive, or they were busy that week, or anything else, you had to basically hope the forces mixed together and you got your domain name. The process of changing domain names, of doing a lot of other domain-related transactions, was weird, slow and stupid. Somewhere around there, I got my COW.NET domain, which I still have.

Network Solutions were slow-moving, unresponsive, dull assholes.  Network Solutions also had a defacto monopoly,  and once they started charging for domain name registration, you got better response, and they got a fuckton of money from domain name sales, and domains weren’t cheap. Let’s be clear about that: $50 a year.

A decent enough showing of how weird those pre-money times were is in this 1993 Wired article.  Joshua Quittner’s a bit of a toolbox but the article serves the function, so there you go. Wild and wooly, slow, and unpredictable. And after the monopoly kicked in, it was wallet-rape city – remember, Verisign bought Network Solutions in 2000 for 21 BILLION DOLLARS.

So imagine when the monopoly was broken, and a chance arose for someone, especially someone like me who’d been doing domain names for nearly a decade, to get domains much cheaper, that is, $8 a year. Well fuck yeah! Thus I and others started going to these other domain registrars, doing our best to make sure they were in some way legitimate. I went with two: EasyDNS for stuff I cared about, Go Daddy for stuff I didn’t quite care about.

So, EasyDNS is fucking perfect. Let’s leave it at that.

Go Daddy was mostly a case that they were cheap, and their interface was somewhat easier to use, especially compared to Network Solutions. Network Solutions had done some sketchy shit in the past, in one case utterly breaking DNS. At the time, if someone had put a hammer in my hand and gave me a free flight to their offices, we would have had quite the news story. In this environment, anything looked better, EasyDNS was expensive (but awesome!) and the domains I only somewhat cared about went to Go Daddy.

DNS and domain name garbage are like funerals and busted water heaters. You don’t want to deal, when you come into problems it’s usually under duress, and when it’s all over you stop thinking about it until the next time.  Such as it has always been with me for Go Daddy.

Most of the time, with Go Daddy for me, it’s been “Oh, I need to register something hilarious (or somewhat hilarious – I’ve owned INAPPROPRIATELYDRESSED.COM or DISRESPECTCOPYRIGHT.ORG and many other things of that ilk), I don’t want to spend any money, I don’t care too much…. OK, off to Go Daddy.” Once I’m there, I’m reminded how much of their business is trickery, deception, misleading user interface, endless endless endless endless add-ons and attempts to make more money from you, and finally a shit-ball storage of your stuff. But in the end, the domain registers, it “works”, and I’m done, and I can go on making the joke site or whatever.

Somewhere in there, Go Daddy went from “bargain basement generic registrar” to “sleazeball make-ads-that-piss-people-off jingoistic hey look at me fuck you pussies registrar”. Now, as someone who did contract work for ROTTEN.COM as a writer and who uses “Fuck” as an adjective, I’m content with anyone being all controversy-and-tits and putting a stake in the ground, with business being gained or lost by those clear and present actions. It’s called “taking a stand”. T-Shirt Hell, which makes offensive t-shirts, had this schtick for years and has always kept that schtick – great. So it was with Go Daddy.

See, but now things have come to a head. It turned out that not only was Go Daddy happy to put their names supporting SOPA, which is a hell of a restricting, dangerous, and censoring law, but they’d helped to write some of it and, even more offensively, were exempted from it. In other words, they’d found a way to be as legally and liberty-crushing offensive as their ads and their posts and declarations were liberty-defending. In other words, hypocrites.

So, a bunch of people, including myself, are beginning to leave Go Daddy in droves. I have about 20-30 domains with them, and they’re all leaving. This process, you will not be surprised to hear, is somewhat laborious, with Go Daddy throwing ALL sorts of things in the way, including spectacularly crappy and misleading tricks (you unlock a domain to allow transfer by clicking on a menu called “Locking” and then unclicking a box that says “lock domains” and then hitting the button), and then a waiting period. Plus, I know better than to do all my domains through a process at once without testing it, so I’m only doing one minor domain first, going through the waiting period and then making sure it’s all kosher, and then off I will do the rest. Go Daddy may call me about this – I have a “celebrity” domain which they have a specific call center number devoted to. Really. And best of all, it’s Sockington.

But when they call, they can take a flying fucking leap. We’re done.

When the shit rained down from the world over the SOPA thing, Go Daddy thought they would have their legal counsel explain, point by point, why they were going to say Fuck You and keep supporting SOPA. They wrote a pretty massive weblog entry, actually.

Once people really kicked in, moving tens of thousands of domains off Go Daddy, well, then the fun began, and Go Daddy announced they were “reversing” their position, and that they still saw a need for certain protections, but SOPA was apparently not it, and oh fucking god please stop leaving us in such massive droves and please we’ll do anything you want goddamnit we have children ACTUAL KIDS HERE that need clothing and shelter and we went too far.

First of all, the best part was they’d still written the law, and were still exempt, and were still officially supporting it. All they’d done is made a new weblog entry to try and placate the mouth-breathers, the utter morons they think their customers are who think the tits-and-controversy image was fucking awesome and just wait for them to no longer care about this and we can all go back to the upsells and the deception.

So, in that way, they DELETED THE WEBLOG ENTRY DEFENDING SOPA.

And so, here we are, here I am, to say, FUCK YOU, GODADDY.

Here’s your lame-ass defense, permanently enshrined. Go suck a banana. My domains are leaving you as soon as possible. I hope everyone leaves. Go into the ground, put a plastic bag over your head, and play astronaut. You’re done.

The original weblog entry you hid:

And here it is as a .zip file. (A huge thanks to Vitorio Miliano for sending this along.)

Anyway, back to my regularly scheduled Merry Christmas.

(I actually enjoyed myself a lot at the various jobs I used to have, but it was rarely because of the job itself.)

I last posted that I’d added some materials to the archive back in September.  That list of periodicals and other materials is way out of date, kids. Let’s do a quick update.

• 80 Microcomputing Magazine
• A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing
• Acorn Programs Magazine
• Amazing Computing Magazine
• Amiga World
• Amstrad Professional / PC Soft Magazine
• Atari Computing Magazine
• Atari User Magazine
• c’t: Magazin Fur Computer Technik
• Color Computer Magazine
• Commodore Format
• Computer Age Magazine
• Computer Monthly
• ComputerKontakt Magazine
• The Magazine Rack (Collection of singular examples of magazines)
• Die Hard: The Flyer for Commodore 8bitters
• Elbug Magazine
• Electronic Games Magazine
• HappyComputer
• Home Computing Weekly
• LaserBug
• LED Micro Magazine
• Magazine ZX
• Micropendium Magazine
• Midnite Software Gazette
• The Gamers Collection
• The Games Machine
• The Transactor
• TV Gamer Magazine
• The Computer Journal
• Crashed Newsletter
• Asgard Newsletter
• Texas Instruments Users Newsletter
• The Coco Clipboard
• ZX Mushroom Club
• Apple Hebdo
• Up Time Newsletter
• Super 99 Newsletter
• Australian National OS9 Newsletter

So there’s another thousand magazine issues for you to paw through.

“What, is that it?” you say. Archivist, Please! 

How about some french-language computer magazines? I got a huge ingestion of those a while back, and I’ve been steadily adding them the last couple of months. They include:

• Amiga Dream Magazine (French)
• Amstar Magazine (French)
• Atari 1ST Magazine
• banzzai-magazine
• cpc-magazine-french
• Cyberstratege Magazine (French)
• French-Language Computer Magazines (Miscellaneous)
• Generation 4 Magazine (French)
• Hebdogiciel Magazine (French)
• Joypad Magazine (French)
• L’Atarien Magazine (French)
• L’Ordinateur Individuel Magazine (French)
• MEGA Force Magazine (French)
• Micro et Robots Magazine (French)
• micronews-french
• netbug-magazine
• PC Novice Magazine (French)
• Player One Magazine (French)

There’s plenty more to add (over 100 different runs) but that’s ongoing.  Spanish and German collections are arriving as well.

But who the hell wants to read, you say. What you want is some sort of software.

Yeah, on that as well.  In the Shareware CD Archive I’ve been curating,  I took the thing from an embarassing 35 CD-ROMs to the current count of roughly 761 CD-ROMs, including a massive collection of FREEBSD installationCD-ROMs courtesy of a donor from the Noisebridge hackerspace. They were going to be turned into wall art, and someone on their list said “Maybe swing those by Jason, first?” so here we are with a pretty much complete set of CD-ROMs from FreeBSD version 2.0 up through 5.4 – a motherlode of unix and programming history.

To review, the Grand Arch Plan that has been going on for 30 years.

Step One: Begin collecting computer history. I started this step when I was 9, pulling together printouts, cassettes, later floppy disks, and hardware.

Step Two: Put it all up on the Web. I started this step when I was 28, creating textfiles.com and consistently adding to both that collection and related collections.

Step Three: Absorb the human stories. This is what BBS Documentary, GET LAMP and the next three documentaries are for. This has resulted in hundreds of hours of footage of people talking about computer history, almost all of which I am putting online into the collections begun in step two.

And now the next step:

Step Four: Ubiquity. Make it possible to get to all of computer history from everywhere, as wherever feasible. Do what it takes to make it feasible.

I’m well into this step, having affiliated myself with one of the largest public data collections in the world and giving them massive piles of materials from the first three steps. Everything is open, everything is on fast pipes, everything is easy to pull down and do what you want with it. It’s going very, very well.

But on the whole I am primarily dealing with artifacts and not experience.  A number of people have done some good work to bring in experience of computer history, most notably the Emulator People. In fact, if you don’t go too crazy on the rococo specifics of the accuracy of emulators, they do really really well to take you from “I wonder what it was like to play Choplifter” to “Wow, I am playing Choplifter“. And as someone sitting in the channels of several emulation projects, I will tell you they are all getting better, every single day – improvements in speed, accuracy, flexibility and expandability.

So here is what I’d like to do.

I want to help port the MESS and MAME emulators to Javascript.

Without sounding too superlative, I think this will change computer history forever. The ability to bring software up and running into any browser window will enable instant, clear recall and reference of the computing experience to millions. Setting up images that provide walkthroughs of specific computer history/reference, that will allow playing and and recall of all manner of things online for the last 50 years (the MESS emulator has support for the 1960 PDP-1). I am more than willing to engage in debate over this – but my hope is that you’re past this and going “but how is that even possible?”

It’s possible. Javascript has become unbelievably powerful. Here’s some stuff you may not know Javascript has been able to do so far:

• Linux. Specifically, a javascript emulation of PC hardware, with an entire Linux OS running on top of it.
• H.264 – They’ve now implemented a H.264 codec in Javascript.
• PDF Reading. The pdf.js reader will allow you to read PDFs in anything with Javascript support.
• Apple II – Gil Megidish has implemented an Apple II emulator in Javascript, which you can play games in.

My strong belief is the emulator people should focus on emulation, and the javascript people on javascript – that javascript should just be one of the ports of MESS and MAME to accompany all the other ports. I feel like there are emulation people who are really focused on the proper accuracy and reliability issues, and Javascript people who are really good at taking accurate, reliable code and making it work in Javascript. In fact, I suspect it’s very easy – we just need someone focused on it.

I’m focused on it. It’s what I do. It’s what I’ve been doing for 30 years.

I am right here. I can be reached at jscott@archive.org or jason@textfiles.com and we can get started making an ad-hoc group to work on it. I can answer questions and talk to anyone. This is priority one for me.

Hope to hear from you.

But regardless, I got my chance to present a new speech, Jason Scott’s Shareware Calvacade, and he has it up on youtube.  Here you go:

Here’s a direct link.

This really is just a fun little speech, mostly providing an overview of the history of Shareware, some wild tangents, and some weird images of the computing past. It’s not infused with the weight of responsibility or an overarching theme – it was meant to be a pleasant post-dinner (or pre-dinner) collection of Neat Crap, meant to inspire people to my big works coming down the pike from my Internet Archive work. I hope it does that, as well as allow me to scream at an Acer Laptop and tell the Worst X-Box Live Joke Ever.

One thing I do want everyone to bring out of it is how I’m looking for more material for CD-ROMs and software in general! Don’t hesitate to contact me if you think you have some lying around and want it to live again as an exhibit or archive.

I’d like to thank the Derbycon folks for an amazing time, even if I truncated it, and to congratulate them on their wild success (the convention was sold out, and filled to the brim with awesome folks).  Next year, I’m there the whole way through!

And as is typical, people found ways to discuss every possible interpretation of the entry and every possible interpretation of everything not the story: the color scheme, my sex life, my age, my resume, my own use of “cloud-like” services, you name it. Opinion Spectrum Collapse Disorder – I coined it!

Much more interesting was a little rumble of second-wave folks finding me and addressing me, ones who missed the whole thing the first time and maybe missed me all this time, and who came to me for more. And of that, there was WebProNews.

WebProNews would not normally be the type of entity I would either browse, or even think about – caked with ads, resembling a horse-racing call-sheet more than a website, this place creates tons of news stories with a perky host, and posts almost every day, giving you ads and sponsor links galore while providing content.  But for some reason, when they asked about talking Cloud with me, I said yes.

I did it over Skype, which was damned convenient, although maybe with my hair such a mess I should have worn a hat.  On the other end was a lady with a notepad and a green screen, whose name was Abby Johnson (No, not that Abby Johnson), and damn if she wasn’t one of the best interviewers I’ve ever had, save for Kevin Poulsen.  She asked all sorts of good questions, gave good followup responses, and took the conversation all over the place.

So here, in a rare show, I link you to two versions of the same video on WebProNews:

• Is “The Cloud” Overrated? (Longer article, includes bonus video from an interview with that sleazebag Larry Halff)
• Why Cloud Computing May Not Be All It’s Cracked Up to Be (Much shorter article, same video)

Instead of Ranty-Go-Bragh Jason which is what we usually get related to the Cloud, this is thoughtful, measured Jason, a rare sight indeed, like two unicorns chained together with goblin gold. I figure faithful readers deserve to see it. If you just want the video, you can click on the little chain at the bottom of the video window and grab the whole thing, like I did.

Great job, Abby. It’s rare indeed I link to such a site like that, but such respect deserves my respect.

P.S. Fuck the Cloud.