Simon of Legaltorrents (and a bunch of other cool stuff) asked me if it was OK to put an episode of the BBS Documentary up on his website of cool crap to download. How could I say no, both by license and wish? The thing is licensed so that he could put it up without asking, and in fact he asked me to give him the best “rip” I could of it. So I did, along with a bonus promotional film at the end (about 60 seconds) asking people to buy the documentary.

The website is here: http://www.legaltorrents.com/

I guess if you were actually on the fence about whether to buy this documentary DVD set or not, you can go ahead and download that episode and get an idea of how it looks; of course, no director’s commentary, no subtitles, and no sense of well-being clutching the kick-ass packaging while you watch, but I bet a lot of people will get by.

It’s ARTSCENE, which covers the ANSI art scene of the 1990s. Check it out if you haven’t already.

I got a mail just this week:

“So, I have a collection of a few hundred megs of MP3s of voice mailboxes run by hackers in 1990. Do you have any suggestions on who I should give them to or what to do with them?”

Why yes, I said. yes I do.

Only one or two directories are properly described right now, but I’m sure I’ll get to them all, and fix mistakes as they go. I try to get the proper nouns and handles in there, so that it shows up on search engines. That way original people who might be mentioned in the recordings can tell me they’re in there (if they want) and give more context.

These are basically hacked voice mailboxes from a week in early 1990, where the contributor called a bunch of them and recorded what came out. Some recordings are fuzzy, others distorted, and yet others utterly devoid of content, but they represent primary source material; here’s what voice mailbox hackers, kids trading codes and offering information sounded like. There’s a bunch of handles in there: Crowfly, AK-47, Phoneman, Scandal. A bunch of kids (you can hear the slang being used) just looking for the next free box, the next open system to leave a mark on.

This was all sixteen years ago. If these kids were 15 back then, they’re 31 now. I hope that some 30-something office worker idly types his old handle into Google, sees a green screen full of files, and then says those words that are music to my ears:

“Oh, shit!”

As someone who is bathed in Bulletin Board System (BBS) history nearly every waking hour, I can sometimes feel like I’m the only one going completely out of his way to find narratives. It’s easy enough to copy together a bunch of floppy disks or scan a bunch of printouts but that’s not really the glue of what put the online world together and why it still holds a strong meaning for people who were there. As a result, I’m always seeking out people to tell their stories from a personal perspective, or at least take a good shot at putting together the human side of the whole BBS era for the sake of those who missed it. If I’m lucky, I stumble upon a few sites where people do a great job of cobbling together what they didn’t throw out from their teenage years. I might even find an extended story out on a website, spanning multiple pages.

With Rob O’Hara’s book Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie, I believe we have the world’s first BBS Memoir. Weighing in at around 160 pages, O’Hara covers his life from 1977 through to 2002, tracing the effect that Bulletin Boards, videogames, and computers have had on his life. Just 33 years old, it might seem strange for someone to write an autobiographical narrative so soon, but like a lot of youth who’ve grown up in the age of the home computer, O’Hara’s gotten a lot of living done in that short time.

This is a self-published book, or more accurately, an author-controlled book. It is currently distributed by Lulu.com, an on-demand printer that provides you with a very “book”-looking book that you would be hard-pressed to think didn’t come right off the shelves of the local chain bookstore. The only difference is there’s no professional editor jamming through the work before it gets to you. It’s easy to find flaws in a lack of slickness and flow in a self-published book, but also no real filtering out of “the good stuff”, either. So I think of this book as a real sweet homebrew creation, rough-hewn but full of heart, not unlike the boards it talks about.

Because of this, the first few dozen pages are choppy. O’Hara works his way around his memories to find his voice: He tries to explain what it is that drives a person to still keep a pile of Commodore 64s in his garage, or build a 20-machine arcade in his back yard (the author includes a picture of this great-looking playroom), or even to want to talk about this history in the first place. He covers it from different angles: the urge to be a collector, the nostalgic dad remembering his carefree days, and the computer guy with the cred built up from now-decades of experience with the machines. He also struggles, initially, with who the book is for: folks completely unaware of the history of the BBS and home computers of the 1980s, or other 30 and up computer geeks who want to take a joyride through a shared childhood? In doing so, he actually touches on some great thoughts on what attracts people to old pieces of plastic and microchips, and why things were so different for him.

A sixth of the way in, O’Hara dispenses with the helping hand, cracks his knuckles, and goes in whole hog. Instead of asking if anyone gets it, he assumes you’ve gotten this far because you want to know it, jams the wayback machine into full throttle, and plunges into the world of BBSing for a teenager in Oklahoma. Except, of course, it’s really every BBS kid’s childhood: The little bargains, the quiet victories, the betrayals, the triumphs.

The heart and soul of the book actually are warez. Warez in the old sense, of newly-acquired one-off floppies of games, painstaking bargained for, traded, and spread out to gain fame and reputation. Throughout the book, it comes back to the warez, and O’Hara does an absolutely fantastic job of capturing the sense of power and expression that engulfs a teenager who has been able to use his skills or his patience to get his hand on a program that nobody else has and then turn around and use that slight lead to his advantage. The methods he uses are laid out in brilliant detail; one involves registering with bulletin boards in a city his family will be vacationing in shortly, allowing his far away “exotic” location to be verified by the system operator, and then traveling to that city and leeching them dry for a free local call.

O’Hara never lets it get dry and technical; it’s about people he met while trading software, the kind of people who he partied with, got into fights with, or loved. He’s not always nice and he’s not always the hero; what really rings true is how none of it feels pumped up or faked, dressed up as some inherently soul-searching activity where every moment in bristling with poignant meaning. That said, some of it rings very close to the heart indeed.

In fact, this book’s greatest effect may be the touchstone it provides for one’s own experiences. Even as Rob’s younger self is getting drunk at a BBS party and stumbling in panic from a perceived bust into the flatbed of a parked truck to sleep it off, I’m harkening back in my own mind to events that accompanied my BBSing that I’d forgotten wholly and totally. But I was there again, saving my own warez for the right moment, meeting my own soon-to-be-lifelong friends, making my own grievous mistakes. Anyone who used BBSes for any period of time will want to run to their keyboards and tell their own story; I see a lot of long e-mails in Mr. O’Hara’s future.

One small disclaimer: On page 14 of the edition of the book I have, Rob mentions my BBS Documentary, but just to say it’s not what he was aiming for with his book. And he’s right; we don’t step in each other’s territory and his book does what my film couldn’t; go front to end on one boy’s story to turning into a man online. And for that, I thank him, and I think a lot of others will too.

Is it for everyone? No way, but a book that takes on its subject so intensely shouldn’t be. If you or an older sibling or parent touched a plastic-and-metal home computer, sipped your bandwidth through a modem, or held a 5 1/4″ floppy disk in your bag to give to someone else, this book is your book. It might even be your memories, too.

It’s a good book and can be ordered through Lulu or directly from the author, who sells autographed copies.

I loved the little theatre.

I don’t quite know when I first heard about it, but likely the name rattled around in my reading the free newspapers while I was in college. That’s how it often works: you see something playing there in an article next to the stuff about politics and bands, and then eventually a film name or genre would get your attention and you’d figure out where the heck the place was and if you could get there easily, since you were a college student.

I’m sure what got me to go was something involving animation or hong-kong action movies; after all, I was 19.

What struck me then about the little theatre was the location, nestled inside a city, the entrance off to the side down some stairs past a poster, almost as if you kind of had to know beforehand where it was. A modern multiplex has no problem getting your attention, since it’s often a big fucking box in a 20-acre blast radius of asphalt near a highway. Or it’s a glowing massive box along a street in a city with a sign letting you know that that film you hated just got a sequel. But the little theatre was cozy, almost demure about itself; no big lights, no massive sign, just you having to know. So when you went, as I went that first time, you felt like you’d discovered it and snuck in accordingly.

There were three theatres within 1500 feet of each other, but the other two were chains and the little theatre was “independent”. I had no idea what that meant other than they were showing some really neat, weird stuff. They printed their schedule on a crazy piece of paper going months into the future, and showing themes, “restored” and “new print” films that I’d never heard of, and a whole bunch of anime and action pictures.

As according with the nestled side entrance, the little theatre’s interior was also strange. The lobby wasn’t even a lobby; at best it was an ill-conceived room with a staircase and a snack bar; you couldn’t fit more than 10 people in that space and so you’d end up with lines going out the door or everyone shoved in there if it was cold. After going up the stiars, you’d end up in the main theatre, which was even more odd. It was a stage, in every way, the kind of barn-roof-like showhouse vaudeville most certainly must have thrived in, with a movie screen set back from the edge of the stage. There was even a balcony, although it was kind of odd up there and not many seats, like an afterthought desperate to sneak in another few people. It was funky, it was weird, and it played off-the-wall stuff. I was hooked and in love, and we had our little relationship.

I didn’t know who ran it and I honestly didn’t care. All I knew was that they would show several movies a day, often just for that day. Sometimes they were in theme to each other and sometimes not. You could buy a ticket for one show and sit around and see the next show. Without fail, I did. If it wasn’t a popular one, I could sit in the front row, the absolute front, rest my feet against the stage, and the screen would still be 20 feet back from me. It was, like I said, totally weird and I got a real habit for sitting up towards the front, which I still do and which drives my friends nuts. But it came from the little theatre, it’s little screen and my perfect position when I sat down and watched the movies.

And the movies I saw! Among the films I saw for the first time, on the little theatre’s screen, were Delicatessen, Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro, The Hunger, Casablanca, She’s Gotta Have It, The City of Lost Children, What Time Is It There?, Seven Samurai, and dozens and dozens and dozens of anime, hong-kong action, and arty films.

So many times, I’d go to see a film, look around, and see old friends who I hadn’t seen much of in previous months. My city sucks for late night hanging out but at least we’d be able to say some kind words before and after and maybe spur ourselves into an event or dinner soon afterwards. It actually functioned as a meeting place.

I had a rotating group of friends (rotations measured in years) who would come with me or meet me at the little theatre and go there for anime night, or kung-fu night, or whatever. Sometimes it’d be a tough sell, as I explained that a movie had taken years to make or it would have puppet sex or it would have as it’s strongest feature that nobody in the film spoke a word. Sometimes people would bite, or sometimes it would be just me and the little theatre and the magic inside.

After I graduated, and as I went into my 30s, I stopped going to the llittle theatre as much, mostly because I had a demanding job, lived farther away from it, and generally didn’t check the schedule until it was too late to make it. I’d still get the phone calls from friends about something coming up and I’d make it, but I also had cable in my house (I hadn’t had it between the ages of 18 and 26) and I caught up on the different TV shows and rented movies and generally enjoyed myself that way. The little theatre, with its quirky bits and odd one-day-only shows sometimes got my attention and sometimes did not. I certainly didn’t avoid it, and didn’t feel weird coming to go in, but it was like going to any place you’d been at a lot and now not so much; you felt fine being there.. it just wasn’t a vital daily need or anything like that.

There was another movie house that I went to that was the closest to “competition” as far as I was concerned: the very grand old theater. The very grand old theatre had everything in spades: a lobby that represented a real lobby (although they had sold off part of it to another business, so it was still a little oddly shaped) and a main showing area that was absolutely goddamn breathtaking. I went to the grand old theater many times, although nowhere near as much as the little theatre. The grand old theatre, though, is where I saw a lot of other stuff for the first time: Laurence of Arabia in 70mm, Donnie Darko, Metropolis (with live music!), and so on. “Big ticket” stuff, in other words. The seats were nicer and the screen was set up so in fact I was happier in the 15th row than the first. The grand old theatre also did week runs (and midnight movies) instead of 2-a-day or 1-a-day, so I wouldn’t bump into buddies all that often but I was basically always guaranteed a seat.

So I was a movie-goer in the classic sense, including going to the big box theatres, but not all that often. I had a lot more interest in these time-tested classics than particularly heading down to the local multiplex and hoping beyond hope I wasn’t going to get hose-slapped with a piece of garbage dressed up in a pretty bow. I ended up going to a lot of films based on the director, and still do. Not a great reason, but generally a help.

But puppies become dogs and kittens become cats, and I bought a house and moved a little ways out of town and my internet connection got better and my home got a lot nicer. Where before I had no cable and an OK TV, now I had a big-screen and more DVDs than I could ever want and the ability to download all sorts of cool films whenever the mood struck me. The little theatre and the grand old theatre could get me, but it had to be something pretty darn special; I wasn’t just going to blow an evening out hoping the film wouldn’t be too painful to watch.

But again, the love affair was still there; I registered a domain and pointed it to the little theatre because their domain name absolutely blew and nobody would find it. My site had their logo and pointer to their site, and I watched college student after college student coming from a college domain click in, and click out. I figure it was something like 200-400 a month, looking for schedules and then going on. I was happy; even if I wasn’t always able to go, I helped a lot of people get to go anyway, helping the little theatre.

Sometime in here, I struck up a conversation with the current people running the little theatre. Just a little bit in e-mail; they had a list and they would solicit suggestions and I’d just go off on flowery tangental sermons about how great they were and how they could get even better and so on. I remember, quite clearly, asking some behind the scenes stuff, like if they owned their theatre, how they chose movies, what events they might have there in the future.

I also remember, quite clearly, being told that while they didn’t own the building, they had a really nice landlord with a really good deal and so there was no problem. I said I thought there was a minor problem with that, having seen too many cases of landlords selling out “landmark” businesses out from under themselves, ending the run. But the rest of the answers were helpful and bright, and I was happy to know “my” theatre was in understanding, caring hands.

So one day the letter came.

The letter explained that in fact the little theatre was not just under the gun, but it’d taken quite a few bullets and was now limping to the community’s doorstep for help. It turned out, you see, that the landlord was such a great landlord because he would let payments slip. The little theatre owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where I heard sunshine and light before, I now heard that it was in danger of closing. Poof. Almost to be gone and removed forever.

The theatre asked for everyone to please send in money. Any amount, any bit, to help keep it alive. They announced fundraising drives, and declared two massive milestones to be reached: a lot of money in a short period of time and a sort-of-lot of money to be reached within a year. If not, they warned, they would close their doors forever.

I felt bad for the little theatre but it was also like finding out an elderly friend had hip trouble: well, duh. The place they were at wasn’t the most accessible, the prices they charged were basically equivalent to first-run theatres, and to be honest, the lineups often didn’t appeal to me; they were often just the first-run “independent” movies, which by the last few years had basically degenerated to the movies that were made by the tiny studios run by the big studios. Hooray. When they pulled out a great one, it was great, but great wasn’t happening as much anymore.

But, I also figured, maybe I was just getting old and cynical. I idly checked up on the listing for the little theatre’s property. I saw that they had a landlord who owned a number of properties, and had for many years; a real old-school one. And the story, as I could piece together, was quite clear: they just didn’t always pay their bills, and finally the landlord wanted some friggin’ bucks.

My research didn’t stop there; I started looking into who was running the place, which I had never cared about, and also didn’t like what I saw. Not so much “film” people as chummy organizer types with recent college degrees and shared board seats on a variety of local “groups” which included an incestual selection of insiders across a number of arts-related themes. Small-town punkery in a city that thinks it’s world class. I had dimly theorized the motor under the hatch wasn’t all that pretty but here I now knew it was.

I’m actually being nice here; I started to write on some weblog comment areas about my concerns with the little theatre and its setups, and was contacted by the theatre’s management, asking me to please take what I was saying down, that it could potentially jinx a number of investments that were coming along. See, as it was explained to me, there were some real big money people who were willing to help the poor sickly little theatre, but they were waiting on all the plebes on the ground to donate their $10-$100 coinage to show there was even any interest in the endeavor. Once they saw this and a groundswell of love and caring for the little theatre, the big guns would come in and save the day. I found this distasteful and ugly, but I’d asked for it getting involved in the first place. I promised I would not use their name again. (And I haven’t, and you might notice I haven’t once even in this entry).

So I was on the fence about the little theatre. I knew that the time for movie houses being the center of all things was well closed, and that competition from other forms of entertainment that, seriously, are just as good and satisfying was eating a lot of the theatre’s lunch. There are a number of unique and forward-thinking things that a theatre can do. After all, it’s a box, and since time immemorial guys with boxes on streets and sidewalks have to figure out how to get people to pay to get into the box. Flashier outsides, cascades of advertisements, eye-catching events and heart-exciting appearances. It’s a business. Businesses have to do what they can do, or they get smeared.

I fell off the fence, late last year, when I read an article that had joined a dozen other articles about saving the theatre. The history! The special place it was! The need to survive to keep this jewel shiny. Typical stuff. But the real crux was the reasoning given by the manager for the dire situation the little theatre was in.

He blamed the reduction in foot traffic, the encroach of home entertainment, the ever-rising costs to do business, the razor-thin profit world of the independent theatre. All well and good, although of course I asked myself what giving them even more money would achieve, if they had no clear plan to make a sizeable profit to float the boat itself.

But then I read down further, and my love affair died.

He blamed 9/11.

Yes, that’s right, because two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in 2001, the little theatre was limping along near death in 2005 and might close in 2006. Audiences were depressed or started shying away from movie theatres, it was explained, and it was a heavy load that had caused a downturn in attendance.

Bull, Fucking. Shit.

People enjoy entertainment more when they’re feeling lost and lonely. They curl up and throw themselves into the great entertainment the creative people of the world present, whether it’s a book, a movie or a concert. The events might have more deep personal meanings, and songs about being torn apart or losing a loved one might have sudden echoes of new interpretations, but to imply that 9/11 was a mitigating and ongoing factor in the little theatre’s troubles, especially when the other independent theatres were doing just fine, thank you was the lowest of the low, the cornered rat squeaking out one last plea.

I washed my hands completely. I haven’t set foot back in the little theatre since.

The grand old theatre gets my cash, although again I don’t often go there, just like I don’t go out like I once did. I work with computers and when I’m not working with computers I’m travelling the world making my own movies. I learned how to float my own boat years ago; I don’t depend on handouts and assuming my debtors will never actually collect because I’m just that fucking cool and arty. The phrase is “head in the clouds but feet on the ground”. Take away the ground part, and you’re in free-fall.

I wish the little theatre well, and I might even attend a movie or two in the future there, assuming it’s truly a unique offering being made that is worth the effort to get out there and spend the money. But that goes for buying any product, really. Give me something worth coming to you for and I won’t care how dumb you’ve acted in the past with your business decisions. Movie houses are not temples. They’re not charities, they’re not altars requiring me to tithe my salary to to ensure a big white rectange stays on a wall in the building. They’re a business. A business with 100 years behind the industry, but still, a business. Adapt or die. Gas stations don’t wistfully recall the time they had electromechanical dials and the customers had to go to the staff to pay. They adapted, they became more efficient, they concentrated on having convenience stores attached to the gas station and ensuring that there was a reason to stick around and spend even more money. I’ve eaten at a lot of gas stations in the past decade.

Harsh? Maybe. Unnecessary, a kick while they’re down? Maybe. But they put themselves there. Aiming a gun at your own head and demanding money isn’t a hostage situation. It’s delayed suicide.

Goodbye, little theatre. I loved you.

Seems I can’t go too long before adding ANOTHER sub-site to textfiles.com. But this was was a logical conclusion and has been on the back-burner for about 5 years (according to the file modification dates I have around).

http://artifacts.textfiles.com

ARTIFACTS covers a problem I’ve had for years and years. People send me collections of files from their BBSes, or which they got off of BBSes, and with the main textfiles.com sites, I basically cut these up and sort them into directories. The files from a BBS might end up in 10 places, held up as examples of a certain subject matter or type of artwork, next to hundreds of items from other BBSes. That’s great on one level, allowing you to get a sense for the sorts of things that were on various BBSes, but it’s pretty bad if, for example, you’re tracking the history of ExecPC, or your favorite local AE line.

So, this allows me to clump together items from a specific BBS, add other bits of information from the collections I have, and start to build up a picture of a specific place. I just linked it to bbslist.textfiles.com so that if there’s an entry in artifacts, it’ll be flagged on the BBS list. Right now, obviously, it’s a tad sparse. Out of 103,000 BBSes, I have a whole 450 or so with artifacts. But expect that to change rapidly as I jam through my collections, especially those of artifacts I had sitting on my hard drives with no obvious place to put them. Now I have one.

My hope is that this will inspire a whole new pile of collecting, as people see an obvious place for the photos, archives, and information they have on various BBSes. We can hope, huh.

And yes, this is starting to encroach on territory currently held by BBSMATES.COM. Sorry, Aron ol’ bean, you knew it was just a matter of time!

Speaking of Jason doing stuff and not telling you about it for the last few weeks, I put a copy of digitize.textfiles.com on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/54568729@N00/sets/72157594265759470/

Why? Why not. They have space and it’s not hurting anybody, and it makes a lot of old cool information join the world again. At 647 images and counting! Of course, digitize.textfiles.com will continue to get stuff AND provide the TIFFs that Flickr does not.

Related to the whole bit of work being done with artifacts, I’ve gotten my hands on ANSILOVE which is an absolutely spot-on ANSI converter that makes a .PNG out of an ANSI drawing. Previously, the ANSI section of artscene.textfiles.com had “preview” shots, but they all basically sucked because the converter I used was poor. The new one is absolutely spot on. The only thing it doesn’t do is make animated GIFs of animated ANSIs, but I think we can all suck it up. Sitting in the inbox, I have… yes, wait for it… 3,000 ANSI images ready to be sorted. It’s going to go very quickly.

cd.textfiles.com has had a bunch more CDs dropped on it; I was so proud when I broke 1 million files and already I’m at 1,415,000. I’m also going through those files next and integrating them into ARTIFACTS. Isn’t that just how it goes? I’ve been adding GIFs of BBS ads, login screens and so on from these files.

While nobody was looking pdf.textfiles.com has grown to 10,000 files and is 13 gigabytes (some aren’t quite browsable yet but will be shortly). But that’s actually inaccurate. In a short while that is going to increase 5-fold. Watch for it.

Did I mention I’m making a couple of movies, too?

Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 13:16:29 -0400
From: “Giesen, Brian”
Reply-To: “Bell, John”
To: ascii@textfiles.com
Subject: Cocktails, Conversation & the Future of Blogging – RSVP Today!

Jason,

I was reading your blog and thought you might be interested in
attending a free event in Boston we are co-hosting with Six Apart
next week.

The event will include an insider’s look at Vox, Six Apart’s new
blogging tool, and it’ll offer a great opportunity to meet other
bloggers and digital leaders from the Boston area.

Details about the event are attached below. I hope to see you at the
event.

Best,
Brian

Brian Giesen
Digital Influence Strategist
360 Degree Digital Influence Group

Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide
direct: 202.729.4117
1111 19th Street NW 10th Floor
Washington, DC 20036

http://blog.ogilvypr.com

Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 05:04:36 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jason Scott
To: “Bell, John”
Subject: Re: Cocktails, Conversation & the Future of Blogging – RSVP Today!

This is going to sound like the stupidest thing in the world, but I can’t
bring myself to attend something that I’ve invited to by a “Digital
Influence Strategist”. Thanks for thinking of me and I appreciate the offer.

Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 07:25:04 -0400
From: “Bell, John”
To: jason@textfiles.com
Subject: Re: Cocktails, Conversation & the Future of Blogging – RSVP Today!

Presuming Brian Giesen from my team invited you (that’s his title)
why would that keep you from coming? If he had another title like
“online public relations” or “online marketing” in his title, would
you attend?

Seriously, the event should be a fun opportunity to meet with Six
Apart and us. We did one in July in DC and had folks from PBS,
Discovery, DNC, RNC all there. Good time had by all.

Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 12:08:38 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jason Scott
To: “Bell, John”
Subject: Re: Cocktails, Conversation & the Future of Blogging – RSVP Today!

Have a fantastic time!

Yes, it’s time once again for “So what file from the textfiles.com collection of sites is getting downloaded the most?”

And apparently, the winner is this little charmer:

He’s extremely popular among the Myspace crowd, and if you think I’m going to link to Myspace, I’d rather eat a jar of thumbtacks. I consider all these social spaces historically important, but they’re not exactly places I wish to always visit.

In case you’re wondering why a site called “textfiles.com” has a picture, it’s because one of the sub-sites covers the artistic work of modem-bound folks throughout the last 30 years, and this is in one of the collections on that sub-site. The site, by the way, is artscene.textfiles.com, because, you know, what I need are more hits.

The “Grim Reaper” by “Razorback” (the name of this piece) has been downloaded over 60,000 times in September alone. That’s in the last 8 days. In August he was downloaded 212,000 times. In July, 150,000, June 118,000 and so on. That’s a heaping bucket of Grim Reaper, let me tell you. And the best part is, he doesn’t even TRACK before April!

So basically, someone found this, linked to it from his site (and by site, I mean myspace page), then others saw it, and THEY linked to it, and probably some unbelievably popular person linked to it from THEIR myspace page, and so we went from about 16,000 within the first month and a half to a quarter of a million downloads within six months. Holy crap!

If anyone’s feeling frisky and wants to let “Razorback” know this thing he drew is now in the browser caches of many tens of thousands of people, go for it.

Why this one? Why this specific image when even looking in the same directory yields equivalently great work? It’s all very arbitrary. Stuff just gets copied and pasted and we’re done! That’s the magic of the world we’re currently living in. Do these people know about BBSes or that the happy little hourglass jockey they’re linking to is from a history site about them? Not the majority, I’ll bet. It’s just more of the pixels in the big soup of their lives.

And you know, when I was younger, I didn’t understand what part Apple or IBM or Hayes or any of the other forces and people in the greater world affected my BBS days. I didn’t really understand tarriffs or equal access or line qualification or service provider requirements. No, I wanted textfiles. And boy did I get them, sometimes at the price of someone else’s phone codes.

So maybe this is it all coming back to me. It’s my turn to get decontextually sucked dry of my resources for arbitrary and strange reasons. I can live with that.

But watch out, kids! The fun looking guy with the skull in the picture is coming for you next! Get your hard drives ready!

One of my friends, knowing how much I’ve grown to dig the video weblogger Ze Frank and his show, sent me a link (which is now getting quite popular) of an absolutely spectacular presentation he gave at an ideas conference called TED a little ways back, before he started doing an every-weekday weblog. And I really did enjoy the thing immensely. I just didn’t expect to cry at the end.

I didn’t cry about the actual conference presentation; that was just great all the way through. But for some reason, this digitized video had to be “brought by” someone, so it was “brought by” a car company.

The theme of the short commercial was “What if great ideas held no value?”, the point being that since we do in fact hold ideas in great esteem the cars that the company makes are all great ideas so you want to buy them and probably pay a little more for them. So to prove this point, while the deep voice is asking you this, they show some great works of art being destroyed or ignored by people, since, again, in this hypothetical world great ideas have no value.

Anyway. At one point they take a wrecking ball to Fallingwater.

In a very realistic and sudden manner, too; one moment you see Fallingwater and then next comes this wrecking ball that starts destroying it.

I don’t know when I first heard about Fallingwater, but it had to be my late teens, and it struck me as such a perfect home, this idea that yes, people could actually gain the homes and places they wanted, if they worked hard enough or made the right choices or were brave. Even though I’ve yet to visit, I forged this strange emotional bond with the building. I’m aware, make no mistake, of some of the design flaws in Frank Lloyd Wright’s design, and how they had to go back and fix some major stuff so it would last, but regardless, it had this very strong place in my heart for me.

I cry seldom enough that anything that can consistently cause it to happen (and I tested it, I can keep playing this footage randomly and I will in fact start crying again) fascinates me. So I spent some time wondering what about it affects me this way.

I think watching it being destroyed, I overlaid this sense that the reason it had been destroyed was that very thing, that nobody found it worthwhile (except me! I’m over here, but nobody could hear me) and so I watched a great thing go away. I actually have nightmares like this, where I find out too late that I am the curator or owner of a wonderous and breathtaking thing or place, but my inaction (before the dream started) means I can only witness it being taken away or being lost.

On the subject of crying, in the 5.5 hours of edited footage of the documentary, there’s only a couple places that consistently make me tear up. They’re kind of weird, so worth mentioning.

One is during the COMPRESSION episode, when I mention that Phil Katz died at 37. I’m 35 (until next Wednesday), and that just really hits home, how short his life really was and therefore how young he was when he got into this controversy. He was in the wrong, by the way, if you haven’t seen the episode or keep going with the “official” memory of what happened.

The other is near the end of the MAKE IT PAY episode. It was so touching at the time that I put it in even though I had to include subtitles explaining what I was asking. I was interviewing three ex-employees of the now-gone Mustang Software, a BBS company that flourished in the 1990s. The company, founded in 1986 by Jim Harrer (and others), sold the “Wildcat!” BBS system. The company was in Bakersfield, California, and I travelled up to Bakersfield (getting a hell of a speeding ticket) to interview them. I ended up staying very late, like 2 or 3 in the morning, and drove back (not getting a ticket on the way back).

They talked about their times at the company, the good and the bad, and especially how they learned how the whole thing was coming apart and ultimately they lost their jobs as the company essentially shut down and was sold off. They also talked about how the homes they were in, the very home I was interviewing them in, was as a result of Mustang, and that it was their time at the company that ensured the homes they were raising in their families in.

I don’t know why the question occured to me, but I asked “If Jim asked you to join a new company, would you go?”

The words were barely out of my mouth when they both rushed to say “Yes. In a heartbeat. Not even a question. Yes.”

Mini-DV is only 720×480 resolution, and it’s encoded in MPEG above that. If I’d shot it in HD, maybe you’d immediately feel what I felt in that room; absolutely undying, to-the-ends-of-the-earth loyalty. Drop-everything-you’re-doing, go out the door and drive to wherever you need to right now. It was a wave of honor that hit me. There’s no clever smile on their faces, there’s no winking “yeah, sure, I’d relive those days”. It’s pure, uncut loyalty. And I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. So when I see that footage in the film (and I moved a lot of stuff around to ensure it got in there), I just start tearing up that someone could actually inspire that loyalty in others.

As for movies in the general sense, I actually cry at great editing/arrangement shots, too many of which to go into here, but that’s just weird. Ultimately weird, though, is that when I saw the 2000 remake of Shaft and just started crying about halfway though and couldn’t stop for the rest of the film. Why? Because one of the main villians, “Peoples” Hernandez, brings his little brother around his job as a leading drug dealer, but obviously just out of a sense of obligation of including his brother in the business, even though his brother won’t touch guns or really do much of anything. In fact, he makes his brother wait in the car when stuff is going on, just so he’s safe. And of course, his little brother is shot by a stray bullet during a fight, killed with no reason, and the Hernandez character goes absolutely insane from that point on, completely irrational until the end of the film, because his little brother died. And I have a little brother. He’s 30 percent bigger than me and runs his own landscaping and landmoving business and could crush a fork in his hand, but he’s still my little brother and one of the great loves of my life, and if anything ever happened to him at someone else’s hand, I would claw through concrete to get at them. So meanwhile the rest of the audience is watching Samuel Jackson kick some major ass, and I’m just crying about the lost little brother.

I suppose it’s not entirely polite to discuss crying, but it’s all part of being a person and I spent way too many years hiding that I was a person. I’m done with that. So yes, I cry.

Saw “Crank” tonight. Great movie. Didn’t cry.

I’m bothered by the battle over the word “Hacker”. I’m most bothered by it because I consider the battle over.

While I don’t mind the energy poured into it, since it generates content and I like content, I do mind the characterization that it’s a relatively new battle, one that is just on a sort of tipping point. That’s a completely inaccurate idea.

And I don’t mean “Yes, we’ve been fighting it since the 1990s”. I mean this issue is at least 20 years old, with some aspects of it dating back 30 years.

I have an entire site dedicated to this and related issues, at hacker.textfiles.com. Some people know about it, some don’t.

Recently, I was sent a very precious document, a message from the bulletin board that ran at the Stanford Artifical Intelligence Lab. The poster is Richard Gabriel. Dr. Gabriel knows his stuff. He is a forward-thinking writer with a brilliant mind and decades of experience with both computers and the people related to them. Nowadays, a good website to learn about him if you haven’t heard of him is dreamsongs.com.

This document was sent to me by someone other than Dr. Gabriel, who wanted me to see how the battle was waging even back then. His belief (and mine) is this hasn’t been in public since it was written back then.

Like I said, new content is interesting to me, so feel free to keep waging the “battle”; just don’t pretend this blood on the swords in this battle isn’t caked with decades. I yield the floor to Dr. Gabriel.

Date: 09-Nov-83 1141 PST
From: Dick Gabriel
Subject: Hackers
To: su-bboards@SU-AI

Maybe I’ll go into business and become an entrepreneur.

I have a Google alert set up to tell me when media discusses Bulletin Board Systems. What can I say, I like to be on the cutting edge.

People often cite BBSes in two main areas: discussing China, and as a reference of how we don’t do things that way anymore.

One of the articles that came by recently was about a company that provides internet connections to fast-food restaurants. Well and good. Somewhere in the middle there is what tripped off my scanner:

“They grew up across the street from one another in Waconia, west of the Twin Cities, playing baseball and football together. In 1994, when they were 14, they started an online bulletin-board service and called it Black Hole BBS. The bulletin board caught on, boasting 4,000 registered users…In 1996, they plugged a game server into a T-1 broadband line in Dave’s bedroom, changed their name to Black Hole Internet and became an ISP. For the first time, they saw more cash coming in than going out…While their peers flipped burgers, they operated the ISP through high school and college, and the company’s revenue passed six figures. After Perrill graduated from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management in 2003 with an MBA, they changed the name to BHI to attract more business customers.”

OK! Black Hole BBS in Minnesota (612 area code, which I know by heart). By then going to bbslist.textfiles.com, which is a site of BBS numbers and information I’ve put together from hundreds of sources, I see a bunch of entries down there:

612-442-2382 Black Hole BBS (1996) John Perrill
612-442-5635 Black Hole BBS, The Black Hole(1994-1996) John Perrill Wildcat
612-442-5682 The Black Hole, The Black Hole BBS(1994-1996) Wildcat
612-442-6363 Black Hole Bbs, The(1995) John Perrill
612-442-6429 Black Hole BBS(1995) John Perrill
612-442-6431 Black Hole BBS(1994-1995)

So from this, I now know the following additional bits of information:

There was definitely a BBS named “The Black Hole” in Minnesota.
There was a multi-line BBS named “The Black Hole”.
It ran Wildcat! software at some point.
The official listed name of the sysop is John Perrill.

Now, the name listed in the article is Dave Perrill, 27. Assuming he did start the black hole BBS when he was 14, that means he would have started it in the 1993-1994 period. Within a year it was multi-line, running Wildcat, which costs some bucks, and in fact the whole thing costs bucks. The rest of the article mentions the father in a different context:

“BHI’s interest in fast-food restaurants isn’t accidental. Perrill’s father, John Perrill, Sr., also an entrepreneur, started Wand Corp., a company that installs computerized cash registers for fast-food restaurants. Perrill Sr. is a minority investor in BHI, and BHI shares office space with Wand.”

So even though Dad’s listed as a minor player, he was major enough back then to be listed as the main Sysop of the BBS while his son wasn’t.

So, what’s the point of this? Primary sources. By yanking in these old BBS lists like I’ve been doing, I was able to do a minor amount of checking on the history of this BBS mentioned, see the family involved, and know what kind of software they were running. This is by taking what’s out there or maybe what’s not so readily available, collating, adding it together, and there’s a little more knowledge.

There’s nothing sinister or bad in saying it’s all your bag and dad was just a minor player, of course. But it’s good to give the databases a workout, in my case, and every once in a while, it does have meaning. I’ve had people claim to be the “first”, claim to have made something they ultimately didn’t, found myself in the middle of a battle that was 15 years dead, but when the documentary and my sites came along, all the old bad blood rushed back like it was yesterday.

I’m not being superlative, either. I have had multiple threats of being sued over publically available information being up on my site, and I’ve had phone calls and intense conversations with people, dredging up who-said-what and nobody involved was calm about it.

Primary sources are gold. They help track down, if not the truth, a context that the truth might be found in. And I’m big on the truth.

Send me your crap.