Here are some one-offs before the end of the year, for ideas or stuff that just doesn’t add up to a single entry. (In case anyone notices, I take the policy on here that I never post more than once a day, and I try to make each entry a complete self-contained idea, and worth spendig some time reading.)

I just found, buried on Youtube, someone’s remix of some clips from the BBS Documentary. Currently hosted on YouTube, this 10-minute remix has clips from BAUD and SYSOPS AND USERS, and gives a pretty nice feel for how my documentary episodes are like. I had nothing to do with it, and the Creative Commons license says there’s no problem with them doing it. And I’m saying there’s no problem with them doing it. Bravo.

If someone made an OS-Tan of textfiles.com, I would be the happiest bastard on the planet.

GET LAMP is coming along nicely; more details shortly.

BBS Documentary is still going out the door, too.

A good greeting to all the people kind enough to read this weblog, and I hope to see you in the new year.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling down or depressed, I cheer myself up the way that most people would: by scanning in 20-year-old dot-matrix printouts, proofreading the resulting textfile for accuracy to the original, and then posting it for the world.

When I was calling BBSes in the early 1980s, I sometimes would print out the stuff I was reading. My IBM PC had an Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer, and it could mostly keep up with whatever was coming off the modem. Looking back, I guess I considered it easier than saving to floppy disk. Maybe there was some other urge, but I can’t believe I thought it was an important historical record. I remember printing out some of my favorite messages from people I admired, so there was definitely a memento aspect about some of it.

(Astoundingly, Epson has gone back and scanned in all the documentation for the printers they used to sell, including the Epson FX-80 I used to own. Guess they’re saving history too.)

So, the upshot of this early-teenage activity is that I have over a ream of printouts of circa 1984-1985 BBS message bases and files. Many of the files I already have on textfiles.com, since I also saved them on the floppy disks I had. In this way, I know many of these files are “saved”; they’re online, mirrored in a dozen places I know of and probably a hundred I don’t.

Dot Matrix technology used a ribbon for printing and set up each letter in a little matrix of dots, hence the name. This means that the letters were really the lowest standard necessary to be legible. It was, really, worse than the typewriter-like printers that came before, but these were cheaper to get and they were, often, faster and smaller. They are also somewhat prone to fading, although a brand-new ribbon produced a printout that 20 years later still looks great.

I should also mention how hysterically loud this printer was, with each line going by like a banshee screaming. If you were running this printer late at night trying not to wake your dad, as I was, the issue was one of striking a balance between need-to-print and getting screamed at about being up at 3am. Therefore, these printouts hold a touch of bittersweetness for me, because they also invoke memories of my dad waking up at 6am, going out to the dining room and finding his eldest son still hunched over the computer, obviously having neither slept nor moved for the last 12 hours. I have a loud voice; my dad’s was even louder, and harsher, criticizing me for not sleeping and drawing the classic groggy parental logical bridges to deeper, darker ruin.

Bittersweet the memories might be, I kept all these printouts and over time, I’ve been scanning them in. OCR technology has gotten very good in the past few years, and a package like Omnipage will go through and nail something like 90-95% accuracy for a lot of these printouts. Occasionally it messes up when getting into particularly number-filled or technical documents, when it will start claiming something made in 1984 was made in 1934 and so on. Since it’s important to me to try and transfer this stuff as accurately as possible, I make sure to do a line-by-line comparison between the original printout and the resulting file, correcting poor character recognition and spacing, but ensuring that all the spelling mistakes, poor grammar and line noise stays in. After all, that’s what happened.

This is slow going and with a bunch of other stuff in my life it’s probablly got the worst effort-to-output ratio of all my projects, but it has definitely been progressing, and there’s a section on textfiles.com with the results of my work so far.

In some cases, these were relatively “large” boards, which meant there were hundreds of people logging on, but others were more likely to have a dozen or two dozen regular users. How many of those were pre-disposed to printing out or keeping record of the activity on the board, I wouldn’t know, but I’m willing to bet very few. So, the only record of these BBSes that might exist are these printouts.

So, if you’ll permit me, a quick tour.

For whatever reason, I was really attracted to a family of BBSes in the 612 area code, which meant (mostly) Minneapolis-based BBSes, and while I didn’t really know where Minneapolis (or Minnesota) was, I assumed it was a magical place because of all the cool messages people left. I was fascinated enough with this that I made a special effort to drive hundreds of miles during a trip to record these people for the BBS Documentary: Here’s some photos from that. For the record, it was quite worth it and these guys were as cool as I’d hoped.

Among the boards out there were the Safehouse BBS and the 1985 BBS. The Safehouse was a mastery of self-promotion – I even have the system specs up as a top 100 file. For an example of how the conversations might go, here’s a collection from the debate den. Initially, it seems a little hacked-together and simplistic, unless you take into consideration the whole context and start to string together the indirect information. For example, these 26 messages span the period from August 3, 1984 to September 10, 1984; five weeks of time, basically a new post every day and a half. And this was considered quite fine, with people responding to stuff posted weeks and weeks previously as if it’d just happened. Compare this to a site like fark.com where a subject will have its main burst of interest and posting within 8 hours, and include massive paragraphs of text, with people jumping into meta-discussion (“this is a stupid topic; people are falling into the same traps”) often in the first 20 minutes.

The 1985 is one of those perfect stories I like to tell. Started by Sinbad Sailor, it had 1985 as the last four digits of the number. It came up on January 1, 1985 and went down on December 31, 1985; it only lived an exact year, the year iit was named after, a fleeting party whose invitations were clear and which went down as expected, as it had always said it would. Here’s some general postings from the 1985 BBS and here’s a “random” sub-board which encouraged just being random.

I talk about the BBS Sherwood Forest II way too much, but it’s my all-time favorite BBS, because you really felt like you were running with the wolf pack and being in the know about stuff, which to a 14 year old is high currency indeed. Here’s some phone-phreak-related postings from Sherwood Forest II, which includes some informative postings by BIOC Agent 003, the crown jewel of Sherwood Forest II.

Another indirect advantage of this printing is catching some record, even a fleeting one, of BBSes that were likely to be created, live, and die within a month. It was hard work to keep one going and it was definitely expensive. Since you wanted people to call your new board, you would go to other BBSes and post messages about how great your place was and then sit back and hope beyond hope someone would actually call. Here’s a nice collection from the Utopia BBS (a personal favorite). Note how many times the sysops would not even leave the area code, assuming everyone would be in the same place (312) and there would be no long-distance callers.

Additionally, I even have the fortune of acquiring some rare gems along the way, for example this printout of messages from the Private Sector BBS, which was the “Official 2600 Magazine BBS” and was taken down by authorities a couple months after that printout.

Another gem is even more esoteric; a printout of a conference on Compuserve held in October of 1983 with Steven Wozniak. People (like myself) used to hearing the “good of all the world” type Woz in the modern day, as he happily talks about learning and doing the right thing, will find this conference transcription quite the contrast. Here, the Woz is all business, talking about the state of the market with the newly-released IBM PC jr coming out and the positioning of Apple’s IIe and III models against the Commodore 64. (Woz predicts the Commodore 64′s fading away after a year, but mostly because he believes a new model will subsume it, which was somewhat true). Additionally, he drops pearls of insight and information about the forthcoming Apple Macintosh, and how it will totally change everything. One of the most interesting passages concerns the dance that Wozniak enters into trying to skirt around the cold hard fact that the Macintosh is a billion times less “hackable” than the Apple II:

The Mac, unfortunately, is so perfect that we didn’t leave much room for
hackers to do hardware “for themselves” or “their own way” — we feel there
were no alternatives. The philosophy on software is different — open, access
the hardware at various levels. You won’t have the interesting world WE enjoy
of programming to handle each of five 80-column cards, six printer interface
cards, four dot-matrix printers and a letter-quality printer, four modem
cards, etc. The world of ones and zeroes, registers and adders, instruction
sets and video modes is very dear to many of us. We were forced to learn it
in order to be Apple II pioneers.

What’s vital to me, here, is that these are primary sources; these are examples of what it really was like to be on a BBS at that time, and are the actual words said by actual people who are a part of it. In today’s information-blender world, it’s frustrating to watch someone summarize the entire BBS era along some warped-for-the-current-argument vector. They do it because it’s easy, because who’s going to check up on that? But now, there’s these examples to point to, to go “No, we really didn’t think it was too slow. Yes, we really did talk this way. No, this term ‘open source’ didn’t pop up 20 years ago.” You hold in your hands what happened, when it happened.

I sometimes get side-swiped with one of the few arguments that will infuriate me, piffle about starving people in other lands or having a life or misjudging priorities. I’m pretty straightforward about these folks: I call them “death-dealers”. I call them that because they equate tearing down another project as building up their own. They consider telling someone they did things wrong to be equal to doing it right. At the end of the day they go into the ground and the world is made better by the silencing of their tinny horns.

I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t consider it important; and just glancing over the printouts, I take great satisfaction in bringing them onto the site. It’s rewarding work like few other projects I’ve done. This is what I do. You do what you do.

And there’s a part of me, giggling, that loves to scan these things in, carefully check them, and put them on the site because of the eternal cosmic joke behind it: for a while, people posting on these boards did think they were making the world a better or different place, and the weight of the words was, if not life-changing, at least highly regarded between the people posting and the people reading them. How hilarious, then, would it be for these kids, these teenagers, to know that 20 years hence, someone would labor to carefully transcribe their words, capturing every nuance, and then place it at personal expense up on a world-wide-accessible stage, for later generations to ponder!

If only life was this satisfying, on so many levels, all the time!

I tried to use other means, but the name is in too much use and database searches don’t really help me lock things down. So here we go.

It shouldn’t be a big surprise that I am a Hell Roommate. Within a short time you figure out that you made a really bad mistake renting an apartment with me. In fact, after college I stopped living with anyone else and rented my own places except for a short interlude out of financial necessity that was, in its own way, also a disaster.

In the case of college, of course, you don’t have much choice in roommates, so the blazing hades of being my roommate was imposed upon, in order, Ben, Chris and Todd. Under “it seemed like a good idea at the time” we also have Mike, Scott, and (somewhat) John and Eric.

Todd was the longest-term college roommate, subjected to me for all of Freshman year at Emerson College. How he put up with me I’ll never know, and most markedly we ended up designing the absolute perfect layout for our dorm room, splitting up the bunk beds and arranging it so, if we wanted to, we could almost never see or hear each other.

He called himself “Ship”, played some basketball, and was going to Emerson for broadcast journalism and radio, with the intention of becoming a sports announcer. It is likely he dropped “Shapiro” later if he in fact went into that field. One side-effect of going to a school with such an entertainment bent is that a lot of people change their names professionally as needed. I mean, look at me, for example.

Anyway, so at one point, during a particularly gruesome fight, Todd said something that struck me enough that 18 years later I still remember it.

“You know, you better become fucking famous, so there’s something that made all this shit worth it.”

I’ve been in Wired, USA Today, the New York Times. I’ve been on NPR, on the CBC, and stuff I’ve written has been read by something in the range of many hundreds of thousands of people. I’ve had a film play on Comedy Central and Sundance. I’m in the IMDB, and I get the occasional fan mail.

I’m not A-list, B-list or even D-list, but in my little sphere, my little area I scoped out, I’m a celebrity.

I did my best, Todd!

The more I collect stuff, and at this point I am collecting a virtual tidal wave of stuff, the more I am realizing how important the role of a guide is.

There are a lot of good people in this world, doing a lot of good work collecting stuff. And by “a lot”, I mean thousands and thousands. In many cases they’re classifying it. In many cases they’re classifying it, finding its context, and methodically making sure the “tags” and “scope” and “whatsis” and everything else is perfectly in place.

Color photographs from 1909-1912. 1,300 celebrity photographs taken over 30 years. Computer Gaming World. Glass Insulators. Bum Wines. Barbed wire. Hewlett-Packard Calculators.

We won, you know. When all this computer stuff started out, even nominally OK digitized and captured works were considered great. Even when the image was in fact crappy or the audio was crappy or the framerate was crappy, at the end of the day your computer could do something neat and you enjoyed it. And you hoped that over time people would create even more cool stuff and put it where you could get it. I won’t state a time when all this happened because it was different for different people.

But the fact is, we’re there! I get sent a lot of digitized material to accompany the in-the-UPS-box stuff that arrives on my doorstep regularly, and people are working to digitize stuff by the truckload. One of the things that held me back with digitize.textfiles.com is that a lot of things I might be inclined to scan in are being scanned in anyway. I’m probably going to scan in a bunch of rather obscure and semi-boring material, simply because I can know that nobody else is doing so. But already my collection is somewhat untenable and will need a little readjustment.

This is where a guide comes in. A lot of people knew about the DIGITIZE.TEXTFILES.COM site, but it wasn’t until I talked in detail about what was so cool about the 1980 Coleco Catalog I’d digitized that people started hitting that particular exhibit with such fervor. In fact, I’m now the #1 hit for Coleco Catalog on Google. But the thing is, I’m not even the best scan of that catalog! A while later I found out that there was a site called the Handheld Museum that had not just scans of the catalog but links to information on all the games inside. Granted, it doesn’t have the FULL catalog, doesn’t have TIFFs available, but it’s still a very good work. Why am I the poobah and he’s the goat, search-engine-wise? Guides.

Without an advocate, there’s just so much stuff that you can’t possibly skim through it all, even to find the thing you want. In fact, you might not even know there’s stuff to skim through, or might not know that one pile is better than another pile.

A lot of my big hits come from Andy Baio, alias waxy, who functions as a very good guide for a lot of people. His link log is a beautiful stew of video, audio, news and ideas, with only the slightest commentary afterwards. I’ve watched comments from him result in world press interest in something on my weblog.

Same for BoingBoing. They can mention something that is 3 years old and cause a hurricaine of interest to knock over an unsuspecting server. For example, on December 13, 2006, which is the time this weblog entry was written, BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder linked to this page about the Schiebe Illusion, which is at least as old as May 24, 2004 (and links to a non-existent page on the home server, so it may be older than that). So this page sits around for two and a half years and then goes through the roof in terms of hits.

Is this bad? BoingBoing doesn’t make any claims their links are to new stuff, or cutting-edge, or even, really accurate. They just say “A Directory of Wonderful Things”. And heck, even if you’ve seen it a gabillion times before, some stuff never ends up being not-wonderful. But what they do is function as guides, which is why they stay popular, because ultimately, in the aggregate, they point you to some pretty cool stuff.

For most people nothing about this is a revelation; they already knew of a buddy or a website or other source that gave them better ideas of where to go. I’m just figuring out, however, that maybe a guide or advocate is not just a nice bonus but a critical part of archiving. Without someone giving context and sense and pointers, you’re likely going to miss out on a lot of cool stuff.

The issue with this is that the dark-mirror side of guides and advocates are Marketers and PR people, who are willing to put approval or demand attention for anything willing to give them a few bucks. And if it serves their purposes, they’ll act just like your buddy or get you to think they’re doing you a favor. I hate them; for example, check out these scumbags. Monetizing advocacy while giving the impression of it all being one big happy happenstance borders on a crime against humanity for me. At one point Creative Commons signed up with these losers, and the resulting shitstorm showed, pretty clearly, the division between the mindset of various people in that “movement”. So there’s a bit of a minefield to wanting guides; a lot of people want that “mindshare” of telling you what is interesting today, and that’s part of why BoingBoing’s front page looks like the lead vehicle in a NASCAR race.

Maybe I’ll put the call out for an official guide to my crap. Or maybe I’ll be that guy:

A much better catalog in the DIGITIZE collection is the 1983 Shelburne Holiday Catalog. It’s a treasure trove of late 1970s and early 1980s electronics design, intense language, and amazing claims. Go check that one out!

Like any relatively sketchy activity, you learn “the rules” either by osmosis, logic, or the hard way. Your buddies involved in the same stuff as you will happily give you helpful advice, but they’re often just grasping into the same darkness as you. Such was the case with Phone Phreaking, which required the use of a telephone to do things, and which, therefore, could track you back to your telephone, and potentially your home, with an unknown amount of ease.

The convenience of phone hacking from home always struck up against the relative safety of phreaking from outside your home. In an ideal world, you didn’t use phreak codes from home, didn’t try to hack them from home, and didn’t really do anything from home. Life, however, is rarely ideal.

My compromise to this, especially in the more pressing situation of tying up my mother’s phone line, was to take over a telephone booth near my house in Brewster, NY, do all my stuff there, and then write down all my learned knowledge. This telephone booth came to be known in my mind as “The Office”.

The Office was pretty amazing as far as phone booths went in 1984; for one thing, it looked like it dated back to the 1950s, with a sort of art deco design and multi-colored paint job, not to mention the classy word TELEPHONE etched in a pretty font on each side. This was definitely not a standard Western Electric phone booth, and it wasn’t blue or adorned with a Bell Telephone logo anywhere on it. I have to assume that at some point in Brewster’s history, they had one of the independent telephone companies that hid under Ma Bell’s left buttcheek for a hundred years. This phone company was kind enough to place this quality telephone booth at an intersection that represented the crossroads between the towns of Brewster and Carmel, and it was all about 200 feet from my house.

As Cell phones dominate the world and phone booths are ripped out by the thousands each year, it will be harder and harder to really know that feeling of standing in one, especially if you were doing something illicit. In a full, glass-lined phone booth you are both encapsulated and vulnerable, most markedly at night, when you would be standing in what is essentially a lit square box that can others can see in but which you can’t see out. The booth had no sort of heating or air conditioning and so dead of winter or hottest summer day represented an unpleasant experience. These negative extremes were balanced by being inside during a heavy rain on a summer’s evening, when you could feel like a one-person capsule sheltered against the reality of the world. Most people these days are used to being able to sit in a car and conduct telecommunications without taking their hands off the steering wheel, and without (generally) being disconnected or asked to insert more money. Your car is mobile, yours, and subject to your whims. A telephone booth is none of these. Yet, in a strange way, I could start to feel like it really was mine, and that anyone who stopped into this gas station to make a phone call was using “my” office. It’s OK, I understood and didn’t raise a fuss.

I’d stand in The Office late at night, in the afternoon, or even the occasional morning, checking on my voice mailbox, dialing people who I wanted to talk to but didn’t want to get in trouble if they did, and always looking for new codes or numbers to try out. If it could be reached by a phone, it could be reached by a payphone; the tricks now in place to prevent access were not enforced then, and you’d get the occasional busy-out signal trying a weird 0-700 or other bizarre number, but these were exceedingly rare. With a tiny shelf inside the booth, I had a place to put my notebooks or pieces of paper and write out grids for scanning telephone exchanges.or lists of 976 numbers. (Both of these came from my time in The Office).

You can see the intersection on this map, and if you scroll up, you can see where my house was. Not too bad, in terms of distance. The pile of cars is what was a service station and The Office was in the parking lot directly south.

I say “was” because after I moved away, some entity took away The Office. I came by years later to see what had happened to my old neighborhood, and The Office was gone. Not replaced with something new; literally a slab of concrete where I had spent hundreds of hours of my teenage years. History, wiped. I never even thought to get a photo.

The Office had nothing around it but the two gas stations and a very busy road. It wasn’t leaning against anything, wasn’t under an overpass or covered with stickers from a nearby venue. It was its own thing, a classy, self-contained room that a young fellow spent his youth wiling away the hours in, trying beyond all reason to be somebody different, somebody more powerful, a unique force at an age when you feel anything but. All hangouts are places where someone goes to be themselves; mine just happened to take up 9 square feet of space.

It was a refuge against the crushing boredom of a teenager. It served me well, and protected me. I thank The Office for the part it played in my life.

I spent a week in London at the beginning of this month. This contributed to lack of updates here and a few other things being pushed temporarily aside. But I’m back, I took a lot of photos, and I had a very good time. I never left the confines of London, so I don’t consider England “done” by any stretch of the imagination, but this was the first time I’d ever travelled over the Atlantic, and it was an excellent first step.

I was in London to present a speech about Wikipedia. Being flown to London and put up in a hotel is not something I normally have happen to me, so I jumped at the opportunity. The event was called the STM Innovations Seminar. STM stands for “Scientific, Technical and Medical”, as in publishing. So what we have here was me being able to punch Wikipedia in the face for a little under an hour, while visiting another country. Who could resist? I was also the lead-in to Ted Nelson, he of Xanadu and pioneering work in hypertext, and who could resist that. So all around, a great way to spend a week.

I’ve now put a copy of the speech, “Mythapedia”, on archive.org. If you’ve already heard The Great Failure of Wikipedia the tone and approach will be somewhat similar, although this one is focused more towards addressing Wikipedia from the point of view of a publisher and a number of my beliefs of what a Wikipedia-like entity needs to sustain quality work.

Naturally, GET LAMP benefitted from this trip as well, as I was able to interview four people for the forthcoming documentary, including game guru Ernest Adams and MUD creator Richard Bartle.

Ernest Adams was particularly friendly and helpful when I plugged my power strip into the wall and blew it up (turns out it was cut-rate; now it’s a plastic paperweight). I also discovered that while my lamps are 120-240v, the bulbs were definitely not; we had to go on a quick shopping spree to buy new halogen bulbs. A minor annoyance, but Mr. Adams was very nice about the whole delay, and ultimately we got a great interview down.

I got a lot of flack for not having more non-North American interviews for the BBS Documentary, and this is why: all the little issues of power, of transiting equipment, of getting transport when in a country… at the time I was working on BBS, it was just too much to pile on to everything else. I think I made the right choice, although it does sting a bit when the insults come in about making it.

Between taking my trips in double decker busses and the tube, eating bangers and mash, and walking miles and miles just taking in the place, I got to go to the GAME ON exhibit at the Science Museum. The thing is, I have a lot of what they have in my basement, with the usual exceptions of a PDP-1 and those first really funky Computer Space arcade machines. It was nice to see they had a exhibit running a text adventure (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Infocom, 1984). ot a jazzed-up one, just the good ol’ text and prompt, waiting for the next move. And people were checking it out!

Life, in other words, is good.