To celebrate a decade of textfiles.com, I’ve created a sub-site called the Ten Years of Textfiles. It’s basically a series of small essays with memories, thoughts, artifacts, photos and links of the textfiles.com story (and my own as well). Please pass it around and let people know about it, if you have a chance. Thanks.

A buddy of mine, Quag7, mentioned the existence of this rather interesting retro-themed music video by a band named “Datarock”: “Computer Camp Love”. As it turns out this song and its video are online at MTVmusic.com, a site that does what MTV most certainly does not do, which is dependably play music videos. Here’s the video, which can be embedded.

The song came out in 2005 and wasn’t a huge hit in the US, so I maybe I could get a free pass for missing it the first time around.

I went to computer camp myself, so maybe I’m being too nice to it, but I do like this little piece of cotton candy.

The time being referenced is somewhere in the area of 1982-1984 (the models of the machines are all in that timeframe). The song mentions the events happening in 1984, so good job there. I can’t really speak to the “plot” such as it is, and what they’re trying to say with the whole thing. The machines are missing cables and I’ve never seen that brand of disk drive before, but on the whole there seems to be a pretty interesting approach to the era. Someone definitely did a good job of assembling old machines and working within a music video budget to at least give a retro vibe, as the reviewers like to say. I liked the addition of the ticked-off girl with black hair being ignored for the girl who could yank out a card from a PC.

I will defer to the audience for all the references, but either way, enjoy the mining of my favorite personal time era for a dance track.

Update: I am sorry; I just found out MTVmusic is doing region restriction. This is the last time I’ll link to them. To see the video, go here.

A few thoughts on interfaces and completeness.

My archives are by no means growing smaller – thanks to the efforts of people and my own collecting tendencies, tons of stuff ends up joining the textfiles.com site every month, mostly in the CD Shareware, Artscene and Audio collections. I am still sent BBS Lists going back 20 years and those end up where they should, but that’s a small amount of the pure mass of stuff that’s being added, and the stuff that’s yet to be added.

As this happens, I’m faced with the problem of getting the stuff up there or working to “integrate” it into the site. So let’s bring up my little priority set in order:

• Make it available.
• Make it comprehensive within its context.
• Make it easy to browse.
• Make it function like some amazing transparent interface bringing you the best in web 2.0 javascript technology wired into a massive database and providing APIs to the general populace to facilitate a wide enough customer base to monetize the assets.

Somehow I never get to the last one.

Experimentation is always underway. For example, the BBS Software Directory has gone through a bunch of revisions, and most recently I tried an experiment with adding shareware under a specific BBS Software directory. The thinking is that if you want to look at, say, Waffle BBS Software, you might also have an urge to check out the myriad shareware programs that were released over the years. Maybe. I guess.

To me, however, it’s more important just to get this rapidly fading software up for browsing. Experiments are fun, but it’s a much more pressing issue to get this data off these disks before it’s gone, and maybe then I can consider how to make it easier to deal with.

Most of the stuff I put up ends up in massive file directories. I have experimented with improving the interface to these directories, but to tell the truth it’s not a huge priority. There are extensions and add-ons for various browsers that do this work for most people, if they need it all laid out and nice. What’s important, to me, is that it’s up.

What’s missing from my efforts is a monetary gain aspect. While I like improving the interface, I do not have any goals to make things “sticky” or to force ads down people’s throats. Because of that, I try to make it get to you as quickly as possible so you can get out of there. It doesn’t matter why you’re here, or that you stick around.

The only price I’ve paid for this is that textfiles.com has none of what people might call a “community”. Attempts to bring “the gang” together have failed miserably and I don’t do it anymore. But I do function as a reference point for other groups of people, or to settle arguments, or maybe just comedic relief.

I feel like a skipping CD on this but I can’t stress it enough how important it is to me to save stuff and make it accessible without immediately yanking it back into another new proprietary stale-in-six-months interface. The interface thing is all sorts of fun, I guess, but that’s not where my heart is. 10 more CD-ROMs are about to go up and a bunch of scans are on the horizon. I think people would rather I get those into the system more than how easily I can javascript my heart out.

Speaking of which, this is fucking evil. Cry into your tea-cosy all you want, Mister Chester, but you’re making things worse in a misguided attempt to make things pretty. If you continue with that project, people will curse your name five years from now. Go work on something more honorable with your talents.

Hey, just because I’m a generous person doesn’t mean I’m not a jerk.

While I’m in a “take photos of things and talk about them” mood, let me mention an acquisition from a while ago. It’s a pile of tapes. I bought them at auction, this one, in fact.

I was won over by the description, which was basically this:

For sale on eBay: 35 Cassettes. On them is a full backup of aBBS, yes One GIANT collection of files from a major bbs that was shut down about 5 years ago. It ran on PCBoard 14.5 but all the files are individually zipped and can be extracted and used without concern for any bbs issues. Vintage, many possibly old files, some still quite applicable, some not. Geneology files, thousands and thousands of them. Games, Utilities, the works. Mostly PC and Windows, some mac. This is a complete backup of over 100 categories of software and files and takes up 33 DC2000XL tapes and 2 TR3’s. You could buy to use the files, or buy to reuse the tapes.

Perhaps some of you are happy that a person of my temperament and goals has acquired the tapes and not someone who needed a little extra storage space.

I got these back in August and when I’ve had time, I’ve tried to see about the process of extracting the information off the tapes. I have not been very successful. The description is likely rather accurate, but there’s additional factors. First, a tape drive has to be found. I purchased some tape drives that would hold some of these tapes. (Bear in mind that the description mentions two kinds of tapes but there’s actually 4 or 5: a medley of tape types from what looks to be a decade of operation. Fair enough.

But even trying to bring the data over from the tapes that fit in the tape drives and connected to Windows (these were without a doubt on windows and DOS) has not been very successful.

Here’s the dirty little secret I mentioned: these tape backup systems used crazy proprietary formats. The software that backs them up is commercial. I can’t find restore utilities to save my life. I’m not going crazy at the moment tracking down every possible lead yet (documentary comes first) but this is a fact: stuff backed up just a few years ago is going to be quite the operation to extract. I approached a commercial entity about restoring, and they quoted me $100, per tape, if I could exactly describe what format they’re in. $3500, what a bargain. My current vector of solution is to create a Restoring Machine, which will allow me to pull a lot of stuff off this dead media. This will take a bit of time.

I mention this because sometimes people wonder about my immediate reaction to just “throwing stuff into a database”, my love of flat files, the slow way I adopt some things, like javascript or the CANVAS attribute or why I don’t gleefully load everything into PHP or stuff that’s “standard”. It’s a habit that leads to stuff like this.

I have 10 years of BBS history on these tapes.

I can’t get them.

Shooting a documentary means doing some traveling. If your subject is particularly diverse or has a lot of locations where people are living, it can mean a ton of traveling. And inevitably, you will run out of friends you know and you will be staying in a hotel. And by hotel I mean a lot of hotels.

Hotels almost never use keys any more. When they do, it is so rare that you probably don’t even notice it for all the other strange stuff about that hotel you’re noticing. What most hotels use now are keycards, disposable plastic cards with a magnetic strip that allows access into a room, assuming whoever is running the desk didn’t screw up. When you’re done with your stay, you’re supposed to return them or drop them off in a box. I do neither.

On one hand, there’s the actual physical aspects of these cards: the designs places put on them, the instructions or commemorative messages, or the differing shapes. Then there’s the memories, the hundreds of memories I have as I blew into some hotel at midnight, knowing I’d have to be out of there by 7, setting up my pile of plugs and chargers and getting everything ready for the next day, and then either watching some of the worst television imaginable or using my laptop if the place had an actual wireless connection.

Most of them are a blur now, with a few exceptions – the hotel I was in when I was told my cousin had a daughter, the hotel in a california coastal town that had the owner’s life philosophy on the walls and in the rooms, the hotel that let me know they were a hotel of morals, the hotel that argued with me that checking in at 3am still meant full price (I actually had no problem with this… and left at 5am). And a few others. Otherwise I remember a lot of variant quality pillows, random bonus hot tubs, an insight into the ecosystem of small towns, and remembering, over and over, that I was the customer and in my mid-thirties and I didn’t need to explain nothing to nobody.

Here’s what it looks like, stacked.

Just for the record, I’m just using this nice picture of Dan/Inky because it’s a representative resulting video screengrab. What I’m talking about doesn’t necessarily apply to his interview at all.

With the end of the shooting phase of GET LAMP, and combining it with my previous film, I have conducted something on the order of 300 interviews. I have interviewed people famous for something, infamous for something. People not famous for anything. People who are ashamed that this is all they were known for, people who have done nothing but define themselves by the subject being discussed. Some of my interviews have been overly friendly, while others have been bland or sad, and while none have been hostile or involuntary, I’ve had people say after the interview that they hate being interviewed and did it out of a sense of duty.

Through all this, I forged for myself techniques and observations in doing interviews, things I had to learn on the run and other things I sort of read about and kept in mind. Let me mention a few.

I am a horrible listener. Or, more accurately, I was. When I was very young I was rather a miserable person, and didn’t get along with most anybody. Why I didn’t move into arson I’ll never know, but I do know that when people showed an interest in me or at least a neutral regard, I talked to them much as a thirsty person sips water. Just the joy of being connected to someone via language meant I loved speaking at or near people when they’d let me, and this unfortunately grew to a habit of endless, withering monologues that could leave the most open-hearted and attentive person blindly pawing for a fork.

I recognized this enough to know that the biggest problem with doing a documentary with interviews in it would be to shut up. As a result, I started training. I had to actually train to shut up and listen. There’s a couple times in Michael Moore’s movies where you can hear him, off camera, absolutely poking someone with a verbal stick, having a conversation with them instead of conducting an interview. It can go the other way, too, with a person listening so much that there’s nothing for an interviewee to go on and they desperately lay out paragaph after meaningless paragraph, hoping some of this is usable. It can really go both ways, but I knew I was more of the conversation side of the coin than the silent side. I would ask people stuff about themselves, at parties, or hanging out, and then not say anything while they spoke. This was an effort. It was not how I was as a person at the time and it took months to try to undo some of that programming.

Oh, sure, I fail. In some of the interview recordings, I’m definitely having a conversation with the person or persons and not letting them go on. I got better, especially when I had to hear myself go on.

This said, there was definitely a case where I had to find myself speaking, and that’s when I was interviewing someone who really had no experience being asked things.

I pride myself on trying to find interview subjects that life hasn’t granted the platform to be heard. While some of the people I’ve interviewed can count the times they’ve been on camera by the hundred, others have me as their only video interview. While this might be because the person was a minor character, it was sometimes the case that nobody had really thought to ask, or no video documentary had ever been made that thought to include them.

And what would happen is they would speak, and then stop. And have nothing more to say. And I’d have traveled for some distance to see them, and a few extra minutes in any direction wouldn’t hurt, and so I would start to tell them a story. I have a lot of recordings of myself telling the same stories. But I wasn’t telling these stories because I needed to hear myself or because I thought it had to get on camera, but because I hoped the story would be a trigger. Let’s try one now.

When I was 18, I was really into They Might Be Giants, and I’d never seen them live, and here I was in college in Boston, at Emerson College, and I found out they were playing locally at the Paradise Rock Club. I decided I’d go, and I showed up so early, noon in fact, that there was nobody at the door. It was open, and I breezed right in, and found myself with the opening band doing a sound check. I’m walking around, marveling, when someone behind me asks where’s a good place to eat. It was John Linnell, one of the members of They Might Be Giants! I started to say something about fast food places, when John Flansburgh came by and said they found a place and off they went.

The story is true, but it’s also a huge pile of triggers. Boston, They Might Be Giants. The Paradise Rock Club. Emerson College, Sound Checks. Getting where you shouldn’t. Getting blown away by something. There’s all sorts of concepts and names in there, things that, if I was interviewing someone about Boston in the late 1980s, would set them off. THEY’d been to the Paradise back then. They remembered other clubs they’d been to. They remembered that time they were in the rain for an hour to get a glimpse of a band they loved. They might even remember the Rathskeller….

Stories help. It also helps to know who you’re interviewing.

Oh sure, you walk in there and you did the research and you know this is the guy who knows his stuff about playground equipment, and you’re going to interview him on that, but maybe, just maybe, a question about his favorite playground as a kid sets him off on an amazing emotional rant about what he loved about his early playschool days, an angle or side of his personality maybe never caught on film before. You have to be willing to switch on a dime – it’s not the facts you’re interviewing, it’s the person.

One last bit.

Sometimes you want to ask something that is going to change the tenor of the interview. Make it more uncomfortable. Work out a bad subject. Mention someone the person hates. To this day, I still turn off the camera and ask them how they feel about it, give them a minute or two to consider. This is a personal thing. I have a problem with getting into someone’s home or workplace and sucker-punching them. Sometimes, I feel like I am quite alone in that feeling.

Let me tell you of a magic thing.

It’s called the letus, and let me explain how it works.

It’s this honked up little converter that attaches to the front of a video camera, preferably one running high definition, and allows you to click on 35 millimeter film lenses onto it. Sound simple enough. It’s also pretty odd looking:

And speaking of odd looking, if you think it looks like something you use to catch fish with when it’s sitting all by itself, you should see it when it’s attached to something like an actual camera, especially something relatively small like my beloved HV20:

THEN this thing looks like some sort of device to inseminate cows.

But here’s the deal: it makes stuff look absolutely awesome. Stunning, fantastic. Check out this thing, shot with a hi-def camera with a Letus on the end:

Now, for the bummer: the adapter is $4000. But $4000 is maybe $100 a day rental, or around there, and if you ask me, the little addition of this guy would make all the difference. Granted, this better be for the right shots because otherwise your k-razy komedy is going to look like it was shot on the eve of apocalypse or in the vineyards of France, but that’s what cinematography is, bub. Choose the right tool for the job. And this is a hell of a tool.

There’s this place called the Letus Lounge on Vimeo. I want to live in the Letus Lounge. I want to be the guy in the corner of the lounge sleeping on a scrounged pillow and using my jacket as a blanket. I want to be in that lounge when the next amazing-looking thing comes by, so I can be the first one there, smelling like burnt cookies and with my hair every which way. Try looking at a few, for example this one with stray cats or this dangerously close to mediocre music video.

But if you’re here because you like me for my archiving and history, then let me encourage you to check out one video shot using this adapter: a story about a man with what may be the largest private collection of records. Most people who do collecting don’t agree with a ton of what he says, and what he believes, and how he’s gone about things…. but I don’t think anybody can argue these aren’t some amazing sad shots of a pile of records.

I give you… the Archive.

And because I’ve often let my opinion known on points of view via editing in documentaries, I feel like this guy is given a fair shake. He makes his statement, he shows what he thinks and what he wants, and he tells you why he loves these records so much. I don’t feel he was slighted, and people can take issue with what he says, but that’s the way it should be. So there.

I didn’t know Jason Scott, but I sure did see his name a lot.

With a common name like this one as my general name (it’s not my real one), it would be expected that I would bump up against other Jason Scotts. There’s Jason Scott Lee, the Hawaiian actor. There’s Jason Scott Roberts, who killed a cop. There’s Jason Scott the Delaware Liberal. There’s even a movie in 2009 (supposedly) called Hello, My Name is Jason Scott. I am not in this movie and have nothing to do with it.

And then there’s Jason Scott.

He was billed as the “Mentalist to the Stars”, and working out of Las Vegas, he was one of those guys doing amazing tricks involving guessing games, manipulating glass and metal and other nearby objects, and generally freaking people out. He had a show in Vegas at various times and had done a lot of different private parties for celebrities, including one that put him up in my area, Boston, where he performed for Sting.

He came home from that performance, said he wasn’t feeling well, went to bed, and died. He was 33.

Jason, it turns out, had taken some oxycotin, and then later had a drink. He might have thought he was fine, but it turns out that’s what killed him; the autopsy report just recently came out.

We never met, never exchanged any mail, and I never saw any of his shows when I was in Vegas. But his name was always popping up on my searches, always getting in the way of my ego surfing, a smiling bald face that said “ha ha, here I am”.

Sorry we didn’t get to meet, dude. You seemed pretty amazing.

OK, I admit it. Nights get long down here at Jason Scott Ranch and I don’t like to just walk away from things for political/ethical reasons just because my politics and ethics fall along a different path than others might. So a combination of wanting to consider all my options and the fact that my DVD mastering software has a Blu-Ray option made me consider what would be involved in putting my movie out on the “winner” of the home media wars, Blu-Ray Disc.

I have all sorts of statements about disc formats and I was rooting for the other asshole, and without a doubt I am disappointed about Blu-Ray winning.

When I used DVD for the last movie, there was a certain spectrum of fuck I had to maneuver around and I like to think I did it well. For example, I removed the region condition (it’s region 0 or “universal” and hundreds of people outside of the US have thanked me for it), and I certainly didn’t pay for that lame-ass Macrovision whatever-the-hell protection they wanted money for. You could, trivially, pop the DVD set right into your player and have it work and you could definitely plug it into your computer and suck out all the files relevant to your interest and put it on your office network or media server or whatever the hell you wanted. It worked great for me (thanks for the bucks), it worked great for you, (thanks for the nice packaging and the respect). Even doing things in a DVD format, with “Copy Protection” sprayed on it, could be routed around for the damage it was

Now, understand something about this format, about the RIAA, and royalties. You might know this or might not.

First of all, there is an office in every duplication plant that you, standard peon, are probably going to use. This is an RIAA office. This isn’t an RIAA-FRIENDLY office, this is an RIAA office. When you send in your thing to be duplicated, they get a copy and they go over it for any obvious ownership violations. This is done. Always. Just so you know. Plants that don’t have this office, and there are likely a few, are basically targeted for raids. More often than not, these “plants” are backroom operations, not fully professional in the sense we might think of them. If you’re high-volume, you’ve got an RIAA office.

Second, you pay a royalty on every DVD that gets pressed, every DVD player that gets sold. This goes to a patent consortium, which gets paid for their work on the format and the basic design of DVDs. On top of that, you currently pay a royalty on every blank CD/DVD in a lot of places, that goes to the RIAA. OK? OK. You pay a royalty, back end or front end, on a lot of stuff you buy, that’s why people nearly blow their fingers off in garages around the world, to get the chance to charge a royalty on something they invented.

The DVD format mitigated the pain for a guy in 2005; just a few pennies a Disc went to this consortium of companies in the “patent pool”. So of my DVD Set that I made, I paid whatever the royalty was times three. The royalty is something like 3-4 cents a disc, so I was dinged for about 12 cents. OK, fine. Thanks, patent pool. Bear in mind, of course, I didn’t see this royalty, I only know about it because I know about such things; my duplication company included it in the costs of printing, because why bother me about “royalties”, which would confuse the average content creator? So this was a “back end” cost. I didn’t see it or feel it.

So let’s fast forward to Blu-Ray, the rat that won the rat fight. Companies that give you lots of information on the website are fun, so here’s a good page from PacificDisc.

Now, I don’t expect you to browse this thing closely, so let’s go right to the boner:

Advanced Access Content System (AACS) is required on all Blu-Ray projects, unless you are producing a ROM-only product. Any Blu-ray disc (BD-25 or BD-50) with any video content, be it for commercial or non-profit purposes must pay the AACS fees. The AACS fees, which are our true costs, without any mark-up, include: an AACS Media Key, AACS Content Certification and all AACS Order Processing Fees.

AACS is required on all Blu-ray discs and costs $1,585 per title plus $0.05/disc

No. Holy Jesus Muffin Baked In Hell’s Sweet Flame No.

There is no fucking way I am going to go through the pain of applying for a “license” to some asswipe centralized copy protection gestapo so that I can be issued my unique serial number, blowing $1,585 out the window for the privilege of this delicious turd which I then HAVE to use (HAVE to use, I must stress) on my disc so it “can’t be duplicated” by normal people but easily duplicated by anyone else and THEN pay another five cents PER DISC for all future copies of the disc using this key I didn’t want for copy protection I don’t want. On TOP of the royalty to the patent pool of the Blu-Ray Consortium per disc. No fucking way! I couldn’t make this clearer if I formed the words using a pile of dead offspring. This is an utter deal breaker, friends.

Think about that the next time you’re in the store considering buying your Blu-Ray player with tasty $30 Sony Royalty in it. Think how much money for all these products out there in the shelves is going to this crime family of copy protection licensing. Most smaller houses consider a 10,000 unit sale of something to be a wild success; it’s usually something like 5,000. Mine has been less than that. This would mean that thirty to fifty cents of every unit you buy is going into NOTHING. Into BREAKING THE DISC SO YOU “CAN’T COPY IT”.

Where’s the EFF in all this? I answer my own question: this situation is too far out there to really get involved with. A judge would point to online distribution and DVD-ROM and hard drives and point out that there’s no constriction of free speech here. They wouldn’t win. It’s too esoteric. But if Blu-Ray becomes “the” way you go to a table and buy a copy off of a stack next to an eager filmmaker, then it’s really the only easy transport mechanism for that direct-sell crowd. It’s sewed up. It’s owned. It’s bought and paid for and fuck you, little guy. Go blow it up on youtube and count your blessings we haven’t shut that shit down this week.

I push the papers back on the table. I get my jacket. I leave the room.

No fucking way am I doing Blu-Ray.

From: Gene Buckle
To: jason@textfiles.com
Subject: Maniac IIe...

Telnet to The Age of Reason - 199.254.199.64.

Apple IIe running GBBS Pro v1.3j and the Land of Spur game from Dura Eurpos.
The _only_ of either one running on the whole fraking planet. 

Gene Buckle’s one of my secret weapons in the fight to save BBS History – he’s midwifed more transactions that resulted in BBS Software than I can begin to count. And he’s thorough, too. The BBS Software Directory wouldn’t be the same without him.

You can really do this, telnet into this connection and try out an Apple II running GBBS, a convenient and informative look back. You can see the early versions of menu interfaces for forums, and maybe understand things a little more… if you weren’t there at the time.

For the uninitiated, here is the title page:

Connect at [2400] baud!
Ctrl-S Stop/Start  Spacebar to Exit
_
/ \
/   \  ___   ____                  The Age of Reason BBS
|  |  |/   \ / __ \                 Running GBBS Pro v1.3
|  _  |  |  |   ___|                2400 Baud, 8 Bits, 1 Stop
/__| |__\__  |\____/ _____           Proudly run by geneb
________| |/    \/  __/____  ____   ____   ___  ____  _ ____
/__________/   |  | /_|     \/ _  \ /    \ / __//    \| ' _  \
\____/ __/|  |   |  ___|   |  |    \   |  |  | \  |
/ /   |     /\____/ \___,_|\_  /\____/|__|  |__\
________/ /    |  |\ \__    ________/  /
/_________/    /__/  \___|  |__________/ -jmb

(*> Welcome to Age of Reason <*)

New users type "NEW"

Account Number
-->

Several notable aspects here, and as the years go by I feel like my explanations become more and more basic because examples of them are starting to disappear more and more with each passing month. Note how the title screen desperately needs a monospaced font (all the letters the same size). Without this, it’s a somewhat illegible jumble of slashes and underscores, missing the point entirely. Sometimes documents fall into my possession that seem to be messed up and corrupted files but which merely need the right formula, be it monospaced fonts, a specific system font, and a standard like MS-DOS’s ANSI or Atari’s ATASCII to make it all right.

Also note that the system requests an account number – you put in your number (like, say, 15) and THEN your password and only THEN does it start showing you your own name. It is not, in other words, your username, just your handle, your easy to remember reference for humans reading it, while the database record is all you get to work with as far as identity verification. Woe be to you if you logged onto 10-12 new BBSes in a night and forgot to write down your account numbers and which BBSes they went to!

A moment of reflection, please, on this little guy:

(*>

This collection characters on either side of the redundant “Welcome” line (which actually served you well if you connected from a problematic or incompatible system, or just couldn’t make out the slashes), are pure decoration, that little bit of humanity peeking out from the basic prompt. It’s not needed, per se, even less so than the use of slashes and underscores needed to be done, other than to make the name bigger. It’s a flourish. I live for those, and they achieve various levels of complication over the years. So, too, is the login prompt:

 --> 

The characters are “dash dash greater than” but the arrow is as clear as day.

Let’s take a quick look at the menu:

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:     List of Supported Commands     :
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:   <(B)>  Goto the Bulletin Boards  :
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
: (R)ead :  E -> Examine your stats  :
: (S)end :  F -> Feedback  to Sysop  :
:  mail  :  G -> General files menu  :
::::::::::  H -> Get detailed  help  :
: $ = News  O -> Other  BBS numbers  :
: I = Info  T -> Terminate  session  :
: C = Chat  U -> Get a user listing  :
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
: L -> Caller Log for  todays Calls  :
: Q -> Quick scan of bulletin boards :
: D -> Define  system display  parms :
: P -> Change / Update your password :
: V -> Vote on your  computer equipt :
: X -> Goto the  file  transfer area :
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
: SPUR -> Land of Spur Gateway       :
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

There were no real “standards” for what menu letters should go to what function, hence “$” for “News” while “N” lays fallow. (Some software made this (N)ewscan.) “Messages” and “News” are different functions here, and most critical, to me, are the General Files.

Why? Well, this is one of those obscure trivia facts that is out there if you look for it but which a lot of people don’t care either way: the first textfiles that I think of as what would end up on textfiles.com come from the (G)eneral Files Menu, where the system operators would put funny, informative, or important textfiles up for people to read. The name “General Files” quickly shortened to “G-Files” or “G-Philes”, or even “Philes”, and that’s where that reference comes from. In today’s world, a lot of what the G-File functionality would stand for is done with “Sticky” messages, messages that float at the top of a topic board for people to read and post on as needed. Note how the “File Transfer Area” is a separate location completely, and with that situation, the chances of making sure people could read these important G-Files (when they were things like system rules and information) were that much decreased. The fact they later flourished into these hot tokens of shared chicanery was just an unexpected but enjoyable mutation. While people are there, why not throw them a few box plans or hacking tips?

The creator of GBBS, Greg Schaefer, has gone on to do many cool things, and he put a lot of excellent work back when he was a young kid working on this project. I interviewed him for the BBS Documentary and should probably get that interview up, as he was utterly shortchanged both in the film and the amount of time I actually had him on camera .

Great work bringing this up, Gene. I invite all students of the BBS era to remind themselves, in some small way, what it was like.