The article that informed me was very upbeat about it, but the fact remains: Computer Shopper is going out of print.  In the contemporary era, “going out of print” doesn’t always mean “died”; with the website now as valid a location for publication as anything else, the lack of a print component merely means dead trees. But oh, what a print component it was.

As someone who spends a lot of time going through old publications, you can usually tell the difference between the happy and not so happy eras of a magazine by how thick it was. This wasn’t the only telling sign, of course, and I’m sure many thick issues were terrible places to work at and many thin ones were joys. But with thickness came money, and with the money came the less insane requests, the further looking ahead. PC Magazine, for example, was nearly a half-inch thick at the best of times, and a thin sliver when times were not as rosy. Wired magazine is going through the same right now: if you pick up an issue from the last few months, you will wonder if you’re not looking at the example copy given out for free at conventions. But few magazines were as consistently massive and intense as Computer Shopper.

I have a bunch of copies, but I figured you’d get the point if I just showed you a specific issue from September, 1987.

Heft is the word that comes to mind. As usual, the size isn’t obvious and I’ll probably start including size-comparison objects in these photos in the future, but this was a pretty big thing to either get in the mail or pick up from the bottom of a newsstand (on the floor). The cover story is about the Amiga 500, that darling second-generation Amiga that did everything right. Notice, if you will, that there are actual advertisements on the front cover; I’m sure these were sold as top premium spots and cost those poor vendors some hard and sick cash.

At the center of any issues of Computer Shopper were, of course, the advertisements, great swaths of black-and-white and occasionally color, all promising you the moon. There’s the “old numbers game” which is always fun to play: realizing that the difference between a 10 and 12 megahertz CPU (that’s .010 and .012 gigahertz, kids) is $100. Seeing a 12MHz 60mb PC for $1,999. And in the center, there, some excellent “Hacker Christmas Gifts”, such as mugs, a weird seat (which I owned) and a pound of chocolate. Yes, what these sedentary hackers need are pounds of chocolate.

In the back of the magazine were tons and tons of smaller advertisements. Usually as little as a couple lines, and some going a full column, these were for the guys without the ability to use images (a notable cost) or who had only one or two items for sale. If all you could offer were quality disk labels, or the only thing you were selling were grey-market Wang stations, then maybe you wanted to lurk past here. Notable in this photo are the amounts of three-star headers. This was an extra cost that you could pay to make your advertisement “more noticable”, and as you can see quite a few people seemed to be willing to ink the checkmark and do that little extra to be noticed, even if they didn’t want to pay the big bucks for “real” ads.

You realize, I hope, what a daunting, terrible task it must have been to put together this monster every month. There must have been between 200-300 “major” sponsors and literally thousands of other people contributing single-line ads, authored columns, you name it. When the Revolution happened over the course of years, this all became much easier, and why others may decry the change, the addition of the text entry box as part of the web experience made life so much easier…

This is a 1987 ad by Gateway Computers (then called Gateway 2000). I am struck, personally, by the “no bullshit” guarantee, a sign of a wonderfully young company not afraid to get your attention. They in fact use this logo twice, along with the “First Time – Every Time” chant that indicates how they’re going to get your business and keep it. I noticed this ad because Gateway has gone on to other things, and many of the firms in this magazine issue have disappeared in the resulting 20 years, but it’s interesting how they were once just another scrappy bunch of people trying to get your attention.

Now, here is one of the core reasons I’ve been collecting these issues: the bulletin board listings. Computer shopper was one of the places to get BBS numbers in the 1980s outside of Fidonet Nodelists and a handful (less than a dozen) of “National” lists being maintaned. In the Computer Shopper BBS section, which went on for pages and pages, you could find all manner of places, all added because someone sent in a letter. Trust me, this bastard is the dictionary definition of “daunting”. Let me zoom in a little here for you:

“(303)597-2743 Colorado Sptrings. Baud: 3/12, online: 24 hrs (disk space=21Mb) SysOp: Kathy Bylkas. FOG #45. Sponsored by FOG A.M.O. 135–Colorado Springs Osborne Group. Using Osborne & Metal. PRASCA member.”

That is a treasure trove of information about that BBS, and a touchstone for all sorts of other BBS-related items that I might otherwise never hear of. “FOG”, “Colorado Springs Osborne Group”, “PRASCA” all lead me to other places, and while I might not get the story, I begin to.

But the problem is, of course, that to transcribe or OCR this information in is just way too much for me right now. We’re talking months of work, which would have to be done by interns. I don’t have interns and it would be ludicrous for me to concentrate too much energy on this right now. Online lists are easy. These, not so much. But when I do add them, the BBS List will swell to crazy ranks.

So goodbye, Computer Shopper, banished to the rank of websites and memories. I appreciated you guys immensely throughout my computing life, and somewhere up there, you’re still selling grey-market materials and promising us just one more megahertz for fifty bucks.

This happened in the middle of one of those dreams where you’re running around a lot, from place to place, probably built up from a couple day’s events.

In my dream, we’re trying to find someone. He’s supposed to be in a play.
This takes us to where we think he’s hanging out, some area with tons of companies.
Kind of like an office park, with a stream in the middle, trees, etc.
As we’re going around looking for him, it’s obvious these are all top secret places.
Like posters of bad things happening, indications you’ll be killed for speaking out, etc.
We can’t find him and I’m telling our group we need to get the hell out of there.

As we’re going back, I’m finding laser tripwires, camera, etc. are all pointing at us.
It’s obvious we’re not going to get anywhere, we can hear people showing up.
So my little team and I put our hands up and walk out from behind some plants to the center of this area between buildings.

TONS of guys are there. Some are in camo. Some are in suits. Some are plainclothes with sunglasses.
They’re all arriving, and then they start arguing. Who is what. Who is who.
Obviously, there are a dozen companies all in this area and they just don’t get along.
Some are speaking reasonably, some are shouting.
We’re talking to everyone, trying to make it clear to everyone we’re just morons.
Suddenly, the whole area is bathed in red light from far above.
And a bored voice, like someone working from a booth somewhere, booms:

“You guys are going to make me use the THOUGHT BRIDGE again, aren’t you.”

And everyone looks around, and they start dispersing, and my group heads away, onto our next part of the dream.

In 2003, having recently bought a house, I achieved a weird little dream of sorts: I had a T-1 line installed into my basement. With it came shelves of servers, a hub that blinked menacingly, and a lordship/dominion over 32 of my very own static IP addresses. This was a good time.

Previously, I’d only had DSL lines, and while DSL lines were, for their part, pretty cool, there was a whole different world when you had a T-1 line going into your house, especially if the term “T-1 line” had any meaning to you at all. For me, the meaning was this: power and glory.

In the context of the modern era, where there is actual competition to provide you multi-megabit speeds, and even in the context of people who remember the era when modems and ISDN ruled, it might have been forgotten just how absolute cockfuck some companies were about bandwidth. In the early 1990s, when I was trying to start a small ISP (not more than 8 lines, plus some amount of people connecting in), I was raked over the coals by companies who I sought bandwidth from, because they were all against “resale”. “Resale”, in this case, is a single person paying for an internet connection and then selling it to others for access. Man, I remember the snooty calls I got, like I was actually proposing actual rape of the person’s actual sister. I’m not kidding or making jokes here, either; I had one ISP (now long dead) actually start laughing and begin telling me that the world didn’t work that way. Strong memories, those.

One company did allow resale: Xensei, run by Jeff Morris. Jeff was the cool beyond the cool. He even came over to my office and personally helped me set up my terminal server and high-speed connection. And bear in mind, when I say high speed, I mean a 56kbit connection that was hundreds of dollars a month.

In this context, of small straws sipping data, a T-1 line was like sliding into a luxury car and doing drifting circles on your mansion’s front lawn. It was, in its own way, the ultimate fuck you to all these places giving sippy little connections to people and harassing their users like slumlords if “usage” went too high. Imagine the bandwidth battles we age  in some quarters now, but for unbelievably small stakes.

When I moved into my house in this new shiny century, things had changed. T-1s were no longer thousands-of-dollars-a-month propositions, and DSL could actually catch up in terms of speed. So I initially got a 1.1mbit down/1.1mbit up DSL connection to the house. Life was good. But I wanted more, and when Speakeasy had a “Business T-1″ service pop up, I went for it. It was many hundreds of dollars a month, but I thought it was worth it. They had a promotion so I didn’t pay for the equipment they stuck in, and installation charges were waived, so let me say, that it was a good deal.

It’s served me well; I was assigned an actual person in charge of my account. This person got a call from me if anything went wrong, which it almost never did, because this was a T-1, goddamnit. If there was a problem, I was able to get a pro-rated refund on my monthly costs. Try getting THAT from your cable modem. I do recall a couple multi-day outages, but in both cases, it was because of actual damage out in my street, that I could see; it wasn’t just a black box of “and now I shall reboot yer modem and hope for the best” from someone I wouldn’t hear from again. And yes, I got money back.

Another thing: bandwidth caps didn’t exist for my T-1. I was a business customer and I paid for them. And I could host anything I wanted to, if it so suited me. I didn’t have to find out that my crime of running a mail server got my shit shut off in the night. It was the kind of rapport that a business gave a real human being, and that’s a rare thing indeed.

One time, I was shut off, and I called in to see what the hell was going on. It turned out someone had hacked one of my servers and put up a phishing site. They tried my home number but I was travelling and they didn’t have my cell. Faced with the fact that my page was gathering tons of credit card numbers (thousands) and mailing them to Stealistan, they reluctantly shut me down and waited for the call. Once I did, they let me in, I disabled the site, and then cleaned up the mess. A day later, I got a paragraphs-long letter from the head of the operations center of Speakeasy explaining their thinking behind the shut-down, what they’d tried to do to contact me, and how they had no choice. Very good work.

This T-1 served me through all sorts of issues, functioning as textfiles.com’s mail home for a few years, running the BBS documentary site and later the GET LAMP site after that. It even ran this blog some time ago.

But in the New Austerity, I had to take a hard look at what I was up to and what I was doing, and I decided that, ultimately, it didn’t make sense to have the T-1 line to myself anymore. It was too much bandwidth for a single person’s site and yet wasn’t scaled up enough should I get hit by Reddit or something. Add to this that I am trying to cut all my monthly costs back, and this was $400 a month, and the sad choice was obvious.

I called Speakeasy, and they didn’t try to upsell me or talk me out of it. (They did mention cheaper options, but I was getting out of this whole “hosting out of my house” thing completely, and the representative quickly shut up about it.) We said goodbye on the best of terms.

Let me take this moment to say Speakeasy were excellent, an awesome company to be associated with for the last six years, in every fashion. They were responsive, smart, engaged, and the people who I spoke to always made me feel I was doing them a favor and not the other way around.  When they were bought by Best Buy I figured that was it but at least from the T-1 level and up (a business account) absolutely nothing changed. I wasn’t harassed, sent stuff I didn’t want, pressured into things I never could want, and they answered everything I ever asked with competency and aplomb.  This is purely a money decision, not a service decision. Times are getting rough and I can’t spend money with such carefree delight as I once did to allow a dragon to feed in the basement.

There are so many crazy things associated with this machine and this T-1. I’ve been pulling it apart like a terrible puzzle box, and it’s going pretty smoothly. I expect some people may get a surprise, but who knows; maybe they’ve all moved on to better things or don’t care if the IP address changes. I’ve got a hosting deal set up elsewhere, and the machine will live again, down the road a ways.

I was proud of my self-starting ways, and I’m proud to have been involved in this part of the Internet experience for all this time, but it’s time to hand over responsibilities to others. I’m headed in a different direction, with a slightly fatter wallet.

Thanks, T-1.

As time goes on I do more and more interactions with the press, and by press I mean “people who interview me or engage me on subjects for later recounting”. Some are professionals, some are children, and some are people who just like to get a little background on things. Many of my interactions go well. Some do not. I wanted to talk about one that didn’t, just to understand how these things happen.

Last April, attending ROFLcon, I was introduced to a wide range of people who had been only concepts, words or dim figures in my head. While I could fill your day describing all of them, among them was this shy fellow talking with a few friends, a slouching soft-eyed figure who I found out was in fact moot, the administrator of 4chan. Luck let me introduce myself to him, and to my delight he knew my name.

We’ve become buddies, the two of us, and like a number of people in my life we chat occasionally, share stories, discuss subjects of interest to us both. It’s a good time. He’s a good guy. He is running, after all, a BBS and he’s a BBS Sysop so far removed from the world I’ve chronicled as to be in the realm of science fiction. We have a lot in common, for all of my being nearly twice his age.

Being called by press about various subjects I’m involved in, be it textfiles.com or my documentary or even just general background on computer/web history is not a new thing, and sometimes it has gone quite well and other times it has not. But a special set of rules come into place if I am being asked to speak, or go on the record, about another person. It’s one thing to be asked “Do you find inspiration in any of the new crop of websites” and another entirely to be asked “What is your opinion of your friend?” It’s a whole different world.

Now, I will not pretend to be the speaker of all things moot, because I’m not. I’ve known him less than a year, we’ve not hung out more than probably a few days in total, and we chat online and I (at least) enjoy these chats and it’s a good solid beginning of a friendship, one that may build and grow as friendships do. I am not an expert in everything that’s happened with 4chan over the years and while I’m a fan of the site for various aspects and reasons (I download every flash animation uploaded to the site, for example) I could probably be quizzed on the top 50 “things” about 4chan and maybe get a few really correct.

Moot threw my name at a reporter who was composing a story about him, and his current situation. More on that in a moment. He did this because he trusted me, knew I had a long history to pull from with regards to people who have run sites like his, who have been system operators and moderators and worked to pull what some people call a “commuity” together enough to keep them sane but not so close that nothing ever happens. This reporter, Monica Hesse, has written a number of stories for the Washington Post, and was looking to do one on moot. When she contacted me, my first impulse, one I acted on, was to get moot’s permission to even talk about him to a member of the press. I wasn’t 100% sure he’d given my name or if we’d been linked some other way, and I wanted his input. Later in the weekend, he gave his permission and told me that he’d in fact given my name to Hesse.

The interview was conducted by phone and lasted, by my recollection, roughly 30-40 minutes, during which I was driving between two cities. We talked about a lot of things.

Talking to me in an interview is an exercise. I go in a lot of directions, utilize a lot of metaphors and strange references, and don’t always answer the question you were seeking. When talking to a reporter, I listen for one of the following things:

• The sound of writing or typing
• The reporter’s breathing
• Being cut off or being asked the same questions again and again

These tell you a bit about the person interviewing you. I prefer the ones that record me, but very few do that; most take notes, and I unfortunately can sometimes give rather difficult answers that don’t parse down to a taken note. It’s up to the skill of the reporter to deal with that, and it’s also up to the approach of the reporter.

In other words, if a reporter asks me a question, and I hear typing, and then I talk for two minutes and hear no typing, I know exactly what is going on, and I mostly take that time to work out my own thoughts; nothing of what I am saying is going anywhere useful and it’s certainly not going in the final story.

Let me give two examples of articles in which someone interviewed me via phone and I thought the results were excellent:

• The Secret History, by Kevin Poulsen for Businessweek
• Know It All, by Stacy Schiff for New Yorker

In one case, the article is about me. In the other, I am quoted once. In both cases, stuff I said was used in a way that may or may not lead to people agreeing with me, but I look at these articles and I am glad my name appears in them. Poulsen’s interview was fun, raucous, and resulted in a really fun look at this hobby of mine. Schiff’s article was incisive, interesting, and she used things we discussed in my interview to do more research in those directions, which I was very pleased by. I look like I did nothing else but that one pull quote and that’s fine with me because the resultant article is so strong.

So I’ve seen it’s possible to do this well, and I’ve been pleased with some results of interviews. I’ve also had sour experiences as well: one podcast forgot to shut off the mic of the sound guy and I got to hear his unhappy opinions about my personality and approach to things during one segment. Live mic, dude! The other interviewers were very friendly, of course, hence you’re not hearing the name of the podcast. And in the case of my weblog entries about that documentary I didn’t like, people wrote entries and articles in which they quoted me from the writing without bothering to write to me personally to ask for clarifications as needed. Sometimes I got used properly, other times improperly, but the point was that it was sort of a crapshoot. For some reason the comments on this entry always makes me start fuming, probably because of the cynicism about the narrative form of film.

In other words, I’ve seen the pros and the cons of this. Usually the pros: your name gets out there, you get connected to people (old friends and new ones have come out of the woodwork when I get published) and on the whole, I’m for it. Let me be called self-aggrandizing and ego-centric in the process: it’s generally worked out for me.

A 30 minute conversation with me is many thousands of words. I don’t expect them to be reprinted verbatim and I don’t expect every subtle point I make to appear in an article, especially if it’s a few paragraphs long.  But I do expect that if I am obviously being interviewed as a source on a person, that what comes out the other end will be somewhat in the realm of positive, or at least honest, about the person.

That didn’t happen in this case.

So about moot’s problems.

Like a lot of people in this economic downturn, moot got into financial issues with his site. He was dependent on a number of vectors for income and over time he let some sources of income fade and being a teenager in charge of a site of many hundreds of thousands of users, he has hardly had time to go beat the bush to find more funding.  He also has ideas about his user experience, ideas that I happen to agree with, which can be summarized as: don’t rape your fucking users. Sure, he could slam as much interstital bullshit as could be handled, charge for everything, force everyone to click on page 5 and then write in the word on the page to be able to continue, but that would, well, ruin things.

Perhaps it’s a surprise to hear that the margins of 4chan are not making the kid millions. But maybe if you go there and browse around and see how much happens in the way of being made to pay or register (none), it might start to make sense. Advertising can help, and advertising happens, but the bandwidth bill and the maintenance, plus occasionally hiring people to do coding for the site, can lead to things being a lot tighter than you expect.

A number of other aspects, including what advertisers will willingly advertise on a site that has unregulated adult content and which payment services will accept payment from sites like 4chan, lead to the usual financial concerns, exacerbated by the fact that a lot of loose and easy money dried up in the past few years. I only mention all this because it is real and not a hoax or some trick to get you to feel sorry for someone who is getting rich on the whole endeavor. This is not the case.

Moot is at a crossroads in his life, at the age of 21, a set of choices most people would not experience until a much later juncture. He’s been doing this site for almost all his life, certainly for the majority of the years most people would pay attention to with regards to accomplishment. Where does he step to next?

He’s got a high GPA at the college he’s been at but wants to see what his other possibilities are. Go back to college and get a degree in something more close to his 4chan work? Or maybe go into the job market itself. Both possibilities are interesting.

My opinion is that moot stuck in some back office doing photocopying is a travesty. He has the skills, the abilities to run a community without it collapsing into the ground in a spasm of destriction and drama. A place that thinks it needs a community manager to keep things smooth and help make things happen would be well served to consider hiring moot.  He’d move anywhere, try something new for a few years, find a place to shine. He’s got a magic ability about him to work with people and make a place happen. You could point to 4chan’s worst aspects and point to moot, but the fact is that moot’s abilities and skills are why those worst aspects haven’t taken the site down in a blaze of hatred and implosion.

I tried to explain this as best I could in my phone interview, this situation where he is now looking at what the next part of his life will contain. This is different than a “regular” 21 year old trying to find the next steps, because other 21 year olds don’t generally have a near-decade winning track record of a millions-strong audience they have been working with and catering to.

I’d hoped maybe his story would come through in this article and maybe inspire people to consider contacting him about employment, giving him the chance to fund 4chan’s costs and keep him out of what may become crushing debt. 

No such luck.

Hesse’s article is a mush-ball of insinuations, side-of-mouth insults and dimissive gestures. If you didn’t like something about 4chan, you’ll find plenty to take home with this article. “They come to 4chan when they should be doing calc homework. Now — in debt, out of work, another example of the Internet’s intangibility — Poole just needs to figure out how to make that matter.” This approach, “ha ha these weirdos are losers” is the sort of thing I used to read in the 1980s when everyone was wondering why in the hell you would make a computer “portable” and cell phones came at the requirement of never leaving your car and attaching a weird antenna to your back window. How strange, these articles would say, you are so much better a person for not having known this world except through this article. I detest this approach. It doesn’t inform; it insults and invites you to take a handful of dirt as well. And nobody comes to know moot better in any way for it.

But obviously, it all comes home to me when Hesse decided this would be the closer:

For his recent birthday, Poole’s acquaintance Jason Scott offered to help him write a résumé.

Scott, a somewhat well-known Internet historian, explains the difficulty of the endeavor this way: “It’s like going to someone and saying, I need you to write a résumé to be hired to be you,” says Scott. “Like, ‘In one page, what do you do that makes you yourself?’ Chris has been running this site almost all of his functioning life. . . . Sitting down and producing the words for what that means is just too hard. Him on résumé is a failure.”

God, did I not say that. I didn’t say that at all. My statements, which I can recognize pieces of in this paragraph as one recognizes pieces of actual chicken in the slices of a chicken deli package, centered around his skill he had, and how that skill was a hard one for moot to himself enunciate. That’s why I offered to help him with writing a resume for his birthday; because it’s nice to have someone who’s studied a culture and has some perspective on things to help you see ways to describe what you do best. 

Does that come across in that paragraph? Or do you see the words “is a failure” and think you’ve gotten it?

Oh, Hesse can point to copywriters and editors and the moon and the stars and the temperature of the sun, but that’s the name on the top and that’s what’s on the paper. This is everywhere and she’s onto the next subject to write about, the next thing to describe and move onto. That’s how it is when you’re a combine ripping through the observed world: the next thing is the next thing and there never was a previous thing. That’s yesterday’s news and that’s what lines birdcages.

But these words will now haunt moot for some time. And beyond that, he’s burned. Really burned. The kind of burned where maybe he won’t believe in himself, won’t think he’s as talented as he obviously is, and maybe he’ll take the easy way out and not try to find a place that amplifies his abilities instead of supressing them. That’s what worries me, and that’s what makes me angry.

An interview that does him justice, or at least presents moot without judgement and insinuation, was done by Rex Sorgatz and contains much more in the way of reasoned observation, statements in moot’s own words, and the chance to hear his side of operating 4chan and what he thinks of the whole endeavor.  Sorgatz is there, asking questions and driving the conversation, but he is not there: moot is the dominant speaker. If you come to a judgement about him, you do so because of moot’s positions, not an errant judgemental set of sidewise snickering over his words. You may like or not like him, but the article doesn’t push you into one bucket or another.

Before the WaPost article came out, there was another article by the Wall Street Journal published last July that was able to quote from moot and a variety of other sources without blowing his character out to the wind, so even if the Q&A format of Sorgatz’ article isn’t your cup of tea and you like the smooshed-from-many-places approach of much of professional journalism, there’s better examples, ranging back months ago, done better, done at least with competency. No excuses.

Why have I written all this? Because all I have are my own words, and my own words are this: moot is not a failure. Moot is a miracle. I hope someone will come to recognize that and give this kid a shot. Amazing things will happen.

My oldest friend, Chris Orcutt, went into his local hangout, the diner of his town of Millbrook, NY, and discovered that the local paper was closing its doors. Chris had worked on that paper over a decade before, as a true newspaper man, for a period of time, so it had a particular and personal resonance. So he did what he does, and wrote about it: Farewell, Millbrook Round Table.

This is a town small enough that you could stand at one end of the main thoroughfare, shout, and be heard on the other. From the outlook of people who have never known a time without television screens, and especially the outlook of people who have never known a time without an Internet, a local newspaper seems perhaps on the level of a ice block delivery. Chris gives it the right sendoff, as a personal story. He also shows the skills he learned working there, and some of what is beginning to disappear, just as a t-square and compass has primarily disappeared from the hands of people who call themselves designers. 

Good riddance, say people who don’t know what they are saying good riddance to. We have Google News, say people who do not understand how this will blend that charming region of New York from a sharply focused observation on paper to a blurred reference on news services online.

Chris’ story is excellent. Take a moment to read it, if you have time in between skipping among RSS feeds or skimming hundred word summaries of distant atrocities.

Based on my memory of the arrangement of the classroom, I believe this happened around the 4th grade. That would be 1980.

We were given a writing assignment, our nascent class of future citizens, where we were asked to write about Valentine’s Day. Specifically, the teacher wanted origin stories. “I want you to write about how Valentine’s Day came to be, and how we come to celebrate it.” It was due in a few days.

The kids set off immediately on this task, creating fun stories of tribes of boys and girls and the one day the tribes would meet, or about how there was a place called Valentine where there was love and puppies and we celebrate that day. They no doubt had a lot of fun making stuff up.

However, I was sure, even then, that there was some real story. At that point I was doing an enormous amount of reading; there were these construction paper “bookworms” one teacher had put outside our classroom door, where a student who was reading could get a segement of the worm for each book they read. My worm stretched to the next classroom and went around that classroom’s door. Books change you, and depending on what you read, your outlook on the world is one of the things that change. Whatever combination of books I read at the time told me that there was, underneath this holiday, some origin involving people making a choice to have the holiday; it didn’t just come out of the air and making it up entirely wasn’t the path to accuracy.

Likely I got a pass to go into the library and went around until I found an encyclopedia. I would have looked for an entry on St. Valentine’s day and read the story of St. Valentine as that book described it. I recall it mentioning a martyred individual made into a saint, although I am likely to have confused the order in which people traverse from “martyr” and “saint”, thinking it was a Saint who had been Martyred. Kids do that. I used the dates of his death and indicated that it was a celebratory feast to honor this Saint and that this feast led to the giving of valentines.

Obviously it would have had flaws and I’m sure that a good teacher would have seen where I swapped around phrases and taught me about using sources and so on. It’s a difficult subject, research, but I obviously had the skill set, or at least the desire, to learn how to be a good reading citizen and get my information from actual sources instead of making up fanciful stories about how things are.

But I didn’t get a good teacher at that juncture.

No, in fact she failed me out, or whatever cuddly term they use for getting a zero or no star on an assignment. This wasn’t the point of the assignment, she said. It was a creative writing assignment, and I’d not been a creative writer; I’d been a researcher.

Obviously it had some effect on me at the time and stays with me, as I can recount that episode with striking clarity where I can recount few others from early grade school, other than that one time I couldn’t get the attention of a teacher in first grade for bathroom permission and ended up getting new pants from the school nurse, or the time the vice principal hit me. Most of that period is pretty much a blur.

But somehow, that feeling of helplessness, of telling what I thought was the truth (and which obviously had some refinement ahead) and doing the work to find out what was real and what wasn’t, and being told this was unwanted, has stuck with me for thirty years. Perhaps you’ve seen traces of my rebellion against this cavalier attitude to research and information in my later work.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

When we last left my adventure into digitial distribution, I said that I was going to report things as they hit crossroads or conclusions, just to not cause too much noise in the process. Well, all the people (well, all dozen of you) wondering how that is going can now hear about Createspace.

Createspace is an Amazon.com company that functions basically as an on-demand publisher for books, movies, and music. They seem to set themselves up as a sort of Vanity Press 3.0, where you get the extra bonus of being hooked into Amazon.com’s other properties, including Video on Demand (VOD) and being able to have your stuff sold through the main Amazon.com site.  Now, bear in mind that I already sell my documentary through Amazon but this was the only way to get it digitally offered through them.

I suspected that the process would be all fucked up because I’m not a desperate teenager selling a 1 hour movie about how his friends are all able to play hard-boiled cops in their city’s alleys but still can’t shave. I wasn’t disappointed in that measure.

This whole “I finished my project and produced a nice package for it and it’s actually a massive mini-series” thing isn’t really going to do me any favors. For one thing, everybody thinks in the basic unit of the Amray Case, that shitball black plastic thing with the plastic sleeve that you can shove the crappy one-sided paper label into and drop off for a buck. I used to get annoyed with people putting their documentaries out this way but everybody wants them to do this: the duplication people, the selling people, even people who would otherwise benefit from nicer packaging. So yeah, having this crazy custom package kind of messes the little machine up.

Additionally, the fact it’s not one but 8 documentaries, that REALLY messes stuff up.

So here’s the details.

I filled out the createspace form and got assigned a title ID. I was given some stuff to sign out and mail along with my submission. For my submission I sent in a shrinkwrapped copy of the documentary. I mean, why not do it right, right? This was in late December of 2008. On January 14, I got the following letter:

Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:10:14 -0800 (PST)
From: "donotreply_1@createspace.com"
To: jason@textfiles.com

Subject: Materials Received
We have received your materials for "BBS: The Documentary".
We are now in the process of setting up your title(s) in our
system. Our normal setup times are as follows:
DVD source copy - 10 business days from receipt of all
necessary materials including artwork.
Tape source copy - 15 business days from receipt of all
necessary materials including artwork.
Amazon Video On Demand - 60 days.
This is the length of time from when we receive all of your
materials to when we ship your proof.
Once we have finished setting up your title(s), we will
produce a proof copy and mail it to you. These proofs are
exactly the same as the final units that will be sold to your
customers. Your title(s) will remain on hold until you
receive the proof copies and approve the title within your
account. If you have a multi-disc set or collection please
approve all discs/titles in the set or collection.

Instructions on how to approve the title and make it
available will be included in the package with the proofs.
For support, please visit https://www.CreateSpace.com/Help
Sincerely,

CreateSpace, Member Services

Note that line about multi-disc productions: “If you have a multi-disc set or collection please approve all discs/titles in the set or collection.”  Seems pretty straightforward.

So now it’s February, and I got this in the mail:

Hello Jason,

Thank you for using CreateSpace for your self-publishing needs.

We are sending this message to notify you that your title 260216 has
been rejected as a Video On Demand- only title.  I sincerely apologize
for any inconvenience.

You have sent in three discs under the same title ID. Yet, at this time
 we do not offer support for multi-disc sets for Video On Demand.

If you would like complete a title setup for each disc, please feel free
to attempt submission as such.

As stated, I apologize for any difficulties or inconveniences. Thank
 you for your patience and attention to this matter.

If you encounter any questions or concerns, please feel free to send
us a follow-up support request via the following
address.

http://www.createspace.com/Support

Thank you and best regards,

Kelly
CreateSpace Member Services

Several things to note here.

First of all, the time from sending it in to “we can’t use this” was roughly 2 months. So understand that this is how things tend to function; you have a completed project, and you could shove it into any DVD player in the world and watch it, but even under this optimum condition, you still have this extra two-month tumor between finished and finished. It’s no wonder people like the immediacy of video upload services like Youtube and Vimeo (and now both support high def to various degrees).

Second of all, this is quite the bait and switch. Apparently my multi-disc project I sent in CAN’T be used as it is. If, perhaps, I took each of my three discs and submitted THOSE? Could I THEN do it? Obviously I would have to whip up three different “part 1, part 2″ covers and so on.

So then I wonder if I can do something to fix all this, and more importantly, will I ever see that copy I sent in again? So I mailed a question about this and what the deal was. Here’s that letter:

Hello Jason,

Thank you for contacting us regarding multi-disc sets.

Through Amazon Video On Demand, we cannot accommodate
multi-disc sets. In order to list these discs as AVOD titles
then you will need to create three separate titles and pair a
disc to each title. If the DVDs you submitted are
distinguishable as three separate titles then you all you
need to do is indicate which disc goes which title. However,
if all the discs were submitted under a single title, then
you will need to resend materials indicating which disc
should be paired with which title ID.

For future reference, we do offer the option of creating
mutli-disc sets, but only in physical DVD format.

I hope this information is helpful. Feel free to contact us
with any additional questions or concerns.

If you need more help with this issue, click here:
http://www.createspace.com/Support

When contacting us, please be sure to reference your Case
Number: 00330810

To be honest, talking to people through this fucked-up cut-and-paste language with all sorts of back-from-10-feet language kind of turns me off. At this juncture, it sounds like I would have to go through a number of hoops to make this go video on demand, and I’m not really interested in those hoops. Maybe in the future I’ll do it, but for the moment, meh.

So there we go:

CREATESPACE RESULT: STALLED.

Yeah, I could take advantage of their put-it-in-shitty-amray approach, but that really doesn’t do it for me.  I have a little less than a thousand copies of this movie in the attic and I’d rather those go out the door. If I make a shitty “you missed the boat and now we’re in re-issue-land” version, I’ll take some effort to make it so.  When I have time, maybe I’ll go through the machine again, but for now it seems like too much work for little benefit.

AND THERE WE GO.

How awesome will my other digital distribution attemps go? Stay tuned!

It is very rare I simply link to another site’s article, and say that I have no further comment. This is one of those times. Perfection: The Trough of No Value.

I wouldn’t change a word.

From: King Jables
To: Jason Scott
Subject: BBS

I know that you'll probably think think that I am a complete imbeceil for asking this,
but I keep seeing the abbreviation "BBS" on your website. What exactly was a "BBS",
and why should the advent of the internet have signalled it's demise? I mean, if people
liked them so much then surely all the retroists out there could have continued them
with legacy machines, right?  But seriously, what was a BBS and what did it do?

Yours perplexedly,
                          Jables.

Jables, I get mail like yours occasionally, and I do sometimes wonder how people find my e-mail but don’t find all the rest of the material explaining BBSes or explaining what the whole thing was about. I get enough that it’s likely not a hoax and I’ve definitely gotten mail from people who are barely as old as the textfiles.com site itself, wanting to know about this history. So let’s quickly cover it.

BBS in this case stands for “Bulletin Board System”, although at one point people would use the term “Bulletin Board Service” when they were trying to make money at it. This quickly got shortened to BBS, an acronym which has at this point been overtaken as referring to Baumgartner Brand Schiltach aluminum car rims. This is part of why it’s so hard to search for auctions on Ebay or general webpages about the subject: it’s all about the rims now. But once, it was about these old computer systems.

In its most fundamental form, the BBS was simply a computer connected via a modem to a phone line. On the computer was software that, when it detected that someone was calling the modem, would pick up, connect, and then provide the calling person with a menu. From this menu you could post and read messages from other users, send or receive files, or play games. 

First created in 1978 by Ward Christensen (software) and Randy Suess (hardware), this setup lasted with only basic changes up to nearly the present day.

Some people added more phone lines (and the ability of people on different lines to talk to each other), while others integrated their BBSes into other networks, like early Internet, or had their BBS pass around messages to other BBSes by calling them.

What happened to BBSes, especially as it looked like they’d be around in some form forever, was multi-threaded connection to the Internet, especially Trumpet Winsock, a program that allowed PPP (Point to Point Protocol) on Windows systems.  With the availability of this and other programs to provide PPP and SLIP access for home computers, where connections to the Internet at large gave a world of abilities to machines previously tethered to single BBSes (or no network connection at all), BBSes were essentially smashed against the rocks. (The first three months of 1995, I have found, broke the BBS “Industry” in two.) This was all replaced with Internet businesses, be they websites, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or software developers, all aimed for the new new thing. BBSes, especially in business, were a taboo subject, as they represented the old guard, the old failures.

BBSes had, of course, the ability to be connected to via the Internet, but the capacity and abilities of the World Wide Web (or HTTP protocol) are very shiny, very new, and the needed growth and new userbase that would replace the older userbase drifting away simply wasn’t there. BBSes started a long fade that continues.

Of course, there are still many BBS-like things, like web forums or comment sections or anything else where the people reading a site can contribute by posting, and these conversations, jests and jousts now replace what BBSes once were. They’re different, sometimes better, often worse. But that’s what happened to them.

That’s about the best I could put it. I made a documentary about the BBSes and keep a site full of old BBS relics, and I occasionally speak about the subject. I think the time when they ruled the earth was fantastic. I miss it sometimes.

In the mail, from Ross Kerr (who has been sending me similar packages), came a small stack of Computerworld, a newspaper-style trade publication covering all aspects of computer technology. This particular stack is from 1987. Some are in not so great shape and some are pristine. They’re obviously ones that were sent to a business, because they have the classic multi-colored “Received” stamp on them.

So, for the benefit of the folks at home, why the hell would I want old newspapers like this? Why would anyone care? And why do I happily take these in (and ask if you have any, to send them to me?)

The thing is, history can be a very funny thing. If you don’t keep around some evidence, some pieces of what came before, history itself becomes malleable clay formed into whatever needs or biases are currently existing. Left alone, in other words, people lie or innocently malign history into something it never was. Keeping even a slight pile of evidence from that time is an easy antidote.

But let’s go further than that.

Obviously, one big advantage is that you get to say “Wow, things were different back then.” This is easy enough: words are used differently, graphics are differently arranged, and priorities are different. Companies huge from the year of these papers, a mere 22 years ago, are bankrupt, mere echoes of themselves, or huger than ever. Faced with selling ideas that we would now accept without question (one photo here shows an article about people “betting on” TCP/IP as a network protocol), these decades-ago technologists, reporters and sellers had to make their case from thin air. Minicomputers? Network printers? Token-Ring? Print-Spool hardware? All of this had to be proposed and then indicated as being a superior choice of what came before. This paper record I have (and of course, paper records are often digitized) will tell you exactly what happened then.

And by exactly, I don’t mean they didn’t lie.. There are promises wrapped in newsprint here that never saw the light of day, and predictions off by parsecs. I just mean that the fact that these items exist proves the thought of them, or the approach to them, existed in 1987. The graphic design existed. The technology to make newspapers in this fashion and with this binding. The photographs. The referenced machines. Names of people. Names of companies, of products, of places. All are captured here. That may have relevance. That may not. But it’s here.

Of course, the simple uses of this sort of collection pop up again and again: look how expensive things were! Look how weird the machines look! Look at how little the capacity was!

For me, that motivation has lost its zest; I am now swamped and in personal control (not to mention the collections others have) of tons of evidence of this basic fact that computers cost more and had less ability, back then. I don’t need to make much effort to prove this, although it does help to be able to specifically and exactly point to the retail prices of machines when someone goes “back then, computers cost this much and could do this” and a quick reference back to this material shows them to be soaking wet. But “gotcha” only goes so far.

No, I think what these pieces of history really do is serve as solid foundation to build new ideas on and maybe avoid certain mistakes. A dropped name, a specific promise, and you research those further to find out what worked and what didn’t and maybe avoid the minefield that came before. Maybe. People have an amazing propensity, faced with a blood-soaked hall of stabbing machinery, to think that somehow they’re going to come out of the other end unscathed and claim the prize. So be it. But at least in these pages I or others can reference how very long some ideas have stuck around. For example, the Cloud. Or gigabyte drives. Or Sun when it was a viable computer company.  I get an enjoyment out of knowing I might do my bit to help people look back with a more informed eye. It really does make it happy.

And maybe it’s just an old man talking, but I think they’re beautiful, these now-solved mysteries, these peeks into an unknown future that is now the known past.