Unlike some schools, my high school allowed students wide berth in what they could put into yearbook photos and had a scattershot staff who could travel as needed to take your photo. I wanted my photo in my room (which I spent a lot of time in) and surrounded by items of mine. A series of photos were taken in both halves of my room, and the second half was used, the one with my BBS in it. (Yes, my BBS is in my senior yearbook photo). This is the other photo, recovered from the original negatives. It is 1987. I am 16 years old.

The linked-to larger image is probably better if you wish to study it closely (or print it out for your wall?) but in summary, I was deep into a couple pop culture items, a few things related to phone phreaking, and non-sequitir.

I am holding a dustbuster because in every single photo I posed to related to my yearbook, I have a dustbuster. I ended up being 4 posed photos in the yearbook, all carrying this dustbuster.

The payphone once made the mistake of not being attached to a wall very well. Same with the highway flashers (both of them) who were insufficient in their attachment to local highway construction sites to overcome an onslaught of teenaged energy. (They were not in service of warning people when they were liberated; so no concerns there, please.) Howard Stern articles and hacking articles are on the left of the photo on the door, and my wood-panelled room had a variety of other strange items, ranging from references to Max Headroom, Pink Floyd, Steve Martin, and even the original cool Maxell poster, which shines brightly from the flash of Rachel Lovinger’s camera.

When this photo was recovered, I was delighted at how clear the image was, how for better or worse it captured this time for me, deep in the time I was involved in BBSes, in being a teenager, in experiencing a life that I continue to mine for stories and references. I’m confident enough to be weird, but humble enough to look like I’m not quite sure what’s coming next. It is a wonderful picture for me to look at. I look forward to sharing more.

Here’s some links from around the internet that have captured my attention and interest in the last bit of time. I don’t often write these, but I like to think the stuff that interests me ranges from obscure to unexpected. Let’s see how this little experiment goes.

From The Past To The Future: Tim Sweeney Talks

Excellent interview by Benj Edwards about Tim Sweeney, who started Epic Megagames, worked on the Unreal Engine and Gears of War… but also was heavily involved with Shareware and adventure gaming at the beginning of the company’s life, and covers it to a pleasurable amount thanks to Benj’s excellent questions. Note that his work ZZT is all over cd.textfiles.com if you want to look it over.

1200 Baud

The Retrogeek weblog at Shardcore almost never posts, but when one shows up, it’s a doozy. This one is a great overview of cassette-based games and some aspects of the way they put all sorts of information into the cassette inserts. He has a small business example and a larger one, and even shows off a pretty crazy copy protection scheme utilizing color printing before color printing became commonplace.

Game Set Watch

When super-connected Simon Carless, editor of Gamasutra and man about gaming industry started a weblog full of little columns and entries, I felt bad because when he’d link to me I’d see almost no hits, a worrying situation. I don’t worry about him any longer, because he has assembled such a massive stable of entry posters, and sent them in so many directions, that his pages are filled, absolutely filled, with a treasure trove of gaming related information. Obviously my interests are in retro subjects, and maybe music and maybe interviews of a personal sort, but there’s such a mass of information at this site that I hope it gets remixed, sometime in the future, into the library/encyclopedia of information it already is. I can hope, right? Highlights include Game Mag Weaseling, which is a world-class overview of game magazines past and present, and The Game Anthropologist, which covers gaming communities in a way that we’ll want to check on in a decade.

ClassicGaming.com

Also known as classicgaming.gamespy.com, this is an absolute treasure trove of reviews, download, artifacts and library of games long past, featuring one of a kind OH DID I MENTION THIS SITE IS GOING OFFLINE? Yes, in the most quiet way possible (a forum post), it was announced that a money/tech decision is killing this invaluable site of gaming history and putting it into the trash bin in August of this year. Hope people can get what they can before it dies!

Hey, I didn’t say it was all going to be good news… enjoy the links.

I was kindly invited to speak in front of some college students a little while ago.  The content was free-form and I mostly tried to give some impressions about computer history, the context of what I collect, and other random thoughts that I thought would be beneficial to the students (and college employees and teachers, who also attended).

At one point, I started to talk about a lesson learned in Racing the Beam and Ian Bogost’s television filter, and out of a moment of curiousity, I asked the assembled group of 30 how many had ever, actually touched an Atari 2600/VCS console, and not played it as an emulated game or simply seen a photo.

Three had.

Now, that wasn’t a particularly disturbing thing for me to hear as a person who grew up on the Atari line of home consoles, including the 2600 – after all, it was introduced 30 years ago! Just as I, a person born in 1970, may or may not have ever worn a Davy Crocker hat, played with a Radioactive science kit, or actually watched an episode of “You Bet Your Life” on a television, so too should a person born in 1989 not be expected to play an Atari 2600, see an episode of WKRP in Cincinatti, or have thrown a Lawn Dart.

But what it does mean is that one has to really start taking the time to make sure all members of an audience know what you really, truly mean with the cultural touchstones you’ve placed in your writings and presentations or conversations. “Atari 2600″ means one thing to some people, and different things to others, and that gulf is truly widening.

Even as I speak about bulletin board systems, I often preface an explanation of what a modem is, was, what it did, why bulletin boards were single-threaded, why people would want to do this, how they gave up their entire machine, and that machine was thousands of dollars. All these aspects of price, sacrifice, availability of information.. the times when I could have referenced these without a second thought to their context is gone.

Reading an annotated collection of Sherlock Holmes stories is truly enlightening – in one story he references sending the mail and awaiting a reply; and the annotation explains that mail within London’s urban center would be delivered upwards of twelve or fourteen times a day. While you could enjoy the core story without knowing that, it made the actions of dropping something in a box without using a messenger that much clearer. From that, then, you realize what a dearth of instant communication existed in that period, and how people coped with it, and what the ramifications are when you read works from the period and realize all that information was collected using different methods. It helps, it really does.

I experience this when I go to car museums, which I’ve done occasionally in the last decade or so. When you actually see a car with a 12 cylinder engine, actually see what a 1920s or 1930s era car, a gargantuan monster of metal and power looks like (can’t really sit in them), you gain a completely different perspective. I’m sure I’d have an even stronger perspective if I rode in one.

It makes my paragraphs and presentations that much more longer, but I’d rather have that be the case than a series of head nods from people who are responding to the words and not the memories.

Assuming you count a published book as a book that the publisher paid you to make and that you completed and delivered, my first published book was The 3D Lemmings Companion (1995).

Unless you count a published book as being one that does all that and also ends up on shelves. Then I’ve never published a book.

When I was working at Psygnosis, we always had access to games that were in the pipeline.  Some of the most frustrating aspects of this was that you’d see games that were well and truly ahead of the curve, stuff that could have totally changed people’s opinions of what was possible on a PC, and it’d sit for up to a year or two while the Home Office in Liverpool figured out how to market it, at which point the game would plop out into the ether in a sea of now-similar games developed in the interim time. It might even have all the hallmarks of what these other games were and be better (or worse) but it certainly wasn’t first, even though the code had been done forever ago. Citations: Pyrotechnica and Blue Ice, both of which were office curiousities awaiting the go-ahead to enter the wild, but just sat around like the watermelon in Buckaroo Banzai.

It’s funny that this is now the case, but it probably has to be explained to people that 3D graphics, that is, actual calculated three-dimensional interaction presented on a 2-D screen, was not always the province of additional CPUs and cores attached via crazy high-end video cards inside a chassis; in the 1990s this work was being done by the main CPU as well as everything else at once, be it sound, game logic, network interaction and disk transactions. In other words, you had all this work being done by a single CPU and so even vaguely “realistic” 3-D graphics was a miracle. (And then there’s 1983’s I, Robot which had custom math hardware, but that arcade machine was sent from the future.)

So in fact, most of these 3D games were primarily 2-D games with sprites, that is, bitmapped images, presented with scaling that somewhat approximated a 3D feel. 3D Lemmings was one of those games. Once you know that’s the trick, it’s very, very easy to see that a portion of it is 3D blocks and the rest is sprites. (Super Mario 64 also utilized this trick.)

All that said, the game was great. You had all the same gameplay as Lemmings that made that game great, and the camera movement was weird and fun, and because you were sliding around in space with these little guys doing their thing, the whole game was like real-time strategy to the nth degree. The original had this situation too, but the 3D just made it even cooler. I loved this thing.

I now forget what exactly happened that caused me to start making maps of the levels, but I did it and somehow this got back to the developers in England, Clockwork Games. A fax came in which thanked me for the maps I drew, and I was given a hint to the game’s cheat code, a hint which totally fell flat on me: Type in the name of Russia’s Love Machine. “Rah Rah Rasputin” was a huge hit in England and Canada, you see, but not in the US. So it wasn’t until I was at a dance in Toronto a few years later and heard the song that I went “ohhhh” quietly at my table.

When I was asked to join the little start-up that came out of the closure of Psygnosis US in Boston, it was primarily to have me write a full and complete book of 3D Lemmings hints and walkthroughs. And over the next couple of months, I did it, creating a 150 page book.

As a testimony to my youth, I did all the illustrations to demonstrate how you would do the 3D walkthroughs. And here’s where it gets weird.  I did them all in Visio, the 2-D drawing program meant for diagrams, flowcharts and sketches. I basically used triangle and square primitives to construct these maps, of walkthroughs I devised myself, through all the levels. I can’t begin to explain how much work that was, other than to say it was a lot of fucking work.

I finished this book, and it was delivered to Prima Publishing, who would have printed out the book, except the game didn’t go blockbuster, and they decided to pass on it. So my book technically never saw the light of day. But I did finish it!

Sitting somewhere deep in my collection of disks is a copy of that book, with all the diagrams and whatever. Maybe, if I’m lucky, it’ll pop up in my life again and I’ll make it available on here, in this entry. Until then, remember what I learned: you can make a living doing games, especially if you’re willing to shove your face fully into a grindstone for interminable amounts of time.

Wait, that’s a horrible lesson.

I’ll just combine these two while I’m here, since they’re just updates on ongoing projects.

PAPER

I have a lot of magazines. Did I mention that? A lot. A whole lot. Being made to split them out and get them into special bins instead of scattered among my belongings like sesame seeds means I’m starting to see the size of the pile. Right now, if I had to guess, I would say I have between 3500 and 5000 magazines in the house. Bagged. In bins. As I’m going through them, I’m kind of amazed at the variety – I tend to keep everything. And not everything is magazines, either.

Therefore, I’ve split off the catalogs and “ephemera” – stuff I thought would be good to save before it disappeaed complete. These will be cataloged at a later date. And when I say ephemera, I really do mean all sorts of randomness: convention programs, tickets, posters, how-to booklets, handouts, you name it. Some has meaning, some doesn’t, but all made me think they needed a chance to arise up a few years down the line.

So now the paper.textfiles.com site has a few more improvements: additional stuff catalogued (600 issues), descriptions of some properties put in (temporary, not researched), and I fixed a columnation issue that made it split “Summer 2006″ into two issues. 

GEOCITIES

Archive Team is still downloading Geocities; no surprise there. Right now the canonical collection is about 530gb, and covers, basically, a metric ton of stuff. I don’t have hard stats at the moment; it takes way too long.

There are now several branches working on this. One branch is using the archive.org crawler. Some of us are direct downloading things. I have crazy scripts doing crazy things. We’re setting up a service where you can see if we have a copy of a given URL in the archive. And so it goes.

I intend to have us keep downloading until we either run out of things to download or Geocities is shut down. And believe me, once you start responding mentally to the URL “geocities.com” in reading stuff online, you realize how many things were using Geocities as the central information repository, for better or worse. Dude, shit is going to break when Geocities shuts down. Just to warn you.

I have an incredible group of people helping me and everybody’s getting a big hug when we move to the next phase: sitting on top of the pile and going “WOOOOO HOOOOOOOO”. It’s a ways off, though.

I suspect I should really go back and do a “Halo” tag for these entries, there’s just too many of them. But I hope the things I’m talking about have a more general usefulness beyond this specific game.

So Bungie (makers of Halo) have a new beta feature in place. Here’s a lovely video showing it off:

Yes, that’s right, that feature is cold blooded murder. It’s also the ability to take a game, record portions of it, and then render it out to a WMV format, which you can then place anywhere, like on youtube. In the movie above, I’m the guy in the white armor, who couldn’t believe his luck in how a player moseyed up to my platform without even noticing I was there (again, in pure white armor) and began wistfully shooting away. I did the only right thing.

The thing is, there are filmmaking tools here. And they’re not really all that crude, either – you can sweep your camera around, choose to go Point-of-View, head fast and slow, and change the speed of everyone as you go. There’s tons of capacity to render out shots and then edit them later in other software, now that we have the ability to turn them into WMV files and drop into an editor. In the case of my clip above, I went for maximum humor, starting things a number of seconds before the action: why is this guy running? Where is he running from? What is he up to? You watch it and then only at the last possible moment do you realize he’s a victim. Depending on your sense of humor, it’s funny to be side-swiped like that, with an unexpected arrival of a second character.

Along that way, here’s another film of mine I put together:

Wherever you aim your sniper rifle, any other weapons you switch out will precisely mimic the exact point you last aimed with the sniper. So the Rocket, which is normally a pretty crude aiming tool, can utilize the scope-magnification of the sniper rifle and then be switched in for the big hit. In default mode, the movie above’s a little hard to see, but in HQ mode, it’s pretty clear what happens when the rocket hits the guy hiding up in the rafters. Notice, too the sound, which has a stereo, environmental feel to it.

The choices I made with the camera angle, moving back and forth, and so on, are all cinematic, done with my filmmaker’s eye. And as I indicated, there is very little gap between what I want to accomplish and what Halo’s controls have provided for me.

One last one, just because I think the sound is very interesting. I’m the guy in the floating vehicle (called the “Ghost”):

It’s quite amazing how the whole thing sounds – according to press reports of the time, Halo 3 is capable of 100-channel sound, but it’s the recording of the stereo separation that gets me. Machinima has gotten to be a pretentious word, so let’s just say that there’s a little movie studio buried in this first person shooter, and that’s fine with me.

Continuing the riveting story of one guy with a perfectly fine documentary trying to go to all the distribution points that well-meaning people tell him in endless fan letters he should go to.

Previous pain coverage was here:  Introduction,  #1, #2, #3, #4, #5.

On with the show!

From: Submissions <submissions@netflix.com>
Subject: Netflix Submission of "BBS: The Documentary"

Dear Jason Sadofsky:

Thank you for your submission to Netflix.  We have received and reviewed your materials.  
Unfortunately, we are unable to make "BBS: The Documentary" available through Netflix as
a direct account.

Please contact Victory Multimedia to make your title available for rent on Netflix.  Victory
Multimedia works with many independent film producers and small distributors.  If you wish to establish a
distribution agreement with Victory Multimedia, they will represent "BBS: The Documentary" directly to
Netflix. You are under no obligation to work with Victory Multimedia and the link below will provide you
with a full list of distributors to choose from.

The following URL will take you to this list:

http://www.business.com/directory/media_and_entertainment/home_entertainment/distributors_and_wholesalers/ [www.business.com]

If you wish to establish a distribution agreement with Victory Multimedia, please contact Randy Freeman
at Victory Multimedia at your earliest convenience.

Once again, thank you for your submission and we look forward to making your title availablefor rent on Netflix.

Sincerely,

Netflix Submissions

Just so we’re clear, I submitted my information and DVD set to Netflix over seven months ago. Seven months passed before they sent an e-mail telling me that they don’t deal with small distributors/individuals for Netflix.

Will I call Randy? Sure. A phone call’s cheap, as I just wrote an entry about. But since most “distributors” take a massive chunk out of the price, I am not so sure I’ll go that way.

Onward.

For years, my cell phone was a variation of a Motorola contractor’s phone. This was the most basic, but tough-built phone in the Motorola line, mostly intended to be on construction sites and in the hands of very rough-handling computer historians. The most recent one of those I owned was a i530. An i530 looks like this:

It’s ugly, bright yellow, and tough, like my conscience. 

It was also such a basic data plan that when people would SMS me with information, it would not tell me who SMS’d me. I spent some time trying to figure out why this was the case, and it comes down to a Rube-Goldberg-Like relationship with the data plan and my phone, meaning that it literally would play a game of telephone until it reached my phone and let me have the bulk of the message, although the identifying information would be stripped off.  I had a couple years there where I’d get a message like “So, up for dinner?” and then be loathe to call most likely persons. Also, as the image suggests, I went with a nice dull black-on-green screen that didn’t have color photos, pretty web browsing.. or much of anything. I lived like this for a very long time.

My day job recently changed, and is, shall we say, a little more demanding. (It’s what’s delayed my documentary, by the way.) Among the whoppers that went by was a 48 hour service call. Let’s cover that again, a two-day solid service call on the phone. No, that’s not big enough. I WAS ON THE PHONE FOR 48 STRAIGHT HOURS, SLEEPING NEXT TO THE MUTED PHONE IN CASE I WAS NEEDED all right, I think that works.

The fun of that and many similar calls was not enough for the universe, and so it was with great surprise I got a cell phone bill for $800. A quick call to the provider revealed that I had gone over my “unlimited” plan (which was in fact a different plan that wasn’t unlimited) and jammed up charges into the hundreds of dollars. We struck a deal: they dropped the $800 charge and I switched to an actual unlimited data plan for $100/month.

This changed things. Now I could make unlimited data and phone calls with the phone, but the phone I had, as tough and yellow as it was, was no longer able to do everything allowed to it. I knew then I had to get a new phone. So I got a Blackberry. It looks like this:

So what you have is a guy who has come up through home computers and a time when mobile phones were only the realm of the rich, the powerful, and the stupid, to this situation.

Naturally, I latched onto the web-browsing, network-kafuckery, and the ability to actually know who was SMSing me. The camera is crap, the keys are a little weird to get used to, and I do feel like a bit of a tool when I whip this thing out. But once you get this enjoyable additional set of abilities, you don’t want to go back. I installed an SSH client on the phone, and the ability to read my e-mail through alpine on my freeBSD box has been a convenience, as has been the ability to use things like Google Maps to not get lost. Again. For hours. All of this has been very good.

But what really worked for me was the installation of Vlingo. Let me explain what Vlingo is.

In a nutshell, Vlingo turns your mobile device into a voice-activated and interfaced voice device. Once it loads, you say things to it, literally speak unto it phrases like “take a note: Remember to get the milk” and it will put a note “remember to get the milk” into the right application. You can say “Open Google Maps” and it will open Google Maps. You can say “Call Voice Mail” and it will work. And you can SMS people by speaking out full sentences and prefacing it with the person’s name. How much this changes the relationship to the phone is legion, so far a jump that it’s the same length as the jump from my contractor phone to my Blackberry. It is, in all ways, a 21st century communicator/hitchhiker’s guide/companion computer I can ask all sorts of things and have it respond.

I have been fascinated at how much voice recognition has improved in the last decade – it can’t be played down. The ability to use services like TellMe and GOOG-411 have been great, and TellMe was the secret weapon that made the BBS Documentary production go a lot smoother – I’d be stuck in the back of nowhere and then desperately call 1-800-555-TELL and beg the machine for directions. I will never forget the ability to just speak into my phone and have it “work”. I remember when this was an assumed given for the distant future but nothing I’d be walking around with. Now I do.

You might wonder why there’s no links to Vlingo on this site. That’s because they’re cocks. Let me explain.

I have a strong memory of being at CompUSA on two separate occasions where the kid at the cash register “did stuff” for me. I would be buying something, like a hard drive, and he would throw something into my bag and start ringing it up. I would then form a question along the lines of “What the fuck did you just throw in my bag” and he would explain that by adding this item, I was saving money, because it would cause a rebate or some hoo-hah. But here’s the thing. He’d just fucking assume it. To him, he was doing me a favor, likely because he had such a low opinion of the cattle-like customers that he wouldn’t even bother to tell them what was going on, like you don’t sit down for a long conversation with a cat about the possible allergic side-effects to their rabies shot. You just do it because you knew what was best. Twice, I had cashiers do this. Twice, I brought this up, was given the explanation, and cancelled the transaction right there and left and drove over to another place to get a hard drive. I don’t care what the kid thought was “right” for me; he’d taken me out of the mix. 

Similarly, it must never be forgotten what assholes Real Networks have been on the user interface and customer service front. The Real media player, during installation, would do things like hide the e-mail sign up box deep down underneath things and buried in scrolling, so you would naturally sign up for their spam. They’d also make the player take all sorts of advantage of your machine, using it as a launch point to hit you up with advertisements, pitches, and unwanted crap, just for installing a video player. Eventually better solutions came and ate their lunch, but for some people Real was the big game in town and they took this advantage to the fullest.

Vlingo has successfully blended that idiot CompUSA kid and Real. That’s a shame.

When you install Vlingo (I ultimately installed Vlingo “Plus”, but it’s the same program with a few things added), it needs to rape your system. You get to watch or not watch, but rape will happen. They tell you that it’s coming, that a page will come up in which Vlingo will ask for full access to every last aspect of your phone, from low-level networking up through every application, calling log, and phone function. It does it in the same tone as the kid did: just trust us, it says. And then it just blows itself into every last nook and cranny of the OS. It nearly filled my memory doing so. And it had to hard reset, so that it would be totally, completely installed. I did this, and essentially my phone became a Vlingo phone. Now, I happen to like the Vlingo Phone for the moment, since it’s voice activated and all. But like a slick lawyer, it made a lot of jumps so I wouldn’t be bothered by the “little stuff”.

As soon as Vlingo is installed, it then turns into Real: it asked me if it was OK to mail every contact on my e-mail list about itself. I said “fuck no”. It then added itself as a signature to my twitter feed and e-mails. It did not ask. It took. I had to go in and undo these default settings so I wasn’t a big fat Vlingo ad.

The application, in its menu, has “tell friends about Vlingo” as the second option, pushing “Help” and “Options” down to some sort of second-class position. This is what it considers a priority – self promotion.

Oh, sure, this is all something some genius person at Vlingo thinks is the bees knees: we can put up ads for ourselves all over the place on this phone we got full admin access to!  But to me, this is the difference between a painter having his truck in your driveway with his information on the side and the painter sitting in your kitchen and answering any phonecalls coming in with the news that they’re painting your house. Stop fucking doing that. Vlingo does this, and for that reason, my deal with them is similar to Real’s. I will use them and will get the hell away from them at the first (and inevitable) sign that something better or equal comes along that does not inject a sales office into my phone.

The future is awesome. Except for the parts that suck.

For fun, let’s include everyone in on a little project of mine. Unlike Archive Team, I’m not actively seeking help on it for the moment, just doing some initial work and including you in on it.

As part of my mission/life/hobby, I find myself often being sent collections of magazines, catalogs, and other paper that folks want to get rid of but know has some historical value and are not into just throwing it out. I’ve now had several cases of someone announcing in a location that they want to get rid of said paper and others specifically suggesting the person send it to me. That’s a nice feeling.

A few dozen Commodore magazines recently showed up, and a few dozen Mac/Apple II magazines showed up a month or two ago. I bag them, bin them in transparent bins, and store them. When I am doing research or otherwise trying to find something, I pull out the bin and either scan the material or just take notes. A lot of my work these days involves just using my own personal massive library of computer history to track down facts or citations. This is awesome if you’re Jason Scott and you live in my house, but not so awesome if you’re out there, somewhere, wishing you had a copy of an old Epyx ad or wanting a solid picture of a Wico Joystick scanned at 800dpi.

My collection is in the hundreds of magazines and catalogs now. I have stuff from the 1950s, up through last week. I sometimes surprise myself with what I have, like when I found I apparently own a massive run of very old Popular Electronics magazines. Not sure how that happened, to be honest. But I have them. Nice little guys, they are.

I’m nothing if not infected with this weird generous streak that seems at odds with the general impression of my abrasive, in-your-face personality (at least in some quarters), so I feel like it’s a really bad situation that I have this decades-in-making library here in my home and someone out there, somewhere, is desperately in need of information or a scan of an image that I have sitting in a bin in my archives.

Is this not the sadness of all librarians? All the true ones, anyway.

So I have begun a rudimentary cataloging of my collection. And the catalog will go here:

http://paper.textfiles.com

It looks pretty simple. That’s right. It looks kind of unhelpful. Bet it does. Right now it’s of no use to anyone, possibly even to the creator. That is very likely the case.

Over time, when I have the slack to do so, I will be improving this site, adding to the list (as of this writing, this is just what I had in my latest shipment and some stuff sitting in my bedroom) and generally making it of actual, good use. I am well aware it has flaws even now, that I will need more information about the images, and that I should do more to make it easier to pull down the information. No doubt. 

But what I am doing here is being transparent, showing people how I organically grow a small idea into a project, then into a site, and then into a helpful site.

Check back in a few weeks, a month, a year. I’ll eventually link it from the main site. But enjoy the show.

To commemorate (or at least reference) the subject I’m talking about (the DAK Catalog), I’m going to write in the style of the catalog itself.

YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME

I often get shipments of old magazines, catalogs, flyers and the like from people giving up collections they no longer want to care for but don’t want to just throw out. They come in old boxes, worn with the dust of basements and attics and often bearing striking themes: Commodore computing, hobbyist electronics, a predisiposition for Nintendo. But the latest huge box to arrive had a very old memory show up in it.

This was none other than a Summer 1988 DAK Catalog, in worn condition but still a complete collection of everything that made DAK such a strong memory for me. A catalog, you say? A catalog that caused a strong memory? What kind of catalog could that possibly be?

PLASTIC DREAMS AND PROMISES

The DAK catalog, created by Drew A. Kaplan (the DAK the company got the name from) was in the business of selling consumer electronic items, which are the companion pieces to the computer history I often focus on; when your item must shave a face or duplicate an audio cassette, the approach, style and presentation are slightly different, more simplistic, but a lot of the same urges and ideas are there. Students trying to understand Home Computers of the 1970s and 1980s would do well to look at how items were being sold back then.

A CROWDED FIELD

Make no mistake, the DAK catalog wasn’t the only game in town – I made it a point of carefully scanning in the 1983 Shelburne Holiday Catalog for the use of later academics and gawkers, all intent on trying to understand our past generations fascination with what appears to be, to the modern eye, crap. But these other catalogs paled in comparison to the DAK catalog in one way: hard core selling technique.

THUNDERSTRUCK

It will always be the DAK catalog that introduced me to the “Sub-woofer”, a speaker intended to blow bass waves directly into the floor. Allow me to have you admire, anew, the wonder of the advertisement for the 15″ Subwoofer:

The language is exquisite, and the presentation is superb. I’ve been told that Kaplan is using techniques from various correspondence courses on selling, and that his performance as a student of these courses is not up to snuff, but I defy someone reading this not to see where it would gain the interest of the next-newest-thing-seeking technophile.

“Oh, just wait ’til you experience the breathtaking sonic splendor of an orchestral chord or a pipe organ that’s unleashed by this subwoofer.”

UNLEASHING THE COMPUTER FLOODGATES

I did have a few of these advertisements, mostly appearing in electronics or science magazines, and an occasional mailing. One of them, called Astounding Writing, is in the digitize.textfiles.com collection.  But it definitely brightens my day to have a complete, whole catalog from 20 years ago to eventually scan in completely.

Before I put it on the to-do pile, I simply couldn’t resist adding these two pages to the mix: a 1200 baud modem, promoted as a gateway to  untold amounts of information and amazing opportunities. And for only $69! Prices slashed!

What I like about these are that he has to ramp up people into the world of bulletin board systems, the way they work, and why you want this ugly little thing. I think he does a very good job of it. While the stuff he sold was of variant quality in some cases, DAK was generally pretty upfront about what you were getting. As a result, he warns you that you’ll have to pay for some services online, and that what you’re getting are discard modems sold from discontinued properties (although they’re made in the same factory as continued quantities). 

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE

Just kidding. That’s it.