While I’m at it, here’s a collection of Infocom Advertisements from the 1980s.  It was scanned in by Infocom Alumni to recall the many appearances that Infocom made in periodicals and other print locations. Each one had its charm, and some of them have stuck with myself and others for decades beyond seeing them.

This is my favorite one; I remember reading it when I was 13, in either Compute! magazine or another such title, and being drawn in by this magical way of standing on the quality of your product.

For the people who don’t remember these ads, now you know why the GET LAMP site looks like it does.

Here’s some more that I like:

Now there’s some quality advertising!

I finished scanning Steve Meretzky’s design binders.

This was a side project and took something like nine months. I have scanned the design binders for Planetfall, Sorcerer, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Stationfall, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz, and of course Leather Goddesses of Phobos. In total, this is something in the range of 3,000 scanned images.

(I’m speaking of those black binders on the bottom shelf.)

It was quite a variety of stuff in there, and I really can’t credit Steve enough for keeping such amazing, complete records of his work – work which, from what I’ve encountered, that holds a special fascination for many people looking back at the history of Infocom across decades. I certainly would have been happy if it was only me who cared – but a lot of people wrote in and indicated they care, and that they appreciate what this was all about. So, on the whole, this was time very well spent. (I haven’t taken a real shot at guessing how long this took, but if I had to guess, it was probably in the neighborhood of a hundred hours.)

Bear in mind that I’m done scanning the binders but am not done scanning – there’s two more crates of documents related to general Infocom history that I’m going through as we speak, but I suspect I will only get a small amount of these before they have to be shipped away to their archival home. This would be memos, artifacts, advertising information, and so on. It’s also important, but I can only do so much while doing other stuff. So it’ll probably be a while before it all gets scanned, by persons other than me.

After the whole collection goes through a process of cleanup, removing private documents (think phone numbers, stuff somebody didn’t know was saved and didn’t want it presented in public, inc.) I’m intending to see these put in PDF form for what I hope will be legions of students and historians to go through.

Anyway, there’s a milestone for you.

It all starts out pleasant enough – we were together at the beginning, long before outsiders would even get a glimpse of what we’re up to.

Our friendship was forged when it was just the interviewee speaking, having a conversation that would stretch out to an hour or two. 60-120 minutes of footage of someone being asked to play in a pop quiz of their own life and experiences, where the best prize would be to have their story told to hundreds or maybe even hundreds of thousands. Later.

Eventually, this one hour conversation ends up as clips on a drive, long and possibly rambling statements made during that 60-120 minutes of footage. These new clips are anywhere from 2-5 minutes. The footage and I are still buddies, since the gist of everything is said, and who can blame anyone for making break points during the parts where questions are asked, or when the conversation pauses, or when someone walks into frame?

At some point, though, we enter the editing process in full force, and then the friendship becomes a little strained.

It’s hard to keep anyone’s attention these days, and especially so if the presentation is a monologue of self-directed answers to questions no longer in the footage.  While the clips all have personality and verve of some fashion, endlessly showing them, repeating phrases all over, would be very hard to watch. Unwatchable, really. So cuts are made, and the footage is cut down.

If two people say the same thing with a minor difference, you want the thing said with maybe the minor difference presented to back it up.  In this way, you can take two 30-second clips and turn them into one 35 second clip, and make it have all the same information.

But in doing so, you’re making quite a sacrifice – you’re choosing one person to have more screen time, to be the authority, and the second person to have to play second fiddle. It’s quite a choice.

So then, what happens when it’s 5 people – or 10? Then you start to pull words, phrases and looks together. And then your little footage friends are very angry at you.

Everything is one crazy sandwich of thoughts and gestures, of people completing each other’s sentences.  It’s a fabric, really – a tapestry of the footage, woven into interlocking patterns that emerge only when all these clips and cut-down moments are placed side by side. It’s a new event, a new happening.

And at the end of it, the audience is pleased indeed. They get a woven piece of art that educates and entertains. What they do not realize is over 50 times as much information and thought is gone with each passing minute they watch. Nor do most feel they have to. But that time is out there, or, I should say, back there, twice spent (the time itself and then review of that time later).

Sometimes you have to recall what you’re choosing when you make the choices you do. I can live with them, but I am reminded, deep in this process, what that entails.

I’ll take a moment out of the keeping-me-from-updating-this-weblog project matrix to let you know that I have proposed two talks for the SXSW 2010 Conference. One of them is about geek documentaries, and the other is the production of GET LAMP. My intention is to have GET LAMP done this year, and therefore at SXSW in some fashion, you see. It’s nice to have hard deadlines.

Anyway, it turns out that the way they do panel selection at SXSW is kind of complicated. They’ve tried to make it easy, but it’s kind of still complicated, just streamlined complicated.

What you do is go to the Panel Picker, an interactive whosis that lets you register, and then vote various panel proposals up and down. You can read the short descriptions, and each panel selection page has a comments section that will allow the proposer, possible members, and the general crowd discuss aspects of this possible, future panel.

I’ve never been to a SXSW festival before and I’ve certainly never paid attention to how panels are picked, but it appears to be somewhat electoral in nature, with “the people” weighing forth but this popular vote (as explained on the SXSW pages) counting towards only 30% of the ultimate influence in vote. I don’t even know how that all works. But it’s obvious that having a panel nobody wants or which doesn’t get a lively amount of discussion is probably doomed. They also encourage campaigning. So, I figure I’d give you the links here.

Here’s the link to my proposed panel about geek documentaries, Tales From the Basement.  My hope is to have the directors of Blogumentary, Nerdcore Rising, The Future of Pinball, and myself on this panel.

And here’s the link to my proposed panel about my documentary on text adventures, Get Lamp: Adventures in Text. My hope is to have several Infocom people and other people from my documentary on the panel.

That’s all. Now, back to scanning.

As one might spend a lot of time making a collection as good and complete as it can be, I’ve decided to take one of mine apart. But I thought there might be some education or smirking memories as to how this collection occurred in the first place, so let’s just cover that a bit.

For a couple years, I collected energy drink cans.

Energy Drink Cans, as I define them, look like this:

The cans are all a little more than 8 fluid ounces in capacity.  They all indicate they’re full of special stuff that will make you work harder or smarter (or, later on, claim they’re more healthy or maybe just soda). And they’re all pretty expensive, usually ranging from $2 to $5 a can.

I have about 200.

I won’t mince words. These things usually taste pretty awful, like the bombs have dropped and someone is asking the Bev-O-Tron to compose whatever those smiling people in archived commercials were drinking, but BOT only had motor oil and recently dead people to work with. I would usually open one up, swish a mouthful, and either swallow it quickly or spit it into the sink. Drinking all of them was usually not on the agenda.

What has fascinated me about these things is they’re rife with charlatans, and a beverage fad that I am sure will be on its last legs within a decade. I can’t imagine us continuing to buy these things in 10 years, when all the ill health effects come out or someone dies from drinking six thousand of them one weekend.  They often have amazing bright colors, photoshop gone wrong in a big way, and claims that would make a zombie Barnum spit out his snake oil and start lawsuits.

Oh, and they love stealing stuff. Check out this suspiciously-like-a-browser-logo label:

(Sorry it’s so dark – it’s just a very dark logo to begin with.)

All sorts of chicanery belies itself throughout my hundreds of cans. Labels that look like a desert, like a cartoon, like ammunition, like fireworks. They all laud having vitamins or Taurine or god-knows-what terms among them. You are expected to somehow come off stronger and healthier for downing these poison capsules. And the fact there are hundreds indicates many believe so.

There are likely historical lines further behind, but for me the story starts with Red Bull. I was working at Psygnosis in 1995 and we had the first betas of Wipeout stop by the office, still being worked on and with terribly dodgy graphics generation (flashes shot up and down the track from faces not lining up). But the game was obviously out to kick some ass, and the fact that you could go so fast and come to a screeching halt by your own lack of skill was kind of refreshing. A lot of driving games, and I mean a lot, are kind of like playing a big fat game of shuffleboard, where you bounce harmlessly down the track just edging people in and out as the AI tries to keep it all ‘fun’. In Wipeout, failure to execute meant you were left behind and would never catch up.

On the billboards above the track were ads for “Red Bull”. I remember this distinctly, thinking “Oh, what a shame they had to make up a drink instead of some actual drink.” I had never heard of Red Bull. At all. It was completely foreign to me.  According to this site, the feeling was accurate – Red Bull wouldn’t make an appearance in the US until 1997.

But Red Bull changed everything. Here was this crazy drink, full of caffiene and who knows what else, supposedly able to give you energy. And it was in this very uniquely shaped can for a soda. And it was fucking expensive. Super expensive. At a time when soda was on a downward price trend ($0.99 for a 2 liter bottle of the usual crap) they were jacking it up, way up, into the multiple dollar range. For less soda! Wow!

Here’s the thing, though.  People paid for it! Way back when, there was this awesome urban myth that Red Bull contained Bull Semen (where “Taurine” supposedly came from) or some variation of Unexpected Bull Portion. Red Bull did very little to dismiss this myth. It grew and became a club mix drink. It took off.

So naturally, six billion later companies have gone “Hmmm. Charge a lot. Make wild claims. Make the cans small. Got it.”

And that’s where my collection comes in.  It’s the form factor that really makes me enjoy them – these small cans with expensive costs and crazy names. I recall enjoying, for example, “Pimp Juice” in Salt Lake City in 2004. “Cocaine” energy drink, shut down and then returned to market. And, of course, “Firedog” energy drink, named after the tech support desk at Circuit City. That’s right, energy drinks to commemorate tech support.

So I’ve been collecting this stuff for years. But in the present day, the goal is to focus on what makes sense to have, and to archive things properly, and archiving cans is crazy. So I’m going to be taking photos of these things, then donating some to the energy drink museum, and whatever else will go into the great metal beyond.

I will be sad to see them go, but you have to make the right choices. I archive computer history. There’s a lot of computer history, and some of it has been hard to find, and get online. Energy Drink Cans are their own thing. I think that others could do a better job and focus on that. I should be putting my efforts where they belong. And somehow, this doesn’t seem to have been it.

Now, if you excuse me, I think I’ll pound a few tiny expensive cans back and get back to work.

I’ve been a little busy this summer with a lot of projects, to say the least. One of them involved going to Steve Meretzky’s basement to scan things.

Some time later, I asked of Steve if it would be possible to, well, you know.. scan every scrap of paper related to Infocom he had.  Nicely, Steve said yes.

So in the background of everything else, I’ve been scanning thousands, thousands of pages of design notes, sketched maps, press clippings, memos, correspondence, you name it. All related to Infocom. (There’s more, but I just couldn’t be 100% comprehensive on all the papers, related to Legend Entertainment, Boffo, and other works Steve was involved in.)

I mention this because we’re getting towards the end of this project. I’m now scanning deep into the night, as much and as fast as I can, all the pages I’ve been lent, so that these will absolutely be saved for the future. I’m scanning in full color, at 800 dpi. Each TIFF is 2-4 megabytes. As you might expect, this has been adding up – hundreds of gigabytes of scan data.  It has been huge.  And I am nearly done.

Poor Intern Rob’s been sucked into this process as well, just so I don’t go completely off the rails.

It’s not been easy – some items are fragile (basically all are one-of-a-kind), while others are odd sizes or require multiple scans to get all the sides and configurations.

How good a scan is 800dpi? This good:

That’s from a hand-drawn map of Leather Goddesses of Phobos, on graph paper. I wanted it to be the case that people down the line could get a very good idea of what was said on each page, and an academic or scholar of Infocom and Meretzky could clip out very good example images for others to inspect.

To scan I use Hamrick Software’s Vuescan, which is so far beyond the other scanning software I’ve found as to leave them in the dust. It does what I expect scanning software to do: I put something in, say ’scan’, and it does the scanning, saves off two versions of the file (full-size and JPG) and then beeps twice. You’d be surprised how unbelievably shitty, un-user-interface-y and plain all around hostile scanning software is out there.

After scanning, I will then go through the documents to find all items written by others who are not Steve, then interact with them about getting permission to post these items. Then comes redaction of personal information (phone numbers and addresses are in some). After it’s been determined what people are comfortable with going public, it will go public. This all might take a little time, but I want no regrets or tears for doing all this – I want people to see the stuff, to see how much work went into these games and how a master gamesmaker honed his craft over a decade at a world-class software maker. But we’re going to do it right, OK?

The documents are destined for an archive that is not me. I’ll leave it to others to announce those details. I just want it known these aren’t going back down into a basement. I just wanted one excellent scan of them before they moved onto the next phase of life.

It was a huge, huge display of trust on the part of Steve Meretzky to let me have the privilege of scanning these documents for posterity. These were documents that had never been out of his hands, ever. I am humbled and appreciative of that trust, and I intend to finish this project with pride, and ensure later generations will enjoy this work, and what can be learned from it.

In Sandman #20, “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream”, a performance of the Shakespeare play of that name is performed in front of the characters it was based on. Afterwards, the King of Fairie comments “..this diversion, although pleasant, is not true. Things never happened thus.” The Sandman, who has comissioned the creation of the play, responds “Oh, but it is true. Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.”

Gaiman’s prose is beautiful to read, but we part ways on this. I am a very big proponent of facts, of having evidence and artifacts that tell a story, or betray a confidence, far into the future. I am not a fan of changing history to suit today’s needs, or, even worse, forgetting history to suit same. As a result, I find myself in the position of stepping into the recounting of facts and history, and issuing corrections where I can. Sometimes I am mean about it. Sometimes I am just neutrally resigned. It depends on the hour of the day.

Years of working on the BBS Documentary and the website made me, for better or worse, an expert in BBS History.  I say “better or worse” because it’s an interesting blend of useful and useless information to have. I know a lot about the transitions the BBS world went through, sometimes down to the month. But I also know way too much about internal fighting at BBS software firms, on message boards, and over controversies that persist in some way to today. I have some amazing triumphs down in the archives, and a good bit of shame and hubris as well. It depends on what you’re looking for.

This article I just stepped in on is an example. Utilizing “various sources” (which usually means Wikipedia and other Wired articles), the author takes one data point (Neilsen Net Ratings says half of households have internet access in 2000) and then bloats out his word count (to hit the minimum) with some randomly thrown-together factoids from earlier days. I doubt a fact-checker was employed; I question how many other people besides the author read the article before it appeared online. I found several errors. I’m sure others would find more.

But this is meant to be an article of record, or at least it should. Others will cite this article as being accurate. Others will use this article in writing more Wired articles. There’s a hysterical bias in Wired articles going back to the beginning – the Well (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) invents online communication, and then everybody else follows up on it. Decades of online communication predate the Well, trust me.

I could let it go, hope that people will find the information they need elsewhere and have it accurate. But something in me just won’t let it sit. What I see in there, intentionally or not, is a diminishing of accomplishments, a dialing down of influence, a quiet nudge of some very smart and bright people closer to a garbage chute. Believe me, I have sat through more than my share of old guys yammering about the good old days and how they did it all first, but in quite a few cases those guys are totally entitled to do so. As one of my interviewees said, “one of [us three being interviewed] has software we wrote on every desktop computer”. He’s probably very, very right. He gets the victory lap. When I see someone else coming along and trying to trip them up during this victory lap without doing research behind it, all I see is red. And this, bear in mind, is when I encounter incompetence. Wait’ll you see what I write when I encounter malefeasance.

Randall’s comic might be quoted by the more cutty-pasty of the reading audience, but I like to think this “stand down, internet warrior” motto is applicable to boards where opinion reigns, where discussing what car or movie or item is “better” than another could go until doomsday. This isn’t the case when someone implies a company invented the Blorp in 1992 when Blorp technology had been swirling around quite a bit in the early 1980s. When you have the messages, the printouts, the files with the date, it’s even easier. And I feel, truly, that it’s a duty to make it known that the facts being presented are in error.

So I correct.

And sure, the time will come when it won’t matter, when the fact may or may not be that this set of four people invented Blorp or this other set of four people invented Blorp, or that two of them stole Blorp from the other two. But that time is nowhere near here, not when all the parties involved in Blorp still walk above the ground and the influence of Blorp is felt on a daily basis. There’s a webcomic for that idea, too.

Until then, I’ll be there, doing the nips and tucks one needs to keep us from steering too far away from the facts I can show are true.

By the way, it wasn’t Sandman #20. It was Sandman #19.

Trust nothing.

A moment of silence, please, for an arcade you didn’t play at.

There are, as I’m sure you might guess, lots of private arcades out there, ranging from just a few games in the basement up to full-blown professional-level places that could rival anything anybody has played in. Some of them open for friends, or the public, or just keep the games to themselves. There was one, which I didn’t have a chance to visit, which opened to charities and programs as well as friends and family. It was quite impressive.

A few days ago, it burned completely to the ground.

These things do happen – crossed wires, unexpected lightning, any of a number of things lead to house fires. The cause of this one had not been determined by the time I put this up, but it does not look suspicious. But all these videogames are basically gone.

Nobody was hurt, luckily. But they’ve lost a great place.

I mostly mention this event to give a moment of attention to how collecting isn’t forever, and how what we have today could be gone tomorrow; these machines are just machines, of course, and it is good no lives were lost, but memories of them may be all we have as time goes on.

Thanks for the memories.

Rob O’Hara has written a much more complete entry on this subject here.

As mentioned previously, the plan was set into motion many months ago to bring a little retrocomputing spirit to DEFCON.

That plan was successful.

Load-in was intense and a little late in the day on Thursday. I think my favorite moment of that was when we realized we needed a few more people to handle the moving of 300-600 pound machines on a very tiny liftgate, and I walked into the DEFCON contest area and asked ‘Who here wants to load a PDP-11 out of a truck?” One kind person stood up immediately and said “me”. And together, we made the load-in that much less painful. Here’s some quick candids of the truck and us working:

On the left in that last photo is Pavl Zachary, who is the owner of all this large-scale computing equipment. He and his crew loaded this stuff into a truck, drove 5 hours from California, and then worked for a good number of hours to bring all this various stuff out onto the floor we were assigned. By the time we had it all out, the place looked like a flea market from hell (or heaven, I suppose):

After hours beyond that of setting things up, we had ourselves a pretty damned impressive room, if I do say myself. I think the best part of being where we were in the layout was that throughout the weekend, people stumbled upon the setup, finding this incredible time capsule of computer technology active and functioning. ‘What do you mean, it works!?” was something I overheard a bunch of times. And really, one glance at this setup and you might be surprised it worked too:

Besides the incredibly functioning layout, we also had tables with tons of artifacts, and notes where possible to explain things. It was comprehensive enough that we were even able to convince Phreakmonkey to drop off his circa-1964 300bps modem for close inspection by the curious:

He gave an excellent presentation and demonstration of this modem, but he was up against a bunch of other talks – so the fact people could just check the thing out directly (look at that great woodwork!) made it that much cooler.

Pavl went above and beyond, loading up various operating systems over the weekend for people to try:

As for reactions that I witnessed, it was interesting.  Some people had never seen this equipment in person (in one hilarious moment, someone asked me where the PDP-11 was, while I was standing in front of the massive PDP-11) while others had worked at these machines for their jobs for years. One or two people claimed to have worked for Digital and played a part in the design of some of these things. And yet others were truly unaware of how truly massive and how underpowered by today’s standards these machines were.

By far, though, the most inspiring thing to me was the one attendee (I am not including pictures of them) who took to this opportunity at full bore. By the end of the event, they were actually keying in boot instructions into the keyswitches on the front of the PDP, utilizing the documentation and basically learning the absolutely core/base information an admin would need to get one of these monsters up and running, from bare metal. I’m talking hours of study to do this, to be able to work this panel properly:

To let someone have the opportunity to be able to literally reach back decades and learn a skill which is essentially being lost to the modern era – this is what drives me in being a part of computer history.  How could I not be delighted at everything that happened here?

The full set of photos is here.

Well, holy moly, people. I put out a call to help with the bandwidth bill to keep textfiles.com going while I do some life transitionary work, and didn’t you all come in droves. Donations ranged wildly, from a few bucks (thanks) to hundreds of bucks (thanks). And because of that, I am paid up for the next year.

I will not be melodramatic and say that you ’saved’ the site – it just would have been a round of pain to pay off this quarter, and I’ve experienced pain with regards to this site before. But you all took away that pain, and showed me how much the site means to you in various ways. And a lot of people just got copies of the BBS Documentary they said they were thinking of getting anyway, so I’m glad that worked out too.

Feel free to keep sending in donations, of course – I’ll just keep using it on the site and to improve things and so on. But the issues are past and I won’t have to think about the financial side of this site until well inside 2010. Thanks again, so much.