This statement is posted as-is, with no changes or editing, by Jason Scott. Comments by Jason will be in the comments section.

My Perspective on the PKARC / ARC Controversy
by Dean W. Cooper

Nov 30th, 2009

Who Am I

I am the author of the DWC archiver which was created around the same time that Phil Katz created PKARC. I corresponded at the time with several archiver authors and eventually engaged in a friendly competition with Phil to see who could create the fastest and smallest compressing archiver. At one point, Phil offered to have me work for him, but for legal reasons that never worked out.

My perspective then is as the only person to have ever matched what Phil did in optimizing and improving the LZW compression algorithm that we all copied from a magazine article.

How I Got Into This

I was intrigued by an article I read in a magazine on LZW compression and thought I might be able to write code that compressed better. I knew about the ARC program at the time and so I grabbed the compression code from the magazine and in two weeks programmed an ARC-like wrapper around it.

I was pleased with my results, as my DWC archiver ran much faster than ARC, so I decided to get onto some BBS’s and see if anybody else would like to use my program. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that Vern Buerg and Phil Katz had beat me to it. Not only did PKARC go much faster than DWC, it was also compatible with the ARC file format, and that made a huge difference.

I hadn’t realized how important file compatibility was for BBS sysops, and so my initial mistake in giving DWC its own file format resulted in it never being seriously considered as a viable contender in the archiver competition. Nevertheless, it bothered me that Phil’s program was faster than mine, so I spent my time instead working to speed up my program.

Optimizing Code

Now I happen to love optimizing code, and I rarely meet programmers who do it well, so to compete with somebody like Phil who was as fanatical as I was at optimizing was sheer joy. I worked on my code until it ran faster than his, and then he would work on his until he could beat my code, and so on until neither of us could make our code run any faster.

This took many, many hours and weeks of work. At first I had to optimize my C code to run as fast as possible, and then I switched the core routines into assembler and hand optimized them using every trick imaginable to eke out ever smaller gains in speed and compression size. We used self-modifying code and would meticulously go over ever single instruction trying to think of ways to simplify things.

It’s a bit hard to explain what it’s like working on a single instruction, worrying about a few clock cycles and trading one instruction over another because of even a single cycle in speed improvement.

I eventually beat Phil, though not by much. But the hours I spent slaving on that code, knowing Phil had to be doing exactly the same thing, ingrained in me just what level of effort Phil had put into his code and how truly unique and original it was.

And in the end, it was the speed of Phil’s code over ARC that made all the difference and why people wanted PKARC over ARC.

Portable C

But Thom Henderson had a different view of the matter. One of the things Thom claimed was that he wrote ARC to be portable and that was the reason for ARC’s lackluster speed. But Rahul Dhesi designed ZOO to be even more portable than ARC, and ZOO ran considerably faster. Likewise, my C code also ran much faster, and moreover, the assembler code was interchangeable with the C code. It was a simple matter to compile using the assembler code on MS-DOS machines and the C version on other machines. Why couldn’t Thom had done the same?

In fact, when I eventually took a look at Thom’s LZW compression code, I found he had changed it little from the code he obtained from Kent Williams. No wonder ARC was so slow. Thom apparently had never spent much time to speed it up – even though the primary reason Phil was eating into his sales was all because of PKARC’s speed.

Core Engine

For me, the significant and critical work Phil did was in his core compression code. Being ARC-file compatible made a big difference in gaining acceptance, but I suspect that if Phil had switched the file format to an incompatible format that PKARC would still have taken off like it did. Why? Simply because the speed and compression of PKARC was so much better.

I was repeatedly told by BBS sysops at the time that they would switch over to DWC – if only it was significantly faster or better at compressing. But since I was competing with Phil and not Thom, that just never was the case for me. I could only achieve a slight increase over PKARC. Phil didn’t have that problem. PKARC was clearly faster and compressed better than ARC.

So was it the name “PKARC” that made the difference, or was it the user interface Phil used? Of course not. It was PKARC’s compression size and speed.

Unfortunately, Thom seems to believe that Phil only made marginal improvements. But given that Thom never attempted to do what Phil did, it is easy to see how he simply doesn’t understand what Phil did.

My point is fairly simple. All of us (Thom, Phil and I) started with the same publicly available LZW code. But Phil and I both reworked that code over and over to such an extent that not one line of the original code remained. So while the algorithm was still LZW at heart, the implementation was entirely an original work. And given that it is the compression engine that made all the difference, it struck me as outlandish that Thom would sue Phil for copying his code.

It’s like we had all copied plans for a Pinto engine which Thom simply stuck under the hood of ARC, while Phil and I reworked and rebuilt our engines until there wasn’t anything recognizable in any aspect from the original. And given that our engines now ran like finely tuned Ferrari engines, for Thom to claim Phil stole his code was laughable.

Stealing Code

But didn’t Phil steal Thom’s code?

Well frankly, I don’t know. I never actually saw Phil’s code. I have to take Thom’s word at face value that they found his comments in Phil’s code, misspellings and all. And really, it does make some sense that Phil likely did take some of Thom’s code when it came to the file format. Perhaps he didn’t realize the legal jeopardy he was getting himself into at the time. Clearly, if Phil even took some code, no matter how minor, it was a huge mistake on his part.

Even still, the ARC format should have been an open standard, given that it was in the public’s best interest to have compatible formats among the various archivers. More striking to me is the fact the somebody could sue over the use of compatible bolts and nuts when it’s the Ferrari engine that makes all the difference.

Think of this. If Thom would have merely argued that Phil stole his file format, he would never have survived the political backlash from sysops and users. It was his allegation that Phil stole substantial aspects of his code that made Phil look like a pirate who had unfairly ripped him off.

Consider that to achieve the speeds Phil and I did, we were forced to design fairly complex file handling logic. Our compression engines were fast, but they also had to be fed as fast as we could possibly feed them. This required doing a lot of tricks with how we loaded files. Something I’m quite sure Thom never bothered to do.

In other words, I know that Phil’s code had to be very different from Thom’s even beyond the compression engine itself. Thom himself said that he would have never hired Phil after looking at Phil’s code. How is it then that Phil copied Thom’s code if it looks like code he would have never done himself?

Also consider that Thom created ARC by using quite of bit of other people’s code – and not just in the compression engine itself. So sure, the law says that the additions Thom made were his unique copyrightable work, but how significant was Thom’s actual work? What exactly did Phil even need from Thom? Isn’t the only thing that he likely needed was the code that spelled out the file format?

So yes, Thom legally owned that code and it was a mistake for Phil to just use it (presuming he did), but was Phil really suppose to pay Thom royalties just for using the ARC file format? Was Thom suppose to make lots of money off of Phil when it was Phil’s work on that Ferrari engine that is what made PKARC sell?

As it is, the eventual settlement to the lawsuit was that Phil would never again make an ARC compatible archiver. PKZIP wasn’t compatible and history has proven that Phil didn’t need it to be ARC compatible. PKARC only kept the ARC file format alive longer than it would have lasted otherwise. In a sense, Phil indirectly paid Thom royalties by keeping ARC alive and keeping it in business.

User Interface

That Thom also sued Phil over copying the user interface amazed me. We’re talking a command line program! Has anybody else ever been sued over copying the user interface of a command line program?

And ARC didn’t even have a particularly complicated command line. Nor did Phil copy it exactly. In fact, Phil used two separate programs to compress and extract, while ARC was a single program. So what was Thom thinking?

In fact, I made DWC’s command line interface much more identical to ARC. I did so on purpose! I did so because I thought users would prefer that I do so. I never imagined that I was somehow copying the look-and-feel of ARC. Who ever heard of such a thing for a command line program. I still can’t believe it.

Talking With Thom

I had been posting messages to Thom asking questions and at one point he said I should call him up and talk man-to-man. So I did. It was very enlightening.

I wrote up in detail at the time what he told me (see the end of the file here). But it all had to do with his legal rights and how he was obligated to protect them, not only for his sake, but for other shareware authors.

The problem was in how far Thom was willing to go in pressing his legal rights. It was compounded by the fact that he had released the source code to ARC and he believed that if anyone even looked at the source, then they were obligated to obtain a license from him if they then created a work that was “substantially similar” – even if the code was 100% theirs.

Given that Phil admitted to looking at Thom’s code and given that PKARC was substantially similar, that’s all Thom thought he needed to prove his case in court. Since I’m not a lawyer, I don’t know about such things, but it is depressing to me to think the law would crack down on somebody just because they happened to have seen publically available code and then went on to create a similar product – especially when the new product is so clearly better and uniquely created.

Ironies

A funny thing happened after the settlement gave Thom access and use to Phil’s code. Thom turned around and came out with a new version of ARC that at long last substantially improved on ARC’s notoriously poor performance. No wonder, as he was now using Phil’s code.

And yet Thom claimed that Phil’s acceptance of the settlement indicated that Phil felt he had “no legitimate right to [his] program”. After all, Thom asked, “why would he give up everything if he was right?”

Why indeed? Could it be that Phil had worked so long and hard on PKARC, that it had ceased to be an algorithm that he merely obtained from somebody else, that it became a part of him, and that he knew just how capable he was of coming up with an alternative that would leave all this ARC/PKARC mess behind him once and for all?

In other words, Phil had become so skilled at what he was doing, that it didn’t concern him in the least to make the concessions he did to Thom. He knew he was capable of creating a wholly new archiver. And that’s exactly what he did.

Phil’s Offer

Around the time of the settlement, Phil talked to me seriously about working with him. Unfortunately, DWC had never caught on, so I sold “exclusive” rights to the compression engine to another company, and that created potential intellectual property issues if I worked for Phil. After all, I knew in my head what I had just sold exclusive rights to, so how could I work for Phil and not allow that knowledge to somehow “leak” out?

I seriously doubt that this was a real problem, but given all that Phil had just gone through with Thom, he was gun shy to even touch another potentially tricky legal issue, and Phil’s lawyer advised him against hiring me. And so I went on a different path. Which given Phil’s alcoholism, was probably the best for me, but then I can’t say I know what the path working with Phil would have been like.

Final Thoughts

I haven’t worked on my DWC archiver since those years, but I do like to tell people how I once beat the guy who was behind the ZIP archiver. Few know of Phil Katz today. Even fewer know of PKARC (or Thom Henderson and ARC). But I do know what an incredible job Phil did in optimizing and fine-tuning the LZW algorithm.

It is sad to me that Thom felt he had to sue Phil. It is even sadder that Thom appears oblivious to what Phil accomplished.

We all have legal rights that we can fight for. What is sad is when we use those rights without significant cause to attack the highly original and unique accomplishments that are such a benefit to so many.

Finally, given what we now know of Phil’s life, it is perhaps no wonder that he couldn’t get along with Thom. But Thom wasn’t an easy guy to get along with either – well at least if you did something he disagreed with. But by suing Phil, Thom relinquished perhaps his greatest contribution to modern computing. For today, no one talks about ARC files. Everything is ZIP.

Amazing, no?

Dean W. Cooper
Tucson, AZ
dwc@usa.com

The file is downloadable here. Here’s a local copy of this file: WesternUnionStrategicPlans_1965

I don’t expect a person coming in from the cold to spontaneously read a 17-page, weirdly-scanned document without some sort of context. So let me give it that context.

This internal Western Union memo from 1965, from what I believe is either a researcher or engineer to another manager, lays out a potential future for Western Union in the coming half-century. He does an amazingly good job. In many ways it all happens, just not to Western Union.

The writer visualizes a future where there will be a need for an Information Utility, not unlike the utilities we have for water, phone, and gas. With this new Utility in place, a network of computers and electronics will provide storage of knowledge for government, businesses and education. It will allow people to utilize this growing network of data to go shopping, send all range of messages, rent cars and book travel, leveraging the current multi-thousand collection of Western Union offices to take on the Bell System’s eventual move into this inevitable realm.

Personally, I think it’s fascinating reading – to watch this guy grappling with concepts from the point of view of the past that now dominate many of our lives and waking hours. Check out, please, page 3, where a world where all sorts of entities know vast amounts of information at a moment’s notice: “Schools and colleges can pool and exchange information and make the libraries of each available to one another; airlines, railroads, bus and truck lines can keep in closest touch with passenge freight, weather, waybills and other pertinent data; business generall can expedite sales production, payroll and other functions – this list is virtually endless.”

Imagine coming up with all these ideas for your bosses, having to indicate that the future of the company was not just in a few data networks in the sense of your telegraph history, but a whole new reboot of your infrastructure and a total rethinking of what your company stood for.  It is not easy to determine the name of this person or group of people who assembled this report, but I hope they lived a good long life and saw that, after a fashion and without Western Union being at the forefront, all these ideas came true.

Well, okay, except this one: “…no matter how many telephones are installed for use by the general public, or private wire and other systems put into service for business, press, government, etc, there will always be a substantial continuing need for the public telegraph services which Western Union alone provides.” Oops. Well, still, A+, guys.

I promise you, it’s worth a pleasant holiday read.

A big thank-you to Phil Lapsley for letting me know about this document, which was pointed out to him by Michael Ravnitzky. And a bigger thank you to the crowd of people who scanned the original Western Union documents.

This is an entry about how that image happened, what was involved in it, some thoughts about it, and a general announcement or two related to it.

In September, my company I’d worked for for between 9-13 years (depending on how count) laid me off. It was done in a perfunctory fashion by a personality-lacking manager placed above me by a dull organization long past pumping the lifeblood of interesting new projects or containing metrics related to respect or pride. That it happened wasn’t a surprise – the ham-fisted communications from the new manager along the lines of “can you tell XXX about everything you do” and “I am coming onsite [for the first time since you were placed under my management a year ago] and it is mandatory I see you” wasn’t exactly a twist ending. But there was kind of a twist ending – once free of the company, I realized how I’d had two lives, one as a system administrator and one as a computer historian/pundit, and how the difference in emotional/intellectual nourishment between these two lives was the difference between a ripe apple and rock salt. It was obvious to me that there was no way I could go back to that.

So I began the process of looking at doing computer history full-time, or at least having a job that would allow me lots of slack in doing computer history, and that, horrors of horrors, would be proud was in their ranks instead of ashamed. A couple bites happened here and there, but it was obvious that money was going to become a problem sooner rather than later and I might end up making the choice based on economic need rather than a place being the right logical step in this planned new direction of my life.

I’d heard of Kickstarter months earlier, mostly in relation to being a slick version of a couple of fundraising sites that existed before it, and then when one or two of the projects seemed pretty interesting and worth reading about. I was mostly, at the time, concentrating on the projects themselves and not the funding service behind it – which is probably how it should be. If a band has a bunch of tracks I want to listen to, it would probably be bad if I didn’t remember the band’s tracks but remembered that great album playing website they were on. Or maybe it’d be good, if I wanted to eventually use that great playing website for my own band.

So towards the middle of October, I considered the possibility of running a fundraiser off of Kickstarter, maybe using it to fund some short project or otherwise bring in some money so I could work on whatever while looking for “real” income somewhere else. Eventually, however, I hit upon a real weird idea: what if I just use it to fund me?

This really isn’t what Kickstarter was designed for, if the current and past fundraisers are any indication – usually someone has a thing or a production-based-goal, like a record deal, a tour, a book, or an invention. You agree to fund this thing, and then you get the thing at the end, plus whatever the rewards were.

In my case, I listed all the fun stuff I’d done over the last ten years, and then said that if people funded me, I would do more of it full time for at least a few months. This was like entering a talent show and saying my talent was winning talent shows.

Kickstarter is invite-only and continues to be – this NY Times Weblog Entry about this article about it has people in the comments quite unhappy that this was and is the case. (A claim was made it would go public “soon” and that was three months ago.) I called out for someone to send me an invite, and I got one, and am very appreciative, and while I am lucky and had someone willing to do that on the strength of my asking, I realize that even this first step is annoyingly out of reach for a good number of folks. (Other fundraising sites like Feed the Muse are mentioned, which was informative.) But in I was, and thanks to the nice person who let me in.

Once on and in the inside, the interface is very slick (there’s the word again and it keeps applying). You title your fundraiser, come up with the goal, the amount of time to reach the goal, your pitch/proposition, and any multi-media attachments you think you need. It’s a little like working on a prospectus, with all the attendant worries of getting the right tone and composing the right period of time and the right amount. I thought about what I’d like my number to be, that would make me drop out of full-time work for a bunch of months, and I came up with $25,000.

So let’s talk about that number for a moment. For some people, the idea of living on $25k for a few months is like riding a jet pack that burns money over orphanages, urinating on them while drinking champagne.  For others, this amount of money was a borderline insanity in thinking it would last any amount of time at all. Did I forget to mention that we all live at different income levels? I wanted a number that would guarantee 4 months of sabbatical out of me. I hope it’ll last a lot longer, and that I could get income through other methods that would be within the scope of computer history. That was kind of the idea.

In fact, that’s the idea that I didn’t even totally comprehend when I began the fundraiser: I was asking people to fund a start-up. This start-up, Jason Scott Historian, would be an entity doing all sorts of computer history work and probably lose money doing it for a while. Over time, though, more stuff would come out of it (GET LAMP being an example) that might support the start-up, and unique situations that might not have popped up doing a month or two of unemployment (like working as a researcher in computer history for a foundation or being paid as a speaker on tour) would possibly make themselves known. We’ll see how that all will pan out, but that was definitely the idea.

So I did all the reading (there’s a lot of reading you can do at the Kickstarter Blog about what works, what doesn’t, and how people go about stuff), and then carefully set up my pitch, and let it out into the world. I mentioned it on twitter and my weblog.

Within two days, I had $9000.

OK, so let’s just make that clear. In two days, people came together and just threw money at me in buckets for suggesting this out-there idea. They loved it. If I had been conservative, and set it at $10k, it likely would have been funded in 48 hours. That is humbling.

Somewhere around $11,000 or so, I hit a brick wall. I’d mentioned it on my weblog and twitter and anything after that seemed pretty creepy. I didn’t want to push people and keep harping on the subject. I watched a few days go by with probably $100-$200 of pledges come in. I tried to think of what to do next.

That’s how I came up with “Scottathon”. I’d get on Ustream for five hours and talk about myself. I announced it (although I failed to give final details on the weblog) and I told people about it on my twitter feed and the kickstarter account (you can post updates on your fundraiser, and contact the backers with the news you put a new update in).

I made the mistake of driving 400 miles that day, dropping stuff off many crates of computer history where the Information Cube would be living, so when I got back to start the fundraiser, I was hella tired, to say the least. The plan had been for it to go for six hours. I only lasted about five, but I did get to talk about what I was up to, show off some historical items, and interact with a few dozen people (and a few hundred that stopped by). For this work, I got another $600 in pledges.

Now, that may not sound great, but here’s the thing. Doing this got people to make twitter postings about it, and, I think, got the attention of a number of other people.

The next day, Jeff Atwood wrote this weblog entry.  This highly-complimentary entry on me, my projects, and the fundraiser got me scads of attention. I am talking thousands and thousands of dollars of pledges came in. It was all due to Jeff getting the word out – this entry was critical to taking things to the next step. So thank you, Jeff.

Naturally, not everyone was completely enamored at the “Jason asks everyone to give him money” thing.  I was struck at this judgmental thread speculating about my life, economics, and personality.  But instead of focusing on this as a negative, I would instead like to point out that this sort of thing was a rarity, when it really shouldn’t have been. The fact that so many people heard this pitch and responded so positively, using it as a platform to compliment me or tell me how I’d affected them over the years, was quite breathtaking.

The only overall negative of this whole process, if I can call it one, was how this fundraising really can absorb your life if you don’t watch it. It can become a sort of job – after all, the more work you do to promote and update it, the more actual money you get – and money can be quite the motivator. I found I lost some hours here and there checking up on the “number” and wondering what I could do to get the number up faster and more definitively. It had the potential to become as unhealthy as the day job I’d been hating months before. I don’t know if I have advice that would help that, since you do need to rattle cups and you need time to let momentum build up, but it’s a danger, like staying up too many nights can disconnect you from daily life and working for long hours can disconnect you from your friendships. It’s something to keep in mind.

Every once in a while, a whopper of a donation would come in. Seven people donated more than $750 to me. A few donated $1000. Two donated $1337. You can imagine how I would blink watching the thousands column jump within a short time of previously checking the total. A couple of these people were close friends or acquaintances. A couple, though, I didn’t know in the least. In fact, a lot of people donating amounts like $100, $200, $500… I had no idea who they were.  Maybe we had exchanged e-mail sometime (I decided not to go into stalker mode over this, so I didn’t check). But the fact is, I saw their contributions and it made a difference.

A lot of old friends, people I’d done stuff with, people I remembered talking to, came out of the woodwork to contribute. Like some sort of “this is your life” situation, it was like hundreds of familiar faces smiling, waving, and dropping money into my hat. Also a highlight.

When all was said and done, I hit my goal five days before the deadline. Five days! For most of the time, I was listed as one of Kickstarter’s most popular projects, topping some of lists for days at a time. I don’t know what people finding this whole thing out that way thought of it. It must have been weird to find a ‘send me money’ project where it appeared, against all logic, that this tard was actually getting money.

So success was mine. I don’t know if this is really a “how-to” sort of explanation, and as friends pointed out, I’d spent a decade in the public eye before doing this, so I wasn’t coming out of nowhere. But it worked, for me.

So now I am free. I am liberated. I am delighted. Life is different for me now, and the race is now on to actually accomplish all sorts of things during these months, start projects, finish other long-term ones, and generally make the trust given into me pay back for people.

And that’s just what I intend to do.

Thanks again, everyone. My life, at 39, just took a 90 degree turn and I am loving it. Watch out.

This Friday, I was at my brother’s compound helping oversee the installation of a secret project, now revealed: The Information Cube.

That’s my little brother and the driver, discussing the best way to offload this monster onto the property. At 40 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet, this is a storage container which has seen some world travel, and which, for at least a year or so, will be the official repository for the contents of PAPER.TEXTFILES.COM.

A 20′ storage container is much more manageable, but the difference between 20′ and 40′ was $10 a month, and that’s a little hard to pass up.

Once we dropped it down, things looked even more imposing:

For the record, a storage container makes a sound like BBBBBBBBBBBUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN when you drop it off the back of a truck. As you also might notice, it’s kind of just sitting out there in the middle of the lot, which isn’t the ideal place, so that’s when it came down to little bro to use one of his vehicles to fix things:

Yes, that’s right. A bulldozer. We have a bulldozer. And a backhoe. And a wide variety of other earth moving equipment. What I’m saying is, don’t fuck with us or you get a free moat one night.

Storage containers are neat. It’s one thing to see them stacked at docks when you drive by or to walk by one when you’re on your way somewhere else, but it’s another deal altogether when it’s yours. This one is mine, or, I should say, is mine thanks to all the generous donations of the sabbatical and some other money I had saved up. This is all part of making my computer history work real. This is the start of an empire, a huge, cubic, green empire. (More thank yous to my supporters, shortly.)

The side of a storage container gives you all sorts of crazy information:

For the folks at home who don’t own or operate a storage container, the “Tare Weight” is “Weight when there’s nothing in there”, in this case 8.470 pounds. As you can also see, it has 2,360 cubic feet of capacity, which is also nice and solid, an excellent amount to do work in. Here’s what it looks like inside, without stuff:

And here’s what it looked like after we loaded in the first 100 crates (!) of material or so:

There’s a bunch of computer equipment, additional material and such that needs to go in here, and then I’ll be resorting and better quantizing these crates, including which crate location various items are residing – in other words, running it like a real library. I will open it up for appointments as needed, although if people simply need a specific item listed in the collection for a reason, I’m up to discussing that as well. I think it’s the right thing to do, and this whole process is going to make it easier for me to do my work.

This is a big, crazy thing, and it had to be done, and I appreciate how it might surprise people I’d move so fast so broadly after the Sabbatical hit success, but that’s what it’s about, right? Showing what I’m up to? Well, there you go.

I just rented a massive metal box of computer history!

I’m going to wrap up the fundraiser during the day tomorrow, at 2pm EST, on ustream.tv. Called “Scottacon II: The Thankening”, it’ll be two hours of fun in a to-be-announced filming location. You’ll be able to see it at this location.

I’ll be elaborating on what this all means during tomorrow’s event, and of course in this weblog.

It’s been an amazing month and it deserves a proper entry, which will be coming shortly. Until then, see you tomorrow!

My talk I gave at DEFCON 17 is now available.

It talks about the legal case I was involved in in which, that’s right, I was sued along with a few others for 2 billion dollars. This is quite unusual compared to a lot of my talks, because some fire code crap meant that my audience had to leave the room and then come back and so by the time we got to starting, it was 20 minutes into an hour presentation. My solution? Jack everything up to 11, and so this is probably the most manic and fast speaking I’ve done in a public speaking situation.

I really like the new video + slides approach DEFCON took this year – that really gets all the information across. And it looks great!

People might be surprised to see me talking with slides, but I do use them now and again, and this presentation was more entertaining with illustration.

Simply go here to download the talk in video+slides, slides only, and audio.

Oh, and I’m all up for speaking engagements in the coming year, so feel free to contact me if you need more profane historical ranting for your birthday party or conference.

Update: I uploaded it to Vimeo for instant gratification.

That Awesome Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars from Jason Scott on Vimeo.

In the thematic family of my collection of  Under Construction and Mail GIFs from Geocities, let me introduce yet another: NETSCAPE THEN!

Much in the same way that the early days of Geocities are quickly lost to time, so is it with the early days of the corporatization of browsers, the transition from academic and hobbyist realms into pure “internet startup” mode, when money was the goal and doing so in a way that was the most impressive.

Netscape, the first prominent browser company, was partially created by scooping the intellectual heart out of the NCSA Mosaic production. Its history has been covered to death in a lot of locations that are perhaps not actively sought out, but it’s a history you should be acquainting yourself with if you’re a student of web history. If I may be so bold to make a suggestion, you can do no better than to hear the rantings of Jamie Zawinski. A programmer with a wonderful perspective on life and willing to write it out, Jamie was keeping a weblog long before the money idiots got involved in the concept, and he’s kept it all accessible.

While I happen to think all of his entries are brilliant, with a willingness to say his peace out regardless of who it bites the hand of, here are the ones that are relevant to getting a feel for Netscape’s early days, heights, triumphs, and despairing ending.

• The Netscape Dorm
• Tent of Doom
• Blow Me
• Really Bad Attitude
• Nomo Zilla
• Netscape and AOL
• Netscape and AOL/Time Warner
• Fortune

OK, fine, one that isn’t in theme: I think Corleone is the first and last word in grounding yourself and your friendships in time of great, unexpected success.

Among the things that Netscape did at this dawn of browsers was try to build a really strong identity/brand around the “N” Logo, and a blue-green color scheme. It was everywhere. And when different browsers came up, we saw a lot of really interesting efforts on the parts of various parties to make their brand even stronger. Ultimately, as we all know, Microsoft broke the law and both used their browser as a free default wrap-in to their OS and also modified their OS in various service packs to make Netscape products function worse. We all know that, right?

Netscape, of course, was sure to have the same problems if it had lived longer than it did as a separate company, as Yahoo now has. But by both dying off young and the brilliant hack of the released open-source Mozilla browser, it had a permanent effect on the world beyond its own lifetime. The name Netscape is still around, but what it labels is nothing like what was.

The  buttons you see in this collection were Netscape’s attempt to “brand” the internet as a place that needed Netscape browsers to run, and which pushed for you to go and grab the newest version of Netscape and join the world. It has always been the case that major browser changes mean major website changes, and while now it’s things like faster loading and the use of PNGs, it was once the ability to center and the introduction of CSS. The more things change, the more the same change changes the same things. Or something like that.

Again, I don’t think it’s my place to be the history guy for the specific experiences of working at companies like Netscape, but I hope through little exhibits like this, people will assemble stories, tales, and maybe people at the companies making a difference now will take jwz’s approach to keeping track of themselves and the life they’re living, for later generations.

Hey, remember those MIDI backgrounds so popular on some websites over the years? Sometimes the songs were great. Sometimes they really weren’t. For some people, the sound of “My Heart Will Go On” playing over a memorial site or “Crazy” (by Patsy Cline) playing over your personal weblog page was the height of tacky. For others, it was an initiation to tearing up and smiling while you read. Without a doubt, it certainly has led to millions of times, all throughout the world, of someone finding out the hard way how high their sound systems were turned up.

Naturally, a lot of the people using Geocities would have been partial to using MIDI, just as they were partial to using backgrounds or flashing animated GIFs or, for that matter, anything striking that got their page to be unique and special.  In the interim period of time, we’ve had lots of ‘designers’ and aesthetic princes declare what we “should” and “shouldn’t” do, but back when anything went, anything did.

I’ve been putting a bunch of runs through on the Geocities data acquired so far, and pulling out thematic collections. I’ve assembled one of all these MIDI songs. Update: I’ve been informed some of this archive (a handful) are mp3 files mis-labelled. Sorry about that! Consider them a bonus.

MIDI is a very interesting format, with a very cool history, one told by others with great ability. I won’t duplicate those efforts. Like most formats, when done well, it can be done really well. When not done well, it’s easier to do but your audience pays for it and you bring the general quality down. Some of the files in this collection are great. Some are really awful. All are historical to some degree.

Here’s the link to a Pirate Bay Torrent. I’ve railed about how torrents are not the be-all end-all of file distribution, but for short-term bursts, it’s a great way to go. This collection’s about 370mb, compressed. It’s about 1.5 gigabytes uncompressed. It would take, I think, months to play all this music.

Let the songs begin.

EXTRA BONUS SECTION

Since I had the thousands of duplicated MIDI files in one place, I decided to find out which ones were most popular. With the caveat that I only worked with the Neighborhoods-era (pre-Yahoo) set, and of course many sites had disappeared before I ran my scripts, here are the top ten most popular songs that you could have show up on a Geocities site!

• 10. The 2001 theme (“Also sprach Zarathustra”) by Richard Strauss
• 9. “Hero” by Mariah Carey and Walter Afanasieff
• 8. “Crazy” by Willie Nelson, made most famous by Patsy Cline
• 7. “Candle in the Wind” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin
• 6. “Star Wars Theme” by John Williams
• 5. “Mission Impossible Theme (Remix)” by Lalo Schifrin and Unknown
• 4. “My Heart Will Go On” (theme from “Titanic”) by James Horner and Will Jennings
• 3. “Imagine” by John Lennon
• 2. “I’ve Got Friends (in Low Places)” by DeWayne Blackwell, Earl Bud Lee and Garth Brooks
• 1. “Theme from X-Files” by Mark Snow

Three explorers set out. One wanted to rescue comrades. One wanted to talk to new people. One wanted to meet people and bring back knowledge.

They never met, but that’s to be expected – they set out at different times, using different ships, to different destinations.

One was Robert Wilson Andrews of the Kilauea, a steamship bound out to rescue a shipwrecked crew. This voyage, from Honolulu to Ocean Island, took four months (December 1870 to April 1871), during which time two ports of call were made. Mr. Andrews was the ship’s engineer, and along the way he noted the ship’s travel, the sights seen, and a smattering of the activity by the crew in their journey:

Friday 6th {Date: 1871-01-06} – slowed down at 2:30 A.M. Said to have sighted land at 3:30; and turned away from the island at 3:30, and were carried so far westward, that it was 8:30 before we cast anchor in Midway I. inner harbor.  Four boats and a gang of men were immediately set to coaling. The weather was very propitious. Mr. Roberts went ashore, and turned over a turtle upon his back. Had all night in; though steam was kept up to 20 lbs. continually.

Journeys were long and arduous, with sleep schedules affected by the ship’s needs and the requirements of the ever-hungry coal-burning engine. Even in this short passage, the fact is that the land sighting was at 3:30am and five hours later, at 8:30am, do they stop off at this island, an island that you, not unlike a god, have visited through a single link in seconds.  Weather is a concern, along with all the attendant needs of a months-long journey and the health and continued functioning of the crew. At the bottom of this logbook page is a clipping, a classified ad taken out by the rescued crew members, profusely thanking the crew of the Kilauea and to “express a grateful sense of obligation to the authorities at this place for the prompt and effective measures taken by them on our behalf, feeling, as we do, that but for their immediate and humane action, we in common with all upon Ocean Island, must have endured very severe suffering and perhaps a lingering death.”

Our second explorer sets off about a century later. His name and age is a combination of lost to time and held from view. While he might, on cursory first glance, seem to be more a pirate than a ship’s engineer, his travels are worldwide and his logbook just as detailed and informative.

His ship is also, we see, a mite smaller than a coal-burning schooner, but it is a hand-built vessel, prepared to sail that most unusual of seas, a place that called itself The Bell System. Already a vast worldwide network and at the time of this explorer’s travels increasingly automated, it was, and continues to likely be, the world’s largest computer. Its ports of call for this explorer are no less exotic, although many of the most interesting aspects are spoken – the voice of operators, confused at this interloper visiting them. The voices of other explorers, meeting at ports of call in the back rooms and equipment areas of all manner of buildings. The voices of whoever dared pick up the strange overnight call, confused as to who could possibly be calling at this hour, and even further confused why the initial sound upon picking up is an echoing series of clicks.

Some choice pages from this explorer’s notebook:

This is hard-won information indeed – all manner of phone numbers, noted interesting locations and voices, and finally the keys to the kingdom, helping to place these journeys in the 1971-1972 period: the calling card code (cc code), which showed the formula for determining what combination of numbers would charge telephone bills to a given number. This was passed from explorer to explorer, and recounted in journals such as TAP, utilized in all sorts of ways.

This explorer’s efforts, during his college days, are myriad and also not confined by the hours – in fact, late nights and overnight efforts are rewarded, with points from across the world being awake while contemporaries and local inhabitants are not. Numbers here point to embassies, businesses, and even individuals, noted for their accents or names and with additional numbers of friends and associates, no doubt intrigued that someone from so far would make the effort to contact them. It is an instantaneous trip now, but communication even in the 1970s is an exotic experience from across the world.

Our third explorer is but a child, a mere ten years later than the second explorer, but harnessing technology and power only dreamed of by the others.

His name is Rob O’Hara, and his journeys are primarily in his home state and occasionally beyond. His ship is a computer, one of many in use during this time: a Commodore 64, build sturdy and dependable and the best-selling home computer of all time. Geography is meaningless here, save what concerns there might be for telephone charges – his ports of call have names like The Bloody Booger, Realm of Magic, and The Dream Palace. They, too, are often maintained by children, but the urge to explore and share is strong. In his notebooks, Rob notes not just ports of call, the BBSes, but friends he has met, names he has known, thoughts on what to do next. As these journeys are layered among multiple days and weeks (and also during the late hours of the night), the ink changes in nature, from scrawled pencil to red markers to Sharpies and whatever else he has handy as a new fact comes to him at his console.

He lists potential trading partners, people he might swap his software plunder with. He notes systems he has the numbers for and no other information, showing what he has found out so far with the potential for further knowledge later. It is worth noting, at this late stage, the inability of his computer to both conduct these travels and allow him to write down his thoughts – we are long past the stage where this information would not now be cut and pasted into a separate document, or, even more likely, logged by the browser itself and saved to a centrally located place to share with others.  The inclination to utilize a notebook to save this information has rapidly disappeared for most.

In a book Rob later wrote about his travels, he mentions a geographic exploit he utilized at the time, travelling with his family from Oklahoma to Illinois and arranging for membership on bulletin boards a couple weeks before. By submitting to validation and sign-up procedures a few weeks before, he had the operators of these boards convinced he was a distant trader logging in. But then upon making the journey to Chicago, he could log into these boards for a pittance of a local call and bring back to Oklahoma his bounty and the attendant glory therein.

The age of the notebook is rapidly passing us. I know it still has places in many circles, and that for some, the function of the notebook will never go away, replaced by weblogs and online diaries and bookmark lists; but the nature of these written-out sketches of crashing ideas overlaying each other and betraying time, emotion and reasoning as it bleeds through a wood pulp page is almost gone. We are going to lose something there, as we have already lost so much.

All three explorers left their notebooks for us to regard.

I thank all three.

This happens more than it should: I am engaged in a roundabout fashion with a person or persons whose work parallels/compliments mine, I acknowledge they’re doing good work, whatever it is, but I don’t just sit down and sift through their work. I have no idea why this happens. Jealousy? Fear of copying good ideas? Laziness? One possibility, as weird as it seems, is that a lot of times I look at other efforts and, while I like the effort, I see so much I would improve, that my endless meddling would result in lost friends and incrementally better projects. Best to just do my own thing over here and not smash around in other pillow forts. It’s obviously something I need to work through if I’m going to be doing this sort of thing all the time.

Therefore, let me make up for lost time and tell you that Know Your Meme is about as perfect as it could possibly be, both the episodic video series and the site itself.  About the only thing I would add is an export function to turn entries into PDFs/ZIPs/etc., and that’s mostly because I’m an asshole about such things. The structure is just how I would envision it, the ability to accept expansion and the curated/moderated/beta-release structure all works in its favor. I’m just damned impressed.

In the inspiration of that, I’m going to write a very intense entry about a very general thing and I hope that Know Your Meme and other students of the passed-along idea will utilize it as needed.

A sidebar about how I tend to write my historical entries. To write truly comprehensive entries would be something that would make me disappear for weeks at a time and result in only slight improvement over a solid first draft. Therefore, I don’t mean to imply I am laying down the final word, just trying to bring the whole conversation lifted upwards a bit. It’s my hope that others, or maybe myself in a future time, will then take this foundation and build upon it even more. This is how I tend to write all of my stuff – and I’ve had a lot of conversations with people doing research or writing stuff where I go “here’s a half-dozen data points you should probably track down”.

So let’s talk about spelling things wrong and how that got to be cool.

Let’s jettison the 20th century and let’s go way back. It’s nice and all to tinkle around the various last few decades and play pin-the-tail-on-the-start-time but if you want some good beginning trends in human behavior, you just have to wander back a ways. Since you’re lazy and want to click around rather than walk a ways and argue with librarians, let’s all visit the Duke University Advertising Collection, which has some awesome wares. Here’s a timeline of Advertising History, and the Emergence of Advertising in America.

Let’s not pretend for a moment that these are the beginning of the central story; mankind has an awesome continuum of “Hey, motherfuckers, come over here and buy my shit” that goes back well past a few thousand years ago. But usually such advertisements were the province of attracting passers-by or utilizing a system of demonstrations, or a range of functions that weren’t just words on a page. (I could see an argument that currency, for example, functions as an advertisement of a local or distant power structure or king/emperor/superior).  What I’m getting at here is the idea of the whole of the engaging force enticing you to pay attention utilizing only words and pictures.

First of all, you have to make your stuff look awesome. And this is awesome:

This roughly-1885-era advertisement for a Positive Cure For All Female Diseases Every Lady Can Treat Herself is one of many thousands of a standard of advertising where all manner of information and opportunity is presented. Just glancing over this simple specimen, you see an offer to do remote by-mail medical consultation (with free sample included), and a warning that you should avoid the minefield of Fraudulant Imitations of this, the Famous Specific Orange Blossom. This ad/leaflet is meant to grab your attention, ladies and provide god-knows-what blend of cocaine, alcohol and whatsis to cure what ails you. Send 2c stamp.

You could blow a summer vacation and two retirements on this collection, believe me. Let me quickly clarify that I don’t just mean the beauty of drawing or even of the fonts, which are pretty great in themselves – I am focusing on the language of this advertising. Observe, please:

This Egyption Regulator Tea will remove indigestion, that Curse of the American People and that from which CONSTIPATION and all other Physical miseries arise, and which will be overcome by the user of this Wonderful but Harmless remedy. It is Worth Its Weight In Gold To Dyspeptic, Debilitated Men to Wornout, Nervious Women, to Mothers of Peevish and Sickly Children, to Girls just budding into Womanhood, to Sufferers from Defective Nutrition, TO ALL CORPULENT PEOPLE.

This is not just simple language and recounting of facts – this is as embroidered a text as you’re likely to find, meant to pull you into its hypnotic realm and leave your head nodding, nodding an affirmative to both its claims and your need to acquire it. It is, like a brightly colored snake, both beautiful, and terrifying. It is also a form of language we don’t utilize much anymore, a notable exception being Jerry “Tycho” Holkins of Penny Arcade, who uses it frequently- I think even a cursory glance of one of his weblog entries shows this to be the case. It’s so out of place a construction as to be a unique style in the gaming pundit industry, and it’s not hard to see, looking at the roots of it, why it might hold interest for people used to more contemporary come-ons.

Among the documents in the Duke library of advertising is a very self-serving book entitled “The J.W.T. Book”, which implies it’s a book on how to do advertising but is, itself, a massive advertisement for the J. Walter Thompson company, which produces advertising. At the time this book was put out, 1908, JWT had been doing advertising for forty years. The advice in the book, by the way, is relatively bunk, because it implies all sorts of high-minded morals and principles in advertising copy and creation, when in fact anything tended to go and avoiding the stupid and malinformed as an audience would have been economic suicide. But I just want attention directed to this chapter:

Here, 101 years ago, is a discussion about the importance of a trademark. They give the example of  Huyler’s Candy and the unique signature logo of the company as being a critical part of the success of the company. (You may be excused if you do not know the Huyler’s candy brand – it was purchased in the 1920s by the Schulte company, which had a chain of stores that expanded out into general stores and then renamed itself into the D. A. Schulte, Inc., Fashion Haberdashery for Men & Women and eventually became the General Stores Corporation and went bankrupt in the 1950s.)

The core idea in this little fake-book is that trademark, specific identity, and branding (they just call it the trademark) is as valuable as the factory that makes the product, and the good will around a product represents the central pillar of the motives of advertising; as the book indicates, a young gentleman of 24 who has known of a product since they were 12 will consider a company as bedrock an enterprise as George Washington and Bunker Hill.

Therefore, it is incumbent upon you to have a unique trademark.

It is also important that your trademark be defensible.

The easiest way to produce a unique, trademarkable name is to use a made-up or misspelled word.

Some of these, like coca-cola, are combinations of what the product is, included in the name. Others, like Uneeda Biscuit, and Heluva Good, are names that evoke a reaction. I will confess to having a strange fascination with corporate naming and activity timelines and trivia, such as knowing that “Motorola” is a combination of “Motor” and “Victrola” and was basically the name for a car radio made by the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation which they later changed their name to.

So, basically, made-up words in this context are a result of legal and protective incentives, allowing companies to control the burgeoning wordspace as later ones would come to control domain names.

Let’s set that aside and go into slang.

Slang which consists of screwed-up/shortened versions of actual phrases and words is endemic for many hundreds of years as well. Again, let’s stay around Industrial Age territory, and pull up some examples of words which have compounded meanings all wrapped into a short form. For example, scapegrace, one who escapes the grace of God, which splits into rascal, scalawag, and scoundrel. Words based on one person’s antics result in terms like Bowdlerize (edit out perceived obscenity or tastelessness for a more general public) and Boycott (agree to not use a service or business or endeavor to force changes in same). Language, in other words, is very permeable, very able to adapt itself and get the “word out” about a new way of looking at things. The field of Etymology is obsessed with these lineages and bursts of usage, utilizing citations from popular cultural locations such as mass media and legal/political documents to produce a history of words. It’s something I dabble in but wouldn’t pretend to be an authority on beyond what I’m doing here, that is, putting up little flags and markers.

In the talk I gave at ROFLcon I spoke about the origins of “OK” as being from “Oll Korrect” and called it a misspelling fad. As this column indicates, the grounds are much more fertile and rich around the creation of this term and the usage of “Oll Korrect”, implying (as one explanation) it coming from insulting spelling of Irish brogue to reference Irish groups involved in the Van Buren election. Regardless, the malleability of language both spoken and printed is demonstrated here.

Newspaper classifieds and Telegrams have similar properties inasmuch as being charged by the word. You buy the space, and then you do what your best within it. (If you want a history of classified ads, you can read this high-school-level report on their history or listen to the author of a book about them).  By charging via the word, you end up with an instant reductive language that is utilized to get rid of the cruft, the stuff we put in to be clearer to each other but which, in a pinch, we don’t need. Hence you might get a phrase like “SWF BBW 29yrs old 38 H breasts. 5feet tall. Lots of curves. Looking for NSA fun. Blonde hair, blue eyes”. We’re now so used to personals references that most of us catch the meaning of what’s being said here, even if the definitions are slightly off. For example, you might read it as “Single White Female, a Big Beautiful Woman, 29 years old, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, with a size 38-H bustline and five feet tall, has a curved outline and is looking for a romantic/sexual encounter with no strings attached.” Or maybe you read it as “Overweight girl wishes to have a series of disastrous one-night stands followed by crying into a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Ice cream. Warning: self-perception issues are at play”. Either works. The point is, you end up with a mass of information encoded into smaller packet-words.

In the telegraph/telegram industry, I learned from the wonderful book The Victorian Internet, there was a big deal of making huge ten-letter words, like PSDREPOWSF, and worse, to encode an enormous amount of information into them, literally on the level of “please purchase 1200 bushels of corn from our Chicago supplier to truck to the Indianapolis depot”. The book cites a legal case where a letter was mis-entered and a wildly excessive amount of an item was purchased, costing a business dearly. The court found that the business was being a cheap asshole and found in favor of the telegraph company. The moral of this story is that as soon as we invent a time machine we have to go back and explain Cyclical Redundancy Checking to them. Hey, what do you mean, “patent spark plugs”?

So overloading words with double meanings and triple meanings via spelling changes, compound contraction and the like is well in effect before we get up to… well, let’s skip over to military slang.  How about that.

Military slang is a much more efficient set of terms for frequently encountered situations. With the same brutality encapsulated in the making of war, comes the repurposing and changing of language to suit situations. Off the top of my head, I think of FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition), Top Brass (or The Brass, from brass emblems worn by officers) and Third Man (to go too far, referring to the third person to light a cigarette in a trench and get killed by a sniper, the first and smokers allowing the sniper to notice and aim, respectively).  And again, there’s an excellent book out there. If you’re in the cheap seats, this awesome weblog entry will do nicely.

The first casualty of war, in other words, is language, utilized as needed as a protection against the horrors of the reality of the situation, as a short-hand form to save time, and as a way to get complicated concepts that frequently pop up into the minds of your audience/comrades so the team can move quickly to the next confronting issue. It is, essentially, the same shorthand that any industry, be it printmaking, fishing, or brewing, finds itself conjuring up over many years and in many situations. The difference, I think, is the self-degradation and insulting nature of military slang, meant to give a bit of rebellion and farce to the proceedings of a situation where the command chain is all.

I would contend, and stick with me here, that the situation is not unlike a lot of intensive online life right now. Come on, stick with me, we got this far. In contemporary electronic discourse, time is of the essence because of the flood of new concepts, the back and forth between strangers, and the propensity for weird and yet commonplace occurrences to pull away your time and imagination. You have to use terms in various ways because otherwise you’d drown telling people that you thought someone was being dishonest in their propositions for the purposes of gaining attention and wasting time, when it’s so much easier to say they’re trolling for victims, or just trolling.

It’d be nice if we could see how people first reacted to being online, without doing so because of military/academic/corporate requirements but simply to engage with other people. Oh wait, we can.

We’re lucky, because Ward Christensen kept the printouts from the first months of the first BBS, and I have transcribed a lot of them. Here’s some choice odd spellings from that time:

 I AM A MEMBER OF THE NORTHWEST COMPUTER CLUB. JUST
      FOUND OUT ABOUT YOUR NEAT SYSTEM FROM HOMEBREW N/L
      AND WROTE AN ARTICLE ON IT FOR OUR N/L. WE HAVE
      A SIMILAR CAPABILITY ON A LOCAL TIMESHARE SYSTEM,
      BUT NOT PUBLIC. I AM AMAZED THAT YOU CAN GET SO MUCH
      THRUPUT ON ONE PHONE LINE! LOTS OF SUCCESS.

“Thruput” and “N/L” for “Newsletter” are interesting here.

[ Randy Suess Breaks into Chat ]

       - RANDY????

       - YES

       - I HAD CALL FROM FRIEND OF YOURS ABOUT HP2000

       - YES HE IS K00L

I have no idea why this guy used “K00l” instead of “Cool” here. He just did. There were no predecessors for the change; it just happened. That’s in 1978.

Now, let’s go to a printout I have from 1984. At this point, teenagers, who have been active since the 1979-1980 era and are growing in significant numbers, are all over the bulletin boards, in many cases pushing out the older users who had come before them.

>>> BY: APPLE ASSASSIN

PERSONALLY,I DONT LIKE BOOT TRACING... ONE OF THE
VERY BEST AND EASYEST WAYS TO CRACK A DISK WITH QUASI NORMAL DOS IS TO USE
MINI DEMUFFIN... IF ANY OF U WANT THIS PROG EMAIL ME...
  *NOTE*
        FOR SOME STRANGE REASON (THE RWTS IS SCRWEY) IT WOUNT CRACK 3.3P SHIT.

                                                LATER -1.1
                                                        A.A

To this end, you can see that Apple Assassin can barely functionally spell. I count five words spelled wrong, including the use of “U” for “you”. “Prog” is short for program; we use “App” now, short for “Application”. I am sure that “1.1″ means something at the end means something, but I’d have to spend way too much time finding another citation. And just to be fair to the people who wrote these long-ago messages, text-editors were nowhere near as sophisticated as they are now, and so it was rather painful and annoying to go back and edit your words. As a result, we’re talking write-once-and-save for the messages, meaning spelling errors just have to take it like a bitch.

Somewhere in here, along the whorls and eddies of bulletin board systems, poor spelling and grammar becomes a hallmark of a cluttered mind which, all things considered, probably isn’t going to have good and new pirated software available. This is reflected in textfiles I have from the period, including the seminal Real Pirate’s Guide by Rabid Rasta. I consider this file to be almost required reading about BBS history, because it shows such a perfect self-aware 1984 BBS user, ridiculing and pointing out what even at that early time were characterizations and issues with some of the more base personalities of the software piracy scene. I was taken enough with this file that I actually created an annotated version of it for people to read, with my own thoughts on the context of the file. (I also notice I go over the whole “OK” thing in this file as well; I loved that story!)

Note, then, the writing of the “parody” pirate in this file:

I SAW YOUR MESSAGE ON THE PIRATE BOARD ABOUT YOU HAVEING SIDE 2 OF SUMMER GAM ES!MY CONNECTIONS MR.ZEROX AND CHEIF S URGEN BLACK BAG ARE’NT AROUND TO MAIL IT 2 ME SO WANNA DO SOME SERIUS TRADEI NG?I HAVE GRAFORTH ,CHOPLIFTER ,MARS CARS ,DISK MUNCHER AND SOME K00L OTHER

And then compare and contrast with the writing of the author of the file, ostensibly using the top of his spelling and grammar skills to express himself:

IS THE AUTHOR OF THE ABOVE MESSAGE A TRUE PIRATE?  SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME
THERE HAS BEEN AN IMPLICIT CODE OF ETIQUETTE GOVERNING THE ACTIONS OF SOFTWARE
PIRATES, BUT AS MANY OF YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED AS OF LATE, THAT CODE HAS BEEN
KNOCKED AROUND A BIT.  ALTHOUGH IT'S NOT DIFFICULT TO DIFFERENTIATE A TRUE
PIRATE FROM ONE OF THESE POOR IMITATIONS, I BELIEVE THAT, WITH THE NUMBER OF
TRUE PIRATES DECREASING AT SUCH AN ALARMING RATE, THIS CODE SHOULD BE SET
STRAIGHT.

What passes for entertainment in my life is the fact that I’ve had to sit through hundreds, perhaps thousands of forum messages in countless years throughout the 1990s and 2000s, 20 years of this, where people are decrying how their “scene” has been ruined and what represents an elite or competent group, and here’s a file in 1984, fully 25 years ago, decrying what is perceived as a possible sunset on the days of “real” piracy.

That aside, the writing seems competent, the thoughts clear, and the setup is succinct and straightforward. From this, I think, comes a demonstration that spelling things badly, changing out letters, and shortening phrases into curt letter sets was something to be made fun of if it hit extremes. Even back then. The BBS world is self-aware of this potential issue and it becomes both a warning flag of breakdown of good communication and a way that people continue to use to communicate.  For some, the terms “K-Rad”, “K00l”, “Warez” and “Zero-Day” (zero day meant something else back then) were both efficient slang and unironic demarcations of your acceptance/stature into the “scene”. That tension has never left electronic communication since. We both use short-form terms and make fun of them. We intentionally spell things wrong and then ridicule others who do same. It fluctuates based on mood, fad, and usage. And, were it not for the utility underlying it, it would have died of shame a very long time ago, longer than a lot of the current crowd using 4chan, say, has been alive.

I believe, therefore, that two entirely at-odds facts exist in our odd uses of slang, spelling errors and short-form terms online: that they have a long and storied history, and that for many of the utilizers of these terms, that history has no relevance whatsoever. They came, they saw “sauce” instead of “please tell me the source of this interesting media you just provided”, and they were fine with using the term. It worked. It was fine and it was good.

And thus it shall always be.