In the BBS Documentary, I dedicated an entire episode to the Artscene, the massive collection of groups doing ANSI artwork for bulletin board systems. I interviewed members of iCE and ACiD (and a bunch of others) and showed both the breathtaking variety of art they’d make, the political battles over the membership and releases, and a whole host of in-danger-of-being-lost aspects of this scene. This was released in 2005.

ACiD released one more artpack during the editing of the movie: ACiD 100. At over 450 megabytes, it contained mp3s, ANSI art, raster art and a whole other range of files. It was RaD Man’s sendoff of his group as a live entity – he wanted a big bang, not a quiet whimper. iCE, the other big remaining artgroup, had a website and unfortunately shut down slowly, in pieces, and is now a placeholder.  Mass Delusion, who is interviewed in the documentary, states it quite well when he says they’re no longer young and able to work on this sort of thing like they used to. I do hope it comes back, though.

ANSI shows up here and there – it has officially joined the semi-new classification of “lost digital skills” – skills which we have with computers which have lost favor or relevance. Some of these skills, like being able to open a hard drive and manually force the thing to work, are a product of the hardware getting smaller and resistive to our fat-fingered meddling. Others, like manipulating front-panel switches, harken to a type of setup no longer in favor. Without a doubt, some of the flavor of the computing experience is lost when these skills are no longer needed, but it’s usually for a good reason they’re gone. Ideally, new skills show up in place, maybe with a completely different flavor and sometimes even more fun and productive.

And like a lot of artistic lost skills, seeing them alive again can cause a range of reaction: wide-eyed wonder by people who never came into contact with the original stuff, delight from people who thought they’d never see it again, bemusement from souls who consider only the newest to be the best and all things dead for a good reason. ANSI, I think can cause these reactions, and more.

A testimony to the power and wonder of well-done ANSI is that a version of it still announces the information about warez released on torrents in the present day. The elaborate, involved block artwork announcing a new movie screener or a cracked version of an Adobe product is, I have discerned, often utilizing artwork made over a decade ago. I’ve had the occasional ANSI artist profess concern about art they did when they were 21 still lurking about as they’re 34, with their old handle attached to it and the back-of-the-mind fear that, somehow, their current employer will discover this tentative but existent link between them and the “warez scene” and fire them. You may think this odd or overparanoid, but it’s not your livelihood at stake, either. I don’t know of a single case of this actually happening, of course.

In 2008, a new group announced itself: Blocktronics. From the About page, the following description is apt: “The idea was to create a refuge to aggregate remaining ansi artists from the “extinct” textmode scene. The group grew faster than expected, mainly because of the interest of “retired” artists that decided to join it and now has 37 members from several countries.”

The idea of “retiring” from ANSI art might seem odd, but that’s what happened, because once you lost people to pass the skills onto, once your stuff wasn’t needed for artgroups, you just kind of moved on, as many did, to working at games companies or becoming tattoo artists (several did) or just pure software development. But somewhere, in the back of your mind, were these unique skills to create ANSI art.

Blocktronics has now released pack #2: “Code Name Christian Wirth”, referencing RaD Man’s real name. It’s just wonderful.

You have a flash viewer to see the packs online, a top-notch piece of software that really lets you enjoy the works. You can download the whole pack as a zip, or read about who did what for this pack. And in what I think really shows off what’s going on here, a number of videos have been released by the group showing the creation of a piece of artwork from start to finish. It’s maybe too much to ask that new artists be inspired to work in this medium from all this demonstration, but you never know.

I’m always fascinated by these old skills rising up – it’s a project of mine, always, to highlight these lost skills and present them in a way both contemporary and respectful. This site, this group, is doing that very thing. Good for them.

I got a kickstarter invite by reaching out to a friend network on twitter and having one step forward and give one to me, which was probably a good sign for the project. I then put together a pitch, listing out a portion of my completed and ongoing projects I’d done, and saying, basically: let me do this full time for a while, and boost me making a career change into doing this full time. I came up with a number, $25,000, which I knew was guaranteed to last me four months plus. I came up with a funding timeline that I thought made sense, 32 days, and I put together some rewards, i.e. things you might get from me for donating certain amounts. I then set it out there, clicking on the button to start the pledge drive.

I mentioned it on this weblog, and in my twitter stream, and my facebook page, and generally let people know about it.

Within a few days, I had nine thousand in pledges. Nine thousand!

This all felt very good.

I thought I’d talk about things now, roughly at the halfway mark of the fund drive, and address some of the ups and downs associated with this.

OK, obviously when you set up a project that comes off at a first glance as “fund my vacation”, some people flip out. The general flip-out responses are:

• Must be nice.
• Someone do that for me next.
• I did a number of quick calculations and here is why this is terrible.
• Here’s a better way to spend that money.
• Here’s my assessment of jason’s financial situation and life, unhindered by having any direct information.
• Jason sent me an awful e-mail once and here we go with the punchy-facey.
• Everything Jason is doing, archive.org is doing better.

Now, obviously not everyone thinks these things, because right now I’m at 207 backers and counting. People have donated amounts from $5-$1337 dollars. (Seriously. Actually, two people did.) People have written me about how they’re happy to help me, and many have wished well either way, no matter how it plays out.

In fact, in many ways, it’s like having a rewind of folks I’ve talked to for many years – old co-workers, folks I met at hacker conventions, people who I’ve interviewed for my documentaries, people who I’ve seen in the comments field of this weblog or other locations.

But I do know that it’s inevitable that someone who comes in and glances at all this will think I’m doing some sort of pass the hat, asking for something for nothing, and man wouldn’t that be nice. From this, I’ve had a lot of people come up with speculative essays postulating on my financial position, intentions, and intelligence. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt, but I would be if I said it was hurting a lot. I’ve taken a lot of arrows in my time, and I’m generally able to yank them out with no problem; or hang a little colorful flag on them.

This whole thing is, after all, a show of vulnerability – I am saying I want to do something and that I need help, and that’s a lot different of an impression one usually wants to make. Ideally, you say “here’s the latest thing, and no need to ask where it came from and how it was pulled off”. That’s natural showmanship. To lift the curtain, to bring money into things, well, that kind of drives some people nuts, and they want to ‘fix it’, up to and including insulting the person to somehow improve the situation. I knew I was doing this, to some extent, but I didn’t know I was doing it quite as much as I am.

There’s actual products here, in this fundraiser. People get DVD-ROMs with my website’s contents, or a hard drive with all my website’s contents. They get a newsletter/weekly mailing explaining what I’m up to and giving them links to what I’ve finished off. There’s at least some trade going on – the money isn’t going into a black hole and is accounted for.

Kickstarter has a dashboard that lets you see who’s donating, new messages being posted, and so on. It can become dangerously addictive, especially when the next few months of your life are riding on things. You feel better when pledges come in, feel worried if there’s no pledges for a while. As I’ve had that thing sitting around, I’ve tried to distance myself from checking on it too much and relying on e-mails letting me know of new donations.

A wall hit in after the first couple of weeks, and pledges stopped. This would be expected – I’d hit the limits of what my direct reach was capable of.  So, I decided that perhaps I’d try to show people what I was about, what I was working on, and have some fun. Hence the Scottathon was born. I intended to be on the air for 6 hours, and show off some of what I was working on and what I’d collected, and go from there.

Here are links to the recorded halves of the telethon. I stopped it after 5 hours mostly because I’d been up since 4am hauling crates of magazines into storage and was starting to get dangerously loopy – I ended up being sick the next day and a half, so not entirely positive on that side. But donations picked up again, and Jeff Atwood of codinghorror wrote a glowing review of me, and drove many more folks towards the site.

It has been very educational of me to see what the responses have been to see people who I’ve never met but who know my work to be willing to pitch a few bucks my way. It’s really propped me up emotionally and excited me about the idea, the dream of doing this full-time for a while. The onus is on me to produce from this whole thing a bunch of stuff that will make people go “wow, that was worth it”. It’s a challenge I can get behind.

More on this adventure as it continues.

Things have slowed down, of course, since the word is out and people who would send cash towards such an endeavor have done so, and there we go. So naturally the concern is halfway is where we’re going to stay.

I’ve put in some good rewards, and I’ve made my case, and my first (rough) weekly update went out, and so I had a good foundation there. But I do feel I need to go further with it. I sat and thought about it, and so I’ve come up with running a telethon.

JASON SCOTT TELETHON, NOVEMBER 4TH, 6PM-12AM EASTERN STANDARD TIME

I’ll be talking about computer history, showing off some artifacts, answering questions, and generally making a fool of myself for six hours, in a way of showing what I bring to the table. I’ll be using Ustream to do the telethon, just because that platform is pretty easy to use for this sort of thing. I suspect it’ll be recorded, as well.

I’m all for suggestions of what this might include, and ways to get the word out.

We’re in weird territory, but the whole thing is weird. My position is that if I’m going to do something like a Fundraiser, I might as well do as much as I can to support that idea.

So there we go! Further details as they come.

Obviously, this needs a truckload of qualifications, so let’s go over them immediately.

First of all “We” is not just Archive Team, badass archivist motherfuckers that we are. While probably 30-40 people from around the world stopped in on the Archive Team tent at the Geocitiesdownloadapalooza, not all the action was going on with us, and not everyone who stopped in was necessarily working with me as project lead, and so on. There were, it turns out, parallel projects going on, five that we know of, and even more people who we might not know of, dedicated to downloading as much of Geocities as “Archive Team”. We’ve had people show up in the days since Geocities closed and offer us 20-30 gigabytes of data, some of which we didn’t have in any of our other stores. They just did it – they didn’t need direction or to be part of anything, and they’re happy just to drop off this packet and move on. I’d estimate that we’re probably talking 60-80 people that we know of so far who took a pretty fair shot at downloading a lot of sites that they had nothing to do with previous to Geocities being announced as closing. Altruistically trying to rescue the artifacts from the burning house, not because these were their artifacts, or the artifacts had intrinsic value to them, but because they knew the best thing to do with the burning house was rescue artifacts. That’s fantastic.

Next, there’s no way all these different groups saved every last single bit of Geocities. But at current estimates, with all of us sharing data, we saved over one million accounts. We’re still crunching numbers, of course, and things could change, but we’re looking at somewhere in the range of 3-5 terabytes of data, and very likely having grabbed every major outward-facing geocities account, outward-facing meaning “showing up in links and search engines”. It is entirely possible that someone created an account, didn’t do much with it, never got word out of it, and it’s gone, but for that matter we seem to have many hundreds, possibly thousands, of various default “wow, thanks for making a Geocities account” pages, untouched since creation. So let’s just say, a million goddamned accounts is nothing to sneeze at.

Finally, we saved Geocities in the most important way – we got the word out about this thing, I did a lot of interviews, and while the sneer-and-move-on crowd who would as soon see history burned for not having a good CSS file might ridicule, a lot of other people saw Geocities in a new light.  No longer strictly thought of as a useless financial property a dying company might be jettisoning to save some coin, it’s now recognized, in some quarters, as one of the largest-scale folk-art installations to exist in the history of the world.  People are unhappy that all this stuff is gone, and more importantly, people felt they could speak out about how they felt unhappy. There was no large-scale effort to petition and protest Yahoo for this; but I did see quite a bit of pity. The kind of pity you feel for a person who doesn’t understand what they have or what they’re doing, immolating themselves for the short-term and walking away from opportunity after opportunity, on the way to inevitable irrelevance and also-ran status.

I’m spending time with a few people who have large archives, and we’re synchronizing our working out what’s where, and how to get the data around. I then have a short-list of people who, involved with history or culture or sociology, are lining up outside to be sent hard drives of Geocities and looking forward to close and meaningful study. Who thought this would be the case in April?

Ultimately, the archive team demonstration/curated collection of Geocities will be at Geociti.es. I’m focusing us on just the pre-Yahoo sites as a first step. Other locations are going whole hog. Everything is going well. We’re all doing awesome. Already, tearful folks have found one of the groups of people and recovered data they thought was lost forever. I don’t expect these expressions of gratefulness to die down anytime soon. It was worth it before, for history, but it’s worth it even more knowing we’ve made lives and memories better for this.

We lost. And we won. I’m delighted.

I am sure we all laughed at the end, there, when one of the members of Archive Team, slaving like the rest of us to yank data out, suggested a link to a Geocities page with a MIDI of “The Final Countdown” by Europe.  The perfect tinny music to blast out of the speakers as we watched a massive site come grinding to a halt.

As it turned out, the machines of Geocities did not die on October 26th, but instead started to come down around 12:30pm PST on October 27th; we assume nobody felt a need to stay up late at Yahoo to do the work and instead began taking machines down and redirecting at the start of the next day. Fine with us – that was 24 hours of bandwidth-absorbing madness we visited upon the servers before their shutdown.

I was already rsyncing tons of grabbed files from all the harvester machines people were running. And man, did we have data – millions of files. I’m STILL rsyncing data from some people, and will likely be doing so into the next week. All told, as much as 2 terabytes of total data was saved.

A nice surprise was the fact that we had not two but four entities that we know of currently who were trying to rescue data wholesale off Geocities.  The four are Archive Team, Archive.Org, Internet Archaeology, and Reocities (Update: And a fifth, geocities.ws). Each of these have approached things in different ways, and will likely present the resulting data differently.  But the fact that something like Reocities would slave in darkness (they didn’t know about us, we didn’t know about them) for over a week in insane download orgies says something about what was going on here.

I’ll let people know when the Geocities stuff we’ve downloaded is available again, and Archive Team Apologizes for the Downtime. We’ll have that fixed shortly.

It might be confusing to people to think of me having both Sockington and Computer History in my life, but it’s really not that big a deal.  Unfortunately, narrative structure tends to favor one-note or specific-sided individuals, negating other sides because it would confuse the story. So when you know a guy is into bulletin board systems and documentaries and data heritage and all that, it confuses things to think he also in somehow wrapped up with an online cat.

But wrapped up with this cat I am, both his online persona, and the actual cat. Both have variant days of pride and sorrow, of joy and delight and scratching.

The thing which some people may or may not totally grasp is that through a combination of dependable appearances on Twitter and something called the Featured Users list, Sockington has over 1,300,000 accounts on Twitter following him. This makes him one of the top 100 accounts out of a space of many millions. In some ways, that’s been big fun. In other ways, it’s given me way too much insight into the realm of celebrity and media and whackjobs and drive-by opinion tourism. I wouldn’t say anything has made me so unhappy that I wish this had never happened, so far. There have been a lot of things that make me happy it happened, and it will be a tough effort for the negative aspects to ever overtake the positive ones.

But as Sockington reached greater and greater “success”, defined here as “number of followers”, a steady refrain has come from all quarters: How do you intend to make money from this?

Not do I or if I intend, or even when I might want to – it’s more that the next logical step is to turn this fun little endeavor into a job. Or, more ideally, a fountain of coins raining into my cup.

Also, to a smaller amount, are people touched by the updates of Sockington and his little adventures, and the fun he brings into their twitter feeds daily, not unlike a comic strip without those bothersome drawings and arriving a few times a day, like the post used to. These people are actually pleading with me to not ruin “it”, where “it” is whatever situation Sockington is in. And the easiest way to do this is to “sell out”.

Now, “selling out” is a hot button topic with anything, but most often it’s used to label unexpected change. If someone does something a certain way, and suddenly they change, the first forces to look out for are outside ones. Did the person get approached by a food or drink company? Did the person acquire an expensive new home? Did the person find themselves kicked out of a group and need income from somewhere else?

And really, “Selling Out” is one of those things that you could stretch to mean anything you want it to. A band that has always had two members but now has four is “selling out” to being a plain old band.  A writer who writes incomprehensible books makes one that’s a straight noir mystery, and he’s “selling out” to be “more commercial”. And so on.

For me, “Selling Out” for something like Socks comes when the cat or myself are doing things we would never do on our own, and people give us money to convince us to do this. Oh, they may couch it as “paying for your time and effort” or “to help with your maintenance costs”, but it’s taking cash to do something otherwise never happening.

In May of 2009, there was a conference called the Social Media Marketplace, sponsored by the IAB, and at which I surely would have begun drinking terrible things so I could throw up on as many suits as possible.  And somehow, during one of the talks, Sockington came up.  On the panel were John Battelle of Federated Media and Ian Schafer of a marketing company called Deep Focus.  During this discussion, it was suggested that a cat food company, any of them, should immediately license or hire Sockington. (I know this because of twittering during the panel.) And this was the exchange that went by:

Battelle: Anyone know who’s behind Sockington?

Schafer: Just a guy.

Battelle: “Just a guy” has a price.

I can’t quite enunciate how angry I was, and how clearly it brought into clarity how I feel about this, this way of looking at things. The Battelles of the would would as soon grind Socks into hamburger and sell him on street corners as give him a toy to play with. A way of looking at the world where everything has a tag on it. An outlook where bright people work together to make the world worse while packaging it so they think they’re making it better. I don’t ever want to be a part of that.

So here we go.

I am not going to sell Socks out.  Period.  Drag your “proposal” or ‘touching base” or “big idea” or “possibility” to your trash icon, or I’ll kindly take the time to do it for you.  The store is closed. It was never open.

That’s it.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled cat.

People have been sending me kind words about this plan, and really coming out of the woodwork for me. I am pleased and humbled.

Energized isn’t the word for the great feelings I get when I see the dashboard that shows the pledges that have come in.  It’s like being struck by lightning that powers you to the core. To know of all the folks who would be willing to throw money into a fund to keep me going while I work on this subject I love, well, that’s honestly the best it can be.

There’s a whole science to fundraising and pledging and the rest, with all sorts of hints and homilies for what you’re supposed to say and when and how to get people to consider donating towards your cause.  For myself, I think it’s a matter of trust and taking the step. People have been contributing towards this fund, a thousand dollars from one person alone (!) and to that end, I will start on what I discussed in the fundraiser pitch. So starting next Friday, I will be providing backers with a worklog and access to stuff I’ve been working on, be it clips, scans, photos, links, and the rest, a couple days before I announce it elsewhere.

The pressure is on me to do enough stuff that people go “wow, this is what a full-time Jason Scott can do”. Maybe that’ll inspire people to put in more towards the goal. Maybe it’ll just mean I get more stuff done. Either way, I’ll be doing that from this point forward, at the very least to the funding period’s end, and hopefully beyond if the fundraiser is successful.

Anyway, so if you were wondering if this was real, it’s real.  Check my pitch and consider throwing a few bucks my way.

And thanks.

It’s 7 in the morning. I’ve been doing a lot of not sleeping lately. I’ve been doing a lot of not sleeping for months. I’ve been working on backing up hundreds of gigabytes of data that you decided to delete. I hate you.

Somehow you thought this was a brilliant idea, to go ahead and shut down that GeoCities property because hey, it’s not a money-maker and it’s primarily a free service and someone, maybe Carol Bartz, maybe someone trying to impress Carol Bartz, told someone who wasn’t you that money needed to be saved and businesses needed to be gotten out of, and who the hell cares about Geocities anyway?

Maybe whatever retarded version of an RSS feeder told you that this was a brilliant move, this easy-before-breakfast shotgun death of GeoCities, since everyone made fun of it even being up. “Ha ha,” went the kind of people who are tasked with writing a half-dozen stories a day to keep the ad clicks coming. “Ha ha, Geocities was still up, isn’t that stupid. Good riddance to it.” You probably read some form of that and considered yourself one brilliant little middle manager indeed.

Well, you’re not. I’m at the vortex of a lot of people trying to save the data you flicked away, people who didn’t have to be indoctrinated or convinced or scammed or otherwise thrust into the role of data duplication of GeoCities because the obviousness of it is on its face. This is fifteen years and decades of man-hours of work that you’re destroying, blowing away because it looks better on the bottom line. You could have sold it, but that’s too much work. You could have donated it to archive.org, but I know that makes your reptilian brain hurt and so I understand that one. But you are, by this action, destroying so much.

I’m sure you think this is all going to go down with a silent little bump, like a robin landing on a nest in winter. Oh, you haven’t heard it yet, idiot. Go ahead and do a search on a real-time news engine, like, oh, Google’s. Go ahead and search for “geocities.com” in news and watch all the places that are, even in the last 24 hours, linking to Geocities sites in press releases and notices and what have you. People who are depending on it being there past Monday and apparently you have utterly failed to notify. These people are going to be hella fucking pissed when they find out that you took their stuff down, deleted it, and then hit the hotel bar by 4. They’re going to want their stuff back.

Remember the great Yahoo Geocities Boycott of 1999? Of course you don’t, you’re an idiot. But in that fight, Yahoo dropped new property-grabs on Geocities when they bought it, and declared that all data on it was theirs, and they could do anything they wanted to do with it. People flipped the fuck out and started going after Yahoo then, called for a boycott, and Yahoo backed down. Yahoo had people back then, people with a brain. People who heard other people being angry and thought “wow, people are angry at this action” instead of what you think, which is a sound not dissimilar to a cuckoo clock in a fishtank. The people of Geocities knew they had something very meaningful there, and wanted to protect it, and attempts to do otherwise drove them batshit. And now you’re going to delete it all. I hate you.

So here we are, with me spending way too much of my time working with good people to back up Geocities. We asked Yahoo for a number, some idea, some rough concept of exactly how much data is in the array. We don’t know if we have 10% or 80% or 99% of the data in Geocities. Nobody will tell us because there’s a germ of a concept of some sort of privacy violation in telling us. Which is fine. Except it’s retarded and stupid. We’re asking for a rough idea of all the people you are fucking so we can make them less fucked, but that’s not what you think we’re asking so we’ve just been skullhumping your servers day and night for six months, redundantly grabbing everything we can just to make sure we’re not missing anything. I hate you.

So now in two days you’re going to shut this place down, this collection of genealogy and pages by people who’ve died and collections of writing and art and music and you’re going to turn it into dust because Carol Bartz said Yahoo needed to save a few bucks and the same idiocy that shut down Yahoo Briefcase, Yahoo Briefcase which probably fit on a USB stick by the time it closed down for fuck’s sake, is going to shut down Geocities.  I would say something like “I hope you know what you are doing”, but I’m sure to you it would sound like me going ‘blah blah blah blah non-functioning-capital gains blah blah” and then your eyes would narrow and you’d ask me to stop shouting.

This has to have been one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done, and it’s your fault. Thanks to your level of galactic short-sighted stupid, I just basically got into the hosting business because I’m going to arrange for people to get mirrors of all the stuff we’ve downloaded and we’re going to keep putting it up and you’re going to keep seeing it up there and we’re going to tell people how stupid you are until your suit is a pile of rags in a garage and your car is holding soup in a hundred supermarkets.

I hate you.

If you’ve been following this weblog for the past few years (it’s getting to be quite a few years, actually) you know I’ve been wrapped up in dozens of projects, ranging from the mid-afternoon inspiration to the decades-on grinding epic. Some people wonder when I sleep. And some people have been surprised to know I had a full-time job at the same time, one that didn’t overlap with any of my projects and history endeavors and travel in the slightest. I’ve always paid my own way to conferences and I’ve put my own time into all the work you’ve seen described on these webpages.

So, having been laid off in September, I’ve begun the process of looking around for a career where I’d be able to use my skills in computer history and my love of all things digital in something really positive. And, hopefully, have time to finish as many of these front- and back-burner projects I’ve got in the air.

Now, I’d heard of this thing called Kickstarter a while ago, and had been occasionally browsing the thing for projects to invest in or to just marvel at how the idea worked. (I am aware there’s other similar sites – I just thought Kickstarter was pretty slick.) You see a project, you have a pitch up. and then you add a reward set where donating more than just a minimum entitles you to extras and other cool things. I liked this approach. I didn’t think I’d need it anytime soon.

But recently, I thought, what if I made a go at it? What if I seriously tried to raise enough funds to live off for a few months, get to work on stuff full time? What if I could get enough donations where I’d be able to have all this stuff I do be the only thing I do? What if I finally finish my documentary on text adventures, clean up textfiles.com’s directories, bulk up archive team’s writings and pamphlets? Conduct research into a bunch of subjects and be able to make my presentations that much better? What if?

So I decided to go for it. I’ve created a page on Kickstarter. In it, I am asking 1,000 people to fund me to the tune of $25. There are rewards (with returned items) for larger donations. Some people, if the mood strikes them and their wallet feels too heavy, can donate enough to make me travel to them (within limits) and play my movie and discuss it with them. There’s a bunch of little rewards I put in there.

If this works, my mind will officially be blown. As mentioned in the pitch on that page, I would be issuing a report, weekly, to my patrons, showing what I’ve done that week and giving them a 2 day headstart on new materials over everyone else. I’d be, in other words, a subscription to someone devouring digital history full time. That interests some number of folks – I do not know how many. I hope it’s enough to push past this limit.

I’ve set the fundraising to 30 days. I figure I can live off unemployment a few more weeks and continue to look for work, while this set of numbers either climbs or doesn’t climb. The time limit plus the ability to see the growth will hopefully encourage people to get involved. I hope you do, I really do.

This is a big thing I’m asking. That’s all I can say. If it doesn’t happen, I will still thank everyone who stood up and said they’d be willing.

Here’s hoping.

]]> http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2271/feed 11 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2269 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2269#comments Sat, 17 Oct 2009 05:27:10 +0000 Jason Scott http://ascii.textfiles.com/?p=2269 This week’s sent-in cool stuff came from Steve Ross, who sent me a box of IBM Binders.

Sometimes (OK, fine, often) I get to indulge in acquiring material that is personally meaningful to me. In the case of IBM binders, it’s one of those connections that, honestly, I find hard to explain but it’s overpowering. I’ll take a shot.

I don’t know when IBM started making instruction manuals in this fashion, but I know it must have pre-dated the IBM PC. That said, for a pre-teen like myself, the IBM PC would have been the first time I’d come up against this presentation and packaging. If it was intended to imbue a sense of power and confidence, to give the impression that IBM was here and everything was going to be OK, it did it in spades for me. I know that Digital and other companies had also made huge strides in creating documentation that smiled and tipped its hat to you, promising the world. But IBM was my first, and my strongest.

Each major product got one of these binders, this huge thing with tabs and the logo and inside a binder whose pages could be pulled out, or added to, or whatever. You saw these boxes on the shelf near any IBM PC. Here’s one in all its glory:

How could a kid not be impressed with something like this? How could anyone not be, especially if it was the first time they encountered a business-grade manual? After all, the IBM PC was going to be business-grade, and having a reference document nearby in such a perfect layout was fine.

If you’ve not encountered one of these in person, I do want to draw your attention to a significant detail/aspect of these manuals: the texture of the outside. This wasn’t just “cardboard” or a smooth colored surface. It was a crosshatched texture, one that gave a sense of richness and strength to the box and binder that you just don’t see as much anymore, now that everything’s commodity and lowest-common-denominator. Maybe this picture will help explain:

Can you see that? That bolt, that rich texture of the manual? Again, not something drawn/printed on the cover, but an actual textured feel. You could bring this to me, tell me to close my eyes, and stick this in my hand and I could tell you exactly what it was – my fingers would call back memories of a cold dining room with the computer on a table, pawing through this binder and trying to figure out how to make various parts work, or what buttons to press, or where I was going wrong in trying to make graphics show up. It’s embedded in my character, part of what makes me me.

Oh, sure, someone who does not buy into this worldview or my description of my feelings for these things can spit off a few quick digs, like my world being small or lacking proper human perspective or something. But in fact, this was all part of my growing up, of realizing that people could do really great stuff, and then when I encountered crappy workmanship in something as basic as the manual, I knew that things had strayed badly or the company didn’t work out all the problems with their product, or showed pride in it.  There really was a pride about it, here. Of craftsmanship, of IBM throwing people at the problem and those people having a lot of meetings and deciding what kind of a manual would, before you even turned the machine on, make you feel like you’d made the right choice.

It’s an outlook that, in this realm, is truly gone. Thanks to Steve for letting me have a few additional specimens of this bygone era.