ASCII by Jason Scott

I was contacted by John Sheetz’ widow regarding my phone call to them offering the DVD and the interview. They want both. I think she cried at the end.

I wonder sometimes if people think to take the video camera they use to record a holiday and just interview a relative about their life, so the later generations can know what happened in their family. I wonder why, with thousands of dollars of audiovisual equipment, I haven’t done the same.

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It took a while, but the IMDB entry for the BBS Documentary now lists over 70 of the people who appeared in it. It is NOT complete and is missing vital folks, but I was entering names as fast as I could, and then it eventually hit an upper limit, and I decided I would wait to see how long it took names to show up before adding more.

For the record, it took 32 days.

While a month for updates is an enormous time, I am definitely in favor of a “cool-off” period when adding new data, so that you put your best work into adding new information, and don’t just dash some off. This is part of why I don’t like Wikipedia, because there isn’t a a “compile with no errors” situation. (With IMDB, you actually do get automated feedback saying “You know this person is new, right? Did you want that?” and “You spelled all this stuff wrong….”) With instant gratification comes a lack of ceremony with adding new data, and it’s too easy to not take a little extra time to double-check all the facts, ensure the spelling is right, or that you couldn’t add a little more information with a bit more effort.

Now that people are in there, I will be correcting mistakes in their linkages (a few people got linked to currently-existing names in the database, while others seem to have been rejected), and increasing biographical information where needed.

In the last day or so, I am happy to have submitted (and had approved) additonal biographical information for the IMDB entry for Vinton Cerf. Spiffy. I hope more people learn about him and the other folks I interviewed because of IMDB links.

I’ve been mailing people who were interviewed, pointing out they’re “stars” now. That’s been fun.

Like I said, more are on their way, but it’s funny how this arbitrary database that IMDB really is, can make you feel “legitimate”. I think that’s just the nature of wanting to be accepted. On a more capitalistic level, people are “accepting” me at $50 apiece every day, so I’m not feeling worried about it at all.

Speaking of money, it costs $35 to get a photo or image up on IMDB. Just in case you’re wondering why so many entries lack them.

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While getting together addresses and information to send out free copies of the documentary to interviewees, I have discovered the sad news that one of them, John Sheetz of New Jersey (K2AGI), passed away in January of this year.

Mr. Sheetz was a complete shot in the dark for me, interview-wise; in trying to make an episode about using BBSes for artwork, I wanted to show that this urge and approach was around long before people were using modems to connect to each other. I looked out on the internet and found out there had been Teletype art contests going back some time, which were run by Don Royer and others, and which were massive in scale. Mr. Royer had died some time ago, but Mr. Sheetz was around and when I called, he was obviously a little confused as to why I contacted him and the subject matter of this documentary, but he agreed to be interviewed for it.

I drove from Boston to his home in New Jersey, which also confused him (“You came all this way just to talk to me?”), but I saw that he had made the massive effort of bringing out stacks and stacks of Teletype art for me to see and take pictures of. I took a bunch of shots and then sat with him for an hour interview.

We talked about how all this art had come about, about the process of creating it using the technology of the time, and the unique ways people could use ham radio to send these pictures around. He talked about his own attempts to create these artworks, how a local business got in trouble using Peanuts Characters in teletype form for christmas calendars, and a bunch of other great stories.

We also checked out his garage and his old teletype machines which he still had. I took photos of these as well.

His interview made the perfect introduction to the ARTSCENE episode, and in fact a good 5 minutes of Mr. Sheetz discussing teletype art is in the documentary. He is one of the longest appearances of the 200+ interviews.

Here are photographs from the interview.

After interviewing Mr. Sheetz, I went into further interviews and editing, and we never talked again. I don’t know what he thought of the strange guy with long hair and the camera equipment who came to his house for a few hours one morning, but I thought he was a great person and worth every mile of the hundreds I drove to see him.

When a Ham passes away, he or she becomes known as a “Silent Key”, because you will not hear their call sign over the air again. I am truly sorry that he never got to see himself on film.

On the other hand, this is precisely why I started this documentary project in the first place. In 2005, there is no John Sheetz to talk about teletype and telegraph art. There won’t be in 2006, either, or beyond. The only regret I have is we talked for a mere hour, because my documentary was about a specific subject. I didn’t talk to him about his decades of being a ham, or his years working at Bell Telephone, or any of a bunch of other subjects that I wonder are now lost to time.

I try not to think about what’s happened to all those reams of teletype art he spent decades collecting.

We stand on crumbling sand.

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Believe it or not, I just went through a day of deep consideration over whether to add the link to the BBS Documentary website that’s now on the left side of this weblog’s page. I consider it advertising and I don’t like advertising, no matter what twisted set of justifications I can throw on you.

Which I’m about to do.

The current state of thinking I have is that this weblog gets a sizeable amount of sites that don’t overlap with the documentary, and this weblog was basically created to discuss the documentary, so I might as well have a link to what I’m talking about, in a way that makes sense. Additionally, the documentary is creative commons licensed, which means people are able to download it as well as purchase it, so I’m not really forcing a product down their throats.

Finally, and I guess this is the most important thing, I need to maximize people knowing about this project because otherwise I’ve kind of wasted 4 years of my life making it just to have it reach a subset of people it could be reaching. That would be a real shame, especially when I’m at the Lafayette Home for Digital Historians and I’m yelling at the TV about how I never got to go to Amsterdam.

The more the documentary sells, the more chance there is of me making more. And along that line, let me let slip that I am in pre-production for two more documentaries. I spend about six months doing research, and who knows how long filming, but I’m in fact working on them. No doubt more details will come out over time, but I don’t want to deflect from the BBS Documentary, which has a long way to go in terms of both sales and released additional materials. But yes, selling tons of these things would convince my family that the next little projects would be worth doing. Otherwise, I’m sticking to websites.

So there. A big hullaballo over a clickable jpeg. Who says obsession always works in my favor?

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Let’s move away from the documentary to talk a little about my big love: collecting. There’s a mental fallacy that I and others of my ilk fall into, where we believe that every single thing we collect has to be a few small clicks away, ready to go, gassed up and waiting in the garage to go out at a moment’s notice.

The problem with this is that you end up with files. A lot of files. A TON of files. And if there’s one thing a system doesn’t like, it’s lots of files. Once you get to the point that there’s thousands of little one-off images, textfiles, or the like, most systems start to get a little sick, not unlike opening your silverware drawer and finding all the silverware randomly scattered in a big pile. It’s just bad.

This required me to make a realization. 99 percent of the stuff I keep on my computers should have the following label:

“A Pile of Neat Crap I Collected At Once And Stuck On My Drive For Later”

Aware as I am of the complete transient nature of websites, when I see one, I wget it, entirely, every piece. I put it into a subdirectory and forget about it. When someone mentions a cool song, or a neat movie someone made, or anything of a “neat thing” nature, I grab a copy.

A good site full of, say, really good drawings or neat 3-D renderings could go into the dozens or hundreds of images. And like I said, my system doesn’t like that. So the right thing to do is just stick it all in an archive.

But then we hit the big problem that comes after the “tons of tiny files” problem: you come back to your hard drive after a few weeks, and you wonder what the hell www.doofusnet.com.zip is. Or AMAZING-EYE-SHACK.zip, or, my favorite: “woah.rar”, which stared at me at one point.

Hence, I now create two files when I take an archive of images:

filename.zip
filename.zip.jpg

The .jpg is a gallery of every image file in the zip. This takes a collection from being hundreds of individual items to a mere two. I use rsync like cars use gas, so this has enormous benefit for me. I can then look at the gallery image, know what’s in the thing, and then go off and unpack the archive if I actually want to look at the stuff inside. In the total sum of this file’s life, that will likely be less than one tenth of one percent of the time it exists in my collection. Maybe a lot less. So it makes sense to add the extra unpacking step.

I do everything with scripts. Often ones I write. Here’s the script I use. I call it GALLERATE.

Note that I’m leaving in my hysterically informal and non-professional status and error messages with this script; it’s how I work with all my programs and scripts, and brightens up what would be an otherwise dreary bit of programming.

#!/bin/sh
# GALLERATE: Turn a zip of images into a gallery.
if [ -f "$1" ]
then
rm -rf .galleryworld
echo "[%] Preparting to squat out $1...."
mkdir .galleryworld
cd .galleryworld
unzip -j "../$1"
unrar e -ep "../$1"
echo "[%] WHY DOES IT HURT!!!!"
montage +frame +shadow +label -tile 7 *.JPG *.GIF *.gif *.jpg *.bmp *.png *.PNG *.BMP "../$1.jpg"
cd ..
rm -rf .galleryworld
ls -l "$1.jpg"
else
echo "No such file, assmaster."
fi

Gallerate works by taking the like GALLERATE [filename], where [filename] is a .zip or .rar file that contains images. It creates a temporary directory called .galleryworld, then unpacks all the images into that directory.

Going inside, it uses a great (but complicated) program called “ImageMagick“, which has a sub-program called “montage”, and then tells it to make a nice gallery, 7 across, of all the images. These gallery images can become large (megabytes big) but it sure beats hundreds of little files all around.

Notice that it tries both .rar and .zip files at once, and tries to deal with both contingencies.

So, why am I mentioning this somewhat technical information?

Like it or not, a lot of people don’t learn new ideas by reading manuals or scanning documentation; they look around for little stories, little tales written by people in the thick of things, and then use the morals learned by those writers. It’s the nature of learning for some. And by putting this online, maybe down the line someone gets the spark of an idea for a new direction for their own maintenance of images.

So here’s my little story.

Once upon a time I had thousands and thousands of files on my hard drive. Now I have a few hundred in pairs. The End.

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The most common question I recieve about the documentary, and I mean hands-down, is something along the variant of “Are you going / trying to put the documentary on PBS?” It ranges, sometimes with “PBS” being “TechTV/G4” or “IFC” or “Sundance” or the like. But the general question (asked over a hundred times, at this point) is basically, when am I going to get this on TV.

The weird, non-intuitive answer is I truly have no interest in the documentary being on television. I am not AGAINST it in the strictest sense, but I am not actually interested in wasting the time, energy and swimming upstream through lies to put it on the air.

The documentary very specifically cleaves out a portion of the population so that it is of more use to another portion. If you really don’t care about computers or telecommunications at all, you will not enjoy it as much as, say, Desperate Housewives. I worked very hard to make it so it provides technical explanations where I could, but it is still a difficult ride for, for example, my mom.

Television really does take anything it gets and jams it into the lowest common denominator. Here is what they will have issues with:

– It’s got “computer people” in it.
– The 8 episodes are not the same length.
– There is profanity.
– It is five and a half hours long.
– It is already released as a DVD.
– It is Creative Commons licensed.

Jason Kottke wrote a very complimentary essay about how PBS could take my documentary and put it up and save lots of money, since they’d only have to pay $50 and then they could rebroadcast it. It is complimentary, but it is somewhat naive (and I assume intentionally so). Lawyers who work in television, yes, even PBS, would be as likely to take a CC work and broadcast it without a sheaf of papers from me, signed and notarized, as you might be to eat a human foot.

Not only will they demand a sheaf of papers from me, they will also insist on a ton of sell-out aspects that I’m simply not prepared to do. They will want rebroadcast rights, reselling rights, distribution rights. They will want to clean up my oversights (the occasional boom microphone or the high-end noise in a couple rooms) and that’s fine… and then they will edit out content or demand I make changes, or ask me to get rid of “difficult” sequences that people won’t “get”.

Here’s a little story for you. I was interviewed last year about this documentary by TechTV/G4, for their Pulse news program. I was interviewed by Kevin Pereira, who had been a WWIV sysop in his early days, and absolutely loved BBSes, and was going to do a small story on them and discovered me. After a couple extended phone conversations about how this would go, we got along well, and planned for the crew’s visit to my house (he was going to do a number of interviews that day in the Boston area) and we got it all arranged. Totally as smooth as it could be.

However, they wanted some example footage. In fact, their standard contract basically shared ownership and distribution rights of the example footage. And I had to sign this contract. Kevin was obviously interested in the subject personally, and I could tell it was all this legalistic crap that was out there, making his job that much more difficult, just to show a few clips.

So basically, I sent them examples of footage that were outtakes. Stuff I couldn’t and would never use. And without a doubt, I am technically sharing ownership of that footage with whatever Skeletor’s Castle owns G4. So I took steps to protect myself, but the fact is, I had to sign a few contracts to appear in a news story about a film I was making. Imagine if I was showing the film on G4. It is a nightmare I see no reason to go through at this time.

I could turn this into a rant, but I’ll explain my position this way: I went to school for Mass Communications. I studied television, film, stage, public speaking, radio, and sound mixing. I learned techniques, theory, process, and many different aspects of these industries. Ultimately, as I got to the end of my college career, I started the process of going into “The Industry”…. and I walked away.

It is so bad in “The Industry” that “The Industry” actually makes fun of how bad it is. And the worst part is, they’re being favorable. No, it really is that bad. The amount of people working in a happy, successful life in the industry that aren’t accompanied by drug use, empty nights staring at the moon, or the same level of self-awareness as a shark, is a lot less than you would expect. I have no interest in it, at all.

I am occasionally lectured rather harshly about how I’m “throwing away money” on various principles and stands I’ve taken. Certainly the Creative Commons licensing has gotten that reaction in some (private) quarters. Such it is with the Television/Cable idea, where people think I’m throwing away money if I don’t get the DVD’s contents out there. But they probably don’t know that the television industry has had decades and decades to refine screwing people who “make stuff”, to the present day where they consider it a great favor that they’ve optimized the screwing process to the level they have. And I don’t just mean financially; I mean content wise, controlling copyright, distribution and then suing anyone in their way.

So no, I don’t think I’m throwing away money.

People who make their own movies dream of what I’ve gotten to at this point: a completely-under-my-control DVD set, with the highest quality I could muster, unencumbered with meetings with “the studio” to “fix” the film, and lacking screaming phone converations with no-nothings deep in the bowel of a cable channel. I was able to add everything I could come up with, oversee its creation to my satisfaction, and then sell it (or give it, thanks to CC) directly to people. I don’t have a mountain to scale anymore, I’m on the mountain.

Why would I work hard to jump off that mountain into a garbage pit?

Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled friendly filmmaker historian guy.

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It was 4 months ago that I announced I was collecting all the podcasts. I figured we were about due for a further update.

The main reason I mentioned this project on my weblog was because it was something around the tenth time I’d set off on a major collecting project, and it made sense to really explain the urge and the process and the ups and downs. In this way, maybe I’d be helping other growing collectors understand themselves or at least know they weren’t alone. I generally toil in silence, so this was actually rather unusual; nobody hears essays of the process of running textfiles.com or my other little hobbies.

I should have known that putting the phrase “all of the podcasts” in an announcement would sent the pundit/reporting sharks into the water, smelling tasty verbiage to bring to screen and paper. As a result, I got a little attention.

OK, I got a LOT of attention.

BoingBoing took an interest.
Wired did a story on me.
Weblogs really took an interest.

I even got a nice little amount of whining from the wings.

But the high point was getting on NPR, not just once but twice. It is my dream to one day be interviewed by Terry Gross about the BBS Documentary, but sitting down in a studio to shoot the moon with Christopher Lydon is a real close second in those quarters.

All of this stemming not from the documentary project, but the fact that I was now basically downloading an amazing amount of crap. Such is the way it goes. Salvador Dali first got attention when he threw a bathtub through a museum window; we do what we have to.

…but that’s the thing. I really don’t have to, in the sense of commitment or need or job status or anything else. I am collecting all these podcasts because I want to. And that’s important, because we’re now at the critical 4 month period.

I find that a lot of projects die in the 4th month. In the case of high school bands or novels or other real-world projects, they just disappear. Websites and online projects are more sticky, because they don’t really go away as easily. They just kind of drift, untouched, unwanted, but accessible at any time from around the world. It’s like the world has ensured that the Junk Drawer will follow us as a race to the end of time.

That fourth month is critical to a collector; as I suggested earlier, I now have a metric assload of podcasts, yet it is not complete and it is not comprehensive. It is just a metric assload. It would be easy for me to go “no, no I shall never have them all, what am I doing, I should delete these and get my hardware back”, but I’m not doing that. I’m plowing ahead, knowing that a big something is better than a big nothing.

How big are we? Well, people saw the quote of 340gb from the Wired article but that was sorely out of date by the time it showed up on their site; I am somewhere in the 700gb range and growing by gigabytes every day as I run my discoverer on various directories and sites. I just did some rough checks and found that I have 35,000 mp3 files.

This is somewhere in the range of nearly two years of talking. Roughly.

TWO YEARS.

That’s a lot of shows. I am pretty sure I’m past 2,000 shows, but I don’t rightly know. And this is something important to explain, as well.

I have now totally forgotten which interviewer asked me this, but he wanted to know how many hours a week I spend with this collecting hobby. He was audibly unhappy when I said “Well, none.”

There’s a machine downstairs. It is in a nice red case (I bought the case for $50) and has a relatively OK FreeBSD-running AMD box (I bought it for $200) connected up with five hard drives; four of them are 250 gigabytes and the system disk is 40 gigabytes. So it has about a terabyte of disk space or so available.

All it does is download podcasts. 24 hours a day. And when it’s done, it downloads more. It’s scripted. Completely scripted, and just jams through the RSS feeds, pulls a copy of the .XML file (and stores it, for later historians) and then yanks every mp3 file it can find in that feed that it doesn’t already have. This whole process takes none of my time. So really, it is less than an hour a week. I think the last time I spent any time with that box downstairs was to check the number of files and the disk space. I’ll probably automate that as well, soon. “Hey, Jason, here’s how much crap I downloaded today, here’s what you’ve got on me. Thank you.”

If I was more emotionally invested in the output, I might spend my days happily glancing over my downloads, eyeing the best and the brightest, listening in to the spoken words of a thousand podcasts with glee. But that’s not what I’m doing right now; I’m just collecting. I’m pretty busy with the documentary promotion and sales and distribution and all that, and while fleshing that work out, I don’t have time to listen to radio.

Well, unless I’m on it. Then I make a little time.

A few people have made little whiny noises about the project, comparing it to their monetized business models and works; but that’s completely apples and oranges, comparing Tower Records or HMV to a guy who’s just buying out old vinyl collections at estate sales or going through bargain bins in the basement of older record stores. It’s just not the same thing! We’re not going to see a “Jason Scott’s Podcast Emporium” opening up anytime soon, although I might make a way to download a list of what I’ve grabbed, so people can tell me of ones I’m missing. I’m all for being corrected on that line, as opposed to “where’s your business model”.

So I am continuing, plowing through hundreds of mp3s a day and downloading them to a bunch of hard drives that are filling quite noticably as I track down RSS feeds everywhere. These hard drives are being syncronized to other removable hard drives that are being burned to DVD-ROMs, by the way, in case you’re wondering if an errant spark is going to blow my collection to smithereens. I wouldn’t mind a situation where a few people were trading hard drives with me, so I could rsync copies of the collection for them. Libraries, where are you?

While we’re here, I’ll throw in a few more impressions I’ve gotten glancing over the collection and the processing that’s been going on to make it:

I stand firm on my belief that the turnaround on podcasts makes my project still realistic. People just can’t keep this stuff up for months and months on end; they do it for a while and then they stop. They just do. There is now a company/program about to come out called Odeo that wants to be for podcasts what Livejournal and the like are for weblogging. What they are going to end up producing are not going to be podcasts, really; they’re going to produce one-sided telephone conversations, not unlike what you’d find on an answering machine. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but there’s a difference between post-it-notes and essays (and books), and there’s a difference between “E-Z-Make” podcasts and what I’m concerned with collecting at the moment.

There is a company called libsyn that is hosting a ton of podcasts, and are functioning as a sink for all of this data. I have no idea if they’re keeping the podcasts long term, but they should, it’d be great.

Finally…. I’m having a blast. This was a great idea, and I don’t regret it a bit.

And I was serious about Terry Gross.

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This is the first of a series of documents covering stuff I consider “Behind the Scenes” or “About the Production”. They’ll range from analysis of the process of interviews, to trivia and other facts that aren’t on the DVD. It’s not because I didn’t think them important or worthy of being on the DVD; I just didn’t have the time to write all these additional documents out in a a timeframe that would have gotten the documentary out before 2006.

This is a bittersweet document; an expansion/explanation of all the names of the people the various episodes are dedicated to. There are eight episodes in all, and seven have dedications to people (the eighth, COMPRESSION, has no dedications because I thought it wouldn’t be tasteful). Here are the stories of the people each episode has been dedicated to, with hopefully a hint as to why I paired that person with that episode’s theme. All these stories are sad in various ways, and I’m sorry there’s nothing I can do about that.

ANDREW FLUGELMAN
Episode: Baud

Andrew Fluegelman is in danger of being forgotten as one of the pioneers in the BBS and computer world. He was a successful attorney, programmer, and editor who left a strong mark on the growing computer industry. With the introduction of the IBM PC, he wrote PC-TALK, a communications program that quickly became one of the leaders in that growing market, because of his approach of making the software cost nothing, asking instead for donations. He called this “Freeware”, and trademarked the name. Others who worked the same way ended up calling their similar approach “Shareware”, a name that has stuck.

He was also an editor of both The Whole Earth Catalog and later PC World and MacWorld magazine.

In 1985, Flugelman was taking medication for Colitis, which was having a deep effect on his personality, with mood swings and depression. In July of that year, he was informed that he had cancer; he drove to the Golden Gate Bridge, left a suicide note in his car, and, it is presumed, committed suicide.

His body has never been found.

DUSTIN GILL
Episode: Sysops and Users

Like many young sysops in the 1980s, Dustin had found out about computers, then modems, and ultimately BBSes, and tried his hand at running one. His BBS, Beyond Reality, stayed up for a while, taking messages and transferring files with Dustin at its head, until he took down the BBS (again, like many others) for the Internet.

This story would not be unusual were it not for the fact that Dustin had experienced a spinal cord injury that paralyzed him from the neck down at age six. He had been hit and run by a driver while chasing down a ball.

For 20 years after, using sip and puff systems, he ran his BBS, attended high school and later college, and then graduated. He passed away in 2002, aged twenty-six.

TIM STRYKER
Episode: Make it Pay

Tim Stryker’s technological achievements nearly eclipse his BBS work; at an early age he was already designing video games (like, full size arcade games) and created a networked game that worked cross-platform (Atari computers could play Commodore computers, and so on) called COMM-BAT for a company called Adventure International.

Stryker founded Galacticomm, and created a product in the form of a custom card that could run many modems off a single computer. To demonstrate the power of this card, he wrote some BBS software as an example.. and the software took off. Galacticomm’s MajorBBS software became a hit, and Stryker had success along with it.

In the mid-1990s, he drifted away from technological pursuits to take on a much tougher problem: restoring the ideas of democracy, possibly with an engineering approach. He wrote a number of books about his ideas for improving voting methods and creating a better society, which he called “Superdemocracy”. While his books did sell, his ideas did not take off, and he distanced himself away from his Florida company to live in Colorado.

In August 1996, Stryker committed suicide in the hills of Colorado. He left behind a wife and four children.

STEVE AHOLA
Episode: Fidonet

Steve Ahola was the Region 16 coordinator for Fidonet in 1991, running
a board called “IBM Tech Fido” in Pepperell, Massachusetts. Experiencing financial setbacks and other factors, he committed suicide on August 13th, 1991. Speaking to some of his friends and associates, there was some indication that he was facing the loss of his telephone line, meaning the end of his interaction with Fidonet, which may have been a factor in his suicide. Regardless of whether this was the case, his loss was felt throughout his online community and throughout Fidonet, and was ultimately commemorated in an issue of Fidonews.

Levi Dedi (NIGHT DAEMON OF ICE)
Episode: Artscene

Levi Dedi was a young man from Israel who had joined the ANSI Artscene and was beginning to make a name for himself. 1997 seemed to be his year; after helping with the organization of a demo party called “Ritual” (he was the Graphics competition organizer), he found himself achieving his dream and joining the ANSI group iCE (Insane Creators Enterprises) in August. But by October, his family life was falling apart, and his mother cut him off from the Internet (and therefore his Artscene world and friends) as punishment. Dedi jumped from the family’s apartment window to his death, sending shockwaves through
his families, both online and off. The next artpack of iCE was dedicated to him and included artwork by and for him.

IBRAHIM “KAM” SHIRANI
Episode: HPAC

I often spend time on IRC, talking with many different channels, getting ideas and starting discussions (or flamewars) with people all over the world. One of these channels was/is a group of hackers and technical folks centered around the Colorado area (although their members were far-flung geographically due to life and jobs and other factors). One of these was someone I knew named “kam”, who was (along with the channel) privy to my frequent updates and monologues
related to the documentary’s production.

Early one morning in August of 2004, as my documentary was nearing completion, kam was driving home from a night on the town when his car rear-ended a van, sending his car rolling into a freeway where it was hit by other cars, killing him. I had spent time with him less than a month before at the DEFCON hackers’ conference.

RODNEY ALOIA
Episode: No Carrier

Rodney Aloia was the sysop of the INDEX BBS, a 40+ line system that he had founded and built up from 1983. Based in Atlanta, he was a very popular board, and had built it into a successful business.

He was an enthusiastic skydiver, with over 250 solo jumps in a very short time.

But in January of 1998, preparing for a jump with smoke canisters, he backed up into the moving propeller of an airplane, killing him instantly.

For most Sysops, this would be the end of their BBS, the lines slowly ratcheted down and the system taken down in favor of other nearby systems. But something amazing happened: his users, friends and acquaintances bonded together and continued to run the system after him, as both a continuation of his system and as a tribute to his memory. The system still exists at indexbbs.com.

JOHN OLCHOWY
Documentary

The entire production is dedicated to my grandfather, John Olchowy, a farmer, policeman, soldier, and patriarch, who passed away in September of 2004, a short time before the documentary was finished. His photo is in the production credits menu.

3 Comments

I have a lot of letters in my mailbox like this:

Dear Jason,

thank you!!

And there are a few weblogs that have reviewed the documentary, like this one:

Over the weekend, I watched the first two episodes of the BBS
Documentary and it is fantastic.

It is phenomenal that Jason Scott was able to put this whole
production together more-or-less by himself. The whole presentation
from box to DVD menus to music to editing to the interviews themselves
are top-notch and professional. The $50 price tag may seem high when
you are used to buying Hollywood-subsidized movies at $10-$12, but
when you consider the amount of work that went into this three-disc
set that is packed with goodies and info that just doesn’t exist
anywhere else, it’s a great deal, and a very important historical
record. And no, I’m not being paid to say that. 🙂

..so I’m not crazy. It’s a good project, a good product, and people who are purchasing it and watching it are enjoying it. (People who are downloading it as well, I would hope.) In fact, I now have dozens of such acclaims and hurrahs, both as e-mail and posted in weblogs.

So then we get into the issue of the Reviewer as it pertains to a film like this.

I’ve not yet been reviewed by a “professional” reviewer, that is, a disconnected party who sits down with my film because they’re assigned it or they have license to choose something to review and choose me. The review there might be a little different than these. But the thing is, even though they might not ‘get it’ or present it in the same bright adoration that my other letters do, they would be read by a larger audience who might be on the fence about it.

I am not overly enthused about the idea of the DVD set being reviewed by people who will trash it because they compare it to other films that are nothing like mine, and all the other sins of reviewerdom, but the fact is, the world needs reviewers. They slog through piles of media, picking out items (albeit arbitrarily) and then analyze them, so that even if you don’t agree with their conclusions, at least they let you know what the heck you’re getting into. So people need reviewers, and as someone with a movie, I know I do too.

I’ve sent out a bunch to potential reviewers, but no real bites yet.

I’ll instead just mention the general negative reactions that come on livejournals and message bases and forums when they hear the details of this thing:

“Holy Crap it’s five and a half hours long.”
“Holy Crap it’s $50.”
“Holy Crap, it has to be the most boring thing ever.”

To a person, it’s basically what they say when they haven’t seen it. Obviously, once a person sees it, their reactions are different. But this is why the website goes out of its way to explain what you’re getting and what’s on it, to get over that “hump”. A good long review would also get me over that “hump”.

An uneasy balance, but there we go, that’s the reality. Let’s hope I get more reviews out there. Feel free to put me in touch with people you think would help with that.

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I didn’t write this; it was submitted to me to go into the Historical Essay portion of textfiles.com. But I like it so much, at his attempt to not just recount his past but understand exactly what was so special about it, that I’m putting it here, too.

This document attempts to answer a fundamental question:

Why Is Today Not Like What It Was Like?

by TCV

formerly Sir Galahad, The Main Man (unsuccessful),
The Unknown, The Watchman, FEH!Head

The intro to Textfiles.com poses a simple question, right? What was it like
to call BBSs? And there are a lot of great textfiles within the section —
some of them like jail-house confessions — that admirably explain what it was
like at the time of the BBSs.

It got me to thinking: What’s different about today’s online experience
that makes it different from yesterday’s online experience?

There is actually a lot more different about today than you might think.
And what’s sad for those of us who were there, there’s quite a bit more that
just can’t be recreated. Those experiences only exist in our memories and our
lame attempts to capture emotions in textfiles.

It turns out that answering that simple question ain’t so simple.

Let’s see if we can’t figure out Why Is Today Not Like What It Was Like.

BEECHWOOD-45789

My friend introduced me to BBSs one afternoon during my 14th year. He
showed me the ropes: how you place a phone call to connect and login to
Paradise, or The Dungeon, or Dante’s Inferno. He also explained how these “BBS
programs” ran on other people’s computers. The board operators kept their
computers on all the time (!!) and the board answered the phone. It was all
very mystical to me. When I left that afternoon, he gave me a big list of
local BBSs to call.

And that’s the FIRST thing that’s missing from today’s online experience:
single contact.

When you called a bulletin board — unless you were one of those rich
and/or thieving kids — you made a simple phone call from your computer to
another computer. If you had fairly good knowledge of area codes and local
telephone number prefixes, you knew where you were calling. This, at least,
allowed you to imagine where you computer traveled.

What happens these days? Well, if you dial a number at all, it’s
certainly to some unmanned, air-conditioned room where a bunch of lonely
modems handle incoming calls for a bunch of online services. Believe me,
there’s no pimply-faced guy there with some mean alias like, “Your Worst
Nightmare!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” ready to scare you with his might when next you
logon. What’s more, when you request a website, where does it come from? At
best, a room with a whole bunch of servers that handle thousands of web sites.

Certainly there are PEOPLE behind all this technology. Someone is
creating that nifty community you log into every night.

But today’s online experience loses that simple contact, the connection
of computer to computer, the single exchange between YOU and the bulletin
board. And, certainly, the locality of it is lost. When you called a BBS
devoted to your area, it operated IN YOUR TOWN, not on some server offering a
free month’s hosting if you purchase a set of steak knives.

And, by the way, this is true from the other side, too. While you once
could watch someone login to your BBS — and see just how lame of a typist
many people were — you can’t do this when you run a web site.

NO CARRIER

Do you remember dial-up? Yeah, I’m trying to forget it, too. But more
importantly, do you remember all that freaky noise the modem used to make?
That’s the modem negotiating a speed so it can make the connection to the
Internet service. At least, that’s my non-technical explanation.

Way back before 56k, people used to connect to BBSs at 110 and 300 bps.
The slower the connection, the cleaner the tone that came out of the modem. In
fact, way back when folks connected at 110 and 300 bps, you could hear the
tone beep-and-boop (the technical terms for modulate and demodulate) as
characters came across the line. (With the VicModem, one could pick up an
extension phone and whisper into the receiver, “liiiiiiiiine noooooooise,”
utterly destroying someone’s connection. Now, THAT’s COMEDY!)

As speeds picked up, it became harder to distinguish the modulation. That
wasn’t a big deal, of course, because you got a super boost in speed. Still,
sometimes I miss the old, simple carrier tone. When the carrier perked up,
text was sent directly to your computer and when you pressed a key on your
keyboard and you heard the carrier beep, what you typed was displayed on the
other person’s screen. It was an interesting technical experience that’s
nearly gone these days.

FASTER THAN A SPEEDING CURSOR

Not terribly long after many BBSs upgraded to 2400bps, one long-time, local
stated that 1200 baud was just enough for anybody. What he meant by that was
as the ASCII scrolled on your screen, a typical person could keep up with the
1200 baud text without it getting too far ahead. While it’s pretty obvious
that 1200 baud would not be quite adequate for today’s connections, what is
missing is the simplicity of the text-only connection.

Web pages and emails are amazingly complex, and not just underneath the
hood. Seems like the simplest pages have lots of elements vying for your
attention — Javascript, FLASHy objects, blinky banner ads, and oh, so much
more. It’s yards beyond a simple screenful of text like we used to deal with
everyday.

What’s also quite different is that even for pages that manage to be simple
— like the ones here at textfiles.com — there is hardly such a thing as a
“screen full of text.” Text is much smaller these days due to the higher
resolutions monitors can display. I’m writing this in TextWrangler on a
PowerBook G4. I’ve set the background to black, the text to green, and I’m
soft-wrapping the text at 78 columns. It takes up slightly less than 1/2 of
the screen. This is a far cry from yesteryear, where 78 columns was the ENTIRE
screen. Poor bastards like me with their weak-ass Commodore 64 had only 40
columns. Vic-20 users? I’m not sure they were even allowed on BBSs, seeing as
they had a mere 20 columns to play within. 😉

It’s not easy to view things as they were, by the way. You can increase the
size of the text, yes, although at some point it does look ridiculous. You
could lower the resolution, but if you’re on an LCD monitor, everything’s
gonna get a little blurry. And today’s operating systems just aren’t meant to
work in anything under 800×600.

If you can force a 25×80 full-screen DOS session then telnet into a
telnettable BBS, you can get something close to the way things use to look.
But even that’s becoming harder to do without buying old equipment! (*sob*)
COMMUNISM

Many web sites these days want community badly. There are thousands of
books and web sites that explain how to create, foster, build, and massage
communities. And when those things don’t work, some web sites FORCE community.
(YOU WILL POST TO THE FORUMS!!) And community has done pretty well on the web.
There are THOUSANDS of websites with quality, busy communities.

It used to be that each local area had a handful of communities and while
some were specifically-inclined, a larger majority of them were general and
had strengths and weaknesses in one or more areas. Today’s communities are
typically micro-focused. They pick one thing and try to do it the best way
possible. This ain’t bad, but it has some downsides.

First, it’s hard to be successful at generality. Some of the most popular
BBSs were “general.” These boards typically just let the conversation go
wherever the users wanted. This freedom was meant to prompt the users to take
the wheel, as it were, and create the community. Many folks today will simply
pass you by if you’re not trying to shine some light onto some topic
previously in the dark.

Second, there’s a price to pay for your time. Just like you might have to
buy two computer magazines and visit four web sites to get a full story these
days, you have to visit several communities to equal up to what you would have
found on ONE popular BBS.

Third, redundancy. There are also a lot of repeat communities, so many so
that if one Star Wars community isn’t working, you can always go to the next.
For this reason, folks have very little reason to make a mediocre community a
stellar one. That leaves a lot of web communities overrun with weeds.

MAH THREADZ

Reading new messages is something people have done online since the
earliest days. But Usenet brought a shift to the way people read new messages.

Why am I blaming Usenet? Well, there’s no BLAME here, per se, but when
people started to read through hundreds of messages a day, folks sought a way
to easily jog one’s memory as to which conversation they were following. Thus,
the THREAD view was born.
On the old BBSs, you typically typed “N” for “New Messages” and you were
brought to each forum only to read those new messages in the particular forum.
How was it determined which messages you saw first? Easy. Your last logoff
time was compared to the messages in the message bases and the data/time they
were published. (Heck, there wasn’t much in the way of real threads with some
BBS packages; the whole of a conversation would ebb-and-flow, die and rise
again, as you read through the new messages. It was all very
stream-of-group-consciousness.)

Today, many web-based forums software, like vBulletin, force the thread
view, shunning the “show me all the new messages” view entirely. And some
packages really never show you the new messages, rather showing the topic
header with some graphic indicating new messages lie within. If your web
cookies are up-to-date and properly situated, then you’ll be able to read the
messages that are actually new since you last visited.

I haven’t found any web forums that do New messages quite like so many
years ago. I find it quite easy to miss honest-to-goodness, new-to-me
messages. A damn shame when community is supposed to be so important!

—

Let’s try to wrap this all into one typical call to a typical BBS. I’ll use
something closer to my experience — a Commodore 64 and a VicModem. (Hey,
Apple IIe owners. I’m STILL JEALOUS of you, that’s why I’m not using an Apple
IIe as the subject here. Nyah.)

The situation described is a BBS in which you called last night as a new
user. You’ve introduced yourself to the community and are hopeful for replies.
So, eagerly, you dial the seven digit phone number to Paradise/The Morgue BBS.
It’s busy. So you wait five minutes — which is interminable to someone your
age — and dial again.

This time it rings! Click. A carrier tone comes over the line. And just
before you remove the handset cord and plug it into the VicModem port, you
hear the tone start to modulate.

^^$@#!L C O M E T O

P A R A D I S E / T H E M O R G U E

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER THIS LOWLY PLACE
SYSOP: SOMEONE VERY MEAN. GRRRR.

You enter your alias and password and, after various promises of death and
stuff for those who would trespass against the BBS, you are whisked away to
the Main Menu prompt. An gets you to the Message Bases. A starts new
messages scrolling your way. In fact, here’s your first message to the
community:

MESSAGE 43 OF 57
BASE: WARROOM
9/5/1985 – 1:17AM
FROM: MR. BAD
TO: ALL (EVERYONE)
SUBJECT: I AM THE MOST BAD

YOU HAVEN’T MESSED WITH THE BEST UNTIL YOUVE MESSED WITH ME. IAM THE MOST
BAD YOU CAN EVER DEAL WITH. JUST TRY ME AND YOU’VE GOT A WARRR!!!!!11

MR. BAD
LEADER OF THE PACK
“COME SAIL AWAY WITH ME, LADS!”

It doesn’t take long until you see a reply to your inaugural BBS post!

MESSAGE 45 OF 57
BASE: WARROOM
9/5/1985 – 1:48AM
FROM: HELLS KEEPER
TO: MR. BAD, ALL
SUBJECT: I AM CONFUSED

HEY THERE, MR. BAD. THIS ISN’T SO MUCH A CHALLENGE AS IT IS HOPE FOR A
CLARIFICATION. WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY “THE MOST BAD?” DO YOU MEAN THE
“BADDEST?” CAN YOU PLEASE CLARIFY?

ALSO, I AM ASTOUNDED YOU WOULD QUOTE A SEVEN YEAR OLD STYX SONG AND AM
ULTIMATELY NOT SURE WHAT YOU WANT ME TO DO. DO YOU HAVE A BOAT? TO BE
SURE, I THINK YOUR QUOTE CHOICE IS A BIT … AHMM … GAY. IF YOUR
INTENT IS TO COME OUT OF THE CLOSET, THEN PERHAPS A MORE DIRECT METHOD
IS APPROPO.
ALL IN ALL, I BELIEVE THAT THE HAPPY FUN BBS WOULD BE MORE IN LINE FOR
YOUR DECIDEDLY NEWUSER FORAGES.

H E L L S K E E P E R

And so begins your online relationship. All the fame (and fortune)
promised by other BBS-calling friends will be yours soon, you think. You
respond with various threats, when suddenly, the cursor starts doing some
unexpected things:

SYSOP COMING ON…

HEY MR. BAD. I’M JUST TRYING TO HELP YOU HERE. I THINK THAT IT WOULD BE
BETTER FOR YOU TO JUST LAY LOW FOR A BIT AND WATCH HOW OTHERS INTERACT
WITH THE BOARD AND THE USERS. I KNOW THAT YOU’RE ANXIOUS TO GET STARTED
AND HAVE SOME FUN, BUT YOU REALLY DON’T WANT TO COME OFF TOO SILLY AT
FIRST.

You respond in a most unfortunate way:

WHO DO YOU TINK YOU ARE? I AM MR. BAD. THAT MEANS IAM BAD. WHAT PART OF
THAT IS HARD FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND. IF YOU DONT LEAVE ME ALONE I WILL
CRASH YOUR BOARD. IAM ALSO AN HACKER OF SOME^@&**

That’s when you hear a click from deep within your VicModem. And it sure
ain’t long before you realize you can’t access Paradise/The Morgue any longer.

Of course, silly new users are around as much today as they were back
then. Perhaps, though, they’re more difficult to delete.

It would be interesting if someone were to take an old BBS package, port
it to Flash, make it fill a screen, and try to start a BBS-style community
around it. Perhaps, with the right visual and audio cues, it would even FEEL
like an old BBS. They could even give you the old modem sounds and mimic
good-old 300 baud.

That’s an exercise best left to the more technically inclined and not
someone attempting to simply relay Why Is Today Not Like What It Was Like.
Indeed, I know I haven’t captured all of the ways today is different, and I
don’t mean to imply that Today Sucks. My hope is that you now have a slightly
better understanding of yesteryear as you read through the textfiles.

3 Comments