ASCII by Jason Scott

Sometimes, there are aspects of history that are so obscure, so unusual, that they are forgotten even by people who were a part of that history. In the sphere of technology, you will often have the case of people being faced with a problem so easily overcome in later years that the fact that the problem ever existed will be buried in distant memory. An easy example is modem speed; in a world where the entire contents of an Apple Floppy Disk can be downloaded in one second, more and more people will forget how truly slow and time-consuming the process of downloading text at 300 baud was. And, sadly, many people will not have learned the art of compressing thoughts and communication to make that 300 baud relate the most information in the shortest amount of time.

But as the world barrels forward and we move to hazy memory the times of dedicated telephone lines running dial-up Bulletin Board Systems, with their single-user capability and their local, town or county-based reach, let us not forget the most weak, the most easily-missed and perhaps bravest of all of them.

I speak of the part-time BBS.

Consider this list of Bulletin Board Systems scattered throughout the country. Lacking a proper date stamp, it’s hard to discern when this list was created. BBSes running at 2400 baud co-mingle with a “38.4k” BBS, which is very likely a misprint or an unbackable brag. More likely, there are 19.2k BBSes, which puts the date somewhere in the range of 1989-1990. In this list, you see a nice cross-section of the types of BBSes from that period. I could spend an entire day describing all the small social quirks being shown in this list, from the illiterate youth of the “Blak Sabbath BBS!” to the staid, no doubt for-pay online service-wannabe of “John’s House” with its 300-meg drive and “PC relayed” “Adult” aspects. But look closer at three of these listed systems: The
“Spider’s Web”, the “Master Powers”, and the “Fantasy Zone”.

These three systems have a datum that does not even warrant its own column: Their hours of operation.

Buying a home computer was an extremely expensive proposition by most standards in the 1980’s. While for some folks the choice to buy a computer could be done with the same cavalier attitude of buying, say, a cross-country plane ticket, the fact remained that it was often a long-fought battle by a young member of the family convincing his or her parents that this large amount of money was worth it for the piece of plastic and wire it got them. Having won that battle and perhaps having earned the purchase of an inexpensive modem sometime afterwards, it was that more unlikely parents would shell out the extra money for a second phone line. This would mean that the young BBSer would have to use the family phone line starting late into the
night, after everyone else had gone to sleep, staying up and typing as quietly as possible so as not to wake anyone. In many ways, this was a good situation: the BBSes weren’t so busy that late, and the BBSer was free to write and interact on the boards with a gusto and profanity-laden robustness they wouldn’t otherwise achieve with parents or siblings nosing in.

But as anyone who spent a lot of time cruising the BBSes knows, the real power didn’t belong to those who just dialed in and posted messages, or even those who uploaded many files and earned higher user levels or greater respect. The true power lay with the SysOps, the System Operators who ran the BBSes themselves off dedicated phone lines and who could grant access to whatever sections they wished, not to mention take it away on a whim. If you were a SysOp, the world came to you, not the other way around, and you could lie back and take it easy while the messages, files, and respect came pouring in. Of course, if you didn’t put any work into your BBS, were unusually cruel, or simply lacked the fundamental temperament to run a BBS properly, then no one would call you. But that’s a fact you would have plenty of time to learn about after you became a SysOp.

Unlike today, where competition and innovation towards the use of the telephone system means that getting a second phone line is neither a major difficulty or a social aberration (and, in fact, might even be considered a necessity), it was an unusual thing to have multiple telephone lines in a house, and seemingly expensive. Again, the same parents who didn’t think twice about dropping $1200 for a home computer wouldn’t blink at the additional expense of a second telephone line, but for some kids it was a battle they simply
could not win.

So what was left to you if you wanted the power of being a BBS SysOp, wanted so badly to run a board and be the master of your own user list, but didn’t have the required dedicated telephone line to run it? Well, you could wait until everyone was asleep, turn on the BBS program on your computer, and then wake up before everyone else did to turn off the computer. Thus, the era of
the part-time BBS began.

It burned brightly and quickly and soon began to fade. Eventually, as the 1980’s went on, there were simply too many BBSes available for people to want to put up with the trouble of going near BBSes with hours; much the same situation that BBSes themselves would encounter as the Internet became more popularly available. The Part-Time BBSes were a quick casualty of these BBS boom times, shutting down and disappearing forever. Their disappearance was a sign of technology eclipsing desparate solutions, a theme that continues today. Precious resources become ubiquitous and hoarded information becomes freely passed.

Say a prayer for the part-time BBS, but also be thankful the reason for them existing has passed on as well.

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As might be expected, running a high-profile site like textfiles.com earns me a lot of grief and attacks from a number of quarters, legitimate and not so legitimate. It’s not a big deal, usually, just the price of existing in such a networked world. The most common reason is that in the course of adding a few thousand files, one with a strange pedigree gets on and the creator or victim of the file comes calling.

While most of these would provide no joy or interest to outside parties, a six-year saga continuing to unfold just might provide some entertainment. I speak of Paul Andrew Mitchell and the Supreme Law Firm.

Mitchell is currently suing myself and a number of other folks, named and unnamed, for two billion dollars. That’s actually not an exaggeration, although it is a rounding off; the current amount is $2,880,696,000.00 as of January of 2003.

Without filling this space with my opinions and characterizations of the entire event, I can at least leave this helpful torch before you descend… If you take enjoyment in going through page after page of legally tenuous material, gaining whiplash through fluctuating legal arguments and bizzare claims, and find particularly outlandish constitutional cross-networking and decontextualization to be a joy, you’re in for a treat.

Prepare yourself, set aside some time, and descend into the world of Paul Andrew Mitchell.

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One of the nice benefits of studying a lot of history is that you start to see inevitable trends and patterns going across decades or centuries. This is in many ways comforting, because instead of feeling sad and forlorn that an apparently unique situation has passed, you know it will likely happen again.

One such pattern is one of my favorites, and produces some of my favorite artifacts. I suppose I could compose a cutesy name for it, but I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader.

Companies form all the time, built around a Big Idea. This Big Idea may in fact be an Old Idea dressed in new clothing, or maybe a Pretty Okay Idea presented with a few new twists or turns. Success or Failure happens to these companies, with Failure happening a lot more than success. There’s lots of reasons why success happens, although it’s somewhat nebulous. More often than not, it’s an actual Big Idea presented at just the right time and in the right place.

Money comes in. Streaming in. Pouring in. Now the company can afford a massive building, maybe several with a green space between them, or to build an entirely new campus with a big sign out front. Assuming the company doesn’t screw up this flow of money, they end up with a massive nest egg and they start hiring. Often, they end up overhiring, because the more people they get, the bigger they are. And the bigger they are, the better they must be!

Eventually, the company is very big and very well-known and either popular or at least respectably feared. It has not yet begun to be ruined. Every company is eventually ruined, but there is a nadir, a period of time spanning months or years when it is established, happy, and the people in it are generally content. Flaws in the business model haven’t appeared with any strength yet, and the also-ran knockoff companies aren’t on the stage in any force. It’s a good time to be there.

At some point, you have people in the firm whose job is to perpetuate this good feeling within the firm, and to keep the sense of the “place” the company exists in as real as possible. The folks assigned to this job have probably not got the tightest grip on what got the company its success and they almost certainly don’t do anything that makes the products better. Instead, they show up in the morning, and work at something until the night, and then go home. And a big part of their work is trying to do something, anything, for the “team” and to impress the customers with the “team”.

This is the precious era of the company artifact.

It can start out simple, with a t-shirt with a slogan. But within no time, it can mutate into items like knapsacks, flashlights, knives, decals, and calculators. Items which don’t actually better the work being done at the company or improve the product, but just get the name into strange places where it didn’t go before. This is a separate concept from company branding, wherein they place the logo or product line title across a series of things they sell to make them all seem unified. These artifacts do nothing but perpetuate the concept of the “place” the company inhabits.

Of course, what interests me the most are the weird, offbeat examples that arise up. International Business Machines, which employed my father for 30 years, has some of the strangest, owing to their long history. For example, they ran (and continue to run) a series of recreational centers throughout the country where IBM employees could play tennis, swim, and do all those things you’d do at a gym. With shrinkage, many of them have gone away, but I still remember my time at IBM’s equivalent of Day Camp. IBM also had many company songs, and therefore produced a beautiful song book filled with them. You can even listen to it, or to others.

Atari, even though it lost its founding father within a relatively short time, also produced buckets of artifacts, many of which are treasured collectibles among those of us who care about such things. Apple has had similar artifacts as well.

It really does take a major upset, a bankruptcy or closure, and to see a company evacuate and disappear like a dying herdbeast, to understand the impermanence of it all. Cubicles and office walls that you thought would never move and shift are removed and stowed, piles of paper and folders you thought must have been precious and in need of sorting are tossed out with the trash, and the people scatter like ants under an errant boot. Once this happens to you, and I’ve had it happen a number of times in this modern era, you realize a lot of life’s experiences are bubbles rising in soda water, heading towards the light, never to reach it.

History makes you appreciate the present.

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I believe I have found my rhythm with this website; I am probably going to post some speculation or concept every few weeks, expounding greatly upon it, and then move on to another subject entirely. I will likely continue to refrain from political discusions, because I consider them banal and irrelevant to what textfiles.com is specifically about, or at least what amount of help I can possibly assist the subject from this vantage point.

I also had a specific policy against comments, because I don’t really think it helps much to have “me-too” sorts of single sentence additions to a site; if people want to write about what I have to say, they will likely reference it elsewhere and link to me. That seems to make more sense and provides greater improvement of the disussions at hand.

Having said that, I think I will open the floor related to this entry, and in the future occasionally post such a story, with comments allowed, so that people can engage in a little bit of discussion, if it so inspires them. So have fun.

3 Comments

I am recently back from a 9-day trip through the Midwest (Midwest being defined as Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas). I have made the personal discovery that I can drive roughly 350 miles a day alone before I start to encounter “problems”. Most of these problems involve potentially running off the road or making poor direction decisions. In all, I drove about 3,405 miles in those 9 days and interviewed 17 people. Their new entries are at the bottom of the Documentary photo gallery and will be expanded to be fully browsable soon.

But this entry really isn’t about that; it’s about how I passed the time, something in the range of 4-6 hours a day driving by myself with the cruise control on and often on a well-defined course (take I-35 forever, for example). For a person who likes to have 10 or 20 windows open on his machine, you can imagine the potential for mental implosion when faced with the monotony of driving, devoid of contact (except when on my cell phone) and without anything engaging to do.

The plan I had launched was to buy an MP3 player, either an iPod or something from Rio, to listen to on the trip, but I couldn’t justify spending hundreds of dollars for such a simple need. I certainly broke my head when I went shopping for an iPod and found that the one I wanted was about $500; I was so worried about the potential of buying an item the size of a cigarette case that went into my jacket pocket that I avoided buying what would have been my dream machine as a teenager. It’s an indication of what fun being older can suck out of your life, even if it leads to less mistakes.

My solution to the problem came from my local Walgreens, which was selling a CDR MP3 player for $30. Basically, it’s a CD player with modified programming: you pop a CDR filled to the brim with files and it treats them like tracks on a regular audio CD. It doesn’t like a massive amount of them, but it will work. I also don’t credit it much in the way of user interface and slickness, but it does what it does as advertised. I also bought a $20 item which, when plugged into an audio source (like, say, the headphone jack of an MP3 CDR player) broadcasts the audio onto a radio band between 88.1 and 88.9. Combined, I then have all the convenience and effect of a radio station that is only playing stuff I want.

So then the question comes of what actually to bring along, and that’s the core point of this entry.

Some time ago, I had a bunch of audio files related to BBSing and computers and a lot of the subject matter on textfiles.com, but obviously an ASCII text website wasn’t appropriate for that, so I created a subsite called audio.textfiles.com. Originally consisting of my own speeches, phone conferences, and noise samples, it has expanded quite dramatically, exceeding my own plans for the site and going into places I’d never thought it would. The site is now at 9 gigabytes of data and growing noticably each week. And a lot of that is because of these amazing files I have of hacker shows.

I’m still determining the true and accurate history of this phenomenon, but here’s what I have so far. Originally, pirate radio stations (and by that I mean actual broadcasting equipment on boats or in the back of trucks blasting stuff into the airwaves in violation of the FCC and similar government entities) covered a number of subjects that wouldn’t be covered elsewhere, including extreme politics, hacking, drugs, and even obscure music not otherwise easily found. Some of these pirate radio stations were obviously just a guy who didn’t have the time or inclination to work at an actual place or who just liked being a goof; the music they played was therefore not overly different from what you’d hear on other parts of the dial. Others, however, really did take it to a strange and different level. This situation has existed as long as radio has been regulated by the FCC or other such standards bodies; it certainly has prominent existence in the 1960’s and 70’s.

Emmanuel Goldstein/Eric Corley of 2600 magazine, who is (to put it mildly) politically active and motivated, got himself involved with a university radio station called WUSB and ran a show called “Brain Damage” from 1988 to 1995. This eclectic radio broadcast covered a wide range of subjects, including some aspects of what we commonly call “Phone Phreaking”, the area of interest to 2600 magazine. Along this same line, he also got involved with a pure hacker/phreaker radio show called “Off the Hook”, which he ran (and runs) on a public radio station involved with the Pacifica network called WBAI. Many of these shows are available for download. (Corley has recently expanded his show appearances to another program called “Off the Wall”, on another station.)

Whatever else you might say, creating a radio program and keeping with it for years is a daunting and difficult task; deciding what subjects to cover, handling incoming phone calls, and just holding the interest of listeners are true and honest skills. As a result, there were not a lot of obvious shows out there except Off the Hook.

In January of 1999, Nullsoft released Shoutcast. It can not be overstated how fundamentally changing this was to the world. With a somewhat steep learning curve but integration with a popular MP3 playing program (Winamp), the Nullsoft guys made creating a streaming radio program into a reality, even from a dial-up modem. Granted, you didn’t enjoy it on a dial-up modem, but the point was clear: here was a tool that not only made things easier for people wanting to be a DJ, but it injected an inherent aspect of cool into the whole process of broadcasting, which is normally a thankless endeavor. Even though law and foolishness came with it, it inspired many people to rethink the audio experience. (Nullsoft have done this again with video streaming in Winamp 5).

In July of 1999, Rob Malda and Jeff Bates of Slashdot began a radio show that was broadcast on Thesync.com, called “Geeks in Space”. They mostly covered whatever was hot on Slashdot that week, and ran it not unlike a lot of radio talk shows, except sans the commercials. I still don’t quite understand why they did this, but the fact remains they did and a lot of folks listened to it before it finally flamed out in 2000. (As I said, it is a daunting task to work on this week after week, and the 36 shows that Bates and Malda created at least represent a consistency across months and months).

In April of 2001, Screamer and Dash Interrupt, inspired by Off the Hook and having already tried a “music to hack to” radio show idea, created a program called “Hackermind“. “Inspired by Off the Hook” also indicates the content of the program: hacking and phreaking. The two broadcasters, followed by others as needed, kept the conversation involved around technical and political issues of interest to hackers, letting the chips fall where they may, stumbling but learning along the way. Their show lasted for about 6 months, with a couple “all-nighter” specials being produced and a long-after-the-fact show return months after any previous issues. (This pattern also demonstrates itself in the output dates of many “e-zines” in my collections.)

Although Hackermind’s life is relatively short, it inspired yet another person to start a radio show, Dual Parallel, who unleashed upon the world Radio Freek America. Where the other shows sparked and then sputtered, Radio Freek America took hold and burned brightly. Now in its third year of extremely dependable and consistent broadcasting, this show is cut from the same mold as these previous shows, but for some reason I have grown to enjoy Dual’s cheerleading and choice of co-hosts (perhaps with the exception of his foil Merichan). He infuses the entire endeavor with a sense of wonder and explanation about what interests him (primarily phones but also free operating systems) and yet doesn’t let things get entirely out of hand. While it is unclear how long he will continue this project, Dual has created a body of work that stands well and truly on its own.

As a result, it was basically Radio Freek America (RFA) that was my companion through interstates and backroads throughout the midwest for a week. I drove through total darkness and bright sun listening to Dual and Rax (and kondor and Merichan and StankDawg and so many others) pick through the weekly cluster of technical news and found phone numbers. I listened to 36 shows in total, and will be getting through the balance over the next year, no doubt becoming a regular listener to his weekly shows.

I should state for the record that I agree with perhaps 20 percent of what Dual says in political and social arenas, but that’s not really the point. The fact that he brings things up I don’t agree with makes it so that I’m at least thinking about those things, constructing rebuttals to his statements in my mind while I drive. That’s more than I might get out of a fuzzy country station whose signal disappears with every major hill. And the fact that I know where to reach him and can see updates from him make the conversations in my head that much more satisfying. It is radio that makes you think.

This is at the center of the arguments where it is thought there is no content out there that isn’t stolen or ripped from some other source. This is actual, original creation, and as he continues the work, Dual stands on firm ground as a within-hands-reach to the question “what out there isn’t pirated media?” his work is free, homegrown, and right up against anything you might find by spinning the dial.

Not surprisingly, Radio Freek America has inspired even more hacker radio shows to come into being, many of which are collected on the audio.textfiles.com site. Taking his cue, these co-conspirators bring their own ideas and approaches to the subject matter, talking about subjects, asking the right questions, and laughing their way to a thinking world. It’s both exciting and fulfilling to know this is going on, and that I merely have to download and present a file on my site to spread that word even further.

The resultant happiness from the various hosts of these shows when I mirror their mp3 and ogg collections is rewarding, but also strange, since I think of it as an honor and a gift to have such amazing creations available to mirror in the first place. Mirroring is a wget and a description; turning one hour of your life’s time into a place of learning and conversation is the hard part. And these folks, for however long the bug lives in their hearts and minds, are doing this, and for that I thank them.

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I am a very big fan of “answering natural questions”, that is, as you take actions and do projects, people’s minds naturally gravitate towards information holes in your work and want them filled. They see artwork you drew and want to know what you used to do it. They hear you built a car that looks like a giant skull, and they want to see a picture.

This is the reason there’s now a publically accessible Photo Gallery on the documentary website; people want to know who I interviewed and what those people look like. I’ve been working on that aspect of the site since the project started, but I was hesitant to release it to the public since the pictures, all nice digital camera ones, will always look better than video, and I didn’t want to mislead anyone. Now that the entries are including video screen grabs, at least I can rest better. The entries also have my own personal memories of the process of interviewing the person, and support files relevant to them, if any. This, I think, is the way any documentary about interesting people should be presented. Give interested people what they want without forcing things on people who don’t care: If people just want to see the DVD and don’t care about how the DVD was made and my thoughts on making in, they can.

So along that line of reasoning, I knew it was inevitable that people, having seen a documentary that lauds the power and the wonder of BBSes, would wonder where my BBS was. Where’s the “BBS guy’s BBS”? So in a pre-emptive move, I’ve created one. Unlike my previous BBS “The Works”, this one has a pretty simple name: “The BBS Documentary BBS”.

The URL to information about it is at bbs.bbsdocumentary.com. But the BBS is not actually at that URL. It is an NNTP server, running INN, located on one of my servers. I always knew that if I ever ran another BBS it would be an INN one, but for people unfamiliar with this whole situation, it probably seems a little weird; I’ll explain.

INN, if you hadn’t heard of it before, is one of the more popular programs for running Usenet feeds. When you hit a news server, it is actually INN (or Diablo, or Leafnode, or other similar packages) and not “Usenet” that you’re connecting to. Similar, I suppose, to how you’re actually connecting to Apache or IIS or HTTPd instead of “The Web”. INN has been around as a package since 1992, when it was introduced to the world at large by Rich Salz, maintained for a year, and then taken over by David Barr and later the Internet Software Consortium. Usenet, as an entity, dates back to 1979, although things didn’t start getting hot until 1981-1982. Again, the advantages of Internet come through since it’s very easy to find Internet history but not so easy to find BBS history.

Usenet, and therefore INN, has had to deal with over a decade of the worst abuse of any collaborative medium outside of the internet itself; Usenet contains very little penalty for being damaging or destructive in conversation or interaction with the system. Because of this, INN is as close to bulletproof as one tends to get and represents one of the more hardened pieces of code relevant to the task it has been given to accomplish, that is, running message boards. The INN documentation is very helpful in creating a “local groups only” news server, that is, basically, a one-site message board.

As an additional bonus, all that nice networking is built right into the product, so if in the future I want to have multiple machines do the duty of the BBS, I can turn those hooks on and start adding other machines. A nice but unlikely feature.

Along with being so popular and tested so well, NNTP has also been at the recieving end of a lot of work on the client side. Newsreaders abound in every platform. Even programs like Outlook Express have support for newsgroups, and with nice threading and bold-i-fying and all the rest of those navigational tricks we’ve learned in the last quarter century. If you want to be able to read these messages with speed and ease, then there’s a program out there for you. There are even programs for pulling messages out of an NNTP server and HTMLifying them, making them a feed, or otherwise aiming the messages into whole new places. Should a need arise for such cool little gim-gaws, I will be prepared for that too.

What I lose is a file section, title page, and all the other aspects of a BBS. There’s a little of that on the webpage dedicated to the server, so I think people will at least get the ground rules and other “hey everybody” kinds of messages on that site. But yes, according to the definition of many, many folks, I am not running a BBS, I am running a broken Usenet server. So be it.

How this will all pan out in the ultimate arena, when people start flooding back onto the documentary site from whatever announcements and trailers become available, I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be soundly rejected by the audience. Maybe it’ll become the biggest thing ever. Or maybe it’ll flame out quickly, becoming a ghost town after what seemed like endless boom times. Either way, I did what I could.

I answered the natural question.

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Snowed in by a blizzard (except for the part where I happily did donuts in a nearby parking lot), I focused some effort on sorting the office in my home, where most of my artifacts and papers are located. When I moved into this office about a year ago, I ended up moving wholecloth my entire previous room, which this old photograph somewhat illustrates. This means that I went from a densely-packed room of information to a very-slightly-less packed room of information, in a house with 5 times the space. Silly.

I chose to sort things in some very general ways, and buy about a dozen plastic stackable bins from the local Home Depot. They’re basically clear, not as prone to crushing as cardboard, and easy to pick up and move around. Without getting bogged into whether each piece of paper had a place or was in the right area, I made some general piles: old high school and college papers, “zines” and other such publications I’d picked up over time, professionally-printed magazines and documents, and personal creations or letters or drawings. Working this way, I found I had 6 bins of easy-to-sort information in no time, and put them into the attic. The room seems nicely emptier, more room to put in better shelves, and maybe even decorate in something other than “the previous owners enclosed their porch”.

The attic already had many boxes of magazines; some time ago I realized I was collecting them without trying, and I cleaned out a comic book store’s stock of cardboard backing and plastic bags and started filing them. The cardboard boxes these magazines were in were, as I said, starting to show how they aren’t good for long-term storage. So I took the remaining empty plastic bins and filled them with these already-stored magazines, finding that one bin held the same as two-and-a-half boxes. Within no time, the attic had a nice little stack of bins in the corner.

I’m bringing up this Martha Stewart-like description of my blizzard-day housecleaning because I think the functionality of the process is similar to how I approach my archives, and for better or worse I think lessons can be learned from it. I encounter in my frequent searches for archives and information a lot of common mistakes and weirdness, most of which can be easily fixed with the same amount of effort it took to create the collections in the first place. What harm can there be in giving out advice, I figure.

Warning: Not Many Professionals Agree With Me

I want to make it clear that how I go about things is a very organic process, one where errors have been made and issues have been encountered along the way that fundamentally changed how I proceeded from then on. Also, I tend to speak with some sort of implied authority, when in fact I have no formal training as an archivist and certainly no sort of degree in the library sciences. To be honest, I’m not entirely fond of the library sciences, but I’m sure that’ll change once I have a few parties with them.

As (I hope) is obvious, I am someone who collects at a rate that would best be described as “furiously”. If I encounter a website that has a large amount of files, information or similar product that is of interest to me, one of my small army of basement UNIX boxes starts a massive wget, pulling every image, document, and program off the site. I sometimes put the resultant files on CD-ROMs or onto tape, or even pull the relevant part into one of my textfiles.com sites. What this means is, I tend to stumble upon an awful lot of archives and see an awful lot of styles.

There are several sub-species of archivist on the Internet. Let’s set aside the professionals like the Library of Congress or archive.org or one of the many collections now showing up at educational institutions. Let’s go for the places where it’s just a person or a small group of people who have a bunch of stuff and want it somewhere.

The two most common mistakes I encounter on these personal archives are perfectionism and possessiveness.

Perfectionism is where I see a site that has a lot of files in the wings but which has not added them because the people involved are concerned about getting it just right, with every single bit presented to you in the coolest, slickest interface and setup imaginable. The information they’ve made such an effort to assemble is undigitized, not presented, and coming soon, ever so soon. They explain on their site how it’s going to be a complete collection of this and that, but what they have to show for it is very tiny. Also, these sites tend to use an awful lot of gimgaws, like flash menus or heavy graphics, with the intent being that you’re not just browsing for content, you’ve been sucked into some sort of virtual computer warehouse spinning and jumping around you with the impressiveness of a science fiction movie. That is, the experience of trying to get at the content is ideally even more fantastic than the content itself. And, in fact, it often is.

Possessiveness is where somebody executes effort to generate content (I’m not talking about writing or creating graphics, just the collecting of previously extant content) and then, at some point along the line, considers themselves the legal guardian and sole beneficiary of that content. Even though they’ve chosen to create a site that is on the Internet, the greatest linking of worldwide information to have ever existed, in fact they only want a small portion of the benefits of the Internet, the ones where they get lots of fans and where everyone comes to them for the “goods”, and not the other aspects, like the fact that their content will be copied a thousand times over in the first month. To this mode of thinking, the loosing of their website must be tightly controlled, the dissemination of their archive is a crime, the loss of control of the content from them must be halted at all costs. The first cost tends to be usability, where the website owner throws in strange scripting to prevent the saving of images, or cracks down on someone copying the whole site. The second tends to be corruption of the content, where the images are given horrible watermarks indicating where they came from, or where the documents are modified to provide ads for the site that compiled them. Note, please, that I am again talking about amateur and private archivists as opposed to professional sites that charge money to access their content; those folks are on a completely different vector of existence from what I do. Naturally, their way of going about things would be patently different as well.

Both of these mistakes are poison to the eventual quality of your site, and a sign that you came into the party with the entirely wrong mindset.

Perfectionism dismisses the ability of your intended audience to impose their own sets of filters or understanding on what you’ve collected. In your quest for the best quality digitization, the most complete meta-information, the ultimate graphical presentation and the adherence to every possible standard that exists in the web, you’ve sacrificed your site’s ability to be alive. You’ve also clamped onto the content an awful lot of un-reproducable weight that won’t survive the next iteration of your site. This time there’s a little animated fish that tells people if the .zip file has text in it. What about next time, when you want everything to match up with a MySQL database of file attributes? Are you holding back your collection because you’re afraid of what people might think? How many hard drives contain a copy of your in-progress website? One? What if that hard drive dies? Do you have any backups? Did you keep original copies of the archives you’re ballasting with scripts and graphics?

In terms of possessiveness, the end result of your efforts will be that people depend utterly and entirely on your site for the content, and will each have small pieces of it. This means that if your site goes away, the content goes away, or at least your assembly of it. Your site going away doesn’t necessarily mean you take it down either; a hard drive crash or a loss of funds to pay for hosting will do just as well. Basically, in your quest to be the “owner” of the information, you’ve made yourself the “sole parent and guardian” as well, and your centralized site is fortified against what you see as interlopers and marauders. You know, your users.

The First Step: Coming to Terms With Your Problem

You might not recognize yourself in these paragraphs, because I’m being somewhat drastic in the descriptions. But ask yourself these questions.

Am I afraid someone is going to ‘take’ my site?
Do raw directory listings make me look ‘bad’ to my users?
Do I hate it when people just right-click and put the images on their site?
Am I using a database (MySQL, etc.) or scripting (PHP, SSI) to provide static content?
Is a lot of my content offline or inaccessible because it’s not ‘ready’ yet?

Framed this way, maybe you see what I’m getting at; you’ve got fears that are getting between you and putting the content out for people to find it. These fears will be reflected in a site that is paranoid and hard to use because you’re thinking of yourself as a business or a top-notch service and forcing your work into that template, to the detriment of the source material.

The Second Step: Make Your Content Available

I’m not one to point out problems without suggesting some ways to go about fixing them, so let me give some pointers. If the previous paragraphs haven’t turned you away from this entry, then you’ll find them just dandy.

The first key is to not let yourself get pulled into silly abstract concerns about the long-term arrangements. Taken to their logical extremes, these concerns about the permability of magnetism and the functionality of various storage media go to some depressing extremes indeed. It will depress and paralyze you. Ignore it, focus on, for example, the next five years. In that case, you want some basic backups, some clear copies of your content, and maybe a friend who can keep a copy as well.

One of the greatest things to watch is how quickly the new technologies can swallow the old. I used to spend hours browsing collections of files, peering through a paint program at every single image, trying to classify them, consider them. Now, I can pull up a thumbnail gallery in seconds and drag and drop images into folders with ease. The situation is even more intense with hard drives; I take the full contents of my old “it kicks ass” 100 megabyte hard drive and just drag it onto one of my USB drives, then run a program that finds all the doubled files and removes them. Then I blow the whole thing to a CD-ROM in the half-finished state as a backup and work on sorting the data when I have time. Seconds where minutes and hours once lurked…. The point is, don’t fret on having all your stuff in absolute pristine condition before it’s presented, because as long as it’s out there, people will write programs that do the sorting and evaluating faster and faster with each generation of machines, and the most important part, the part where you had these files and got there somewhere safe, is at hand and easy enough to do.

The next thing you must come to terms with is the concept that the information owns you more than you own it. This is likely where our two philosophical paths diverge and you will go on your merry way; it’s been nice knowing you! For my own part, I simply can’t look at these thousands of textfiles and artpacks and demo programs and music and act like they’re “mine”. As for my descriptions and other meta-data I’ve added to them, those are “mine” in a way but they would be useless without the core data, and the core data isn’t “mine”. So while I appreciate it when people think of me as the “textfiles guy”, I’m just the latest in the line of people who’ve had possesion of them, and the one that got them into your hands in many cases, but I would be nowhere if other folks hadn’t created textfile CD-ROMs or put up lists of them on their BBSes and AE lines. To act like my luck in being around when the Internet came forward is some sort of skill that I deserve due compensation for (and more importantly, ownership of the files) is delusional.

This is a very, very difficult thing to get across, just like any core philosophy. It’s why some people love and some people hate the GNU Public License. It’s why some people give money to the local library and other people threaten them. It’s an inherent belief system I adhere to: not so much that information wants to be free, but that information that was free is still free. I call the syndrome of turning previously-free content unfree as “tollkeeperism”. Just because you’re first, you think you can build a little toll booth and charge everyone a nickel to go by after you, or tell them how they can use the road you’re charging them to use. It’s profitable, it’s good business, but you’re not in business. You’re just a person with information to share. It’s a high calling, but it’s not a knighthood and it’s certainly not an excuse to lock everything away so you can approve every bit that goes by. If it’s actually stuff that you personally created, then huzzah! Yes, stick a price tag on it and go to the market. But it so often isn’t. You didn’t write it, you didn’t create it, it’s just your collection. Why act like others shouldn’t collect it, too?

An example of how technology came along to solve inherent problems of distribution is Bittorrent. It has its detractors, but my own take is that it provides a way to download massive files (for example, an archive of an entire website) in a clean, efficient manner. And best of all, the program simply insists that the copy it gets be an exact duplicate of the original (believe it or not, some other technologies let you get working sub-pieces, diminishing the integrity of the original file). You can then pass around this massive file as just another thing to trade. This is why textfiles.com now has a torrent site. It’s also why I don’t have much belief or patience in people who say it would be too difficult to put their entire site up for download.

It’s an excellent test; are you comfortable with what you’re putting up that you could just give it away in one big chunk to whoever comes by? If not, why not? What’s the worst they could do; put up an exact duplicate of your site? Maybe even charge money for it?

So what?

People do that with textfiles.com all the time. Sometimes they even take the color scheme. This, I hope, indicates that on a very personal, very singular level, I experience this supposed downside of my open philosophy about the content of my sites. Folks take copies, put them up, and start serving them, far out of my control, using my descriptions, to whoever they can find, taking people away from my site. I can’t stress this enough: I love that. When I first started looking for BBS textfiles in 1998, I was basically stumped; I could find small smatterings of files I’d remembered, but I couldn’t find something like textfiles.com out there. Now people go searching and they stumble onto my site through google or the like and they pull an immediate copy. Or they find the other sites and pull their copy. Files that were once on the verge of being either lost or very hard to find are now living, breathing in thousands of machines across the country (many people have used my torrent site). That’s fantastic.

Sometimes, I do searches for “textfiles” on peer-to-peer networks, and to my surprise (or maybe lack of it) I find copies of the entire archive of textfiles.com available for download. There it is, sandwiched between digitized albums and months of amatuer porn, is a good sizeable chunk of every major BBS-borne textfile from the 1980’s and 1990’s. Just another ware. Just another single click of the mouse and it comes onto your computer, which has more than enough space to hold it. Maybe I’m still too wide-eyed for my own good, but this is a miracle.

One day there will be no textfiles.com. It’s not an announcement that I’m shutting down, and it’s not some weird prophecy. It is just the way of the world that things come and things go. What I hope, to be sure, is that when the site has long gone away, the archive of text is out there for people to find. I hope the information outlives me. I hope the works live a very long time. That’s the most important part of the site; what it provides for after it is no longer up. Otherwise, I’ve spent an awful lot of time on a sandcastle.

Every week, I go to sites that were once “the largest” and “the best” and find an empty site, or an unpaid domain name, or a greatly reduced archive because the owner had too much bandwidth costs. In some cases, they remove content because there’s been too many downloads, an irony I find breathtaking. This loss of content is happening now, while you read this, all over. And it’s so avoidable, that’s what hurts the most.

Textfiles.com is mirrored (many states and countries with different laws, plus unannounced mirrors). Textfiles.com is simple to use (every directory has a .descs file, so you can pull the information and not be married to my html.) Textfiles.com lets you download all of it (via torrent, soon via archives). Textfiles.com thinks you’re the best part of the site: the person who cares enough about history to want a copy for themself. I hope my site makes you feel at home.

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It’s been a while since I’ve added any major amount of vintage textfiles to the main site. When people send me their own creations, I quickly add them to the uploads section; that works out to maybe one or two files a week. But I’m happy to say I added over 120 new adventure walkthrough files, most of them from an archive of files grabbed about a year ago.

I don’t know how many people really care about the process of adding new files to textfiles.com, so I’ll just say that I use a combination of perl and bourne shell scripts that “do the right thing” when I place new files into the directories. I haven’t hand-made a directory for the site since the first month of operation, some five years ago. The scripts let me take a swath of files, be shown them, describe or delete them, and then integrate them into the right location. Variations of the scripts maintain all the sites, and is how one single person can maintain all this information. I get accused of “having no life” because of the sea of files through the sites, but in fact it takes relatively little time to maintain.

In the case of these files, they’re all pretty much Adventure Walkthroughs, an interesting subspecies of file that began as early as the late 1970’s and has continued to the current day. The concept is both simple and intriguing: in the case of games where a complicated set of moves or choices are required to “solve” it, a person will write a file describing those exact moves. Some of the walkthroughs are literally that, a set of commands that, if you type them in exactly, will put you through an entire game until you are victorious. Others are a little more subtle and drop hints and ideas to push you towards making the final “a-ha” yourself.

What was most disconcerting about this collection of walkthroughs was how some were written as late as 2000 and 2001 and some dated back as far as 1983. So you would have examples from the late-and-lamented Mines of Moira BBS along with things obviously grabbed off someone’s web page. I try, as always, to date the files as accurately as possible, but it’s not always to be, since the pedigree can be lost over the last two decades.

If it’s not obvious, I have a weakness for text adventures, those ascii-only games that depended almost entirely on literary ability to create and abstract thought to solve. Few games can claim that, and in the modern age of the DirectX library and the DVD-ROM, I think there are games crafted with the same exquisite skill but not with the same intense result that I got internally from these games. Hit the dragon, move south.

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While I’m a person who despises intrusive and unwarranted advertising in previously clean and ad-free spaces (a concept best typified by urinal ads), that doesn’t necessarily mean I hate every single last aspect of marketing. Just most of it.

Specifically, when a company or entity designs a product or service and, instead of just shoving it out in a working state, goes to a marketing or design firm, the results can actually be quite beautiful. In fact, the resultant imagery can go so far as to become a treasured part of one’s life at the given time.

It might seem bizzare now, but as a child, I used to pick up magazines like Compute! and Creative Computing, circle every last number on the back of the “Reader Service Cards” in the back, and then sit back and wait as dozens and dozens of 4-color mailings would show up at my house. I’d gather them all up, take them to my room, and open them like presents. Many of them were dreary photocopies of some lifeless text, but many of them were fantastic little pieces of fiction, describing computer programs for the Commodore 64 and Atari as the most realistic, mind-blowing experience you could hope for. At the very least, their advertisements promised this. And really, who needs comic books when a candy-colored mailing tells you about all the incredible features of a new video game?

To this day, I still have all those mailings! In fact, I started a project some time ago to grow a slave-race of digitizers in the Boston area to take all these little nuggets of history and get them online; the project has gone nowhere since I’ve been so focused on my documentary. When it’s done, maybe something will come of it. Until then, you can glance at the aforementioned box of leaflets and letters and see how much there is.

Buried among these different works, there were artists whose work still has an effect on me. For example, I immediately connected with the work of Scott Ross, specifically with his work on “Preppie!” and “Preppie! 2” for Adventure International, but also for all his other computer game covers, which I coveted by cutting them out wholecloth from the computer magazines I owned. Just the existence of his stylish “Ross” signature on a piece of art got my attention. While I couldn’t afford many of the programs his artwork appeared on, in the case of Preppie! for the Atari 800 I saved up the money (literally, nickles and dimes) to take the bag down to the local computer store and buy the game. On a data tape. Which took 20 minutes to load. What mattered to me was that I could take this incredible program home, with the Ross artwork on it; the fact the game turned out to be really decent was a bonus. How backwards a kid could be about a product!

(There’s a solid interview with Scott Ross here.)

The box art for a slew of Atari Cartridges had the same effect on me. They ranged in quality, sure, but for the best of the best, you were looking at some wonderful paintings, portraying events that were peripherally attached to the experience within the box. One only has to look at the artwork for a game like Othello for the Atari 2600 and see a master at work. Compare that artwork to the actual game; the difference between the program and the artwork… it nears galactic levels. And for whatever reason, this doesn’t anger me in the least.

As adults we become cynical, tied to the idea that whatever is being offered to you, it sucks, it doesn’t work, and there’s something that actually works and is cheaper just 10 feet away. We inherently do not trust ourselves and the people around us, because enough negative experiences have occured that it’s safer to just shut down the hatches and walk away from things because you won’t be hurt, killed, or ripped off. As a child, you don’t have these defense mechanisms, and while perhaps that sets you up as a potential statistic or sad story on the 6 o’clock news, it also means that you’re ripe for the ultimate headrush: a fantastic yet believable promise. That first time you see a cartoon mascot promise you that the sugar-coated cereal you eat will send you into an amazing jungle or kingdom, or the first time a game box cries out to you and claims that once you buy it you will be inside an amazing world where everything is fun for the rest of your life, you are delighted. Until the toy reveals itself to be a little less than your wild imagination assumed it would be, you are absolutely excited and tingly and plotting in your mind how you will scope out and explore this new world. That feeling is so strong, so powerful, that it only comes in small portions in later life. I know I feel something like it when an exciting programming setup like Graham Nelson’s Inform shows itself, or when I find a semi-obscure cache of neat photographs on the internet, waiting for me to pore over them. For you, you might have something else that gets the juice flowing, but probably never like that first time, totally buying in, so beyond gullible you have achieved a sort of personal holiness, floating gracefully over the world with your dreams.

The fact is, all well-done presentational art could be construed as a lie. Maybe it’s not a lie in the formal sense of a direct statement advocating a mistruth like “This can of poison will not kill you”. But it grabs the eye, portraying an uplifting and possibly life-changing experience, and then leaves you with a handful of dots on a screen to remember your money by. This is, make no mistake, a subtle bait-and-switch scam. But at the core of it, it is a masterfully-crafted lie, and the world is so full of uninspired meanderings and poor-quality creations, that even well-made falsehood must be admired for the effort it contains. Lies, it seems, are inevitable: a fact of modern existence that both eschews privacy for convenience and dismisses difficult questions in return for pat answers. But at the very least, we can relish the human effort in constructing a breathtaking falsehood for implied (but self-serving) good.

This article, for example, is a lie. One gentleman’s perception of the world around him presented as factual and true, when it is riddled with opinion and recounted personal experience in place of hard information. But if I write well enough, the reader considers this understandable and takes what I say as that; editorial opinion, preferably one whose opinion coincides with theirs. Is someone really reading a weblog entry about nostalgic memories of marketing and having their opinion changed?

All these gerrymandering statements aside, I did recently run into a concrete fulfillment of a dream, and I suppose it was inevitable it would come from Apple, that never-ending fountain of implied dreams and tasty presentation.

While visiting a friend recently, he let me try out his iPod. As I was admiring its lines, it occurred to me how many dreams converged in it. Storage, Durability, Cool… many of these were implied in computer products for a very long time. And here was a small machine, with gigabytes of disk space (gigabytes!), feeling like plastic that was as tough as metal.. no obvious moving parts, just a hint of controls on the front, interfacing with other machines seamlessly. Unbelievably expensive, true, but real, and in my hand.

I couldn’t help but feel that, at least in some small way and with the proper application of a good amount of your discretionary cash, the promise of 20 years ago was finally being kept. Here’s hoping the world can keep more.

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I could tell by the phone number on my caller ID (217) that I probably didn’t know who this was. 217, that’s Illinois. Probably one of the usual telemarketing calls that want to offer me telecommunication services or reams of copy paper for my (non-existent) business. All of my domains basically point to the same phone number, so who knows which it is.

“Hello, 217! How’s Illinois!” was my greeting.

There was a pause. I was waiting for either a click, or the deep intake of breath before the spiel begins. Either people call a wrong number, or they have to reassure themselves against my voice before launcing into a scripted hit.

“Is this… Scott Jason?”

Excellent.

“Yes, it is. Actually, Jason Scott. So you got Scott Jason because of a screwup on the domain name form. So what’s up?”

Pause. One can figure he’s a little uncomfortable that I’ve told him what state he’s in, the first three digits of the phone number, and how he found my number, and I’ve given him nothing.

“You run textfiles.com?”

“Yes, I’m the textfiles.com guy.”

OK, now, generally, when people steel themselves up to call the telephone number to talk to me, they are of some extreme mind when they do so. Either they are so taken in with the history and the meaning of all these thousands of writings from years back, they want to thank me (this actually does happen) or they’ve found something that pisses them off so completely and totally that they have to make their mind known, and e-mail just isn’t enough for it.

Unfortunately, this was the latter.

“I just want to know how you can live with yourself encouraging people to commit credit card fraud. You have a file on your site that tells people how to do it and you are encouraging them.”

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve had one of these.

“Well, sir, I have many thousands of files on the site, which are collected from the era of bulletin board systems. They are very old, they are of historical value, and they provide historical context to that time. I distinctly do NOT encourage them to commit criminal acts. In fact, I doubt any of those files even work.”

I can’t help but feel that the caller wasn’t entirely expecting this; I’m not one of those lame “@NARCHY” sites which have a bunch of old files HTMLified and combined with animated rotating skulls; I’m really doing something I believe in and have been doing so for quite some time. Or maybe that fact made them even more mad.

I decide to go for it. “Which file are you referring to, specifically?”

“The Video Vindicat….”

“Sir, that file is from NINETEEN NINETY-TWO.”

I hope the intonation is understandable; it would be laughable that credit card companies would be open to fraudulent techniques a decade old, or that those techniques even possibly worked at the time. Did you know that the number one reason that hacking and phreaking BBSes went down was as the direct or indirect result of Credit Card Fraud? The fact is, my friends, it doesn’t work. If it works for you, you are either seriously playing the odds or you have a meeting scheduled you don’t know about yet. Credit Card Fraud automatically incites the pursuit of federal agencies, who have very large budgets and very specific goals. It’s like going outside in the Everglades and punching alligators. Sure, you might get away with it… maybe. But the resultant pain would never make it worthwhile.

“You realize that by printing these files, you are commiting a criminal act, you are doing something illegal.”

“I am? How is that?”

“You are facilitating a criminal act by printing instructions on how to do so.”

“Sir, there’s a good hundred years of case law that disagrees with you.”

The pause was palpable.

“You… are a BAD BOY.”

Well, that’s something.

“Is there anything else, sir? We’re not going to resolve this here.”

“Well, no, I guess you can live with having no conscience. And one of these days you’re going to go to jail.”

“OK! Goodbye!”

It took about 2 minutes to look up the phone number that called me and find their e-mail address. I figured that I’d mail them back and discuss things a bit more rationally.

I got mail from the president of the company that had called and they explained someone had attempted (note, attempted) to defaud the company using credit card information that matched some aspect of a Video Vindicator file. From this, the employee had decided to contact me directly, no doubt to vent anger.

I wrote back, and since I think these issues affect any site with unpopular information, I would excerpt it here. I am not identifying the company in question because it would be needlessly harassing.. and really, beside the point.

Several things… I didn’t write the file, I disclaim its
contents, I certainly go out of my way on my website asking people to NOT
follow instructions in the files that are contained on the site. With over
75,000 of them spread across the different sites, they range from the
tawdry to the sublime; if you look at my “top 100” files:

– Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM

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