ASCII by Jason Scott

A significant period of time before a pissed-off Richard Stallman arc-welded politics into programming, for-pay and for-free software makers co-existed relatively peacefully. The general needs for each type of computer user were handled by their type of company or individual. There were the occasional blips here and there, but the type of people who were selling software were generally selling consulting services as well, and the type of people giving away software didn’t think of it that way, or didn’t think much of doing it.

Around this time (let’s call it the 1977-1981 period, but it’s a little more fluid than that) there was this golden situation where one person or an entire company with dozens of employees could create similar packaging and to the casual observer, there would be little difference. This time is the golden age of the Baggie.

The last I checked, little tiny cardboard boxes with fold-out covers and CDs inside are the current method of getting your attention. They’ve come along with some really kick-ass printing methods where parts of the box are conversely shiny and dull, and the art covers every square millimeter of the outside-facing surface. This is a change from the earlier (now seemingly) massive cardboard box with CDs or floppy disks inside. Before that and all throughout the time that software has sold, we’ve had some completely out-of-sanity packaging ideas and innovative “oh please mister, pick me up” boxes. But the “industry” tends to move in packs and this is how it’s been. Small shiny boxes descended from large shiny boxes, descended from cardboard boxes, descended from…. baggies.

The baggie (or the zip-loc bag, depending on your term for it) was the first and primary way for a software company (including individuals) to sell their package with its floppy disk or cassette tape in a store, a way that you could stack it against the wall and get people’s attention. Baggies sealed easily, with a small piece of tape or a sticker holding it closed, and the clear plastic let you put an insert inside that would give you all of the front to tout your title and ware. On the back you might get additional information but you might actually get a view of the floppy and nothing else.

It was in a baggie that Richard Garriott became Lord British and built a pretty large empire and a really neat house. It was in a baggie that you could find all of the original Penguin Software graphics programs. And it was in a baggie that a little place in the mountains called On-line Systems sold the all-text Softporn Adventure, before becoming Sierra On-Line and growing into a company the size of a medium-sized galaxy. A quick browse through a Video Game Museum shows some of the many packages back then, simple on the front, simpler on the back. You picked it up, and more than ever after you could tell that it was put together on some table somewhere, by a person working for a little company in some room somewhere, stuffing a little treat for you to take home. It felt good buying software.

Because all it took was a dream, a lot of late nights coding, and a drive through all the nearby towns to put your baggies on the shelf, some really neat companies flourished where now they would be swallowed up or ignored like so many gnats. Some just put some great little square ads in computer magazines and sat back for the orders. One that comes to mind are the Beagle Brothers, which I might humbly make a suggestion as being one of the all-time great software houses. A quick jog through the Beagle Brothers Museum shows that it was a very small number of people behind it, but whose energy and humor (and a lot of copyright-free clip art) made them a must-have for your Apple II.

These little one-offs lived for many years, some staying as one-man operations and some getting along quite nicely as the industry moved into slicker and slicker graphics, marketing and packaging. While time has turned many of these old grand houses such as Broderbund and Sierra On-line into shells of their former selves, gutted and resold many times, we can still look back on their glory days with full digital clarity.

We’ve had this sort of period in the past with the World Wide Web; certainly between 1993 and 1995 it was difficult to see major differences between websites run by A Guy and websites run by A Company, with a few notable exceptions. Nowadays, you can kind of tell that Amazon and Dell aren’t just somebody’s weekday tinkering, and that your usual weblog is.

This will happen again, and we should enjoy each time it happens; it’s when once again the power of a person shines as bright as any other force, before fading into a part of a chorus. And to be honest, the chorus doesn’t sound all that bad.

Comments Off on Bloggers, Meet the Baggies

My previous discussion of experiences with Psygnosis neglected to mention Henk Nieborg. By the 1990’s, Psygnosis was generally more like a record company bringing in outside talent rather than a software house producing everything from within. This meant that there were a bunch of people who would just grind away at a game for a year or two and then present it to the firm, ready to be published after a few “tweaks” from producers and other folks. (The winner of the all-time “incubation” award was Andrew Spencer and his astounding six years to produce Ecstatica, but I digress…) As it were, there were a couple of developers who actually rode this wave of develop-refine-produce a couple of times, where most would develop a game and get out of that into some sort of independent deal. Among these special few were Henk Nieborg and Erwin Kloibhofer.

They produced two similar programs for Psygnosis, Flink and Lomax. They are what are called “Platform” games. They are simple on one level: land in a place, and head towards another place, generally blowing up or removing obstacles in your path. Eventually you fight a very big guy and you win.

However, they are breathtakingly beautiful.

There is something truly magical and wonderous about someone’s ability to create an alternate world just by hand-creating a bunch of graphics. And hand-created his work is; his website allows you to browse them very closely and see how he worked. You don’t look at them and see a picture; you just see a fully-formed drawing, not lacking any perspective or angle that makes you think something’s “wrong”, and yet not like reality in the least. So when you’re playing, you’re truly immersed, in a way that the latest attempts to make a bunch of triangles appear like a roving tank don’t quite accomplish.

And his animations… now you’re talking. While at Psygnosis I saw some prototype animations Henk did for a possible Lemmings game, and those little guys moved! Their little robes swayed, every hair on their heads went back and forth in time to their steps, and yet the whole thing was pixellated, drawn by hand but capturing their movements perfectly. Lomax has some remnants of that work, when someone deep with Psygnosis (was it you, Greg?) indicated that it would be a better idea to turn the “Lomax” character into a Lemming, to push the property a little further.

I had the good luck to see the breathtaking prototype of Lomax, back when it could only run on the Blue Playstation. Quick mention of that; the Blue playstation had 8 megabytes of memory where the regular ones only had 2. During the wild and wooly early days of playstation development at Psygnosis, a few products and prototypes took full advantage of the 8 megabytes, only to find they wouldn’t play on regular Playstations! This means there’s intense versions of a few games (like the secret development version of Darkstalkers that Psygnosis did that nobody’s supposed to know they did… oops) that just don’t exist outside of a few CDRs. The version of Lomax that I saw in that prototype had many more backgrounds drawn, as well as much more intense animation. They had to remove frames for the production version!

My point of going into all this about Henk is that Psygnosis was, and the world is, full of guys like him, intense, talented folks (Henk is only about 35 now; he did Lomax when he was 26 and was already a veteran) who slave away at their craft, quietly producing these works with true quality that are thought by the buying public to be “throwaway”. Hello, Tim Wright. Hello, Andrew Spencer. Hello, Yak. Hello, Mark Hosler and Don Joyce.

So don’t get me started on the saga and miracle of Psy-Q.

Comments Off on Ever Heard of Henk Nieborg?

One of the big responses out of people when they visit my historical sites are the incredulity that the data still exists at all. Certainly, that was my own response when Google Groups started pulling in data from 1982, and when I first stumbled upon the ever-fluctuating Asimov Archive of Apple II disk images. (I’ll save a debate about the legitimacy of such an archive for a later time.)

But the cool part about digital data is, all it takes is one person, saving their copy, and putting it aside somewhere safe, and then yanking it out 10 or 20 years hence. Unlike, say, antiques, they really don’t take up a lot of space and assuming it can be brought back, the copies (now imbused with the artificial values of rarity and time) spread like wildfire. Especially now in a time of the Bittorrent archives, which I call the master method of “you didn’t know you needed it until you glanced upon the title”.

Recently, a group of researchers did some work with weblogs where they happened to pull about an enormous amount of entries from them, creating some sort of multi-gigabyte monster of a MYSQL database. Naturally, I grabbed a copy; I haven’t even glanced at it, I’m just going to shove it onto a DLT tape and forget about it. Say what you want about weblogs, pro or con; I consider them as close to BBSes as we tend to get on the Internet, what with their day-to-day subject matter and reactions to current events in a distinct, flavorful manner. By saving them, they end up being a great time capsule for a given time. People a century from now will appreciate them quite a bit.

Along that line, I am a very big proponent of saving archival copies of one’s livejournal. Livejournal makes it very easy to archive off a copy, which can then be stored away. People drop hours a day writing into these things and then they don’t care in the least if the stuff is teetering on the edge of disaster if the livejournal servers have a problem. A small amount of effort now and all your work is that much safer.

Sprinkle a little rsync into your life and keep copies of your most precious data in at least two locations. Blow stuff into a tar or zip (or ace or rar) archive and throw it onto a CDR. Nothing’s worse than losing your stuff, and you never know what it’ll be worth to history at large a decade or two down the line. The best way to ensure history knows a fuller story is to keep around the data that formed the story in the first place.

Comments Off on Save Everything

For about a year in 1994 I had the pleasure of working for a video game company called Psygnosis, based in Liverpool but with offices all around, including Cambridge, MA. I was called in for a temp job, and the temp job was doing tech support for Psygnosis. I worked with a fellow named Chris Caprio and for a guy named Jim Drewry. My job was to be one of two people who would take phone calls from the tech support number for Psygnosis USA and help people with their problems. I remember the first time Chris sat with me by the phone and let me answer the call. If I ran into problems, he’d be there to help. The woman was quiet but not yelling or screaming, and I knew it’d be a breeze.

“Why are there satanic symbols in Lemmings?” she asked.

I went on hold and went “Ha ha, she wants to know about the satanic symbols in Lemmings. She’s kidding right?”

Chris said “Well, no, there are in fact satanic symbols in Lemmings. Offer to exchange it for Creepers.”

And so it began! I was employed there for about a year, before Sony (who at that point had already purchased Psygnosis) came in and closed the office, laying a lot of people off, spreading a few to California and England, and bringing a chapter to a close way sooner than I’d hoped. The development guy at Psygnosis USA, Mark Tsai, offered me a job as art director at his new video game start up, Focus Studios, and I took it. That too lasted about a year and I got out of the video game business entirely at that point.

But here’s the thing. Working at Psygnosis, from the inside, was the capstone of a relationship with Psygnosis Games, and with video games on the whole, throughout my young life. Like a lot of kids my age, I played video games. A lot. A scary lot. Like, farther and further and over the top than probably was healthy for anyone. I was blessed with the advantage of being there right at the beginning, when concepts were truly new, and games like Centipede and Pac-Man and Crazy Climber were the first of their kind, before they were nailed into genres and classifications and all that sort of post-partum garbage that happens to an industry as it matures. In my mind, I can still remember those first times walking into the arcade, with the newest offering of video games, and going “What the hell is Zaxxon? And why is the up and down reversed on the joystick?”

When the Amiga showed up and we were all huddling around our friends’ screens to see this amazing thing (Hi, Jiro!) What blew me away personally was that first time witnessing Shadow of the Beast II. The music, the sound, that opening theme with the scrolling background with multiple levels…. this made me crumble inside that I had seen it all in video games. Here was this incredible graphics and sound explosion coming out of a home computer! And there was that weird name, Psygnosis, right at the front, with that strange owl and unusual letters. The work, by the way, of none other than Roger Dean, he of the Yes Album covers and many other great art.

Psygnosis got and continued to get my attention. As luck would have it, I somehow magically avoided their lemons and saw only the best of the best from their people: The Killing Game Show, Infestation, Lemmings… people would complain later that the gameplay took a back seat to the beauty and the look, but you know what? I was a teenager, I didn’t care. There was just something about those otherworldly logos and box artwork and feel… you just were somewhere else with these people.

So by the time I’d found out the company that needed me for a temp job with friggin’ Psygnosis, oh man, you could imagine how I felt. And on the whole, I had an absolutely fantastic time! There were little fights here and there and there were the usual conflicts, but we were truly a team, a company aimed towards a goal and bent on getting these games out to people. I was there when the first Playstation (we got a blue one) showed up, and we were watching all the protoype Wipeout and Destruction Derby and Lemmings 3D games. I was an insider, at least feeling like I was.

I learned the video game industry (on the management and inter-company level) took a look at the ruthlessness and backstabbing of the Record and Movie industries and said “We can optimize that process.” But down on the level we were at, we just had a great time. Also, I’m sure the experience of working with/for Psygnosis over in England was entirely different from those of us in the Colonies; there’s even a support group out there for ex-employees and I’ve heard some pretty wild stories.

One of my colleagues was a young artist, really depressed at the end, named Daniel Robbins, who first got himself hired when he saw a Psygnosis employee playing frisbee wearing an Owl shirt. He went over and introduced himself, and joined up. By the end of our time together, he was so depressed… I assumed when he moved away to the southwest he’d just end his own life and that’d be the end of it and I’d miss him. Boy, was I ever wrong.

Sony, being the rat bastards they are, wanted to kill the Psygnosis Mystique as fast as they could, and wanted to rename them to Sony Psygnosis and then later Sony Computer Entertainment of Europe (SCEE). And get rid of the damn owl. This was eventually accomplished, but years and years after I was gone, thank goodness.

It’s always poor hyperbole to call a year or two of your life “the best time of your life” but I can definitely vouch that an awful lot else that has happened to me couldn’t come close. It was like the finishing school for my years spent in video games; I came away not so much embittered and cynical but able to put it into a part of my life, not overriding everything else. I saw a lot that made me feel sad at how those who Didn’t Understand could tarnish beautiful work, but on the other hand I saw how all it could take was a few people with intense energy to accomplish anything. It was worth it.

I liked my time there so much I couldn’t stand to see the Psygnosis name disappear forever. So I registered Psygnosis.org and started putting up all I could about the company. It’s woefully inadequate and incomplete, but I had to do something. It’s a low priority, of course, but over time I’ve tried to stock it up with artifacts, information and anything else I could find.

I really do miss that damn owl.

Comments Off on A Prayer for Psygnosis

The documentary has made me do an awful lot of research, not just on hardware and events, but on people as well. Along the way I’ve met and researched a lot of interesting people, but even better yet, I’ve researched people I thought were interesting and found that, in fact, they’re even more interesting and deep than I could have imagined. A perfect example is Tom Jennings.

For myself (and probably many others), he’s “The Fidonet Guy”, the fellow who created a BBS program called Fido that included a feature of sending along messages to other connected Fidos, enabling them to pass messages and e-mail between themselves. Sure, you say, Arpanet and all that, but unlike Arpanet, Jennings’ program just required a modem and a PC and a phone line, and suddenly you had a personal node on the network, right there. This was the “ah hah” that brought many more people in to keep this dream going, folks who didn’t have the opportunity of working on DARPA research projects or cradled in the hands of an academic institution. This was something you could pull down, crank around it, and (after some effort) be onto a functioning, real network within a very short time.

A large group of folks circled around Tom when he started working on Fido, taking the fidonet network and making it more scalable and robust, improving the “fidonet protocol” and, even cooler, writing third-party modules that would allow you to bootstrap a ton of other BBS programs into the Fidonet network as well. Suddenly you didn’t even need to be running the original Fido program and you could get on there, like everyone else. Then came Echomail and the IFNA and, well… this is why an entire episode of my documentary is dedicated to Fidonet.

But here’s the thing… by the time Tom comes out with Fido and Fidonet in 1984, he’s already a solid veteran of the computing industry. He’d worked at Ocean Research Equipment. He did engineering for Bose. He did the preliminary BIOS work for what eventually becomes the Phoenix BIOS. A little bit of Tom is in a lot of home computers.

He slaves away at Fidonet for a good number of years before finally drifting away from it in the early 1990s. But where for most people the story would slow down (or end), Tom’s actually speeds up. He founds a skaters’ rights group called “Shred of Dignity”. He becomes Wired Magazine’s first webmaster. He throws his heart and soul into creating a ground-breaking ISP called The Little Garden. And oh yes, he founds a Queer/Punk zine called HOMOCORE.

Not enough for you, you say. Well, besides his ongoing work with the up2us software package, Tom is also the force behind World Power Systems, his personal artistic and creative entity that he discusses and displays his artwork and research on. Here he coincides with work I am doing, as he has done a lot of effort to keep track of old Character systems. It’s not just ASCII and EBCDIC, after all. This interest of his in old text has also led to his assistance with rescuing some RTTY art from the middle of the 20th century. In fact, he has a whole host of projects and historical research projects he’s been kind enough to share with us.

When interviewing Tom, I’d have been hard pressed to put his age above 30. His energy and dedication shows in everything he’s done, and like many renaissance men, he’s capable of being both charming and intimidating depending on what he speaks of. Talents like this walk through our lives and the lives of many, affecting them profoundly in ways we never completely grasp. Personally, I think it’s important to recognize them before they’re gone.

Comments Off on Tom Jennings, Renaissance Man

The most interesting statement I get from people when they tell me about their history is how “it’s all gone now” and “everything is different now”. I find it interesting because it’s entirely untrue, but it belies another related issue: finding content, and finding relevant content.

My secret trick for dealing with search engines is to find the “secret word”, a strange spell of words and terms that, when together, indicate that very thing you’re looking for, without naming that thing. If finding hidden and lost locations is your thing, it’s not obvious on the face that you actually might want to use the words Urban Exploration” which will give you a variety of sites of startling complexity about the art of Urban Speleology. But for all that easy work, there are a thousand other amazing related nuggets that you have much less chance of stumbling onto.

And such it is with historical stuff. While I may be (relatively) prominent for what I’ve done so far, there are now hundreds of people doing the exact same thing I’m doing, on a smaller or different scale. They’re providing collections and directories and very-hard-to-negotiate or misguidedly-HTML-converted libraries. (Oh, and I should point out that a bunch of these were doing this collecting before textfiles.com arrived in 1998, so I’m no pioneer.)

Which is why I’m sending you a warning shot about my own idea of what will become the future: TOSEC.

It’s not important that TOSEC stands for The Old School Emulation Center any more than Coleco stood for Connecticut Leather Company. What’s important is that TOSEC, in trying to keep track of thousands of game ROMS, ended up creating this great naming convention for the games in question. They ended up creating a program called TUGID (The Ultimate Game Information Database) to keep track of the resulting ROM lists. Other programs also have risen do use those databases and keep distribution in check. Over time, this naming convention has been taken in by an awful lot of people to keep track of what can be tens of thousands of little, mysterious programs gotten from all over the place.

Through their use of a unified name setup and the MD5 hash of the resultant named file, TOSEC has removed a lot of the need for specific clearinghouses of available programs and ROMs, making it that you can just download a few hundred megs of what-have-you from the internet at large, shove it through these programs, and out on the end comes the 5 percent you didn’t have and the 95 percent you did goes quietly away. Now, when a database is brand spanking new, you might not want that, but down the line, the database grows and starts to envelop a given known quantity, like Atari Magazines or Commodore Demos. And it provides that important line in the sand for anything resembling a standard to come out of collecting.

What I’m getting at, is that over time it allows a lot of incoming digital data, whether it be songs, screenshots, digitized articles, CD-ROM images, captured video, or what have you to get a standard name and an associate MD5. It allows the often sewer-pile-like collections that show up on some peer-to-peer networks to have a field day with renaming files or bathing them in misclassifcation, because ultimately your TOSEC program will make them squeaky clean. Sure, between now and then there might be some naming convention besides TOSEC, and it might seem different, but this is it, this will take collections away from specific websites and set them loose, floating, on a hundred thousand hard drives and passing from person to person like a treasured book or a special memento. It’s very exciting.

Well, for people like me.

Comments Off on The History is Everywhere and Nowhere

Like most people, I started out just “fooling around” on documentaries. I thought I could handle it, keep it under control. When it came to seeing them in the theaters, it was by mistake or unintentionally, like the time I found myself watching The Thin Blue Line or Roger and Me. I enjoyed myself, but didn’t really see why they were better or worse than any of the other hundreds of films I was watching during my teenage years and film school.

Now it’s out of control. You can find me at the local independent theatres (the Brattle and the Coolidge) seeing such films as Capturing the Friedmans, Dogtown and Z-Boys, and Step into Liquid. I’ve tracked down and bought the DVDs of Grey Gardens, Endless Summer and Genghis Blues. But the thing is, all these films are generally “big” and have pretty nice budgets or have achieved success. For a true junkie, it’s like picking up over-the-counter stuff. Enjoyable, but not a rush. It’s too simple.

Tougher, then, are the documentaries that I’ve been hunting down, ones where they’re made by just a few people, with little or no “big sell” dreams, just trying to tell a story. I mean, if you didn’t hunt, how else would you know about documentaries about The Pixelvision Camera (The Art of Pixelvision), Laser Tag and Photon (Lightsport), and, of course, First Person Shooters (Gamers: A Documentary).

I love nothing more than tracking down these little obscure projects with their non-wide marketing, tiny budgets and intense, fanatical commitment to getting the story out. And when I see a film that’s trying its best to take on the same sort of difficuly, hard-to-grasp and hard-to-film subject like I am, then they really get my attention. Like Avatars Offline, which is a documentary dealing with Everquest and Ultima Online and the related situations and people to that. And when I originally heard about the Demo DVD Project, well, it was just a matter of waiting, and when it came out, I pounced.

Sometimes, you hear about a documentary and then, like some sort of animal, it skitters away, never to be found. A good example is Bang the Machine, a documentary made in 2002 about competitors in Street Fighter 2.
There have been articles and writeups on it, even a little bit of TV coverage. It is possible, with some effort, to download the trailer. And if you were lucky enough to be at the right festivals you might have seen it. But what if you want to see it, like I did? Sorry, the officially listed site has been down for a year (believe me, I’ve checked) and good luck finding much about the makers, who billed themselves “JabStrongFierce Productions”. Oh, look! Another link!

I found out about The Joystick Generation and I’ve been waiting outside his door for over a year now as well, breathing on my hands and shifting back and forth on my feet like the little addict I am. Just one more hit, just one more…

Comments Off on Documentary of an Addiction

Well, not quite, but close to my original dream. As I gave in a speech at DEFCON 9 a couple years back, it was my hope that eventually the collection of textfiles.com would become just another “ware”, a singular, tradeable “thing” that people could pass back and forth. By building it up into a multi-gigabyte collection, it got on the radar of people who were trading CD images with nary a care. Well those times have come and are spreading like wildfire, thanks in no small part to programs like Bittorrent.

Like any other file-trading mechanism, Bittorrent has its share of fanatics and detractors; file me in under the fanatics. It’s rotten for files under 2-3mb, but files like that can be sent as e-mail attachments without causing any problems. It’s those big files, those massive collections of data that Bittorrent shines for. Yes, it’s good for movies and albums, but it’s also good for sending, oh, say, all of textfiles.com. Additionally, its demand that it get the whole file at once means the original file stays pristine, and the the model it puts forth for uploading and downloading means that the more people interested in it, the easier it tends to be to download. Is it perfect? Heck no! But what is?

I used to joke about “I’ll trade you textfiles.com for etext.org, but those times are here. Now! I’ve bought so much into it, I created a site that allowed you to download all of textfiles.com:
torrent.textfiles.com.

If you were looking (and hey, you might have been) for an excuse to download Bittorrent from Bram Cohen’s site, now you have one. Grab it, go to torrent.textfiles.com and begin pulling down a roughly 700mb-900mb file of many thousands of texts, more than you’re likely to ever read.

Comments Off on Every BBS Textfile Ever

It’s natural to ask if I myself run some example of this very thing I collect so much information on. You’d be suspicious of a critic that doesn’t “like” movies or a music historian who never at least tried to pick up an instrument.

When I was 12 and first getting into modems and collecting textfiles, I dreamed, like most kids dream of owning a car, of running my own BBS. I knew that I would name it after a prototype computer graphics film being done at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) called “The Works”. Even by the time I’d heard of it, the project had been languishing and eventually collapsed, but there was something about the small amount of information I’d seen on it and the captivating images of strange robotic bugs that made me decide this was what my dream BBS would be named.

I was so sure that the BBS would be named “The Works” that I started pre-labelling my floppy disks that held textfiles with “The Works Disk #10” and so on. This went on for years, until 1986, when my BBS finally got its own phone line and joined the somewhat exclusive club of 914 BBSes. I tried running every bit of software I could, from Colossus to Fidonet to PC-Board, and more. Eventually, however, I decided that there was no better choice than “Waffle“. Only problem was, Waffle BBS was written for the Apple II and I owned an IBM PC. So, I started writing my own version, which I called Ferret BBS, or FBBS.

Like any piece of software written by a sixteen-year-old, Ferret BBS was a mish-mash of weird ideas and bizzare implementations. If you typed “Control-V”, it removed all the vowels in the line. When people logged in and it sat at the password prompt, it would play the “Jeopardy” theme… but only for me.

I ran the BBS from 1986 to 1988, when the move to college and a massive phone bill took The Works down. But while in college, I was contacted by a young sprite named Dave, who offered to bring the BBS back up at his house. I wasn’t sure he’d do it, but he did, and from 1989 to about 1994, Dave ran the BBS during its most popular period. He messed up the Ferret BBS code really badly, but he also got it to be a Cult of the Dead Cow node and earned it a reputation as one of the places to go to for textfiles. Keeping my principles, the BBS continued to be “Textfiles Only”. He also had the opportunity I never had, to run Waffle as written by the original author. When he asked if we should turn our back on years of our own code, I said “We were trying to duplicate Waffle, and here it is! Put it up!”

After Dave went off to College and himself lost track of the BBS, it was taken over by Grendel/Iskra, a user of the original Works and the later Dave Works. He ran it on and off for a good number of years, insisting that the Works be online for its 10th anniversary.

The Works, believe it or not, lives on, and is a fully connectable ssh-only BBS. Just ssh over to “works.org” and log in as “waffle”. It’s now run by a nice kid named Owen (Autojack) who holds his mantle as the Fourth Works Sysop with pride.

The thing is, there’s all sorts of stories like this for the many thousands of BBSes that rose and fell in the last 25 years. Many of them are lost forever, but others are taking up the torch and are writing their stories down. I’ve collected some of them but others are spread throughout webpages out there.

In case anyone’s wondering, the documentary will have a affiliated BBS, but if the way of recent message boards are any example (here and elsewhere), I am not overflowing with anticipation as to what it will end up like. But this is the way of things now, no sense hiding from them.

Comments Off on Does the BBS Guy Run a BBS?

One of the nice side-effects of an online life (and for some of us, childhood) is that almost all of the output of your efforts and experiences are digital, ready and waiting to be brought back in full binary clarity. With textfiles.com, this is especially the case, since people can go and find the exact file, with exactly the same formatting and phrasing, that they remember from a decade or more before. This is probably the biggest “jolt” that folks get from the site (and similar ones) because the stuff seems “pristine”.

There are a few people who I would call “of my ilk” who have this insatiable need to save everything, anything, whatever they can get their hands on. Of all the like-minded folks I have heard of or dealt with, only one of us has an enormous amount of money, and that would be Brewster Kahle.

In case anyone cares, other equivalent spirits that I’ve interacted with, met, or otherwise know of are Paul Southworth, Michael Hart, Jim Leonard (Trixter), Christian Wirth (RaD Man), Curt Vendel, and a host of some whose names escape me this Saturday afternoon.

Some of the collections of these associates and friends are huge indeed, but Brewster’s archive.org (which is, I hasten to add, not just run by Brewster alone) is incredibly friggin’ huge. So big, that when I’ve occasionally gotten my urge to “back up” a site, attacking archive.org is like trying to use the Moon as a jawbreaker. Kahle’s site is breathtakingly massive: just browse for a couple seconds in the
movies section and you realize how much data they have, in so many easy-to-grab formats. These people are barrelling down on a petabyte of stuff. For you. For free.

Obviously, at this point, a massive amount of volunteers and paid members are doing this project, and they’re sending it into wider and deeper waters. They also have enabled it to do some amazing projects that a lot of us single-person websites simply can’t do. The Internet Bookmobile is a personal favorite, just for its “you have no idea how far we’ve come” demonstration ability. A van pulls up and just starts handing out books, any book you need from a million texts. Amazing.

Except for the occasional whack-ass who doesn’t get it, people are generally amazed and delighted at these collections, because it puts everything that once was right there in a way you can immediately copy for yourself and yet still leave. There is, by its nature, no need for an “original” in the most common sense, and the “duplicates” are just as good.

Here’s some examples I think show how neat this can be: The Beagle Brothers Online Museum, the Atari Coin-Op Specification Stash, the Youth International Party Line, and of course, the one my tax dollars pay for (and it’s money well spent), American Memory.

Of course, beyond all these basically legal and above-board digitizations are the hundreds, likely thousands of people who are digitizing anything they can find, be it comic books, movies, recordings, flyers, photographs…. compiling them into archives, and trading them on Peer to Peer networks as if they were some sort of ‘Ware’. Which, I suppose, they are, but it’s pretty shocking to see “Every Spiderman Comic” or “The entire run of Red Dwarf” or “20,000 Science Fiction Books” being traded where once there was “Choplifter”. It strikes me how people are doing this, bringing all this stuff online, and some of them are doing it with all the care and process of art restorers. Where this is going, I don’t know, but I’m making my best effort to collect the artifacts.

Comments Off on The Race To Digitize Everything Ever