ASCII by Jason Scott

The Javascript MESS Plays Atari Today — August 14, 2013

The Javascript MESS project (mentioned here and here and here and so on) continues its progress towards the goal of emulating dozens, later hundreds of computer platforms, in a browser-based fashion. And now, the Atari 800 joins the pack.

If you want to check it out, just go here and select one of the programs in the drop-down menu, and then hit space.

It makes some crazy bad noise in Firefox, but runs faster. And it definitely works in a bunch of situations, to various levels of “success”. We’re aware the keyboard mappings are crazy, that it is not 100% speed (more like 2/3rds speed as of this writing), and a host of other things. We’re going to rope around and go after some of the interface issues so it’ll be easier to do things like hit the START button (It’s F1 on most keyboards), and the joystick button, which is ALSO not working at this time (I know it’s somewhat important that the joystick button be working).

This is a huge jump and a personal delight, because with the addition of an Atari 800, we’re well into mainstream computing – the Atari 800 was one of the big ones in the computer wars. Introduced in 1979, this masterpiece of plastic and color was the introduction for many to the world of computing, building on Atari’s excellent name in gaming and entertainment. With four joystick ports, cartridge and later cassette/disk options, and a whole range of cool peripherals, this thing was serious business. Serious FUN business.

Unlike the other JSMESS implementations where the software library was under a thousand titles (and in most cases, under a couple hundred titles), the collection of Atari 800-compatible software I have goes past the 10,000 mark and I’m positive that’s nowhere near the amount of software out there – it’s just what I happen to have at this moment. So the problem was what to put into the drop-down menu for now.

I hit up some fellow Atarians, and the list has a bunch of canonical titles, including the 1980 Atari Dealer’s Demo, which ran on computers being sold at stores, and which I have a very happy memory of staring at through the window of a closed computer store at the age of 11. In fact, when I first heard it have music, it was years and years later because I only knew it as being through the window!

There’s memories aplenty in this software, along with lessons to be taught about working with limited resources, what it was like to play Star Raiders (a very early space game) and how the 1984 Pac-Man port for the 800 was a little masterpiece of design.

Just go here to try out the project, and remember to check out the main JSMESS project page to learn how to contribute or play with other platforms emulated so far.

Thanks to Vitorio for helping push through this latest platform, and to Alon Zakai for working with us intensely recently.

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Life Inside Brewster’s Magnificent Contraption — August 12, 2013

This essay is going to tell you at the end to subscribe to the Internet Archive. If you want to go ahead and do that now, the link is here. You can also do a one-time donation at that link as well.

I joined the Internet Archive in March of 2011, after a very short meeting that came a few weeks after asking for employment at a conference held at the Internet Archive’s headquarters in San Francisco, CA.

So it’s been a little over two years since that meeting and my hiring. Let’s review, oh.. let’s review everything.

I work primarily out of my home in New York, but the Internet Archive is located in San Francisco. It’s in one of the most beautiful buildings one can imagine, a renovated Christian Science church (it hasn’t been a church in a long time) that now has servers, offices, and all sorts of amazing one-off architectural individualities.

Some time ago, I took a bunch of photos within the walls of the building, just because I figured they should have them. I’ll put a bunch of those here, so you can see what I’m talking about when I say that it feels like a little bit of heaven every time I’m on site.

For what feels like 99.9% of the world, the Internet Archive has precisely one feature and one purpose: the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, an immediate call-back into webpages going back nearly 20 years. It has saved so many necks, proven so many wrongs, and brought back so much history, that I completely understand why it’s considered one of the internet’s crown jewels. There are people working very hard to incorporate endless scraping of data from the web, all the time, and even having occasional injections of older data acquired from other sources. No joke, we’re talking petabytes of web history stored in it. It’s a miracle and you should be giving money to the archive just on the principle of that solitary feature alone.

(Fun fact, while I’m here: the entire web crawl collection of the failed search engine Cuil, over 310 terabytes, was donated to the Internet Archive and are in the Wayback Machine. You can even download the raw data.)

But take it from me: knowing about the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive and little else is like going to Walt Disney World, riding Space Mountain once, and then going back to your car in the parking lot.

The Internet Archive’s collections are massive, truly massive. Many petabytes. They’re just about to surpass having 2 million books available to read or download. I could spend the rest of the year aiming you at the different collections, like Atari Computer Related Books or Dance Manuals or Cookbooks or whatever else I feel like throwing at you. Millions of books! Online! Right now!

Let’s set aside books for a moment. How about audio? This place is loaded with audio, from podcasts and old time radio programs all the way through to a truly astounding amount of music shows and jazz collections and of course a world-class Grateful Dead live recording collection.

The films! There are tens of thousands of films in this place. There’s television shows about computers. There’s the stunning diversity of the Prelinger Archives. There’s sports videos. There’s tons and tons of feature films, just waiting for you.

But how about miracles? Have you even taken a little time to visit the TV News Archive, one of the more stunning search engine accomplishments of the 21st century? Just go in there, type in a search term, and watch the Internet Archive do something that would normally take you hundreds and hundreds of hours to accomplish, and do it in seconds.

When I was hired, it was to improve the software collection, which sat among these other massive collections but hadn’t gotten the attention it deserved. It’s gotten that attention and I wrote an entire entry about it. Summary: Largest collection of vintage software on the internet. Period. I’ve been busy.

No, I’ve been really busy. Checking my upload statistics, here’s what I’ve added to the Internet Archive: Over 169,000 individual objects, totaling 245 terabytes.

Ow.

I have a name for the system that drives the Internet Archive: Brewster’s Magnificent Contraption. The methodology for making sure data isn’t lost, that URLs stay static for decades, and to ensure you can make whole scale improvements to the underlying machinery without disruption… well, it’s a wonder to behold. I behold it frequently.

The Contraption uses the cheapest hardware possible. It strives to ensure you will always, always, have access to the original file uploaded. This alone makes the Internet Archive stand head and shoulders over so many other environments that take your 13 gigabyte MPEG original and shell-game you into a 256mb “pretty ok” version for the web.

You can add things to the Contraption using a browser-based upload, FTP, S3-“like”, and physically mailing material in. It’ll all funnel in quickly, get treated by endless scripts that poke, prod, and derive alternate versions, and then pop up on the web for immediate, complete, free download. It just happens, most of the time. Data is flooding into the place from all directions. I’m doing a lot as an individual, but I’m one of many entities bringing in this material, and the Contraption takes it all.

(Every time a picture of these boxes of external disks comes by, someone writes a missive along the lines of “what are you doing! externals are so much more expensive!”. However, this was during the great disk drive shortage after floods in Thailand knocked out a bunch of factories, and careful investigation revealed that buying the external versions of drives were notably, notably, cheaper than the so-called “bulk” or “internal” drives. This is the kind of attention to detail the Archive is soaked with.)

Does the Contraption have quirks? Hell yes, it does. You learn to deal with them – for example, it passes duties from machine to machine, so you’ll see an item in the collection “populate”, that is, sit there with no real links, and then a preview clip shows up, and a few minutes later a link or two shows up, until maybe an hour or a day later, all the different derivatives have done their work and shown up as well. A little weird, but at the end of the day, you personally did nothing, the machines did the work, and there’s this wonderfully complete collection of file variations to choose from.

Every thing or set of things is an Item. An Item can be grouped with other Items into a Collection. A group of Collections can be grouped under yet another Collection, making them all Sub-Collections. You get used to it. It’s not easy to go through the stacks, but it keeps the stacks sane.

The tradeoff is that the Archive is putting in hundreds of millions of these items, and once they’re up, they’re pretty much up forever at the same URL. You’re not going to go to this collection of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar radio shows in a month or six months, or feasibly a decade or a century and have it no longer be there. It’ll shift machines and storage media and a whole host of other aspects but it’ll stay there.

I stopped thinking about storage, and bandwidth, a long time ago. How much storage do I get, I’m often asked. “Enough”, I say. How much bandwidth? “Enough”. It’s just not a factor I bring into my calculations these days. What I’m focused on, entirely, is acquiring the data that’s out there, on the net, shoved into hard drives and out of the way sites and who knows where else. Stuff that people felt didn’t have a home or which they were terrified would get Reddit or Slashdot or Gizmodo attention and then put them in the poorhouse or in a permanent 404. Not with the Archive. I spend a lot of time contacting people, helping them get the data into the site, and then let them hotlink us to hell, forever serving the data for their audience without being worried about what the next ISP bill will bring. It is handled. That’s Magnificent in its own right.

As I said, I’ve been inside the Contraption for some time and I’ve totally gone native. I still get the occasional surprise, the weird unexpected output, the hilarious balloon crash of script vs. data. But they’re easily dealt with, and the great people who I work with help it get sorted out.

The people!

It may seem like the most mundane and obvious thing, but when people ask me about the life with a non-profit like the Internet Archive, and want to know what I find most unique and striking, it’s simply this: everybody has the same goal.

Now, let’s not kid ourselves – there’s disagreements and bickering and flameouts and hand-waving, but they’re all doing it because they’re trying to get to the same goal. Different paths, different approaches, same goal: Gather the Largest Free Collection of Information on the Internet to Provide to the World. I spent a lot of years in places where if you asked folks around the office and the divisions what the “goal” was, they’d often have to tell you their personal goals because they’d know balls-all about what the “company” ultimately wanted to “do”. It just wasn’t part of the discussion. Here, people are on the same page. They want to make stuff come in. They want it to be useful, and they want stuff to go out. Everywhere. To everyone. Now. As fast and as efficiently as possible. This is breathtaking if you came from a world where your company would do something insane because of reasons and forces you were not privvy to and not welcome to investigate or try to understand. Your head is down. At this place, your head is up.

If you work at the Internet Archive for three years, they make a little terra cotta figure of you and it lives at the Archive. There’s a lot of these around. Show me the other places that care about your time like that – there aren’t many anymore. (You have to go pretty far afield, like, say, Blizzard Entertainment.) I still have a year to go!

So look, this place is pretty amazing. But it’s also a non-profit that utilizes grants, selling of scanning/archiving services, and donations to stay afloat. When Archive Team and I were starting to blow out their projections for disk space usage for the year, I got right up into the financials of the place. I’m allowed to tell you them.

The Internet Archive, all of it, including the Wayback Machine, the hardware, the bandwidth, and the people, costs $12 million dollars a year.

If you know anything about what stuff costs, this is by far the best bargain out there. $12 million is peanuts for what this place provides to the world. It also barely makes this amount every year since economic times went a little south, and so I resolved I was going to do something about it.

Hence, the aforementioned, the presaged, the I-gave-you-plenty-of-warning request that you consider getting a subscription to the Internet Archive. It’s great to send in a bunch of cash, and believe me it is really important the place get donations of that sort, but subscriptions provide something one-time donations do not: stability. It gives a regular income from people towards the non-profit. It rounds out hard choices having to be made each year when the board and administration looks at the budget. It allows the Archive to grow.

Even though it is technically not in my job description, I have shoved it in there anyway – I want the archive to have a huge number of subscribers, people who benefit from this place constantly and who can throw $5, $25, $100 a month at the place for what they do, to ensure they keep doing it.

If I can help shepherd money into the Archive’s operations, money that gets squeezed for every last bit of value, the resulting benefits are enormous. The drive space increases, the bandwidth increases, the hosted material comes in at a faster clip. The world benefits.

My boss, Brewster Kahle, has a pretty amazing biography. Go check the writeups about it out there. There’s a lot of them. And they all point out that in the 1990s, he ended up, through boom time sales, with a lot of money.

He could have bought a huge-ass boat. He could have bought a sports team. He could have cornered the market on software patents and made massive culinary books. He could have done anything with that money, and just drive with it in a handmade car into the sunset. But he didn’t.

He did this.

He hired some amazing people and knocked on a lot of doors and he never stopped dreaming. This puts him pretty far up there in my book.

And so while he’s not the type to shake trees for cash, I am. Especially when the money does something this utterly wonderful. So I’ll say it again.

Subscribe to the Internet Archive. Get people you know to subscribe. Talk to me or to the Archive itself about ways you might want to donate funds or resources to it. (They’re tax-deductible, after all.) This is some of the best money you could possibly spend.

All Hail The Contraption!

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Exploding The Phone: The Last Word on Phone Phreak History — August 8, 2013

Exploding The Phone is an extraordinary book. Even before it was written, I knew that it was going to be the last word on phone phreaking. By the time I had the book in my hands, all my expectations were fulfilled and I was able to breathe a very heavy sigh of relief.

I’m thanked in this book at the end. That’s because I read an early draft, and had a lot of conversations with the author, Phil Lapsley, about approaches to the subject, and helped him get to a couple HOPE conferences to speak about the subject of phone phreaking. (These presentations, by the way, are excellent: Cats and Mice (2010) Phone Phreak Confidential (2011) are among his best.)

That side disclaimer aside, I was involved with the book because I saw what was going on with Phil’s research and approach, and knew that if there was the slightest chance I might be able to add something positive, I would do it. Why?

Phone Phreaking was a major component of my youth. The idea of the phone system, the weirdness of the world of the dial tone, and the feeling of it stretching so far beyond the small towns I lived in, made it unimaginably compelling. When bulletin boards were the primary communication for me and others, the files that I collected from them about phreaking were like mystical tomes.

Of course, I was doing all this in the 1980s, and anyone who did any amount of research knew that we were in the tail end of the golden age, or maybe even in the post-sunset darkness from the golden age’s end. We all knew it, but naturally there were no stories, no well-researched books on the history from a human perspective with the facts all in place. We didn’t have our epic tale.

And now we do.

It’d have been good enough if Lapsley just tracked down a bunch of phone phreaks (and he does, in amazing amounts and depth), but then he turns it around and interviews the law enforcement and telephone security officials who sat on the other end of the line, trying to make sense of what the phreaks were up to. He pored over thousands of documents, many of them acquired from dozens of FOIA requests, and pulls out all the stops to give us an accurate picture of how it all went down.

From the early discoveries by isolated curious individuals, through to the connections and gatherings of phreaks, through the retooling of phreaking as a revolutionary act, and up through the fading tones of the world of phreaking I knew, this book puts it all down and lays it out expertly. It’s truth talking.

Lapsley worked for half a decade on the book, and has been writing some amazing entries about the process (and following up with even more information) on the official Exploding the Phone site.

The copious end notes and conclusions at the end mention the amount of interviewees who died during the research phase or in the years since. It’s significant – Lapsley even mentioned one older phreak who said “…is it dangerous to my health to talk to you?” He gained a lot of trust to tell this story, and I think it paid off amazingly.

To have such a significant, yet underground story captured in such brilliant detail is rare, especially without turning it into a one-sided hero’s tale. Exploding the Phone is nearly perfect. I have three print copies, all paid for and autographed.

You can’t have too many miracles lying around the house.

Exploding the Phone.

Hardcover: 416 pages
Publisher: Grove Press (February 5, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 080212061X
ISBN-13: 978-0802120618
Product Dimensions: 1.6 x 6.3 x 9.2 inches

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Not for Hire: One Conference Documentary Director — August 7, 2013

Now that I’ve finished the DEFCON Documentary and the views are skyrocketing, I’ll mention that a few people approached me in the previous months about maybe, possibly…. would I do something similar for their conference?

No.

The DEFCON Documentary was a pretty unique situation, what with my very long history with DEFCON, the upfront fee being available to wipe out my credit card debt, and the excitement of wanting to try something so new. So I said yes, and there went about 18 months.

I committed some time ago to making three documentaries, documentaries that need my full attention cinema-wise while also doing my work for the Internet Archive. While there are some wonderful conferences out there, all with rich histories, I just don’t have the bandwidth to dedicate to doing a film the way I do films, that is, insanely.

I’m willing to give consultation/producer status to some, but that’s about it. (I actually like consulting, i.e. doing very long phone calls, on any of a number of subjects.) I did a full presentation on the making of the DEFCON documentary and that’ll show up sooner rather than later, and I’ll point people to it. But no, it won’t be me running any cameras for such an endeavor.

I hope people do make more documentaries about conventions and the people behind them – it’s a really worthwhile subject. Besides DEFCON: The Documentary, there’s also Comic Con IV: A Fan’s Hope by Morgan Spurlock, Trekkies and Trekkies II by Roger Nygard, and probably a few dozen examples of “They ran around the conference floor with a camera and then strung across the best parts.”

But it won’t be me doing it. Thanks for asking! I think I’m pretty cinematically booked for the next two-three years.

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It Stinks! — August 6, 2013

Since we’re now going to be deep in “everyone is watching my movie” season, I thought I’d mention some of the fun unique aspects of having something out there for everyone.

Here’s the first review on IMDB:

This documentary is simply bad. It exclusively focuses on the “geek”. Yes, these people are pleased to know each other. Yes, they are also thrilled to be allowed to drink beer. So, what? Time after time, we are told that DEFCON is what you make of it. Really? Here is a universal truth: so is life and everything else.

The true relevance of DEFCON (and hacking in general) is dismissed in favor of portraying the event as a wonky dentist conference. Here we have some of the smartest people in the world yet all we get to see is how they get Mohawks, buy T-shirts, and play catch in a pool. Who-gives-a-damn.

There are a zillion interesting stories to be told about hacking and those of us with an interest in the subject were looking forward to some of them. Sadly, this documentary tells none.

Now, before friends and family come rushing to my defense, let’s discuss this.

I find this sort of review fascinating. Utterly fascinating. The fact that the movie could hit some people so hard as a failure, and to demolish their expectations that it would be watchable, just sucks me in.

By my very rough calculations, about 8000 people have seen the documentary as of this writing. The number is growing pretty significantly over time. (I’m combining accurate stats generators I have as well as mentions, along with some other voodoo.) I don’t know how the film landed with the vast majority, but I can at least see things like 100-1 like-dislike ratios on YouTube as well as the very nice notes and comments I’ve gotten.

But man, when it doesn’t hit, it does not hit. To reference Patton Oswalt, it’s like they’re watching a monkey shitting where it’s so painful the monkey wants to punch its own ass. The music, they hate it! The choice of subject matter, a total loss! The boringessness of it, it is the boringestness of a thousand dying suns. Trust me, there’s a bunch of these reviews floating out there, but I’m not supposed to have seen them so I won’t quote them. The themes are: Bad movie, doesn’t show hacking, boring, fuck DEFCON.

I don’t know if they want me to make better movies next time, or if they are now prepared to shitcan me for all of time. If it’s the first:

A real help, for myself and really anyone else whose work undergoes this sort of review, is to maybe have a reference to what the reviewer does like. Even a sentence on the order of “Unlike ________, the DEFCON Documentary never captures the hacker spirit” would at least give me a guidepost as to how far afield the work has gone.

It would also be good to know what you were expecting the movie to be about. There’s a chance I made a choice down the line along editing that considered your preferred approach, and there might have been a really, really good reason I made the choice I did. Sometimes the movie inside your head isn’t actually very good once you run it through the video editor. Trust me.

I’m lucky, really. When I put together these films, DEFCON and the previous two, I can walk away knowing I made all the choices. DEFCON was more collaborative, to be sure, and not all the footage and interviews were shot by me and the scheduling of the shoots were handled by my super-talented producer Rachel, but at the end of the production, it was me and 280 hours of footage, and I pieced together that thing in my own way, in the order I wanted, and added the music and images that I thought were best. It’s my film. I watched it in an auditorium of a thousand people and loved watching moment after moment land with cheers and happiness and gasps. That works for me.

Some of this may just be from reaching a wider audience, but I don’t think so. I think DEFCON itself comes into it – people have raged over the years over what DEFCON is “for”, and the movie was meant to address, in its own way, what DEFCON “is” for better or worse. I know it has inspired some people to consider going next year, and bringing family and friends who previously shunned the event. At over 14,000 attendees, it obviously appeals to some level of crowd, and people returning year after year is a good sign. I know Dark Tangent has been assuming a leveling off for years and years, but it just keeps growing – it might outgrow the current hotel after next year. Outgrowing a hotel! And it’s done it multiple times!

So it won’t make a huge difference to DEFCON itself if some people do or don’t like the movie. But it wasn’t made strictly for DEFCON attendees. I spent months and months to make it accessible to others, to not make it an insider fest with language and shots that would put off strangers. So I hope that works for them as well. The same with folks who used to go but don’t go since it left the Alexis Park or Riviera or who simply aged away out of these interests – I intended the movie to have them feel included as well.

Again, I’m not seeking pity here – the accolades have come pretty fast and furious and a lot of inspired, happy people are seeking me out to tell me what they liked. I’m not down on this flick.

I’m just fascinated!

With three more movies on the way, I can see if there’s a trend, or what else might have contributed to this sad, miserable group of viewers. It’s always best to have good data.

And movies.

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DEFCON: The Documentary — August 5, 2013

On August 1st in Las Vegas, the premiere of DEFCON: The Documentary took place on the first day of DEFCON 21. Audience attendance was about 1000. Mood was high. There was free beer and the sound system could explode a Volkswagen. My dad flew in from New York to attend. It was a good time.

If you weren’t aware, I’ve spent a lot of time across the last 18 months working on a documentary about the DEF CON conference in Las Vegas, which has been held for over 20 years. Started in 1992, this convention of hacking, making, security and tech has been a pretty big influence and story for a lot of people for a long time. I’ve been attending regularly since 1999 and many of my most known speeches have been given there.

I was asked to work on this project in February of 2012, and I accepted. I used the fee from the project to immediately pay off all my credit card debt, which came as a huge relief. From February until, basically, July of this year, I worked on this production, with my other three films being pushed to the background while I got this done.

The main challenge was one of time – everything was flipped from how I would normally do things. Instead of interviewing people about something that happened, I would be interviewing people before and during it happening. Tons of unknowns. Buckets of challenges. And best of all, nobody had ever really had any unfettered access to the DEF CON conference before because they had an iron-clad policy for two decades against unfettered access.

So, spoiler alert, the movie was filmed and is done. Let’s give you all the relevant links right now.

The Official 720p Torrent from DEFCON.
The Vimeo Copy
The Winner of the YouTube Lottery
The copy on The Internet Archive (with Subtitles!)

The movie is 1 hour and 50 minutes. It’s about 4 gigabytes to download. There are copies of it on The Pirate Bay that are smaller in size, but they basically re-compressed it into smaller resolution versions, and what’s fun with that?

Thanks to the equipment at my disposal from the Kickstarter of some ways back, I had some really nice methods for capturing interviews. I did dozens of these around the country, meeting up with DEFCON management, attendees, and vendors. Before the conference even started, I had around 30-40 hours of footage of people talking about every aspect of the event and hacking in general. This also murdered my summer.

Next, there was the filming of DEFCON itself, which was a different sort of murder – with up to 20 hour days, lots of walking or driving my Segway, and dealing with an in-process event. Luckily, I had the best crew ever – Rachel, Steve, Drew, Rick, Eddie, Alex, Kyle.

We’re in bright orange outfits because one of the ways we came up with to compromise with the no-photos policy was to make ourselves really obvious and then I’d later remove anyone visibly freaking out that the documentary crew was there. That worked out pretty well. DEF CON is now an old enough and large enough conference that the real “no photos of me, no knowing my name, no recording anything near me, no personal details” crowd has long since moved away or into other endeavors. There’s still a few folks understandably unwilling to be involved in such silliness, but between the vests and the obvious filming, we got by.

It’d be redundant to describe the event, since, you know, I made a movie about it, but suffice to say that it’s not just a bunch of presentations inside conference rooms and a strict agenda with a keynote each morning and bagels and butter waiting on tables for lunch. DEF CON is a massive, thriving, varied and strange gathering of people, one I’ve been part of for over a decade and which brings the stories by the bushel. My problem wasn’t having us film interesting things – it was trying to figure out how to shove all those interesting things into one single block of movie.

On the organizational side, Jeff Moss (The Dark Tangent, founder of DEF CON) primarily wrote the check and then backed off, letting me put the movie together as I saw fit. Russ Rogers, a longtime DEF CON organizer, was the go-between for a thousand little questions and approvals regarding getting things done. Rachel Lovinger, the producer of the whole mess, got to deal with my insane flipping out about planning and process, something I’ve done entirely differently with all my films before and likely after. And then there were the people running the event, watching these orange maniacs run through. Somehow, it all worked out.

Am I happy? Yeah, I’m very happy. As I’ve been doing some initial searches for reactions to the final work, I find people either really like it or really hate it. This puts it right in line with the other documentary work I do, so I’m gifted with folks who just adore the movie. At DEF CON itself, I was having handshakes and thank yous from a wide variety of people, an endless stream of bee-lines across hallways for people to thank me. Is that top-flight payment or what?

It is a visually rich film. Many variations of characters and events happen. There are moments of sadness, joy, and pride. I wanted a film that would have meaning to people who have never gone, or who have always gone, and even people who used to go but no longer do. It was challenging to turn what was ultimately 280 hours of raw footage into 2. I could probably teach a class on all I learned on all aspects. Rachel Lovinger and I gave a 90 minute presentation at DEFCON about how this film was put together, and at some point that’ll be up and public and I’ll link to it. Suffice to say, there was true and honest hard work on all sides. It was a boot camp and it was paradise. I’d do it all again.

If people have questions, I’ll happily answer them in comments. Otherwise, download the movie and enjoy! I’ve now got three other films to get back to, and this one enters the history books (and IMDB). That’s a wrap.

18 Comments

Catch Up Month — July 30, 2013

August will be catch-up month.

The last time we saw a drought of postings on this site, it was for the same reason it has happened now: a terminal case of Getting Shit Done. The point of these entries is to reflect, to entreat, and to call to arms when arms are needed. Their priority drops when I’m busily doing what needs to be done and that is absorbing all of my extra attention. And this year has been one where I’ve sat down and begun one of the core reasons the Internet Archive hired me in the first place: a massive wholescale addition of data, especially software, into the Archive’s drives.

After a trip to DEFCON I am taking tomorrow, and after a few other commitments to family and friends, I’ll be back to writing on here about all manner of subjects I think need that reflection or soapbox, and those who enjoy my writing will have much to enjoy indeed.

August is going to be very interesting.

6 Comments

Goodbye Coins, Hello Lower Price — May 1, 2013

When I started work on GET LAMP, I had all sorts of wild ideas about the movie itself and the presentation and the packaging. Among some stuff that came to reality was the beautiful mural inside the package:

But most crazily, I wanted something included in the packaging, some nice item that came along with the DVD set and which harkened back to the “feelies”, included items from early text adventures (like a cloth map or glow in the dark rock) that really brought the whole thing with you.

I decided to go with a coin.

It turns out that making a coin, especially one that is made of multiple metals and which has a really nice finish, is a rather expensive proposition. The coin that came with the package was half the material costs – the packaging and DVD duplication and plastic wrap made up the other half. That’s crazy.

But let me tell you, it sold the package. I think we’re basically out of the realm of physical copies being the dominant way to buy items. People want to download or stream or otherwise not get a “thing”. The people who want a “thing” want that thing to be as nice as possible, but their numbers are shrinking.

About 3,800 coins went out. (The others went to interviewees and supporters and friends.) These coins meant things to people – they have been kept in wallets, put up on shelves and walls and keepsake boxes, and I occasionally run into someone who is able to pull one out and show me in no time. I am glad they had that effect on people – they were fun to make.

One last shout out to the amazing company that did them for me – Monterey Coins and their top-notch sales contact, Hollis Fulmor. I was walked through the whole process, we came up with the design together, and they just did a spectacular job with them – the detail is incredible.

Thanks, coins.

This leaves about 1,000 copies of GET LAMP to put out into the world.

To help calm the sadness and nostalgia, I’ve gone ahead and dropped 25% off of GET LAMP (and BBS Documentary, as well). My physical packages are now $30 apiece. If you go to the GET LAMP Order Page, you can pick them up as a double pack, with combined shipping.

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International Shipping Ends — April 30, 2013

I’m no longer going to take international orders.

This is not a light decision. International orders are half my sales. But I have to do it.

So, here’s what’s been happening on the back end for a while: people order one of my documentaries, GET LAMP or the BBS Documentary. About once a week, when I have time, I ingest all the orders, print out labels, put them on packaged boxes for the documentaries. If they’re domestics, that is, US-bound, then I have a nice stack of them in a box ready to go.

If they’re internationals, well, depends. If it was a couple months ago, I would fill out a relatively simple form, a one pager, that stuck to the box as well. I could print out the label for myself and the recipient, fill out a couple blank spots, and then it was done. I would then take these two sets to the post office locally, where I’ve built up a nice relationship with the gang, even waiting to the side if the lines are long, and then sending out my own set when the place would die down. Out it goes, everyone’s happy.

I knew I was on borrowed time with that simple green form – my post office buddies told me it’d been phased out for another option, and it was just usual post office overlap letting the “old” form still be valid when they wanted the “new” form. I asked if the new form was easier. The look in their eyes….

In January of this year, the Post Office changed their international (and other rates). And by changed, I mean jacked up beyond belief. A DVD box that cost me $9 to ship is now $15. Some of them are higher. or equivalent where they used to be $8. I used to have a flat shipping rate for “internationals” and let it eat into the price. Now it basically devours the price. And the form that the post office people warned me about is definitely up to its reputation, because I can’t use pre-printed labels anymore – I have to sit there and write on multiple copies (the pens don’t really go through worth a damn) and there’s much more to fill out.

I do not want to bore you with endless details about the research I did to show that it’s now intensely difficult to send all this out. I do not want your brilliant suggestion of how I can save money with all sorts of tricks and traps to sneak around it (media mail doesn’t work that way for this stuff, other services are just as onerous, and I’m not interested in working with ‘a guy’ in Europe). I’m telling you that it’s over – the problem isn’t that I can’t probably hack some solution together that makes it merely a time-sink and trap-filled – it’s that with all my duties at the Internet Archive and all my other projects, I just can’t devote hours to this packaging.

And it’s not like it’s the image of Good Ol’ Jason working on these documentaries in his spare time anymore. I get yelled at for not having tracking numbers, for it taking a week to get to people (or longer, as per the delay in doing internationals). People think of it as a business that’s just shipping out documentaries. Parts of my life are slipping because of this time sink. Something has to give.

What does this mean going forward?

First, again, no international orders. Those are leaving the order pages today.

Second, for the last year or something I’ve been predicting where things are going in the future for my next documentaries. The answer is going to be REALLY super deluxe packaging, like in the $100 range, that’s a physical product, or digital download/streaming. In other words, a push to the extreme ends, instead of a somewhat expensive nice package. People who want something in their hands will get it but it’ll be pretty costly, and most will not want that. The others will get digital copies, and those will be pretty low cost and available quite freely worldwide. I knew it was coming, and I’ll be refactoring my current films this summer to fit that new paradigm. And the new ones will have that regardless.

So there you go.

I expect to answer lots of e-mails going “WHY DO YOU NOT SHIP INTERNATIONAL” and “WHY CAN’T YOU SHIP TO CANADA AT LEAST” and so on. Hopefully this entry will be something I can point to.

Do I like this? No. Am I proud of it? No. But it’s reflection of where I am in my life right now – my inbox is FILLED, BURSTING with people asking me in the role I play at the Internet Archive and Archive Team to help them with projects and research, attend conferences, provide consulting, and save materials both physical and digital. That’s what needs me. Being The World’s Worst Amazon Seller is not the best use of me.

I’ve sold many thousands of these things. I’m sure I’ll sell a few more domestically and I’ll always endeavor to have some on my person at all times to be able to do transactions in person.

But it’s over. Internationals are done. Please forgive me.

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Change Computer History Forever: Well, Here We Are — April 13, 2013

When Brewster hired me in 2011, he had the foresight to recognize I’d spread in many directions once I was under the auspiciousness of the Internet Archive, but he definitely had one overarching goal with my employment. Paraphrasing, it was this: the Archive had done very well with books, music, visual items, and of course websites – but it was sorely lacking in the realm of software. My provided goal was do for software what archive.org has been doing for all these other mediums.

In short summary, I have done that.

Thanks to the additions of the Shareware CD Archive, the TOSEC archive, the FTP site boneyard, and the Disk Drives collection, and the encouraging of the hosting of the Classic PC Games library along with the (in-process) integration of Fileplanet…. The Internet Archive is the largest collection of historical software online in the world. Find me someone bigger.

Through these terabytes (!) of software, the whole of the software landscape of the last 50 years is settling in. But since software is just that, programs and materials, it’s best to have some documentation and writing regarding it as well.

I’m well along on that too: the Computer Magazines collection is well over 10,000 individual issues of computer magazines and journals. If they’re not magazines, they might be newsletters and there’s a Computer Newsletters collection for that, with thousands of THOSE issues as well. Or books! Maybe you’re looking for books and in the Folkscanomy project, I’ve set aside a section just of computer books. Obviously there might be some hardware issues or information you would need, so be aware the Folkscanomy collection has an electronics section that veers here and there into the computer and programming realms as well.

No, no, SIT DOWN. I’m not done. The mirroring of the amazing Bitsavers Project means that over 25,000 documents that group have been digitizing for almost 20 years are right online, readable and downloadable at a whim. I’ve been separating them into company type, but I currently do that by hand so it’s uneven. Either way, an automatic process now does the ingestion, meaning anywhere from 10-100 new documents enter that library a week.

Regular ephemera? I’ve been doing a little of that on the side and working with people. It’s called the Reader Service collection. Gems aplenty there, I can promise you.

So, between all this material, and much more is coming in, the Internet Archive gives you unrestricted access to the largest collection of computer history and software in the world, bar none. Bar none.

So what’s the problem?

Well, our metadata is shit, I can tell you that. We’re not good at having all the careful twee metadata entry that most archives and libraries demand. If you look at, say, the Apple I manual we have online, it’s kind of just that – an Apple I manual. Not much detail, page listing, context. It’s just there. Preserved, easily accessed, easily read – but not described all that much. That’s a thing. People in more formal disciplines might call that a showstopper. I call it a minor issue for the moment, but one worth improving.

The other weirdness is that a lot of material is inside other archives that have to be browsed using the Archive.org’s file browser. So here’s some examples: The insides of a DOOM Level CD-ROM. A view of the entire software output for the Colecovision. The racy insides of the Devil’s Doorknob BBS. There they are, but you have to do a little digging.

Yes, this is a crate digger’s paradise. The cries of “Look what they had, they didn’t even know they had it” should echo through these stacks. The superior feeling of being the first to find a rare demo of a game that nobody ever ultimately released. The citation you note deep in an advertisement in a computer magazine for a promised hardware family that never came to fruition, or did with radically scaled-back qualities. It’s in there.

But these are problems of effort, not of possibility. That’s all they are.

More importantly, here’s the question I now ask the culture, the world, the people who might read this or get pointed to it.

Are you ready for this? Are you in?

What I mean, is that for well over 20 years now, I’ve been in the world and the culture of the software collector, the curator, the theorist, the fan. That is my life, to have been part of this group. Some of them have gone into some very professional circles with this hope in their heart to bring something like this around, but an awful lot of life and fear and reality has gotten in the way. A lot of people are well on their way towards these goals, to have this much online, this much available, this much right there and allowing us to do the Next Steps.

Well, we’re here. Now what.

There is now a fully-accessible, worldwide-reachable, massive-bandwidth and completely unrestricted collection of computer history up right now, in these collections I’ve just mentioned. Some are mirrors of incredible projects that have been around long before this moment, and let me not diminish their continued work. But some of these efforts needed that little extra bit of access, that ease of reading and downloading, and now that is here. The URLs on archive.org are designed to be permanent. This link to a little running cat (NEKO, which has been around since Macintosh days) will, barring incredible disaster, be around for a very long and dependable time. So will this collection of 30 gigabytes of Amiga software. And notably, over 360 people have downloaded that 30 gigabyte collection, absconding like Bilbo Baggins out of the mountain. Fine! Enjoy! Have a great time! But the point is, if someone asks for where it came from, they can point right here, and here it is. In a library. Online, like it belongs.

So where are you?

Where are the students of computer history who needed primary source material, downloadable images and PDF files of every description from which to make their thesis statements and reports?

Where are the bloggers and essayists who are putting together in-depth, critical, long-reaching and ranging assessments of historical events to provide context to today?

Where are the people dedicated to busting some of these lame-ass software patents that have clogged and destroyed so much innovation, all in the name of some corporate worship that says that someone patenting breathing oxygen is helping the world improve?

When do I get to see the brilliance of works like this that shed amazing new light into these old things?

This is it, folks. This is the ideal world I’ve heard whispered about, referenced, and planned for a very long time. It’s here. I know you might have expected it to land with an earth-shattering boom but it was a slow and steady flowering on the Internet Archive’s servers. The Archive of Historical Computer Software is here, and it is very, very large.

Blow me away.

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