ASCII by Jason Scott

CD.TEXTFILES.COM Needs Mirrors — November 11, 2010

OK, so CD.TEXTFILES.COM is such a wild, insane success that I’m starting to think I need mirrors.

Right now, the data’s only in two locations, and I don’t like that. I’m going to make it three, shortly. With over 350gb of data in over 3.3 million files, it’s a lot of data.

But what data! Old games, programs, writings, lists… it’s an amazing collection, one of those investments that’s paid off for me a thousand times over.

There’s a pro-side: all this history is right there. And there’s a con-side: all sorts of scum-sucking sites directly hot-link to the cd.textfiles.com server, surrounding the links with advertisements.

And then there’s a huge pro-side again: it’s a library that essentially runs itself. I track down the data, and it just… goes up there.

I’m about to take delivery of over 300 CD-ROMs to add to it. It’s going to get really big.

Who wants to step in to mirror? It’s time.

8 Comments

Your Roger Corman Future — November 10, 2010

OK, let’s begin by establishing some things.

Currently, by the standards of independent (actually independent) filmmaking, I’m fucking Steven Spielberg. I’ve made two films, BBS and GET LAMP, which are not even films – one is a box-set miniseries and the other is actually three documentaries combined with a coin. They’re films++, a reflection of various childhood influences which I will go into shortly. The two films have grossed (versus netted) six figures apiece. I am my own distributor. I am my own agent. I am my own packaging and art director. My subjects are specific and niche and in both cases, the films stand as the defacto baselines of the cinematic meditations on the subject. I am, by most standards, a wild success. Therefore, if I’m saying anything now, I’m saying it within the guise of the guy who has actually succeeded at making independent films.

And let me make clear, independent using the word independent and not the bullshit term Independent which means “we want to be just like Hollywood but Hollywood won’t return our calls so we’ll just be assholes by our own selves and WOO HOO HOLLYWOOD CALLED SEE YOU SUCKERS”. I’m afraid to coin a new term for people who are making films who are not part of some vast Hollywood-wannabe network, because then that will be used. So I’m saying I’m that independent where you are literally just some person with a camera and a computer. And you make a movie or something. That one.

Here, then, are my predictions for the coming years:

It will be strange to buy physical media for your entertainment by 2013. Strange like buying a CRT TV for your house, or buying vinyl records. You will do it, because you’re of a certain type, but you will be in a fun little minority and it will be an effort to acquire the physical media. Right now, it’s just annoying. Within a few years, it’ll be pretty strange. Eventually it will be totally weird.
There will be a relatively small number of networks for distributing entertainment media to stuff. Probably not more than a dozen, and #11 and #12 will be like visiting the Mojave Phone Booth.
These networks, by and large, are going to fuck the media creator, hard. I mean, really, really hard. Left with boxer shorts in mouth up against a dumpster hard.
To survive, films that are not locked into these networks in some way are going to be even more pathetic and desperate than they are.

Let me quickly jump back to how I make films, which are a very specific way and which either gives me some authority or diminishes it, depending on your point of view.

I make extremely geeky films that take years to craft that attempt to be exhaustive, human-oriented narratives brought out of countless interviews of technically-astute people. Not content to merely assign a bunch of pre-fitted spoken narrative from an announcer over slowly-moving slides, I attempt to bring in the voices and the accompanying material a sense of what caused this event or subject to happen. I leverage current technical limitations to make very large bodies of work, in the multiples of hours in length, and provide them as a finished, massive package which itself is an integration of the values and themes of the subject.

That has the potential to sound like crap to people, but it’s what I’d put at the bottom of some statement when I was required to make a statement. Now let’s rip it apart.

Because I have a strong sense of wanting a range of voices, that means I have to travel and interview those voices, i.e. people. Because I want to integrate all their speaking in a way that makes sense, it ends up being many months of editing (BBS was roughly 10, GET LAMP roughly 9) to get things to just “work” like they do. And because I have some sort of weird attitude about craft, the packaging for these finished works is borderline insane in terms of quality.

When the price of the most recent film, GET LAMP, came out ($40, plus shipping), a wide variety of people responded negatively. I’ve saved a few for your edutainment.

“45 dollars? What if you just want to see the documentary, not experience it and get all sorts of swag? To someone who is just interested in documentaries about gaming, and not specifically text based adventures and ridiculous swag, this is sort of a slap in the face.”
“That is great, but what an evil price tag. It is likely to eat me.”
“it’s a ridiculous price point, basically begging people to pirate it”
“I have no idea who this dude is – I’d probably give it a shot for 4/5 bucks for an online rental but at $40, I won’t even consider it and will have forgotten it exists by tomorrow, which is a shame”
“I can appreciate attention to detail but who would want to watch something that long? On a subject like BBSs and Text based games? Guy needs to hire an editor to reign that shit in”
“$45 = blow me”
“Ouch. Geez. I was really excited about this, but not really $45 excited. Maybe in a year or so they’ll release a coin-less cheapy edition.”
“I might be willing to pay a small fee for a downloadable version, but $40 is kind of insane.”

I have to point out these are real, from forums, and every single one was written with absolutely no knowledge of what the final product would be; they came out months before the movie was ever released.

Instead of coming into their homes at night to strangle them (and at least three have double-bolted windows, so what’s the point), I’m mostly bringing up this collection of saucy quotes to point out what’s going on here: the film, the idea of film, is rapidly becoming devalued. Not just devalued; decimated.

A lot of people talk about Netflix like it’s the natural place for this to all end up. If they don’t want a copy of BBS to pay for and watch, they’ll just “wait for it to come out on Netflix”. After watching dozens of people say this, along with accompanying language, I’ve determined a lot of people don’t understand what Netflix is anymore. They think it’s some sort of iTunes. It’s not iTunes. iTunes is a whole different set of problems, but iTunes works by a royalty system – Netflix most certainly does not, unless you’re in such a huge position as a film library that Netflix has nervously sent some people over to your office to negotiate with you. Netflix is not sending anybody over to the TEXTFILES.COM offices to negotiate with me.

Should BBS ever end up on Netflix, I will get $40 for each copy they buy, and then I will never see money from it again. That people would think that a $9.99/month fee to Netflix (now less than that for a streaming-only license) is somehow imbued with royalties, that somehow that tenner gets split among the dozens of films you watch that month, strikes to me at the heart of what’s going on – a greater and greater insulation of cost versus value.

I am at this point convinced that a large amount of audience have little or no idea of what it costs to make a film. I’ve encountered folks who literally think the cost is the physical media of printing the DVD and the packaging, and if they download a copy at zero, my costs are therefore zero, and we’re quits. I’ve been informed what my movie should cost and the next set of calculations are based on that should. And I’ve encountered a lot of strange ideas over what exactly constitutes a fair price – and the crime I am committing not holding to it.

And can you blame people, when movies are available for $2 or a game goes on sale for $1 or entire albums are handed away for free? It’s nice and all, and the buffet is delicious, but the result is that an actual piece of work that represents years of effort ends up providing a ball-smack-level of sticker shock.

So the two solutions are obvious. Make no profit, or make shittier movies.

Here’s a good place as any to give you this letter. It was sent to me; not written as a “open letter” or as a thinly-veiled reference to me or on some message board deep out of site behind a registration-only wall. This was written specifically to me as the filmmaker.

Just thought I would shoot you an email letting you know in my opinion 45 dollars is way too much money. You know this will be up on TPB with high rez scans of all the feelies and crystal clear copies of the films within the month. You even have an account on there, so you know it will happen. I love Infocom games, and I love text adventures, and this documentary sounds amazing. Yet being a young kid on my way off to college I have no way to justify buying this product for 45 dollars. I’m really sorry, but I felt since I cannot afford to monetarily reimburse you, I would express my appreciation and thanks at you creating such a labor of love. Hopefully one day I will see it (it hasnt been seeded just yet) but until then, thank you very much and hopefully there are more deep pocketed IF fans out there than cheap college bound kids. My recommendation is that you make just the film a free download, provided you donate at least 5/10 dollars through paypal, and then leave the “deluxe elven quality” package at 45 dollars (one in which no grues were harmed in the process of filming of course). I, being as cheap as I am, would even donate and I feel that a lot more people would too. Look around for articles about your film and the comments invariably say that 45 bucks is too much. For a documentary about a genre of gaming in which the only simple and complete way to get copies, of more than the most mainstream of titles and in modern day formats, is through pirating the Unofficial IF collection you must know most of your audience today will be familiar with torrenting. I really hope you make some money off this and I really cant wait to see it, but for $45 dollars I will wait. Best of luck and sorry to chew your ear off!

You’ve got to really put this one up on the lift and root around under it to see where it is coming from and where it’s trying to take me. Again, this was sent directly to me, an education from someone half my age explaining how the world works; he felt I needed to understand this, this idea of what things really “cost”. His business model, a sort of begging freemium, is well established and predates him by a while, but his interest in me going that way is by explaining to me, in no uncertain terms, that not only should I do it this way, that if I don’t, I will be pirated. (As a side note, a high-res scan of the gold coin is not yet as good as the gold coin, but he seems to think otherwise.)

I am less specifically interested in the kid himself than what he represents – an idea that things are inevitable, that films of a specific quality just happen, that they should all go to a $5/$10 optional payment, and it will all work out, like a game of Super Mario Brothers. That in a world where you “will” end up on The Pirate Bay, that people will gravitate towards payment regardless, and not just consider your work a part of the background, another thing to play for 15 minutes until moving onto the next shiny button. I think he’s right that I am going to encounter more and more of his type, who do not just consider these works to be side-effects of the ecosystem of technology, but not, in the greater sense, worth any more than anything else. A movie as ringtone; a song as system beep; a book as forum post.

We did this already. His name was Roger Corman.

Roger Corman made (and makes) shit films. They are shit. They are truly, honestly, shit. That they occasionally are not shit is mostly a result of several factors not related to the making of the movie. Any aspects in which they are not shit, such as the director or the actors or crew, quickly abscond to greener, non-shit pastures as soon as is feasible. He was/is a leg up into a tough industry, but a could-die-anytime car is a leg up into moving to a new city, and not what you want to be driving around once you’re in that city. So again… shit.

But what they also were are cheap. Super cheap. Cheap cheeeeaaapppppp, re-use paper plates and wash plastic cutlery cheap. Films shot in 2-3 days. Shot for less than fifty thousand dollars. One of my favorite Corman tricks is to place a camera in an open space and film four scenes, one after another, by turning the camera 90 degrees between takes. You end up, inevitably, with four different backgrounds and the setup time is trivial. You get things done in 12 hours that used to take five days.

This is an environment where great stuff can happen, to be sure, but it is also a place where you are guaranteed a lot of excruciatingly awful stuff will happen. But goddamn, that stuff is cheap. Sell that for five bucks a head and you’ll not lose a dime.

What I’m saying is, if you degrade the meaning of media to the point that you expect, nay feel the need to write the filmmaker should he decide to charge for his work, you will get Roger Corman. You will not get me. If you get someone like me, you will get one film out of them, one that cost them a lot of money but which they are very proud of. But they won’t be able to go another round – there’s no money to do it with.

If I sound like the cantankerous old guy in this entry, I’m sorry. I go out of my way to be upbeat about the whole thing, about all the good stuff done and when amazing things happen and when I see brilliant work out there. I’ll bring you news of cool stuff where the cost is free to you; just go watch this short documentary film. It’s great! It’s beautiful! And it’s free!

But it’s 8 minutes long. It has one person talking. It brings in absolutely no money for the creators, and it may or may not ever have a follow-up. It certainly has little chance of ever seeing a DVD, or getting subtitles, or bonus features provided for you.

But it’s free.

Welcome to the future.

38 Comments

Flyer Archives — November 7, 2010

I’ve gone on about how fantastic Jamie Zawinski’s chronicles of taking over and renovating the DNA Lounge are. Besides his unflinching of the ups and downs of renovating the club, and his deliciously nasty reaction to the status quo of licensing and politics surrounding entertainment in a city reknowned for being open-minded and supposedly free, he has a great sense of historical context.

From the beginning, he was trying to track back what came before, why his club was where it was, who owned it, who ran it, what functions the building held. Through the lens of his current ownership, he traces his place in the world. He finds old blueprints, old news stories… whatever makes sense.

The DNA Lounge came into existence in 1985, many years before Jamie bought it. And like any club, they had shows. And like any club with shows, they had flyers.

Jamie recently found some. He’s put them up here.

Flyers are a very specific thing – they’re meant to be self-contained invitation and news capsules, jettisoned out into the world to drag people somewhere they weren’t thinking about going to. In a world of weblinks, these are notably different – weblinks just send you to the thing in question (although of course, a weblink can lead to a flyer). With a flyer, you have to both attract the audience without overflowing them with information. Especially if you’re talking about a place to come drink and dance. So they’re compact, but alluring. Intense, but easy. They have to balance all these factors, while still ending up who-knows-where to attract the audience.

But as an aside, they also show how far short-run printing has come. In 1986, his flyer archive has an image like this:

Composed from photocopying a bunch of cut-out printed papers and photographs, this flyer is a single color (black, with colored paper to get the effect) and obviously came together rather quickly.

Contrast with this image, created a few years later in 1991:

And then this 2002:

Amazing differences.

I love flyer archives for this reason. I do think there’s a problem with dumping thousands of images on people with no way to easily search through them, or to set up a browsing experience that mimics finding these and finding out what happened there – it’s just a lot of work to set up and asking the audience to essentially do that job for you, but without the tools, is a bit much.

But for the initiated, please check out some of these wonderful “flyer archives”; two magic words that summon an avalanche of intense imagery.

1 Comment

Chicks — November 5, 2010

There was a joker in every crowd. I use the word “joker” because the jokers traditionally have thin defensive skin and calling them what they are instead of Jokers gets that hurt look I don’t need on a night of triumph.

All the nights were nights of triumph on the JET LAMP tour, by the way. I had crowds as small as 4 and as large as 100, and they all had high points and low points, and I think it was a great couple of months. But there’s always the Jokers. The Jokers would always ask questions that were more about the Joker than the film they just saw, like commenting on how everyone had beards, or glasses, or thought some people weren’t dressed for the occasion. A couple would be more cutting, regarding possible proclivities or social skills of an interviewee, as if you could tell anything from this footage about the interviewee’s life as it was currently lived.

But one question would pop up in various ways and in its boat of shallow judgmentalism showed a greater, more interesting situation. So I’ll discuss that.

The question is, “Where Da Women At?”

At this point, for both the documentaries/sub-episodes and a variety of other projects, I’ve interviewed about 320 people in the realm of computer history. Some of them have been impromptu and short, and others have been two-day affairs requiring lunch breaks and discussions over said lunch on how to address all the issues raised. I have done a lot of interviews. I have planned them. I have sought them out, and I’ve certainly been there for choosing who gets interviewed and what.

Gender, race and income level does not come into it. I promise you. I do not sit around getting calls from women involved in computers and quietly pressing 9 to delete the voicemail or hitting the d key on my cellphone mail client to push these unwanted females into the bin. Does. Not. Happen.

My films have primarily been about events happening in the 1960-1990 computer era, with a few references to “modern” iterations of the subject. In doing so, there’s a simple, basic fact: Less women used computers back then. I had less of a pool of women who would ever potentially contact me or be contacted about my documentary, and so if a guy turned down my movie (and many did) then it was less destructive to the quota of male interviewees than it was to the female ones. In fact, if I couldn’t interview someone male of a certain stature or position or historical significance, finding someone who could answer the same questions or be the same voice of authority was, more likely than not, also going to be the same gender.

So up to this point, you and I are both probably on the same page and thinking of it all in the same terms, so you then make the expected point. “But Jason,” you say, “that’s understandable given the circumstance, but we’re much better now, and getting better.” Better, in this case, means “more women in engineering” and, ostensibly, “less women being shunted aside on the basis of gender”.

Yes. Cognitively that’s true, but in actuality the situation is not worked out and it is still in effect. It is still weird, in some ways, to see really kick-ass women engineers aggressively innovating and being at the lead of a team doing engineering problems. It is made note of, or light of, when described. For a fun hour, go ahead and see how Google VP Marissa Mayer is mentioned and described in press.

But before we get off track onto quotas and pointing out the obvious, here is the specific sound bite I started using at the end of the GET LAMP tour answering questions about why there’s not more women in GET LAMP:

“Until mom and dad stop pushing little Suzy away from the Tonka Truck and towards the Barbies, my technical documentaries will not have a lot of women in them.”

Less of a pool of women in computer subjects mean less of a pool of women who might really excel in their field or get on the radar of “person you need to ask about X” when I’m doing a film about Y where X plays a part. It means that just like expert rock climbers are generally going to be in very good shape, engineers who are getting major attention or innovating in a hugely public way are going to be men, and so on.

But this isn’t even what I really wanted to talk about.

The whole entry to this point is basically obvious stuff. You can feel good that you’re following along. Here’s something I’m encountering that is not so obvious.

During my last DEFCON speech, I said that “being a historian means being a hater of all things”. By that, I mean you watch the same patterns happening again and again. You see patterns of people pointing out patterns of things happening again and again. Once you see it, you start to go a little crazy because you realize how futile a lot of action is in terms of using cold, simple logic to manipulate choice.

So the pattern I now see, more than ever, is that people who live in a certain period of time start to evoke their own values on the previous eras and are shocked or disappointed or ignorant that the era is going to maintain what happened back then regardless of what happened later. Need it easier? The present, which is past’s future, is perennially disappointed in the past’s inability to incorporate present’s values.

It’s been a while since I’ve written in this weblog regularly, so I won’t get too meta on you, so let’s go back to brass tacks/reality: in general, in the computer industry, at least up into the 1990s, if you were a woman and you walked into an engineering section, you would more likely than not be asked to get the coffee. Or, if you were in a meeting, be asked to make copies for the team. You might make noise about it, sure, and if you really got loud about it you could be sure that you’d sure not be getting any damn coffee or copies for anybody again, but you were still in an environment where you were not putting up with that crap, not where that crap was, itself, something that you shouldn’t have to put up with.

You can scream at me for weeks about examples of women engineers, architects and technical folks who are out there, but find me one without the stories, the stories of what the guy engineers were like when they got there, or the first promotion into management, or anything where they excelled in the sea of norms. It was a weird situation for people, and while things got less weird quickly for individuals, it is still a weird situation.

As society moves along in its floppy, messed-up way it does and it always has, maybe Suzy will get the Tonka Truck or the Adafruit kit for her birthday. And maybe there won’t even be a low grumble on the side from other family members as she pushes the truck around or reads the instruction manual on how to make a Mintyboost. But that’s not happened yet. Not really. I’ve got hundreds of cites of women in technical fields covered with some sort of reference, oblique or joking or self-aware or subtle, along the lines of “and she’s a woman”.

I can’t do anything about this. It is a fact. If I keep making documentaries taking place involving computers and engineers and especially if I focus pre-2000, it is going to keep happening. There’s no agenda. There’s no intent. There’s no overarching aim here. It’s what happened.

Next question, Joker.

8 Comments

A Torrent of Attention — October 31, 2010

It has been an interesting few days.

Creating the archive of Geocities content from the Archive Team’s collection took my machine roughly 10 days to compress. The resultant collection of .7z files is 642 gigabytes, expanding out to 909 gigabytes. Then I began creating the actual .torrent file, which is merely a collection of pointers to the files that trackers and clients use. This took 13 hours, and I had to do it twice: it turns out the default “piece size” is 256k, this sent the machine up into the 2 million plus “pieces” and a LOT of clients do not like getting two million entries in anything. Rejiggering to 16mb “pieces” did the trick. But it still took another 13 hours.

A few of us in the Archive Team IRC channel did some testing, and we’re off on a roll. The swarm has been in the hundreds range since.

I’ve been sending out e-mails about the torrent existing over the past week to the over 800 people who requested to be notified. This slow rollout isn’t because I think the torrent can’t handle it – it’s just that Gmail is not as easy to run little scripts against collections of mail to extract a mailing list. So there’s a little copy-paste action going on and I am not going to do that full time. A few hundred of those folks have gotten notified and I’ll probably be done with the full list shortly.

And then came the press.

So, I’m going to punch the press in the whizzer for a paragraph or two.

The whole point of this exercise was to gain attention to the issues and cause that Archive Team is involved in: preserving digital heritage and lambasting entities/companies that treat user-generated content like so much trash. I think the issue transcends anything I’m mucking around with and represents a real and vital issue as more of life moves online. By boiling things into “Geocities as a Torrent”, attention was sought, attention was got. But along the way, I’ve gotten another taste for contemporary news-gathering and the stratification of quality is getting ridiculous.

On the one hand, I’ve got reporters like Ken Gagne of Computer World and Lauren Schenkman of Science Magazine who have contacted me, spoken to me on the phone, and then gone off and gotten related individuals on the phone or e-mail to discuss the issues. They’re doing this with pretty fast turnaround. And I guarantee I’m probably a tad spoiled by reporters like Stacy Schiff, who spoke to me for hours to get background on her excellent Wikipedia article, or Kim Zetter, who shows that you can write an informative article without being fawning.

And then come the slightly-slapdash ones, who write articles using my one weblog post as their source, but then go off to find some additional illustration. Not really great, but then again these are newish organizations not really interested in a whole lot of standards when it comes to telling the stories. Pleasant surprise should occur when they get things right. (For example, a lot of places wrote that the torrent is 900gb and will expand out to terabytes, something nowhere in anything I’ve written.)

One that made me go off the rails was this article in PC Magazine, which was written by Sara Yin and had the name of an employer I had quit 10 years ago and spelled the name of that employer wrong – ignored the original weblog post about this and never contacted me once. So I made a little noise about it, got a few buttercups up in arms that I’d be so mean, and ultimately got a few additional insights into perceptions of my personality.

Oh, sure, PC Magazine made a correction, but not before it got syndicated to hell, with the wrong information baked in. And the corrections do not follow. It was especially galling as PC Magazine was an entity that I was reading like a bible in my teens, even submitting software for their new PC Disk Magazine subsidiary because I thought it was such a point of pride to be in its pages. Well, obviously not anymore – now they have crap farmers using the first three google links to write inaccurate stories and still calling themselves “reporters” in a land with people with Schiff and Schenkman. For shame.

Anyway.

There have been some amusing podcasts mentioning the situation, for example Infosec Daily has the story at the end and Dan Misener did a recorded interview with me that was so much fun and got the message across so clearly that it’s actually included in the torrent. Even This Week In Tech mentioned the event, comparing it to zombies and yelling “BRAAIIIIINS” and hey, whatever works for you.

Right now, there’s only one seed machine, but I am duping the archive over to a portable drive, and a number individuals and organizations are mailing me hard drives to get copies to seed as well. So anyone going on seeing that the top seeds are “merely” at 8 percent or some lower number, that torrent is about to speed up dramatically.

I’m glad the word got out about this. Even if people choose not to download the data (and come on, this is a hell of a lot of data), they remembered Geocities one last time, and remembered what Yahoo did. Maybe that’ll change something down the road.

So there we go. One last thing – another Geocities archiving project, Reocities, was done by Jacques Mattheij, who is such an awesome dude and so perfect as a counterpart to what Archive Team is doing, I hereby call out some tech conference to bring us both in for a panel. We will fucking kill the room, I guarantee it! Kick out some lame “how to distribute your blah” speech and give us 90 minutes. Trust me. Get on that.

Oh, and PS: I put all of my Geocities archive on this:

Was it really that hard to keep around, Yahoo?

14 Comments

Goodbye to VK7AX BBS — October 29, 2010

I have a number of scans running in RSS feeds to let me know about stuff related to my movies, projects, and people chit-chatting about me. I also have a scan watching for the words “BBS” and “Bulletin” in them, which more often than not scoop up references to “Bulletin Board Systems”. It does a pretty good job and the false positives aren’t that annoying. What it means, however, is I get to hear a lot of reminiscing and correlation of the BBS era to events and items of the present day.

Or I get announcements like this:

Closure of VK7AX packet BBS network

After approximately 35 years of operation, Tony VK7AX has decided to close the Packet Radio BBS known by the SSID of VK7AX-6.

This decision was not taken lightly, however the time has eventually come, according to Tony, to close the BBS.

Due to the decline of RF users in recent times to ZERO and increasing running costs, he has reluctantly come to the conclusion that it is not worth continuing to maintain a system purely to act as a Bulletin Forwarding machine only.

He takes the opportunity to thank the many sysops and friends (world wide) that have helped or contributed in one way or another over many years. Without the true Amateur Spirit and encouragement shown to him by many, he feels that he would not have continued maintaining and operating the BBS for as long as he has.

The BBS will be turned off on Saturday 30 October 2010.

This follows the closure of the Tnos packet Gateway machine VK7AX-8 which was decommissioned approximately 3 months ago for the same reasons.

Once again many thanks to everyone for their support and valued friendships.

Finally, for those still interested in packet, please support the only remaining BBS in VK7 – VK7HDM
( email: ddm@lnx-vk7hdm.dnsalias.org )

73’s
Tony VK7AX
(Past SYSOP VK7AX-6 and VK7AX-8)

The language used might require some explanation, even from followers of BBS history. Please excuse me if I utilize links instead of my own quaint linguistic approach; a lot of people have done really good work on explaining it.

But first, some pretty pictures. Let’s start with Tony VK7AX:

Tony VK7AX is in fact Tony Bedelph. He lives in Tasmania, and he has been doing things with amateur radio and other signal transmissions for many, many years – longer than I’ve been alive, and I’m old. If you browse his website for the amateur radio/television station he works on, you grab a hold of a lot of years of work. Slow-Scan images, links to syndicated shows, and information about his various projects he’s been involved in.

You can not do better for an introduction to everything about what Packet Radio and Packet Radio BBSes are than this excellent tutorial from Larry Kenney, WB9LOZ.

It is not clear to me how to reach Tony – I would love to archive the BBS he has shut down as of Saturday, to capture this long-running warhorse for all of time. Here’s hoping I figure it out.

The BBSes that are going down now will often be like this – fantastically old, filled with years of history, disappearing quietly.

I try not to get to sad about this.

4 Comments

Historian!! — October 28, 2010

The stack of huge boxes on my door containing this material heralded an important milestone in my life: my first assignment as a professional historian/archivist.

From the official announcement:

To celebrate ‘GDC 25’, the conference organizers have appointed an official historian for the show in the form of noted technology archivist Jason Scott, known for his Textfiles.com digital archive and his history of preserving important digital artifacts.

Scott, who has created the BBS Documentary and the just-debuted interactive fiction documentary Get Lamp, will be in charge of receiving and synthesizing historical accounts, anecdotes and other media from GDC attendees, and digitizing extensive printed, audio and video archives.

He will be posting a twice-weekly blog post on the official GDC website news page [RSS feed] and sister outlets starting in early November, revealing exclusive videos and audio lectures, stored on the UBM TechWeb Game Network’s GDC Vault website, alongside other images and analysis from the history of the event.

Alongside this announcement, GDC organizers – part of the Game Network, as is this website – and Scott are calling for submissions from people who’ve attended the show over the past 25 versions. They’ve set up an official email address, gdc25@gdconf.com, which CGDC and GDC attendees can email with anecdotes and reminiscences of attending previous GDC shows.

In addition, if previous attendees have content from classic shows they’d like to share, please tag photos as ‘gdc25’ on Flickr or upload videos to Vimeo or YouTube, and email the official ‘gdc25’ mail address.

As it says, I am going to be posting updates of the incoming pile on their official weblog for the GDC (Game Developers’ Conference, in case you’d not picked that up) and not here. However, I am allowed to keep copies of what I scan and digitize and even host stuff that I think is relevant.

It’s a paid position, but I’m not being feedy-hand-bitey when I say it’s not enough to live on – it’s a fee for a part-time contractor to do this work. I would like to get a couple assignments or jobs that could help me bring in income, because to be honest things are on a very slow downward spiral financially. I know that sounds surprising, but GET LAMP and BBS Documentary are high-quality projects – they cost money to print (and more have to be printed) and I do actually, you know, travel and buy technology to support my work. I just mention this in case anyone wanted to talk to me about possible employment, part-time or other… I’m around, people. Let’s do lunch.

What’s important about this role is very obviously not the money. It’s that I am truly and honestly doing work in the field I wanted to switch to, computer history. I’m doing it for something very interesting, and I am being given an opportunity to prove myself in this task. It is challenging, it is fun, and it will be a great time telling the stories coming to me. Not to mention all the artifacts that people are getting inspired to tell me about. This is fantastic.

This very simply would not have happened without the Sabbatical. Absolutely not. I never get tired thanking the people who gave towards that funding, because I never stop benefiting from it. Thank you, people.

Now, let’s archive some GDC!

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A Softwear Archive — October 27, 2010

Sometimes, when you’re an archivist of my stripe, your tools don’t just include computers – sometimes they include something like this:

And really, you better have a truck when you drive down to the local post office with your “fuck if we’re going to deliver this” yellow slip and come up against this waiting pile:

You see, not all the history is downloadable, not all of it comes on hard drives or in a small package. Sometimes, it comes in a very large pack indeed.

So, what’s in this major haul of boxes? Well, it’s going to be pretty easy to explain and perhaps somewhat difficult to hear me out.

A while ago, Randal Schwartz of Perl fame announced that he was leaving his current home of many years and setting off on a new life, and along the way he would be discarding a lot of his old material to lighten himself up. So out would go the trappings, to the dump or friends who were buying things, and then he’d be all set for a different way of living. Along the way, he took a photo and said “look at all this stuff” in his twitter stream. Another person, Daniel Packer, suggested that I be contacted. Things being what they are, discussing contacting me in a public space immediately contacts me, so I hopped in and offered to pay postage.

And that is how I ended up with 22 years of computer conference T-shirts.

So, I guess for a certain segment of the population, the news of this is sufficient, but to another, perhaps larger segment, the question is why the fuck do you want someone’s laundry?

Well, let me first say that the vast majority of these shirts, possibly all of them, have never been worn. They were given as prizes or gifts because he’s Randal Schwartz and Perl is Cool and so Randal got them for free. So get your nose out of the gutter.

But what attracts me to this is that these are an easily collectable slice of computer history and cultural context. The shirts are printed for all sorts of reasons, and provided with all sets of expectations and goals. The collection, as it is, gives you a glimpse of the last 20 years of computing that later times might really want. It is going to be relatively trivial to photograph these, list them, package them up, and then have them available for the future.

So here’s some off the cuff shots of these shirts. I don’t have time at this moment to really catalog them all, but maybe you can see where I’m going.

The hardest part is done – these shirts have been rescued from recycling and disappearing. Now we’ll see what comes of this.

Thanks, Dan and Randal.

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Archiveteam! The Geocities Torrent — October 26, 2010

Well, here we are on October 26th, 2010.

Can it really be a year ago that Archive Team had dozens of people assaulting Yahoo’s servers desperately trying to save disappearing history? Well, let’s be frank — not disappearing history, but in fact history being actively and quickly destroyed on purpose. I mean, it’s not like Yahoo! had some sort of terrible server failure or something. They in fact had made the active decision to turn off the site called Geocities, an at-that-point 15 year old hosting site that contained terabytes of user-generated content.

Oh, we were having a great time one year ago – rushing around from this server to that, faking the Googlebot user agent string, bringing our full downloading power to bear. At one point we were well past 100 megabits of bandwidth yanking onto all our archives. As October 26th leaked into the 27th, we watched as site after site disappeared. Sites that were, in the vast majority of cases, less than 10 megabytes. Remember the last time 10 megabytes mattered?

Well, apparently it mattered enough to Yahoo! to decide to kill off Geocities across a couple days, after announcing somewhat quietly that all that data was going away. The usual sarcastic-hand-wringing and point-and-laugh ensued from popular press. “Remember Geocities?” and “Good Riddance” were the order of the day. So it came as a surprise to some that Archive Team thought all of this worth saving – by any means necessary.

What we were facing, you see, was the wholesale destruction of the still-rare combination of words digital heritage, the erasing and silencing of hundreds of thousands of voices, voices that representing the dawn of what one might call “regular people” joining the World Wide Web. A unique moment in human history, preserved for many years and spontaneously combusting due to a few marks in a ledger, the decision of who-knows for who-knows-what.

Well, actually we do know what – it was to show that Yahoo!, after purchasing Geocities for nearly $3 Billion Dollars With a B, was cutting costs for the 2009 financials. Faced with a lingering, saddened death, new management sought to save money where it could, and projects unshielded by internal advocates were thrown out with the bathwater. (And the bathtub, and probably a number of unused plumbing supplies filling one of the back offices). The amount saved? Probably very little – the servers ran themselves (it appears there was no actual team assigned to Geocities beyond maintenance for the last year of its life) but by saying that something that was there was no longer there, the illusion of progress could appear. So an announcement happened, and then over the next few months, the death march continued, until October 26, 2009 fell and with it the sunset of Geocities.

Of course, Yahoo! might have tried spinning off the company, but it doesn’t appear to be the case that Yahoo! knows how. So death appeared to be the only option, since shutting down Yahoo! properties was “in” that year.

But you see, websites and hosting services should not be “fads” any more than forests and cities should be fads – they represent countless hours of writing, of editing, of thinking, of creating. They represent their time, and they represent the thoughts and dreams of people now much older, or gone completely. There’s history here. Real, honest, true history. So Archive Team did what it could, as well as other independent teams around the world, and some amount of Geocities was saved.

How much? We’ll never know. One of the Archive Team members called Yahoo! to find out the size and was rebuffed. When we called later in the year to ask exactly when the site was going down on October 26th, we were told that the person who spoke to us last had been let go. It must be like spring break down at that place.

But we know we got a bunch of Geocities sites – a significant percentage, especially of earlier, pre-acquisition data. We archived it as best we could, we compared notes, we merged and double-checked and did whatever needed to be done with what we happened to have.

So now, on this one-year anniversary, Archive Team announces that we are going to torrent it.

YES THAT IS RIGHT, WE ARE RELEASING GEOCITIES ON A TORRENT.

This is going to be one hell of a torrent – the compression is happening as we speak, and it’s making a machine or two very unhappy for weeks on end. The hope had been to upload it today, but the reality is this is a lot of stuff – probably 900 gigabytes will be in the torrent itself. It’s not perfect, it’s not all – but it’s something.

Who will want this? Anyone who feels like browsing among the artifacts of yesterday, who wants some data to play with, who is doing research into history, who wants to get some mileage out of a few weblog postings of crazy glittery animated GIFs and MIDI music. It’s not for everyone. Some people will probably grab a few files out of the thousands of archives in the torrent, unhook and call it a day. Others will want all of it, every last bit, to put onto their $80 1TB hard drive they bought down at the local computer mart.

UPDATE: The compressed archive is 652 gigabytes, and you can stop down at that famous computer history site The Pirate Bay and get the torrent.

While it’s quite clear this sort of cavalier attitude to digital history will continue, the hope is that this torrent will bring some attention to both the worth of these archives and the ease at which it can be lost – and found again.

Clear your disk space – this one’s going to be a doozy.

FURTHER UPDATE: There’s an update on the status of the torrent on this entry.

94 Comments

You’re Stealing it Wrong — September 25, 2010

This summer, for DEFCON 18, I gave a talk called “You’re Stealing it Wrong: 30 Years of Inter-Pirate Battles”. The proposal was good enough that less than a few hours after I submitted it, Dark Tangent himself tweeted about it. That was enough pressure to ensure I had lots of backup material, lots of items to discuss. The result is pretty far out there.

Here’s the video from the speech.

You’re Stealing it Wrong: 30 Years of Inter-Pirate Battles from Jason Scott on Vimeo.

I endeavor to thank the contributors to my sabbatical, for it’s their efforts that have allowed me to get all I’ve gotten done this past year, stuff that will pay off literally for years. (I am well aware I owe my contributors their actual awards, and that’s the plan for October.)

As for content, I have a strong opinion that a good talk isn’t a self-contained story, but a series of entertaining threads all gathered up, all of which you can then pull on and learn more about. To that end, there’s a lot to check out. Happy hunting.

I must say, I really, really like this format that DEFCON’s recording entity, The Sound of Knowledge, use for speeches. You get the slides in perfect clarity, the name of what you’re watching, and the gesticulations of the speaker all captured as great as they can be. Yeah, they glitched and lost my video for a little bit, but you got my audio recorded properly.

And what’s up with that hat!

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