ASCII by Jason Scott

Hey, remember those MIDI backgrounds so popular on some websites over the years? Sometimes the songs were great. Sometimes they really weren’t. For some people, the sound of “My Heart Will Go On” playing over a memorial site or “Crazy” (by Patsy Cline) playing over your personal weblog page was the height of tacky. For others, it was an initiation to tearing up and smiling while you read. Without a doubt, it certainly has led to millions of times, all throughout the world, of someone finding out the hard way how high their sound systems were turned up.

Naturally, a lot of the people using Geocities would have been partial to using MIDI, just as they were partial to using backgrounds or flashing animated GIFs or, for that matter, anything striking that got their page to be unique and special.  In the interim period of time, we’ve had lots of ‘designers’ and aesthetic princes declare what we “should” and “shouldn’t” do, but back when anything went, anything did.

I’ve been putting a bunch of runs through on the Geocities data acquired so far, and pulling out thematic collections. I’ve assembled one of all these MIDI songs. Update: I’ve been informed some of this archive (a handful) are mp3 files mis-labelled. Sorry about that! Consider them a bonus.

MIDI is a very interesting format, with a very cool history, one told by others with great ability. I won’t duplicate those efforts. Like most formats, when done well, it can be done really well. When not done well, it’s easier to do but your audience pays for it and you bring the general quality down. Some of the files in this collection are great. Some are really awful. All are historical to some degree.

Here’s the link to a Pirate Bay Torrent. I’ve railed about how torrents are not the be-all end-all of file distribution, but for short-term bursts, it’s a great way to go. This collection’s about 370mb, compressed. It’s about 1.5 gigabytes uncompressed. It would take, I think, months to play all this music.

Let the songs begin.

EXTRA BONUS SECTION

Since I had the thousands of duplicated MIDI files in one place, I decided to find out which ones were most popular. With the caveat that I only worked with the Neighborhoods-era (pre-Yahoo) set, and of course many sites had disappeared before I ran my scripts, here are the top ten most popular songs that you could have show up on a Geocities site!

• 10. The 2001 theme (“Also sprach Zarathustra”) by Richard Strauss
• 9. “Hero” by Mariah Carey and Walter Afanasieff
• 8. “Crazy” by Willie Nelson, made most famous by Patsy Cline
• 7. “Candle in the Wind” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin
• 6. “Star Wars Theme” by John Williams
• 5. “Mission Impossible Theme (Remix)” by Lalo Schifrin and Unknown
• 4. “My Heart Will Go On” (theme from “Titanic”) by James Horner and Will Jennings
• 3. “Imagine” by John Lennon
• 2. “I’ve Got Friends (in Low Places)” by DeWayne Blackwell, Earl Bud Lee and Garth Brooks
• 1. “Theme from X-Files” by Mark Snow

17 Comments

Three explorers set out. One wanted to rescue comrades. One wanted to talk to new people. One wanted to meet people and bring back knowledge.

They never met, but that’s to be expected – they set out at different times, using different ships, to different destinations.

One was Robert Wilson Andrews of the Kilauea, a steamship bound out to rescue a shipwrecked crew. This voyage, from Honolulu to Ocean Island, took four months (December 1870 to April 1871), during which time two ports of call were made. Mr. Andrews was the ship’s engineer, and along the way he noted the ship’s travel, the sights seen, and a smattering of the activity by the crew in their journey:

Friday 6th {Date: 1871-01-06} – slowed down at 2:30 A.M. Said to have sighted land at 3:30; and turned away from the island at 3:30, and were carried so far westward, that it was 8:30 before we cast anchor in Midway I. inner harbor.  Four boats and a gang of men were immediately set to coaling. The weather was very propitious. Mr. Roberts went ashore, and turned over a turtle upon his back. Had all night in; though steam was kept up to 20 lbs. continually.

Journeys were long and arduous, with sleep schedules affected by the ship’s needs and the requirements of the ever-hungry coal-burning engine. Even in this short passage, the fact is that the land sighting was at 3:30am and five hours later, at 8:30am, do they stop off at this island, an island that you, not unlike a god, have visited through a single link in seconds.  Weather is a concern, along with all the attendant needs of a months-long journey and the health and continued functioning of the crew. At the bottom of this logbook page is a clipping, a classified ad taken out by the rescued crew members, profusely thanking the crew of the Kilauea and to “express a grateful sense of obligation to the authorities at this place for the prompt and effective measures taken by them on our behalf, feeling, as we do, that but for their immediate and humane action, we in common with all upon Ocean Island, must have endured very severe suffering and perhaps a lingering death.”

Our second explorer sets off about a century later. His name and age is a combination of lost to time and held from view. While he might, on cursory first glance, seem to be more a pirate than a ship’s engineer, his travels are worldwide and his logbook just as detailed and informative.

His ship is also, we see, a mite smaller than a coal-burning schooner, but it is a hand-built vessel, prepared to sail that most unusual of seas, a place that called itself The Bell System. Already a vast worldwide network and at the time of this explorer’s travels increasingly automated, it was, and continues to likely be, the world’s largest computer. Its ports of call for this explorer are no less exotic, although many of the most interesting aspects are spoken – the voice of operators, confused at this interloper visiting them. The voices of other explorers, meeting at ports of call in the back rooms and equipment areas of all manner of buildings. The voices of whoever dared pick up the strange overnight call, confused as to who could possibly be calling at this hour, and even further confused why the initial sound upon picking up is an echoing series of clicks.

Some choice pages from this explorer’s notebook:

This is hard-won information indeed – all manner of phone numbers, noted interesting locations and voices, and finally the keys to the kingdom, helping to place these journeys in the 1971-1972 period: the calling card code (cc code), which showed the formula for determining what combination of numbers would charge telephone bills to a given number. This was passed from explorer to explorer, and recounted in journals such as TAP, utilized in all sorts of ways.

This explorer’s efforts, during his college days, are myriad and also not confined by the hours – in fact, late nights and overnight efforts are rewarded, with points from across the world being awake while contemporaries and local inhabitants are not. Numbers here point to embassies, businesses, and even individuals, noted for their accents or names and with additional numbers of friends and associates, no doubt intrigued that someone from so far would make the effort to contact them. It is an instantaneous trip now, but communication even in the 1970s is an exotic experience from across the world.

Our third explorer is but a child, a mere ten years later than the second explorer, but harnessing technology and power only dreamed of by the others.

His name is Rob O’Hara, and his journeys are primarily in his home state and occasionally beyond. His ship is a computer, one of many in use during this time: a Commodore 64, build sturdy and dependable and the best-selling home computer of all time. Geography is meaningless here, save what concerns there might be for telephone charges – his ports of call have names like The Bloody Booger, Realm of Magic, and The Dream Palace. They, too, are often maintained by children, but the urge to explore and share is strong. In his notebooks, Rob notes not just ports of call, the BBSes, but friends he has met, names he has known, thoughts on what to do next. As these journeys are layered among multiple days and weeks (and also during the late hours of the night), the ink changes in nature, from scrawled pencil to red markers to Sharpies and whatever else he has handy as a new fact comes to him at his console.

He lists potential trading partners, people he might swap his software plunder with. He notes systems he has the numbers for and no other information, showing what he has found out so far with the potential for further knowledge later. It is worth noting, at this late stage, the inability of his computer to both conduct these travels and allow him to write down his thoughts – we are long past the stage where this information would not now be cut and pasted into a separate document, or, even more likely, logged by the browser itself and saved to a centrally located place to share with others.  The inclination to utilize a notebook to save this information has rapidly disappeared for most.

In a book Rob later wrote about his travels, he mentions a geographic exploit he utilized at the time, travelling with his family from Oklahoma to Illinois and arranging for membership on bulletin boards a couple weeks before. By submitting to validation and sign-up procedures a few weeks before, he had the operators of these boards convinced he was a distant trader logging in. But then upon making the journey to Chicago, he could log into these boards for a pittance of a local call and bring back to Oklahoma his bounty and the attendant glory therein.

The age of the notebook is rapidly passing us. I know it still has places in many circles, and that for some, the function of the notebook will never go away, replaced by weblogs and online diaries and bookmark lists; but the nature of these written-out sketches of crashing ideas overlaying each other and betraying time, emotion and reasoning as it bleeds through a wood pulp page is almost gone. We are going to lose something there, as we have already lost so much.

All three explorers left their notebooks for us to regard.

I thank all three.

2 Comments

This happens more than it should: I am engaged in a roundabout fashion with a person or persons whose work parallels/compliments mine, I acknowledge they’re doing good work, whatever it is, but I don’t just sit down and sift through their work. I have no idea why this happens. Jealousy? Fear of copying good ideas? Laziness? One possibility, as weird as it seems, is that a lot of times I look at other efforts and, while I like the effort, I see so much I would improve, that my endless meddling would result in lost friends and incrementally better projects. Best to just do my own thing over here and not smash around in other pillow forts. It’s obviously something I need to work through if I’m going to be doing this sort of thing all the time.

Therefore, let me make up for lost time and tell you that Know Your Meme is about as perfect as it could possibly be, both the episodic video series and the site itself.  About the only thing I would add is an export function to turn entries into PDFs/ZIPs/etc., and that’s mostly because I’m an asshole about such things. The structure is just how I would envision it, the ability to accept expansion and the curated/moderated/beta-release structure all works in its favor. I’m just damned impressed.

In the inspiration of that, I’m going to write a very intense entry about a very general thing and I hope that Know Your Meme and other students of the passed-along idea will utilize it as needed.

A sidebar about how I tend to write my historical entries. To write truly comprehensive entries would be something that would make me disappear for weeks at a time and result in only slight improvement over a solid first draft. Therefore, I don’t mean to imply I am laying down the final word, just trying to bring the whole conversation lifted upwards a bit. It’s my hope that others, or maybe myself in a future time, will then take this foundation and build upon it even more. This is how I tend to write all of my stuff – and I’ve had a lot of conversations with people doing research or writing stuff where I go “here’s a half-dozen data points you should probably track down”.

So let’s talk about spelling things wrong and how that got to be cool.

Let’s jettison the 20th century and let’s go way back. It’s nice and all to tinkle around the various last few decades and play pin-the-tail-on-the-start-time but if you want some good beginning trends in human behavior, you just have to wander back a ways. Since you’re lazy and want to click around rather than walk a ways and argue with librarians, let’s all visit the Duke University Advertising Collection, which has some awesome wares. Here’s a timeline of Advertising History, and the Emergence of Advertising in America.

Let’s not pretend for a moment that these are the beginning of the central story; mankind has an awesome continuum of “Hey, motherfuckers, come over here and buy my shit” that goes back well past a few thousand years ago. But usually such advertisements were the province of attracting passers-by or utilizing a system of demonstrations, or a range of functions that weren’t just words on a page. (I could see an argument that currency, for example, functions as an advertisement of a local or distant power structure or king/emperor/superior).  What I’m getting at here is the idea of the whole of the engaging force enticing you to pay attention utilizing only words and pictures.

First of all, you have to make your stuff look awesome. And this is awesome:

This roughly-1885-era advertisement for a Positive Cure For All Female Diseases Every Lady Can Treat Herself is one of many thousands of a standard of advertising where all manner of information and opportunity is presented. Just glancing over this simple specimen, you see an offer to do remote by-mail medical consultation (with free sample included), and a warning that you should avoid the minefield of Fraudulant Imitations of this, the Famous Specific Orange Blossom. This ad/leaflet is meant to grab your attention, ladies and provide god-knows-what blend of cocaine, alcohol and whatsis to cure what ails you. Send 2c stamp.

You could blow a summer vacation and two retirements on this collection, believe me. Let me quickly clarify that I don’t just mean the beauty of drawing or even of the fonts, which are pretty great in themselves – I am focusing on the language of this advertising. Observe, please:

This Egyption Regulator Tea will remove indigestion, that Curse of the American People and that from which CONSTIPATION and all other Physical miseries arise, and which will be overcome by the user of this Wonderful but Harmless remedy. It is Worth Its Weight In Gold To Dyspeptic, Debilitated Men to Wornout, Nervious Women, to Mothers of Peevish and Sickly Children, to Girls just budding into Womanhood, to Sufferers from Defective Nutrition, TO ALL CORPULENT PEOPLE.

This is not just simple language and recounting of facts – this is as embroidered a text as you’re likely to find, meant to pull you into its hypnotic realm and leave your head nodding, nodding an affirmative to both its claims and your need to acquire it. It is, like a brightly colored snake, both beautiful, and terrifying. It is also a form of language we don’t utilize much anymore, a notable exception being Jerry “Tycho” Holkins of Penny Arcade, who uses it frequently- I think even a cursory glance of one of his weblog entries shows this to be the case. It’s so out of place a construction as to be a unique style in the gaming pundit industry, and it’s not hard to see, looking at the roots of it, why it might hold interest for people used to more contemporary come-ons.

Among the documents in the Duke library of advertising is a very self-serving book entitled “The J.W.T. Book”, which implies it’s a book on how to do advertising but is, itself, a massive advertisement for the J. Walter Thompson company, which produces advertising. At the time this book was put out, 1908, JWT had been doing advertising for forty years. The advice in the book, by the way, is relatively bunk, because it implies all sorts of high-minded morals and principles in advertising copy and creation, when in fact anything tended to go and avoiding the stupid and malinformed as an audience would have been economic suicide. But I just want attention directed to this chapter:

Here, 101 years ago, is a discussion about the importance of a trademark. They give the example of  Huyler’s Candy and the unique signature logo of the company as being a critical part of the success of the company. (You may be excused if you do not know the Huyler’s candy brand – it was purchased in the 1920s by the Schulte company, which had a chain of stores that expanded out into general stores and then renamed itself into the D. A. Schulte, Inc., Fashion Haberdashery for Men & Women and eventually became the General Stores Corporation and went bankrupt in the 1950s.)

The core idea in this little fake-book is that trademark, specific identity, and branding (they just call it the trademark) is as valuable as the factory that makes the product, and the good will around a product represents the central pillar of the motives of advertising; as the book indicates, a young gentleman of 24 who has known of a product since they were 12 will consider a company as bedrock an enterprise as George Washington and Bunker Hill.

Therefore, it is incumbent upon you to have a unique trademark.

It is also important that your trademark be defensible.

The easiest way to produce a unique, trademarkable name is to use a made-up or misspelled word.

Some of these, like coca-cola, are combinations of what the product is, included in the name. Others, like Uneeda Biscuit, and Heluva Good, are names that evoke a reaction. I will confess to having a strange fascination with corporate naming and activity timelines and trivia, such as knowing that “Motorola” is a combination of “Motor” and “Victrola” and was basically the name for a car radio made by the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation which they later changed their name to.

So, basically, made-up words in this context are a result of legal and protective incentives, allowing companies to control the burgeoning wordspace as later ones would come to control domain names.

Let’s set that aside and go into slang.

Slang which consists of screwed-up/shortened versions of actual phrases and words is endemic for many hundreds of years as well. Again, let’s stay around Industrial Age territory, and pull up some examples of words which have compounded meanings all wrapped into a short form. For example, scapegrace, one who escapes the grace of God, which splits into rascal, scalawag, and scoundrel. Words based on one person’s antics result in terms like Bowdlerize (edit out perceived obscenity or tastelessness for a more general public) and Boycott (agree to not use a service or business or endeavor to force changes in same). Language, in other words, is very permeable, very able to adapt itself and get the “word out” about a new way of looking at things. The field of Etymology is obsessed with these lineages and bursts of usage, utilizing citations from popular cultural locations such as mass media and legal/political documents to produce a history of words. It’s something I dabble in but wouldn’t pretend to be an authority on beyond what I’m doing here, that is, putting up little flags and markers.

In the talk I gave at ROFLcon I spoke about the origins of “OK” as being from “Oll Korrect” and called it a misspelling fad. As this column indicates, the grounds are much more fertile and rich around the creation of this term and the usage of “Oll Korrect”, implying (as one explanation) it coming from insulting spelling of Irish brogue to reference Irish groups involved in the Van Buren election. Regardless, the malleability of language both spoken and printed is demonstrated here.

Newspaper classifieds and Telegrams have similar properties inasmuch as being charged by the word. You buy the space, and then you do what your best within it. (If you want a history of classified ads, you can read this high-school-level report on their history or listen to the author of a book about them).  By charging via the word, you end up with an instant reductive language that is utilized to get rid of the cruft, the stuff we put in to be clearer to each other but which, in a pinch, we don’t need. Hence you might get a phrase like “SWF BBW 29yrs old 38 H breasts. 5feet tall. Lots of curves. Looking for NSA fun. Blonde hair, blue eyes”. We’re now so used to personals references that most of us catch the meaning of what’s being said here, even if the definitions are slightly off. For example, you might read it as “Single White Female, a Big Beautiful Woman, 29 years old, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, with a size 38-H bustline and five feet tall, has a curved outline and is looking for a romantic/sexual encounter with no strings attached.” Or maybe you read it as “Overweight girl wishes to have a series of disastrous one-night stands followed by crying into a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Ice cream. Warning: self-perception issues are at play”. Either works. The point is, you end up with a mass of information encoded into smaller packet-words.

In the telegraph/telegram industry, I learned from the wonderful book The Victorian Internet, there was a big deal of making huge ten-letter words, like PSDREPOWSF, and worse, to encode an enormous amount of information into them, literally on the level of “please purchase 1200 bushels of corn from our Chicago supplier to truck to the Indianapolis depot”. The book cites a legal case where a letter was mis-entered and a wildly excessive amount of an item was purchased, costing a business dearly. The court found that the business was being a cheap asshole and found in favor of the telegraph company. The moral of this story is that as soon as we invent a time machine we have to go back and explain Cyclical Redundancy Checking to them. Hey, what do you mean, “patent spark plugs”?

So overloading words with double meanings and triple meanings via spelling changes, compound contraction and the like is well in effect before we get up to… well, let’s skip over to military slang.  How about that.

Military slang is a much more efficient set of terms for frequently encountered situations. With the same brutality encapsulated in the making of war, comes the repurposing and changing of language to suit situations. Off the top of my head, I think of FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition), Top Brass (or The Brass, from brass emblems worn by officers) and Third Man (to go too far, referring to the third person to light a cigarette in a trench and get killed by a sniper, the first and smokers allowing the sniper to notice and aim, respectively).  And again, there’s an excellent book out there. If you’re in the cheap seats, this awesome weblog entry will do nicely.

The first casualty of war, in other words, is language, utilized as needed as a protection against the horrors of the reality of the situation, as a short-hand form to save time, and as a way to get complicated concepts that frequently pop up into the minds of your audience/comrades so the team can move quickly to the next confronting issue. It is, essentially, the same shorthand that any industry, be it printmaking, fishing, or brewing, finds itself conjuring up over many years and in many situations. The difference, I think, is the self-degradation and insulting nature of military slang, meant to give a bit of rebellion and farce to the proceedings of a situation where the command chain is all.

I would contend, and stick with me here, that the situation is not unlike a lot of intensive online life right now. Come on, stick with me, we got this far. In contemporary electronic discourse, time is of the essence because of the flood of new concepts, the back and forth between strangers, and the propensity for weird and yet commonplace occurrences to pull away your time and imagination. You have to use terms in various ways because otherwise you’d drown telling people that you thought someone was being dishonest in their propositions for the purposes of gaining attention and wasting time, when it’s so much easier to say they’re trolling for victims, or just trolling.

It’d be nice if we could see how people first reacted to being online, without doing so because of military/academic/corporate requirements but simply to engage with other people. Oh wait, we can.

We’re lucky, because Ward Christensen kept the printouts from the first months of the first BBS, and I have transcribed a lot of them. Here’s some choice odd spellings from that time:

 I AM A MEMBER OF THE NORTHWEST COMPUTER CLUB. JUST
      FOUND OUT ABOUT YOUR NEAT SYSTEM FROM HOMEBREW N/L
      AND WROTE AN ARTICLE ON IT FOR OUR N/L. WE HAVE
      A SIMILAR CAPABILITY ON A LOCAL TIMESHARE SYSTEM,
      BUT NOT PUBLIC. I AM AMAZED THAT YOU CAN GET SO MUCH
      THRUPUT ON ONE PHONE LINE! LOTS OF SUCCESS.

“Thruput” and “N/L” for “Newsletter” are interesting here.

[ Randy Suess Breaks into Chat ]

       - RANDY????

       - YES

       - I HAD CALL FROM FRIEND OF YOURS ABOUT HP2000

       - YES HE IS K00L

I have no idea why this guy used “K00l” instead of “Cool” here. He just did. There were no predecessors for the change; it just happened. That’s in 1978.

Now, let’s go to a printout I have from 1984. At this point, teenagers, who have been active since the 1979-1980 era and are growing in significant numbers, are all over the bulletin boards, in many cases pushing out the older users who had come before them.

>>> BY: APPLE ASSASSIN

PERSONALLY,I DONT LIKE BOOT TRACING... ONE OF THE
VERY BEST AND EASYEST WAYS TO CRACK A DISK WITH QUASI NORMAL DOS IS TO USE
MINI DEMUFFIN... IF ANY OF U WANT THIS PROG EMAIL ME...
  *NOTE*
        FOR SOME STRANGE REASON (THE RWTS IS SCRWEY) IT WOUNT CRACK 3.3P SHIT.

                                                LATER -1.1
                                                        A.A

To this end, you can see that Apple Assassin can barely functionally spell. I count five words spelled wrong, including the use of “U” for “you”. “Prog” is short for program; we use “App” now, short for “Application”. I am sure that “1.1” means something at the end means something, but I’d have to spend way too much time finding another citation. And just to be fair to the people who wrote these long-ago messages, text-editors were nowhere near as sophisticated as they are now, and so it was rather painful and annoying to go back and edit your words. As a result, we’re talking write-once-and-save for the messages, meaning spelling errors just have to take it like a bitch.

Somewhere in here, along the whorls and eddies of bulletin board systems, poor spelling and grammar becomes a hallmark of a cluttered mind which, all things considered, probably isn’t going to have good and new pirated software available. This is reflected in textfiles I have from the period, including the seminal Real Pirate’s Guide by Rabid Rasta. I consider this file to be almost required reading about BBS history, because it shows such a perfect self-aware 1984 BBS user, ridiculing and pointing out what even at that early time were characterizations and issues with some of the more base personalities of the software piracy scene. I was taken enough with this file that I actually created an annotated version of it for people to read, with my own thoughts on the context of the file. (I also notice I go over the whole “OK” thing in this file as well; I loved that story!)

Note, then, the writing of the “parody” pirate in this file:

I SAW YOUR MESSAGE ON THE PIRATE BOARD ABOUT YOU HAVEING SIDE 2 OF SUMMER GAM ES!MY CONNECTIONS MR.ZEROX AND CHEIF S URGEN BLACK BAG ARE’NT AROUND TO MAIL IT 2 ME SO WANNA DO SOME SERIUS TRADEI NG?I HAVE GRAFORTH ,CHOPLIFTER ,MARS CARS ,DISK MUNCHER AND SOME K00L OTHER

And then compare and contrast with the writing of the author of the file, ostensibly using the top of his spelling and grammar skills to express himself:

IS THE AUTHOR OF THE ABOVE MESSAGE A TRUE PIRATE?  SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME
THERE HAS BEEN AN IMPLICIT CODE OF ETIQUETTE GOVERNING THE ACTIONS OF SOFTWARE
PIRATES, BUT AS MANY OF YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED AS OF LATE, THAT CODE HAS BEEN
KNOCKED AROUND A BIT.  ALTHOUGH IT'S NOT DIFFICULT TO DIFFERENTIATE A TRUE
PIRATE FROM ONE OF THESE POOR IMITATIONS, I BELIEVE THAT, WITH THE NUMBER OF
TRUE PIRATES DECREASING AT SUCH AN ALARMING RATE, THIS CODE SHOULD BE SET
STRAIGHT.

What passes for entertainment in my life is the fact that I’ve had to sit through hundreds, perhaps thousands of forum messages in countless years throughout the 1990s and 2000s, 20 years of this, where people are decrying how their “scene” has been ruined and what represents an elite or competent group, and here’s a file in 1984, fully 25 years ago, decrying what is perceived as a possible sunset on the days of “real” piracy.

That aside, the writing seems competent, the thoughts clear, and the setup is succinct and straightforward. From this, I think, comes a demonstration that spelling things badly, changing out letters, and shortening phrases into curt letter sets was something to be made fun of if it hit extremes. Even back then. The BBS world is self-aware of this potential issue and it becomes both a warning flag of breakdown of good communication and a way that people continue to use to communicate.  For some, the terms “K-Rad”, “K00l”, “Warez” and “Zero-Day” (zero day meant something else back then) were both efficient slang and unironic demarcations of your acceptance/stature into the “scene”. That tension has never left electronic communication since. We both use short-form terms and make fun of them. We intentionally spell things wrong and then ridicule others who do same. It fluctuates based on mood, fad, and usage. And, were it not for the utility underlying it, it would have died of shame a very long time ago, longer than a lot of the current crowd using 4chan, say, has been alive.

I believe, therefore, that two entirely at-odds facts exist in our odd uses of slang, spelling errors and short-form terms online: that they have a long and storied history, and that for many of the utilizers of these terms, that history has no relevance whatsoever. They came, they saw “sauce” instead of “please tell me the source of this interesting media you just provided”, and they were fine with using the term. It worked. It was fine and it was good.

And thus it shall always be.

11 Comments

OK, so here’s the high-level report: We Saved Geocities!

Obviously, this needs a truckload of qualifications, so let’s go over them immediately.

First of all “We” is not just Archive Team, badass archivist motherfuckers that we are. While probably 30-40 people from around the world stopped in on the Archive Team tent at the Geocitiesdownloadapalooza, not all the action was going on with us, and not everyone who stopped in was necessarily working with me as project lead, and so on. There were, it turns out, parallel projects going on, five that we know of, and even more people who we might not know of, dedicated to downloading as much of Geocities as “Archive Team”. We’ve had people show up in the days since Geocities closed and offer us 20-30 gigabytes of data, some of which we didn’t have in any of our other stores. They just did it – they didn’t need direction or to be part of anything, and they’re happy just to drop off this packet and move on. I’d estimate that we’re probably talking 60-80 people that we know of so far who took a pretty fair shot at downloading a lot of sites that they had nothing to do with previous to Geocities being announced as closing. Altruistically trying to rescue the artifacts from the burning house, not because these were their artifacts, or the artifacts had intrinsic value to them, but because they knew the best thing to do with the burning house was rescue artifacts. That’s fantastic.

Next, there’s no way all these different groups saved every last single bit of Geocities. But at current estimates, with all of us sharing data, we saved over one million accounts. We’re still crunching numbers, of course, and things could change, but we’re looking at somewhere in the range of 3-5 terabytes of data, and very likely having grabbed every major outward-facing geocities account, outward-facing meaning “showing up in links and search engines”. It is entirely possible that someone created an account, didn’t do much with it, never got word out of it, and it’s gone, but for that matter we seem to have many hundreds, possibly thousands, of various default “wow, thanks for making a Geocities account” pages, untouched since creation. So let’s just say, a million goddamned accounts is nothing to sneeze at.

Finally, we saved Geocities in the most important way – we got the word out about this thing, I did a lot of interviews, and while the sneer-and-move-on crowd who would as soon see history burned for not having a good CSS file might ridicule, a lot of other people saw Geocities in a new light.  No longer strictly thought of as a useless financial property a dying company might be jettisoning to save some coin, it’s now recognized, in some quarters, as one of the largest-scale folk-art installations to exist in the history of the world.  People are unhappy that all this stuff is gone, and more importantly, people felt they could speak out about how they felt unhappy. There was no large-scale effort to petition and protest Yahoo for this; but I did see quite a bit of pity. The kind of pity you feel for a person who doesn’t understand what they have or what they’re doing, immolating themselves for the short-term and walking away from opportunity after opportunity, on the way to inevitable irrelevance and also-ran status.

I’m spending time with a few people who have large archives, and we’re synchronizing our working out what’s where, and how to get the data around. I then have a short-list of people who, involved with history or culture or sociology, are lining up outside to be sent hard drives of Geocities and looking forward to close and meaningful study. Who thought this would be the case in April?

Ultimately, the archive team demonstration/curated collection of Geocities will be at Geociti.es. I’m focusing us on just the pre-Yahoo sites as a first step. Other locations are going whole hog. Everything is going well. We’re all doing awesome. Already, tearful folks have found one of the groups of people and recovered data they thought was lost forever. I don’t expect these expressions of gratefulness to die down anytime soon. It was worth it before, for history, but it’s worth it even more knowing we’ve made lives and memories better for this.

We lost. And we won. I’m delighted.

19 Comments

I am sure we all laughed at the end, there, when one of the members of Archive Team, slaving like the rest of us to yank data out, suggested a link to a Geocities page with a MIDI of “The Final Countdown” by Europe.  The perfect tinny music to blast out of the speakers as we watched a massive site come grinding to a halt.

As it turned out, the machines of Geocities did not die on October 26th, but instead started to come down around 12:30pm PST on October 27th; we assume nobody felt a need to stay up late at Yahoo to do the work and instead began taking machines down and redirecting at the start of the next day. Fine with us – that was 24 hours of bandwidth-absorbing madness we visited upon the servers before their shutdown.

I was already rsyncing tons of grabbed files from all the harvester machines people were running. And man, did we have data – millions of files. I’m STILL rsyncing data from some people, and will likely be doing so into the next week. All told, as much as 2 terabytes of total data was saved.

A nice surprise was the fact that we had not two but four entities that we know of currently who were trying to rescue data wholesale off Geocities.  The four are Archive Team, Archive.Org, Internet Archaeology, and Reocities (Update: And a fifth, geocities.ws). Each of these have approached things in different ways, and will likely present the resulting data differently.  But the fact that something like Reocities would slave in darkness (they didn’t know about us, we didn’t know about them) for over a week in insane download orgies says something about what was going on here.

I’ll let people know when the Geocities stuff we’ve downloaded is available again, and Archive Team Apologizes for the Downtime. We’ll have that fixed shortly.

7 Comments