ASCII by Jason Scott

This week’s sent-in cool stuff came from Steve Ross, who sent me a box of IBM Binders.

Sometimes (OK, fine, often) I get to indulge in acquiring material that is personally meaningful to me. In the case of IBM binders, it’s one of those connections that, honestly, I find hard to explain but it’s overpowering. I’ll take a shot.

I don’t know when IBM started making instruction manuals in this fashion, but I know it must have pre-dated the IBM PC. That said, for a pre-teen like myself, the IBM PC would have been the first time I’d come up against this presentation and packaging. If it was intended to imbue a sense of power and confidence, to give the impression that IBM was here and everything was going to be OK, it did it in spades for me. I know that Digital and other companies had also made huge strides in creating documentation that smiled and tipped its hat to you, promising the world. But IBM was my first, and my strongest.

Each major product got one of these binders, this huge thing with tabs and the logo and inside a binder whose pages could be pulled out, or added to, or whatever. You saw these boxes on the shelf near any IBM PC. Here’s one in all its glory:

How could a kid not be impressed with something like this? How could anyone not be, especially if it was the first time they encountered a business-grade manual? After all, the IBM PC was going to be business-grade, and having a reference document nearby in such a perfect layout was fine.

If you’ve not encountered one of these in person, I do want to draw your attention to a significant detail/aspect of these manuals: the texture of the outside. This wasn’t just “cardboard” or a smooth colored surface. It was a crosshatched texture, one that gave a sense of richness and strength to the box and binder that you just don’t see as much anymore, now that everything’s commodity and lowest-common-denominator. Maybe this picture will help explain:

Can you see that? That bolt, that rich texture of the manual? Again, not something drawn/printed on the cover, but an actual textured feel. You could bring this to me, tell me to close my eyes, and stick this in my hand and I could tell you exactly what it was – my fingers would call back memories of a cold dining room with the computer on a table, pawing through this binder and trying to figure out how to make various parts work, or what buttons to press, or where I was going wrong in trying to make graphics show up. It’s embedded in my character, part of what makes me me.

Oh, sure, someone who does not buy into this worldview or my description of my feelings for these things can spit off a few quick digs, like my world being small or lacking proper human perspective or something. But in fact, this was all part of my growing up, of realizing that people could do really great stuff, and then when I encountered crappy workmanship in something as basic as the manual, I knew that things had strayed badly or the company didn’t work out all the problems with their product, or showed pride in it.  There really was a pride about it, here. Of craftsmanship, of IBM throwing people at the problem and those people having a lot of meetings and deciding what kind of a manual would, before you even turned the machine on, make you feel like you’d made the right choice.

It’s an outlook that, in this realm, is truly gone. Thanks to Steve for letting me have a few additional specimens of this bygone era.

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Well, well, well.

So you might have missed this piece of news, but this past week, if you owned a phone branded as a T-Mobile Sidekick, which itself was based on original work of the Danger Hiptop, then your phone’s data was all lost and if you power-cycle your phone, you will lose all your contacts, photos and other important data. Permanently.

That’s pretty awful.

So let me modify my previous sentiment:

FUCK THE CLOUD, BEFORE THE CLOUD FUCKS YOU.

Being the guy who gut-punched current presentation and marketing crap of “The Cloud” earlier this year, I’ve been a lightning rod for a spectrum of frustrations. Some are annoyed at this weird marketing term taking on such strength. Others are people who have glommed onto this marketing term and are hella pissed that some upstart fuck like myself is indicating in some way that they are charlatans or misinformed dupes. And some others are end-users who are worried about some of the concerns I have been raising and want more information. It is nominally less interesting than other mail I get, but it’s pretty important stuff, so I don’t mind being at the center of it.

Therefore, when things started really going to ass-town earlier this month for Danger/T-Mobile, I got communications from a lot of people. I’m still getting links and I am grateful to all the people who wanted me to know about this nightmare and what it was all about. I was also given vaguely privy information to what is “really” going on, and how some perfectly talented folks are not getting any sleep for quite a long time while the problem is being addressed.

The story, as I understand it from various sources who may or may not be as insider as they claim, is that this is a classic case of “no separate hot hardware backup during major upgrade”, resulting in a worst-case scenario when what was supposed to be a relatively smooth transition fell apart, cascading and knocking over all current data. Backups exist, I’ve been told, but obviously they are slightly out of date and probably don’t keep around every piece of data important to the end-users. And they will take quite a while to come back. Meanwhile, we are treated to people, regular and normal folks, who have been absolutely fucked over. This is the human side we probably tend to forget:

You should have a bunch of feelings when using computers. Excitement. Pride. Delight. Amazement. Curiousity. Yes, even frustration and anger. But you generally should not feel despair. You should not be feeling desperation. You really shouldn’t. An architecture and environment that could lead you into this situation, where you are helpless and wronged and did nothing but what you were told was right, and then punished quite severely, is very wrong. It is the opposite of what a computer and technology should do. And worst of all, by any of the information I’ve been given, it was avoidable – just more expensive to assure such avoidance. And expensive gets lost as an option, when you’re dealing with a cloud.

What we call The Cloud is about obfuscation, about blurring. It’s in the name of ease and convenience and about incredible savings on a number of columns in your galactic spreadsheet. Unfortunately, this marketing bullshit easily comes at the cost of service level agreements, error tracking, and accountability.

Oh sure, the worms have come out of the wood to make fun of people who owned T-Mobile Sidekicks, saying they shouldn’t have been with a “kid’s” phone instead of a grown-up phone or some other platform-related calling of the dozens.  These people are beneath contempt – all centrally located items, like, oh, telephones that rely on checking centralized servers, are prone to potential failures in the future. Failures that could affect everybody, even people who own some other brand of phone who are the type to point and laugh at others’ misery. Here’s hoping the hot guy/gal you gave your digits to was using a T-mobile, Mr. Jerkin’-it-on-Saturday-Night. They ain’t calling you back anytime soon.

And sure, I’ll be sure to get mails and comments from people who have hung their shingles on The Cloud to tell me that this wasn’t the fault of the Cloud and that the Cloud was actually down at the local pub sharing a pint with 39 buddies who The Cloud bought drinks for and so The Cloud is innocent. That’s what’s so great about something like The Cloud – a few tweaks of the words, a clever turn of phrase, and the bad part doesn’t apply to you and what you’re selling. That was something else, somebody else. Not your fault. No mea culpa required. Come buy our new Cloud service.

Remember lives could be very negatively affected by this outage and loss. People whose sales contacts or organization information or any of a number of critical phone lists were on these phones is gone. That can be devastating to a businessperson who relies on this list to get work done, or who stored photos, memories, messages on this platform. Sure, you can point here from the Magic Fucking Future and act like they were committing a sin by not syncing their data up every single night, but how’s your sink looking, motherfucker? Got any dishes in it?

Like Roger Boisjoly, I don’t take much pride in being “right”. What I want is for us to stop making these mistakes, to stop several terrible trends from continuing. It’s partially an engineering issue – syncing up data quickly and easily to several locations isn’t a terrible task and it certainly isn’t something to be ashamed of and hidden way up the food chain at the central servers. It’s also a social issue – data owned by users should be sacred, considered the highest calling in computer services, with people’s lives understood to be affected by every choice. It is often, instead, thought of as a business case – if we lose everyone’s data, what will it cost us? Right now it’s costing T-mobile plenty (they’ve halted sales of the Sidekicks), but how often has anyone within the paradigm of Microsoft/Danger/T-Mobile used the terms like “trust” and “caretaking” with relation to this data? Will they ever? Will anybody else? In a world full of fucksticks like Larry Halff who should have a restraining order from ever being in charge of user data again, you don’t know what the ethics/value system of the people in charge of your data are, and in this situation, the idea of something like the approach of what we call The Cloud is a step, no, a marathon run backwards. We’re better than this. We really are.

This is not a time, over here, for pointing and laughing. It never was. It’s a time for mourning. It’s a time to realize that tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people woke up and had part of their lives ripped from them and had done nothing, nothing to deserve it. And to realize, with horror, how many people are walking around as we speak with pieces of their own lives hanging in a fragile balance with only one bad upgrade, one poor business choice, one missed phone call between them and losing it forever.

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We’re nowhere near done with the absorbing of as much of Geocities as we can take, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a little time to show off the kind of stuff that’s being scooped up in great handfuls by the machinery.

Among these things are the idea of the “Under Construction” graphic, a perfect example of something that was once ubiquitous, of its time, and rapidly falling beyond just disuse and into the burying of memory and reference. Perhaps it might be shocking to someone to think that others don’t know what’s meant when referencing “Under Construction” GIFs, but this is a natural thing when you have people mere years into their web-browsing experience.

Hence, may I introduce an Archive Team Exhibit:

PLEASE BE PATIENT: THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Feel free to instead just click on this helpful graphic:

Oh, and speaking of helpful, a small warning: the onslaught of nearly a thousand “Under Construction” GIFs may crash your browser. But that’s the price of going to a museum – sudden and terrible crippling death twitching in the face of historical artifacts. We all have to live with that risk.

What I like about this exhibit is that it captures the emotions of the entire Archive Team project with regards to Geocities. Some people scream “WHY!!!!” at the heavens, others grow emotional realizing how much is here, and others just walk along briskly while pointing and laughing and then moving onto the next great thing the web is giving them for free.

There are stories here; stories of why people felt the need to do Under Construction images on their web pages, the people who did ever-more-elaborate images to one-up other designers, and the many ways that a simple idea was turned around and modified for a wide variety of needs and priorities. Notable, for example, is that two or three versions of the same GIF that appear on that page are often re-calibrated to use less space: 15k, say, versus 100k. You know, to get that precious space back. 85k makes a difference and adds up when you have a total of 15mb to store things, or you’re on something like Geocities where there was a per-hour limit on how much you could transfer.

I could probably spend quite a bit of time going into the aspects of these graphics in a historical, design, and technical context. But the fact is, there’s no time to properly do that. I was surprised to see this already the subject of a Metafilter thread.  Some excellent reactions and ideas in there – I hope there’s more.

At least there’s some of this history being saved to have ideas about at all.

Remember, Archive Team needs you, one way or another.

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