ASCII by Jason Scott

Ah yes, are you in luck, or will be shortly. The shadow film to King of Kong I have referenced, Chasing Ghosts, is breaking into the public eye, soon. I am not 100% impressed with how this world premiere is being handled, but the point is that you will have a chance to objectively see it, and that’s the important thing.

This entry contains my review of this film. The version you will see is the one I saw.

Here’s Peter Hirschberg’s announcement of the times it will be appearing on the movie channel Showtime. The schedule on showtime is here and will of course disappear after the middle of December.

As you can see, Showtime has done them a fantastic service by playing an awesome documentary about video games at times ranging from 8:45 to 11:45 in the morning with one extra-special showing at 3am. Thanks, cable company!

My bitcheroonies aside, this will be your chance to see if I’m lying or wrong when I say that this movie is superior in so many ways to King of Kong, especially the part where it’s not made up. Allow me to “be a Doctorow” and say that it is inevitable that people will capture this movie and torrent it, and at that point I would hope someone on the production side of Chasing Ghosts would then take the amazing buzz this movie would generate from people downloading and seeing it to making a wonderful DVD package full of all the extras and footage they got their hands on, because there is a metric ton of it, and it’d be the best $20-$30 a videogame fan could spend.

But seriously…. 3am? 8:45am? What the fuck, Showtime.

As to the whole King of Kong vs. Chasing Ghosts thing, I have said so much on this subject I am sick of it, so I’ll just let this weblog entry say all the same things.

Update:

I discovered that there was a PDF file with a more complete schedule across showtime’s channels. So, here’s the FULL times it’s showing:

December 3: 8:30am, Showtime Next
December 4: 7:30am, Showtime Showcase
December 6: 3:00am, Showtime Too
December 7: 12pm, Showtime Next
December 9: 12pm, Showtime Showcase
December 11: 2:30am, Showtime
December 11: 1:30pm, Showtime Next
December 13: 9:30am, Showtime Too
December 14: 12am, Showtime Too
December 15: 8:30pm, Showtime Too
December 16: 7:15am, Showtime Next
December 16: 3:30pm, Showtime Next
December 20: 3:40pm, Showtime Next
December 22: 12:00pm, Showtime Next
December 26: 11am, Showtime Too
December 28. 10:15am, Showtime Next
December 29: 12:30pm, Showtime Showcase

7 Comments

I have become a vendor of Commodork, the book by Rob “Flack” O’Hara. Here’s my inventory:

I’ve gone on the record about how I liked this book, which has the occasional rough edges but is as honest and fun as the BBS days that it comes from. Flack covers his teenage years and the love of computers and bulletin boards with a real enjoyable narrative voice.

Subsequently, the BBS Documentary ordering page has been updated with not only sales links for the book but also some “BBS Packs” which are combination values for buying both the book and the documentary, or the book, the Dark Domain DVD-ROM and the documentary.

Look at me, a one-stop super-shop for your BBS needs.

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It’s nearly 20 years since a harbinger of the BBS’s future made itself known. Time for a recap.

I think there’s two levels to discussing something historical: compiling a general overview of an event that may have slipped by and is in need of attention, which is easier in today’s info-soaked world, and then a more in-depth research, which really does need more primary sources, interviews with people involved, and so on. So pardon me while I do the first level of research on this subject.

Throughout the 1980s, BBSes were, on the whole, single or dual-line affairs. Exceptions were definitely abounding, thanks to Tim Stryker’s Galacticomm MajorBBS software/hardware, Diversi-Dials, and similar super-multi-line situations. These multi-lines, however, were ghastly in their expense on the hardware and software side: you needed as many phone lines and modems as simultaneous users (not counting the local sysop who could use the machine) and you often had to have software that charged you something significant. Galacticomm’s MajorBBS could run you in the thousands, Diversi-dial needed a little chunk of change, and so on. In other words, these were the sorts of rare places, often requiring paid subscriptions, that thrived but even at the top of their game could service a few dozen people simultaneously.

I think nothing illustrates this combination of cost and difficulty to breathe the rarefied air of multi-user computing for BBSes as this photo of the Rusty and Edie’s BBS setup, circa late 1980s:

Consider for a moment, if you will, how much computer you’re seeing in this shot. Each of those machines is a fully set up PC compatible, with the attendant costs of memory, hard drive, and internal cards. They are all connected to modems (some of which you can see stacked on top) and all of this collection of hardware are plugged into the masses of power strips along the back. The room was obviously never designed for these computers – it has a regular carpet and those power strips are ad hoc. Consider how much effort was expended to make this system even work, to keep it all running, to make it function, to administer the software. This was a hell of a way to make a buck.

One of the books I’m currently reading is How Invention Begins: Echoes of Old Voices in the Rise of New Machines by John H. Leinhard, and one of the interesting ideas put forth in the book is how much invention arises out of an urge; in the case of the book, an urge for speed. We could see what we wanted, some of us could get speed in various ways (horses, skiing) but as the introduction of faster and faster machinery came to the masses, speed became a commodity and the satisfying of that urge. I contend, therefore, that another known urge, powerful whenever it reared its head, is simultaneous multi-user conversation, both online and via telephone technology. In both cases, when it burned, it burned bright, but often at a financial cost relatively few could sustain on either the front or back ends.

The difference between a single-use of a computer and a doubled use is almost infinite. With two people interacting in the same space at the same time, so many more qualities arise out of the experience. There’s a reason basically all the major games invented in the dawn of video games are two-player – computing power couldn’t begin to capture that sense of competition, the knowledge that the other entity there was against you, as smart as you, and was ready to take you on. It was a long, long time before the single-player game that wasn’t a pale echo of this competition became commonplace.

Once you were online and could talk to others directly, you knew in your heart that you got things that way you didn’t get just reading the files and messages the last guy left. A BBS that could claim it had multi-line chat had a pretty strong reason for people to call it.

Like many refrains from 20 years ago, it is either a tired (but true) phrase or a new concept to those who haven’t heard it before, so it’s worth singing: the Internet was not always the Web. The idea of a client sitting with an all-you-can-eat connection and a all-we-can-suck-down approach to data was a early 1990s concept, and took years to truly ramp up into absorbing the vast majority of what people would consider the online experience. Communication and mores had existed for a decade beforehand among the relative hoi polloi of college students, and of course lurked in years previous to that in a miasma of scientists and engineers, cloaked in seriousness but prone to the occasional extensive play and entertainment as needed. The meat had a light coating of sauce, instead of the cooked sugar covered with gravy we now consider the status quo.

The two worlds of Internet and BBS overlapped, but not significantly. Access was of a certain strip and the BBS world was where all the exciting on-the-ground just-a-bunch-of-folks stuff was happening. Certainly people would use the Internet’s available functionality and then disconnect their modems and connect to the local BBSes. It was an odd world to look back on, but it was the case.

So there’s this event that happened in 1989, on the Internet, that laid it all out. The moment the BBS broke free.

It was called the Mars Hotel.

Located at Mississippi State, this 1989 BBS ran in Unix using software that called it PBBS, for Pirate Bulletin Board System. The creation of Ed Luke, this was the dream brought to life – a multi-user BBS system that you could merely telnet into, a connection from anywhere on the Internet, to log into and leave messages, upload and download files, and do what had previously been the province of the dial-up Bulletin Board Systems.

The Mars Hotel pulled away that final restriction for multi-user connections for a BBS. You could see, in the dozens of people on, how fast things would become. A message posted could have other replies almost immediately; instead of the slow burn of a BBS message base with its queue, a flamewar could erupt and engulf a board within a half an hour. It was also, vitally, free; people who might point to the WELL as a predecessor to Mars will also have to admit it was a money-making venture (or at least a monetary membership if you weren’t a journalist or celebrity). Charging for a BBS is (temporarily) weird again, and back then it was usually to be able to handle these enormous back-end costs I spoke of. Mars had very little of that.

Here’s a list of Internet BBSes of 1990, with Mars and its other contemporaries (Quartz at Rutgers, Freenet in Cleveland) running in sizes unfathomable just a couple years earlier.

There is, I am sad to say, such a dearth of information on these places. They are truly, for the moment, lost to time.

Here’s a collection of unix-based software packages, some of them dating quite a ways back, others maintained for many years by people who were not the original creators. PBBS, for example, has gone through several revisions, including to the last incarnation, “Pivot”. A 1994 Linux Journal Article describes this software and the later Eagles’ Nest BBS, a derivative (and improved) version that came about in 1992. This article, by Ray Rocker, is absolutely excellent and takes what I’m talking about into very deep technical details you may want to know about.

But technical details are not stories, they’re not memories and they certainly aren’t interviews. I wish someone had sat down and spoken with some of these people. I was quite busy getting other stories but this one didn’t get in my schedule. It’s an important time, one more people should know about.

And now you know it too.

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A basic concept worth mentioning, even if it means a text dump and some commentary.

So, the anthrax letters of 2001, the investigative team of which pursued one man, until he was found innocent. Remember that? After he was found innocent, the FBI pursued another individual, who during the investigation committed suicide. There’s an article from the New York Post, captured here, which contains, in the middle of its discussions, this set of paragraphs that really struck home with me and my historical work:

To convert the wet anthrax strain he had developed at Fort Detrick – the only strain he worked with – into dry anthrax, which can be inhaled and is much more lethal, Ivins would have had to use a lyophilizer, a freeze-drying machine that is able to dry large quantities of liquid. Ivins’ colleagues say they never saw the scientist working with dry spores – in fact, dry anthrax was not made at USAMRIID – until he was asked to examine the anthrax-laced letter sent to Daschle. The lyophilizer, located in a hallway surrounded by four labs, did not have a protective hood. A hood is necessary to circulate and filter air and make it possible to use the lyophilizer to work with harmful bacteria without the bacteria becoming airborne. Co-workers say the hoodless lyophilizer would have spewed poisonous aerosols, infecting co-workers. But no colleagues of Ivins experienced any symptoms.

Co-workers also point out that the machine would have to be fully decontaminated after use – a 24-hour process called paraformaldehyde decontamination that involves locking down the lab. Without a full decontamination, the machine would have contaminated other bacteria or liquids used on the machine at a later date. And if it had not been decontaminated, the FBI should have been able to find traces of the dry anthrax on the machine. Yet they swabbed Ivins’ machinery numerous times and were unable to find traces of dry anthrax spores in his lab, Kemp said.

Records show that Ivins logged an average of only two hours of overtime in the weeks leading up to the attacks – and even at those times, he could not have gone undetected. Even if Ivins did have access to a freeze-drying machine and a protective hood, sources who worked closely with Ivins estimate it would take a minimum of 40 days of continuous work without detection to create the volume of spores used in the attacks. “If he was working eight hours a day on spore prep every day, it would be noticed,” said Gerry Andrews, Ivins’ supervisor between 2000 and 2003. “It’s ridiculous.”

Ivins’ lab – just 200 square feet – was in “highly trafficked areas, and Bruce had colleagues that worked with him every day,” Andrews said.

OK, so why in the hell does this interest me or trigger any relevancy with my work?

Well, what we have here is a case of technical people discussing and defending known technological limits to an audience that could not care less and ahead of an organization who uses the generally non-known aspects of the technology as evidence, even in the face of inaccurately doing so.

When I researched the general history of the busts by Police, FBI and Secret Service of BBSes in the 1980s and 1990s, there’s a continued thematic use of this technique, of relying on lack of knowledge of technology to assume worst case scenarios and to apply superhuman or impossible talents to people for the sake of a gettable “win” in the courts. A conviction plea-bargained down to a lesser sentence is still a conviction, and so regardless of the people involved, the lives torn asunder, the “get” goes on the big board and the team moves onto the next kill.

What comes across to me in these paragraphs are scientists – people whose job is to work with specific applications and specific equipment – saying “this is how this equipment works, it isn’t even feasible for the equipment to work the way it is being described”. You know your car can drive at a certain speed. If you’re clocked by radar at a speed you are incapable of driving, say, 150 miles per hour, the natural defense is “the car can’t even DO that”. A more accurate assessment, though, is that your car can do that, given a number of factors which you would never think to do, like ignore the machine red-lining for 8 minutes as it slowly crawled past 120 miles per hour and ignoring the amount of straightaway you had to have to get to that point and assuming that you somehow developed superhuman ability to steer, well, yes, you might be able to hit 150. Imagine trying to explain that subtlety. Imagine trying to do it to a jury. Maybe you could do it, maybe you couldn’t. It would be tedious and expensive and the agency involved in putting you before that jury would have considered its job well done.

At one time in this country, when bulletin board systems were seized, the police or prosecutor’s office would set up the BBS and the seized equipment for photographers and news cameras – I once watched an 11o’clock news broadcast in which a collection of bulletin board systems, including the Private Sector BBS, were on tables with flashing lights and the newscaster describing the arresting of a computer “gang”. I remember this so clearly because the index cards on the machines were bulletin board systems I’d used. It was a very sad way to finally see these machines from the other side. But beyond that, they would show off this equipment, equipment like answering machines and telephones and describe them as computer crime tools. The inherent idea was that of a sinister form factor, a way that a machine “looked” that just told you it was for evil.

Few things make me angrier than the demonization and persecution of children. Children were put in this horrible position, of being described as evil creatures, utilizing tools not yet understood by the populace and now so commonplace that a crowded assembly devoid of a laptop is a strange situation. While I confess to little accurate knowledge of the description of the equipment by the scientists in the article, I can sympathize with the situation – how do you tell the readers of the New York Post that without a hood, a lyophilizer could not possibly perform the tasks ascribed to it by law enforcement? How do you portray the smallness of a lab and the requirements of dry spores of anthrax to be manufactured within it, without the audience shuddering at even discussing anthrax? How do you, yourself, not find yourself tarred with a brush of “evil” when you even show yourself capable of comprehending a substance’s deadly effects?

This situation for computers and hackers got scant better over time. It still flares up, even to this day. And I flare up with it.

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So I turned around and realized that CD.TEXTFILES.COM has over 400 CD-ROMs on it. That’s pretty crazy. I remember a few days that felt like they’d never end where I was shoving CD-ROM after CD-ROM into drives, making ISOs, extracting information from them. But I had no idea that over the years I’d gotten it to be so large.

The directory had gotten to the point that it was basically a massive scrollfest to get through, and there was little to no indication of what anything was. In other words, I’d tweaked the knob from “archive” to shitpile and control was being lost. This is my biggest issue with places that just go “and here is 3,000 photos from the 1920s” and then sit quietly, smiling – you can’t really find anything too easily and browsing things for serendipitous delight is heavily muted.

So I blew things into sub-directories where I can. Right now it’s for CD-ROM series. A set of CDs called the “Night Owl” collection is a staple of most people’s ideas of what a shareware CD-ROM is; now there’s a subdirectory of Night Owl. (Note that I’m missing a bunch in the numbered collection and am always on the hunt for more of them. Feel free to contact me if you have them.) The directories for specific series could stand to have some contextual notes at the top of the directory – I may do that in the future as well.

I’ve considered plunking all of, say, the Amiga or Atari CD-ROMs together in a directory, but I haven’t completely won over to that argument yet. I still have no easy way to present the Macintosh stuff online except as massive ISOs and I’m not quite ready for that hit. Time is, however, on my side and it seems we’ll be in the realm of 300 megabyte downloads in the near future, without too much pain.

All of this, by the way, is generated by scripts: the directories, the layouts, and the calculations of how many files are on the site. If that sort of information makes you happy, here’s the script that does the main directory. I work in Bourne Shell because I know it best and I work best with it. I use Perl like some people use formal wear – for special occasions and needs but not to take out the garbage.

What stuns me, by the way, is how even though I have all these CD-ROMs, I am still finding new ones with such frequency. Even when I am focusing on the pure “shareware for BBSes” collection, I still get my hands on metric tons of new data. Somewhere in the future is someone’s thesis project going through my millions of files and creating evaluating scripts and databases from it. Good luck, overeager imaginary future kid.

2 Comments

To celebrate a decade of textfiles.com, I’ve created a sub-site called the Ten Years of Textfiles. It’s basically a series of small essays with memories, thoughts, artifacts, photos and links of the textfiles.com story (and my own as well). Please pass it around and let people know about it, if you have a chance. Thanks.

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A buddy of mine, Quag7, mentioned the existence of this rather interesting retro-themed music video by a band named “Datarock”: “Computer Camp Love”. As it turns out this song and its video are online at MTVmusic.com, a site that does what MTV most certainly does not do, which is dependably play music videos. Here’s the video, which can be embedded.

The song came out in 2005 and wasn’t a huge hit in the US, so I maybe I could get a free pass for missing it the first time around.

I went to computer camp myself, so maybe I’m being too nice to it, but I do like this little piece of cotton candy.

The time being referenced is somewhere in the area of 1982-1984 (the models of the machines are all in that timeframe). The song mentions the events happening in 1984, so good job there. I can’t really speak to the “plot” such as it is, and what they’re trying to say with the whole thing. The machines are missing cables and I’ve never seen that brand of disk drive before, but on the whole there seems to be a pretty interesting approach to the era. Someone definitely did a good job of assembling old machines and working within a music video budget to at least give a retro vibe, as the reviewers like to say. I liked the addition of the ticked-off girl with black hair being ignored for the girl who could yank out a card from a PC.

I will defer to the audience for all the references, but either way, enjoy the mining of my favorite personal time era for a dance track.

Update: I am sorry; I just found out MTVmusic is doing region restriction. This is the last time I’ll link to them. To see the video, go here.

3 Comments

A few thoughts on interfaces and completeness.

My archives are by no means growing smaller – thanks to the efforts of people and my own collecting tendencies, tons of stuff ends up joining the textfiles.com site every month, mostly in the CD Shareware, Artscene and Audio collections. I am still sent BBS Lists going back 20 years and those end up where they should, but that’s a small amount of the pure mass of stuff that’s being added, and the stuff that’s yet to be added.

As this happens, I’m faced with the problem of getting the stuff up there or working to “integrate” it into the site. So let’s bring up my little priority set in order:

• Make it available.
• Make it comprehensive within its context.
• Make it easy to browse.
• Make it function like some amazing transparent interface bringing you the best in web 2.0 javascript technology wired into a massive database and providing APIs to the general populace to facilitate a wide enough customer base to monetize the assets.

Somehow I never get to the last one.

Experimentation is always underway. For example, the BBS Software Directory has gone through a bunch of revisions, and most recently I tried an experiment with adding shareware under a specific BBS Software directory. The thinking is that if you want to look at, say, Waffle BBS Software, you might also have an urge to check out the myriad shareware programs that were released over the years. Maybe. I guess.

To me, however, it’s more important just to get this rapidly fading software up for browsing. Experiments are fun, but it’s a much more pressing issue to get this data off these disks before it’s gone, and maybe then I can consider how to make it easier to deal with.

Most of the stuff I put up ends up in massive file directories. I have experimented with improving the interface to these directories, but to tell the truth it’s not a huge priority. There are extensions and add-ons for various browsers that do this work for most people, if they need it all laid out and nice. What’s important, to me, is that it’s up.

What’s missing from my efforts is a monetary gain aspect. While I like improving the interface, I do not have any goals to make things “sticky” or to force ads down people’s throats. Because of that, I try to make it get to you as quickly as possible so you can get out of there. It doesn’t matter why you’re here, or that you stick around.

The only price I’ve paid for this is that textfiles.com has none of what people might call a “community”. Attempts to bring “the gang” together have failed miserably and I don’t do it anymore. But I do function as a reference point for other groups of people, or to settle arguments, or maybe just comedic relief.

I feel like a skipping CD on this but I can’t stress it enough how important it is to me to save stuff and make it accessible without immediately yanking it back into another new proprietary stale-in-six-months interface. The interface thing is all sorts of fun, I guess, but that’s not where my heart is. 10 more CD-ROMs are about to go up and a bunch of scans are on the horizon. I think people would rather I get those into the system more than how easily I can javascript my heart out.

Speaking of which, this is fucking evil. Cry into your tea-cosy all you want, Mister Chester, but you’re making things worse in a misguided attempt to make things pretty. If you continue with that project, people will curse your name five years from now. Go work on something more honorable with your talents.

Hey, just because I’m a generous person doesn’t mean I’m not a jerk.

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While I’m in a “take photos of things and talk about them” mood, let me mention an acquisition from a while ago. It’s a pile of tapes. I bought them at auction, this one, in fact.

I was won over by the description, which was basically this:

For sale on eBay: 35 Cassettes. On them is a full backup of aBBS, yes One GIANT collection of files from a major bbs that was shut down about 5 years ago. It ran on PCBoard 14.5 but all the files are individually zipped and can be extracted and used without concern for any bbs issues. Vintage, many possibly old files, some still quite applicable, some not. Geneology files, thousands and thousands of them. Games, Utilities, the works. Mostly PC and Windows, some mac. This is a complete backup of over 100 categories of software and files and takes up 33 DC2000XL tapes and 2 TR3’s. You could buy to use the files, or buy to reuse the tapes.

Perhaps some of you are happy that a person of my temperament and goals has acquired the tapes and not someone who needed a little extra storage space.

I got these back in August and when I’ve had time, I’ve tried to see about the process of extracting the information off the tapes. I have not been very successful. The description is likely rather accurate, but there’s additional factors. First, a tape drive has to be found. I purchased some tape drives that would hold some of these tapes. (Bear in mind that the description mentions two kinds of tapes but there’s actually 4 or 5: a medley of tape types from what looks to be a decade of operation. Fair enough.

But even trying to bring the data over from the tapes that fit in the tape drives and connected to Windows (these were without a doubt on windows and DOS) has not been very successful.

Here’s the dirty little secret I mentioned: these tape backup systems used crazy proprietary formats. The software that backs them up is commercial. I can’t find restore utilities to save my life. I’m not going crazy at the moment tracking down every possible lead yet (documentary comes first) but this is a fact: stuff backed up just a few years ago is going to be quite the operation to extract. I approached a commercial entity about restoring, and they quoted me $100, per tape, if I could exactly describe what format they’re in. $3500, what a bargain. My current vector of solution is to create a Restoring Machine, which will allow me to pull a lot of stuff off this dead media. This will take a bit of time.

I mention this because sometimes people wonder about my immediate reaction to just “throwing stuff into a database”, my love of flat files, the slow way I adopt some things, like javascript or the CANVAS attribute or why I don’t gleefully load everything into PHP or stuff that’s “standard”. It’s a habit that leads to stuff like this.

I have 10 years of BBS history on these tapes.

I can’t get them.

10 Comments

Shooting a documentary means doing some traveling. If your subject is particularly diverse or has a lot of locations where people are living, it can mean a ton of traveling. And inevitably, you will run out of friends you know and you will be staying in a hotel. And by hotel I mean a lot of hotels.

Hotels almost never use keys any more. When they do, it is so rare that you probably don’t even notice it for all the other strange stuff about that hotel you’re noticing. What most hotels use now are keycards, disposable plastic cards with a magnetic strip that allows access into a room, assuming whoever is running the desk didn’t screw up. When you’re done with your stay, you’re supposed to return them or drop them off in a box. I do neither.

On one hand, there’s the actual physical aspects of these cards: the designs places put on them, the instructions or commemorative messages, or the differing shapes. Then there’s the memories, the hundreds of memories I have as I blew into some hotel at midnight, knowing I’d have to be out of there by 7, setting up my pile of plugs and chargers and getting everything ready for the next day, and then either watching some of the worst television imaginable or using my laptop if the place had an actual wireless connection.

Most of them are a blur now, with a few exceptions – the hotel I was in when I was told my cousin had a daughter, the hotel in a california coastal town that had the owner’s life philosophy on the walls and in the rooms, the hotel that let me know they were a hotel of morals, the hotel that argued with me that checking in at 3am still meant full price (I actually had no problem with this… and left at 5am). And a few others. Otherwise I remember a lot of variant quality pillows, random bonus hot tubs, an insight into the ecosystem of small towns, and remembering, over and over, that I was the customer and in my mid-thirties and I didn’t need to explain nothing to nobody.

Here’s what it looks like, stacked.

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