ASCII by Jason Scott

This is about playing video games and watching a movie. On its face, not a particularly unusual-sounding day, but this was my favorite collection of videogames and I’d been waiting for over a year to see this movie.

The event is, as I’ve ranted about in the past, the semi-annual Game Day hosted at Luna City, Peter Hirschberg’s self-made private arcade located in Virginia. This work of art, this living museum, has been functional since the beginning of 2008 and barring disease or other unforseen circumstances, I will attend as many of these that he chooses to hold, forever. Less a private playpen than a sort of shine, a regular pilgrimage to this location clears the soul. The arcade, like many such places, is a pure source of amusement, a collective of machines meant to vex, delight and entertain.

I am not the only one to come to these, of course, and the parking on the front lawn has become more and more full over time. Along this line, the event had an air castle (bounce room or sock hop or inflatable castle to others), which was the perfect place for scads of screaming children. On the other side of the barn, snacks and soda were available for a small fee, benches let you enjoy the sun, and there was even a small contingent of games out on the lawn to play, including an Atari 2600 and television braving the outdoors.

As is the norm in Peter’s character, this particular game day had an additional theme, that of helping to raise money for a friend of the family named Shawn Haines, who has Hodgkin’s Disease and whose insurance is unable to cover his expenses related to medical treatment. There were opportunities to both learn more about Shawn and to donate towards helping him with the sizeable costs. The page I linked to has further opportunities, should the incentive grab you. It was very kind of Peter to add this aspect to the event.

I have yet to grow even the slightest bit fatigued taking photos in Luna City. Like a classic artwork or a famous landmark, you find new angles to try, new shots to construct, and a sense of a timeless place waiting for you to capture it. I was there from about noon through to the evening. Were that I could stay longer!

Just a few more. Come on. As time has gone on through 2008, all manner of magazines, newspapers and websites have come to admire and obsess about the Hirschbergs’ project, and all that attention is very well deserved. May it last a very long time.

And yes, down here towards the bottom of the article, let me mention the highlight of the day: being able to finally sit down and watch, completely, the final cut of Chasing Ghosts.

Here’s a photo of the producer and Peter just before one of the multiple showings they had upstairs during the day.

OK, so here’s the thing. I’m known as the guy who hates King of Kong. In a series of articles I wrote on this very weblog, I got to lay out my position and what I found out was wrong with it. I paid a tiny little price for that, and so I was glad to be rid of the whole thing. (Not as much as poor zota has, between his semi-enthusiastic timeline and his passive-aggressive conspiracy theories.)

But get out your collander helmet on this one: this film features sequences done by Peter Hirschberg, and is an arcade documentary I happen to like very, very much. Now, do you decide I like the film because Peter Hirschberg helped make it, while somehow also deciding that I didn’t like King of Kong because I’m working on an arcade documentary? Or do you buck up and let me tell you how great this thing is?

Let us move on.

The core story of Chasing Ghosts is this image:

This photo from Life magazine was taken on November 8, 1982 in Iowa, at the site of the Twin Galaxies arcade, the self-styled Videogame Capital of the World. It portrays a once-in-a-lifetime grouping of the champion videogame players of the time (along with, as we find out, one faker). That videogames would have this sort of cachet, that the high scorers would have such celebrity, that all this conjunction of technology, celebrity and oddity would take place in a tiny town called Ottumwa.. this is what we learn in this film.

In tracing the lives of these men, we find pathos, triumph, wonder, loss, and all manner of humor. We see the growth, peak, and disassembly of the Classic Videogame Era, and find out what has happened to most of the people involved. Some have long ago left it all to memories of a bygone era, and some snap into the issues and stories as if they’re still living them.

The portrait of Walter Day, the referee and founder of Twin Galaxies (and, we find out, all sorts of other strange endeavors), is heartfelt, teasing, and ultimately well-rounded. I’ve interacted with Walter a number of times. This documentary gave a portrait of him that was so much more than I knew about him, and give me a greater respect for how he’s lived such a strange and fun life.

Is Billy Mitchell in here? Oh yes. Is Billy Mitchell a mullet-wearin’, trash-talkin’ son of a bitch with the arcade skills and the iron nuts? Hells yeah. I never said, anywhere, he wasn’t any of this. What I took issue was the (inaccurate) portrayal of him as a liar and a cheat. He gets in just as many zingers here as he does both in King of Kong and in articles written about him. What we also get, like we do all the other interviewees, is a sense of this person both in his youth, in his modern guise, and how his life is with family and friends. People get a fair shake in this movie, is what I’m saying.

I could step through the events in this movie (they range from the 1970s to just a few years ago), but let me instead direct your attention to the film’s primary achievement: the media sources.

This film is packed, absolutely loaded, with photographs (hundreds of them), video (ranging back 20+ years), and recordings related to videogames. All throughout this character study are amazing sequences featuring the interviewees talking about something that happened 20 years ago and us seeing the footage of that event happening. The talking heads, in other words, consistently give way to us being there, seeing the news camera footage, hearing the people talking in their original teenage voices, the bright and dazzled eyes, the declarative voices of youth who knew that they were the best in the world at something. It’s a torrent of history that this movie brings to its audience, without being overwhelming.

The lives of the players in the present day are of all types, some happy with family and others living in a clung-to-edge existence that some would find pity for. Regardless, it’s their lives; people aren’t “caught out” or duped into juxtaposed implications of criminality; they’re just a range of guys who on one very cold morning assembled with some videogames to pose for a photo shoot 25 years earlier.

The movie is wonderful.

And currently, you can’t see it.

They ran it on DVD that day, on Game Day, a half-dozen times, and the producer was there to answer questions (as well as one of the interviewees). The movie is still out there in limbo, with some hopeful release on the horizon. I think it would be snapped up in a moment by thousands of people who remember the lure of the arcade, the wonder of that time. And it would be a great introduction to how different life was back then, when these games invaded our space. I can’t wait to see it out there, wowing you all.

Until then, trust me: it’ll be worth the wait.

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I don’t normally create weblog entries consisting of a smattering of opinion followed by a link elsewhere. I consider this lazy and barely putting myself above a shell script in terms of enhancing your online time and experience. But sometimes, you just have to hand it to someone and also take some time to hold up for regard a project you particularly admire.

Phil Lapsley has been spending the last couple of years on a book that will be a, but I declare will be the, history of Phone Phreaking. It’s a subject that has gotten a number of magazine articles, once captured the hearts of generations of technically minded people, and has enjoyed various ups and downs in popularity and regard. What it has not enjoyed, however, is a from-all-sides historical overview, assimilating the myths and legends and then scoring them out with research. Normally, it takes a very long time before “serious” historians enmesh themselves with the telling of events, and with the breakup of the Ma Bell telephone system now 24 years hence, it was certainly getting on that time.

I’ve hinted at Phil’s work previously, and was happy enough to be present for two presentations he’s given regarding his work, one at the Vintage Computer Festival and one at The Last Hope. The Last Hope presentation can be enjoyed at this link, although sadly just in mp3 form; you really need the slides to understand all that he’s talking about. As a bonus, you can hear my lovingly tender introduction.

Recently Phil opened up a website related to his project and upcoming book, historyofphonephreaking.org. That’s the relevant link. But let me point you to a number of postings on this page which will be of interest to anyone who calls themselves interested in Phone Phreaking history.

Concurrently to his book and speaking, Phil has been making available various artifacts that are precious heirlooms related to Phreaks. Specifically:

• Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching by Breen and Dahlbom, November 1960. As Phil notes, the documentation that is considered to have given away the keys to the kingdom and laid bare the inner workings of phone signaling.
• Secrets of the Little Blue Box by Ron Rosenbaum, a 1971 magazine article which broke wide the story of Phreaking, and is also resented by those who felt the game was up by this article being published. They were, it turns out, sort of right, although the machine did take a while to grind truly to a halt. It is one thing to read this article transcribed to text as it appeared in BBSes and another to see it properly laid out as it was originally presented.
• General Switching Plan for Telephone Service A 1930 white paper which shows how many years in the making the switching systems of the modern era were; area codes were still 17 years away when this was written.

But Phil has outdone himself. See now, all and sundry, the Youth International Party Line (YIPL) / Technological American Party (TAP) New York FBI files!

In the process of researching this book, he has issued hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests for phone phreak and law enforcement information, going back significant amounts of years. (He has also been speaking to the subjects of this information, on both sides). And this new release really brings it home to me; it’s one thing to think they’re out to get you, and yet another to be shown the process of them being out to get you.

The pages are fascinating. Reprints of TAP articles (which some people might not have seen before) as well as redacted information, that classic indicator of some fun stuff being covered. You can see hand-wringing over nuclear bomb information, the suggestion of Toll Fraud arrests being made. It’s a fun little treasure trove.

As a bonus, Phil gives us a tutorial on how to read an FBI file, so you understand what the documents mean and what all the codes are. It’s a lifesaver for the denser parts. Phil has previously covered how to do FOIA requests and he also gave a talk on the subject as well.

While I do not cherish this story of Phreaking FBI Files being covered by the likes of BoingBoing and their consistent “let’s focus on the entirely wrong thing and hear how Cory thinks this all relates to himself” approach, I would gladly grit my teeth perpetually if it led to one more old man, or one more old man’s family contacting Phil and giving him yet another perspective on this century-long, fascinating history. So get cracking, web beavers. I’ll be filling out my own FOIA request in the meantime.

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This arrived in my mail, as pure uncut History. If you care much about RBBS or knowing a little more about Andrew Fluegelman, this will be of interest to you. (The first episode of the BBS Documentary is dedicated to him.) Note that RBBS predates the IBM PC – a version on CPM existed in the 1979-1980 era. But it was definitely Russ Lane who created RBBS-PC, the port that exploded into wide use on the newly-dominating IBM.

My name is Larry E. Jordan.

I was chairman of the Communications Special Interest Group of the Capital PC User Group in 1982 – one of the first user groups for the PC and located in Washington, DC. At the time I was testing BBS software named HostComm written by Don Withrow. One of the members of my group approached me one day and asked if I would like to try another BBS for a while. He worked for IBM in Gaithersburg at the time and did not want to become visible in the public discussion of BBS software.

To make a long story short, the software was RBBS that had been written by Russell Lane. I really liked the software features and functions. I also liked the idea that it was written in interpretive BASIC. That meant I could add to the software.

I was well underway “improving” the RBBS, when I received an update which included the XModem file transfer protocol. I believe it was written by Brad Hanson. Anyway, I did not want to throw away the work I had done, so I integrated the protocol into the version I was working on.

When the software was stable, I started to use it full time to replace the HostComm I had been running. I became a full-time SYSOP with RBBS-PC. I also started to distribute the source code to other members of CPCUG. Needless to say, I was not very popular with Don Withrow and some of his friends who were active members of our SIG. The free BBS software cut into Don’s sales of HostComm.

At the time I was running and modifying RBBS-PC, I was writing articles for the CPCUG Monitor newsletter about IBM PC communications. I was also using the PC-Talk software written by Andrew Fluegelman. PC-Talk was also distributed in source code…so I took the liberty of adding the XModem from RBBS-PC to PC-Talk. That way I could send and receive files between my computer at home and the one at work.

As a result of my work on PC-Talk, I got to know Andrew. He and I spoke on the telephone several times. During those conversations, he asked if he could include my XModem file transfer module in the next version of PC-Talk that he planned to release. I believe it was version PC-Talk II. Anyway, we agreed to that plan.

Also during those conversations, Andrew asked if I would start writing for PC Magazine where he was an editor. I agreed to do so, but before I got underway half of the staff at PC Magazine left and started PC-World magazine. Thus, I became a Contributing Editor of PC-World.

The first article I wrote for PC-World was a review of 12 communications software packages, including PC-Talk. That article made PC-Talk famous…and enhanced both my career and Andrew’s income…as documented by Kevin Strehlo and Bob Ketcham in the following link:

http://www.textfiles.com/news/freeware.txt

Part of the outcome was a publishing contract that I signed for my first communications and networking book for the IBM PC. Bruce Churchill was in my Comm SIG and agreed to be my co-author because of his networking knowledge at the Pentagon.

While all of this was happening, I ran for and was elected president of CPCUG. Shortly after I took over from the guy who was the first president, I concluded that I no longer had the time to write articles and a book, SYSOP, enhance RBBS-PC and keep my day job as an engineering manager at Halliburton. I concluded that I had to give up something, and the something was enhancing RBBS-PC.

Tom Mack had shown a strong interest in the software and was running one of my versions. Ken Goosens was also interested in helping. Thus in 1983, I turned the maintenance and enhancement over to Tom and Ken.

I saw that Tom added a copyright either later that year or early in 1984. I had long conversations with him about doing so. He felt strongly that he had to maintain control over RBBS-PC development, and that a copyright was the way to do it. I was so busy that I did not argue the point with him.

As time passed, I could see that Tom was really into RBBS-PC. It became a big part of his identity. He really wanted to ride that horse into history… and he did. He did a great job with lots of help from Ken and others.

The irony in all of this is that I missed the challenge or developing BBS software. RBBS-PC had hooked me too. Within six months of turning RBBS-PC over to Tom et al, I started the development of another BBS written in C. Jan van der Eijk worked for me at the time. He and I agreed to develop the TCOMM package and sell it as a retail software package. I used a lot of the ideas and designs I had added to RBBS-PC as well as enhancements that I had planned to make. Jan and I sold the software through local advertising for about a year. At one point, we were negotiating with the folks at The Source to have them publish the software, but they decided that it would be difficult to compete with none other than RBBS-PC.

That decision among others caused me to reconsider my career options. I finally decided to go to work for IBM in their newly-formed systems integration business. I became so enmeshed in that business that I no longer had time to track and participate in IBM PC communication activities. IBM never asked me to stop writing and publishing PC books, but they did ask me to give up my software business. I turned it all over to Jan in 1986 as documented in the following link:

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/software/IBM/DOS/TCOMM/tcommdoc.txt

So you see, there was a long and convoluted history with RBBS-PC. It added to all of our lives and I believe it was a precursor to the Internet. We all felt we were part of a movement that was bigger thanany of us. Living and working near Washington, DC and having some big name folks in our user group probably added to that high. I never saw Al Gore – but maybe he was there somewhere?thinking about inventing the Internet.

The only sad part of the story involved Andrew Fluegelman. He wanted to port PC-Talk from BASIC to C or Pascal to improve its speed. Apparently a package called Qmodem was on his heels. He approached me in early 1985 with a request for help in making the port. He said he wanted to keep the concept away from the eyes on the west coast. After much discussion, I found a group in Columbia, MD to do the port. I also signed a contract with Andrew to include TCOMM under the covers as a BBS extension of PC-Talk. Well, as you well know Andrew disappeared near the Golden Gate Bridge in July 1985. With his disappearance, the new version of PC-Talk with TCOMM never happened.

I still think of Andrew on occasion. He was one hell of a guy, and a visionary. I loved to just sit and talk with him. We even rowed ocean kayaks around Angel Island once while I was on a trip to San Francisco.

Enjoy!

Regards,
Larry Jordan

And thanks to you, Larry. Additional reminiscences are available at Rich Schinnell’s Weblog. Rich was also interviewed for the documentary. I never did get a hold of Tom Mack, and Ken Goosens was available but I was unable to travel in the scope of the documentary to interview him. I think some phone interviews are in order.

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A person seeking a real sense of innovation vertigo could not do much better than to browse issues of GIF News, an online distributed newsletter edited and maintained by Eric Hsiao from 1988 to 1993.

For example, it is worth noting that this is the full resolution of the earlier issues, 320 by 200 pixels. There’s no larger size available because there was simply no larger size made! As time went on, the average capabilities of systems were considered raised enough to make issues 640 by 480 pixels. (Here‘s an example of this greater expansion in screen real estate.)

As for the content of this newsletter itself, it’s important to note that the content was not about the GIF format itself (the Graphics Interchange Format is described in excruciating detail here), but simply used the GIF format to provide something that in 1988 was pretty unique for a person working out of upstate New York: a full-color, easily transmittable, completely static presentation of computer news. Because he had the 256 color palette to work from, Hsiao could intersperse color screen shots, artwork, and all range of unusual fonts. While not preceding the era of vector-based formats like Postscript, GIF News could produce a relatively low-size file (almost none exceed 100k in size) that could then be archived with other pages and transferred throughout the world.

This vertigo I speak of is evident in just browsing the set on Flickr that I have collected from various sources: in an instant, we see the result of years of work by Hsiao, all presented in a quilt of bright colors and (to our current eyes) incomprehensible text with barely-readable contrast issues. At one point, however, these images would be displayed in such a manner as to cover the entire screen, bringing the view up to anywhere from 9 to 16 inch monitors that were the standard of the time. That we now would not blink or be astounded at a near-instantaneous download of a 72k JPEG that utterly dwarfs this tiny GIF is a sign of how far we’ve come.

Beyond the transport mechanism, of course, is the content being discussed. The GIF News would only arrive every 60 days or so, and each issue would be at most four pages/images, so the ability to devour the content in a world with RSS feeds and news shooting at us by the bucketful blows through a given posting in no time. It would be unfair, again, to sit here in 2008 and compare what tools rest in our hands for generating an image-and-text newsletter and berate or sneer at Eric’s seemingly glacial release pace; every one of these pages could have been hours of painful adjustments and drawing, writing the articles and then carefully placing pixels or groupings around captured artwork. Imagine, for a moment, the creation of a page such as this with no advanced Photoshop or layout software:

This was, after all, a hand-crafted creation in a world that would soon turn even the most difficult of printing tricks into a double-click action. That he started to turn away to other concerns and put the newsletter on hiatus is hardly surprising.

The articles themselves range wildly but reveal another unexpected treasure: they show the pervasive effects of the BBS and its slow disintegration when faced with the Internet. A profile of the Channel 1 BBS reveals that the system is “huge – about 100 new messages in the main area a day”. Each day would also bring upwards of 40 uploads to the file directories. At one point the newsletter announces a new distribution system consisting of five bulletin board systems – an internet aspect is not to be found anywhere. Yet by 1992, addresses for Prodigy, Internet, Bitnet and BBS all share space in the contact area. Articles focus on modems but over time it is obvious there’s a new force on the horizon.

Technology long past, be it a type of soundcard or lists of the most popular software give us insight into what was popular at the time and where the thinking was. (Note also that the graph in the article was culled from a USENET newsgroup.) We are told that Laserdiscs are the future, and that Nintendo sent out threatening letters to every PC-Board operator because one specific pirate happened to use the software for a BBS that hosted Nintendo ROMs.

The full collection of what I could recover is here; I only could find issues from 1990 to 1993. Every once in a while an issue was missed, so there are apparent gaps but I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten all the released issues between those years.

This is one of those collections that’s both difficult and easy to provide: easy, because our fast systems are all able to show images at amazing speeds and collate and tag the resulting items quickly. But difficult, because these were all locked away in ZIP files and in some cases rather anonymous as to their contents. It’s certainly the first web access to the amount of issues in one place with such an easy interface. I hope I find more.

If you have a moment, leaf through the pages of this newsletter (after all, there are only 72 pages for 3 years) and enjoy a little insight into how people lived a mere 17 years ago.

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I got a nice letter from someone discussing how the BBS Documentary missed a subject. For the record, it missed it because I didn’t cover contemporary BBS issues, and the shooting for the film was done in 2004, so even if it had done contemporary issues, they would be contemporary issues from a half-decade ago.

The subject being discussed was Worldgroup software. Here’s some excerpts from the letter, stripped of identifying details for obvious reasons.

HI Jason, I saw the BBS Documentary and have used Textfiles as a resource for some of the material I have on my own BBS. There was something not mentioned in the movie, which should have been mentioned about the underground movements to bring WG BBS and its games back online. There are two camps which are divided. One is led by the majorbbs restoration project, which is called the legit ones. They are not gaining, but they are
very valuable to gain resources from. The other is the editors and hackers who understand the code and work with it make their own individual boards, mostly to host majormud, but some are starting to run full BBS systems again. This group has made allot of gains and has an extremely strong following with some boards having over 60 people logged in at one time.

I am one of those in the editing/hacking group who has a full running BBS, as well as a handful of others. I am helping on a daily basis now to help people set boards up and get them off the ground. These boards mostly sponsor majormud, farwest, tradewars as well as a few other games. Some of these boards are full ANSI and very graphical while others are plain stock look. However, each have their own personality based on who
plays on them and with the custom edits within their majormud. These boards are starting to turn into full running Free-BBS systems.

Unfortunately those on both sides of the aisle are split, with the people who want to keep everything stock are void of users or a following but have the software versus those who know how to edit and hack that have a very strong following and very strong user base. The same cannot be said for other BBS systems. Synchronet Wildcat, GAP, as well as many others have fallen by the wayside. To top this off the text game community itself is splitting due to the introduction of using GMUD to now handle software that was intended for use with WG.

In many aspects the WG BBS community has lost a lot due to METRO Entertainment’s failure to produce and live up to its promises to the majormud community. This has causes a quick collapse in so called Legit BBS’s. However, it created a spark which is igniting flames in the hackers’ community because they are moving forward with everything Metro and Worldgroupware has failed to produce and promise.

I can’t speak to the accuracy of this characterization, but I can say that the whole situation does interest me.

Naturally, a question that comes to mind is who the fuck cares? but that’s a question that comes from anyone observing something they don’t particularly care about. Since everyone involved in this is involved, basically, in BBS culture and outcroppings of that culture, it’s easy for someone not involved in said culture to wonder what the big huzzah is about and why any amount of this would have people at each other’s throats, or, as the case may be, emotionally disoriented over the actions of people who are basically the same.

Oh, but we’re so good at this, this quibbling over minor points, and turning them into distinct battles, and “camps”, and “parties”. I’ve seen it in many different places, and events, and so I think it’s just part of the territory, and perhaps it’s a landmine that an open heart and mind might be able to avoid. Or not.

We long passed the line where some people consider themselves keepers or at least big fans of the Legacy of certain pieces of software. The idea, perhaps strange if you’re thinking of these things as mere code, is that there is a mythos or honor or any of a dozen aspects of this software that should be kept alive, improved on, or at least not ruined by the march of time, commercialism, or obsolescence. I know that the default reaction by people when they see something important or influential in previous years presented in sequel or new version format is oh no, and this reaction has been justifiably earned many, many times. This is frequently the case with movies, but I’ve seen it happen with games, parks, logos, cars, and candy. We think of change as an assault, and we think of needless change as an insult. And yet, none of these things are “ours” in the sense of ownership. It’s an interesting situation.

So here we see a case where there are still active, commercial maintainers of software and another set of people who think this software is being wrongly trapped and maintained, like a hostage or an abused child. Matters have been taken into their own hands by some, while others feel they can’t legally or morally interfere, as much as they might not agree with the direction.

The problem is inherent, involved, and, ultimately, intractable. I watch from afar and observe the fireworks, and am glad, at least, that in some realms the BBS fire burns.

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One piece of trivia did come up during Comic-Con I should probably hasten to mention, as it clarifies a theory/rumor I gave to a lot of other people about 10 years ago.

There was a game released for the Apple II and many other platforms in the early 1980s called Karateka. It was written by Jordan Mechner, who was the brother of one of my friends in high school, David Mechner. I wrote about David previously.

Karateka had this really neat feature on the Apple II: If you put the floppy disk in upside down (label-side down) the game would be upside down on the screen. It would work the same way, but just be completely upside-down. One of the effects of this would be that people would call Broderbund, the manufacturer, and say the game was upside-down, and they could tell them to ‘flip the disk over”.

I had heard a rumor in school (this was the same school that Jordan and David had attended) that Karateka had another feature: Once in 100,000 times, the mountain in the background of a lot of the game would explode, like a volcano. The idea being that, ultimately, some kid would be playing Karateka, have this happen, tell all his friends, and then never be able to prove it again. It’s a delicious little idea, and I mentioned it, with lots of caveats, at my first speech at DEFCON in 1999.

At the Comic-Con panels, there was one held with Jordan talking a little about the Prince of Persia comic book and movie and other projects. I took this time to ask him definitively if this volcano rumor was true, and he has definitively said that it is not true, but the disk flip story is true. So there you have it.

(By the way, Jordan Mechner’s mainstream fame comes from the Prince of Persia series, but he released a game in 1997 called The Last Express. If you’re a fan of adventure games of the Myst variety, you are truly missing out if you don’t try the game out or at least watch some gameplay.)

It pays to go right to the source.

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