ASCII by Jason Scott

Another day, another digg. Waxy’s mentioning of my posting of arcade manuals got someone inspired to put it on digg, and then it got enough traction on digg that I provided 24 gigabytes of arcade manual PDFs to 8,500 guests, for a total of 29,000 manuals.

I never approach these with the terror of the webmaster who has an anaemic connection and realizes that he’s gotten a horde going through his directories; I put these files up for people to browse and now they’re browsing them. Note the difference between this and my take on hot-linking. In the first case, people are now arriving by the thousand to see what I’m offering. In the second case, people are decontextually yanking a file by the thousand as background decoration for their websites.

What fascinates me, and will probably always fascinate me, is when something like this “goes large” and I am face to face with opinions and outlooks entirely foreign to mine. What an opportunity!

Browsing sites that linked to this page, I see incredulity that there are arcade manuals, speculations on the sexuality of people who read manuals, wild-eyed joy that such a collection is out there (there are tons of other arcade manual collections, by the way) and just plain crazy-talk from reaches beyond the stars.

I have to stress, as I have before, that I didn’t do the hard work of scanning them, getting the pages aligned, naming the manuals correctly, correlating against different arcade game models. Many people worked together to accomplish this, and all I’ve done is create a collection online under my textfiles.com site. Other collections abound with these exact manuals, and other sites add even more data than I have (so far). But the wheel of fortune fell on me today, and it warms my face.

Naturally, I wonder if the same will happen for my later projects, but that’s a concern for another time.

Maybe the day will come where my every move, every entry posted will be visited upon by a 10,000 browser strong horde, and this will all seem run of the mill. But that’s certainly not the case now, and for the people who are checking the rest of my entries to see what the hell else is going on, I say welcome. I hope you stay awhile.

A little update: In point of fact, within 48 hours I had served roughly 61,000 manuals to 14,000 people, for a total of 60.2 gigabytes of arcade manual delight. Thanks, folks! Especially the ones complaining it was “very slow” while they downloaded the entire collection after reading about it on Digg.

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Just a few days ago at DEFCON, in the middle of my speech, I said “If you think you know hacking history and you don’t know the name “Joybubbles”, then you’re wrong.”

Joybubbles (he legally changed his name from Joe Engressia later in life) was a phone phreak. And not just a phone phreak, a legendary phone phreak; blind since birth, he could whistle 2600hz tone into the telephone, bypassing the need for any trickery to do so. He was a humorous, fun fellow, one of the big names. And now we’ve lost him.

Just a few days after my speech, Joybubbles had a heart attack and died in his apartment in Minneapolis. He was 58.

Unlike a lot of figures in history, we are blessed, in our sudden loss, to have a collection of artifacts and recordings of Joybubbles to remember him or learn about him for the first time. He started recording recollections of childhood on a phone line, and called these recordings “Stories and Stuff”. I’ve been keeping an archive here, which is the work of many others who called and recorded them.

Here’s some links to get to know him:

• An article that mentions Joybubbles in detail.
• A memory of meeting Joybubbles.
• Short documentary filming of Joybubbles in action, circa 1970s.

He was a good one. I hope everyone takes some time to find out who he was, even if it makes them miss him as much as I do.

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This entry was written on August 12th. It’s filling the August 10th slot.

The last few weeks of entries were “catch-up”, written many days after their “official” date. I had the ideas in various states of readiness and non-readiness, life got complicated, so I fell behind.

I really wanted to keep things to five days a week, so to do that I had to back-fill. It’s not pretty but I did it. I hope the entries were of sufficient quality.

I’ll do my best not to let this happen again.

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Like anyone who went to film school or liked watching movies, I always harbored a set of “properties” (books or short stories or other written material) that I’d like to make into a film of my own. Two of mine share a similar situation: the play Hackers by Mike Eisenberg and the book The Adolescence of P-1 by Thomas J. Ryan.

They share a positive and a negative: they were lifelines of artistic justification for an interest in computers that I held, and they both have really fatal flaws.

I saw Hackers because of an article I read about a play being produced that would be about computer hackers. This was absolutely mind-blowing to me at 13 because I couldn’t imagine what that would entail. Really, I didn’t understand plays much at all either, having gone to a couple local “shows” of various types and not having been at full-scale professional theater much at all. I’m sure my dad dragged me to a few plays or events during this period, but a lot of them are dim memories at best. This, however, was me wanting to go to a play and dragging my dad to one instead.

I should ask him what he thought of this idea, his 13-year-old having to spontaneously see an off-broadway play, but the fact was I’d dragged him deep into New York City for “Pac-Man Day” in recognition of the release of the Atari 2600 pac-man cartridge, so I guess this wasn’t entirely a surprise. But still.. a play!

Hackers was mounted along a theater row off-broadway deep in New York City, and my father and aunt came along as I attended an evening performance in what I probably thought passed for theater clothes but which I’ll bet looked like I fell out of a laundry hamper. I thought the play was just fantastic; people talking about computer hacker, adventure games, chess playing, Turing machines… this was a play for me; this is what I expected them to be like. I was one happy fellow, and good memories were made that evening.

Similarly, I had picked up a book just a couple years earlier, in the home of my friend Chris. His grandparents, who he lived with at the time, were quite technologically savvy. This was, in fact, the first time and place I ever encountered a BBS; Mt. Kisco NY, in the spare bedroom of his grandparents’ home, using an acoustic coupler to call a Dial-Your-Match BBS. Besides the tech, they were also avid science fiction readers (avid anything readers, really), and they had a copy of this book, The Adolescence of P-1, lying around. One afternoon over at Chris’ house, I picked it up and read through a lot of it, and was again stunned at the powerful idea of a computer, specifically a computer virus, that would spread itself through networks and seek out its creator. This was heady heady stuff for an 11-year-old, and I never forgot that book.

So both these creations stuck around in the back of my mind as things that, some day, with my requisite million dollars, I could make movies out of. The questions of budget and rights and all the little logistics were another set of problems, but I felt that there was potential here, going for “properties” that nobody else might pick up.

So fast-forward to 1998-1999.

It turns out to be a relative pain in the ass to acquire the script for a play, especially once that hasn’t been mounted in a significant amount of time. I don’t have any evidence that “Hackers” was ever mounted after its initial run, but I do know the publishing rights were picked up by the Samuel French company, which is where I bought a copy of the script.

Buying an old book, meanwhile was extremely simple in the era of Amazon, where it was just a matter of deciding what amount of money to pay for what quality of book. I think I ended up paying $50 for my particular copy (“like new”) and it was pretty nice.

So, in the tail end of the 20th century, I read these two works that had played a major part in several memories of mine through my early teen years. And guess what!

They both fall flat in the third act.

Both are, like I had expected, interesting takes on computers and technology, P-1 especially so considering it was written in 1977. They both put together some cool thoughts on technology, and the virus-as-intelligent-creature take in P-1 is especially great, as is the adventure game sub-plot in Hackers. But by the time we get to the third acts, they both fall apart: the climactic line in Hackers is a cheap knockout, and P-1 nearly becomes incomprehensible at the end.

So I guess I could get the rights and rewrite them, but at that point I’m making the movies in my head, not the ones written on paper. And seriously, I might as well just make up my own stuff, then.

Now, as it turned out, I’m a documentary filmmaker! So I don’t have to worry about licensing novels for plots anyway. (Although a lot of documentary filmmakers have made fiction films, to a wide spectrum of success and failure). But my plate’s filled for years, so I don’t have to worry too much.

Now, if someone was to take these creations and make movies out of them, I’ll be the first guy in line at the premiere. But I’ll guarantee they’ll be pretty radically changed. And I don’t want to be the one to change them.

Here’s the New York Times theater section review, if you’d like another take on the play. Here’s the amazon.com page for Adolescence of P-1, which will serve as good as anything.

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Entry written on August 12th.

How lucky I was to talk with Richard Thieme at a Shmoocon a number of years ago, and to discuss the topic of my talk, which was finding pre-20th century parallels to hacker cons. And how lucky it was that Richard then asked if I’d heard of a book called The Victorian Internet, by Tom Standage. I had not, but I purchased it minutes later online and it was waiting for me soon after I got home.

The Victorian Internet is a look at the history and events of the Telegraph, the morse-code-driven communication over wires that dominated trans-oceanic communication for a number of decades. But more than that, it is a brilliantly arranged historical narrative drawing together threads and parallels to the modern-day Internet, both in discussions of human interaction, commerce, law and most importantly the resulting crash of life before and after this new technology. It reads like a novel and comes off as accurate, with an awful lot of citations and a lack of need to exaggerate that comes from having done actual research. It was brilliant.

To my delight, I have found that Standage continues to write historical books in this vein: The Neptune File (about the rush to claim discovery of the planets Herschel/Uranus and Neptune), The Mechanical Turk (Of automatons, a chess-playing robot, and the nature of human intelligence), and A History of the World in Six Glasses (concerning a tracing of human history based on the beverages consumed). All are wonderful. All are an easy read. And all should dominate the sales charts; books like this make their readers smarter.

My talk at DEFCON at the beginning of this month centered around historical narrative and how deriving information based on narrative is going to be inherently faulty, so better to focus on source materials and objective gathering as best one can. That said, I am entirely happy with quality narratives derived from the source material, providing a linkage for people to read about which itself can be researched from the source material. I feel the same way about people who sort through archives I or others have and do little stories based on some subset of the material; the source material and alternative/additional resources are right there for the initiated, and a delightful candy of story is there for the uninitiated. Winners all around.

Standage is my gold standard; if I think I can write a narrative with his level of quality, I’ll have considered what I’ve done a success. Otherwise, I’m not trying hard enough.

Do not hesitate to buy his books, every one.

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Entry written on August 11th.

It would be unfair to heap another bit of recognition onto YIPL/TAP without pointing out a slight-less-known phreaking magazine called TEL. PDF.TEXTFILES.COM has a collection of the seven known issues of TEL, which I will not hesitate to make clear is a mirror of a collection from the Green Bay Professional Packet Radio group. GBPPR is a strange entity; dedicated to hacking, dismissive of many other groups, and of the opinion that my site is the “best site on the internet”. Naturally, I will therefore recuse myself of discussion or judgment of a lot of their website, although I’ll state for the record that I lose hours reading it every time I wander by.

TEL (Telephone Electronics Line) hit the ground running with an overview of Traffic Services Position Systems consoles and just went on from there, covering payphone functionality, credit fraud, and interesting codes/numbers throughout the Bell system. You can see a lot of what made TAP famous and interesting in the pages of TEL as well.

After a mere seven issues, the zine was shut down permanently by Pacific Telephone and Telegraph. Booooo! Subscribers were also told to destroy all copies of the magazine in their possession; this didn’t work out all that effectively. But good try, PT&T.

The only bummer is that some of the scans aren’t so hot in the collection; I’ve seen collections of this magazine go by and as soon as I can purchase one, I’ll scan it in for top quality and get that up on the site as a replacement.

As time goes by, I hope more of these little creations show up in my collection. The more the better.

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Entry written on August 11th.

I could probably stretch post-defcon discussion into a bunch of entries, but let’s just go with one big one.

From the Thursday evening of the 2nd of August through to early morning of the 6th, I probably walked 20 miles. You can’t get much of anything done in Vegas for any amount of cross-hotel activity without walking a bunch. I stayed at the Wynn Casino and attended Defcon in the Riviera, visited Cesear’s Palace and the Mirage and Bellagio and Paris and generally made my way around a lot of locations. Trust me, I got a bunch of miles in there. And so I hurt.

This was the second time DEFCON was held at the Riviera, which is a dump, but on the other hand its got a lot of space and they used this space much better than last year. More talks were near the entrance to the conference area, and there were five tracks of talking. The odds were that you would have two talks you’d want to hear at the same time, but it was a risk they were willing to take. I didn’t experience this problem myself, because I don’t ultimately go to many talks.

What problem I experienced in droves this time around was time management. DEFCON serves so many purposes for me at once that I simply don’t have any time to do anything. I have friends who I only see at DEFCON/Las Vegas, I have events that I want to attend, and I have people who want to talk to me who I don’t know who I want to make maximum time for.

It might or might not surprise you to know I have to use a flashcard-like system to remember names to faces; I have a pretty bad visual memory problem so I have to keep track of people who I only see 2 or 3 times a year by keeping a collection of names attached to pictures. So this becomes a problem with people who I met at a previous convention who are now coming up going “remember me?”. The thing is, I want to remember you but I am simply not that good at it.

I have fans. It’s nice to have fans, as long as they’re not fans for the wrong reasons or I start to judge my self-worth based on the existence or non-existence of fans. I can go shopping at my local grocery stores with no harassment, so I am quite happy with my level of fame. And at places like DEFCON and HOPE, people notice figures they’ve conversed with and read about and so on, so they strike up conversations. The problem for me is that I actually talk to thousands of people a year in e-mail, and so I won’t easily remember you that way, and if I’ve never met you before, I’m not so good at knowing that either. So when someone walks up and talks to me, I appreciate it and like talking, but I also won’t know who you are just by osmosis. I’m just not that good at names and faces.

At Shmoocon a while ago, I found out someone had attended Shmoocon just to see me talk. When I found out who he was, I hung out with him at the hotel bar, chatting, for a few hours. I know that if I’d gone to a show just to hear someone, it’d be a great thing to talk with them about the stuff they do and get that much time; I’d really treasure that. So there we go.

So poor planning meant that a combination of friends, fans, commitments and parties ensured I did everything about half as well as I’d have hoped. Next year, I’m going to do my best to juggle all that much better.

I gave a talk, “The Edge of Forever”, which was about computer history; I got a nice large room and a few hundred folks (somewhere in the 400-500 range) who sat through most of it. The talk was an hour and a half; it would have been an hour except I threw in a few extra stories to give what may or may not have been a bonus. I was very happy with how it came out, all told. I like it enough to want to publish the notes and write out further ideas on what I was talking about in it, with regards to history, personal narrative and perspective.

Attending other talks at DEFCON is not something I entirely do; I tried to show support for my buddies’ talks but more often than not the fuckin’ things were packed so tightly that my presence was neither comforting nor necessary. In at least two cases it was a fire hazard! But one theme continued through a lot of the talks I did glance in or sit through: The Slide Ride, where a person puts up slide after slide on some powerpoint or keynote presentation software and then just dully reads off most or all of it to the audience. No sense of timing, no dramatic pauses, no improv based on audience reaction… everybody’s locked into a poorly designed amusement ride. Half the time I want to give classes in presentation, although I have set in presentations that utterly and completely kick the ass of anything I’m capable of. But if I’m minor league, at least I’m aware I’m minor league and what I do well or don’t do well. Maybe I ought to put my money where my mouth is and do something about it….

Enough about me.

That DEFCON continues to function well at all with over 7,000 attendees is a tribute to its organizing staff; people who don’t know what it takes to put one together are inclined to complain about this aspect or another aspect but at the end of the day, nobody was hurt and pain was minimal. That says something for the skill of the people involved in running and maintaining this party year after year. I salute that.

The Hacker Foundation created a “hacker space” in a side room to show what they were trying to accomplish; this I thought absolutely brilliant, and while the version 1.0 they did lacked some aspects of what people might look for, it was quite an incredible 1.0 regardless and I expect 2.0 to be even better.

The hotel, like I said, is a dump, a holdover from “old vegas” that feels like a worn-out-sock and which imparts all the grandeur of a lunch pail full of twinkies. I realize the reasons for DEFCON being there but I doubt I will ever rent another room in that place. It’s like having a bed in the back of a convenience store. That said, there’s something about those skyboxes…. those little rooms of pleasure and sight over the conference floor just seem to capture my imagination and I love being up there.

It is a rare place indeed where I really do feel that dozens of little stories are playing out simultaneously, tons of parallel locations which are experiencing fully-formed events with many contributors; at DEFCON I feel this all the time. The hundreds of milling attendees are a pleasure for me; I love walking among the crowds, seeing all the smarts, knowing people are having a good time, and envying the youth who walk the hallways when all I could do at their age was dream of such a place existing.

All in all, this was a wonderful time; I wouldn’t miss it for anything.

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Entry written on August 11th.

Like a healthy, extended walk in the woods, a browse through the TAP/YIPL archives is always good for the soul. I recommend a little jaunt through them about once a year. I shirk away from calling them “The Original Hacker Zine”, or “the beginning of it all”, because that isn’t the case, but in terms of bulletin board system culture, they were pretty influential, with transcriptions of articles from its run appearing on BBSes (often without citation).

If you’ve not encountered these issues before, then let me say by way of quick introduction that there was a New York City-based pamphlet for the Youth International Party (the Yippies), which became, over the course of time, a photocopied “zine” that blossomed into a sort of general hacking magazine, before ultimately going under and having its audience mostly replaced by 2600 magazine, which continues to this day. In all, roughly 93 issues of this magazine were created in the years 1971-1983.

There’s multiple ways to see them; probably the most convenient for the general populace is the PDF version, which compiles pretty much every known issue of YIPL and TAP and even a few flyers and related materials. My copy of this collection is located here (It is also 28 megabytes).

I started on coming up with alternate ways to browse the issues, including this still-in-progress sub-page, which is basically broken. Vertical sheets in a horizontal-screen world is still an annoying, clumsy process, for no good reason.

Variations exist; one of my heroes, Bioc Agent 003, presented this transcribed version of YIPL #1 for people to look at, including attempts at capturing the layout and flow of the original using ASCII.

But what makes this little endeavor so interesting, so worthwhile to click through again and again?

Mostly, it’s a combination of how-far-we’ve-come with a dash of the lost attitude and hubris.

A lot of the early issues are hand-written. Many after that are the product of typewriters. In most cases, you can see the result of hand-assembling/gluing in the strips of print into place. Circuit diagrams are sketched, headlines and reprints show tell-tale black lines of the cutouts. In a world where you can create a picture-perfect, beyond-the-capability-of-1980s-publishing-companies document, just realizing how much manual effort was required is worth the trip.

But more than that is the writing. These are angry screeds in some places, pissed off at the dominance of AT&T, the profiteering of war and the common man, and the repositioning of one’s self and technology when the world conspires to use you up. Within a short time, however, everything’s up for grabs; TAP presents ways to mess with most anything out there, and the latter-days artifice of textfile and zine, “for informational purposes only” starts to raise its head.

It wasn’t always for informational purposes, you see. It was originally to fight a power that looked to be crushing freedom and bilking citizens of their wealth and voice. We were, to some small amount, at war. That much is obvious in the initial issues of this zine.

Later, however, things are more clean-cut. The peace sign is given furtively in between “fitting in”. Better to smash the system from the inside, you figure. Pick up an OK paycheck but work peacefully. Cause a little trouble, but deal with the way things are, as best you can.

Obviously I’m reading a tad into the trends of the magazine, but that’s part of the gift of it; read it yourself and you’ll find your own interesting meanings and roots in it. After all, it’s free.

Speaking of which, this collection has been up for sale for years. Decades, really. There’s some punk who sells copies of it in the back of 2600. My friends and I used to call it the “2600 Index”, because you could figure out the trading value of hackerdom by how much was being charged for this collection. Currently the index seems to be at zero, with no copies being sold. Quick! Dump your shares!

Enjoy the walk through the woods. I highly recommend it.

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Entry written on August 10th.

If you were saying to yourself “Now, where can I browse over 1,700 arcade manuals in PDF format?“, your prayers were just answered. This is over three gigabytes of manuals, schematics, and general information about arcade machines, scanned in by an anonymous army of dedicated people, and going back up to 30 years.

My collection was previously at around 300, but that initial collection was from a different source, and the filename structure isn’t compatible with what I got in my latest set. So I’ve knocked it to a separate section from the main collection. They are likely doubles, and I’ll deal with that in the future.

The collection is one I got from usenet newsgroups months ago, and I just hadn’t gotten around to throwing it onto the site. I now have scripts that deal with this sort of stuff quicker, and so here we are. The filename structure of the current set is in what’s called “TOSEC Format”. TOSEC stands for “The Old School Emulation Center”, but at this point TOSEC format covers a ton more than just old-school game ROMs, which is what it was designed for. Here’s the document explaining TOSEC format, and since it’s not handled by any standards group in the typical fashion, it’s subject to some modifications, but also isn’t overloaded by nerds trying to break the thing in half to satisfy commercial interests.

I find the TOSEC format really easy to understand. If a filename says “Mario Bros [Schematics] [English]”, you know what you’re getting. Most of my stuff is in “8+3” format, that is, eight characters, a dot, and then three more characters. I wish TOSEC was available for this other stuff as well, but we do what we can with what we have.

Arcade manuals are this fascinating thing to me; as a kid I can count on one hand the times I came into contact with one, and somehow I thought they held all the secrets to the game. If I could just understand what these crazy schematics meant, I’d beat the game handily, truly master it.

I can even remember my first manual. You never forget your first manual; mine sits on a shelf just behind my head in my office. It was for Asteroids, and I swiped it out of an abused, dying, broken Asteroids machine at a dude ranch my dad brought his kids to. The back of the machine was open, agape, and I saw the little book on the floor of the machine and thought there it is, the key to mastering this machine. So somehow I got it into my jacket and home in a suitcase without dad noticing.

Now, of course, one merely has to grab the manual off my site; the dude ranch has been completely stricken from the equation.

What shocked me, going through the manual back then, was how it was possible to set up the coin return for different currencies, and the fact that you could manipulate dip-switches on the machine to make it run differently. This should have been obvious, but there you go, it blew me away at the time.

Enjoy the manuals, watermark free, ready to go. Now let’s make those games work!

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Entry written on August 9th.

Philosophy Chat Time. These never go well for weblog entries, but it can’t hurt.

I have a lot of friends who show me stuff they’ve worked on, or intend to send out there, or which is out there and they want me to review. I get sent a lot of stuff from my friends because they want me to see it, and I’m always open to checking stuff out.

One problem is that if something isn’t so good, I let them know. I’m not entirely into the whole “encouragement” thing where you lie and say something is good and it isn’t. I think this isn’t being a good friend. I’ll certainly give my reasons why I think it’s not so good and what I’d do to improve it, of course. But still, it can be a bit surprising to some of my buddies when something shows up and I say it’s sub-par.

The difference of opinion in here is whether your thing is you. I don’t think it is. Your thing is something you made and it’s likely it reflects a lot of what you are, but it also reflects how you go about making things. And sometimes that’s not so hot.

My one thing I will do if I don’t like a thing is to not mention it at all, that is, not officially come down on it anywhere. I figure that’s the least I can do. So perhaps that’s an error or slight of omission, but we’re talking about friends here.

The flip side of this is that when I see something I like, I really go off about it, sometimes for weeks. I shove your creation in the face of everyone I see, I write reviews and promote it, and I constantly throw people towards the item if I think they’ll be improved by it. I do this all the time, serving as some go between between neat people and neat crap.

I’ve sometimes had to deal with the cold shoulder for a few weeks or months, but I’d rather that be the case than for someone to walk out into the wide world thinking a project has my seal of approval and completely support. And when people hear me praise something of theirs, they know it’s the real deal.

This has been another Philosophy Chat.

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