ASCII by Jason Scott

I’ve tried to figure out when a portion of software and application development started to truly hate its users.

First, we need to go back in time a bit, to 1983. IBM PCs are still sparkling new. Time magazine has made the personal computer “machine of the year” because of the effect it’s having. Comparatively, not a ton of people have personal computers but those who do are doing their best to work with them, and that includes bulletin boards. On the IBM PC, there’s a limited number of telecommunications programs. One of them is PC-TALK III, by Andrew Fluegelman. This program was a lifesaver if you were looking for top-notch terminal software for your IBM PC. And it was free.

It was not just free, it had very specific, very idealistic documentation about how and where it was free. The style is preceded by Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib and other sources, but for a bunch of people using personal computers for the first time, it must have seemed pretty weird but delightful. Here’s what was in the documentation:

Like a breath of fresh air. Just soak up that historical, open-ended, loving text.

Certainly, it’s a shame that he trademarked “Freeware” but on the other hand the ability of just any company to then call its non-free software “freeware” is avoided. This was Amazon’s claim when they started taking software patents, and is also the thinking of the trademarking of “Linux”. There was even a situation like this with MAME, the arcade emulator, where a US company trademarked “MAME” to “protect” the name.

This blemish aside, Fluegelman is a pioneer in terms of framing the debate. He indicates not only that the software should be distributed freely (with attribution), but provides a way for people lacking access to modem programs (like PC-TALK!) could send him a disk and some postage and get the program for free.

Ironically, people afraid of Fluegelman’s trademark come up with an alternate name for their own versions of this approach: they call it “Share-ware”. The idea being that you share the files around, and if you want to, you can send payment in the form of a check or some cash through to the creator.

Inevitably, this leads to the usual problem: people download, use, and don’t pay. Depending on what you write, maybe the vast, vast majority do not pay. In some cases this is because your stuff is just so popular and ubiquitous that people don’t consider it a “product”, or sometimes your program is about 3 minor steps between someone doing it themselves and downloading your code. A lot of amateur/small-range software is this way: a program that goes through and finds all the undescribed files and lets you describe them. A program that lets you concatenate two files together. And so on.

So what do you do? Well, you could quit altogether and go pay. Or, your clever programming mind thinks: How about if I release a non-functional version of the program and tell people they can’t use it completely until they pay me?

This approach got an appropriate name very quickly: Crippleware. You download a program; heck, you waste credits or assigned daily time on most BBSes downloading a program, and guess what. It’s a word processor that won’t save, a telecom program that times out, a file sorter that won’t entirely sort. Broken. But the idea is that you’re temped enough by what you see, enthralled enough by what you get, that you’ll go ahead and mail the check that day and get activated, eventually, a week or two down the road when the floppies arrive. The best part of this is how everyone pays: the user pays in long distance and time, the sysop pays in electricity and disk space, the creator pays… wait, no, the creator doesn’t pay anything. He makes bank. He also, of course, changes his relationship with the users as well. They’re no longer really people they’re sharing information with; they’re suckers, people downloading what they think is a good program, only to find out it’s 1/3rd of a possibly good program.

Some BBSes hated this, and would delete this stuff on sight, and then advertise themselves as “Crippleware Free”. Here’s an example of a programmer having to make it clear they won’t be doing this to you:

SSSPCB15.ZIP: Shuttle Software Suite v1.5 for PCBoard. Contains 5 seperate PPE applications to enhance your PCBoard BBS. The programs in the package are: Internet Site List v1.7, Time Banker v1.4, Liners v1.4, User Alias Lister v1.1, and Numbers v1.1. All of these apps are fast, good looking, feature rich, and fully functional! Not Crippleware! Quality Shareware from Shuttle Software.

The disease is there, but not quite where one would have noticed it; the world was now a place where, when you downloaded software, you weren’t guaranteed to get software at the end. Your ZMODEM might have worked, your connection might have held, you would not have run out of disk space, but at the end of your efforts you had an advertisement and some broken code. In other words, you lost, with a clear decision, the inherent trust you had previously in downloaded programs. The result was a place a little more mercenary, a connection a little more distant.

This got worse quickly. As programs became network aware, and connectivity was a given, negative innovation began to rule the day. The best example of this period I can give were programs that had buttons for “Register”, “Later”, and “Exit”. Naturally, a person would be inclined not to click on “Register” anytime soon, so you would build a habit of clicking on the “Later” button. The solution was clear: Make the program switch the “Register” and “Later” buttons randomly. In other words, the interface was now being designed to hoodwink the user. If giving you a non-functioning version of a program wasn’t heinous enough, the expectation that the buttons would continue to be in the same consistent locations has been removed as well. The thinking, the poisonous conclusion, is that the users will purchase the program if they’re confounded into pressing a button that was somewhere else the last time they looked.

But this is all kid stuff, playground battles, compared to what happens next and what has continued to happen.

I want to say the real granddaddy of fuckery is Real, Inc., whose Realplayer programs (which allowed easier-to-stream access to video and sound) were masterpieces of deception. The goal would be to make you sign up for any of a range of aggressive sales and advertising. I recall checkmarks left checked and hidden away in tiny scroll windows, carefullly-worded selections meant to make you concerned for the viability of the environment without allowing Real to send you newsletters and spam. This was bastardry at a high level. You were now not just a hapless user being fed crippled software or misleading buttons: you were specifically being tricked into “falling for” whatever sleaze was being sold to you. This was considered acceptable, right, and positive. Winamp does it. Instant messaging clients do this. They indicate it would be in your best interest to give the companies that have made them a peek into your actions, interests, and choices. They promise you, as a sleazy salesman would, about what’s the right choice for you, which is really the right choice for them.

We let them into our homes this way, and now they think they belong there.

But I think the real crime against humanity, the actual bottom of the barrel which itself has an even more horrible bottom, is reserved for peer-to-peer programs and the insidious idea of “adware”. The only justification I can possibly see in this situation for what they do to you is this: you are a thief, so you deserve what you get. Like putting poison in your peanut butter that your roommate keeps swiping, or stringing up a gun to fire at whatever comes in through your window, the thinking is flawed, the potential for things to go wrong flung off the scale for its excessiveness.

Who thought Adware was appropriate? How could any developer, in his right mind, be it Kazaa or Bearshare or what have you, possibly imagine that it would be good to quietly install software that forces ads on the end user in areas outside of the program? What manner of thinking makes you think you are doing any good in the world, or treating your customers like something this side of dogshit?

You hate your users when you do this; you truly do. And they hate you for it. The fact that the software would go so far as to change the function of your computer to satisfy the requirements of charlatans, to jam open in the face of security and honesty any ports necessary to allow an endless channel of ads…. that’s not software any more. You’re not a developer, the users aren’t users. It is a place where the sociopath, having determined he can lift a wallet while ostensibly inside a home to do a service, determines it’s even more efficient to rape and kill the occupants. And maybe eat them.

We suck it up because a lot of people have a lot of tolerance for a lot of things. It’s the nature of people. The savvy among us will download programs dedicated to yanking these pony nuggets out of their system, while others do no such thing and wonder why their machines have slowed to a crawl.

I am reminded of this each time I interact with Limewire. If you hit the “close” menu on the item, the program does not end. In fact it shoves itself into the taskbar, hiding itself away, using your resources and network connection long after you made it clear you were done with it.

How deep we’ve gone. How dark it has gotten.

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Another day, another person telling me I wouldn’t be interested in them and they’re not interested in being interviewed.

In this case, it was a coin-op and electronics business somewhat near my home. They put the whole shebang up for sale on Craigslist ($175k, firm!) and included some numbers to call. What the heck’s to lose, so I call the numbers.

It is basically impossible to explain to someone like this who you are and what you’re up to. They want to know why I’m interested in them; surely this is a scam! They want to know who I’m “with”; surely this is a scam! In this case, I kept saying I was doing a documentary on arcades and she kept telling me “We’re NOT AN ARCADE!” Well no, but her business maintained machines that went in arcades, and the whole point of my documentary is to talk about the people who work on machines that people have fun with.

I am not easy to explain. I am not an easy sell. Sometimes people jump at the chance to be interviewed. Many times they don’t know what to make of me. Also, of the people in the world to be distrustful, coin-op distributors are way up there. So I didn’t make my case and she told me to get lost.

I’m sad about this because nobody will hear the story. I’m also sad because I couldn’t convince them that I was real. I could hear the skepticism in her voice. All she wants to do is retire, and here’s some firm or sleazebag who wants to make a buck. How could I easily convince her otherwise? URLs aren’t always a great argument.

I’ll continue my efforts, of course, but I always hate these days.

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I spent a good portion of the weekend not doing much of anything.

While at an interview on Friday, I called my buddy Chris and asked if he had some time and a couch. And he did.

So instead of running around, instead of doing a bunch of technical stuff, and instead of touching computers, I hung out and ate fantastic grilled sausages, watched a TV show or two, and drove around a bit through one of my childhood towns with a friend of 25 years and his wife.

While I like having my days full and my life hectic, it pays a little to remember who your friends are; your objects are not your friends. Your friends are your friends. And thanks to a little generosity on my buddy’s part, I got two more days with him. So here’s to you, Chris.

Well, OK, I also drove 600 miles in three days. But still, I was relaxed!

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What the heck, let’s go into the 3279 terminal a little more.

As mentioned previously, this was a terminal that my dad would plunk me in front of to give me something to do when he had projects at work to finish. As I am quickly nearing the age that he was when this was going on, I understand quite perfectly what the situation was.

This terminal and the system behind it (which I never got to see) was absolutely amazing. At a time when the home computers you might encounter would have an OK collection of colors and a little bit of storage, this thing was blazingly fast (connected to a mainframe, after all) in crisp color (a top-quality monitor) and had what seemed like infinite space and stuff to do.

When you’re 11, one of these terminals dominates you. The keyboard was designed for data entry, and was the classic heavy-and-clicking keys that are relatively difficult to find anymore (although there is a small niche market that continues to sell that style of keyboard). It had buttons, status lights, and the layout of control was completely crazy. Luckily, whatever terminal I was sat down at had tons of little hint sheets taped to the table, so I could always refer to them when I got truly lost.

And lost I got, because instead of just wandering aimlessly at a prompt, Dad knew the secret menu. I feel kind of weird even telling you the secret menu’s access name; it might still be in use for all I know. It was passed along between those in the know; likely my dad was given it in confidence, but violated this trust for my benefit. It was a foreign word for “games”. Typing this would put you into a browsable menu (using arrow keys) that opened up hundreds of amazing little programs, all done in spare time (cough) by the hackers in the IBM system.

There were tons of written documents, like best take-out food around the Research Center, or reviews of movies. There were “standard” games ported to this IBM system, like Adventure (and an expanded version of Adventure with even more puzzles). And there were basically video games. This in itself was mind-blowing to me. I recall a slot machine that had spinning wheels, and ducks and spiders as some of the items. If a spider and duck were in the same set of wheels, the duck would actually extend its neck and eat the spider, getting you points. This may or may not sound as miraculous as it was for 1981 and an 11 year old.

At the time, of course, I was blissfully unaware of any machine time I was sucking up, that the machine doing all this work was in some heavily protected and environmentally controlled room far away, and that the reason the thing would pause when I hit the “send” key was because it really was “sending” the information somewhere. I just loved this huge fuckin’ computer.

It has been many, many years after Dad moved away from that Research Center that I have ever had my computers at home or work show such elegance, power and skill behind them. And I do miss them, very much.

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This is a product endorsement, but don’t worry, the product is free. I’m also endorsing it on my own initiative and have not even communicated with the creator of the product.

One progression I have encountered many times in researching GET LAMP, is the following:

• See your first text adventure game (Adventure, Zork, or the later modern games). Play them.
• You are immediately blown away with them.
• You are inspired to make one of your own.
• You start hacking together an absolutely unplayable one.
• You give up.
• You keep playing text adventures until you stop. Or you never stop.

For me, this all happened in the early 1980s. I definitely came into contact with adventure in the 1979-1980 period, playing it on an IBM 3279 terminal (which had color!) and meandering throughout the outside portions of the game. For extra nerdishness, this all took place at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown. If I may say so myself, that is one incredible fucking building. It’s a large semi-circle, and when you walk the hallways, they all curve, giving a sort of strange feeling to the proceedings of wandering past door after door, unknown crazy things inside. And throughout this place were terminals. This was during that great time in the divorce when you have a dad who’s taking the kids on visitation but his life is not quite free enough to allow him to just blow the day off. So we’d go to work, which was this research building, and he’d drop me in front of a 3279 terminal, and I was one astoundingly happy bastard.

I’ll probably go into those times with more detail later, but the point is that I encountered Adventure under ideal conditions, and I loved this game and the ones past it.

Later, I played Adventure at my cousin’s house with the whole family and completed it. A different experience altogether, but memorable along its own lines. I also purchased, for a reason lost to time (likely it was the only game available at the store I was at), Zork II, bypassing that silly “Zork I” game that couldn’t possibly have assisted just a little bit in playing the game.

So I had an IBM PC and I decided I should make one of these here text adventures, my own self.

Let’s just stop for a moment and declare this clearly: I am a horrible programmer. My code works, but it tends to be very, very inefficient and since I am mathematically retarded, I avoid all those crazy “algorithms” and anything math-oriented and instead make stuff that approaches a situation artistically or lyrically. This does not translate to a great program. But it works!

I could program in BASICA on the IBM PC so I wrote my programs in that. As I recall, I made two text adventures.

One was called “The Slipped Disk’s Castle” and had you wandering around just the kind of fine real estate you would expect from a 12 year old, or a top-charting rapper. Time has faded this a bit, but I’m sure it was just an endless barrage of rooms and crazy out-of-my-mind puzzles of the sort that the Interactive Fiction community files under “Read the Author’s Mind Puzzles”. It was a two word parser (meaning all commands were things like GO NORTH, UNLOCK DOOR, GET LAMP) and I’ll bet it was really really hard to deal with.

Around this time, PC Magazine announced they were making a magazine that would come on disk, called PC DISK Magazine. They had a way for people to apply as authors to get on. I applied with The Slipped Disk’s Castle.

I did not get accepted.

But I did get a great rejection letter, which I’m sure is located around this fine home of mine.

The other’s title is completely lost to me. In this monster, I was going crazy trying to implement geographic relation. This is very hard to do when you’re 13 and there’s no programming mentors in your life of any major stripe. I recall, specifically, a hand grenade. You would put this hand grenade somewhere, pull the pin, and then you could walk around. Depending on where you were when it would go off 3 turns later, it would print a different message. If you stuck around, you died. If you were nearby, it was deafening. And if you jammed away as fast as you could, it would be a distant “boom”.

This was an enormous pain in the ass to program. It was also not implemented well. I eventually gave up. I’m sure that thing’s on a dying floppy somewhere as well. Maybe.

What I’m saying here is I had dreams and I had stories but I knew shit from shit about programming and I was suddenly finding myself spending 99% of the time trying to implement my ideas, and 1% of the time telling a story. It didn’t take long to wear even my young enthusiasm to the nub and the little project died. Would either of these have been better? Maybe. Probably not something Nick Montfort would have been raving about in his book but probably something I’d have looked back on with fondness and maybe redone in my later years. As it were, the results probably weren’t even solid enough to do a remake.

So, maybe you’re reading this, and you’re young (and giggling at my profanity) or older (and giggling at my haplessness of youth), and maybe you have an idea inside your head and you’d like to make a text adventure of your own.

Your problem is solved.

While you weren’t looking, this program came out, called Inform, version 7 (usually called simply Inform 7). It makes Infocom-style adventures, with the full sentence parser and the advanced interaction with a virtual text world and the whole hoo-ha. It is available for Windows, for OSX, for Linux, and for Solaris. You cannot easily complain that you don’t have a machine that can run this program. The program is free. You pay nothing to download it and use it.

Now, here’s the critical thing.

It’s a natural language parser.

No, not the resulting game.. the programming language.

Here’s an example of how the code looks:

"Midsummer Day"

East of the Garden is the Gazebo. Above is the Treehouse.
A billiards table is in the Gazebo. On it is a trophy cup.
A starting pistol is in the cup.
In the Treehouse is a container called a cardboard box.

I am not playing games with you. I am not being exaggerating, or making things up. That is actual code written in Inform 7. Did you feel that little pop? That was your brain no longer concerning itself with how to build a vehicle from scratch, but instead trying to decide if you want to drive to the mountains and then the beach, or through the woods and across the desert. With the mass of documentation, examples, and written works accompanying this program, your bar to making a game has been dropped so far out of sight that you lost the bar in the darkness and heard a distant clang and a “ow”.

The program includes an editor, a debugger, a compiler, and enough tweaky-knobs to make anyone happy. It will output your work into a variety of forms, including one that works with standard Infocom interpreters, meaning your work has the potential to instantaneously work on a dozen platforms.

If the documentary does nothing else, I hope it energizes a set of people who had dreams of making such games in their youth, or maybe a week ago, and who might not have been aware of the advances made, the hard work done.

The Inform program is waiting for you. Have fun.

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As of tonight, I now know I am speaking at three engagements in the coming months:

• The Vintage Computer Festival Midwest on July 14th, in Indiana.
• DEFCON 15, the weekend of August 3rd, Las Vegas, NV.
• The Black and White Ball, week of 18th-21st of September, London.

I always enjoy speaking, and it’s nice to be able to speak at events I had planned on attending anyway.

A segment of the reading audience will be absolutely delighted to hear that all of these talks are centered around computer history of some sort and none discuss Wikipedia, licenses, or kidney stones.

I apologize for the shortness of this entry, but it is a stupid level of hot right now. It just saps my energy out the door. Still, I got a bunch of footage imported and I’ve been enjoying pulling out diamonds of statements from this coal mine of interviews.

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People sometimes hit me up with simple questions that you’d think I could just dash off, but a lack-of-pithiness reaction stops me from doing so. Sure, I could whip up some off-the-cuff answer, but it wouldn’t be accurate, and that always stumps me. A classic one is “What’s your favorite arcade game?” There’s about five of them, for different reasons, but I feel a pressure to answer with the favorite and I still don’t know what that is.

But another question, more rarely asked, is “What was something cool you learned making the documentary?” This one, after I’ve had time to mull it and decide, is easily answered:

Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems predate auto-answer modems.

Isn’t that crazy? The logical way people might assume, looking back, would be “auto-answer modems and home computers show up, someone puts them together, and tah-dah, BBS”. I know I certainly did.

But in fact, when the first BBS is assembled in 1978, auto-answer modems had not yet hit the market. Instead, hackers trying to piece together such an item utilized ring detection circuits.

The fun part is that now people are starting (just starting) to have a situation where ring detection won’t mean the thing it used to, especially if your telephone is IP-based (like a Vonage device) and you carry a cell phone. But back when it was copper wires connected to your home from a centrally located facility owned by the phone company (called a Central Office), the central office would send various voltages and signals down the line, which your phone would deal with or respond to as needed.

By the way, when you picked up the phone, you were connected to a tone generator at the central office that would generate the dial tone while waiting for your commands. When it was pulse/dial dialing, you would be breaking and restoring the circuit with each “click” of the dial; 9 times meant “9”, 4 times meant “4” and so on.

(This was also why you could, if you were talented, click the reciever button on the phone in sets of numbers and dial that way. This sounds like a worthless talent until you realize that they used to put locks on dials for “incoming calls only” phones in places, and so this way you could make free calls. Also, the dial-tone was sometimes just another phone number, so people who were screwing around could call that number and get the “dial tone”.)

With the addition of “Touch-Tone”, you could just send down pairs of signals down the line to replace the “pulse” signals you’d sent before. But the idea was the same; you were connected to a machine a few miles away that was sending you a “I’m listening” sound, take your signals, and then route your call.

ALL of this is faked up and replaced on cellphones and especially IP phones. When you pick up an IP phone, you get a dial-tone, but it’s being generated by the telephone or routing box itself; there’s no “central office” at play. There’s certainly nothing like “Touch-Tone” having any meaning either; after you play with your box or your cell phone, a request is sent down to the switching equipment in toto. After the connection is done, your phone or your cell phone can generate “Touch-Tone” for the purposes of communicating with items connected down the line, but the tones themselves played no part in your call connection.

But back to the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) copper-loop days. Besides the signals sent down the line (including on-off/pulse and Touch-Tone), you had specific voltages that indicated the state of the line. One of these was “ringing”: 40 Vrms. When your telephone got this voltage on this copper-line connection, it would start ringing. It was years and years ago, sometime the middle of last century, that the ringing you heard on the line when you called someone was ever actually their phone. In fact, you were being given a “ringing” recording by equipment. This is also why you might pick up on 2 rings but the person calling you would hear 3 or 4.

So it was inevitable that electronics people would be able to build a circuit that “listened” on the telephone line for a voltage surge from the 40 Vrms change on the line, and know that the phone was “ringing”. (When you pick up the phone, the voltage drops, by the way.)

What was explained to me by Ward Christensen (and later Randy Suess) was that Randy built a ring detection circuit, and hooked it to the S-100 machine. Now here’s where we get into more of a time warp.

What it would do, upon detection of ring, is RESET THE MACHINE. The S-100 machine would then boot, start the BBS program, and then pick up the modem and send a carrier.

In other words, it could boot the machine and run the “application” in the time between the first and third rings of a telephone.

This level of jiggery-pokery involving interacting directly with hardware is a hallmark of this era. The S-100 was a “home” computer in the vaguest sense; nothing like the pre-made plastic boxes most people associate when they hear that term. It was a hand-built project, and you knew, very deeply, what it was and how it functioned. It was a small but important jump for people like Randy to want it to “do” something with phones and to just add another circuit to it.

But this whole little world of voltages, circuits and telephones is shifting. Within a generation there will be acknowledgement but vague skepticism that we ever wired every single house and building, everywhere, with a circuit that was always kind of on and ready to go. And that to make a computer respond to a ringing phone on this always-on circuit, you had to whip out your soldering iron and get cranking.

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Well, this is something. I stumbled upon someone’s attempt to do a “Grand Unifying” history of hacking, phreaking, and cracking. It jumps around everywhere from the dawn of the telephone system up through to mentioning my documentary (!) which is how I found it in the first place.

It gets a few things wrong, like crediting John Draper with the discovery of the 2600hz whistle (he most certainly didn’t) and parts of it are obviously pasted-in swaths of text from other locations, but cheers to that guy for trying to take a shot at it.

I have a copy of the file over here in case it was going to disappear off the face of the earth… now it won’t!

A part of me thinks that there’s a danger of encrusting “hacker history” into a classic case of telling the same 12 stories over and over and getting facts wrong; but on the other hand, it’s a lot of fun to see people try and get it “right”, and unlike a lot of histories there’s a bunch of supporting documents out there.

Sorry, no clever story today; there’s more than enough gunk in that link for anyone. Let me know what you find wrong with it.

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Cancer, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a horrid potential byproduct of the natural process of cell division. Things go wrong, a process goes out of whack, and the next thing you know you’re doing all sorts of insane, crazy shit to fix it. And make no mistake; most cancer therapies are insane, crazy shit. The results are not always great, the earlier you find it the better (because then the madness is in one place) and in the meantime things are generally horrible.

The real bad part is, you can get cancer of the nearly everything. Unlike diabetes or migraines or breaking a bone, the problem can, quickly or slowly, spread elsewhere and make cancer happen there. It is pernicious and deadly.

Kind of a bummer, I know. Let me talk, then, about online cancer.

A while ago, I heard Tom Jennings say a brilliant thing. This is not hard to do, if you’re listening to Tom Jennings. But it struck me how many levels of brilliant the statement was, over time, considering it from many angles. It was at a Vintage Computer Festival talk, the one where I beta-premiered the nearly-done BBS Documentary episodes. The organizer, Sellam, had decided it would be fun to have the Fidonet guy also speak at the same event, and then have the Fidonet guy sit through an episode about himself. I do believe that was the scariest part of my entire production!

Anyway, Tom gave a talk about the considerations of putting together Fidonet. And he mentioned some error checking, and he veered off into a rant about error checking. And what he said was:

“Error handling is 90 percent of the work. Most of your time is spent trapping for everything that could go wrong.”

This may on its face sound either simplistic, wrong, or exaggerating, but once you consider it thoughtfully, it blossoms into brilliance. Rephrased another way, it could be considered that engineering is primarily the preparation for unwanted events both external and internal, not just the successful completion of a series of wanted events. The “holy shit it works” phase is rewarding and heartwarming and all the rest, but under controlled situations with little variance in user pool and approach, stuff can be made to work very quickly.

A buddy of mine worked on a lot of software projects, a well known instant-messaging environment. He told me how they’d check in a new revised version of the server and they’d know if it was working within 90 seconds; that’s how long it would take for the onslaught of user interaction to slam it to pieces. It’s not the “hey, people can message each other” part that kills you, it’s the “everybody can do anything and that includes stuff that wasn’t accounted for” part.

A lot of time has been spent on making sure stuff works, and can handle the onslaught of stuff that specifically makes a website crash. It’s rather hard now to put in some magic set of control characters or paste in HTML or pile on the long-length words and make a site go down. When you’re faced with an input window of text that you can fill out, chances are you won’t cause the thing to die. The problem is exacerbated by the use of libraries, where the libraries are created by an entire other group of people outside of the ones making applications that use those libraries. Applying my rule of the two-way street, this is fantastic in putting in improvements — everybody’s stuff gets better! But it’s disastrous when there’s a security bug — stuff you didn’t even know used that library is now able to be dressed in a gimp outfit!

But all of this is well-tread ground. If you base the success or failure of your project/application/website on its ability to stay stable and online and handle whack-ass input requests and poorly-formatted queries and the rest, then you will have success relatively easily, and this “start to success” time has decreased as libraries are strengthened and people depend on the strength of years-and-years of quality control. There’s an entire industry dedicated to software-level quality control and a lot of effort put into it.

So where’s this online cancer I’m talking about?

My web browsing puts me into a lot of forums, in a lot of websites, in a lot of places. Sometimes these forums are fully-formed groups of people with a specific theme. Other times, it’s just the commentary at the bottom of an article or weblog posting, or under a Youtube video. They’re all, in some way, forums, just at different levels of complexity and thought given into the process of people being able to communicate with each other.

Obviously, I’m looking at these places with a more historically-aware eye than most. I passed my quarter century of using “message bases” last year. In fact, let’s pull one from that time:

http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/PRINTOUTS/198408shpolitics.txt

This one is interesting, because it’s about politics, always a contentious issue. Yet, generally, discourse is outward-focused (Reagan, Mondale, Heavy Metal) instead of inward focused (users, the political structure/system, the quality of posts). The reasons for this are pretty clear: very small group, and very long turnaround time. Remember, only one or two people can use the Safehouse at once, and so the first post is on August 3, 1984 and the last post is September 10, 1984. 38 days later. With 26 total posts, that’s an average of less than a posting a day. 24 hours between posts.

Now, compare that to a thread on Fark.com. Here’s a good one:

Ex-Marine kills bear with log.

This thread, meanwhile, started at 9:04am on June 21, 2007. Within 12 hours it has 187 messages. The majority of those 187 messages are posted in the first 3 hours.

So we go from a posting rate of once every 1,440 minutes to once every 45 seconds. In the first example, it’s about “politics”. In the second, it is “An ex-marine fought off a bear with a log.” and a link to a news story.

The conversation, and bearing in mind this is one of sixty new stories/topic threads started on Fark the same day (two an hour, every hour, the entire day), starts off with jokes and commentary on the story. Then it divests into discussions of camping and marine egos. Then it turns, discussing the motivations/choices of the marine in the story, and the wisdom of the other posters. Bear in mind, too that Fark implements moderators who remove particularly offensive or attacking letters, so this represents, if not the cream of the crop, the best of the remaining.

Keeping up with all postings on all threads of Fark would be a full time job. There’s another online community-thread site called Metafilter. They had 22 story postings for the “main” page (there are sub pages), and over a thousand comments between them. Another full-time job.

Fark and Metafilter are both working very hard to control what I’m talking about, the online cancer where the pure mass of postings into a forum from so many disparate folks inevitably leads not just to bickering and misunderstandings but screaming, blind hatred within an hour. Fark and Metafilter have subscription levels, inexpensive, but functioning as a barrier to entry (in the case of Fark, to see topics before they’re posted, and in the case of Metafilter, to be able to post). Metafilter, in fact, has gone years ahead of a lot of websites and has moderation of comments, history browsing of users, and a very, very strong ruleset about quality of topic threads, duplicates, and so on.

I don’t think a lot of people are recognizing this cancer for what it is, this rapid, rapid posting of messages where any out-of-lockstep post can send the entire conversation flow cascading down into bitter side-taking and attacks. Mention a political party. Mention a hot-button topic from recent news. Mention a place, a job, a race, and watch as everything turns on itself and makes a horrifying feedback noise. As much as actual cancer comes from too-quick division of cells, I feel like this online cancer comes from uncontrolled, unchecked cascades of off-topic messages with no real moderation/quality control capable by the site or the users themselves. Sure, a place will send their guy in to delete an article with someone’s social security number or which informs another user that they are going to be killed in their sleep; but that’s the level of baseline legal protection. It’s what you do because you don’t want the site sued. But what about the quality of the conversation, the working together to end up with a conversation that makes everyone who plays a part in it better for contributing?

Choose a youtube video. Choose any popular Youtube video and you will watch the cancer eat out the bottom of the page with people turning on each other, insulting each other, dragging topic into places that make no sense and have no bearing. And there you go, someone might have spent weeks working on a great video and below them lies absolute garbage. Sure, they can turn off comments 100%. Is that really a solution? No.

Will the conversation and the engineering really turn its priority from ensuring that there’s no buffer overflows in input windows to coming up with a lightweight “personality” that you can have from site to site? Or devising improvements to moderation, or determining solutions to this online cancer? Cute little conferences are being held around the world lightly touching on this, but the idea, which should be as fundamental a goal and question as getting the webserver machine running, is an afterthought, a hindbrain twitch, a quick sleeve-polishing of the glasses before throwing it out to the wide world.

It shouldn’t be. The cancer is going to grow.

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So, if you needed some sort of incentive to start going through your collection of old home computer crap and send it to me or someone else to digitize/curate it, here you go.

It’s now 30 years since 1977. 30 years since the real send-off of the “home computer” era, where sales are measured in many many thousands and stores selling them are selling toys and clothes down the aisle. Obviously there are many precedent computers and home computer-like models before 1977, but by 1977 people are catching on that these things are going to take off and you better make some space on your shelf.

30 years is a long time. People don’t always effectively store things for 30 years. In 30 years many things break down. Floppy disks don’t wear entirely well; I’ve received collections of them and found a 10-40 percent failure rate. Luckily there’s a lot of overlap, but that’s still quite a bit.

Paper fades, machines die. Stuff rusts out. Batteries do that crazy thing where they turn into the Alien and barf liquid brown death over everything for an inch around them. You’ve kept this crap because it was part of your history, part of what you enjoyed, part of what made you what you are. But it’s now the 21st century. We’re in flying cars and it turns out that Skynet showed up but it’s OK because all it wants to do is sell you shit. And your home computer stuff is disappearing.

Please consider a rummage through the parents’ basement on your next trip home. Consider opening that file folder of printouts of old stuff, whether it be BBS messages, film, video, books, you name it. This is your warning sign; I’ve stopped getting stuff that’s made it through and I’m starting, just starting, to see stuff arrive in a crash-landing fashion, or a few months past when it should have.

I and others have ways to deal with this stuff. Some of it is still quite common. A lot is not. I can put you in touch with people who can take your stuff if you don’t trust me or want someone specializing in your stuff. But please, you’ve been holding this stuff for decades and you’ve got to make your mind up with what you want to do with it, because Time is about to make the decision for you.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

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