Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I believe there is either a penny whistle 
modem or prototype for one in our
garage.  maybe also design schematics.

my first modem was 1200 baud.
iI still miss the handshake sounds.
  

    
i've been trying to get <lee> and
<pozar> to come participate in
this discussion.
  

    
I think I found handshake sounds as kind of a 
courtship.

hey!
you there?
i'm here.
wanna hookup?
yeah.
i'll send the first signals.
  

    
Well I wasn't too wise about the money angle then. I was nerding out
(phoenix) and they were going for public sale. In hindsight, I think
they knew I was essentially fucking off on their dollar, but it kept
me out of competitors' employ.

And my next move after Phoenix was to drop anyway. Met up with folks
in the SF punk, queer, activist, artist scene, we leased a warehouse
at 164 Shipley, started Shred of Dignity Skaters' Union, I continued
worked on Fido/FidoNet more or less living off the shareware income
(IT WAS NOT MUCH BELIEVE ME lol) and funding a lot of Shred's
activities.

That left me free to take on the early Little Garden stuff when that
became an annoyance Gilmore, Pozar, Crocker, etc. That occurred the
year or so before the CO/RE split in the internet, and when Rick
Adams told Gilmore, "Go find another provider" when John pissed
Adams off (lol). Then the early-net games began in earnest.

Socially/culturally during that time -- 1983 through 1993, when we
left the two Shred warehouses, then 1994 through 1996 when I lived
on Rondel and ran TLG (a block away at 16/Mission) -- was the
intense peak of all the punk/queer punk stuff in San Francisco.

We (me, Shawn Ford and Duke (David) Crestfield) were older than
everyone else (OK Shawn was 15 or 16! but core nonetheless) and
organized. We got shit done. 

Hit and run shows often (we'd flyer for some location, often Beale
and Brannon at the Base of the Bay Bridge, and pretty much every
daylight savings morning, not a good idea), bands played til the
cops showed up. (Pat Cadigan fictionalized them, coincidence or
not.) Organized street protests (No on 96/102; we routinely
outmaneuvered the police, and had a better sound system!)

Shred alum, about 20, 30 people over the years, more or less all
went on to do amazing things; Donna Dresch, Diet Popstitute
(Klubstitute, Sick and Twisted Players), Honey Owens (Valet, etc)
... many of us still in touch, however peripherally via the FB
thing). 

For TLG (The Little Garden) I/we hired our smart, persistent punk
friends and paid them using the Rainbow Grocery model: fairly
average shit pay for a trial period, then raises hard and fast. We
had health coverage with a group size of 3! In 1995! I have no idea
if it was any good, lol, but we did it. We paid well too, but there
was crazy growth. We trained a half doen folk who ended up in the
net business as engineers, one way or another.

TLG grew ~ 15%/month for two years (?), and sold out before we were
steam-rollered; we had no plan, no big money, but man we made cash,
$150K/month. If we hadn't we would have been displaced.

What was so radical about TLG was that 1) we allowed unlimited
resale, and would help customers get CIDR and DNS for CIDR subsets
and 2) we provided pipe ala carte; explained how to lease your own
circuit from telco, which routers to buy/make, how to config them,
...

The allow-resale was not foolish at all; it allowed our customers to
become eg. ISPs that did specialized services that TLG did not
(email, web hosting, etc). We were not simply a middle-man; we
handled scale for them. We did have a very few customers who split
off, way out growing us. But that was rare, and offloaded us, and
they weren't competitors, but biz too large to need our scaling and
services. These splits were very friendly.

We even allowed 24/7 100% connections via modem. 

We freaked people out and it was good.




A lot of code and hardware, 8080/z80, then x86, got written in the
sidelines
  

    
Pozar could error-correct my dubious and flawed memory, in addition
to his obvious and varied contribution here.
  

    
It's great to learn this stuff.
  

    
I'm glad we're capturing and preserving this detail!

I didn't think of myself doing technology before the mid-80s, but I
had been reading the Whole Earth publications, especially
CoEvolution Quarterly, and was aware of the Whole Earth Software
Review (though I didn't read it, because I didn't have a computer
yet when it appeared). In Coevolution, which became Whole Earth
Review (and was an inspiration for the 'zine we created in the 90s,
Fringe Ware Review), I learned about the WELL and was hot to join so
that I could connect with all the people I'd been reading over the
years. We bought got a small bank loan and bought a computer at PCs
Limited (which later became Dell Computers), and I found myself with
a box of tech, a monitor, a 300 baud modem, and a big stack of
manuals that were often hard to decipher. But I plowed into it, and
told my wife I was going to dial into the WELL via long distance.
She told me I was out of my mind, and we debated about the
considerable long distance charges that could entail, to dial into
Sausalito from Austin. While I was softening her resistance, I
dialed in to local BBS systems, especially SMOF-BBS, Pair-O-Dice
BBS, and Illuminati Online. 

SMOF stood for "Secret Masters of Fandom," a BBS run by the late
Earl Cooley, AKA Shiva, populated mostly by science fiction authors
and fans. Since I was into science fiction in a big way, it was a
natural place for me to hang out. SMOF hosted, Cheap Truth, the
first digital 'zine I ever saw, written by "Jules Verne," who turned
out to be Bruce Sterling - this was part of the pathway into our
long friendship and association. There was also "Johnny Mnemonic,"
who turned out to be Mike Godwin. 

Pair-O-Dice was operated by the late Bob Anderson, aka Bazooka, a UT
art professor. He and I became good friends, and he helped me
realize the possibilities for online art. He was part of the OTIS
collective, which later renamed as SITO. 

Illuminati Online was run by Steve Jackson Games. Steve used it for
play testing and connecting with fans. This is the BBS that was
raided by the Secret Service around the time the Electronic Frontier
Foundation was forming. By then I was a member or the WELL, as were
Bruce, Mike, and Steve. EFF was forming here, and had an active
conference. When Steve's business was raided, he immediately logged
into SMOF to let people know what had happened. He had no idea why
he was raided. Of course Bruce and Mike were both aware of it, and
Mike was in the process of joining EFF as it's first counsel, and
that's how EFF became so quickly involved in what became the Steve
Jackson Games case against the Secret Service. A cause celebre at
the time, and inspiration for Bruce's nonfiction book "The Hacker
Crackdown."

At some point EFF started talking about being a chapters
organization, and Steve suggested that Austin should have the alpha
chapter. He sounded a call for a big picnic at his workplace. People
showed up with tons of food - Shiva and I bought a massive sandwich
something like four feet long and carried it with us to the soiree.
Steve climbed on a table and made a rousing call to action speech,
announcing that EFF would form and asking for potential board
members to volunteer. That's how I became part of the first board of
directors for what became EFF-Austin, and there's a whole history
from there.

John Quarterman, mentioned in Kevin's book, was also on the board.
John was an Internet consultant (this was 1992 or so, before
mainstreaming, so he and his partner Smoot Carl-Mitchell, also a
board  member, were consultants for the universities and r&d firms
that were using the Internet at the time). John taught me some unix,
which helped me on the WELL, and he taught me a lot about the
structure of the Internet and how to use various facilities like
Usenet. He kept reminding me that "the WELL is not the Internet."

Anyway, that's how I came to be an Internet maven. I was a writer
frustrated that I couldn't figure out where to publish the kind of
stuff I wanted to write, and this solved the problem - I started
writing for various publications like Mondo 2000, Boing Boing, 21C,
Factsheet Five, Mindjack etc. I became an associated editor at Boing
Boing, where I met Paco Nathan, who also lived in Austin at the time
and was a genius who could do pretty much anything. He wrote
listserv software for our email list, and he mastered Pagemaker when
we decided to create a magazine/catalog, which was Fringe Ware
Review. He even created a FringeWare font. We knew that there were
people who had cool products but couldn't find cost-effective ways
to bring them to market, so our core idea was to become an online
store. Except we discovered that banks wouldn't support credit card
purchases online - we had to have a bricks and mortar store to get
approved to accept credit cards, which was how there came to be a
FringeWare store... though we also sold via mail order from the
magazine, which had a catalog in the back pages, something I'd
learned from "Famous Monsters of Filmland." We didn't make a lot of
money, and I never saw a dime - I had a job, and any money we got
went to Paco and to pay authors, something we were scrupulous about
even though we couldn't pay much. I had issues over time which I
don't think Paco and other FringeWare folks understood - though I
thought at the time they should be obvious. I eventually left the
company, which continued for a few years.
  

    
I was wondering, how many of you are still in touch with your "BBS
friends" since the web and social media changed everything?

I can think of two people I'm still in touch with, we follow each
other on Twitter and have visited each other a few times in the past
20 years.

For the most part, tho, my BBS friends in Houston were all local to
Houston or sometimes Austin.  I might look them up the next time I'm
down that way.
  

    
My first exposure to proto-online media was in BITNET groups over
the Internet in 1983. I found usenet just after the Great Renaming
in 1987. I'm still in touch on social media with many people I met
through those media in the '80s and early '90s, including <jet>.
  

    
00~Thanks (jonl) for alerting me and inviting to this thread.

I see my name mentioned a couple of times here. Thought I would
chime in here.

First off, you may want to check out Jason Scott's excellent
documentary on BBSs of the era called simply "BBS Documentary".

https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary

My interview for the documentary is at:
https://archive.org/details/bbs-20020730-pozar

There is also an interview of myself about The Little Garden by
Marc Weber in 1996 right after we sold TLG.

<puff piece>

Back in 1977 (or so) I purchased a Vector Graphics S-100 kit with
a Tarbell tape interface and a "modern" Z80 instead of the 8080
chips that were out there. I also bought a early modem that ran at
300 baud but with some tricks you could get it to do 600 baud. I
originally wanted this in order to get into our University's IBM
360 computer and not have to go in to submit batch jobs.

And thanks to Randy and Ward's CBBS, among other systems springing
up, I was able to exchange files, email and chat in real time to
distance folks. All of a sudden my community expanded from just my
friends in my home town of Fresno to a world-wide group of nerds.

Fast forward to March of 1984 when I moved to San Francisco to take
the job of being the Chief Engineer of KLOK-FM (was KSFX, KGO-FM).
A couple of years later the station bartered some time for a bunch
of Eagle computers. I still had my S-100 box but that was quickly
replaced with something I didn't have to align the disk drives every
day.

Leo Laporte was one of the DJs at KLOK-FM at that point and a bit
of a nerd as well (Seems he made a career of it.) We bonded a bit
in running to conferences together among other geeky things. One
day, Leo showed me an article about Fidonet. I was ecstatic as Tom's
software radically changed the landscape of BBSs in that there was
a protocol that would exchange mail with each other. I had to run
one and shortly after, I had a personal node up and one dedicated
for KLOK-FM for the listeners. (About this same time I also joined
the Well.) I became a bit of a fanatic about Fidonet and quickly
contacted Tom to talk more about it.

Tom was very welcoming and we spent many hours at his place at on
Buchanan St or chatting at Cafe Flore on Market. I got involved in
trying to establish an organization to support Fidonet that we
called the International Fidonet Association (IFA?). (I remember
pushing back on the name as there was a name space collision with
the International Frisbee Association.)

In joining the well, I got to know Hugh Daniel and his various
friends. This got me introduced with John Gilmore and Erik Fair.
More about these two in a moment.

In order to help with the community and get Fidonet news out, Tom
published a weekly Fidonet Newsletter. As the Well was apart of
USENET and with help from Erik, the comp.org.fidonet newsgroup was
established and I would post Tom's newsletters there. This got me
wondering, with all this FidoNet vs USENET concern, why not create
software that would gateway between UNIX to UNIX Copy Program (UUCP)
mail and USENET conferences and FidoNet's email and echo conferences.
This is where Gilmore comes into the picture again.

Hugh Daniel and John Gilmore had been working with Richard Stallman
to free up UNIX from AT&T. This meant re-writing as much of the
code to not have any AT&T intellectual property in it. One of the
things John was working on was the UUCICO program that was the
transport program for UUCP. UUCICO ran a proprietary protocol (called
"G"), among others, to dial up other UUCP-enabled sites to exchange
mail and USENET. Both USENET and FidoNet were store-and-forward
networks over dial-up phone lines.

John's work uncovered a clone of UUCICO that someone wrote called
UUSLAVE. John spent a bunch of time reverse engineering Protocol G
to get UUSLAVE to work with it. I took John's code and ported it
to MicroSoft C and coded it to support the FOSSIL serial port
drivers.

So now MSDOS boxes could exchange UUCP-style mail but the format
and addressing schemes for UUCP were totally different than Fidonet.
This meant that we had to come up with programs that would convert
UUCP to FidoNet mail files. As I knew Tom, he gave me the source
for reading and creating Fidonet mail. UUCP used an open standard
for mail called RFC-822 and used RFC-1036 for USENET. A bunch of
time was spent with two other friends, John Galvin and Garry Paxinos
to create these conversion programs. Lots of testing and long
distance calls later as well as a long story working with SRI to
get a domain name and mapping the Fidonet Zone:Net/Node addressing
scheme to a domain name, we came out with the package called UFGATE
that BBS operators could run on their Fidonet BBSs and exchange
mail with UUCP hosts.

A bunch of FidoNet nodes used UFGATE or the following clones of
UFGATE for other BBSs. This caused all sort of hue and cry by
UUCP/USENET folks saying we were polluting their net with machines
that didn't run "real" operating systems. We just ignored that as
there was a sizable number of Fidonet and UUCP system operators
that wanted these gateways.

Enter Randy Bush, whom Tom mentioned in his posts. Randy wanted
everyone connected at that time (as we all did) but he had the
contacts at universities. There were a couple of universities in
South Africa that were blocked for exchanging email with other
countries due to our sanctions against South Africa on apartheid.
We didn't feel that isolating communications for a country was going
to help in the matter. In fact, we felt the opposite as it just
creates an echo chamber for the local countries policies. Randy
took UFGATE and set up a covert pipe between these universities and
Fidonet so they could get out. At this same time, I established a
UUCP connection with Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL) to
exchange mail and USENET. LLNL was happy as they had a back door
to exchange mail with their colleges in South Africa. So all of
LLNL' mail for South Africa was going through my little MS-DOS
(FidoNet) and UNIX (ESIX) computers I had at home.

Apartheid went and the Internet came. The landscape changed again.

Of course, there are way more stories here.

Now if you want to hear about The Little Garden...
</puff piece>
  

    
I loved the restaurant!
  

    
Thanks for joining us, Tim!
  

    
> Leo Laporte was one of the DJs at KLOK-FM at that point and a bit

Wow, I had no idea where he came from.

I also liked The Little Garden, it was near to my house and the
collection of "vintage" business cards was pretty amazing.  I went to
a few lunches/dinners there were 6 or 12 of us just said how many
vegetarian and how many not people were in the group.  Moved to
walking distance around the time they changed owners and closed down.

When I joined the EFF, I'm not sure I knew that the well existed or
what it was.  I was a SJG customer and involved, in, uh, somewhat
possibly not legal use of phone lines, but I felt compelled to join:

<https://www.flickr.com/photos/allartburns/8036144161/in/dateposted-public/>
  

    
I'll contribute two short things, from the early '90s when I was
discovering online life. First, my dial-up list from '93.

<img src="https://people.well.com/user/jnfr/misc/dial-up.jpg";>

I was a political organizer in the '80s, and those connections
continued somewhat onto the Internet as I discovered it. I don't
recall there being much useful political organizing though, since so
many of us weren't online yet, or were actually anti-tech to various
degrees. Of course now, organizing online is radically different
because of the expanded communication abilities we all have.

The second thing is my memory, also from around that time, of using
the Well's connection to the BARRNet gateway (I think that was the
name) to go onto the Internet of that time and having to agree to
never commit any commercial activity while in the system. It was
forbidden.

Oh, and one other small memory that reminds me of how accessing the
riches of the Internet was also incredibly frustrating when using a
800 or 1200 baud modem: I could use gopher to look through the
Smithsonian archives directly - they were rapidly digitizing their
photo collection for example - but I couldn't afford the time it
would take to actually download any pictures at 1200 baud when the
pics were megabytes of data. I was paying long-distance charges and
also per-hour charges to use the Well, and I could see all the
digital photos were there but it was too expensive to access them.
  

    
Let's jump briefly ahead to the Well's Medieval times, when we were briefly
the property of the late Bruce Katz:

<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/02/business/bruce-katz-dead.html>

I recall meeting him at a Well gathering. My impression of him throughout
his tenure was one of a rich, game and befuddled guy who wanted to make the
Well a big-time thing, somehow. There was talk of franchises, regional
Wells, things not quite hare-brained but pretty scattershot.
  

    

Cyber Scouts..
  

    
I still have my "You own your own fucking words" New York WELL
t-shirt. 
  

    
<https://people.well.com/user/jnfr/96picnic/yoyofuck.jpg>
  

    
Figuring that the topic is about the book, it arrived last night
at 7:30 and I am half way through it. I am very happy to see FidoNet's
history get some ink here. It impacted so many folks and defiantly
had an impact on the online culture, and as Barlow coined "meat-space".

Thank you Kevin for dedicating a chapter to it.
  

    
tomj, pozar, great to hear your comments and reflections here.

This topic also reminded me of Dave Hughes' writings online.
  

    
Kevin ...

Thank you for the effort you put into this book.  Of course, the
details go much further than what a single book can contain. It
would take volumes to just cover FidoNet's history.  But you touched
on many of the pain points that, frankly, I had forgotten about and
shouldn't such as Lisa Downing's alienation at FidoCon.

Thanks again... Tim
  

    
Building on <tomj> and <pozar>'s comments about Fido in South Africa
in <35> and <60>: it's fascinating to see how quickly Fido spread
beyond the United States (and out of view of most folks living in
the US.) By my count, the number of nodes in the US declined quickly
after 1995 but there were huge components of the network that
continued to grow and thrive in Europe and Asia for years after. 

As a result, the cultural meaning of FidoNet is very different in
other places, such as former Soviet states. There is a lot of
evidence of this out on the public Web but it is not in English.
Historian Bo An is doing exciting research about the "CFido" network
in China that, by necessity, used a variant of the Fido software
that supported a Chinese character encoding.

One way to get a sense of these branching histories by running their
respective Wikipedia pages through Google Translate (these URLs look
funky on Engaged but they should work when you click on them):
- Russian:
<https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B5%D1%82>
- Chinese:
<https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E6%83%A0%E5%A4%9A%E7%BD%91>

So, yeah! We really do need a whole book on Fido history!
  

    
Thinking back to <jet>'s notes on the USENET archives in <29>. One
funny thing about internet history is that it reveals how much has
already been lost or deleted and how surprising that loss can feel.
We kind of expect things to just stick around but "link rot" is very
real.

The available USENET archives are full of holes but they also make
up one of the most complete records of the early Net that we've got!
There is nothing comparable for Echomail or BITNET, never mind
CompuServe, AOL, or GEnie. And even if you have access to old files
or backup tapes, it may be difficult to recover the messages or
reconstruct the conversations. Plus, there are tricky ethical
questions with some of these systems. What if people were happy to
have their messages vanish into the ether? 

When I think about these digital "afterlives", I often think about
De Digitale Stad (aka DDS or "The Digital City"). It was a popular
local system based in Amsterdam that ran from ~ 1994 to 2001. Super
interesting visual aesthetics. A few years ago, a group of people
reconstructed the DDS using archived data. But instead of connecting
it to the public internet, they built a museum exhibition. Former
users who visited the museum could log on using their old
credentials! 
- Documentation of the revival: <https://reinder.rustema.nl/dds/>
- Waag Futurelab exhibit info:
<https://waag.org/en/project/digital-city-dds/>

Related: the (academic) journal _Internet Histories_ just published
a special issue on "platform death." It's a treasure trove for
anyone interested in what is saved and what is lost from the online
world. It's partially open access so please let me know if you need
help accessing any of the articles:
<https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rint20/6/1-2>

Also related: really cool piece by Avery Dame-Griff using USENET
archives to trace the genealogy of the term "cisgender"
<https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-histor
y/may-2017/tracing-terminology-researching-early-uses-of-cisgender>
  

    
I was one of the first director of operations at Internet Archive.
One of the first things I did was to set up an NNTP server to gather
as much of the USENET conferences we could.  We added that with Henry
Spencer's archives from University of Toronto.  It was searchable
at one point.  I think IA stopped archiving new postings when I
left as there wasn't someone that took up the interest in dealing
with NNTP peers and the social connections you needed to keep those
connections up.  Also the NNTP software was a bit finicky to run.

Knowing Brewster, I expect the archive is still at IA some place
packed away.
  

    
>Leo LaPorte

I appeared on his radio show to tout the WELL, way back in the day. I can't
remember who I went with for that.

Later, Leo said rude stuff about the WELL being nothing but "gassing about
the Grateful Dead."