Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
> I'm also the worst person to ask since my POV was so
> warped,...

But clearly the sysop's POV is key to shaping a given board's culture --
having many BBSs (and sysop s) leads to a sort of cultural diversity. That 
diversity is constrained, of course, in complex ways.

But that's what changes, I think, when we fast-forward to now and see
how the sysop's role in making culture has been transformed and 
automated by the organizations that dominate the "social media" category.

Is that all that "social media" means now?
  

    

<https://www.flickr.com/photos/dgans/52202648538>
<https://www.flickr.com/photos/dgans/52202621036>

Flyers we distributed at Grateful Dead shows in the spring of 1986.
  

    
I got one of those.

For a while I paid for a second phone number in Berkeley so I could relay to
the Well toll-free. Never heard about the phone in Tina's basement.
  

    

tom, this is important:

>  The whole point of BBS boards/conferences/etc is conversation continuity

i think you really nailed it. forums, boards, conferences -- if properly
tended and maintained over time -- imagine a long conversation. (elsewhere
on The Well recently, folks have been discussing whether we should use or
stop using an archive mechanism here which really kills old topics and puts
them out of commission forever, though one can still browse through them.)

who is the beneficiary of a long conversation with continuity? in the case
of BBSs and The Well, the conversationalists were the beneficiaries. maybe
we just failed to monetize that style of conversation properly, and
therefore online conversation has mostly turned into the shallow,
short-term social engagement you posted about above.
  

    
Thanks to <113>, I've been listening to these Future Sound of London
ISDN broadcasts all day. Can't vouch for the accuracy of the
dates/locations but there are a bunch of radio rips up online:
- Rome, 1994 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdEqCCERsdU&t=1854s>
- Netherlands, 1994 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBnopaQpA1Q>
- Manchester, 1995 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWqbV1NAWNc>
  

    
clm wrote:

> But clearly the sysop's POV is key to shaping a given board's
culture 

and

> ... to now and see how the sysop's role in making culture has been
> transformed and  automated by the organizations that dominate the
> "social media" category.

Well, the "sysop" has been eliminated, partly through simply scale,
but by intent of the platform. On forums, it's as BBS's were --
user-centric. Alas, there's no money to be had here (for the
platform).

"Social media" is shorthand for user-contributions concatenated and
massaged in various ways to make streams of posts. It's fine and
even good for "hey what's up with you" but useless for anything
persistent. But truly, not everything needs or should be persistent.

In the BBS days nothing was monetized. Now everything is, indirectly
(ads and stream manipulation). The past wasn't "better", it merely
passed.
  

    
Roundtable and Pennynet, both CB sims, were businesses that charged
for service.  However I think that Jim Penny (and his son nicknamed
"Guido") were mostly doing it to cover costs.  They had two
sixteen-line systems in Houston and another on in Austin.   Even
*getting* two phone lines to a residence was a PITA in Houston in the
late 80s.
  

    
magdalen wrote:

> who is the beneficiary of a long conversation with continuity? 

As you state, the participants....

> maybe we just failed to monetize that style of 
> conversation properly...

... should a/the platform necessarily profit? Certainly CPU and
network costs to operate, but I think the whole thing needs a ground
up rethink. I realize how the world works, I'm just not interested
in that thinking and left the industry long ago, when that model
came to dominate.
  

    
Super interesting to hear about sweeper and picodown. Were these
community-lead efforts? Does anyone have a copy of either program? I
see some references to it, e.g. <inkwell.vue.113.184> and
<inkwell.vue.446.17>, but haven't found a download link.

Switching to an "offline reader" must have totally transformed the
experience of getting online. Yet, it's so easy to forget how
fundamental intermittent / asynchronous connectivity was for the
organization and culture of dial-up networks.

I'm reminded of the recent passing of Mark "Sparky" Herring, 
creator of the ubiquitous QWK message format:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format)>

You can watch an unedited clip of Jason Scott's interview with
Herring on the Internet Archive:
<https://archive.org/details/20021102-bbs-herring>
  

    

tom, perhaps you don't remember me from back in the day, but my posts often
have a soupcon of irony or archness or even snark. 

so no, i was not actually-really proposing that we "failed" to monetize
conversation. just pointing out why these types of conversation are harder
to find nowadays. because they were not monetized and exploited the way
social monetizes and exploits shorter-term convos.
  

    
For those of you unfamiliar with USENET in the 80s, it was a bit like
sweeper.  

Overnight my desktop unix box would download USENET messages at 1200
bps for many hours.  The next day, after I got home from school/work,
I would read newsgroups and post responses.  Those would go out over
the course of the evening to my peer sites and be received by other
USENET sites over the course of the next few hours.

A bit like fidonet but different.  My upstream peers had things like
dedicated T1 lines and could shove messages back and forth 24/7.
  

    

I found the local download store and forward back up to the Well to be too
far from real time logged in, hot, conferencing. While I did on occasion use
Sweeper to download and reply, I seldom found it satisfying to do so after
any delay. In the end, I had some $300 to $400 /month phone bills. CPN and
later Telnet over civilian commercial internet were a huge relief.

Sweeper was written by a Well member... whom I'm struggling to remember. Was
it <bryan>, the writer of Motet?

As for picodown, dunno.
  

    
jim rutt developed and owned
Sweeper.
  

    
My recollection of picodown was that you could download all the new
posts in your conference list, write responses and upload 'em. It
was very helpful for someone like me who had to dial in and pay long
distance charges - something like $25 an hour. It wasn't the best
experience, and I was happy to find PC Pursuit, then CPN, and
finally Internet access via telnet.
  

    
<tomj> you might be interested in Open Global Mind,
https://openglobalmind.com/ , kickstarted by Jerry Micahlski but the
real amazing person in there is Peter Kaminski. The goal is to
connect people/knowledge towards solving big problems. Old dream as
we saw in this quote from above

"The dream there was for a 'sort of collective memory' -- a
knowledge
medium. Is 'knowledge' intrinstically 'social?' Was this a dream of
social media?"
  

    
>Sounds like picodown?

My script predated that. I did share it with a few folks I knew in
the South Bay wrestling with the same telcom tariffs, most notably
Tom Mandel, so it may have escaped the lab and informed later
efforts. It wasn't very elegant software (which nearly always leads
to better software), but it worked well enough for what it was.
  

    
Thinking about what's happened to sysop's, the longing to rethink it
all, and the mention of Open Global Mind from <140> brings to mind
Kevin's point that the stories we tell ourselves about the past are
often misleadingly incomplete.

This must be true of the stories we tell about the *present*, as well --
largely for the same reasons, I imagine.

So, while the "sysop" has been largely eliminated from our general
awareness, there may be some important 'pockets' of similar 'intent'
to be found, even today. (The Well itself may be a small example)

And I take Open Global Mind to be the sort of project that might have
been done using FidoNet if it had been started back in the day. The
intention behind it is clearly something other than "maximize profits."

It may be that the "intimacy of the modem world" has been overshadowed
more than simply lost. It may still exist, but in small pockets just
beyond general notice.
  

    
I ran a FIDO node for a while - a lot like sweeper in that I would
connect to the remote site, download everything, upload whatever I
had waiting, and log off. Next night, rinse, repeat.
  

    
Talking about sweeper and "long conversations" got me thinking about
how time (or ~temporality~) shapes our experiences with these
different systems. 

The big platforms seem to give us nothing but a perpetual present.
Any time, day or night, you can scroll or swipe a seemingly infinite
stream of posts without interruption. Meanwhile, on a forum, you
will eventually read all the new posts. When you hit the end,
there's nothing to do but wait for someone else to come along and
write you back. 

Many forums also enable you travel back in time by browsing or
searching through old posts. As <tomj> suggested in <118>, that
archive is useful, especially for any community where people are
sharing information and growing knowledge together. But it's also
seems like a way of reminding community members of their shared
history. (Raw material for those stories we tell about ourselves,
<clm>?) Communities need a way to say, "remember when..." 

And I keep thinking about <magdalen>'s observation that long-running
conversations are harder to find today. It seems like forums used to
be the primary format for group communication online. Whether it was
a BBS or a mailing list or, I dunno, Prodigy, the forum structure
was fundamental. Now, at least for the last ten years or so, the
primary format is the infinite feed. 

The Web of the late 90s / early 00s seemed like another key period
of experimentation between conferencing and feeds. I'm reminded of a
great documentary by Michael Stevenson about the creators of
Slashdot, Everything2, and PerlMonks called _Geeks in Cyberspace: A
Story from the Early Web_:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deefSs5Qxz0> 
  

    
An attractive aspect of long asynchronous conversations is that
people have time to read, to reflect, and to compose thoughtful
responses. Much of what I see these days are slapdash reactions and
sight gags.
  

    
> The big platforms seem to give us nothing but a perpetual present.

And on FB, at least as I've experienced it, perpetual anger and
irritation.  I joined FB in the days when you needed a .edu and a
couple of months ago I stopped using it for personal stuff.  My
personal account was well hidden and most of my "friends" were actualy
friends I'd invite to BBQ.  A few months ago, however, many of them
started being really mean and insensitive in ways they never would in
person.  At the level of my almost posting "would you to talk at each
other like that at one of my BBQs?"

But I didn't.  I walked away.  The "perpetual present" wasn't fun at
all while Dotard was POTUS and I unfriended/unfollowed a lot of people
in those four years.  Including people I met on the well in the
mid-90s.

There are a small handful of people on the well who really irritate me
but I have them on bozo lists in conferences where I am not a host.
This makes my time on the well actually pleasant for the most part.
  

    
Hi Kevin:

I just kindled your book and look forward to reading it.  

I was around for a fair bit of pre-internet history and am glad to
see a book on it.  I did a series of interviews with another writer
about 18 months ago, the book hasn't yet surfaced, hope it does!  He
was more focused on the timesharing commercial services (The Source,
CompuServe, Genie, Prodigy, etc) rather than the BBS world.  I see
your book covers both.

I went to work at The Source in December of 1980 and did various
things there in my 20 or so months including regional sales manager,
director of market research, director of application software
development, and finally what today would be called product manager
for about half of the The Source's offerings.   

I personally designed the 2nd generation email and bulletin board
systems that we needed as me migrated off of Dialcom to our own
systems.  As head of applications software development I managed the
porting of all 800 programs on the Source from Dialcom's hacked
version of an older Prime Computer's OS to the current official
version of PrimeOS. 

I was also the one who created the User Publishing offering, perhaps
the first commercial "blog" type offering.  There had been a small
group of "wildcat" folks who had created some rudimentary software
for something like blogging. Like The WELL, The Source had some
ability for users to write and run software.  One of them was Dave
Hughes, an early WELL stalwart and a very interesting character -
and character he was!  

I flew Dave and four other prominent wildcatters to Source HQ in
Northern VA and concluded that they were really on to something.

So in my spare time I rewrote the user-created software in a more
professional and supportable fashion and talked The SOURCE bosses
into letting me offer significant royalties to the authors.  It was
a pretty big success.  

I was also the co-product manager for Participate, a precursor in
some ways to social media, created by Harry Stevens, a college
professor.  There is, alas, nothing I can find online about it.  I
recently posted a query about "Participate" on the "I Was Online
Before You Were Born" Facebook Group, a hangout for the online OGs,
looking for a copy of the documentation or at least a detailed
description of the quite unusual Participate functionality (as I
vaguely recall it).  Alas, nobody had anything.  

Anyway got to run, several more ancient history details later.  
  

    
>slashdot

I did a pretty interesting podcast episode with Rob Malda about the
history of Slashdot.  

https://www.jimruttshow.com/currents-rob-malda/
  

    
Thanks. Looks interesting.

> Communities need a way to say, "remember when..."

Indeed. Here, I think the concept of "Communities of Practice" might be
important (<choco> would know better than I would). Because it seems to
me that the "why" and "how" (the fitness to purpose) of community memory
should depend greatly on what the community is all about -- what is it
"doing?" -- what is its "practice?"

> Now, at least for the last ten years or so, the
> primary format is the infinite feed.

I wonder if we have this impression because of all the media attention
given to the 'dominant' players -- like twitter, FB, WhatsApp, etc.

Perhaps the question is what do we mean by 'primary' or 'dominant?'
Is it based on who gets more media exposure (and has more political
impact)? Or is it based on aggregate user-time spent in each format?
(Including private spaces?)
  

    
I do think this idea of an infinite feed, vs conversation, is an
important difference between attention as a commodity vs community -
hopefully not as a commodity.