+A PRAYER FOR THE PART-TIME BBS
+
+Sometimes, there are aspects of history that are so obscure, so unusual,
+that they are forgotten even by people who were a part of that history.
+In the sphere of technology, you will often have the case of people being
+faced with a problem so easily overcome in later years that the fact that
+the problem ever existed will be buried in distant memory. An easy example
+is modem speed; in a world where the entire contents of an Apple Floppy
+Disk can be downloaded in one second, more and more people will forget
+how truly slow and time-consuming the process of downloading text at 300
+baud was. And, sadly, many people will not have learned the art of
+compressing thoughts and communication to make that 300 baud relate the
+most information in the shortest amount of time.
+
+
+But as the world barrels forward and we move to hazy memory the times
+of dedicated telephone lines running dial-up Bulletin Board Systems,
+with their single-user capability and their local, town or county-based
+reach, let us not forget the most weak, the most easily-missed and
+perhaps bravest of all of them.
+
+
+I speak of the part-time BBS.
+
+
+Consider
+this list
+of Bulletin Board Systems scattered throughout the country. Lacking a
+proper date stamp, it's hard to discern when this list was created.
+BBSes running at 2400 baud co-mingle with a "38.4k" BBS, which is very
+likely a misprint or an unbackable brag. More likely, there are 19.2k
+BBSes, which puts the date somewhere in the range of 1989-1990. In this
+list, you see a nice cross-section of the types of BBSes from that
+period. I could spend an entire day describing all the small social
+quirks being shown in this list, from the illiterate youth of the
+"Blak Sabbath BBS!" to the staid, no doubt for-pay online service-wannabe
+of "John's House" with its 300-meg drive and "PC relayed" "Adult"
+aspects. But look closer at three of these listed systems: The
+"Spider's Web", the "Master Powers", and the "Fantasy Zone".
+
+
+These three systems have a datum that does not even warrant its own
+column: Their hours of operation.
+
+
+Buying a home computer was an extremely expensive proposition by most
+standards in the 1980's. While for some folks the choice to buy a
+computer could be done with the same cavalier attitude of buying,
+say, a
+cross-country plane ticket, the fact remained that it was
+often a long-fought battle by a young member of the family convincing
+his or her parents that this large amount of money was worth it
+for the piece of plastic and wire it got them. Having won that battle
+and perhaps having earned the purchase of an inexpensive modem sometime
+afterwards, it was that more unlikely parents would shell out the
+extra money for a second phone line. This would mean that the young
+BBSer would have to use the family phone line starting late into the
+night, after everyone else had gone to sleep, staying up and typing
+as quietly as possible so as not to wake anyone. In many ways, this
+was a good situation: the BBSes weren't so busy that late, and the
+BBSer was free to write and interact on the boards with a gusto and
+profanity-laden robustness they wouldn't otherwise achieve with parents
+or siblings nosing in.
+
+
+But as anyone who spent a lot of time cruising the BBSes knows, the
+real power didn't belong to those who just dialed in and posted messages,
+or even those who uploaded many files and earned higher user levels
+or greater respect. The true power lay with the SysOps, the System
+Operators who ran the BBSes themselves off dedicated phone lines and
+who could grant access to whatever sections they wished, not to mention
+take it away on a whim. If you were a SysOp, the world came to you,
+not the other way around, and you could lie back and take it easy
+while the messages, files, and respect came pouring in. Of course, if
+you didn't put any work into your BBS, were unusually cruel, or
+simply lacked the
+fundamental
+temperament
+to run a BBS properly, then no one would call you. But that's a
+fact you would have plenty of time to learn about after you became
+a SysOp.
+
+
+Unlike today, where competition and innovation towards the use of
+the telephone system means that getting a second phone line is neither
+a major difficulty or a social aberration (and, in fact, might even
+be considered a necessity), it was an unusual thing to have multiple
+telephone lines in a house, and seemingly expensive. Again, the
+same parents who didn't think twice about dropping $1200 for a home
+computer wouldn't blink at the additional expense of a second
+telephone line, but for some kids it was a battle they simply
+could not win.
+
+
+So what was left to you if you wanted the power of being a BBS
+SysOp, wanted so badly to run a board and be the master of your
+own user list, but didn't have the required dedicated telephone
+line to run it? Well, you could wait until everyone was asleep,
+turn on the BBS program on your computer, and then wake up before
+everyone else did to turn off the computer. Thus, the era of
+the part-time BBS began.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
diff --git a/textfiles.com/thoughts/speech.txt b/textfiles.com/thoughts/speech.txt
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..190d151e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/textfiles.com/thoughts/speech.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,751 @@
+
+ * Introduction, Who the Hell am I? and Welcome
+
+ Hello, everyone. And thank you for attending.
+
+ My name is Jason Scott, and I am the administrator of a site called
+ TEXTFILES.COM, which is dedicated, as the name suggests, to textfiles.
+ Originally the site was concentrating on textfiles of the BBS world of
+ the early to mid 1980's, but over the course of the last year the
+ mission expanded and there's now text from the early 60's all the way
+ up to earlier this year.
+
+ In relation to what DEFCON is about, I am probably most known for being
+ the original Sysop of The Works BBS in 914, NY, from 1986 through 1988,
+ before handing it over to Dave Ferret, who ran it for a number of years
+ afterwards. In both cases, the BBS was known for being dedicated to
+ textfiles-only, and boasted, pretty inaccurately, as being the largest
+ collection of textfiles in the country. At the very least, I'm pretty
+ sure we were in the top 10.
+
+ The purpose of my talk this morning is to cover a number of related subjects.
+
+ I'd like to give an introduction to what I'm doing with the textfiles.com site,
+ to talk about what role textfiles have played in the last 20 to 30 years, and
+ to wax nostalgic about 1980's BBS history, which I and at least some of you know
+ pretty intimately, at least from how we experienced it. With some luck, it'll
+ be cohesive and interesting, although I make no promises.
+
+ * Who are All of You?
+
+ So I can know more about who I'm speaking to, I'd like to ask a couple
+ questions.
+
+ There's a big difference between a computer and a computer with a modem,
+ so I'd like to call out some years starting back from 1995. If you had a
+ computer with a modem, raise your hands, and take them down when I go
+ past the year you got the modem.
+
+ And just for my own curiosity, I'll throw out a few machine names, and
+ you can raise your hand if the computer you had with a modem was... an
+ Apple II? TRS-80? Atari? Amiga? IBM PC?
+
+ Thanks.
+
+ * Why TEXTFILES.COM?
+
+ TEXTFILES.COM is my primary project these days, and is taking an awful lot of
+ time to compile. Like similar grandiose projects, I have plans for the site far
+ beyond what it currently has, but I think it's coming along well, and it was
+ important to me to open the site before I was done, so others could use it.
+
+ The reason I started textfiles.com was that last year I suddenly wondered
+ what had happened to some of the people I'd known in my youth, people who'd
+ had a big influence on who I am today, but who in many cases I'd never actually
+ met. They ran Bulletin Boards all over the country, or they'd posted messages
+ and files to those BBSes, or they'd generally earned some sort of reputation that
+ I got wind of.
+
+ By this time I'd grown pretty accustomed to search engines, and if I could find
+ it out there, ONE of the search engines would be able to help me. I figured that
+ hey, this all happened at least 10 years ago, and was pretty amazing stuff, so
+ someone must have had a site out there dedicated to it.
+
+ So, imagine my horror when I started using Hotbot and Altavista and put in names,
+ names that I personally consider major, major influences on my life, on me, and
+ they're just.. not there. Not a mention, not a shout-out, not a word about these
+ places. Sherwood Forest II. The 1985 BBS. The History of K-K00l D00ds. Phido
+ Phreaks. Count Nibble and Countlegger. It was like this whole world I'd grown up
+ in had not only disappeared, but disappeared without a trace.
+
+ That really bothered me. So I started assembling my own collection of 5 1/4"
+ floppies, which I'd had in a box shoved into one of my closets, and began
+ re-assembling my textfile collection. Since then, the site now houses over 18,000
+ textfiles spanning 30 years, and I've got something in the range of 40,000
+ more textfiles to sort through and add.
+
+ So this brings up the question of my motivations for taking on such a mammoth
+ project, especially one of such an obscure nature.
+
+ * Why Do You Even Care?
+
+ Some people might say "Why do you even care?" and that's a somewhat hard question
+ to answer in the few short words they want you to answer in. I could have seen
+ that nothing showed up on Altavista, said "Gee, that sucks!" and gone on my
+ merry way. But instead I've put months of work into the site, and won't be
+ slowing down anytime soon.
+
+ So, I've given some thought to it and I think I care on three specific levels,
+ with some other reasons thrown in as well.
+
+ The first is that I'm trying to recapture my childhood. This is something a lot
+ of people do, whether they buy a car they'd always dreamed of, or they travel
+ back to the old neighborhood to see how things have changed (or they haven't).
+ In my case I'm very lucky because so much of my childhood was spent online, I
+ have access to logs and files and I can pull those up and be right back in my
+ house, trying to post some inane thing so that my call-post ratio is where it
+ has to be to download the next g-file someone wrote about trashing.
+
+ The second is that the width and breadth of these files from all sorts of places
+ means that I can piece together a pretty solid view of a very specific and
+ fascinating culture, the BBS scene of the 1980's. A lot of subcultures aren't
+ readily able to be studied or collected because they didn't leave behind a lot
+ in the way of writings or pictures or other collectable artifacts, and they
+ certainly didn't leave them in a handy digital format. The opportunity to
+ present a really cohesive view of this culture, especially one I was part of,
+ gets me through some of the more discouraging times.
+
+ The third is that I love to read, and I derive a lot of entertainment out of
+ reading different styles of writing, especially when it's all got a central
+ theme to it. By working on the site, I'm reading many thousands of files written
+ across lots of time and space, and the cross-currents and ideas presented
+ make it more alive and engaging to me that a single work of fiction or
+ some novel I picked up at the bookstore.
+
+ So between these different levels, facing the thousands of files I have to sift
+ through in a day's work on the site, I find a lot of energy to draw from.
+ I think what I'm doing is really worthwhile, and renewed inspirations keep
+ appearing every time I sift through a new directory.
+
+ * The Minefield of History
+
+ So with all that in mind, I'd like to travel back to the age of the 1980's,
+ which to some was a golden age and to others a complete hell. Slow modems,
+ 40 column versus 80 column computers, unbelievable expensive machines, but
+ in all of that, looking back, a unique sense of exploring, of doing something
+ new, that just hooking a modem up to a phone brought you into a whole new
+ world.
+
+ One Caveat: When I talk about history, especially living history, history
+ that many of you experienced, I'm entering a minefield. And I understand
+ that going in. But I do want to stress that this is MY history, how >I<
+ experienced the 1980's, and it would be both presumptuous and stupid on
+ my part to think that every story I heard was true, that every event
+ as I percieved it is what actually went down. We're talking about text
+ here, and text can be modified or faked. But on the whole, I think I got
+ a pretty good sense of what went on. I expect corrections to happen. That's
+ the nature of learning.
+
+ * What Are Textfiles?
+
+ Since the word "textfiles" is a little general, perhaps I should talk
+ about what I mean when I use the term. Obviously, any file written in ASCII
+ could be considered a "textfile", whether it be source code, or message logs,
+ or data files. I mean, basically, if it uses ASCII, it's a textfile, right?
+
+ But in the purest sense, I'm talking about those files that were companion pieces
+ to BBS messages. You created a textfile if you had an idea or concept that was so
+ important, so needful of nationwide distribution, that instead of just posting
+ it on a specific sub-board on a specific BBS, where it might be recycled out or
+ never read by your full potential audience, you uploaded it to the file section.
+ There, it'd have a title applied to it that indicated what you could read about
+ in the file, and it would be downloaded by people who could upload it to other
+ BBSes, and then the information would spread everywhere.
+
+ As the number of these important files increased, more and more BBSes would
+ have special textfile sections, and you could be reasonably assured that if
+ the BBS you were checking out mentioned its "G-file" section, you could find
+ probably one or two dozen interesting textfiles, usually the same you'd find
+ on a lot of other BBSes.
+
+ Textfiles were often called "G-philes", with a ph instead of a f, which appears
+ to date back to GBBS software for the Apple II, which had an information
+ section where SysOps were supposed to have system statistics or BBS news or the
+ like. The software called them 'General Files'. I think this is the root of the
+ term G-philes, unless someone has another story.
+
+ With room for only a few G-files on your BBS, Sysops would tend to go for the
+ greatest hits, the files that told you right away the cool way to get around
+ something, or which came with some sort of impressive pedigree, that promised
+ elite and impressive knowledge in just a few paragraphs.
+
+ While I'd like to claim that my BBS was one of the first to concentrate soley
+ on textfiles, I know that this wasn't the case. A lot of BBSes had really
+ incredible textfile collections, with separations by topic or writer or group,
+ and they made these dozens of files available to anyone who connected to the
+ BBS.
+
+ Over time, the nature of textfiles has changed in one major way:
+
+ People determined that the textfiles they were writing would have a
+ greater chance of not being lost or corrupted or forgotten if they banded
+ together and put together a lot of files as a "zine". I'm thinking of
+ PHRACK, LOD Technical Journal, and the eventual dozens and dozens of
+ electronic magazines, or e-zines, that you can find in a wide variety of
+ sources, including my site. Along this same way of thinking you saw the rise
+ of textfile-writing groups, such as Cult of the Dead Cow, Milk, UxU, and
+ even more dozens that I'd run out of time talking about if I'd list them all.
+
+ But at the heart of this change was the same idea. Have a concept or piece
+ of information you wanted to spread to the world, write a textfile about it,
+ start uploading it as fast as you could to as many BBSes as you had access
+ to.
+
+ * The "Classic" Textfile
+
+ Let's say you'd logged into the DEFCON BBS, running on an Apple II with 64k
+ of memory, and, because they always want to be cutting edge, they'd paid the
+ $600-$800 for a 9600 baud modem. So these guys were elite, you knew that
+ the minute you logged on and saw that massive application for access. You
+ filled it out, the sysop validated you online because he was watching
+ Wargames on his VCR and saw you logged in.
+
+ So of course you completely ignore the message base, and go right to the file
+ section, and started reading textfiles. What was the classic kind of textfile
+ you'd see?
+
+ I have no hard evidence about where the "classic" style of textfile started,
+ although I'm entertaining a few theories. But I think a lot of people besides
+ myself would recognize the classic, typical textfile. The style, for better
+ or worse, has really stood the test of time. It might just be people referencing
+ files that came before them, but 17 years of a similar style is pretty
+ impressive no matter how you look at it.
+
+ The classic textfile usually has a box made up on equal signs or another
+ set of characters, with the title of the textfile and the pseudonym of the
+ author inside. The title box might also have any other introductions,
+ thank yous, or ads for the BBS that the author was affiliated with, or
+ wanted to be affiliated with.
+
+ If the file talks about or encourages any sort of illegal or questionable
+ act, you're treated to a hasilty-written or oddly constructive disclaimer
+ about how the author will not be held responsible for whatever henious
+ amount of damage you do to yourself or people around you. I don't know of
+ any case where the legality of this disclaimer had to hold up in court,
+ but on the other hand if there wasn't a court case that I can recall, it
+ might be some sort of lucky charm that wards off the police, so in it went.
+ Eventually, people started parodying this disclaimer, so you have disclaimers
+ that say the author takes full responsibility, or that the author is going
+ to be severely disappointed in you when you hurt yourself.
+
+ The actual textfile ranged from a hasilty written, uppercase only
+ sketch of some project or idea or computer system you should explore, with
+ the author either having done this project themselves or taking a wild
+ assed guess as to if it was useful, to a cleverly written, well-spelled and
+ thought out, tutorial where you felt like you were reading a textbook or
+ professionally-written manual. Obviously, the content could be most anything,
+ and so thousands of these textfiles have appeared over the years.
+
+ When the textfile concluded, you often had the author thank people who'd
+ helped him write the file, or ads to call all the bulletin boards the
+ author frequented, and an invitation to send the file to as many places
+ as you could, assuming you didn't change the file. People would often
+ tack on ads for their BBS before sending it along, so some of the more
+ distributed files got pretty chain-letter-like after a while.
+
+ That was the template for the vast majority of "classic" textfiles, although
+ there have been some really crazy variations, with some files being captured BBS
+ messages that were so important that people sent them along with no embellishment
+ at all, and other files which were these out-of-control ASCII Art Masterpieces
+ that made you wonder how they accomplished it.
+
+ * Gotta Start Somewhere
+
+ So where do all these textfiles start? One rule I adhere to when I look into the
+ accepted historical account of how something came to be, is that you can always
+ find an earlier case to draw from. So let me take a stab at that contest.
+
+ * The "Original" Textfile
+
+ To me, the original textfile is this, Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book".
+ When I leaf through this book, which was printed in 1970, I get a very very
+ strong sense that I get reading a classic textfile.
+
+ Abbie's book is chapter after chapter on how to get free medical help,
+ free food, and how to rip off the phone company, supermarkets.. basically,
+ it's a how-to manual on fighting and using the system on your way to revolution.
+ Abbie presents his ideas in a witty style, with lots of examples, lots of
+ encouragement, and from a position where he encourages the whole thing as a
+ big game and the Right Thing to do.
+
+ And when you look over a lot of textfiles that were written, a lot of them
+ take that tack: here's some information I've gotten, it's given me lots of
+ fun, I've benefited from it, and I want you to benefit too. How-to's written
+ by computer telling you how to get by in the world, occasionally at someone
+ else's expense.
+
+ It's probably worth noting that Abbie Hoffman started a small magazine,
+ dedicated to ripping off the phone company and the gas company and whoever
+ you could use to get your message across and get your piece of the system,
+ and that 4-page newsletter was called YIPL, the Youth International Party
+ Line. And when Al Bell, the editor of YIPL, found himself diverging
+ with Abbie, he changed that newsletter to TAP, for the Technological Assistance
+ Party. And from TAP, a massive wealth of textfiles came into the world, many
+ of the articles being copied and posted on BBSes for people to read. So, under
+ this theory, you have Abbie Hoffman as the father of the textfile. Maybe I'll
+ develop that theory more in the future. It's an interesting one.
+
+ Of course, like a lot of the files on my site, the exact information in Steal
+ this Book, who to contact for information, put this slug in this phone, is out of date.
+ It isn't even a place to start to accomplish the same goals put
+ forth when they were first written. But when you read the book, you come
+ away with something different than what was intended when it was created.
+ You get a feel for the turbulent times that it was written in, and if you lived
+ through it, it brings back a flood of memories.
+
+ So let me share some of my memories with you, going over some of the textfiles
+ of the past, and the BBSes that I got them from.
+
+ * Cold Hardwood Floor
+
+ It's the case for me, and I'm sure for a lot of you, that if you sit back and
+ start to browse through the past, through these textfiles, that some very solid
+ sensory memories come flooding back. In my case, my early BBS memories bring
+ back three magic words:
+
+ Cold. Hardwood. Floor.
+
+ I spent so many nights curled up in some blankets in the dining room of my
+ Dad's house, on this hardwood floor that was meant for a dining room table
+ not a computer system. And all I was doing, early into the morning, was
+ connecting to BBS after BBS, keeping all my printouts with lists of other
+ BBSes to call, just collecting all the g-philes I could. If a place hinted
+ that it might have some new ones, I would go right there, trying over and
+ over to get through the busy signals, begging for access in the sysop comments
+ file, just to get access to those files.
+
+ I couldn't tell you when I finally settled on wanting textfiles and textfiles
+ exclusively. I think a lot of it might have been that I didn't have my own
+ Apple II, and a lot of the places that traded games did so for the Apple.
+ However, textfiles I could download with no trouble. It didn't matter if the
+ board was on a C-64, Apple, PC or some obscure UNIX box; if I could find a
+ text section, I could take everything there and know I could at least
+ read it, even if it didn't have relevance to anything else.
+
+ As time went on, my collection grew to the point of needing multiple
+ floppies, and eventually a couple dozen of them. By the time I was 13,
+ I knew I was going to run a BBS, and that it would be dedicated to textfiles.
+ I was going to call it "The Works", named after a Computer Graphics Project at
+ NYU I'd heard about. I started labelling all my textfile floppies "The Works",
+ and would list out what files were on them.
+
+ I think during that initial burst of collection, I amassed something like 4
+ megabytes of textfiles, BBS message captures, chat captures, the usual.
+
+ I'm an incredible packrat; I still have my original computer, a Commodore Pet,
+ in my basement. So when I collected all these files, I've kept the floppies
+ and printouts for what's now over a decade. When it came time to create my
+ own BBS, I called it The Works, ran it on my dad's IBM PC XT with 10 megabytes
+ of disk space split across two 5 megabyte drives, and brought back all those
+ files I'd saved.
+
+ But this gets away from why I was looking for those files in the first place.
+ I rarely used the information in them, and I only seldom traded, because other
+ people I hung out with didn't care as much about textfiles as I did.
+
+ But here's a theory I have based on something that happened a few months ago.
+
+ * (> The Hunt is On.
+
+ I'm one of those people who get distracted by some fascinating
+ aspect of something I'm studying and suddenly I'm dropping everything to find
+ out everything about this aspect. It's one of the reasons I keep referring to
+ my notes, since I have a real tendency to stray.
+
+ Recently, I was working on the Apple II directory on textfiles.com, sorting
+ through the couple dozen Apple II-related files I'd collected, when I
+ decided I really wanted to know more about the Novation Apple Cat Modem.
+ It's an amazing modem, I just can't get enough information on it and I hope
+ to own one some day, but the point is, I just dropped my work on textfiles
+ that night and I had to know about the Novation Apple Cat, and that was that.
+
+ Well, through this search engine and that link, and using dejanews and
+ other tools, I stumbled upon Celestial Haven, Chaven.com, who had shown up
+ on a couple Apple searches I'd done. They mentioned they'd once run on an
+ Apple II, and I figured that was the link. But on a lark, I looked through
+ their FTP site. And to my absolute delight, buried in one of Chaven's directories
+ was an absolutely MASSIVE Apple II Soft Docs archive. Soft Docs are essentially
+ transcribed manuals of pirated games, although of course you get a lot of extra
+ information bunched in there as well. Which groups were active, what they called
+ BBSes, what they thought of the games. You might expect a collection of a dozen
+ or so files, but Chaven had over FIVE HUNDRED!
+
+ It was then that I felt "it" again. "It" was that rush that had
+ hit me so many times when I was a 13-year-old kid peering at some AE line
+ at 2am, and finding directory after directory of textfiles. It was that feeling
+ that you'd stumbled upon an absolute gold mine, that it was your big chance,
+ that they'd left you with the keys to the store and you had an hour before
+ they were going to come back and somehow realize their mistake.
+
+ And that night, a decade and a half later, there I am, happily going through
+ hundreds of files about games I'd never played, absolutely estatic that I'd
+ saved all that history, that I was going to put it somewhere and all those
+ people who'd had Apple IIs and couldn't remember the name of a game they'd
+ loved to play, or who were looking for documentation for some program they
+ were screwing with on their resurrected Apple II system they'd rescued from
+ their parent's attic, were going to find it, quickly, and easily, on
+ textfiles.com. I was up WAY too late that night, but I finished describing
+ all those files, and when I stumbled home, I felt like I could do this
+ forever.
+
+ THAT's just the greatest feeling for me. I think that's what pushed me to
+ collect file after file; I was saving everything, I was becoming their
+ owner and caretaker, I was building a body of work composed of the work of
+ others, but with my own spin on it.
+
+ So let me talk about some of the places I visited while collecting these
+ files.
+
+ * Some BBSes I've Known and the Textfiles They Had
+
+ Through the hundreds of bulletin boards I got the chance to travel through
+ during my teenage years, there were a lot that were just places for me to grab
+ files, and a lot of places that were probably very nice in themselves, but
+ which I was unable to dedicate the time to really get to know.
+
+ A few of the BBSes really touched me, and I bring my memories of them with
+ me today. In all cases, they had textfiles, so I'm not straying too far away, here.
+
+ * The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
+
+ You never forget the first BBS you were a Co-Sysop on, and I had the privilege
+ of being one of several Co-Sysops of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,
+ which was run by a fellow who called himself Mister I/O. It was on an Apple II
+ and we had a great time, although the place was a little small, running on two
+ floppy drives, for a grand total of about 300k of space. It was located in New
+ Jersey, and a couple of times, I came down by Train from New York to meet
+ the Sysop.
+
+ A few months into running the place, I got an excited call from Mister I/O, who
+ told me he was going to be purchasing a 10 meg hard drive! We talked about all
+ the space we'd have for more message boards, for secret user areas, and for
+ a big file section. He renamed the board Outland, and he called himself The
+ Outland, and for quite a while there we had one kicking BBS going on.
+
+ The Outland was a member of the Neon Knights, which were a subset of Metal
+ Communications. I met two of the other Neon Knights at one of the Outland parties,
+ name of The Blade and Metal Communications. At the time, it made no sense to me;
+ two clear metalheads, the whole deal, metal band T-shirts and ripped jeans, jean
+ jackets, and there they were clamoring to get onto the computer and write some
+ rebuttal to some particularly stupid posting. Mister Outland was also a little
+ hard to get a grasp on, this completely clean-cut, quiet guy who absolutely loved
+ nihilistic punk music.
+
+ And what was really something, was how this quiet-reserved guy would write some
+ of the most violent textfiles you could imagine. I'm thinking of his "Kill them
+ Dead!" series, where he wrote such classics as "How to Kill Santa Claus...DEAD!"
+ or "How to Kill the Easter Bunny... DEAD!" And I still remember how one of his
+ files suggested that you should ring on someone's doorbell, ask to use a phone
+ book, and while they fetched it, you would whip out a golf club and tee off
+ in the living room.
+
+ One day, the Outland called me and told me he was taking his BBS down. I asked
+ him why, what was causing him to do this, whether he'd been busted or got in
+ trouble with his parents, or something. But he said he'd looked at the BBS,
+ realized it was popular and thriving and had been that way for a couple years,
+ and that if he took it down before it inevitably started to die off and go
+ downhill, it'd always have been at the top. What do you say to that? That's
+ exactly what he did. He hung out on my BBS for a while afterwards, and then
+ he just stopped being a part of any of it. He'd finished.
+
+ * Utopia BBS
+
+ Utopia BBS was one of those places that I had called looking for textfiles and
+ stuck around for a few months simply because they'd charmed me so much. It was
+ one of three or four affiliated Chicago-Based BBSes that ran off what used to
+ be GBBS: The Glue Ball, the Greek Inn, the Output and the South Pole. I say
+ it "used to" be GBBS because they'd modified the source of the programs so much
+ that it was barely recognizable as being the same framework of other, similar
+ boards. When you called one of these boards, you had absolutely NO idea what
+ was going to happen the minute you got the CONNECT message. Some days, I'd get
+ a long rambling story, and other days I'd get the entire text of a newsweek
+ article on hackers. It'd ask me for my password, then ignore me and keep giving
+ me text. There were times I'd log on three times in a week and get what seemed
+ to be three different BBSes.
+
+ You see something of this spirit with Web pages that use scripts to change around
+ the look of the pages every time you reload, but at 300 baud, 40 columns, all
+ uppercase, it was something to behold.
+
+ In fact, I derived such entertainment from the constantly changing welcome messages
+ from Utopia, that I buffered a collection of them, which are on TEXTFILES.COM and
+ which I count among my top 100 files.
+
+ The art of constantly adding to your BBS program was called "adding mods", and
+ for a nice golden time there, you had BBSes that were trying to attract people
+ by saying they had the latest and greatest Mods, like spinning cursors or
+ weird control characters you could imbed in messages. After a while, this
+ disappeared, especially as BBS programs arrived written in something other
+ than BASIC.
+
+ * Sherwood Forest II
+
+ The BBS that made me really feel like I was part of something great and
+ wonderful was Sherwood Forest II, located in NY. It was run on an Apple II
+ of some sort, and was an extremely active phreak board. It put me in contact
+ with a lot of names that I later saw in the news or in textfiles. It was
+ also the home of Bioc Agent 003, who I consider to be one of the top-flight
+ textfile writers of his time. Again, there are people who might disagree with me,
+ but an awful lot of people who downloaded his Basic Telecommunications
+ Series came away impressed with the quality of his information, the
+ excellence of his spelling and grammar, and his attention to details like
+ citing his sources. BIOC was always adding interesting and unique files
+ to Sherwood Forest II besides his telecommunications series, and I have a lot
+ of them on textfiles.com today. Several are in my top 100.
+
+ Sherwood Forest had several levels. There was, as I recall, level I, II, and
+ III, access, which gave you different amounts of daily login time, and access
+ to different message boards and file areas. Now, I knew that in level III there
+ were textfiles that I just had to get, so I sent in the $10, and a week later, I
+ got an e-mail message that announced I'd achieved level III! I immediately latched
+ onto their textfile section, and took every one.
+
+ Now, this may or may not be true, but I was told by someone who knew the Sysops
+ that I was the only person who didn't use bravura or bluffing and who actually
+ sent in the money for the textfiles.
+
+ When Sherwood Forest II finally went down, and not of its own choice as I heard,
+ it left this very large gap in my BBS list, one which really didn't get filled
+ by anywhere but OSUNY, who, while just as great a place to visit, just didn't
+ have the same feel. It says something that 14 years after I'd last called the
+ place, I could just pull the number out of my head while preparing this speech.
+ 914-359-1517.
+
+ * The Dark Side of the Moon
+
+ To this day, I have trouble trying to tell people what attracted me to the
+ Dark Side of the Moon so much. They had a unique sense of humor, and they
+ always backed up this humor with technical mastery, programming in great
+ features that made the place a joy and a surprise to use. On top of that,
+ they'd had such an interesting community of San Jose teenagers who were
+ contributing files and messages, so every time you called, even daily,
+ there were dozens of new things to read about. It was great.
+
+ When I first got onto the Dark Side of the Moon, and I don't know how I found out about
+ the place (it was probably from a textfile), I knew something weird was up. On the
+ face of it, it appeared to be an ASCII Express Line, except they'd modified
+ the code to act slightly different. What I found out later was that they'd
+ rewritten the ASCII Express interface from scratch, so you were actually in
+ their own creation, completely. Because of that, there were all sorts of weird
+ commands you could enter, and a lot more flexibility in downloading files,
+ and other cool features.
+
+ When the Dark Side announced that they were going to switch to a BBS, I was
+ really, honestly heartbroken. I thought that this precious community, this
+ group of people who could only express themselves through the most basic
+ of file uploading/downloading, were going to be ruined by the addition of all
+ the cruft that a BBS adds to the experience.
+
+ I shouldn't have worried, because the software they wrote, Waffle, was just
+ as fun and expandable and powerful as the work they'd done on the rewritten AE
+ line. Now you had whole message bases of neat things going on, and all the same
+ with the AE workalike, which became the file system.
+
+ I'll give you a quick example of the idiosyncratic humor the place had that
+ attracted me to it. Due to a dead battery in the Apple's clock card, the
+ Dark Side's clock was perennially stuck at 6:29pm. Every message posted, every
+ login and logoff, everything happened at 6:29pm. After a while, you got used
+ to it. You had no idea how many people logged in in a day because everyone came
+ and went in the same 1 minute period. Well, eventually this got fixed, and
+ people started to complain; they'd gotten USED to the 6:29pm time, and some even
+ speculated that 6:30pm was the end of the world, and the Dark Side had saved them.
+ So the sysops quickly added in the BATMAN command, which, when you typed it in,
+ responded "Batman!" and set all the messages and logins back to 6:29pm, where they
+ belonged.
+
+ The Dark Side was also home to Anarchy Incorporated, one of the more
+ prolific textfile-writing groups of the time, many of whose files were dedicated
+ the the torture, harassment, and assault of one Matt Ackerett, who probably
+ didn't really exist. Possibly. Maybe.
+
+ So for me, by saving the textfiles from all these BBSes, I was doing a part
+ to save these stories, and I think the story of these BBSes is one that
+ should be told. Another project. Speaking of projects...
+
+ * 100 Textfiles
+
+ I soon discovered when I got up past 10,000 textfiles on the site that
+ nobody knew what files were worth looking at and which ones were just there
+ for me to be complete. So I started assembling a top 100 section, where
+ people could quickly see what I was talking about.
+
+ That of course led to the question "What ARE the canonical textfiles?" and
+ again, choosing that, especially when you're one guy, is just asking for it.
+ As it were, I choose files that either everyone had, or files which I thought
+ best represented a certain genre. Not everyone will agree with me, but it
+ was tough enough to come up with a solid 100, and I think it was OK.
+
+ * It's Just Getting Better
+
+ So where do I go from here?
+
+ What I think that I'm looking for, realistic or not, is some sort of curtain
+ call, some sort of forum where one by one, these heroes and influences of my
+ teenage years step out, say "Hello, I was Rabid Rasta, I wrote the Real Pirate's
+ Guide, thank you." and then I'd get a chance to ask and know all the things I
+ just have to guess at right now. I'd know who they were, what they were
+ up to, what was going on when they wrote it.
+
+ By putting textfiles.com up, with a nice clear name and a solid mission, I'm
+ hoping to be a lightning rod for people who were a part of that time to weigh in
+ with what they were going through back then, to tell the other story, the story
+ I have to guess at.
+
+ That's already happening, which makes me really delighted. Just recently, I
+ got letters from The Reflex, who provided me with his entire output, and the
+ same from Thomas Covenant of the Phido Phreaks. They described their files as
+ they saw them, and I know that they've created web pages where they talk about
+ the past, and how they felt as they lived through that time.
+
+ Nothing makes me happier than when people write in, who were there, people
+ who I only knew because of their name on this file or that, who have found the
+ site and are deriving so much joy from seeing their work available to everyone
+ again.
+
+ But let me clear up one misconception. People have sometimes gotten the
+ impression that being as interested as I am in the past, that I think the present
+ sucks.
+
+ In fact, I get a lot of mail about that subject. People tell me how great things
+ were back then and now they're nothing like that. How we've lost the sense of
+ community, how we've lost all the innocence and love that we had back then.
+
+ Well, I just don't agree.
+
+ Subcultures interest me; and when I go out onto the Net these days I see neat
+ subcultures popping up left and right. Let me list a few quick ones.
+
+ Overclockers, who take CPUs, throw way too much juice into them, attach insane
+ cooling systems to them, and get performance the CPUs were never meant to
+ achieve.
+
+ Arcade Emulation, which went from one or two neat programs to being a small
+ cottage industry these days, with the attention of the big boys, and many,
+ many web pages and people dedicated to all level of interest about recreating
+ or reviving the arcade games of the last 20 years.
+
+ Even 3-D multiplayer games have become a formidable community, with the revival
+ of the classic "finger" command to let all the different companies let people
+ know what they're up to, what's on their minds, and a large infrastructure of
+ web pages to discuss all aspects of the games, along with programming additions
+ created by people completely unaffiliated with the game companies.
+
+ These "scenes" are thriving, active communities with producers, complainers,
+ authorities, and hangouts spread across different web pages. I consider them
+ just as vibrant as what I remember BBSes to be back when I was trying over
+ and over to log on through a busy signal that didn't go away until late at
+ night. The main difference is speed and graphics. Before you had to tell people
+ in text what you were up to, now you can take a picture and show them. Maybe
+ it's a little less literary, but now you know what people are talking about.
+
+ Another thing that makes it all wonderful for me is how much technology has
+ grown from that time. It took me years and years to collect my textfiles
+ for the site; now people can download the entire site in the matter of an
+ afternoon. When my energy level's low, I just do a tail -f on the textfiles
+ web site log; there, constantly, 24 hours a day, I can see people grabbing
+ file after files.
+
+ In fact, I have another demonstration of the greatness of the present right
+ here. I've taken the 100 top textfiles, compressed them onto a .zip archive,
+ and thrown them onto these floppies. Every person I give a simple floppy
+ to gets the cream of the textfiles.com crop, along with my review of the
+ files and the original text of this speech. How can you beat that? I'll give
+ these disks away to whoever wants them at the end of my talk.
+
+ Speaking of which, I'd like to wrap up, then open the floor for any questions
+ or comments you all might have. But let me speak of one more important thing.
+
+ * The Hammer
+
+ In trying to build textfiles.com, I'm attempting to build a site that will have
+ files from the BBS world of the 1980's, along with historical essays written
+ by people who were there, as well as what I call "guided tours", where you can
+ read about some interesting facet of that time, such as cracking games or
+ trashing or the rise of different textfile groups, and then get links to file
+ that demonstrate the points being made in the tour. It's very ambitious, and
+ as I said, I'm spending a lot of time on this project, many hours, and the
+ success even so far has been wonderful. Thousands of people connect to the site
+ a day now, and my mailbox is filled with accolades and thank yous.
+
+ But even in the short period of time I've had the site up, I'm already
+ starting to come into contact with forces that I'd long forgotten about, which
+ scared me when I knew them as a teenager, and which still, to a greater
+ degree, scare me now, because I have much more to lose now.
+
+ For the sake of brevity, I call these forces "The Hammer".
+
+ The hammer, to me, is the power of popular opinion and the government, when it's
+ faced with something that has been characterized as different, or dangerous, or
+ otherwise something that should be "dealt with". Anyone who has seen these forces
+ in action over the past few decades knows how arbitrary and how destructive
+ they can be. People you might have heard about or even know personally have their
+ lives ripped up or ruined for years on end, while others who are standing right
+ next to them just get a spectacular show and little else.
+
+ The shadow of the hammer shows up when you hear the press talk about someone or
+ something being dangerous, or unsafe, or about to ruin the social order, or whatever
+ clever turns of phrase they can come up with. The hammer rises when popular
+ opinion, whether it actually exists or if it's been reported as such, says that
+ "SOMETHING MUST BE DONE", and the hammer comes down when those in power step in
+ to crush whatever they consider a part of the disease that's caused this dangerous
+ thing to happen.
+
+ Textfiles.com chronicles the thousands of textfiles written during the 1980's,
+ textfiles that weren't held back by what people consider the usual standards of
+ propriety, correctness, or other limits. This is a generation saying what they
+ want, about who or what they want, and saying it in whatever fashion they thought
+ they needed to to get the message across.
+
+ The side-effect of this is that textfiles.com contains not only inspiring stories
+ of technical marvels and some truly wonderful examples of writers reaching out
+ to a new audience, but also calls for revolution, destruction, racism, and
+ revenge that in many cases even the original writers wish to distance themselves
+ from. This is the nature of being a library or an archive; if you start trying
+ to decide what in history should be saved and what should be hidden forever,
+ you put yourself in the role of censor, and that role is abhorrent to me.
+
+ It is way too easy for the population at large to look at files on my site out
+ of context and decide that these are my opinions and that these are files I want
+ people to implement or experiment with. And I want to state that this is not the
+ case. I am in the role of librarian; I am saving a large body of texts that I
+ think are a vital link in understanding the roles that computers have taken in
+ our lives.
+
+ Already, there is a near constant call to regulate content on the Internet, and
+ I've seen laws go by that would make the housing of content such as that found on
+ textfiles.com to be a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison. People have
+ gone to court and jail over some of these textfiles. And yes, that scares me,
+ because it means that I could feel the shadow of the hammer any day now.
+
+ So, thanks to the donations of space and effort by some wonderful people,
+ textfiles.com is now mirrored nationwide, and I hope to add even more mirrors in
+ the coming months. I believe in what I'm doing, and I get mail all the time
+ from people who believe in what I'm doing as well.
+
+ But my warnings aren't just for me.
+
+ Every few years, it becomes fashionable to attack and go after the youth who
+ show up to something like Defcon, and in the process, a lot of people are hurt.
+ The hammer comes crashing down, satisfying the calls to "do something, do anything"
+ and a lot of unnecessary heartbreak and terror follows. If you look back over
+ the years, it's an almost rhythmic pattern, and who knows when it will happen again.
+ But it will happen again, and I want everyone listening to me who is currently
+ wrapped up in the details of one-upmanship or trying to find some way, any way
+ to get noticed by the world, to step back every once in a while, look at the big
+ picture, and keep backups of the things that mean something to you, including
+ your plans for the future. There is an awful lot of animosity between people who
+ would otherwise be kindred spirits. The more energy and time you waste acting
+ like nothing will ever happen to you and your reputation and how well you can put down
+ people, people who are you are lucky to have met because they see the world in that
+ special way that you do... that's just more and more opportunity for people who
+ don't understand to gang up on us and destroy everything we care about.
+
+ In the textfiles I've collected, I've seen heartbreak, I've seen bravery, I've seen
+ every bit of the human spirit that you find in literature, and I'm proud to be
+ one of the people working to bring these files back to everyone, to show them that
+ everything we did back then meant something. And I honestly believe, that what
+ we're doing now means just as much, and more.
+
+ * Thank You and I Throw Out the Floor
+
+ My name is Jason Scott, and I deeply thank you for listening to me.
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T E X T F I L E S: The Kind Words
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