When I set out on this whole "BBS Documentary" project, it had been almost a decade since I had touched audiovisual equipment on this scale, and I'd certainly never tried a project as huge and involved as this one. I knew that whoever the first interview was was going to have to basically put up with delays, weird-acting equipment, and my own stumbling attempts to organize a good shot. To that end, I decided that this person should be someone I knew, someone familiar with being interviewed on camera, and someone located nearby in case I wanted to come back later and try again. The person who fit this bill was Count Zero. He got (and still occasionally gets) a lot of press and media attention being a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow, and so I wasn't worried about him freezing up or acting differently just because there was a camera in the room. We were friends going way back, so there wasn't going to be any discomfort or weirdness asking about his past, and I also therefore knew my subject well. Compared to later interviews, I completely overworked the lighting in the shot, adding all three of my lights in and carefully arranging them in an "artistic" fashion. I also found out the hard way how not to set up a light when it started to smoke quite noticably after a few minutes. Actually, it was the small screen one puts in front of the bulb burning off my oils, but the place smelled a tad funny after that. Count Zero had a great apartment to film in, a stunning room with spiral staircase and bizarre creatures, both stuffed and living. It's not quite noticable in a lot of the video footage, but the whole time he's talking, he has a very large millipede on his left arm. He also has a stuffed coyote named "Woofy" in the background as well. This interview has a lot of the natures of the first few interviews: overshooting (2 and a half hours of footage), sub-optimal sound (I was still shooting with the onboard mic, so this is one of the few interviews shot in
It's funny, looking back, how little I knew about setting up shots and planning for a shoot, but I knew enough to plan things so that I could have a "do-over". John was located near me geographically so I could come back if the whole thing really didn't go well. It actually went pretty well, although we conducted the interview for way too long. At the time, I was concerned I didn't have enough possible footage, so we spent a long time covering every possible aspect of BBSing, running a board, being a user, and so on. The real great part turned out to be the old BBS he had in a box in his basement, which we went down and pulled out on camera. Between his dark basement and the pure "from another time" sense of his BBS, it's almost archeological how the whole thing comes across on film. I made a lot of mistakes on this shoot, like I said, but there's definitely footage that I was able to use in the final episodes. And John was great, even inviting me to a party a year or two later. I lost my first item on this shoot, a screen that is meant to go on one of the lights and stop debris from falling on it, which could lead to damage. I never recovered it.
The Gweeps are an excellent example of the depth of stories that exist out there, the true scope of which are simply not covered in my documentary because otherwise the documentary series would have been well past 8 hours. Basically, there are a group of people centered around Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts, who have known each other primarily through both their own computer interest and through a collection of systems that collectively are known as GweepNet. The name "Gweep" comes from a sound made by a computer setup in the WPI library that made a sound not unlike "Gweep" when being used. The non-computer-using students, annoyed by the folks who were making this noise in the library, started referring to these computer users simply as "Gweeps". I interviewed three of these Gweeps, as part of a planned (but later abandoned) episode that would focus on just one BBS "Scene" so you could see its beginning, middle and end/current situation: Worcester, Massachusetts was close enough to my home that I wouldn't lose a lot of money travelling there, but also small enough that I could get a grip on the whole story, without going crazy with a major city like Boston or New York. As it turned out, even Worcester's BBS community had fractured enough and enough of the sysops were not interested in such an endeavor that I had to stop that line of investigation. But I did get three really great interviews out of it: Chet Lawrence, Frank Deignan, and the Gweeps. I spent a good amount of time with the Gweeps, who were extremely generous with their answers, willingness to let me try different angles and setups, and explore every last bit about their group's history. Here was a case where my initial approach to use the on-camera microphone really screwed me; a lot of the footage is understandable, but not really enjoyable to listen to, due to the echo and the ever-present background hum of a couple of the locations. If I had to do the whole docume
Robert Fowkes was one of my real longshots, where I was trying to really think outside the box of what kind of folks I was going to interview for the documentary. In his case, he was one of the more prolific creators of Orchestra-80 music. I'll take a moment to explain what that is, and why I thought it needed to go in (even if ultimately it did not). As I was working on what was expected to be the "Artscene" episode, I was going to go into some detail about other BBS-related Art Scenes besides just ANSI art. Among them might be people who made crack screens, who made songs, and who made any sort of creative endeavor and then transferred it via BBSes. And in the early 1980's there was a really neat piece of music hardware for the Radio Shack TRS-80 that would allow it to make nice multi-voice music. It was called "Orchestra 80", and creating songs for it was like putting together a computer program. It appealed greatly to a number of people, including Robert Fowkes, who made a few dozen. (A few made many more than that.) I found e-mail addresses of some Orchestra-80 musicians and decided to try to get as many as I could together to show how the BBS let them express themselves in a new and interesting way. As it turns out, Robert was the only Orchestra 80 musician (or for that matter, musician using BBSes in a way I could discern) that I ended up interviewing. So a large part of his "purpose" in his interview ended up not being used. That aside, though, I found out that he'd done a good amount of work as a computer teacher in the 1980's, so we covered that aspect of his experience as well. In fact, while we were talking, he impressed the living hell out of me with his memory. He'd recognized me, and after some back and forth, it turned out I had competed in a computer competition for the Putnam Schools in my middle school years, nearly 20 years previously. And he remembered me. That's something. (I didn't place, but I did learn a lot about how much I DIDN'T
Conducted in New York City, I interviewed Brian and and David at Brian's really nice apartment. He lived in a place that exemplified what I would call "upscale loft living", with a real nice floor, beautiful open kitchen, and a set of nice halogen lights hanging down from the high ceiling. I looked around and decided we would shoot across his kitchen counter, with the balance of the apartment behind him. Brian had brought up a big pile of the stuff of his BBS youth, mostly Apple II-related hardware, including a Cider drive, which was a heck of an expensive add-on in the early 1980's. Brian wanted me to understand how much they HATED Diversi-Dials back in their BBS days, and how they went out of their way to visit various ddials and cause trouble. Diversi-dials, in case you never got to meet them, were a special blend of hardware and software that let an Apple II run a multi-line chat system. You could connect and speak to a bunch of other folks, and, using one of the lines, a number of Diversi-Dials could be connected, and therefore increase the chat size even more. But because it was so accessible, it was also accepted by people who were more into the social side of computers, which Brian found to be too much cuteness and light for his taste. I had gotten better with the questions by this point, and we stayed focused on BBSes and Diversi-dials through most of the interview, as well as a few thoughts on hardware and programming a BBS. With over 200 interviews conducted, I knew I couldn't have much opportunity to really create any central visual "themes" or even really any consistency in the shots themselves. I shot in farms, high-rises, homes, basements, you name it. But it was in this interview I found something I'd latch onto for a little pleasant enjoyment for the next few years. I looked around this great urban apartment and found that Brian had a full DJ setup (two turntables and a mixer) in one side of the room. I commented that it was such a class
I state this in several locations and on tape in commentary, but I was always very sensitive to the BBS Documentary not being, basically, a home movie or a memoir; I didn't want, at the end of the day, to produce a work that was nothing but my friends and close acquaintances showing up, all giving the impression I had an "objective list" of viewers, when in fact it was a very subjective one. So I didn't go running to my buddies, didn't arrange stuff for too many of my old friends from 914, and didn't focus too much on my own past. In the end, I ended up almost blocking out all my own past, which I didn't really intend either, but there you go. An exception was this early interview with some of the guys from Uncensored! BBS, a BBS running on Citadel/UX that still lives and breathes in the present day. Seth/The Joker is one of my oldest friends from the BBS days. We were on OSUNY together, as well as a bunch of other BBSes. He always thought me strange, but we hung out a lot in our youth, went to hacker meets and BBS meets together, had a great time. Ari and Art, I don't know as well. Art runs Uncensored and is the maintainer of Citadel/UX. He also has been my staunchest voice in making sure that people know that BBSes are not dead, that they live on on the Internet. We conducted two hours of interviews. The first hour is basically unusable, soundwise, so it's not in the documentary (although it'll show up as raw footage in the future). I interviewed them in a big, cavernous location which seemed to be a great shot.. and it was! But it was horrible sounding. I never made that mistake again. We shot the rest in a conference room, and it went a ton better. We covered the unique environment of the Uncensored BBS, some memories of the early days on BBSes, and OSUNY. It was great stuff.
Meeting Jake was like running into your old friend from elementary school who who really cool but his family or your family moved away. He was friendly, outgoing, funny, and was as excited about the whole project as I was. Jake is the guy you find at the back of a party, beer in hand, ready to save you from banal chatter with whatever stuff you feel like talking to. As a result, we ended up spending a lot of our time just chatting about the documentary and about all the cool things in his house. It's funny how you can share so much good will with someone who you've never actually met before. The power of BBSes. Jake had an apartment all his own in a condo development, a cool place for one person, with two bedrooms (one made into a computer room), a dining room, and a big ol' leather-couch-filled living room. Just the kind of place to hang out and play with the PS2 and talk with your buddies. I took a tour of his place, and saw the futon I'd be sleeping on, where I piled my junk. I started to get really worried about the sound at this point. The microphone I'd purchased before heading on my Washington/Richmond trip wasn't working with the camera, and Jake and I loaded into his new (-ly purchased) vette and drove down to the music store. I saw some mics there that would be perfect, but I couldn't just drop the $300 right there. I decided we'd have to make do with the one I had. During the ride out to the music store and to get a meal, we ended up in a little impromptu drag race with a ready-to-rock modified Japanese car. Jake got that smile I can remember on all sorts of old friends, and we went for it, blowing the competitor into the dust. We laughed and kept driving, only to hear a horrible noise to our left as our foe, wanting to show something for all his modification efforts, rumbled past us. He was obviously flooring the poor thing, and we heard a horrible sound from somewhere in its depths, and he slowed down to a crawl, while we glided past. We wen
Steve Garfield contacted me and indicated that he'd both been a member of the Boston Computer Society (BCS) in the 1980's, and that he'd used a lot of Macintosh computers. Since I've been working hard to capture people who used computers other than PC compatibles, it seemed like a really great fit. It turned out I was right. We conducted the interview at Steve's house in the Jamaica Plain area of Boston, a nice old one off the main road. The framing of the shot is somewhat distant, but I thought it was a nice combination of the BBS user and his older Macintosh computer, side by side. Steve never stopped loving the thing, so for him it was like taking a nice trip down memory lane without the slightest bit of bitterness or regret. Steve seemed a naturally upbeat person, both in mail and in person, and so I was especially glad he was so conveniently located to my home; it made for a nice day out. Steve's enthusiasm about the subject comes off pretty handily during the clips I've garnered from the interview, including a really incredible one about the realization of being online in a multi-user environment. In a nice story about bumping onto someone online, he really captures the feeling many people might have with adjusting to meeting a real person across the computer. Most people would have forgotten this in ensuing years, but not Steve. Like I said, he simply moved on to other computers, and it wasn't a case of him having any unhappy experiences with his Mac; and for the small number of (then) Macintosh users I could have found, I think he's a great representative. Also, he had a pristine specimen of the Macintosh travelling case, which we filmed him using, as well as his discussions about the machine and the process of being a Macintosh user. It was good stuff. Steve and I talked a number of times since about editing and film work, since he does a lot of it for himself. About a year after filming, he gave me the information to get to the Boston Final Cut Pr
Ted lives right near my home, in Massachusetts. I shot over, met his family, and we sat down for an interview. Except the interview, which yielded an hour, took quite a few hours to complete, because it turned out that Ted and I shared a metric TON of friends. I could name people who I'd known in the are and he would say "Oh, yeah, him! He was like this.." and I'd go "Yeah, when I was at that party!" and he'd say "Yeah! I was at that party too!" It was really crazy, because we'd never talked or met before, we just kind of floated in the same circles for years and years. His voice is very low on the tape; not low in volume, but low in pitch. I used multiple clips from our interview (even with the all the stops and starts we had from it) and in each one, his voice kind of booms forward from the tape. There's also a cat in the audio track, if you listen for it. He had one of those cats that meowed to get into a room and, once let in, meowed to be immediately let out of the room. Basically, cat wanted open doors or nothing. Everything else was an affront to the cat's feline sense of justice. All in all, good times... and easy access to home. Naturally, I shied away from just walking around the Boston area and filming my cronies and calling it a "documentary", so this didn't happen too much.
Ward's interview stands as the most stressful of all of them, simply because of the pressure of interviewing the guy who invented the thing the documentary is about. I had done everything I could to ensure there'd be no "surprises" with the session. I'd interviewed folks for a month beforehand, and even scheduled a flight to Washington DC a week before I went to Chicago, simply to see if going on a plane with the equipment would cause any issues. It didn't and it hasn't (although I've had to take all of the equipment out of my camera bag and show them to security guards more than I care to mention). I pored over historical documents related to Ward and the history around him, and I had a list of questions in my mind to ask him. We had the interview scheduled for that night, a few hours after I'd get in, figuring I'd need a little time to get my rental car and find the location. Disaster struck when I arrived at T.F. Green airport in Providence, walked up to the ticket counter, and was told that since I had arrived 45 minutes before the flight, there simply was no way I was going on it. Not only that, but I got the real great "you're an idiot" attitude from the ticket counter person, like I'd worn a silly hat to a debutante ball. I begged and pleaded for something to be done, some other move or action we could take that might get me in the air that night, even paying more money, but they were adamant; I was not going anywhere. I was basically in tears; here I had assembled this history-filled weekend, starting off with the father of it all, and there was no way I was going to make it there that night. I went downstairs and called Ward at a payphone. He was gracious and understanding, and even went as far to say that my cancelling Friday was in fact a boon, because he had a major project at work and this would give him the whole night to work on it. I went back to the counter and asked if I could have my ticket moved to a flight the next morning, and was t
Peter turned out to be one of my secret weapons, one I became aware of very soon after the announcement of the BBS Documentary. He contacted me in e-mail a day or two after word of my research came out, and had several major points he wanted me clear on: the BBS story was from the mid-west, and while the coasts had done a lot for the history of telecommunications, to tell the true and rightful story about the BBS, the mid-west (and specifically Chicago) should get its due. Unlike a lot of others who were more than willing to give me demands and rules about how the documentary would proceed, Peter than proceeded to back up his letters with article citations, contacts e-mails for important figures, and invitations to come to Chicago and attend various events related to BBSes. And now, looking back, this is precisely what he did, on multiple occasions. Through his efforts along with others, I interviewed Ward Christensen, and entirely through his efforts alone, I interviewed Randy Suess. Since they're the canonical creators of the BBS, I owe quite a bit of debt to him. Peter's a bookish sort of fellow, intensely into research and into both the depths and heights of politics and sociology. He considers himself an outsider to the revolutions of telecommunications, so as he instructed me on who to talk to and where to go, he never once suggested himself. When someone contacted me saying "you simply cannot make a BBS documentary without interviewing me", I took that more as a challenge than anything else. Peter never did that, and so at the CACHE meeting I attended to interview folks, I made it a point to tell him to sit in front of the camera. Peter only got about 20 minutes before his shyness/lack of self-importance brought the interview to a halt, but he had some interesting things to say about the roles of hackers and early BBS pioneers in changing the face of technology. I saw Peter several times during production, including the very-late Suess interview,
Pud was a complete drop out of the dark for me. As a reader of fuckedcompany.com throughout the late 1990's, I'd always enjoyed his wry sense of humor and quick jabs at some of the foolish companies that took so much money from everyone in the name of pies in the skies. So it was very surprising when he contacted me, directly, out of the blue and said that he was interested in being interviewed. It turned out that Philip Kaplan ("Pud" on his site) had run a pirate BBS in earlier times, before he'd joined the world wide web. And not only that, he really wanted to talk about it. This was big news, because in the amount of talking I'd done with anyone who'd touched pirated software or BBSes, the general reaction was a complete disinterest in talking about those days. A few mentioned the Statute of Limitations and their current positions in society as reasons; obviously Kaplan did not really care what other people thought. And really, it came out in his interview that he was no insane big player in the pirating of software; just another kid with a BBS who offered a few games for download that weren't his. The interview was to be done at his offices in New York City, and when I arrived a half-hour before the appointed time, I decided to stick it out in the lobby of the thin, strange building in downtown until the right moment. I got into the clanky elevator about five minutes before the appointment, not wanting to show up too early but not cruise in late, either. Imagine my surprise when I got to the floor, went into the hallway, and found all the doors locked and all the lights off. I waited around for an hour and a half, figuring I'd messed up in some way, double checking the time, calling Pud's phone number from the interview sheet, and trying to determine what to do next. It was apparent at that time that for whatever reason, Pud was not going to be available for an interview. Outside, with my equipment, I decided that I really needed to make up for the 2
Mr. Greene was a personal triumph that turned into a huge asset for the documentary as a whole. When I set off on the BBS Documentary project, there were a bunch of people for whom I held a special admiration or knowledge. In many cases, it was simply because in my early days as a pre-teen using BBSes around 1981, I was blown away at the magic of the BBS and wondered how these wizards were able to make these computers do these things. In other cases, I simply saw people's names a lot and thought they must be the most important folks in the world. Among these idols was the name GREENE. All I knew him as was GREENE of the GREENE MACHINE. In the late 1970's and early 1980's, BBSes were a weird enough and rare enough occurrence that you really could list them all in a pretty small file. While I don't have firm figures, I'll definitely commit and say they numbered in the mere hundreds at best (of those that didn't go up for a week for an experiment and disappeared forever). And of those hundreds, there were only a dozen or so BBS packages that got passed around and used by people beyond a bunch of one-offs. Programs like ABBS, Apple-Net, R/CPM, CBBS and BULLETIN 80 were about all you could find. And among them was GREENE MACHINE, written for the TRS-80 home computer. Like the early days of the car industry, nothing was out of bounds; every program had a different way of dealing with the world, everyone was sharing ideas (or borrowing them, they might say) and you really didn't know what you would get coming down the line at you once you called a BBS. And I knew that whoever wrote the GREENE MACHINE would be in the middle of it. I also knew that a "regular" BBS documentary would never, in a million years, think of trying to track down the author to talk to him, let along know what part he played in the early days. I was really hot at the time to prove that "my" BBS documentary would be different, and so it was a personal goal to find whoever made the GREENE MA
Interview with Dr. Trevor Marshall, conducted on May 19, 2003 in Thousand Oaks, California.
Interview with Brad Templeton, conducted on July 29, 2002 in Sunnyvale, California.
Known as Shaggy and Metalhead at different times, here was one of the top members of Insane Creator Enterprises (iCE), one of the top ANSI groups through the 1990s (and one still existing to this day). He'd gotten away from ANSI art soon after he'd discovered DJing and clubs, but before then he was right in there with the best of them. We covered a lot of ANSI topics; he was concerned there'd not be much to talk about. As usual, we filled a tape in no time. We probably could have gone a lot further but I didn't want the actual next interview to suffer, so we kept it to one full hour. A great time.
RaD Man showed up late, and we immediately commenced the "summit". It turned out that one of ACiD's top sysops, Sharp, had literately called that day to RaD Man saying he was in town, and if they wanted to do something. RaD Man said "Oh, yeah" and so Sharp had been pulled into this interview. I made sure (like I always try to do) that Sharp understood what project this was and what it was all about, so he'd be making an informed decision about being a part of it. Since I didn't know who he was, I thought the interview might end up being "the other guys and Sharp", but in fact he was right in there with the rest of them for the whole interview. A truly excellent bonus. Like all top leaders in a subculture, they had long realized they had more in common with each other than with the rest of the world for what they'd gone through, and would benefit more talking together than against each other.
Baud introduces the story of the beginning of the BBS, including interviews with Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, who used a snowstorm as an inspiration to change the world.
Sysops and Users introduces the stories of the people who used BBSes, and lets them tell their own stories of living in this new world.
Make it Pay covers the BBS industry that rose in the 1980's and grew to fantastic heights before disappearing almost overnight.
Fidonet covers the largest volunteer-run computer network in history, and the people who made it a joy and a political nightmare.
Artscene tells the rarely-heard history of the ANSI Art Scene that thrived in the BBS world, where art was currency and battles waged over nothing more than pure talent.
HPAC (Hacking Phreaking Anarchy Cracking) hears from some of the users of "underground" BBSes and their unique view of the world of information and computers.
No Carrier wishes a fond farewell to the dial-up BBS and its integration into the Internet.
Compression tells the story of the PKWARE/SEA legal battle of the late 1980s and how a fight that broke out over something as simple as data compression resulted in waylaid lives and lost opportunity.
We covered a number of subjects, including his days with WWIV boards and the boards that affected him, up to the running of his BBS company, Digital Dynamics, and their part of the BBS industry. He was less than enthused about how his company was treated compared to other companies, but came away from the whole thing with a positive outlook ("it supported me and some employees for a couple of years"). His infant daughter sat in on the interview (that is, she slept nearby) and his cat had a few things it wanted on camera as well.
Interview with Bruce Fancher, Dead Lord of Legion of Doom (LOD) and co-founder of the MindVox bulletin board and internet service provider, conducted on October 13, 2002 in New York City. Topics include TAP meetings, connecting to different bulletin boards, busts, the operations and internals of MindVox, hacker ethics and motivation, and opinions and thoughts about the mid 1990s explosion of interest in internet and politics. Some noise reduction is in place, and the interview was conducted under rushed conditions.
Thom's story is one of the most emotionally wrenching for me personally because it's one of someone who did an awful lot of good for an awful lot of people and who then, sum total, suffered and hurt for the 10 years before he finally threw the whole thing out of his life. One of the expected anomalies in this documentary is that almost to a person, the result of the BBS era for people I interviewed were that it was "Good". They had a good time, they met good people, the end feeling they have of their time with BBSes is that they were enjoyable and full of good memories. This is not the case with everyone who used BBSes. There were, in fact, a number of people who would not agree to be interviewed because for them, the BBS story is one they would rather forget forever. Some people lost their livelihoods, their relationships, and even their freedoms because of BBSes, and they'd rather never deal with that part of their lives again.
An interview with Stephen Jones of SDF.org fame.
Interview with John Madill, at home in Freeland, MD.
The interview was really great, not just because of his work with OSUNY, but because of an extended talk we had about the "old-style" (1980s) aspects of hacking which are rapidly lost to a newer generation. While there's lots of history before the 1980s, there was this sense of hacking specific to that early time... and Sysop covered it perfectly. I hope I can use a lot of it.
Mark Steven Herring, age 60 of Bethpage, passed away Monday, April 27, 2020. Mr. Herring was born December 17, 1959 in Memphis to the late Robert Edward Herring, Jr. and Loda Maud Matthews Herring. He is survived by daughters, Corinna Herring Fitch (John) of LaVergne, Casey Danielle Monroe (Johnathan) of Collinwood, TN, and Katie Edwards Hooge (Robert Gregory) of Gallatin; brothers, Robert Edward Herring III (Vanessa) of Memphis and Philip Brian Herring of Memphis; sister, Loda Marguerite Herring of Memphis; and 6 grandchildren, Mason, Tucker, Austin, Gunner, Caleb, and Brooklynn. Mr. Herring was a computer programmer for the State of Tennessee.
Interview with John Sheetz for BBS: The Documentary. Conducted on March 22nd, 2003 in New Providence, New Jersey. Discussions center around teletype art and the use of Ham Radio to transfer text-based images. Techniques in creating RTTY art, the process of transferring artwork over Ham Radio, and some occasional copyright issues are all covered. Speculations on the future of the art, as well as what other skills Mr. Sheetz picked up in the medium. Sadly, Mr. Sheetz passed away in January of 2005, and was not able to see the final product or this interview; this work is dedicated to his memory.
Deth Veggie has been a close friend for over a decade, and his position in the Cult of the Dead Cow came around in the early years of knowing him. Founded in 1985, the group went from textfile-writing to world-wide media mavens to security pundits. Along the way, they found themselves in a great and unique position as "hacker celebrities". As the image grew somewhere out of control, I knew many of the members as friends, and saw both sides of the story.
Interview with infamous cracking group for the Apple ][.
Victor and Marian are good people. Living in a cool rambling old house in Ann Arbor, I drove away from the Rubi-Con conference to interview them (avoiding some police action while I was gone; the con was shut down) and spent a good couple of hours talking about how they met online, the multi-line BBS that Victor ran (the remnants of which are in their basement) and about BBS culture in general. I had come to focus on their online meeting, which was silly because I ended up with a LOT of stuff about online meetings, but it was good to have it on tape and I ended up using the sequence. We also did some outside shots, but ultimately, I thought they were too weird (the setup was basically configured for indoor work, without wind and cars zooming by).
Two brothers who absolutely kicked butt, remembering not only why they got into BBSes, but why they got out. We went everywhere in our interview, and covered a good sense of what the 1980s were for two kids in the south playing with their computers.
Don't ask me how this happened, but I didn't realize Meryl was deaf until an hour or two before the interview. I hadn't picked it up in the letter she'd sent me to register, and it wasn't until I was going over my notes before driving over that she mentioned her husband would likely pick up the phone if I called. Not that it ultimately matters; I just didn't know and I hadn't even thought if I would conduct the interview differently. I had to modify my interview method one slight way: I have a habit of walking around taking pictures while questioning people (which is probably pretty disconcerting to some) and in Meryl's case I couldn't turn my head away from her and keep asking questions, because she wouldn't be able to read my lips. I think I did it twice anyway, just out of habit. As a result, there aren't many photos of Meryl here, and they're all pretty much taken when the camera wasn't rolling. Meryl speaks to communicate, with the taught construction of sounds formed even though she can't hear them. By a really, really strange coincidence, I'd spent an hour the previous day listening to an NPR story in which the main subject was a woman who was deaf and spoke with the same taught construction of sounds. The story was fascinating so I'd listened intently and had learned really quickly how to understand the slight difference in syllables. As a result, even though I'd had no idea that Meryl would speak this way, I'd had an entire practice session the previous day! Now that's luck. I asked Meryl if it was OK if I subtitle her answers, and she agreed. When you subtitle someone speaking english with english, it could be interpreted that you're saying the person doesn't speak english well enough to be understood on their own. This is not the case with Meryl; she's entirely understandable (a very clear speaker) but if you get a sound bite of her she'll be off the screen before your ear adjusts. Of course, there's an excellent chance we'll not even use subtitl
Discussion of Fidonet politics, internal issues, triumphs of engineering, influence of Fidonet. Covers some parts of the ARC-ZIP battle, as well as why the various interviewees ultimately left the project. Shot in the same living room in which Fidonet's main implementation was created, at Ken Kaplan's house. The interview began with just Ken Kaplan and Ben Baker, and Fisher showed up during the process of interviewing. (He does not appear on camera until hour 2). Jason appears at the end, during a break, talking about learning about Ryugen Fisher by his nickname "The Old Frog".
Interview with Minor Threat, conducted in Austin, Texas, on January 30th, 2004. Minor Threat is most known as the creator and co-author of Tone Loc, a "wardialer" program that would connect to thousands of phones looking for carriers, voices, and other surprises in a phone exchange. However, this interview mostly focuses on his memories of both PD (public domain) BBSes and hacking BBSes; a section in the middle focuses on Tone Loc and the challenges associated with the program. The interview starts slowly as we warm up and then moves very quickly.
Interviews with various CACHE members.
Interview with Matt Rowland aka "Truflop" on March 16, 2002 in Marietta, GA.
Interview with Justin Cohen in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on December 27, 2002
Interview with James MacFarlane and Ken Spence, conducted on December 27, 2002 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Interview with John Hedtke, recorded on January 24, 2003 in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Interview with Jayne, recorded on May 23, 2003 in Portland, Oregon.
Interview with Dennis Cruise of Mustang Software, conducted on May 24, 2003.
Interview with James and Liz McDaniel, conducted on May 28, 2003.
Interview with Milky Puppy and Liz, BBS users, in Toronto, Ontario on May 25, 2002. Subjects covered included early BBS use in Chicago and Toronto, various BBSes run by Milky and their unique themes, the YIP group, BBS Meets, co-sysop and sysop duties, Atari and Macintosh platforms, and points of pride or highlights from BBSes.
"Wayne Bell". The name makes hundreds of people look at you with this faint recognition, and then a shocking realization that you're talking about the creator of WWIV Software. His name is legion among many, many kids who started their own little BBSes, offering what files they could and trying to make a name for themselves. Created in 1984, WWIV was the BBS of choice for teenagers for a long time because of its modifiable source code and ease of use. While there were more complicated or feature-rich software programs out there, there was something about WWIV that just appealed to teenagers and made it the software of choice.
Interview with BBS user Jeff Keegan, conducted on October 1, 2002.
Interview with user Cheshire Catalyst, conducted on July 13, 2002
Interview with Joe Russack aka. Dr. Strangelove, conducted on July 30, 2002.
Interview with Torray Wallace, conducted on September 8, 2002.
Interview conducted with the staff of the Dorsai Embassy, conducted on November 24, 2002.
Interview with Loren Jones conducted on January 25, 2004 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Rich Schinnell was using BBSes in that interesting early time with IBM PCs, when they were a growing force but still not the dominant winners with home computers. As time is going on, it's becoming harder and harder to explain those early days, because it really was a case of the IBM PC and PC Compatibles being just one of another choice in what to use, and so the tight-knit community back then was not just for support but to encourage adoption of their favorite hardware.
Interview with Ryan Brown/Zendo conducted on May 22, 2003 in Mountain View, California.
Interview with Alan Aspuru-Guzik conducted on May 31, 2003 in Emeryville, California.
Interview with Anne Madison conducted on September 7, 2002 in Baltimore, Maryland.
Interview with Aron Insinga conducted on November 10, 2003 in Nashua, New Hampshire.
B.W. had worked for Ahoy! magazine, a top Commodore magazine in the early 1980's. He ran a BBS affilated with the magazine... which also had a small pirate section. In our questions, he deftly bounced between questions on being a part of the growing home computer industry and being a part of the group that was duplicating software as fast as they could (which was a snail's pace by today's standards).
Interview with Bob Whiston, conducted on February 23, 2002 in Fort Lupton, Colorado.
Interview with several luminaries of the Chicago-area, including sysops and users; Ward Christensen among them. Footage not used in documentary, probably due to amount of background noise. Unknown filming date.
