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                                 [3]ASCII by Jason Scott

   Jason Scott's Weblog

[4]A Never-Ending Block Party -- April 21, 2024

   Kerfuffles are Kerfuffles. Causing one recently, with its particularly low-stakes
   aspects (what's done is done, no actions appear to be planned, I'm already doing
   things differently, etc.) allowed me to at least re-visit a policy I've been
   somewhat silently instituting for years.

   I block. I block frequently, quickly, and across every single medium that
   consitutes "communication" in the contemporary era.

   I've been doing it for well over a decade, but somewhere after my heart attack I
   upped the frequency and dropped the level at which the "block" action gets
   enacted. It is very, very easy to find yourself unable to directly communicate
   with me via the method I blocked you.

   Why anyone would possibly care that I do this (beyond the people I block) is not
   entirely my responsibility, but I think there's a point, so let's keep going.

   First, I'm rather easy to find and communicate with. I have many channels of
   ingress, from phone numbers and e-mails to social media and streaming. I do this
   mostly because I'm trying to be there when people have materials to donate to
   Internet Archive, or if they're in distress and need to reach out to someone.
   Both these situations happen more than one might think. I appreciate both when
   they do, and do my best under the circumstances.

   But the downside is that people can reach me very easily and all your instincts
   that there are spectacular counts of truly damaged individuals who have
   effortlessly acquired internet access and spray their damage around the world
   like some urine-filled lawn sprinker are, as I can personally attest, correct.

   At some point, depending on how far back you have persisted online, there was
   this unspoken contract that you gave someone multiple bites of the apple to show
   how awful they were, under the theory that the first interaction was an
   inadvertently bad impression. That contract is no longer in effect. That's a
   large contingency of folks gone; the masters of showing up in the middle of a
   conversation or communication, unbidden and unwanted, and dropping absolute bile
   into the stream. One strike and they're out.

   Occasionally, I even pre-block. I block people who, when I see them interacting
   with others, I have no overly powerful urge to envision ever being a part of
   their online lives. I suppose there's some fundamental Fear of Missing Out that
   could be ginned up regarding them, that they might end up saying or doing
   something that I should know about, but I'll let others tell me. There are a
   non-zero amount of times I've seen people say "Foobatz69 has a point" and I go
   look them up and I've blocked Foobatz69. Maybe I'll peek in. I probably won't.

   Less obviously, it goes the other way too. In a notable amount of situations,
   I've blocked people because I recognize that I'm going to be the problem, that
   what I do and how I approach things are exactly the sort of activity that makes a
   given person or account go ballistic or switch to attack mode, so I save us both
   the trouble. I occasionally hear they're confused. I do not seek to explain why.
   They continue to live a normal and happy life, and I continue along with mine.

   So, why bring this all up?

   Well, first, occasional this-and-that publicity has provided me with the ability
   to see discussions about myself in which a small number of blocked folks
   commiserated about the whole "Jason blocked me" situation and of course many have
   taken the Imagination Express to Injustice Town to describe a situation where I
   could possibly have come to the decision to block, and the general consensus will
   be some variation of a degredation of my mental health.

   It's quite the opposite. My mental health has never been better.

   Outside of absolute buzzbomb cornhusks dropping corossive misery at every
   opportunity, there were a range of folks who I truly admired and respected who,
   upon my looking back retrospectively at our interactions across years, totally
   lacked warmth and friendliness from their position. Literally every response a
   vicious insult and somehow, I'd considered this a pleasant and comfortable dish
   to be served down the front of my tuxedo on common occasions. Their blockage is
   literally medication, a salve, an ointment. I'm free of my delusion that they are
   friends.

   And again, there are folks who, I find, are going to be nothing but negative
   energy in my life, at a time when I am growing older and don't see much need to
   throw my body and life into a deep dark well of irrelevant free-floating rage,
   never to be recovered or rewarded.

   And you know? On at least a half-dozen occasions, which is more than any
   reasonable person should experience, I've had individuals who, upon being blocked
   and clearly indicated their presence and communication were unwelcome, proceed to
   track down and find every single communication channel still open to them and
   begin upping the energetic demands I explain myself. I'm talking chat systems,
   phone calls, e-mails from various addresses, and asking friends of mine who might
   still have contact with me to "put in a word" to "set the record straight". In
   other words, I have entirely too many examples where people I had a bad feeling
   about have gone absolute full stalker mode, in a way that they would never
   imagine themselves as such, but absolutely are. On two of those six occasions, it
   happened physically.

   None of those half-dozen are being unblocked. That was not the solution to the
   percieved issue.

   I'm sharing this not for some sort of support plea, or to indicate I have a hard
   life. I have the mathematical opposite of a hard life.

   I'm sharing it on the off-chance that someone reads this, realizes their
   relationship with someone or someones online is actually a massive negative
   energy drain, or rife with abuse, or simply a case of not realizing you've left a
   pathway to lightweight harassment that can do nothing but increase. If that's the
   case, trust me. Block, block, block. Report and block. Mute and block. You will
   feel parts of your soul unclench that you didn't previously understand were
   balled into tights fist of stress and simmering disaster. I'm involved in dozens,
   sometimes hundreds of interactions in a given week, and I do it. You should
   consider this your license to do it as well.

   If this helps two people, it was worth it to discuss. And it's already helped
   one, and that one is me.
     ____________________________________________________________________________

   [5]5 Comments

[6]I Continue To No Longer Attend Vintage Computer Festivals -- April 12, 2024

   As should be expected, a number of individuals have come forward with responses
   to the [7]initial blog post. While I do not expect everyone to take even a
   passing interest in the rabbit-hole of the situation or the context, I figured it
   was worth writing a few quick addendums.
   Naturally, as is the case when you post anything anywhere in public, I am called
   a liar. I'll simply say that everything I describe in the blog entry happened. I
   contacted a VCF administrator and was told it was all disposed of, and that they
   kept the bins. I am fine with people claiming that disposal was not what
   happened, but this is what I was told, directly, in human words. The fact that I
   am seeing contradictory and confusing descriptions of what happened is not a
   checkmark destined for the Win column.

   A few people have rushed to indicate that I need to be more careful describing
   "which" VCF entity is at fault. I am sad to report to them all that the Byzantine
   VCF structure of name licensing, geographic branding, and internal corporate
   entity is meaningless to anyone six inches away. You all know each other and you
   all interchangeably use nomenclature. If you are part of an organization that
   calls itself some form of "VCF" and need an opportunity to write a statement
   about how your organization in a solitary/separate entity and should be
   considered more worthy or ethical than others, feel absolutely free.

   A small sliver of people were concerned I was saying that I was never going to go
   to any computer history conference or event again. I am a free person with the
   freedom to attend whatever is open to the public. As it stood, however, VCF East
   was the easiest event for me to attend, so it was where I saw people the most. A
   minor point is that I considered attendance a form of endorsement, but that is my
   own personal choice. The chances of me attending other events is, like death by
   cow, low but never zero.

   The rest of the discussions I have seen from the blog entry, raging in the usual
   stages of social media and posting forums, have failed to require any further
   response or thought from me personally.

   Finally, this is all relatively minor in terms of the work I do and projects I
   focus on, an event that brought me some fury but which has mostly played the part
   of filed under "life lessons". I just got tired of having quiet inward emotion
   when I was reminded of the event, specifically when VCF announcements would pass
   by my screen, followed by nice folks asking if they would be seeing me at the
   event. Now I have made a statement, and rather than the beginning of a saga, I
   consider it the end of one. My conversations with people and organizations I
   shift materials to are much longer, much more involved, and with much more
   contingencies as a result of this event, and things are better for it.
     ____________________________________________________________________________

   [8]18 Comments

[9]I Am No Longer Attending Vintage Computer Festivals -- April 11, 2024

   I spent some time trying to figure out when to make this announcement in a way
   that didn't seem like direct sabotage; the day before the VCF East event seems
   about right.

   Years ago, clearing out the Information Cube, I donated its contents to roughly
   10 organizations, carefully splitting things up for the best home, as I'd been
   entrusted with these materials by many great folks who believed I'd make the
   right choices. Videogames went to the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment,
   books and many printed materials to the Internet Archive, piles of game-related
   magazines went to the Strong Museum of Play, multiple sets of Wired magazine went
   to a scanning group, and so on. This was a shipping container worth of material,
   so we are talking dozens and dozens of crates, received by trustworthy and great
   folks across the entire country.

   Among these donations were a set of publications, mostly IEEE-related but with a
   few other sets of titles, to the Vintage Computer Federation, based in New
   Jersey. The donation was roughly this:

   To make this donation, I paid for the containers, filled them, put many issues in
   bags, and then rented a truck to drive them the roughly 70 miles to the VCF
   headquarters in Wall, NJ. There I dropped them off and went home. This was
   roughly 2017.

   A number of years later, I contacted the Vintage Computer Federation to ask how
   the magazines were doing, if they were part of a project, or if I needed to
   transfer them elsewhere.

   I was told they tossed them out. Every one.

   However, I was told, they had decided to keep the plastic boxes, and were making
   use of them.

   As a result, I'll state clearly: I have no intention of attending the Vintage
   Computer Festival or doing any sort of interaction with the VCF team again.

   I'm mentioning this because I went to so many of the festivals, I know people
   would be expecting me to go, and I get mail every year looking forward to my
   attendance. I have indicated I would not be there, but not totally explained why.
   Now I have. I consider attendance to be an endorsement of this action, and I am
   fundamentally uninterested in whatever clumped-together set of words they might
   consider an apology. The concern is dead to me.

   I also want to take this moment to clearly state that Evan Koblentz, the director
   of the Vintage Computer Federation for many years, who took the original
   donation, had absolutely no say or part in this pulping of historical magazines,
   having been driven out of the organization years before. Evan has always been a
   steel beam of dependable honesty and directness in all the years I've known him,
   which is bordering on decades at this point.

   There's not much else to say. Go if you want, but I won't be there. Hopefully I
   will see some of the nice folks I know from the event in other contexts.
   Otherwise, it has been quite real, and they're memories I won't trash for their
   containers.
     ____________________________________________________________________________

   [10]34 Comments

[11]In Realtime: Digital Heaven (And a Call for Donations) -- February 2, 2024

   Imagine an epic of nine years having a happy ending.
   I've written so much about what is now called the Manuals Plus Collection. Let's
   go find those:
     * [12]In Realtime: Saving 25,000 Manuals
     * [13]In Realtime: Prepping for the Transfer of 25,000 Manuals
     * [14]In Realtime: It Is Almost Halfway Done
     * [15]In Realtime: Day 2 Felt Like Week 4
     * [16]In Realtime: It Is Done
     * [17]A Small Dark Detour
     * [18]In Realtime: Post-Mortem
     * [19]A Little Bit of the Manuals

   If you don't want to walk those, I'll make it simple: I got word in 2015 of a
   collection of manuals inside a business that was getting out of the business, and
   while a lot of well-meaning people talked a good game, they wanted to cherry-pick
   (people getting rid of stuff hate cherry-pickers), and I drove down to show I was
   serious, and after a week of work with MANY volunteers and contributors, we ended
   up with pallets of documentation inside boxes, numbering something like
   50,000-60,000 manuals. (A rough estimate.)
   Then they were stored in a storage unit. Then they were stored in a closed coffee
   house. Then they were transported to California. Then they were stored until last
   year, 2023.

   Last year, a group called [20]DLARC, doing digitizing and indexing projects
   around ham radio and radio technology, worked with me and the archive to sort out
   a few pallets of the manuals for products related to the history of radio/network
   technology, and off they went overseas to be scanned. And as of this month, the
   evaluated, professionally-scanned and available-to-the-world manuals are
   beginning to show up in this collection:
   [21]The Manuals Plus Collection

   Like, it's happening! It's happening. It's happening!

   Like anything else open at Internet Archive, you can search the text contents
   (which are being automatically OCR-ed). You can download the original unformatted
   jp2 files in a zip. You can download a PDF generated from the jp2 files. [22]You
   can read it online.

   Either this is the first time you've heard of all this going on, or you've known
   about it and wondered whatever happened to that mass of manuals.

   They've been kept in safekeeping, awaiting their moment. We reboxed them, and in
   fact, transporting them from MD to CA was the last major project I did before my
   heart attack. It might have been the last thing I ever did for the Archive! That
   would have been a pretty good way to go out.

   But here, in 2024, the final stretch is going on.
   And now, the pitch.

   The group doing the digitizing does lots of digitizing for the Internet Archive.
   They are well-paid and legitimate professional contractors who are sent the
   items, and who do careful scanning to the best of the materials' ability to
   provide access to the information, and then do quality checks, and then upload
   them. When they're humming, they're processing a pallet every couple of weeks
   (with lots of mitigating factors). They're going to get through the four pallets
   sent to them from the DLARC sorting very quickly, in other words.

   I've negotiated a situation where, if money is sent in, the remaining pallets
   that should be scanned can just be sent along without sorting them for DLARC
   funds, DLARC will fund any that happen to overlap with their mission, and the
   rest will just be done.

   That's if money is sent in.

   How much money? We're still working that number out. It's going to be somewhere
   in the range of tens of thousands of dollars. So I'm looking for both big-ticket
   supporters (who can mail me at jason@textfiles.com) or individuals. In all cases,
   you're just going to donate to the Internet Archive itself, which is at
   [23]https://archive.org/donate and your donations are tax-deductible. Telling
   them you're donating to support this project will help keep the project funded.
   (There's a way to leave a comment, and if not, send me a note you did it and how
   much).

   We've already sorted these things into pallets, and we know a subset of these (HP
   and Tektronix) are scanned elsewhere and don't need to be specifically done this
   way. This leaves just the historically vital and informationally wonderful
   manuals dating from the 1940s through the 2000s. As they're popping up, each one
   is a gift.

   If we make less than we need to scan them all, then we'll only scan up to where
   it's paid for. I believe we can close it out, but if the interest/money isn't
   there, then it isn't there - fair enough. [24]Browse the collection as it grows
   into thousands of manuals as it is and consider if you want to be part of all
   that. That's definitely happening.

   But what a happy ending it would be to push all these manuals through the
   process, and close it up. That's why I'm popping up to talk about it, and why I
   hope you would consider contributing towards it, for a non-profit that deserves
   your support generally.

   Meanwhile: It's happening! It's happening. It's happening!!
     ____________________________________________________________________________

   [25]2 Comments

[26]Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami -- June 5, 2023

   There's no way for me to know where your awareness starts with all this, so let's
   just start at the beginning.

   Computer Shopper was a hell of a magazine. I [27]wrote a whole essay about it,
   which can be summarized as "this magazine got to be very large, very extensive,
   and probably served as the unofficial `bible' of the state of hardware and
   software to the general public throughout the 1980s and 1990s". While it was just
   a pleasant little computer tabloid when it started in 1979, it quickly grew to a
   page count that most reasonable people would define as "intimidating".

   In a world that saw hundreds of magazines and thousands of newsletters come and
   go about technology and computer-related subjects, Computer Shopper was its own
   thing entirely. Not only thick as a brick, but clearly opened to anyone who waved
   cash and covering vendors who were selling computer components down to the
   individual part level. You might have a good set of ads in PC Magazine but to
   browse over price lists of capacitors, power supplies and wiring, the massive
   monthly Computer Shopper issue was going to be your go-to.

   There were two other aspects to Computer Shopper that has given it a halo of
   intrigue and positive memory: First, the paper was incredibly cheap, newspaper
   tabloid level by some eyes. This seeming disposability infers a weird sort of
   honesty about the advertising contents - it is what it is, it represents what the
   actual pricing is, and what's actually available. The lack of pure slickness in
   the printing process was a baggage of "look, I'm lucky if we survive another
   month and this is the straight up price we're offering" across the many hundreds
   of ads in a given issue.

   But second, was the full-bore willingness to seemingly absorb anything computer
   adjacent into its pages. Pre-fab computers and commercially available software
   was listed inside, sure. But if you were selling tech clothing, clips, floppies,
   tapes, plugs, paper, switches and accessories... you had a home there as well. It
   gave a truly manic and freewheeling melee to the affair, and for those of us who
   wanted to know more than the standard 20-30 software packages everyone was
   buying, or to think about smacking together a bunch of parts to get a
   mutant-powerful system up and running, this was the place.

   To a smaller set of us, the BBS Listings in the back were also a very notable
   aspect. BBS operators across all the spectrum of cliques and locations thought of
   Computer Shopper as the BBS yellow pages, the phone book of the online, for
   almost its entire run. You flipped to the back, found your area code or state,
   and downright eye-watering levels of BBS listings were waiting for you.
   Inaccurate? Sometimes. But a truly unique assemblage of what was.

   That catches us all up to what Computer Shopper was. Like many print-based
   computer magazines, Computer Shopper grew in size into the many of hundreds of
   pages, some greater than 800. It thrived in the world before the World Wide Web
   took hold, and once you could do daily updates of parts and prices at various
   websites, the months-lag in printing schedule and the lack of responsiveness
   compared to websites made it lose curry, favor, and eventually pages. It died a
   quiet death in 2009, becoming a barely interesting site and then an uninteresting
   zombie.

   Still, it was a heck of a run.

   People often ask me the same basic questions regarding old computer history and
   access to it. One of them is to discuss potential holy grails, possibilities of
   where some effort might be afforded to acquire potentially lost information or
   artifacts before they're gone.

   A common go-to for me was Computer Shopper, because it's a perfect storm of
   absolute fascination and completely intolerable amounts of barriers towards
   digitizing it into something readable online.
     * It's fantastically huge. If you scan in an issue, however you do it, you're
       talking hundreds of pages for that month, all of them requiring babysitting
       to ensure they got through.
     * The cheap, cheap paper is a nightmare to run through a scanner - either a
       flatbed-based misery or a sheet-fed scanner that's one molecule of damage
       away from crunching pages up.
     * The gutters (space between the spine and the information on the page) is
       offensively small - millimeters where there should be a half-inch. Especially
       towards the 1990s era, the instructions to advertisers about layout clearly
       didn't make many bones about informing folks about margins. This means the
       books have to be split apart, a despicable sin that strikes against the heart
       of the pure.
     * These myriad, no-gutter, cheaply-printed pages are both tabloid size and
       never considered text too small to allow. This means that not only is the
       page size not going to fit in 95% of the consumer scanners out there, but
       they're going to need to be scanned at the highest level you can, to not miss
       anything. The page size, digitized, is going to be offensively huge.

   So, the prospect this would ever happen was basically zero. You needed someone
   who had the time, inclination, and support to do what was going to be one of the
   more painful scanning projects extant.

   It turned out to be me.

   So, there I was whining online about how it was 2023 and nobody seemed to be
   scanning in Computer Shopper and we were going to be running into greater and
   greater difficulty to acquire and process them meaningfully, and I finally,
   stupidly said that if we happened on a somewhat-complete collection, I'd figure
   out how to do it.

   And then an ebay auction came up that seemed to fit the bill.

   Out in Ohio, someone decided to sell nearly 200 issues of Computer Shopper for a
   few thousand bucks.

   It's important to understand the usual per-issue prices for Computer Shopper, and
   that usual per-issue price can get as high as $50 an issue. Obviously, at some
   large scale, this becomes an untenably large price. But in this case, they were
   being sold for about $13 an issue, which is not zero, but somewhere in the realm
   of manageable: About $3,000 for the lot.

   Now, I'm not going to have $3,000 to throw around like that. So I put the
   challenge out there: If people get together and give me $3,000, I'll buy this lot
   and scan it it.

   It hit goal in about 3 hours.

   As you might have figured out, delivery/mail was not an option. To make that
   happen, I reached out for a volunteer, and a few people came forward, including
   Wes Kennedy, who made this his main project for a few days. He'd left one job and
   was starting another a week later, and "picking up all the issues, packaging them
   carefully, and putting them in the mail to Jason" became his fun-cation. He
   deserves all the kudos for this.
   When 14 large boxes arrived, they included all the issues, put inside large paper
   envelopes and wrapped in blue plastic that definitely didn't look like cocaine to
   the storage unit guys I cruised past.
   So all of the issues were now safely within my control.
   One might be inclined to say "Well, that's only half the problem". and you'd be
   off, because it's actually less than a quarter of the problem. Acquisition, after
   all, was just money - buying issues in bulk and ending up with a good amount of
   them was just a case of assembling some cash.

   No, it was definitely the scanning that was going to be the big .... issue.

   If not obvious, the pages of this tabloid-sized periodical are not just big,
   they're over the bounds of pretty much every scanner out there, at least in the
   consumer space. (There's plenty of large-format scanners past the $5,000 range,
   and they're also gargantuan affairs, meant to handle blueprints and posters.)
   But I did find one commercial scanner that could do the work: A Fujitsu fi-7480
   wide-size sheet-feed scanner, which tops out at about $3,500. I'll simply say a
   kind anonymous donor bought it outright so I wouldn't have to crowdfund for it,
   and for that I'm eternally grateful.

   Here's what dealing with that process looks like, with the scanner software
   (Vuescan) set carefully to neutral and pulling in the massive pages through the
   fi-7480:

   ...which brings up the situation involving the pages.

   Now, about 12 years ago, I really [28]raked someone over the coals for destroying
   copies of BYTE magazine to scan them. He was not happy about this at all, and
   there's a chance he may have stopped his project just not wanting to deal with
   such criticism. I hope not, but I do stand by the fact that he indicated he was
   immediately disposing of the pages after scanning them, which meant any mistakes
   or oversights were permanent. (At one point, he mentioned having to fish a page
   out of the trash when he discovered he'd skipped it.)
   At that point, I made a declaration of my standards for debinding/pulling apart a
   magazine to scan it:

   "IF I have a document or paper set that requires some level of destruction to
   scan properly AND IF I have three copies of it AND IF there is no
   currently-available digital version of the document AND IF there is a call or
   clamor for this document set THEN AND ONLY THEN I will split the binding and scan
   at a very high resolution and additionally apply OCR and other modern-day
   miracles to the resulting document so that the resulting item is, if not greater
   than the original, more useful to the world".

   ...I should have added an OR.

   "...OR if there's very little chance of anyone ever being able to assemble issues
   to scan in the foreseeable future".
   Because that's rapidly what was happening with the Computer Shoppers.
   $13 an issue is perhaps quite a bit, but people want even more for individual
   issues and it will be a bit of a stretch to actually acquire them all. So, even
   though I don't own 3 copies personally, I also know the other two potential
   copies are passing among collectors at this point, so they're being held, in some
   way, in trust. It's my hope that I'll eventually have a chance to do this work
   for all the issues, but until then, I work with what I got.

   Debinding, the taking apart of a bound issue of a magazine to turn it into a
   stack of papers to scan in, turns out to be a process. A painful, time consuming,
   involved process. One which I knew would be involved but not as involved as it
   has definitely turned out to be.

   Luckily, people have come before me. [29]There is a rather beautiful
   documentation out there, about the best practices in debinding magazines, from
   Retromags. They walk through the pros and cons, the potential issues, the
   considerations while doing it, and the most common pitfalls that will befell your
   project if you don't stay on top of them. I read this like the Book of Life
   before setting off on dealing with Computer Shoppers, because their "how to ski"
   primer was going to be critical as I skied backwards down a double-black-diamond
   slope of these bible-sized monsters.
   In this case, I have to use a heat gun, aiming them at the glued issues of
   Computer Shopper, warming them up until the glue starts to become slightly liquid
   and then carefully pulling the pages apart from each other, placing them on a
   large table I'm working on. If the glue comes too close to the pages after I pull
   them apart, it actually sticks them back again. It's a huge mess, and with
   hundreds of pages in a typical issue, hours of work.

   There are banger groups out there working tirelessly to debind magazines, scan
   them in carefully, fix any issues with the looks, and upload them to various
   locations. One of them is [30]Gaming Alexandria and it's been a pleasure to fall
   in with them and discuss the nitty-gritty of this process. They're scanning in
   obscure periodicals at scale and they know what they're up to.

   In fact, we've made a deal, where I'm just focusing on the "Raw Scans", and these
   raws will go to them for post-processing, creating a more readable or functional
   set of final readable versions of Computer Shopper for people to appreciate. The
   Raws will always be available, of course - 600dpi TIFF files scanned neutrally of
   the original pages, placed together in mothra-sized .ZIP files that number up
   into the many gigabytes, for people to pull down when needed.

   A scanned page of a typical issue looks like this (with a little size reduction
   for this essay):

   You can see immediately the difficulties and intricacies of this project.

   Like I indicated, there was very little care for margins, and none for minimum
   size of text. Computer Shopper advertisers did whatever they wanted, however they
   wanted, and into newsprint, which further made things whacky because bleed is a
   major issue, pulling the other side's ink into the current one. And all of this
   on a massive piece of paper - so in total, the original TIFF file of this image
   is a full-on 20 megabytes - and this issue has over 400 pages.

   And before I forget to mention... I did a test scan with an issue that I had two
   copies of, to work out any major bugs and problems. And one major problem was
   that there was a roller at the top of the feed scanner meant to separate a stack
   of pages into single ones and feed them in properly. Well, that roller grips the
   page so tightly, it started to pick up ink and put it on later pages, leaving
   streaks on the page. A quick browse through the service manual, and I had to
   remove that roller entirely. This means that I have to feed the pages in, one by
   one, since otherwise it'll stick them together and jam.

   Through all of this, we're talking hours of work to do a single issue, and I have
   to do it a couple hundred times at least. This is going to be quite an epic
   task... which is, again, why we're down to me doing it because the combination of
   cost, time and effort leaves almost nobody else who'd be in a position to be able
   to do, much less want to.

   We did one issue, [31]February 1986, "all the way through". I debinded it,
   cropped it, scanned it, handed it to Gaming Alexandria to process, got it
   processed, and then put it on Internet Archive, resulting in three sets of
   images: The Raw Scans, a "Readable" version and an "Aesthetic" version.

   The "Readable" version has been heavily processed and contrasted. It makes it
   very easy to read a page because it has a really nice dependable color setup for
   it:

   Contrasted with the "Aesthetic" version, that looks more like you would expect
   the newsprint and bleed-through original to look:

   I personally prefer the "Aesthetic" - it brings me back to the way things were
   when I would buy Computer Shoppers at the local Microcenter and scour them for
   information and inspiration. But a researcher, and more importantly an Optical
   Character Recognizer prepping things for searches by researchers, will much
   prefer working with the Readable version.

   Now, Here Comes The Pitch.

   So, I live here now.

   For the next however-long-it-takes, I'll be debinding issues, doing careful scans
   of them, then putting the resulting piles of pages into baggies and sending them
   into cold storage for permanent holding, awaiting the next time they might have
   use, or to redo a problematic scan. That's happening. I'm just going to be on
   this all year, when I can.

   But this effort of mine is rather meaningless unless there are real humans and
   smart scripts going over what's being produced.

   By a back of the napkin calculation, there will be at least 100,000 and more
   likely 150,000+ pages of Computer Shopper issues scanned during this project.
   There's going to be a lot of them, and they're going to be jammed full of
   information, imagery, embarrassment and glory.

   I really hope that a group of people, together or separately, start using this
   bounty to rip out BBS listings, find trends in pricing and nomenclature, in
   tracking down humble beginnings and finding other amazing tidbits throughout
   computing history.

   It's nice to drop 400-800 pages at once into an item, but unless I get some of
   those nerds out there scouring the pages for interesting things, it's just me
   scanning into a void.

   If you know people will be interested, help them become aware. And if you see
   something interesting, bring it out and make it part of sharing, wherever you
   want to.

   This will be an incredible amount of work. Folks threw thousands of dollars into
   acquisitions of hardware and paper and I'm going to blast a lot of my personal
   time into scanning these.

   Make it worth it.

   Addendum:

   This entry got a lot of attention. Two questions arose, and I'll answer them both
   here:

   Are There Missing Issues?

   Yes, there are. Here's the list. If people want to donate or buy good quality
   copies for me, mail me at jason@textfiles.com. Here's the missing issues as far
   as I can tell:
     * Everything before November 1983
     * 1984: January, October, November
     * 1985: October
     * 1988: June, November
     * 1989: April
     * 1994: April, May, August, November
     * 1995: February, March
     * 1996: April, May, June
     * 1997: July, September
     * 1998: January, May
     * 1999: April, July, August

   If people send them to me, I'll take them off this list. So if this list is here,
   I'm still missing them.

   Can I Help Support You?

   [32]Just enjoy the Podcast. I spend a lot of time on it.
     ____________________________________________________________________________

   [33]46 Comments

[34]The Great Aboveground Empire -- May 22, 2023

   I'm about to write an essay that will lead to mass misinterpretation or out of
   context quoting, and before I get into that situation (intentionally), I have to
   create this entire sidebar to talk about a social construct I've observed over
   the years. I've spoken elsewhere about the [35]Inside Out, but this is a
   different online (and offline) situation to that. Very quickly: The "Inside Out"
   is my belief that there are people who believe they are in private spaces online
   that are in fact not private at all but they're absolutely convinced of it and
   the resulting friction is nearly blinding when it comes to a head.

   What I'm talking about is something else entirely.

   It's a situation where people want all the cachet of being outside the
   boundaries, in lawless territories where you survive on the wit and bravery (or
   brutality) of Taking The Initiative and damn the costs and risks, but also want
   to be protected and safe with all the constructs we in Civilization provide so
   you don't wake up with your throat slit and your pockets turned out.

   They want a fictional in-between place that doesn't bend to the "inconvenient"
   rules and yet lets you summon them in a moment's (or hour's) notice when the game
   doesn't go your way and you need to get the DM to re-roll for a Natural 20.

   I have my own term for this phenomenon: The Aboveground, a mystical (and
   profitable) land where people want to believe they're under the radar, being all
   subtle and hidden, when they're actually functioning in plain sight.

   (This is very different, I should note, from people who are functioning in an
   underground manner in plain sight with knowing intention of being watched and
   findable, just doing so in a double-switchback situation that means they function
   in that environment. Most people don't actually want to take on the burden of
   this, but some do.)

   I'll give a hypothetical that I've used before trying to explain my thinking.

   The Underground wants to do sketchy shit, so by word of mouth, everyone knows to
   meet over at Ken's house, and Ken has a separate basement door entrance, so you
   know to park down the street and go to Ken's house and let yourself in the gate
   and knock on Ken's basement door and Ken lets you in because other people said
   you were cool. Once you're all in there, drinking beers, everyone gathers up the
   stuff you're going to do sketchy shit with and you head out into the woods and do
   sketchy shit.

   The Aboveground wants to do all the woods stuff, except you meet at Starbucks and
   post it on multiple forums and tweet about it using some stupid codeword and also
   you want a sign at Starbucks telling people the Sketchy Shit Club meets around
   6pm every Friday.

   The simple fact is, we've been spending so many Herculean efforts to bring every
   single aspect of life online and make communication by massive observed networks
   and corporate-owned byways and highways that many people don't even see these
   worlds as anything other than "the world". From that lack of perception comes the
   continued desire to stay out of the eye of the public, or at least out of the eye
   of authority, to do neat or weird stuff that others might not approve of.

   And yet, the fact is (or should be) that doing risky things entails risks.
   Playfully pop out of the window of your pal's car to get on the roof to goof
   around, and you might injure yourself and die. Modify electronics or equipment to
   do something neat, and you might cross a wire and bust it up permanently, or
   (again) injure yourself. Take stupid chances, win stupid prizes, right?

   But the growing denizens of the Aboveground don't entirely like that. They've
   either internalized or integrated into their worldview that somewhere, out beyond
   the bounds of sight, they will always have a safety net, a ramp or an apparatus,
   that will ultimately provide comfort and rescue to pull them back from the abyss.

   And to be clear: It's an awesome deal if you can get it.

   I, myself, have absolutely benefitted from taking wild swings at the fences and
   going out into the darkness with a flashlight and a prayer, emerging messy,
   sweaty, with a few cuts and a recurring nightmare about what almost happened
   there that one time. In my mind, the idea that ultimately, whoever or whatever
   found us would first try and get the injuries handled at a hospital, or would
   probably toss us at the edge of the border with an admonishment to not come back,
   was always humming along in the background, warm and safe. I've certainly walked
   in the Aboveground and fooled myself with the illusion that I wasn't.

   But that's the point: The Aboveground is the Aboveground but it's also the
   Illusion of the Underground cooked into it.

   Perhaps that's where I started to sour on it all, and recognize it for what it
   was: Cosplay for Hardship; a Kabuki Theater of acting out the long-worn tropes of
   the outlaw you once were, wearing the new business suit of what you actually are.

   The Aboveground is a template that fits in hundreds of situations.
   The reason I bring up this thought experiment and sidebar is related to the two
   most frequent times I see it in use, personally.

   First, it's what I started to see over the years as I would attend a lot of
   "hacking" conventions, where it was clear that the realms of curiosity and risk
   were being traded for 401(k)s, contract-driven shrunk horizons, and the safety
   and dependability for family. No shame in that. But yet, as that morphing and
   breaking out of the rebellious chrysalis happened, there was an insistence, or,
   more a demand that the strange, confused, brilliant and deranged hacking
   mentality be worn as a faded t-shirt or jacket throughout the process.
   Hacking conferences are, in the present sense, overly Aboveground - they have to
   be. There are contracts signed, real names writing real checks with conference
   centers and multinationals that price out damage and vandalism, along with an
   at-call internal and external security force primarily focused on Stopping
   Crimes.... and yet people either still do the crimes, or they pretend that in
   some way, some squint-and-you-can-see-it version of being an outsider still
   persists with your name on the room and a credit card for the flight that brought
   you here. It's endemic, marbled into the aging steak of these events, and it's
   why, with very very little exception, I only attend ones I both like and which I
   can drive home from the same day.

   And then there's the other situation.

   The entire technical industry and infrastructure space, especially the really
   "disruptive" ones, has progressively built itself not only on the idea that you
   should ignore the rules until someone actively stops you or you can get bought
   out, it nearly depends on it.

   Fat with venture capital, bloated with many levels of management and oversight,
   and exhibiting absolutely no understanding of what represents long-long-term
   integration into the operations of humanity, good and bad, they instead chose the
   Aboveground lifestyle.

   Don't get me wrong - it's hard for someone with a family or maybe even harder
   when they don't have one, to turn down gargantuan once-the-province-of-kings
   level of wealth in doing whatever it is this company does and leaving the hard
   part, the question of what the ramifications are, to others. In fact, the whole
   idea of the Aboveground company is to let others deal with the ramifications.
   Find a weakness, a difficult thing to pull off in the realm of humanity, poke
   untold wealth into its eye and make the other eye think it's seeing you, a fake
   thing, as a real one. Do this so much, you convince yourself there was no other
   way. Composed, as you are, of people with no allegiance and no cohesion except
   "we're all in this together and the train's left anyway", the skies are literally
   the limit.

   But in slow motion, and now fast motion, we are seeing the consequences. We see
   innovation corralled for its thrust potential instead of its energy and focus. We
   watch good minds convinced that their mundane-as-dishwater job is that of a
   scallywag aboard a Pirate Ship with a Heart of Gold.
   And most notably, when the ship runs up on inevitable rocks, we watch as these
   Aboveground rebels slip back into the darkness, forgetting the mess they made,
   and ready for the next "no other way" disruptive orgy to commence.

   Consider me old or throw your names at me as I strike a little close to your
   home. But that's what happens when you're Aboveground: Your voice carries very
   well and very far. Because you're not in hiding and there's no blowback for your
   senseless, consequence-free experiments of "what if I fuck with it".

   So, when you see me lob a few more words in the general direction of a cool,
   awesome group of rule-breaking rebels, this little declaration should be
   harmonizing my writing in your mind:

   You're Aboveground. You've forgotten what Underground even is.

   IMPORTANT ADDENDUM:

   When I speak about a truly Underground situation, I also want to recognize that
   along with risks and danger come the fundamentally unjust, heartbreaking,
   exclusionary and despicable environment that this situation often brings. While
   the tales of incoherent mayhem and hilarious anarchy might represent entertaining
   memories, more often than not you have participants who remember those tales as
   simply traumatic. Underground does not mean inherently mean "good", "good old" or
   "original good" in any way. We move beyond this situation for a reason.

   The Aboveground, however, will have a tendency to bring along those very same
   traumas and miseries as being flavoring, spice of the experience of being as cool
   and awesome as the Underground must be, and meet the same resistance that any
   reasonable person might respond with when faced with them. The annoyance, the
   infuriating aspect of it, is that the cries of "we've lost something" accompany
   the protests the Aboveground meets. It's literally the worst of both worlds; the
   other choices must be better.
     ____________________________________________________________________________

   [36]4 Comments

[37]Discord, or the Death of Lore -- March 6, 2023

   I chose the life, it didn't choose me. I could have walked away from it a long
   time ago, and I've certainly shifted my focus over the years. But I still hold
   the heft and halter, the one standing at the death of all things, and while it
   means a lot of moments of rescue and recovery, it also means knowing, looking
   across at that which thrives and bustles, the desiccation and destruction to
   come. The only part of the fog of the future that's guaranteed is the moment it
   switches from theory to a wall of iron and then darkness.

   All this to say: Discord.

   Twitter, in its own death throes, its own misery, will always stand in its later
   years as a fantastic tool for raining down misery and pain on others with a
   simple "quote tweet", and I've been guilty of such on the absolute regular. Few
   of my tweets maneuvered past 100,000 "impressions", but this one most definitely
   did:

   The last I checked, that tweet got the attention of over a quarter-million
   individuals and/or machines, and the next two follow-ups got a smaller amount,
   but are still worth noting:

   There is absolutely nothing new about Discord, say people with experience of IRC.
   Of course, they're wrong: Discord has speed, ease of use, and (at this point in
   time) general societal acceptance far beyond IRC. IRC is a bouncer looking you up
   and down and asking you to do a small dance of proof of worth before entering a
   text-only cave of obscurity; Discord added skylights, pretty lights,
   cross-platform access and verification, and centralization, not all of them great
   additions but very welcome for their intended audience.... who is now everyone.

   I've been on well over 100 discords, and I've run or in some way moderated a
   half-dozen. They're good for fast spinning-up of projects, to glom a bunch of
   humans into a channel system, and not have to deal with Slack's oddities, or the
   ridiculous on-ramp for IRC. At one point I asked for people to send me invites to
   the weirdest Discords they were members of, and I can assure you, there's weird
   ones indeed. And the capacity is notable - walking through the halls of
   particularly "hot" Discords with literally hundreds of thousands of members,
   especially when active, is to walk through a space station hosting an all-star
   concert as it blasts through the darkness.
   I have no disputes as the popularity of the places, the things that happen there,
   and the unquestioned vivaciousness of being the party that never seems to end and
   everyone wants to join.
   I just happen to be the sort of person who notices there's no decent fire exits
   and most of the structure is wood and there's an... awful lot of pyrotechnics
   being set off.

   Discord's official birthday is 2012, but it's really 2009, when OpenFeint was
   created.

   [38]OpenFeint is the pile of bones worn into the foundation of Discord telling us
   it was built on land that will very occasionally flood to great catastrophe. It
   was founded in 2009, was given a huge ecosystem of plugins and support, gained
   ten million followers, took in roughly $12 million of known VC investment, was
   sold to a Japanese company in 2011 for $104 million, and was fucking dead in the
   ground by 2012. By the flickering light of its Viking funeral, Discord was
   founded and the cycle began anew.

   Spare me the "they learned their lesson speech", and please store it in this
   garbage can I've already stuffed with the "it won't happen again" and "you don't
   know what you're talking about" bags I tend to get. It will happen again; it's
   just a matter of when.

   The main considerations I have are what will be lost.

   When the free image-hosting site ImageShack made the realization that they were
   losing buckets of money hosting images for free, and shifted over to a
   subscription model that also cut off legacy accounts, deleting them in fact, the
   question was who would care. Perhaps the original uploaders of the images, too
   cheap to pay the additional fees of a few bucks per month, or maybe someone who
   took amusement from this image or that, but probably had downloaded it anyway?

   No, what this did was decimate warehouses of lore.

   It turns out, in the breadth of time, ImageShack was the unofficial official
   clearinghouse of diagrams and illustrations of web discussion boards that had
   limits (or difficulties) hosting images. Sure, most of the boards had software
   that allowed you to upload to them, but ImageShack was very easy to host with,
   and the results were fast and simple and could be rather large when needed. This
   was very helpful for technical diagrams and explanations that would cover (at the
   time) larger resolutions of graphic information.

   So, when ImageShack killed what had been 13 years of these illustrations, they
   definitely probably saved the business, and they ensured everyone who was hosting
   with them was truly engaged, but they also lobotomized hundreds, possibly
   thousands of forums and discussion groups and absolutely wiped an entire
   collection of reference documents from the web at the same time. Walking through
   some of them (before they, themselves, died) was walking through a bombed city,
   its institutional and cultural memory pockmarked with "pay us to see this stuff"
   placeholders.

   Documents are documents. Books are books, recordings are recordings, and so on.
   As time has gone on, though, I've observed the probably obvious-to-others fact
   that Lore is the grease between the concrete blocks of knowledge, the carved step
   in an otherwise impossible-to-scale mountain, the small bit of powder sprinkled
   through a workspace to ensure sparks don't fly and things don't burn.
   Inconceivably odd to the outsider, but vital to the dedicated or intense practice
   of the craft.

   Certainly, the ideal situation is lore is inlaid into a framework of knowledge.
   As the joke goes, there's no real conflict between herbs and medicine - we took
   herbs and the ones that worked became medicine. In the same way, the lore of
   knots became the rules of the sea and the lore of practiced building that was
   vital to share across long distances of time and space became engineering. This
   is an overly simplistic view, but it holds true that "lore" joins "knowledge" in
   a very haphazard fashion, usually relying on someone so driven to push the
   process that they create a 400 page behemoth of writing that is gleaned by social
   calls and favors into the story of How It Has Been Done.

   The danger in this process, the potential lost ballast in the rise to the skies,
   is that the lore-to-knowledge transfer is lossy, messy, and arbitrary. Maybe
   those in the know want to keep the information to themselves, so it won't be
   given to whoever the person or persons are who are laying down the written form.
   Maybe the chronicler of information has blind spots they don't know about and not
   enough people to correct them. Or, more likely, you have to set the "noise
   filter" of the information to not go down the rabbit and rat holes of
   contingencies that maybe a dozen or two people will even want to know about, to
   the favor of that which everyone will need. The outcome is always the same: Lore
   loses in the long run.

   I'll take a quick diversion to say that we do see attempts to whip lore into
   shape on a shared basis, be it Quora, Yahoo! Answers, Reddit and Stack Overflow -
   all of them centralized entities, some of them better than others, and all of
   them fundamentally unstructured compared to a "book" form factor but infinitely
   searchable and fungible to the needs of whoever is wandering in, even if they
   must know three-quarters of the solution to get the actual final part.

   Discord, in the decade and change it has lived, and especially once it took off
   beyond its initial social and classification groups, has exploded exponentially
   in all the parts it plays on the remnants of the Web. Time and again, we see a
   Discord rise that represents a subject general or specific, a grouping of dozens
   or hundreds of folks interested or entangled in the subject, and then a massive
   growth of channels and direct messages rising from that clumped "community". Some
   of the results are droll mostly-silent channels with occasional flares of
   conversations, while others are waterfalls of discussion and write-once
   read-never rants and dumb questions, punctuated with someone asking a question
   for the hundredth time and someone answering a different way.

   There are more Discords than you realize, and more lore pouring into them than
   anyone can truly comprehend. They are not the exclusive spigots of lore but
   they're a major pipeline, a notable artery on Knowledge's Heart that we would
   definitely notice if, for whatever reason, it was clogged with Mission Shift or
   New Opportunities cutting it off.

   The two-line discussion at the center of my first public lambasting of Discord's
   nature is telling, not because of the individual who responded as they did, but
   the situation they were unintentionally highlighting:

   EmoSaru is not evil or a paragon of Knowledge's Destruction; they're a shopkeeper
   noticing that fresh tomatoes aren't selling as well as ketchup and ketchup is
   cheaper to keep on the shelves and lasts longer, and everyone who might come
   along and complain about losing fresh tomatoes aren't buying said beloved
   tomatoes. They're following the wind. Only fools stay in the field when the herd
   has gone in from the rain. I highlighted them just because the exchange was, as
   they say, el perfecto.

   My grandmother would always scold me, lightly of course, about my cartoons I'd
   draw on paper because I wouldn't use both sides of the page; my personal belief
   that it would bleed into each other wasn't part of the argument, just that she
   had long memories of doing without and making do with little and she wanted me to
   not waste the (temporary) bounty before the next (inevitable) hardship.

   To that end, I am, again, the angel-winged herald of the Death of Discord and I
   only wish to highlight what might blunt the pain of the inevitable decay and
   destruction of what it is.

   In the unlikely event that Discord sits across from me at a table and asks What
   Exactly Do You Want To Leave Us Alone, my list of demands is both logical and
   impossible:
     * Right now every channel is meant to be both transient and permanent. I know
       that'll never change, so create a new "Lore" or "Archive" channel where the
       moderators tap on wisdom and preserve-forever statements or threads, and they
       get added over there. Think of it as "Pinning" but they're pinned forever and
       there's a bunch of them.
     * Make it possible to export this Lore/Archive channel to a reasonable file,
       like JSON or any other text format. Hell, make it a feature for "[39]Discord
       Nitro", which is obviously a part of the "oh crap, we need to prove we can
       make money with this thing" phase of the cycle you're now entering.
     * At the very least, consider some sort of "FAQ" feature/contingency that does
       a similar function to the old-style FAQs, so people can contribute sets of
       knowledge in a structured manual instead of an endless search for terms from
       everyone who ever touched a server.

   The unlikely event of them sitting with me across a table is doubly joined by the
   unlikely event they would implement anything like I'm asking for.

   Consider this me walking through and pointing out the wood structure and lack of
   fire exits, and if someone did the work, even if it cost a little extra, a lot of
   people will be a little less sad down the line.

   And when the inevitable does its inevitable thing, maybe we can all sit down and
   talk about what could have been.

   ...just not on Discord.
     ____________________________________________________________________________

   [40]17 Comments

[41]The Grind a Day -- March 5, 2023

   4am doesn't suffer fools, or repetition. Or mysteries. Focused out of nowhere on
   tinkering with an Apple II a number of years back, they re-learned the whole of
   how the unique floppy disk system worked, how it could be manipulated, and then,
   ultimately, how legions of companies and individuals used those manipulations to
   "protect" commercial software.

   Left to just that level of knowledge, this would store 4am in the cattle car of
   all the people I know of and deal with on a frequent basis. They're the reason so
   many people know the penguin [42]gets fat on the second run-through of Mario 64,
   or that what a [43]fast-load cartridge actually does for a Commodore 64. Maybe
   not enough, probably too much.
   But 4am is an engineer, and also a documentation writer, and also the
   aforementioned resister of dumb and deja vu, so not only did we end up with
   [44]examples of crack writeups that rival a 1930s pulp story for adventures and
   twists, but also a series of [45]increasingly complex and [46]intense tools for
   the simple goal of removing the protection from Apple II software.

   Somewhere in the middle of this journey, now well into the realm of a decade,
   came John Keoni Morris and [47]Applesauce, itself an
   overengineered-for-the-purpose multi-tool that started with doing flux readings
   of Apple-only floppies and then expanded out into masses of other related systems
   and setups, and all allowing us to be [48]broken free from chains.

   To my great delight, the two creators of these projects don't entirely hate each
   other, and share very similar goals, and listen to each other within reason.
   The result is that years in, there are literally [49]thousands of floppy disks
   that are definitively captured digitally, remixed or presented as packs of files,
   and offered without crushing pre-requisites or unseen gatekeeping. It's all
   just... happening. If you've not paid attention (and you are quite welcome to not
   have been doing so) let me assure you that Apple II disk preservation has been
   flying at a speed and quality that almost no other platform enjoys, except
   Commodore 64, and C64's surpassing comprehensiveness has come at [50]great
   unpleasant costs.
   As collections and piles of floppies have turned up, an amateur army of
   Applesauce owners (including 4am) have absorbed these plastic squares and turned
   them into files, literally rescuing them from oblivion. The to-be-expected
   reserves have been exhausted years ago, and we're in the realm of the rare, the
   newly discovered, and the open hailing frequencies letting previously-unaware
   people know there's a home for their boxes of floppies to be turned digital from
   the merely magnetic.

   This all to say, the result of this set of happy accidents and personalities
   combined with the strange alure of this commercial computer platform and the
   relative sturdiness of the engineering has resulted in a renaissance of access to
   the old software. My small contribution has been to ensure that the old software
   has a permanent-as-possible home.

   4am, however, rises to the top again and again.
   Sitting at the Internet Archive, is the [51]4AM Collection, an Apple II
   collection of cracked software (cracked "silently", meaning no title screens or
   destruction of function in the name of getting it out the doors), that numbers
   past 3,000 individual titles. And because we have an emulation system in place,
   you can click on almost all of them and begin interacting with them immediately,
   often instantly.

   The pure existence of this collection, that it actually works and is available
   all the time and people use it by the thousands, also stands as a perfect example
   of what I've come to realize: Accomplishments fade, to the accomplished. People
   who are in the business of getting things done take very little time to wander
   out to the veranda to look down among their completed tasks and not move, quietly
   jiggling a beverage. They're back inside working on the next thing, or trying to
   shore up a devastating (to them) flaw in their work they glanced at the last time
   they ever looked back at it.

   Meanwhile, this collection (still growing) represents a foundational location to
   some audience, the size of which I can't easily discern, who are just living in a
   world where thousands of Apple II software packages are ready to go at the
   slightest itch to make it happen.

   The use of Passport and Applesauce means that when 4am gets new floppies, either
   by purchase or donation, they enter a well-oiled machine and process, which reads
   the disks, cracks them (or asks for help cracking them, before they are then
   cracked and everything else like them will be cracked in the future), and uploads
   the new ones to the Archive. There's a lot less time to get bored, find it
   repetitive, and get a hold of the inevitable excuses to do anything else.

   There's lessons in all this but I'm not convinced they'll reach the right people.

   Speaking of lessons, the point of all this congratulatory fog of words is to
   bring out a hard lesson I learned due to a secondary 4am project: [52]WOZ A DAY.

   Applesauce pushes out three general types of disk images in its work. Fluxes,
   which are to-the-bit accurate portrayals of the magnetic flux of the floppy
   disks. Files that are just the data inside the floppies, and a third type, WOZ
   format.

   Flux reads are huge, owing to how they're being done, and can be 20 megabytes for
   a single floppy which would normally be 144 kilobytes. The files of JUST the data
   are usually the exact same, that is, 144 kilobyes.

   But WOZ files are another beast all together. They shift; they are different
   sizes for the different unique aspects of that floppy disk images. WOZ, in other
   words, is a standard disk image but with an [53]entire additional layer of
   information about the layout of the floppies and additional data shoved into them
   for the purposes of copy projection.

   In the context of the end user, a WOZ file, booting inside a WOZ-enabled
   emulator, will boot with not a single solitary byte changed in the name of
   preservation, or a single solitary microsecond mistimed in execution and speed
   from the original hardware booking the original magnetic black square.

   If you start up Choplifter! as a WOZ, you will [54]experience Choplifter! exactly
   as you'd have booting something you picked up at the local computer store. For
   people who might have only played cracked versions, modified towards being
   copyable and easily transferred over modems, it might sometimes come off as the
   program being "wrong". But no, it is you who is at fault; you remember something
   else, a simulacrum of what Choplifter was at the time.

   The aforementioned process and automation on the part of 4am has resulted in
   [55]WOZ-A-DAY holding over 1,500 individual commercially released programs in its
   collection. This number is astounding; for most individuals with a glancing and
   maybe even deep knowledge of Apple II software lore, they will be very hard
   pressed indeed to recall any program they bought in a store (or wished they had),
   or to find any commercial product advertised inside a magazine, and not bump into
   it among the hundreds contained here.

   It is among the high crimes within my personal penal code when someone hears
   tangentially of a major project like this, spanning years, and coming back with
   "Well, call me when they have ______" without even checking, thinking they've
   added anything of value to the discussion. What they generally have done is
   withdraw another 15-45 seconds of my life to tell them that yes, this collection
   has [56]Prince of Persia, [57]Apple Galaxian, or [58]Copy II Plus among its
   stacks. It has so many more, not just games but utilities, applications,
   educational and genres yet undefined.

   Walking these exhibits myself, as I've done over the years, it feels like we're
   looking at both a memorial and a testimony condensed into an object. After all,
   to know how amazing a game like [59]Dung Beetles is, and being able to point to
   that specific URL to instantly play it, seems like a high watermark. It shouldn't
   just be a simple case of the name and year of the program and then you play it -
   surely we can do more.

   Already, WOZ A DAY and the other 4am collections stand as the kind of puffery
   discussed at a game convention or around a table on the second day of a tech
   meet, a wishful thinking of "someday" that could exist. I've sat in on those
   conversations, and yet here, absolutely, is the real thing.

   But it's thin. You are told a game exists here, you can click on it and play it.
   You do not get context, documentation, links to magazine articles and ads and all
   the other pieces of a program's life that came through the world as it was sold.
   Worst of all, the Internet Archive is absolutely brimming with the information
   I'm talking about - digitized magazines, flyers, books and recordings discussing
   these very items.

   So, at one point, I decided it was time to do something about it.

   It failed and I wanted to talk about why.

   To understand what I was going for, I put in the time for [60]Hard Hat Mack, a
   pretty straightforward platformer game from 1983, which has [61]gotten the WOZ A
   DAY treatment. I spent time and tried to pull up everything about this game -
   write-ups, interviews, reviews, announcements, alternate versions and trivia. I
   created an item that would reveal Hard Hat Mack's full spectrum of information
   and allow someone who played the game to also enjoy the world it was part of. Or,
   conversely, for a student or researcher to grab footholds in the history of the
   game.

   If this sub-project started and ended with a handful of items, it'd be a success.

   But there's a lot of items.

   After spending some weeks rounding up people to contribute entries in the same
   style of depth, tracking contributions and sharing the duties, only a handful
   ever got the treatment. I have mostly shut the whole thing down at this point.

   So, what exactly happened?

   Well, it comes down to a rather tricky situation - there are jobs/tasks that will
   only bring in fanatics if by fanatics you mean people being paid for their time.
   And those jobs/tasks will likely never get any sort of funding to do so.

   They're the worst of both worlds - profoundly boring, utterly necessary. No
   amount of rah-rah work, no reframing of the whole thing as a competition, "do it
   for the good of it" situation will obscure the fact that it is very difficult
   effort that should be compensated.

   4am happened upon the secret - write code to do the boring parts, then make more
   and more parts boring; figure them out utterly, until there were no choices to
   make, and then code that followed those no-choice journeys thousands of times.
   But rich, interesting descriptions and lists of tangents are not the province of
   automation, yet, and so the WOZ A DAY remains as, simply, a spectacular selection
   of Apple II software, much of it rare as can be in the form it exists.
   I could cook up some other schemes to get an army of people to do this work -
   fundraisers, "hackathons" and livestreams come to mind. But at the moment, things
   are stable, and I tried to do the experiment and have a lot of data about what
   worked and didn't work in the process. We got a handful of nice items updated
   with their history, and I learned a lesson.

   Maybe, sometimes, we take the lesson, and move on.
     ____________________________________________________________________________

   [62]4 Comments

[63]Priority and Process -- February 13, 2023

   The reason I'm doing a bunch of entries around the theme of "A couple people
   asked, so here's a long and drawn-out answer that touches on a host of
   considerations" is because the era of "I am on multiple platforms that harvest my
   low-level brainwaves and let me make two-sentence jabs masquerading as insight"
   is coming to a close. In its dimming light, I can make out the glow of people
   wanting to know some of the opaque processes I engage in, either as inspiration
   or a warning.
   That approach (one focus drains, another rises) is the core of how I do
   everything, so let me answer the curiosity of a few people who wondered why I
   choose what I do and how I do it.
   The usual caveats: One person's approach to life, especially as described by
   themselves, is an observed artwork, not a curated manual. Priorities shift and
   opportunities flicker and fade, and it's not a good idea to have made your
   priorities or opportunities the defining (or worse, only) aspects of your life.
   In a year I could read all this and laugh at that deluded bastard, unaware of the
   Coming Thing that will make any of it irrelevant. Consider this all a gentle
   introspective song played in words and not a thundering drumbeat demanding you
   march in lock step.
   I am also focusing on my Internet Archive era, not how I approached things back
   when I was a systems administrator and doing documentaries on the side, that is,
   a documentary filmmaker who administered systems to pay his travel and camera
   equipment costs. I'm talking about 2011 to the present.

   With all that out of the way.

   On a personal level, I've been speedrunning a game called "Die With The Least
   Amount Of Confusion About What To Do With Your Remaining Stuff", and
   professionally, I've been running a project called "Die With Maximum Finished
   Projects Lacking Interest By Co-Workers And Reasonable Public Levels of Awareness
   Of My Efforts". Both are going quite swimmingly.

   It's bright-line obvious and easy to cleave my Internet Archive era into before
   and after my 2017 heart attack.

   I've [64]described the situation at length before, even [65]doing so onstage, and
   I've touched on the themes and lessons that came from the event. But
   functionally, the result was my realization of how entirely arbitrary existence
   is. Reality provides the experience of going from [66]Zero to Dead with alarming
   frequency; but even more troubling for me was the inaccurate signaling my body
   provided that anything was wrong.

   You would think 99% blockage of a major artery on the heart would be really
   really intense, a thunderstruck pain shifting all priority, but it was mostly an
   annoyance until it was a misery. But even the misery was just that - an ache one
   might get from sleeping poorly, or having eaten an undercooked potato, which I've
   done once or twice. Only with a number of experts and authorities showing me
   exactly how dangerously close I came to ceasing and exactly how that happened, am
   I even able to articulate what went on. No sense of conclusion had come to me
   beforehand, no overriding awareness of a chapter and possibly the entire book
   closing.

   It was Luck, but also a Lesson. Things will shift in an instant, and I am likely
   to have little warning beforehand. One moment delicious meal, next moment
   oblivion. And with that outlook, a lot of stuff came into pretty sharp focus and
   a pretty deliberate roadmap came into being.

   Building on what I said a [67]couple entries ago, cleaving my possessions into
   items held for myself and items held in trust for others betrayed a ridiculous
   ratio, something on the order of 99 to 1. For every memento of a person or
   experience that I was keeping close, I had dozens and dozens of magazines,
   floppies and pieces of equipment I took on just because I was worried nobody else
   would make the effort. This outlook had resulted in a shipping container of
   materials, and when I finally put together the process of transferring most of
   them away, the resulting movement of material was, frankly, shocking.

   Thousands of magazines went to organizations and tens of thousands of items went
   into the Internet Archive's physical archives. Monitors went to museums and
   individuals, and gaming systems went to yet more locations. By the end of it all,
   I had divested so much material to more permanent homes, that it would be assumed
   I'd had absolutely nothing left.

   And, comparatively, absolutely. It was less than a couple storage units worth, a
   sliver of what it was, and that description is where it remains today. In a
   recent consolidation effort, with a number of volunteers, a single truckload was
   able to take the contents of all the remaining units and put them into one, and
   while the view of the remaining storage unit could seem dire on first view, it is
   not:

   A heartening sign is that a notable percentage is furniture and vintage
   equipment, particularly nice pieces that are not compatible with my current
   living situation. A good amount are books I'm either going to donate, or which
   I'm going to bring back to a bookshelf in my home.
   And then, in an amount I will be able to better quantify soon, are the Things
   Held in Trust; floppy disks, cassette tapes and typewriters, materials meant to
   have something "done" to them, after which they will go into some manner of
   permanent storage away from me. This is probably the majority of non-furniture
   and technical object items.

   The remainder are a set of what would be called my Personal Effects - papers,
   drawings, pamphlets, mementos and a handful of artifacts from old jobs, old
   experiences, mostly meant as talismans for me, personally, to be able to recall
   people and events that otherwise I might have a harder time to remember. How many
   of THOSE could stand to be just digital and then stored away with a marking to
   toss them if people want, is part of the near future task set.

   Now, for a moment, let's veer into Everything Else.
   Sitting in three physical locations around the country are collections of what a
   classifier might deem "Touched by Jason Scott", that is, I am the instigator that
   caused the Internet Archive to acquire materials, with an eventual goal that
   either the organization at large, or myself, "do something" with them.

   This is a lot of material. It's books, software, papers, videotapes, and a
   smidgen here and there of the kind of weird gathered up miscellany that comes
   when you absorb the world by the truckload. I can't estimate how much this is.
   It's probably many tons.

   This is waiting for me. If I work on it alone, and single-stream, it will never
   be done before I am 100 years old. It's that's much.

   Luckily, I'm not working alone. There are collections that have a general mandate
   to be digitized over time, and I am but one of many potential parties who may do
   that work. There are others that will get pulled into other larger digitization
   and archiving endeavors that will come along in the future, during that madness
   when an entity comes along saying "We want to put this truckload of cash into a
   digitizing effort; what do you have available to work on as a set?"

   Then there's some sets that are definitely "mine", in terms of I advocated for
   them, we're holding them, and in the expanse of time I'm the top candidate to
   step in and start getting them pulled into an online form. I'll resist
   distraction listing their classifications and stories, but just be aware they are
   in big pallets in a very large set of rooms and the second I address them is the
   second they ultimately get addressed.

   Which, ultimately, brings me back to being in my hot little rented office,
   digitizing whatever materials with whatever equipment is working, as fast as I
   can, for as many hours as I can.

   Permit me to join the legions of people for whom the Pandemic was and continues
   to be disruptive. Besides health issues, I did not visit the Internet Archive
   Headquarters and most of the physical archives for years. It put a pause on my
   digitization and classification efforts, while no pause was put on acquisition.
   (The Archive actually took in dozens of entire libraries of institutions shutting
   down during the pandemic, literal millions of books and items.) For a lot of
   2020-2022, significant portions of my pipeline and priorities went out the
   window. I wouldn't call everything "normal" now, but I am proceeding with my
   scanning/digitizing efforts full apace now, and doing activities of assessment
   and interaction that would have normally been done multiple years before they
   actually are happening.

   Here, in the present day, things have gotten understandable and quantifiable
   enough for me to be able to finally address piles of to-dos that are within 10
   minutes of my rented office, easy to pull in, do work on, and then mail away or
   store locally in a "just in case" contingency. I expect by the end of this year,
   I will have a reasonable understanding of where things are and where they will be
   going.

   From then, it's rinse, repeat. Take in each new block of promises and intentions,
   do the work, often on a stream, and go forward until I run out of materials,
   time, energy or health.

   That's the priority list: Do the media and materials I have machinery for,
   acquire machinery to do materials that I currently can't, exhaust my local
   collections, then acquire the larger to-dos from Internet Archive stores and
   begin doing those to the best of my abilities.

   Simultaneously, be aware of the fact that since I was unable to detect
   life-threatening health issues until it was past too late, it's always possible
   that happens again, and I leave everything in a grinding halt, halfway through a
   project, with all my machines humming until they crash.

   At that point, I hope that that what I've left behind is inherently obvious, in
   good hands, and understandable in case someone else wants to race the doomsday
   clock and make more items see a digital future.

   If not... well, buy a Ouija board.
     ____________________________________________________________________________

   [68]1 Comment

[69]How I Do It, Buffered By Cries I Am Doing It Wrong -- February 8, 2023

   The [70]last entry garnered an awful lot of attention. While I would normally
   write in such a way as to move around between unrelated subjects, sometimes I'm
   backed into a corner to do a follow-up or second part; the amount of people who
   have wandered into my field of vision to ask me for deep details of what they
   variously call my toolchain, setup, or approach has now overflowed my life's
   efficiency.

   Here is a quick time-saving suggestion: Skip everything I'm writing down to the
   nice picture of the videotapes. Then read what's after that and don't comment.

   Still here? Let's go.

   There are many things which set me off, but few have been as consistent as Nerd
   Bullying, especially where people who consider themselves kings of very tiny
   kingdoms take their knowledge and smoosh it in a bowl with their social
   awkwardness and lack of cue-observing and come out of the gate with a
   way-too-overtuned neg-throwing style and tone criticism.
   By all rights, this should be a minor, almost rounding error of an experience,
   but part of what I do on the daily is often a process or procedure and Nerd
   Bullies looooove these linear steps because it's one dimension away from a
   flowchart and they feel they need to add one more dimension, one more fix, before
   it's either better, or perfect.
   Now, of course they have no idea what minefield they're wandering into with me,
   or the disproportionate response it often garners when they're "just helping",
   but that's also because I'm translating their words on the fly:
     * "Not sure if you're aware" - Salutations, Dilettante Moron
     * "Pro Tip" - I think my opinion matters so much it should be canon
     * "Curious ______" - Everything after the word "curious" is always awful
     * "Why are you choosing to _____" - Everything after the words "choosing to" is
       similarly awful

   And so on.

   Their weirdly-framed criticisms or "Not a question, more of a comment" ends up
   doing nothing to move my needle, and in a few cases, gets a profanity-laden rant
   they are completely unsure how they signed up for.

   Therefore, when people ask/demand how I "do" things, I tend to hesitate, because
   instead of providing Education, I feel I am providing Ammunition.
   This is all, however, my problem, not anyone else's. Of course people stumble
   through life, confused and various levels of paranoid, unsure if they're doing
   the right thing or oblivious to the fact they aren't. They found solace in the
   churning sea of life's short run on a floating plank of easy-to-master geekery
   and in their minds it becomes an island from which to send up signals of their
   prowess before their bad diets send them into the darkness at shockingly high
   numbers and shockingly low ages.

   And, of course, marbled like fine steak among this crowd are some truly generous
   and thoughtful folks, who honestly do want your opinion on what you do, realizing
   that someone else's decisions aren't edicts or judgements on their lives and
   choices. They benefit hearing the footsteps of another soul's journey and taking
   warmth or warning from what they observe.
   It's to these folks I am now speaking.

   Let's get something out of the way: Depending on how you count it, I have, in my
   inbox, roughly 100,000 videotapes to process.

   With numbers like that, choices are going to be made. Choices of whether to do
   anything much with it, how far I'll get along in the expanse and functional
   reality of time, and what exactly a by-tape approach will take. I've spent a lot
   of time and a lot of consultation to come up with what's going on currently, and
   the journey is not over.

   Also, the choices are going to shift over time, as new opportunities present
   themselves, costs or income interfere, and long-term trends with the equipment
   and materials come to light.
   At this point, I've digitized roughly 2,000 tapes. Last week I digitized 60. Who
   knows what next month will bring. My process is a snapshot, not an immutable
   declaration.

   What I Do And How I Do It

   One of the most variant choices to make are what Codecs your final video files
   are going to be in.

   For the tapes of value or uniqueness, I am doing [71]Lagarith, a chonky little
   codec which is lossless, and then compressed. It works out to anywhere between
   25-50gb an hour. It is memorably huge. It has been around a long time, and it can
   be converted into a mass of lossy compression schemes down the line. It leaves
   the most options open in that direction. It is a pain in the ass to transfer,
   taking hours to upload and download. I keep them interlaced, again to provide the
   most options later.

   For tapes where I will be dealing with many thousands (think, someone has
   recorded years of news programs), I use various types of MPEG-4, which is lossy
   (drops bits in the name of saving space) but gets the information across
   effectively, and the notably reduced disk space usage means that having a
   half-million hours of programs will be within the realm of cost availability.
   Should a tape go by that is so incredible it will need to be ripped via Lagarith,
   that command will arrive someday and it will be dealt with.

   I do not throw out any tapes. They are all stored after digitization.

   Currently I use an analog to digital device/card called a [72]BlackMagic
   Intensity Pro 4k Card, which is about $240 and which does the job very well. It
   is compatible with a wide range of software, does not get flustered easily, and
   is not a massive mystery as to how it exactly works. It can work with HDMI,
   Component, and S-VIDEO cables, and I use the latter two. I currently have five of
   these cards in use.

   I don't care about brands of cables.

   I use whatever cable is generally thought of as the "best" connection between the
   videotape deck and the outgoing signal. In order, that's generally HDMI ->
   S-VIDEO -> Component -> Composite for me. Since none of the decks I work with
   have HDMI conversion (nor do I want it), they almost all are S-VIDEO right now.

   The cables from the BlackMagic Intensity are going either into the deck, or
   through a "Time Base Corrector" which is located inside of a Panasonic DMR-ES10
   DVD Recorder. The cable going into the DMR is either an S-VIDEO or a Component
   cable, but right now it's always an S-VIDEO going into the card because why not.

   I did not always use [73]Time-Base Correction at the beginning of my process, but
   I use it all the time now. When you're dealing with terrible, terrible, terrible
   tapes, you want to run them through this device, which helps with the signal to
   make it synchronize with the sound and not drop frames in a way that the result
   is a broken, fuzzy, off-kilter mess. If I don't use it, it's simply because I am
   dealing with the best of the best tapes, or I recently got a deck and I haven't
   purchased one. In general, I use them all the time.

   Finally (on the hardware side), I use a variety of VHS and UMATIC decks, and will
   be adding BETAMAX and BETACAM decks as well in the future. In general, I go for
   brands that are either well-regarded, or passable with my being given them for
   free playing a part.

   Right now, the weirdest decks I use are SONY SVO-9500MD decks, which normally go
   inside MRI machines. They have very, very, very capability and they're built like
   tanks. Someone who donated one to me had gotten it, and his insight caused me to
   love this model type very much.

   I also use some variation of JVC S9600U SsVHS machines, because they have a lot
   of circuitry inside to take absolutely terrible tapes and make them look better.
   When I was dealing with [74]bootleg rock tapes that are on their 3rd-5th
   generation, this makes a difference.

   For the UMATIC tapes, I'm currently working with a SONY VP-5000 machine. This
   machine is hell on earth to work with, but when it all comes together, the image
   and output is very nice. The JVC and 9500MD decks put out SVIDEO, while this
   VP-5000 puts out a BNC connection I convert to component into the Time-Base
   Corrector.

   Now you know the "Hardware Chain".

   For software, I am currently using Virtualdub, which is a rather old piece of
   video processing software, but which works very well for the straightforward
   "take in what's coming on the BlackMagic card, and turn it into a file". I can
   run two of it on a single Windows machine, with two BlackMagic cards in it. When
   I'm done with the files, I can use a third instance of Virtualdub to crop either
   side of the recording so I don't have minutes (or hours) of blank space being
   stored in the file. So, in this way, Virtualdub is both a capture, and a
   finisher.

   I do not process the files further. I do not de-interlace. I do not convert them
   to another codec beyond Lagarith. I put them on USB drives and I upload them as
   is, with the filenames as the metadata that was written on the tapes, if any.

   Again, for the more "Tape to File" mindsets:
     * VHS or UMATIC Tape
     * Sony SVO-9500MD or JVC S9600U SVHS, or SONY VP-5000 UMATIC
     * Connected via SVIDEO or Component Cable to Time Base Corrector
     * Panasonic DMR-ES10 DVD Recorder being used as a pass-through Time Base
       Corrector
     * S-VIDEO and the Audio Cables into a BlackMagic Intensity Pro 4k Card for each
       Deck
     * Capturing video via Virtualdub for each card, running in Windows 10 or 11
     * Lagarith Codec, Nothing Special Added,
     * Cropped via Virtualdub and uploaded with Filename as Metadata

   This is how I do, and this is how I do it.

   Philosophy

   Come back in a year, and I may have changed any part of this - this is not a
   final decision with no negotiation, although I have talked to more people than
   most might expect, and the choices here come from a real place and aren't random.

   The tapes are not thrown out, and can be revisited. I do not let myself worry
   that I get one shot with the tapes - in almost all cases, I'm going after tapes
   that would never have seen any treatment at all, so what I'm doing in the
   aggregate is already better than expected.

   This is all very hard on the decks. I expect to go through many along the way. I
   do not throw them out when they break, yet, and will see what goes on.

   My experience is USB digitizers (you plug the video into a little device, and the
   little device goes into a USB port) are not dependable.
   Everything I digitize, I [75]share immediately. People find errors and I have
   fixed them.

   I am focused on doing the same thing decently enough 100,000 times, not doing a
   tiny handful of things perfectly. If you have 20 tapes to work with, no doubt
   you'll be different. You may be different all the way down, in fact. Have a ball.
   Don't tell me.

   [76]See you on the stream.
     ____________________________________________________________________________

   [77]3 Comments
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   Jason Scott's weblog of computer history, punditry and trivia, from the creator
       of the [79]BBS Documentary, [80]GET LAMP, and proprietor of the
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       [82]jason@textfiles.com.
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  46. https://github.com/a2-4am/passport
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  72. https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/intensitypro4k
  73. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_base_correction?useskin=vector
  74. https://archive.org/details/diamondheadtapes
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  76. https://twitch.tv/textfiles
  77. https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5467#comments
  78. https://ascii.textfiles.com/page/2
  79. http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/
  80. http://www.getlamp.com/
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