 I know that you have many choices when you fly DEF CON, so I want to thank you for taking the time to come with me. My name is Jason Scott. I'm at this point. What's that? What's doing that? Elves. All right. Anyway, my name is Jason Scott. Some people might be here because they don't have anything else to do. Some people might be here because they specifically want to hear whatever the heck that talk description was in the program. I, at this point, am known for a number of things, so I'll just take a show of hands. Did you hear of me because of textfiles.com? All right. The VBS documentary. I goat said my space. Okay. Okay. That's good. And otherwise it's just inertia, right? You're just here because the other talk stopped. Okay. Also, I want to point out the first two rows are a splash area, so if you've got ponchos at the hacker foundation room, that would be good. So this talk is called The Edge of Forever, Making Computer History. I like to tell people why I choose to give certain talks and what they should listen to me for. This talk is very specifically about computer history. And that is to say history of computers, history of people who use computers, lore around them, all the ancillary parts of things that have happened. When people ask me what I call myself now, I usually don't call myself a Unix administrator for some sort of vague company that's out there. I call myself a historian, and it's a badge that I wear with pride. It's something I'm really proud of. I started as a historian so far back in my past now that I kind of have to make up a story of when I became a historian. The closest I can think of was that when I was very young and using bulletin boards, and we'll stop off for a second here to go, does anyone here not know what a bulletin board is? Okay, excellent. Did I see any of you there? Good. The bulletin board system plays an important part in my own personal history, which is why so much of the projects that I've done have been associated with them. So as a youth, when I was born in 1970, my father brought computers home when I was eight, and by the time I was 11, I was on computer bulletin boards. And whereas a lot of people would be on them at that age just to kind of cruise them, get software, do messages, I had this compulsion to go onto their file sections and download everything I could, but not just that, go onto the message bases and print them out, print out the user lists, print out anything I could find, and store it, and that's the other part, store it. Store it enough that I still have them all. And, you know, that's a very odd compulsion to have, but I had it from a very young age, and one can try to figure out why that is, and I'm sure that I've got some guys who will gladly accept 60 bucks an hour for me to find out why, but to me, a lot of it was just that it was so goddamn fascinating, all that was happening back then, that I just started to collect it, and sometimes I'd look back on it and say, this is pretty cool, and other times it would just, you know, why not, why not keep this thing around? History, and is to say the concept of history, is one that gets bandied about quite a bit, especially in today's world when we are able to consume so much information so quickly that it's natural to run out of things that are going on right now and want to think about stuff that used to happen. Sounds fruity, but it's true. The problem, of course, is that in this information-soaked world, history can be kind of twisted to mean whatever it wants to be. In computer history, the vast majority of what we usually see when people discuss computer history is usually money-based, that is to say, they want to know when something started to get sold, they wanted to know how much of it was sold, they also want to know what replaced it, who got rich because of it, who was able to market it first. So, as a result, a lot of computer history out there is extremely confined to a small degree, and that actually, by the way, is the nature of history. We as people want to tell history as a narrative. This is a very strong urge. Unless you're a drug counselor, I've probably had to sit through more stories than you have, and let me say that after hearing thousands of people talk about their stories, one thing comes to mind, which is that people tend to craft themselves as the hero. By that, I mean that things happen to them or they cause things to happen, but they very rarely tell you about what was going on nearby to them. This is not a big surprise, but it's important to know that that bias exists all the time. A very good example of this bias is, for instance, in modem speeds, to take an example. Modems, as you know, started out pretty friggin' slow, 50-bod, and after a while we were able to move to 110-bod, 300-bod, there was a 450-bod for a while, there's 600-bod, 1200, 2400-bod, and then, next thing you know, Comcast-Born. If you talk to people, they will have very radically different ideas of when that happened, not coincidentally around the time that they became aware of them. For instance, I've been told that, oh, 2400-bod modems came around in 1992. I've been told about 9600-bod modems coming around in 1988. I've been told about, you know, when somebody discovered this, and that's when it must have happened, and that's the way it is. That's just normal. I mean, people do that. And you, as a historian, or a person trying to track history, are pressed upon to come up with, well, what's the truth here? Truth is even more fucked up than history, because people want the truth to make what they believe in the right thing. It's no fun if you say, well, you know, it turned out my political leanings were completely fucked up, and I didn't get any of that right. And you don't often hear that unless the person is trying to convince you to their new political leaning. Then they'll admit to their old political leaning being fucked up. Again, this is a natural urge, but if you're somebody who's saying, well, when did this happen? When did this go on? You know, the urge to narration. Now, when I bring up names like Mitnick, Poulsen, Susan Thunder, MindVox, or, you know, the dateline bitch, you end up with these stories where people are already crafting narratives based on that. What did Mitnick do? What did Poulsen do? What did John Draper do? And a lot of times they're not quite accurate. And by not accurate, I mean literally not stating the right thing that happened at that time. People will say, oh, yes, he hacked into this when he didn't, or he was able to do this when he, or she did this or this happened. Again, it's because when people tell stories, they want everything to link up. When you say to somebody, first there was the Commodore 64, then there was the Atari 800, and then there was the IBM, and then there was, you know, Dell Computer. What you're doing is you're trying to put everything into a piece of motivational movement. In other words, this caused this, this caused this. This is a pain in the ass for a computer historian, because it's not often that way. We work in so many parallels. Dreams that are being dreamed now at this conference may not come to fruit for 15 or 20 years, but here's where they actually started. Here's where that conversation was over in the bar where the two guys talked, and the guys suddenly thought that the thing he's been working on quietly for about a year, it's turned out to be completely wrong. Actually, maybe that thing that guy shouted over there. But there's no record of that, and he's not going to announce it. For example, here's a fact that I have that I've been told that may not be true, but may be true, which is that Atari needed seeded money, seeding money when it started in the 1970s, and it did it by making a porn film. I was told that basically the head of Atari was in it, actually, and this gave them some of the seed money to work on part of Atari. Now, I bring out that one because, A, it mentions porn, and that's very popular. But number two, it's because what I want you to think about is how much does it affect you if Atari was started by porn? Do you no longer want to use Atari? Do you like Atari more? Do you feel smarter for knowing that? Do you feel dumber for knowing that? That's a fact that's presented to you by some ass on a stage that you may remember, and you may bring it up just to go get an Atari porn. You end up pulling that into your own lexicon of knowledge. So in my projects, my projects include textfiles.com, which is a compendium of bulletin board system era text files, which date back to the 1970s for bulletin boards, but now I'm pleased to have things from 1940s and 1950s like ham radio collections and things like that. I branched later into artscene.textfiles.com, which collected things from the various computer art scenes of the last 50 years. I then thought it would be kind of fun to do a documentary. I was only half right. It's sort of fun to do a documentary. It's not fun to do a documentary for four solid years, but it's pretty fun to do a documentary. This was on bulletin board systems. You're starting to see a theme here. The bulletin board system documentary involved me traveling around the country to ask people what the hell happened. And this is where I first started to encounter personal narratives. So for instance, I interviewed a lot of people associated with something called Phytonet. Anyone here doesn't know what Phytonet is? Can I make it in two seconds? Excellent. Think of a bulletin board system, which is a computer hooked up to a phone line with a fat guy behind it. He's very lonely because he can only allow one person to connect to his computer at one time. He's got another friend who's not quite as fat. Actually, he's kind of skinny. I think he has a gland problem. He has another bulletin board system and he can only take a certain number of people. What happens is with Phytonet is that this software overnight has one computer call the other and go, hey, did anything happen today? And then it passes it over. This is like describing the Internet as a couple of things hooked up. Within a short period of time, people loved this Phytonet. And what they started to do was it started to grow. So it started out as being about 50 nodes in 1984. And by 1992, its peak, it was well into the tens of thousands of nodes all over the world, able to communicate with email, transfer stuff, and move files and data around all over the world, pre-popular commercial Internet years ago. Email in 1985 when you're just somebody somewhere who wants to send a message to someone in California. Now, bear in mind you would send a message and it would literally take two or three days to get there and then come back, but you were doing it and you were living that life. So when I hear people who say, oh yeah, when email was invented in 1992, I hasten, actually no, I hasten to disagree. I don't hasten to tell them that I disagree. Let them go. Let it go. Let it go is a theme of a lot of my life actually. Let it go. It's okay. It's cool. They're not going to hurt you. With Phytonet, when you interview the people in Phytonet, another thing comes out that's not quite as obvious when you read about the lore of Phytonet, which is that it was basically a program that generated angry politics between people. You would basically, after a while, run out of a way for these computers to communicate. You know, basically, you know, you can only have so many fat guys and so many lines at so many times, so they moved to a hub and spoke model where somebody would become the one who would take all the messages for his area and then it would bounce over to a big area and it would bounce around here, thereby saving money. And you can imagine once you start to hear that what kind of an organizational nightmare that ends up being, because none of these people are being paid. They're just kind of doing it. So the potential for, I hate him. I don't want to be him to be in our group and I want this and don't pass messages from him and this unbelievable amount of pain. And this is being experienced by people in 1986, 1987, very, you know, deep, angry feelings that I interviewed people about. Well, all of this in some ways predates a lot of what we see now. A lot of the issues they had to deal with and they came up with their own vague solutions to and some of them worked and some of them didn't. We're now seeing again. And to me, that's one of the most important roles of a historian is to make people understand, no, this isn't the first time. Besides a narrative bias, we also have what I call a first, greatest bias. You want to be the first. You want to be the greatest. You want to be at least near the greatest. OK, DEF CON has to be the greatest hacker convention. You don't want to say, oh, I was attending one of the minor ones. You say, I want to be in the greatest one. And you say, well, look, we are the greatest. Look how many people come. Look where it's held. Look how big a space we took out. Look at this and you start to throw out these metrics. The story that I give, that's a good example of the first best one, is there's a gentleman who I encountered who claimed that he had the first software store in 1979. This is wrong. He definitely ran a store and it definitely sold software. And I said, OK, well, I know of a guy named Stan V. He ran a computer store in 1975. He wrote a book about it. It's later the first place where Stephen Jobs stopped by to convince him to sell Apple computers. I think he was first. And the guy said, huh, not the first software store. Because by his metric, a computer that, and again, not mail order. He was saying the first, and you see this is what happens. It's the first brick and mortar store that sold just software for computers that were for personal computers. But damn it, he was first. He gets the blue ribbon. He gets the fucking prize. And you encounter this when you're asking people about stuff. They want to say, not just like I did something that a lot of other people did. They want to say, I did it best. We were the first. We were the best. We were the greatest. It doesn't diminish what you've done if you're not the first. It doesn't diminish what you do if you're not the greatest at it. What matters is you did it. If you once you start to realize what a sea of inaction we all float in, little boats of action floating in this massive sea of duh, you start to really get a perspective on it. And perspective is a really tough thing with history. So again, the narrative need, the need to be first, the need to be the greatest. And, and this one gets fucking weird, our pattern recognition issue. We love patterns as a human race. We love patterns. If you show us a bunch of dots, eventually we see God wearing a hat. That says he loves us. We will do this. We will look at a bunch of events. We will see that, you know, we saw that, you know, a classic example of this is the stock market. The stock market will go down 50 points. And a news reporter will say, with absolutely no gumption whatsoever, yeah, Adobe's new products sucked. As if that's, okay, the new product didn't sell as well. We went down 50 points in the stock market. Done. We finished it. People when they write narratives will say things like, oh, because the English were not being fed well in this particular event, that's why they lost the battle of whatever. And that the losing the battle of whatever led to a general sense of malaise, which then overcame the English and caused them to lose this and eventually, you know, led to the invention of the airplane. And once you look for it and you recognize that that's what they're doing to you, and it's, I mean, it's a very simple thing to do, right? It's a very simple thing just to come up with your own sets of if then, therefore, this happened, everything else. This is very, very normal. But it correlates badly with what usually actually happened. And one of the side effects of that is that all it takes is for somebody to come up with another perspective, another factoid, and everything, your whole house of cards comes crashing down. This puts you in a very odd position as a historian. You can either go, jolly good show, good man. You've totally shown me to be an ass. I will move into stacking boxes for a living. Or you will say, your new idea is completely out of the realm of possibility. It is a fringe concept that can no longer be listened to by anyone who has any knowledge of the subject. I believe the FARC.com references, you know, I do that and I am getting a kick out of these replies. And what that is doing is you're saying, well, because I was able to first craft this statue of narrative out of this marble block of time, anybody else who tries to make any other kind of statue out of that block of time is totally and utterly fucked up and should totally be ignored. History moves linearly. That is to say, things do happen one after another in time, but sometimes the thing that's just before the other event is not the motivating factor, even though it's moving along the lineage. Boy, you didn't know you were going to go to a metaphysics discussion, did you? No, you didn't. Sorry. The reason I mention that is because there's what I call history highways and history goat paths. And so a history highway is that causational discussion that I mentioned before where someone will say, oh, once home computers started to enter the market, there were more hackers. And because there were more hackers, there was more money in security. And because of that, Wacken Hut got bigger. And because, you know, a person will construct this absolutely interesting narrative that may or may not be true, but that becomes the story. And then you find out later that there was this parallel little group that kind of did something that didn't blossom, but they existed all this time. Right now, in hacker worlds, and by hacker worlds I'm discussing this thing. If you know what DEF CON is or have been to a DEF CON, that's the group I'm using here, because there's obviously many others. But there's this very strong sense, if you want to show people your incredible history wang, you mention the Youth International Party Line. This was a hacker slash anarchist slash yippee zing that came out in the early 1970s, co-founded by Abby Hoffman, which encouraged people to really fuck with the system. Every few issues they would come out with the new formula for the calling cards of the phone company, you know, fuck Ma Bell, because Ma Bell has a war tax, a tax that was made to fund a war, and we should stop that. And the best way to stop that is by avoiding paying any money to Ma Bell, so that that way our money can't be used. It's a very interesting theory. It's also this magazine that then became TAP, the Technological Assistance Program. This went through a number of editors, and this is the prototypical zine, the one where hackers were coming in saying, here's some blue box plans, here are some ideas for screwing with electric meters, here's how to make cocaine, because why not? Free phone calls, cocaine, what could go wrong? And then as TAP started to go under, 2600 rose up. 2600 rose up and went on for many, many years until finally at some point frack, which we're not sure when that started, got into legal trouble, and then the EFF was formed to stop frack from being arrested, and then we had the EFF turn into something else where everybody was saved, and then there was Slashdot. Slashdot came along, and everybody started being assholes, and everything went under, and all I remember now is just you can't post anything on YouTube anymore because people are fucks, and why aren't we back at Yipple? So that's the basic story. It's pretty good, actually. However, there's another magazine besides Yipple. In fact, there's many other zines besides Yipple in TAP. There are many other hacker conventions. When's the first hacker convention? Well, I had a theory that it was the first World's Fair in the 1800s when they assembled thousands of engineers and creators to come to one single location and build a beautiful structure and show off their newest wares to people, and all these guys got really friggin' drunk and hung out for days and days and talked about great ideas and shared them. So that's like 100 years ago. But there was also a phone freak conference that occurred in New York City. If you've ever seen... there was a documentary about it that had a... had Mitnick... sorry. Documentary's not a great word. There was a show, and it had Stephen Wozniak, Kevin Mitnick, and John Draper, and all of them cabitzing, and it had a little bit of footage, but it had some beautiful 16-millimeter footage that had been held in the 1970s in which there were stacks of Lone Ranger masks at the door so that everyone could wear them when they were looking around, and they set up in the corners, they set up labs where you could have phone equipment set up, like switches, and screw with them and learn how they worked. So that was 30 years ago. Now there are people who were there who could tell you stories that I can't tell, and there are people who think they were there or want to act like they were there who then inform you in their own narrative style which consequently stars them as the hero that, you know, will give you the real story about that and which was which, and it turns out this was this. But those phone freak conventions and those alternate zines that didn't get the prominence of TAP or the props that were given to them by 2600, they fade in our lore. Right now, people in 2007 will quote something particularly old for them. You know, they'll mention codes from blue boxes or they'll reference the loft or they'll reference some early 2600 blue box plans or so on, and if you think about it what they are doing is they're functioning as talismans, they're functioning as a way of saying in our history, this was something that was really important and I wear it as a crest or maybe they're drunk, but I want to think that it's got that weight in some manner to say look, because I am aware of this thing that happened 10 years before I was born I am a part of that continuum and I am something that will improve upon that continuum that goes on. I encounter a lot of people what the hell is that beeping? The projector? This clock is informing me that it is 622 I hope that was the clock God, that's depressing I don't think it was the clock God, that's so sad Anyway Sorry if I've diminished the power of my speech I should have just taken it We weren't filming me destroying hotel property, were we? Oh look, I've entered lore I was there when God he pissed on it and then he hit somebody with it and there was blood and oh my God where was I? Oh yes, the continuum One of the side effects of having lore however is that lore will pull from any source around it to make itself stronger In other words if you see something that's sort of like the thing you saw you combine it with it One of the downsides of this is the massive use of pop culture references and I don't like the term mass media references So for instance the film Hackers 1995, Angelina Jolie and somebody else was basically this movie that gets referenced that movie came out when I was 25 but obviously there are people who are at this convention who were born when that came out it was the hacker movie and them and so for them it's this ancient cinematic piece of work that they can refer back to as somebody who was born in the 70s might refer back to a 1950s or 1940s era film to say look isn't it cute and here's the reference I'm making Now Hackers is a very interesting poetic project I happen to like the movie as a poetic work In other words I do like the fact that it does deal with things in a kind of almost you know tangential feel they don't really hack on computers they do a sort of dance that's relevant to being near a computer which indicates something happening over here and there's central themes of hate and love and despair and wanting to have a name and not having a name and how do you define yourself great excellent it is not a technical manual it is not a proper portrayal of any of the process it's not really related to hacking all that much at all this was actually a huge shock to Emmanuel Goldstein who I talked to at the time was led to believe that because it had some people associated who were hackers in it and it used hacker things like the mentors you know manifesto that this thing must have been made with at least some vague hope of being accurate but that's not why it was made but that movie will now function for the next 20, 30, 40 years as an example of what hacking is what other people do in lore it is much easier to pull up this already filmed AVI that looks really good and has Angelina Jolie's left hit then it is to get some sort of scratchy mini-dv film of a bunch of guys standing around going oh shit fucking camper so what you end up with instead is this kind of slicked over reality for me the movie that was mine is Wargames which again I mean this is the problem right in your own personal narrative if Wargames is your hackers then if you look at that movie it falls flat on its face in almost every single aspect except that the spirit of what the guys trying to achieve is in there in other words it's like I'm trying to learn this new thing and why do I make this thing happen and yes not everyone likes me and there's a girl here and I'm not going to do her because I'm so fascinated by this computer but you know yes a total fantasy it was like a science fiction fantasy and so that movie however was the closest that I had I remember actually when I was that age that my first thought was oh shit the jig is up now everyone's going to know what I've been doing and what's up and turned out it wasn't so bad I don't know if anyone remembers the film why am I spacing the name of this thing it was a series with Matthew Levitro um no anyway there was a whiz kids that's it whiz kids anyone remember whiz kids if you go into youtube right now you type whiz kids you can see it and this is important to me to note right now because for instance none of you who don't know what whiz kids is are like what the fuck is whiz kids but if you type whiz kids opener into youtube right now you can see this 1980s hacker television series that was started moog music and had all of this references to computers and technology and making all the kids get really screwed up things and grades and everything else and it lived it was born and it died you know it was basically a standard television series it mostly exists now only in scratchy videotape nobody's really produced a DVD version of it so it doesn't show up as much in the lore now before war games you have and well around with war games you have other films obviously you have movies like sneakers you have buckaroo bonsai you have the foreman project all of these are movies that portray technology and so all of them are very easy to snap up examples of technology now when I talk to people they of course inform me that the real life isn't anything like that movie and that's fine that's true because that culture will want to use those movies as examples of reality which is part of why people like me get really anal and ass holy when we see this culture portrayed as it has been portrayed I'm going to punch two people in the face right now ones in the audience I'm going to punch one person in the face right now his name is dan verton he wrote a book called confessions of teenage hackers it is dog shit this is a book that is supposed to talk about young hackers it's one step above child exploitation he essentially talks to them says to them so tell me the incredible stories of your hacking and they proceed to tell him wild fantastic stories which he then puts down essentially is fact the one I'm reminded of is of the young lady who came to DEF CON and won one of the contests she won I think it was hacker jeopardy it was a year when they didn't do it it talks about how she was his story is this brave tale of a young lady who using only her skills was able to overcome the amazing male tidal wave of DEF CON and rise above every so if you look at the tape they weren't sure how they were going to end it so they did the old hold the hand over each person and clap over who wins the end guess what she won if the tape wasn't there Mr. Burton's story would be the actual story the only thing that makes me angrier than his stories is his introduction when a book's introduction angers you you've made a fine purchase there's a story another piece of lore related around the Legion of Doom who here doesn't know the Legion of Doom wow that's great the Legion of Doom is one of the more famous hacking groups passes through several hands mostly associated with Chris Goggins Eric Bloodaxe that has other people associated with of course including the mentor who wrote the hacker manifesto they have a number of stories associated with them for instance the famous manual story I don't know if I'll just quickly tell that one which was that Chris Goggins got word that he was going to be busted, raided so of course he cleared all his stuff out and when the authorities came to bust through his house he had an application and a manual for I believe it was the Secret Service or the FBI on his desk and he said I'm thinking of joining great story there's a story associated with them that became the basis of the Bruce Sterling book which basically as he tells it was that the phone system crashed turned out there was a bug a problem with the subroutine it failed to exit properly it was just I believe it was one character I think it was a semicolon and it basically caused a switch to crash but when it crashed this switch then gave all of its data to another switch which proceeded to crash until they were all crashing so there was a phone outage during that time there was a FBI and Secret Service program underway Operation Sun Devil named after the Sun Devils which was still in the research phase but which was then pushed into action because of this crash because it wasn't determined yet who had caused the crash turned out of course the crash was a programming error but in fact this group and these other groups were all busted very quickly because this got pushed in the only reason I mention all that and that amount of excruciating detail is simply because it was known very quickly that it wasn't these kids who did it it was basically a case of a programming error and a bus that got precipitated so there was a fire downtown so let's bust the brothel In Burton's book he quite happily explains to you how the LOD crashed the phone system and caused a crack down that's what really pisses me off he actually uses the term crack down implying he did read the first four to seven pages of the hacker crack down enough to get the title but then just reported it is wrong so this book which is written in the 2000s is now a sightable source of reference and continues to be so next question is Jason why don't you do something about it on top of a stage that's true I started a site called hacker.textfiles.com hacker was my attempt to start to try to get some idea around the concept of the term hacker because it does not seem to be dying down seems to be rather popular still and so why does it cause so much complication so much politics and why do they keep making bad books about it and so I've already taken one book Hacker Culture by Doug Thomas and went through it paragraph by paragraph and found the 45 errors the he did this when he didn't the date that isn't right the motivation that was never there and so on that's just me right I mean I'm busy but I mean I thought I'd do it just to try it and yeah it revealed a lot of problems there's a lot of money to be mining the hacker story you know there's a lot of story money you can make movies out of it and get rich you can make books out of it and not get it all rich you can also get a newspaper article out of it and make minimum wage so it's it's it's very very very easy to just kind of scoop out of Hacker Culture this vague set of lore and kind of put it forward as its fact and nobody's gonna really care and so as a historian who's taken an interest in this I'm quite happy to try to correct some of the problems but it is a boring anal depressing sad lonely job which is why of course I'd love all of you to do it which is why I'm and so the problem is when you do a sad lonely depressing job whether it's writing a device driver or you're trying to figure out where this book got up what motivates you is to think that you're doing something for the greater good and I tell you that yes it is for the greater good more than once I get letters from people who thank me for whatever historical work I've done and thank me for working on a particular project enough for them to get quote-unquote the story the BBS documentary which is here it is for sale but it's also up on google video it's also Creative Commons licensed because it was very important to me that the story get out and more than once a kid who can barely I mean I remember not being able to afford pizza but wanting to learn and those two things don't always go together very well and so I would have been very happy to know that there was an entire documentary about a time before me that's told through personal narrative that tries to combine them in a way that the parallels and the history highways and stuff are worked and I could get it for free right now and download it so I do get letters from kids who are basically younger than my underwear who tell me that they're really pleased that they really understand ANSI art or FIDO net subjects which they may never have come into contact with I'm going to move forward into archiving and collecting because that's something else that I do when one collects computer items or really most any items well let's stick with computer items there are many people here have older computers things they used to play on or use and yet they're still in their house I find it works across several vectors the first one is what I call speculative that is to say some people are under the fucking delusion that this stuff will be worth something later so they will hold on to a piece of shit for years thinking that now the shit will be worth shit times five is a natural belief system some things appreciate some things depreciate some cars appreciate some cars depreciate same thing with computers there is an there are what you might call anomalies bizarre kind of one-off computer historical artifacts a good example is chase the chuck wagon does anyone know what I mean when I say chase the chuck wagon oh good let's let me let me get that market full of more people there is an Atari cartridge that was produced as a promotion by Purina I don't know why I wasn't there I don't know the thinking but they hired somebody to make an Atari 2600 game called chase the chuck wagon it's not that good it's not a great game but there's almost none of them because you had to fill in a bunch of labels of Purina products and mail them in where they could then get one not many people did this at a time when you could buy most Atari cartridges for between $2.50 and $5 with things like combat being 50 cents chase the chuck wagon was going for $114 at this point chase the chuck wagon will actually go up into the four figures somebody will actually pay $1000 for a chase the chuck and chase the chuck wagon Atari 2600 Atari cartridge right now well great that's great this should not inspire you to hoard your Atari 2600 waiting to pay off your kids college fund because it's probably not going to happen but people do do this the most common phrase I hear is well maybe it'll be worth something in a little while this is an extremely shallow and extremely poor way to look at life as a series of things with price tags on them that are being slowly crossed off and increased in value over time it's a poor way to live and it doesn't actually tend to function the people who do that who really do that who do that for like money often what they do is they just do bulk lot buyouts they find someone who's died which does happen and then they buy all their crap they go through it they see what they can get that looks somewhat value with their jaundiced eye and then they go and they put up what's left of the shit to a larger market who then go to a larger market and so on and that human roach like existence can be done but you end up with having a very small amount of stuff that may be valuable to a certain set of people there is an extremely vibrant very enjoyable glass electric insulator culture if you didn't know about it you know about it now when I say electric glass insulator I'm talking about on railroad ties when you and on electrical poles next to railroad ties I mean there are power connectors that are insulating it from the pole there was a market in this there are manufacturers that came and went there there are particularly unique models that were designed certain ways low production runs great production runs all you have to do is take one look away from the thing you're doing on ebay and browse a different category and then you start to get a real good perspective on what you're trying to do so when I get my hands on old pieces of computer equipment the reason I do it is what I say the second one which is nostalgic I'm actually picking up memories I'm picking up old stories this is not any better or worse in terms of morality or anything it's just my motivation is that there were these things that were this way and I'm going to keep specimens of that before they go away and in some cases it's because I need the hardware to be able to save the software this is less and less the case but you often need the hardware to pull out the data so it's good to have this stuff around and then there's the third one which I call inertial that is to say you had it and you still got it in that situation it doesn't really matter to you what you have that's when you go up to the uncle Julius died oh Jesus look at his attic I'm not even 20 grand gets you the house and that stuff in it and people will do this people as human beings I mean if you buy something I mean if you pay $2,000 for a computer it takes you a long time to get rid of it because it cost you $2,000 it's not worth $2,000 anymore it's not got anything on it that could get you money you can't use it anymore but you keep it because there's still room in your house I had actually interviewed a gentleman he's in the documentary he had so much stuff that in his living room this is besides the rest but in his living room there were piles kind of like pylons you know three to four feet and he had arranged pathways so that he could get to the television set this way or come back this way to the couch or go this way to the kitchen and the rest of it was literally papers computer pieces books very well arranged I might say really crazy but definitely he had such a strong connection to his stuff he did not want to get away from it and later I met him and he had gotten a girlfriend and she was like we fixed that but I was very glad that I did in my own way he gave away the stuff to appropriate people one of the things that happens is I'll find out somebody who has a lot of stuff died and I'll be like things and sometimes I find out that oh no no his things were properly disseminated across the people who would then appreciate it you have these things where people build up piles of their lives and then their lives are split up into other people's life piles very cute and so it doesn't mean I didn't like the person I'm just saying I had a guy who contacted me who was like I wish to throw out all my issues of Nintendo power do you want them now that's interesting because my initial immediate reaction was of course yes definitely please send me I don't like Nintendo power I actually don't even I mean I just bought a Nintendo Wii but I don't have much Nintendo lore in my life but I I didn't want the Nintendo power to be gone by the way he had every issue of Nintendo power every issue of Nintendo power is 75 pounds so 75 pounds of Nintendo power showed up at my house I did the experiment with this actually I was going to write a newspaper article about it because I was fascinated by the concept of collection what does collection mean to people well somebody put up on eBay the ultimate saved by the bell collection this collection which was the product of decades of effort had every episode on minidv some of them duplicated from studio masters one off specials that were only shown once every fan magazine every related book photos control of the the domain name so I bought it I've never actually opened it there's this white box in my attic that I know in my heart is the largest collection of saved by the bell and the reason I'm doing that is because I'm fascinated by that idea of like I own all of the saved by the bell lore this gets me in with screech if I was to bring it up with him at some sort of hello sir I have everything ever that you did for saved by the bell I have not added in the porn tape I should shouldn't I keep the you know it's a constant maintenance nightmare Jesus so yeah yeah so the saved by the bell collection sits in my attic and I keep that there as my talisman to remind me that this can become a medical malady if you don't watch it I meet people who are now this is another piece of personal knowledge I've gained over the years is that everybody who does something that seems like it's rather extreme knows a more extreme mother fucker personally points to them and says I'm nothing always you find the person who's wearing the vest of tats and he's got the guy who's got the face of tats you talk to the person who has a motor now ten motorcycles and then you meet the guy who has the motorcycle shops and the 400 motorcycles in the back everyone knows these kind of guys I own a checker marathon taxi cab and there's a guy who has hundreds of them checker ben I'll never be as fucked up as checker ben similarly there's a gentleman named selham ismail selham ismail owns vintage org well worth visiting but his website doesn't give you the impression of the 4,000 square foot warehouse he owns with over 2,000 different brands of computers that's not to say he doesn't have 45 mac pluses I'm just saying he has 2,000 different types he makes his money doing salvage he sometimes lends them out as movie shoots or for legal battles because sometimes somebody tries to fucking patent air and so he's gotta come in and go look air tanks and add them in the 60s dumb fucking bottom feeding ass shit cock met these guys who patented the fucking bbs and I have to sit there with ward christiansen who by the way made them and there's somebody patented the bbs where you put in a message and then others respond to that message and it's under a topic that patent exists and so we brought in ward christiansen and stuff to go that went by before I can't help but tell you and so when I see these guys who just air patented or air sellers where they just they just fucking grab something and go it's mine and they can make enough money in the interim time before someone wrenches it out of their hands that it's worth it to them that kind of encouraged behavior yes one of the aspects of history is that you get to go I told you so you're wrong you fucking get and that's one of the great pleasures actually I think I have a lot of cases where someone goes this is the way it was and I'm like except for the fact that it wasn't and here's a picture of not your idea hero sorry sucker the the the drive that I have is sick and I realize that it's a certain level right I mean when you have that much you know I just added 120,000 music files to my site I just there's a good example I'll give you a few examples of what I do now and I guess in some ways it's speculative and somewhat nostalgic I currently download every image uploaded to Wikipedia I have a machine that does that part of that is because they delete things very quickly and so I get them I also download every database dump of Wikipedia which I have going back years now which is a standard database dump is 5 gig compressed using BZip so I don't unpack them that often but they fit they fit on a dual DVD and they go in other places and I keep them on hard drives and stuff but why do I do that? partially I do that because I'm known as a Wikipedia critic but a lot of the times when I criticize Wikipedia it's more like you built a really nice car and then you let 12 year olds drive it into a wall 24 hours a day but man it's a really nice fucking set of shocks there that can sustain that much damage from those children 24 hours a day unendingly but good work so that's a lot of what I do so people are like you want you criticize Wikipedia you don't want there to be Wikipedia you're part of the corporate law something blob fuck things and I go no no no I like it but I think there could be some deals I edit on many wikis that aren't Wikipedia I think it's a great new way of looking at putting information together the problem is is that you have to make sure that you don't have an unfettered fuck nut Wikipedia's growth currently is because they have a very very low barrier to entry and that produces what I call an informational bottleneck informational bottlenecks are very interesting Wikipedia is very fashionable it has a lot of people using it so as a result if you go to the discussion pages of Wikipedia there is buried in the dog shit the diamond of brilliant conversation people who are like really amazing people who are stumbling on to this and giving out good information and discussing things and doing stuff and yes I think the outcome is not as good as it could be but there is some amazing stuff there Napster had this gift for about a year for a year everyone said wow I can trade digital music here's my collection amazing obscure crazy shit you know it wasn't just 400 hits for Nickelback it was this amazing collection where someone would go oh here's my entire collection of 20's tapes that I you know put up why not and you could browse amazing collections like that because for a while you had that combination of fad accessibility and ease and so people would go to it and show themselves and then after a while things would kind of suck and someone would go well I'm going to make a sub-site just dedicated to my little group and I'm going to make one to here and they don't interact and the parallels begin and the interaction is lost and then it's kind of dissipated but if you can get in in that little bit of time and recognize that period and grab it as fast as you can you will have something that historical wise will be absolutely precious you know in 20 years people will want these database dumps of Wikipedia before everything went to crap or things got crunched so much that it doesn't work the same way that little period of time when people were really trying to get things done so that's why I do it and then I put them out and I try to get everything up and uploaded there's a site that I have called cd.textfiles.com which I just oh man man that thing just rapes you in the face every day because there's nothing on there but shareware CDs now shareware CDs I keep asking if everyone knows I'm going to assume people know pretty much what a shareware CD is it's a CD full of shareware but what it was was there was a period of time when these bottom feeding cocksucking bastards would go on to bulletin board systems download every file they could and then make it available for sale and so yes they were assholes and so unwittingly they were historians they collected things because they had an idea of let's try to get this thing out to as many people as possible and so they would take anything well I've now taken them and put them back up again so for instance there's historical citations you can make because here we have an actual CD from 1991 and we know in 1991 that this thing came out and this is the ISO that I have from the original item and be attested to as being accurate at the very least you can know that this file existed at this time there's other ways of finding lies and hoaxes and people are good at lies and hoaxes but it's that little bit of datum that I'm doing my best to put up there so that people can make choices and make decisions one of the side effects though is I really do get raped because all of the Google searches and the Yahoo searches they just search it so someone looks for a picture of Petunia and there's a picture of a Petunia somewhere in my best shifts of Bolton Board's thing down here so people just come on and they just kind of decontextually come in and grab a certain thing and I certainly pay a bandwidth bill for that but I'm not going to knock that down it's very important to me that this stuff becomes accessible I would have wanted it accessible if I hadn't found it associated with cd.txtfiles.com it's a very inspiring story which I will go off book to tell you I get a lot of letters I have an inbox that can make Jesus cry I strike across a lot of vectors and some of them are bizarre and some of them are wonderful and touching and everything else and I was contacted by someone who said hello they always start out that way they never end that way is there any way that you would like to have some of the cds that I have? I have a large collection of cds well my natural answer is if I have the whole fucking save by the bell collection I'll certainly take your cds so I saw his name was Magère I thought that was a pretty hacker name Magère okay fine Magère how many cds do you have? oh 200 shareware cds, well that's fantastic I also have an entire run of hardcore computerist this obscure apple 2 cracking magazine I have every issue plus some of the beta issues some of the newsletter issues would you like that too? oh most certainly Magère Magère you are my new best friend so Magère and I are talking and he sent me cds on duplicates he explained to me that the Library of Congress had stopped by and duplicated some of the cds as well so this was not the only time he was contacting and during our conversation he used a very strange phrase in the email it's one of those times when a person says something to you and you just you know email captures that when you talk to somebody they might say something pretty fucked up which you are getting from me but when you see it in an email you go okay that was an odd Magère is everything okay you used a really phrased sentence he said oh yeah I am very sorry my first language is Dutch Yiddish Dutch Yiddish Magère you must be on drugs no I am Amish and it turned out that his name wasn't Magère, Magère was the title of the man he was typing for turned out there was this fellow who when he was young with this Amish clan it was discovered that he had photographic memory and an amazing ability to assess information well if you ever wonder why the Amish don't get totally fucked over all the time they have spies what the Amish do is they take somebody from their group and they send him out to live among the English which is what they call all of us bastards and this person walks among the English and learns about what the world's like, learns about phrases like air rights, pollution, global warming learns all these things that might affect the farms that might affect prices, might affect the survival they come back and they sit in the meetings of the council of the elders and the elders say, so what do you think of this and he says, oh when they say that they're lying to you or oh we should really keep an eye on this or no that's a perfectly good idea but it turns out if we buy from over here so this young gentleman in his teens was sent out into the world well he did what any normal Amish kid would do in the Elton board system figuring it was a good way to pull in information he bought every shareware CD he could he subscribed to every hacker magazine and technical magazine that he could and he did this for 30 years at the end of his 30 years he started to get ocular degeneration found that he was going blind so he went back to the farm where he got a huge long barn in the barn he put in shelving unit after shelving unit and put numbers underneath each area and then proceeded to take all the information he had collected in his life and arrange it along these numbered shelves to this day when he travels with them he says things like check shelf 37 I think that's something we can use for this Magère turns out to be a title meaning living saint because he is thought to have lived his life in hell because he walked along the English and was not part of his clan for 30 years so that's the craziest story that I have the Amish helped me save BBS history thank you Amish I have other ones but they're not quite that fucked up the one that I've been the one that I keep wanting to do the book on which fascinates me and it kind of helps to know a little bit about phytonet to know but we'll see if I can tell this properly and you'll see where it's going very quickly in the mid 80s the way that phytonet works is that you have hubs and you have regions and so on and you have this hierarchy of spaces and things that go on well one of the secrets of phytonet that again isn't really reported in general history was it was very expensive to run a hub in fact it could run you into thousands of dollars a month if you weren't careful so one of the little minor secrets of course was that people quietly did it through work and work numbers which is part of what helped support the phytonet but anyway, every once in a while it worked really well well there was a man named John Olesh and John Olesh ran a hub in I believe it was Minneapolis Minneapolis I'm pretty sure it was I could be wrong it was definitely a smaller city and he came along and said you know I can help you guys I can run a bulletin board system as a hub just drop all your traffic on me I can handle it dudes and he passed the traffic and John Olesh became a very popular figure John Olesh would have parties and invite everyone over and again all the people would have a great this guy was a fucking great guy he was like that guy in the center of everything who just put stuff together for you and he got into some business dealings with people where you know he's like I can get a good deal on computers and so they would do computer stuff together and this went on for about a year something like that some property I have there and then the phytonet node stopped transferring traffic people were like what's going on better contact John well you know his phone didn't answer they go over to his house and it's empty and that's when it came out that John had entered into a few $25,000 deals with a few people for computers and John Olesh wasn't named John Olesh his actual name was John Richard and when he lived in Texas he shot a cop don't do that he was being pulled in on another charge for some problem wrestled the cop's gun from him and shot the cop in the leg don't do that he put him on the 10 most wanted for a while because he wasn't be able to be found so he moved up to Minneapolis started a new life fucked everybody and then left they put up his picture his mugshot his information his everything they could find and they put it up on phytonet nodes and I collected this this was sitting in my collection for 15 years I didn't even pay much attention to it in 2000 the beloved head of a ISP in Indianapolis died of a heart attack in his apartment when they went out to his wallet they found that it had multiple names in it and they went to his storage unit where there was an old beat up truck with additional false information gassed up and ready to go at any time what had happened was was that John Alash or John Richard had moved to Indianapolis started up another scam started an ISP and it made fucking boatloads of cash so he stayed got sports cars hung out with people I had the pleasure of chatting with his main competitor who was kind of a buddy and he and John Alash would sometimes have lunch every few months with the local FBI representative we currently don't have the nuclear technology to have a big containment enough field for balls that size and his name that he gave at the time was Robert Hockam H-O-A-Q-I-M not completely unlike Hockam H-U-K-U-M putting something on, too lie and so there is a fascinating situation because he bought a lot of sports cars and there was a court case that arose up over one of the sports cars and I can find cited in the legal documents because I looked this up where they said it appears that the owner was an on the run FBI most wanted man who had run an ISP for 10 years in unusual circumstances so we would like to reevaluate the ownership of the car anyway so that's again not as cool as the Amish story but there is a case when you think about it that transfers across phytonet, bulletin boards the internet revolution the ways that information because here was a case where I found and of course by the way I immediately wrote the people he had fucked over and said hey there is an estate you probably want to sue so they were appreciative third story which I'm going to tell very quickly or maybe not so quickly, we'll see where we are is the zip arc story this is on my documentary but I just wish to go into it just a few seconds because this is an example where even to this day people don't know the actual story and by the actual story I mean how things actually happened because it's easier to go for the easy story than the hard one anyone here use zip alright good excellent good good good does anyone here remember arc alright excellent arc and zip had a lawsuit who won zip or arc nobody wants to play that's fine you all get negative 10 in the late 1970s a gentleman named Tom Henderson he had been a sailor he had been in the Navy he was a midshipman had gotten into the computer business the computer consulting business in the late 1970s he and his cohort did computer work for major companies they do contracting work along the way he fell in love with his partner's sister and married her they had a little business and the business was called system enhancement associates or SEA to reference back to his midshipman days they made a number of products but one of the products that he made he had gotten himself involved in the phytonet community to some extent and helped write things that made phytonet work better he was such a good programmer so smart he was very very good at optimizing other work and he was also very very good at coming up with his own really good ideas well one of the things that he worked on was a product called ARC now ARC was interesting ARC was a for sale product he sold it for a lot of different platforms he worked with other people and he basically had this compression product that used Huffman compression and would make your file smaller and this was obviously an extremely important thing at the time because of the cost of phone calls a vector which more and more people just like this are losing the memory of how much the phone company would charge you because we just got that again with that mega bit thing where the person paid two grand from his phone because he was an idiot the idea is that a lot of times now you pick up your phone or your Skype and you talk to somebody it's really not a problem it's not a mine field of eating or not so at the time though anything that could help you would be beloved so ARC so Tom Henderson had this thing under what he called a shareware license it was possible to use it for free you could pay for certain kinds of access to it and it gained a very quick and popular usage along the way a young man named Phil Katz took the product and optimized it what he did specifically was he took the code he optimized in machine language some of the code so that it was no longer portable but works much faster on a PC and sold it now this is an interesting thing it was a better product if you used a PC which is what it was written for but it used almost all of SEA's code down to the comments it was a duplicate that had minor changes now at the time which cannot easily be thought of now it's amazing now how somebody who works in computers now has to have their programming manual and their copyright law and their lawyer's phone number to function for a long period of time but back then it was kind of a thought of as this little paradise and again bear in mind I'm telling this narrative as I'm telling the narrative look it up yourself too but basically what would happen is people switched over to this new PK arc this Phil Katz arc that would run faster now at some point SEA contacted Phil Katz and said you know that's kind of our product you've done some things to it but we sell it and you are selling it and Phil Katz said he wasn't interested in talking and continued to sell it now at some point what they tell me people who I interviewed was that there was a time in one of the PC magazines that an ad comes out now in this ad it was on the same page as an SEA products ad and it was over right next to it and it said much better and cheaper than the other arc so they sued him now this is a shot across the world at the time it's not the first time people do each other obviously it's not that kind of a deal but in the bulletin board world this had not really happened all that often certainly not between different firms but one of the interesting things that wasn't really reported at the time was that Phil Katz his company PKware was about five six people and SEA was about four or five people but very very quickly Phil Katz started to send out messages across the phytonet across the very network that Tom Henderson had helped work on and optimized telling people about this unfair lawsuit and how they were trying to monetize bulletin boards and that nobody should use this arc product anymore they lost the lawsuit as to say PKware lost the lawsuit because they did steal it and they were selling it I say these words very clearly because that's not how it's often reported however the community turned on Tom Henderson they said we will no longer use arc then there were products there were scripts that could change any occasion of dot arc in your collection to dot sue there were utilities that came out to wholesale move all of your arc to other formats very quickly and the money dried up for SEA very quickly they lost all of their cash and they ultimately sold their compression to a Japanese company where arc is still somewhat in use and Phil Katz came out with a new product called zip now zip it wasn't sure what the name was going to come from here's a good example where CDs can help you I interviewed the guy who ran exec PC I don't know if anyone knows exec PC he sold exec PC for 29 million dollars so he owns an island now which sounds like making a joke but no he actually fucking owns an island it's off the coast of Florida don't visit he'll shoot you and he was friends with Phil Katz and did work with him and Phil Katz said what should I name it and he said name it zip because zip sounds like a zipper it's kind of sexy but it's also zip it's fast so along those sexy fast things like a car people will go for it now when he told me over this phone I was like bullshit that doesn't sound right at all but you know when I went back to my 1992 era CD shareware in the documentation for the original versions of zip it says thanks to my friend Bob Mahoney for coming up with the name zip to put on the archives so I was able to verify for myself through these ISOs that this actually did happen so when I pass it along to you he's got seal of approval Jason says it's true now Phil Katz drank himself to death what he did was he started drinking heavily in the mid 1990s started buying a lot of strippers I mean a lot of strippers and had drank enough that it was causing dental problems and died holding two bottles of peppermint schnapps in a hotel room outside of Milwaukee Tom Henderson is a somewhat broken man who lives off the shore of Virginia and runs a small business and his is the only interview I have on there which somebody just breaks into crying talking about his own life and what he said to me very clearly at the end was I appreciated doing this but I'm not going to do this again I'm going to talk about this and it strikes me how many people to this day say oh yes oh yeah that's the arc zip battle is the one where the arc people the arc company sued this guy Phil Katz and tried to control bulletin boards and Phil Katz won the day and that's why we are like we are now and you know I can attest to you took me two years to get all the names but that's not true you know there was something else that happened the question I put out to you is how often do the stories you hear have similar actual stories behind them skepticism is the watch word from anything including me I might just be a fuck nut who got up here I might add you need me running in right now going I'm Jason Scott who's that guy what I tell people is I really encourage them to not buy adulterated lore and accept it we have that in spades in this community people like to tell stories they're very fun the mitnick stories the draper stories the early hacking freaking how it went the names if you call yourself a phone freaker and don't know who Joy Bubbles is that's a problem if you say that captain crunch discovered the crunch whistle you have a problem if you have a case where you think that if you think that Kevin Mitnick was 100% wronged there's a problem was he wronged yes he was wronged when son had to come up with the price of their source code for his court case they included the price of building the buildings the source code was developed in so yes he was mistreated but the classic question is somebody who was doing something wrong who's really miswronged therefore completely absolved of the wrong that was already there but they're not easy questions and they're not ones that people like to ask because the story is a lot more fun here's what happened here's what happened here's what happened it's fun hooray have another drink not to be a downer I am going to quickly give some advice and it's very odd advice but it's advice that I've picked up in my 15 to 20 years of a historian and that is live a full life what I mean by that is a lot of people live lives in which they do very similar things constantly it's a lot of fun and it can make you very good at those things but sometimes if you just change shit up a little if you go some place you weren't supposed to if you take left where you weren't supposed to take right and you go to some other location that you've never thought of going to even though you see the sign for it all the time what you very quickly do is you get perspective on where you were sitting before one of the advantage of the bulletin board system documentary was that I was able to walk into the homes of people I would have never talked to all they linked to was bulletin boards which was a pretty scant amount of things to have in common among these people but I would walk into homes where I couldn't see because of the lack of light because of the the little one bulb that they owned and the home that couldn't have been worth more than five thousand dollars to interview them about running their lives I talked in homes which had fountains in them and flat screen TVs that rose up out of the kitchen cabinets each time I was blessed with being able to talk with these people just talk with them sometimes for an hour sometimes for two hours, three hours and just say how was life for you and in that way I learned a little bit about how life was for me people work so hard at these conventions to find the five people they remember from previous conventions and go talk with them and get drunk and say hey it's good to see you again it helps to stop a few people in the hallway and say hey what are you up to what are you kids doing over in that corner oh god stop it we love pattern recognition we absolutely love to find patterns in things call it a day one word this is how bad things can happen I mean not you know I'm not saying it in a dramatic sense but sometimes you just say that looks fine, that looks fine, that looks fine it's on fire because you just want to naturally do that and it's so hard to break out of that pattern to say so what was the story what was the story I had a gentleman walk up to me in a computer show and proceeded to talk to me it was really boring I don't mean just boring boring you know this boring like alright I can see where you're going with this and then this boring like I actually don't see where you're going with this it's a dark tunnel so I don't know when it ends and you're going very slowly towards the light but it may not be light I don't know what that is and I can't leave because I have the same I was I met people like that aren't they great those are great people you find like nine dead hookers in their basement because they're just like you know like yeah so what's up and they're like I can't do that so I sat there and talked with this gentleman now he was part of a group called the resistors which sounds really scary but it's really not it was one of the first computer clubs in the 60s composed of high school students who worked with Ted Nelson and people to come up with code gave presentations, had a lab and a barn in New Jersey and they would do amazing things I didn't really know that I didn't know shit from that I didn't know anything about that when I worked on my documentary he was talking about this stuff and yes it was slow and it was boring but it was true and it was honest and it was his life that he was telling me about and he was very very passionate about it if a bit dull and slow and that's critical we so much as people want to get the story and move on what do you do I do security ZING good for you brothers and then move on that's interesting informational fast food but that's really not learning anything about anybody else and it's tough to know and love other people I quite admit that so yes what I if anything else I say if the rest of my beautiful one hour and 26 minute rant which I really appreciate everyone who sit through if you walk away with anything else it's just to say yes live a full and wonderful life that other people will remember thank you thank you he cut off my mic bitch I'm selling BBS documentaries for $40 because I'm a whore as I say yeah exactly here's my shirt if I sell 20 the shirt comes off the anyway so I'm selling the BBS but I'll quickly answer any questions the question should not be in the form of a narrative about yourself alright okay I like craigslist I think the problem with craigslist on a certain sense is that it's push is okay and it's not a problem but it's a it's primary motivation is to make people provide things for other people when people do other stuff in it that fucks around like I totally admit casual encounters is the funniest fucking thing in the planet those are great stories those exist as an aberration as far as I'm concerned on there and yes aberrations are really cool but it's not craigslist mission craigslist mission is I've got some shit who wants my shit you've got too much shit get the shit I want shit give me shit right that's what I mean and so when I as a person who does bulletin board history I see a lot of things that are community discussions like how we do this and one of the things I've always said is that we have spent a lot of time in a web world right now working on the engineering of allowing input but we did not spend as much time on engineering the quality of the input and the output so for instance it's very hard right now to type into a text window and really crash the system a lot tougher than it used to be gets tougher every day we're good with that we got libraries we got shit and if someone throws in a unicode it doesn't fucking explode great excellent but then there's the problem like all it takes is one asshole to go you are so all totally to the left I hope you all eat shit and die and that's it you are done that conversation is over it is no longer about the fact that there was a hunter killed down the street it is about fuck you and your fucking fuck for about 30 pages you know it's like watching a bunch of people juggle and then someone just throws dog shit in and people just go oh shit the dog shit the dog shit and balls are going everywhere and there's no juggling anymore there's no knowledge that's being passed there's just fuck you and your fucking fuck and look an lol cat we're done and the reason for that is because I don't think there's been a lot of engineering for that with bulletin board systems part of the issue of course was that they were slower I there's a political board I have it's it's it's and and now you can't believe this it's like watching you know kids play with toxic waste but they're basically saying let's have a political discussion and there's 37 posts on it an average of one every 24 hours on this one example from 84 that I have because each time kid calls in goes in Reagan blows bush rules Van Halen and the guy who comes in and goes Van Halen everyone fucking ignores him because they're moving on right you can quickly move around him because it's so slow and then I looked at a fork example and there was one it was like kid fights off bear or something right and it had you went from one message every 1440 messages for minutes to 45 messages a minute and just all it took was some asshole down the middle it turned out the father was a marine that was that went after the dad why does the dad do blah something ex marine left right bullshit fuck kill you and and I'm like you know I think something I don't know it's it's not a case of censorship it's a matter of engineering on meta filter I hold up as an example of community that is so desperately trying to save itself in terms of conversation there is a wide amount of I guess the phrase would be a repercussion in other words you click on someone it's like here's how this asshole talks like you click on it and shows you the last 10 postings they made anywhere so in two seconds you can go oh he's a fuck and then move on to the next thing and so that engineering level you can see where he how often he calls and connects and does things and how often he does so by engineering that into the system which is tedious and weird and boring but not focusing so much on the how do I get the input window working it'll get better so craigslist right now I mean I have a rss feed on craigslist don't do that because yes they're very good at getting rid of crap after the crap happens so your rss feed is full of amazing crap there is some dingleberry who wants to buy a pinball machine he really wants to fucking buy one because that bastard must put 40 looking for pinball machines that's the classic use net issue of right you know solution to the problem got one I love that second question that's a go ahead over there there okay he's asking so do you collect shit do you have a collective collecting shit and there are computer places that will do that and I will do some and the fact is that there's only so much that I can take personally you don't want to see my attic it looks like I keep records on the world but a lot of times like I will cruise like there are classic computer lists there are historical computer groups a lot of the effort right now is being called trailing edge computers and trailing edge tries to create simulations of mainframes there's a beautiful thing damn oh bit savers oh Jesus you go on to that thing it's got digitized punch tape it's got old os tapes pdfs of old manuals they're just trying to get as much stuff as they can and are they going to get everything no and do people want to throw stuff out you know this whole stupid thing they do now the fucking fuck you know this whole set of crap they do now where it's like getting rid of extra guff in your life choose 14 things and throw them out right now and if you just assemble things remember this thing is not your mother it is a gift your mother gave you throw it out there's this thing get rid of it and you can slim down your life and not be choked by your god that's like watching a needle in my eye where I'm just like okay so instead of giving it somewhere or making even the minimal of effort trash bin that shit so much stuff that I've rescued has come because someone said you know there's a pile of stuff outside this building maybe you want to go over there and I go over and yeah I mean the value is mostly to me where I'm like oh my god that's a one only and that's something the fact is someone threw it out I've met a guy who I've done some dealings with he has 3,000 pinball machines and they are in various states of disrepair but it is quite something to walk with him and have him go yeah this is the only one left this one was in a flood so I had to fix it from the ground up this one is a pinball machine from 1927 before they invented flippers and when I see that kind of stuff that kind of inspiring bit there's a PDP-1 that has been reconstructed from scratch at the computer history museum and they've brought in Slug who was the guy who designed the original space war to consult on it and I had the pleasure last year of playing him in space war on a PDP-1 and Jesus did he kick my ass there's a gravity well in the middle of space war which is what they got rid of in the arcade ones and it sucks you in so you have to constantly be doing it so you know me I'm fucking Tokyo drifting my way around the gravity well and he blows me up and he's like you can't shoot from the side son school was in session alright you had a question say it again turn down n-ball or turn down oh ok why why have I turned it down I gotta think about that one by the way if anyone wants to buy the ultimate collection of save by the bell memorabilia I can put you in touch with a guy well I paid $350 for it so anything above that just take care of it new in box you know it's funny stuff that I've you know you do get to that point where you look at a pile and you're like walking away from this one retreat a lot of times if it's got bugs I won't go near it if it doesn't if it generally doesn't function has no hope of ever functioning and I don't have a functioning version of it I sometimes I have an apple Lisa and I have an apple Lisa that doesn't work so they're paired up for all of time but like yeah you know and yeah this isn't fake hesitation I take a lot of shit I moved into a house and I was like woo hoo the little fuel gauge just increased by a half so yeah no I mean my general rule is I will take it because if at the very least I'll take it I mean what I remember was I was working at MIT a temp secretary and they were going to clear out a lab and the guy said Jason call up the property services and have them throw out all the machinery in that lab so I go down into that lab and it is a fully formed vax lab I mean fully formed everything right there every single piece you could imagine totally hooked up right so I didn't call property services they called the loft and they said we'll be right over and we went in there and bear in mind they were pulling out a climate controlled lab with vax equipment and everything so they could put desks in it so the loft guys came with about three or four trucks in a van and we just stripped that room I remember specifically at one point, Stephon who was the one member of the loft that most people don't know but he was their electrician and other skill man he was only there from the beginning but he was like I don't think they're going to use the power in this room properly so he took the power grid and I remember that because that was black magic to me electricity scares the shit out of me and this was a two phase or three phase 250 volt power grid and he was like here's the deal he gave me like electricity retard 101 hold on to this that way you can't ever become a ground for something else by working and always do this and stuff and damn he ripped all the wiring and the circuit board and breaker and everything out of that room and MIT never cared and that's where the vax that was the lady of the vax came from was just ripping that out to MIT it was to less to the loft it was priceless and the constant battle in this is matching up the person who thinks it's worthless with the person who thinks it's priceless and that's an art and that's tough so I try to be the person who thinks it's priceless and if I'm not I can at least find the person who thinks it's priceless so at least I can put them together but shit's lost every day on Metafilter somebody decided to throw away 90 CDs and said should I throw them out and everyone's going yeah choose 20 things from your life and throw them out and all that crap and I was like I will take it and he's like they're really scratched up I will take it and I will pay the postage well I don't know if it's really a pain you know because you don't want to say I will take it and pay the postage for international shipping and I will pay you back for any price you put it in packaging it okay so I got them 90 shareware CDs for the Mac which he thought were absolutely valueless and which a lot of people on that board thought were valueless and do you know how I found it I found it because I saw a referral link website and one of the postings on Metafilter was you ought to give this to Jason Scott so that works for me I think since we seem to be am I doing one more oh you're in the darkness I can't see you go ahead yeah that one waving yeah you ask a dangerous question because you're asking what the ultimate purpose of what I'm doing is and why not there's a number of things that are involved in collecting that are not quite clear right like I said you can collect because of its speculative worth you can collect it for a nurse chuck cause you're not doing anything with it or nostalgic reasons or what I do and I call myself an archivist I don't call myself a librarian over time I've learned to not like librarians librarians are very nice people who provide a collection for the purposes of their very distinct audience and then throw them out or dissipate them if they fall out of favor libraries shred archives keep archives store so I'm sticking with archivist for now but the problem is is that the librarians are so much sexier so I don't say that in public when I'm talking to a librarian oh yeah actually that's the phrase I believe what was it like the internet it's from cat and girl where the person was like the internet's like a super highway goes no no the internet is like a drunk librarian they won't shut up anyway in terms of an ultimate goal I don't know I suspect what will happen is that over time I might find somebody I trust whether that's an entity or something else that I can give my stuff to or I will go through it and save it as best I can and then hold it somewhere in the hopes that I will be picked up by a ship I mean the problem is that people die I die and if I'm lucky I can take you with me but in the when I was a kid my shocking phrase used to be like you know how do you want to die and I'm like in a way that takes out all living things for one mile around me but anyway so when that one mile around me death sphere happens the question is what happens to my stuff and I don't know and that's a problem when you have these archives what you want to do is you want to start a foundation or something that holds a greater good that does not depend on individual lives unfortunately I'm a paranoid bitter fuck so I don't quite work well with others I don't join groups I don't go in with things you know it's always like Jason Scott who does this not Jason Scott of the blank because I'm not quite emotionally ready to share like that but I do my best to put as many copies of it up as possible so even if you don't like me and a lot of people don't and that's okay I'm not a nice guy you can at least benefit from the work that I'm doing that I'm doing maybe for myself or because I want to help people or stuff so I'm a very big fan of trying to make things available a lot of work has already been done very well like there are a lot of pictures of Commodore 64's out there Commodore 64 stack that I have because it's done, we're done we got the schematics, we got the PDF's up it's a little more difficult with later ones or with Wang computers Wang computers are a good one that are just going to friggin die there are some amazing stuff with the Wang computers there's a Wang demonstration tape that you can just see they're doing this amazing shit and you're like wow why didn't this take off because it was $45,000 and nobody wants a $45,000 desktop they don't want it then, they don't want it now so I'm not being coy when I say I actually don't know how it ends I I really can't hear you oh I'm an educator oh no no I'm an educator well I do my documentaries where I interact with people I put those out, people learn from those I'm taking all the raw footage and putting them up on archive.org I put up all the files that I grab in fact I have such a reputation now that there was some guy he had like all these old bell system things he has like the bell system memorial CD so I bought it and along with it came a note going hi Jason, I know who you are could you hold off putting it online for a little bit and I put it online but I actually got that with someone else somebody had like the full testimony of Bill Gates in that trial where he just got friggin grilled for hours on end which Microsoft sucks and he sells DVDs of it and I've got those DVDs and the only reason they're not online yet is because I just haven't felt like putting them up yet but I will, why not they're in my room, they're duplicable why not so yeah I mean there's that side of it I mean there are some people who are collectors who will happily collect stuff and keep it somewhere and I assume masturbate on it everything because it's theirs and that's that and you know no I'm not compatible with those people but I am compatible with understanding why some people don't immediately start massive foundations and want to interact with people and turn it all into an XML interfacable doodad thing yet we're now at the 46 minute mark I'm going to go to the Q&A room with my four sale documentaries and answer any questions and listen to your personal narratives and give you the love that you need thank you so much for the time you've given me