emr – The Roohr Way

Brick By Brick (David C. Robertson with Bill Breen, 2013)

Authors David Robertson and Bill Breen have unfortunately achieved a dubious honor: they’ve taken an exciting human story and turned it into a stuffy suit.

Brick By Brick details the critical years of The LEGO Group (herafter TLG) as it lost its way, almost went bankrupt, and managed to pull off a feat of business alchemy by becoming (now) the biggest toy company in the world. As a (kid) fan of Lego during that era, I remember watching this from the outside; the Ploughman years where TLG made famous mistakes like Galidor and soaring experiments like Mindstorms are part of the contours of my memory. The inside baseball view was fun, and I’d recommend reading the book if you’re really into that sort of thing, but it’s a lot of book for a few nuggets.

It’s not written as a history, it’s written as a guide for business “innovators,” and as such object lessons sometimes crowd out the finer points. I recognize that I’m not the target audience for the book, and that it’s not the book’s fault that it’s not everything I want it to be. But I can only react to it the way I reacted, so let’s check it out!

Character based themes were nothing new

In Breen & Robertson’s telling, you would be forgiven for thinking that Bionicle was the first time TLG had shipped a theme based on original characters.¹ This is plainly incorrect though. We got lore for System themes going way back; it just wasn’t taken seriously early on, see this section from a 1996 Mania Magazine:

Does that support an action-packed space exploration theme? Would the target audience even get the joke that MST3k is a show featuring robots?

It got better though! Check this character bio page from a 1998 mag:

While clearly off-brand Indiana Jones, this takes the premise much more seriously and is trying to design characters. A few other themes from the Ploughman era went in a similar direction; some were even media tie-ins, like Rock Raiders which was launched with a strategy video game.

MindStorms also had a tie in web-game, Stormrunner, quite a high quality one as well; a full on RCX programming simulator in a world you could drive your robot around in to explore. They discussed MindStorms in detail in the book but don’t mention the connection-the online MindStorms game was created by none other than Templar Studios, the same folks that created the Mata Nui Online Game that would prove instrumental in selling Bionicle as a theme with a story.

Another thing I think the book missed about Bionicle is that the art was just far better than what preceded it. Compare this to the above marketing materials, and while you’re at it, compare it to Toy Story 2, the best CGI most of us kids would have been exposed to in 2000:

Kids weren’t used to high quality CGI like this being used to market toys to them. Galador was just a (live action) guy, but Toa were these intricate, alien robots. Unique and memorable. Bionicle does get credit, but the focus is mostly on how innovative it is. But I think not enough credit is given for points on execution; it was just a much better put together marketing package than any theme had ever been treated to. The story was more coherent, the story was consistent (ish) across media, and the story was taken seriously, rather than used as an excuse to write dad jokes. If you were a genuine fan of System Themes, the Magazine blurbs sometimes felt like they were laughing at your expense… Bionicle never felt that way; Faber and co. were clearly huge fans of the material, hell Faber is still talking about it twenty years later! I’d say it was a confluence of factors-trying some of the same things and some new things, plus bringing the quality of the worldbuilding up to the obsessive quality of the bricks.

Nonetheless, Bionicle shouldn’t be seen solely as a unique moment for Lego, but also a progression from earlier attempts, a pulling together of all of the different things TLG had tried, especially during the zany Ploughman era.

Misunderstanding Minecraft

The chapter on Lego Universe unfortunately lacks depth on Lego’s history with gaming, and maybe gaming in general. I wish they’d tapped a seasoned games journo for this one rather than their kid who plays Minecraft. I suppose to be fair, Gaming was taken quite a bit less seriously ten years ago when Brick By Brick was written.

What they don’t seem to see is that Lego was no stranger to publishing games that promote a building play style. Lego Loco (Intelligent Games, 1998) was also an open ended sandbox game, a much gentler, challenge-free take on a sort of Sim City type of game, featuring lego minifigs and trains:

In the same year, TLG also published Lego Creator, an immersive 3d Lego building simulation featuring the ability to build lego models at minifig scale. It wasn’t exactly Minecraft, but it can be easily described in terms of Minecraft, it’s like Minecraft except:

You could build drivable vehicles
Static flat ground, no mining
Not voxel based; you could build with bricks of various shapes
No enemy npcs, threats or challenges; you just kinda build whatever you want with unlimited resources
Single player; no multiplayer

Apart from that, it was comparable to Minecraft, at least for its day. The sequels may have added some challenges, I never played them. But the prior art was clearly there. Had TLG chosen to develop along that path, it’s possible that they could have shipped something remarkably similar to Minecraft before Infiniminer, which inspired Minecraft, got off the ground. And I think it’s worth asking why and laying some blame on the inability for the culture of TLG to understand the industry, but I wish the book really engaged with that question instead of just lambasting the way they engaged with MMO producers in a fairly shallow way. I agree that perfectionism was the enemy, but I think that it was also a question of seeing kids MMOs like Toontown succeed massively and wanting to replicate that success, another subject not touched on.

The book I want someone to write

A book more focused on the Ploughman era specifically, with a deeper look at what TLG tried and when, when it worked and when it didn’t, and how the things that worked culminated in Bionicle and subsequent themes. I’d love to hear the inside story of TLG working essentially as a video game publisher, something Brick By Brick basically skated over! I want to know how we went from seemingly goofy after the fact ideas like Ann Droid to intentionally created stories like Johnny Thunder. This was clearly a gradual process, and one that’s as responsible for saving the company as a particular fire truck model was!

What I’m asking for, in other words, is a history of Lego Themes.

But how does it compare to The Lego Story

I gave both the same rating on Goodreads, but in retrospect, I enjoyed Anderson’s story a lot more. It also lacked a lot of theme-level coverage I crave, but it did attempt to tell a story and ground that story in research instead of fitting the narrative to instruct on some specific lesson (besides of course being a hagiography of Kjeld Kristiansen.) If you absolutely loved Anderson’s book you might find additional insight by comparing the two. If Anderson wasn’t for you, or if you were only mildly enthused, I’d give this one a pass.

Footnotes:

Actually they do bring up Fabuland for some incomprehensible reason. I dunno.

November 2024 Web Links

udm14.com

Turn Off google’s annoying AI summary by forcing web mode search. How long will it work for? Who knows. But it works this month.

The Corruption of Open Source (techwontsave.us)

More on the WordPress affair and the Open Source AI definition affair. Excellent coverage and a lively guest. I’m waiting for the dust to settle before I upgrade!

iron mountain atomic storage (computer.rip)

In interesting write up on the history of ubiquitous data storage company Iron Mountain.

Jazz Cups (99percentinvisible.org)

Somehow I’m missed this the first time around. Designer of the ubiquitous Jazz print got some recognition. Interesting to know it’s originally a charcoal sketch that was then colored on a computer.

MG Ultra (bandcamp.com)

Machine Girl’s most coherent (but still very punk) offering to date. The crazy breakdowns (like the end of track 12) are much appreciated.

The End Of EDH (commandersherald.com)

When I got back into MTG in college in 2013, one of the exciting new features was the EDH format. It was much more casual, closer to the kitchen table tomfoolery that kept me entertained back in the my first run (~2002-~2005.) We didn’t all run Sol ring.

It’s interesting to see what the format has become since then. The bans seem good, but I suppose the writing was on the wall when Wizards decided to print those cards in the first place.

Designing a few cards for EDH was neat; people were using commander precons. But the coolest thing was how it made you reconsider the types of cards that never saw play in constructed before. Overcosted things that fit into weird archetypes. Jank old legends like from actual _Legends_, amd trying to make them work. I get the sense that commander has become more like other constructed formats, with people making tuned decks using good cards.

I don’t know if I should care, I do not play a whole lot anymore and new cards aren’t really printed with me in mind. But it’s interesting to see the last gasp of a truly community driven hack of Magic as it’s absorbed into Wizards.

Pollyanna’s Corpse (interruptkey.com)

Delicious page design, but a chilling investigation. The idea that we’re all building our own digital tombs only for them to be refurbished as spam instruments is a sobering one. I suppose it’s a consequence of two factors: nothing can resist entropy forever, and on the internet the form entropy takes, the heat death, is turning into spam. Spam and bots are the gray nothing of the dead web.

Sex on the Moon (Ben Mezrich, 2013)

The premise held promise, but I think Mezrich fumbled this one. Sex on the Moon is too excited about telling convicted moon rock thief Thad’s story and not interested enough in informing the reader about anything in particular. If the story had enough juice to support a novel, it might have been worth it, but Thad is a poor fit for a hero and his story isn’t a heroic journey, or even a very good yarn.

The initial promise of a moon rock heist as a heist story is dashed fairly quickly; this seems like as much as an insider threat crime of opportunity committed by a habitual swiper as it is a proper caper. To summarize it: A couple of NASA Interns showed up at NASA with a dolly, stole a safe full of tiny moon rocks from a favorite processor’s office, and proceeded to try and sell them to an FBI agent. You don’t want to read a book about a bank robbery committed by a bank teller unless it’s told in a particularly compelling way (it isn’t) or it tells us something interesting about our world (I would argue that this does not.)

It’s written like a novel (interspersed with absolutely atrocious blank verse-presumably excerpted from Thad’s returned-to-sender jailhouse love letters to his accomplice) but heroes are usually expected to change or grow in some way. He starts the story casually stealing from his employer and ends the story after a jail sentence for stealing from another employer. There’s no sense that he has learned anything about right and wrong or trust or greed. His apology in court was barely a step from ‘it’s just a prank bro.’

It’s important for true crime writing, if it wants to be remotely tasteful, to make sure there’s empathy for the victims of the crime. There’s very little here. I wish he’d gone into what the effects were on the culture of NASA after the heist. Did interns still enjoy the same level of access? Is it still a viable pathway to an Astronaut career? Did they implement new security procedures? The scientist who’s safe NASA Intern thad and his co-conspirators stole testified in court that he left precious notebooks that represented thirty years of work in the safe and they were never recovered, but we don’t hear that in Thad’s telling. His co-conspirators told the FBI that Thad insisted they throw the notebooks out!

And that’s really the crux of the problem. The story puts us in the Perp’s head for the most part. The book is interesting enough when he’s describing how fun it is to be a NASA Intern and barely worth reading when he’s describing his head over heels plunge into adultery with a coworker. We don’t get a whole lot of empathy for his wife either, just his side of the story about how her… career was getting in the way of their relationship? Despite the fact that he of course moved out of state to chase a highly unlikely dream of becoming an astronaut and then threw it away for a life of crime. I suppose the book is trying to answer the question “what would drive a man with so much going his way to risk it all?” But the best answer we get is ‘he is very bad as gauging risk and engages in lots of risky behavior’ or ‘Thad, who seems to be telling the story, doesn’t want you to think that he was just greedy.’

I don’t believe Thad. He tells an improbable story of using a Hollywood chemistry trick to steal the keypad combination to gain access to the facility he stole from. I suspect one of the conspirators was leaked the code, and Thad lied to the author to protect that source. Why the author pointed it, I don’t know. We don’t know if there was any physical evidence for this story. The names of the co-conspirators are changed even though they’re a matter of public record. What journalistic purpose did that serve, besides (I assume) help assuage the guilt of the perpetrator? These make it difficult to take any of the facts in the book at face value. As a work of journalism it’s frightfully compromised.

As a yarn it’s frayed. It certainly kept me turning the pages to see what stupid mistake Thad would make next, but the sympathy left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s salaciousness wasn’t offset by any other qualities; it reads, partly, as a really weird love letter to a person who clearly no longer wants anything to do with the narrator. Skip this one and read the Atlantic article linked above instead.

The Cybergypsies (Indra Sinha, 1999)

If you were to list the great popular historical books of the computer world, you’d probably hear The Cuckoo’s Egg, Soul of a New Machine, and then a smattering of books by Wired Magazine regulars, like Cyberpunks and Where Wizards Stay Up Late. Fire In The Valley maybe, though I imagine Cromemco gets less relevant every day. What I rarely see recommended, however, and what I think belongs on the podium along with Kidder and Stoll, is Indra Sinha’s The Cybergypsies.

The gibsonian flair of the first few chapters creates the impression of a novel, and I think this confused some readers. I had to check out several facts and, low and behold, they turned out true. Eventually I realized “Bear,” the narrator, was Indra, and it’s a memoir. Shades was a real place; you can see a YouTube video playing back a recorded (and very chaotic) session. What else confused people? The terminology is probably period, but it’s a period that was over when the book was published-it’s a story of the modem world and what we would now call BBSs running MUDs.

The characters are drawn with attention to their humanity. It would be easy to turn this story into a people zoo, but Bear never does, instead opting for empathy even when he’s relating outrageous behavior and hilarious drama. In a different era, with a different pen, it might have been delivered as a very long forum post. Nowdays, perhaps as the sort of YouTube essay Folding Ideas produces. Because it really gets to the heart of what it means to be terminally online. Sinha was terminally online before that was even a thing.

You also need to realize that Bear’s got a truly fantastical imagination, and this may have rubbed literal-minded hackers the wrong way. He describes playing online MUDs with a richness that helps justify the outrageous price tag of being online in those days. There’s one scene where you suddenly realize he’s playing Colossal Cave Adventure and you almost don’t recognize it because his vivid description doesn’t betray the spartan description actually given in the game. Indeed, it’s a really interesting appraisal of text adventure games in general and the power of imagination.

So why don’t we hear about it now? Well, for one thing, it’s got a slur in the title. That makes it a bit awkward to bring up. In 1999 the dot-com crazy world wasn’t interested in a book about BBSing; compare similar books and they’re associated with favored technologies like Unix and TCP/IP. It wasn’t associated with any big exciting well known company either. Also, the original dust jacket (NSFW) features a pixelated, suggestively posed woman. It is a mature adult story but not lurid; the cover probably didn’t do it any favors in getting a more serious audience. Oh, and it’s not entirely optimistic, indeed showing the dangers of being terminally online, but again it’s not sensationalized. A lot of reviews at the time latched on to this, selling it as a bit of a horror or anti-tech story. But I really don’t think it earned that appraisal, I just don’t think we had the words we now have to describe what he was writing about.

(Bonus: interview with the author https://in.rediff.com/news/2007/aug/22inter.htm)

October ’24 Web Links

Does Open Source AI really Exist? (tante.cc)

This is an important article and everyone who spends time in the open source community should pay attention to its contents. OSI is preparing to adopt a definition of Open Source specific to AI models which doesn’t fit the definition it uses for code. I assume this is to allow some open source AI to exist, but in effect it is allowing Facebook (and Stability if they don’t go under) to pretend that what they’re putting out as far as weights is the same as the faffing Linux kernel.

Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg (news.ycombinator.com)

Litigant commenting on social media. Always something interesting to see. I have no plans to switch off of WordPress, but that’s of course mostly about inertia and avoiding link rot. I’d be happy to switch to a fork not managed by… a litigant posting on social media.

Redditor linked some old internet resources (reddit.com)

I haven’t actually tried these out myself yet, but if you’re an old internet enthusiast you may be interested.

https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/

I like sites that document old models and stuff like this. Been meaning to ask if they’ve seen anything like those unidentified Archie McPhee ships; when I tried to google for information about some similar stuff, I got there.

Opensourcing of Winamp goes badly (el reg)

A frequent complaint you’ll hear in the retro tech community is wishing that people would just open source beloved old software. Owners of said source code frequently say that that’s not as easy as people might think. This article is an illustration of why that’s correct; it’s not as easy as just throwing it on github and hitting publish, which the owners of Winamp seem to have done.

This awesome DnB clip made out of car noises (youtube.com)

Listen to it. Wish it was longer.

Why are unironic imperium posters so common? (Reddit.com)

Speaking of reddit, this was, embarrassingly, locked. But I think the following article may help answer it:

Satire Without Purpose Will Wander In Dark Places (timcolwill.com)

Put much better than I could have, but a line of reasoning I’ve had to have with folks before. GW definitely wants to sell its exciting world but also get out from under the massive problem it’s created with its lore by calling it satire. Nobody can keep a joke going for that long, not even SNL. The jabs at the US armed forces stings of course, and I’m not saying I agree with all his politics here (remember folks, a link is not an endorsement), but he does an excellent job of laying out the tension of GW’s two sided “it’s a satire / please enjoy how cool space marines are” position.

And while we’re on this general subject…

Godot 5 Wish List

Godot has had some coverage, and over the course of a conversation, someone said something like “What would you even want in Godot 5.”

I made a couple of off-hand lists, but I think there might be something interesting here so I’m going to go back, edit them together, and add a few more.

Interfaces, and deep integration of interfaces. For example, I’d like to be able to create a Group with an interface and ensure that any node added to that group implements that interface and get editor support when I pull that group. Interfaces should be able to require methods and signals at least.
Improve large scale scene editing and navigation. The scene editor is great for something like a character, but it’s downright painful to move around a really large scene to try and use it as a level editor.
Built-in heightmap terrain
Split Code Windows (and better code window management in general. They seem to open and switch around at random.)
Much better asset import/export story. I’m mostly talking about Blender here. Getting an animation successfully exported and imported is an arduous journey.
More debug drawing primitives. Arrows and stuff.
Please make it less painful to edit dictionaries in the node inspector. Needing to click add and navigate a drop down for each key hurts. Should be easier now that we have typed dicts.
Print should use log levels we can toggle like we toggle drawing navigation and physics shapes. Bonus if we could expose our own log level checkboxes in the same menu.
Better debugging information during nav mesh baking. Understanding why the nav mesh turns out the way it does tends to be a lot of trial and error.
Demo projects replicating common multiplayer use cases in depth to demonstrate parity with popular multiplayer games.
Allow us to define custom variable decorators (like @export) so that we can, for example, annotate which variables need to be persisted in a save file.
Tuples, especially Tuple unpacking so we don’t need to return untyped arrays everywhere
Pack file explorer so we can debug our exports.
Linter integrated with editor. Gimmie green squiggles, including support for linter flags like “forbid untyped vars”
Improved VSCode plugin.
Make it easier to move subtrees from one scene to another. Right now it’s a bit onerous.
Scene inheritance is sort of a mess; clean that up. I don’t have a great proposal for how but it’s a core feature and still feels like an obscure edge case by how the editor handles it. My not-great proposal is to have scene superclass be a parameter you can change in the inspector with a ‘reparent’ dialogue.
vi mode for the editor.
Python style fstrings.
Input event names could be an enum or something like an enum so the editor is aware of the available options. Ditto for groups. This works very well for node paths, I’d like to see it in more places.

Some of this may already exist, which makes it more of a doc bug than a missing feature. If some or all of these are filled in by plugins, please let me know in the comments if I’ve missed any good ones.

September ’24 Web Links

America now has a centenarian ex president. But check out this statue in his home town:

Review: Videodrome (kevinsreviewcatalogue)

I was thinking of writing about how you could totally remake Videodrome now, but someone already wrote a much better review to that effect.

A meme about USB (lemmy.sdf.org)

This really captures what I dislike about USB-C.

sfdictionary.com

I was really hoping that something like this existed, and wouldn’t you know it, it totally does. This site cross references sci-fi jargon across the history or science fiction.

The best sports headline you’re going to see this month (Nola.com)

Best sports headline of the month.

Digital Terrain Models of Mars (uahirise.org)

I was looking for some heightmaps I could use (see the next link) and found these really cool scans of the martian surface.

Ceefax (nathanmediaservices.co.uk)

Replication of Ceefax, for retrocomputing enthusiasts.

Fandom Wiki Considered Harmful

Fandom has a major ongoing outage, tearing a not insignificant hole in the web. Seems like as good an opportunity as any to discuss what it is and the problems it presents.

“Fandom”, formerly Wikia, is a hub for anyone who wants to make a wiki but their subject matter isn’t a good fit for ur-wiki Wikipedia. It’s the perfect place for cataloging every detail of beloved media franchises and games. Notable Fandom wikis include Memory Alpha (Star Trek), Wookiepedia (Star Wars), and one for almost every video or tabletop game, from the popular to the obscure. It’s sort of replaced GameFAQs, and often your only alternative if you don’t enjoy watching a lets-play to get you unstuck.

There’s a huge amount of useful content on Fandom and I have nothing but respect for the editors who devote their time to maintaining these resources, but I’m here to argue that Fandom is bad for fans and bad for the web.

Intrusive Ads

Fandom devotes only a small section of the screen to content. The rest is intrusive, animated ads that move around the page, pop over content, and generally make a nuisance of themselves.

Browsing fandom is an utterly hostile experience. On mobile, it just gets worse:

Lousy Performance

I don’t know if it’s the ads or the auto play videos, or what. I’m not going to try and profile the site. But someone should; performance is a frequent complaint and it’s one of the few sites that will actually crash a tab; you don’t see that very often these days!

Why not just use AdBlock?

I refuse to participate in a two-tiered web of the power users who get to use free services uninterrupted and the bulk of everyday users who have to pay for it with ad garbage. Empathy is a critical skill for engineers, indeed it’s one of the things that makes good engineers good, and the lack of it is what has lead to the worst excesses of tech. As someone who still sometimes develops web things, I need to be able to see the web as users see it, not as some elite cadre of tech enthusiasts gets to enjoy it. Call it penance if you want to, but I think that power users using ad block (and subsequently tech failing to realize just how garbage top google results have become) is part of the problem, not the solution. I have an inkling that the people who have the pull to actually change things have hidden the problem from themselves instead.

What are we to do?

This would be an awesome article if I could end it with a call to action, a viable alternative with a great onboarding story that you could pick up and use. This isn’t that article. I do not have a neat solution.

Host your own?

Some Wikis are self-hosted. This allows for total control by interested parties, but can also be a burden for the hosts to administer. It also puts the (not insignificant) burden of SEO entirely on each individual wiki. Fandom is perhaps best understood as an SEO spam operation that crowd sources its content. Without the ability to share infrastructure and maintaience costs, there’s a major advantage in Fandom’s favor here. Not to mention the oft-underestimated hurdle of users needing to create yet another login (and expand their attack surface by one more some-day-compromised account.) Wiki.gg exists and is trying to centralize off-Fandom wikis and may be addressing this problem that way; one can hope they themselves don’t fall prey to the same perverse incentives that created Fandom in the first place.

Licenses as a solution?

Most Wikis use CC-BY-SA for their content, even when the content is directly copied from, for example, in-game text. This allows Fandom to monetize while still maintaining a facade that they’re merely hosting free content. You could take all of the text and images from a Fandom site and start your own, but because of the aforementioned economies of scale that isn’t a winning move. Likewise, if you create a wiki off-site, Wikia authors can happily copy all of your content into their own competing wiki. Perhaps it’s tome to write a new license for wiki content, one similar to AGPL or CC-NC, which would be impossible for Fandom to comply with; one that disallows commercial use or mandates releasing your source code.

I don’t expect this overnight

Wikia’s reign is entirely up to the folks who decide to put words on the internet. I don’t think it needs to be a one-site race to the bottom. But there’s massive inertia, even on days like today when it’s rendered entirely unusable by technical issues.

But examples exist! Check out the Sarna.net, the BattleTech (MechWarrior) Wiki. It’s using MediaWiki, but the ads aren’t nearly as intrusive.

August 2024 Web Links

Sorry for the shorter link list this time.

Dubsnatch (DarknetDiaries.com)

Darknet Diaries is often carried by its host’s boundless enthusiasm about cybers ecurity, but this episode features one of the strangest moments: the host insisting that there’s a pattern of featuring dolphin noises in Dubstep music. When the guest doesn’t play ball and politely tries to beg off the conversation, the host keeps pressing-he’s apparently a huge fan of dolphins. If you’re old enough to remember the heyday of Brostep, you might get a kick out of the artists referenced in this episode.

Battletanx Covers (youtube.com)

Had battletanx on the mind (it’s a perennial fascination) and wanted to see if anyone had done any decent covers. Turns out the answer is an emphatic yes!

Reckoning (infrequently.org)

This is a good discussion of the failed promises of JavaScript Single Page Apps (SPAs), complete with real case studies where SPAs have sabotaged public services.

But I do think he’s missed something critical that was always hammered home at my first job when I learned about SPAs, back when we were building them out of jquerey: server conpute costs money. Client side compute is free. To you. This could be an appropriate attitude for a commercial outfit, but not one providing a public service.

The Dying Computer Museum (textfiles.com)

Another article about the LCM’s demise. This is textfiles at his best here, highly recommend giving it a read.

Blogosphere (mikegrindle.com)

Reading this article gave me some sort of warm-fuzzies and the desire to link to it, so here goes.

abortretry.fail

This substack author seems to be gunning for https://www.filfre.net/‘s spot, but for hardware instead of software.

A brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks (loriemerson.net)

This was pitched as a brief history of barbed wire communication. I of course assumed it would be about the way barbed wire sends a clear message to anyone planning to get to the other side of it, but it turned out to be stranger and more wonderful-a story about using barbed wire feces to carry telephony. A neat find for any fans of guerilla telephony.

The Modem World

When I was younger, I occasioned to write an essay about the history of the internet. I don’t have a copy in front of me, but I do recall that it ended up being practically a book report on the classic Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner and Lyon. It gave a strong account of the technical and social factors that took us from ARPANET to TCP/IP. But apart from an excellent digression into Email, it’s sparse on the question of what factors outside of the specific technology BBN was building lead to the internet we knew in the aughts. It was a fine enough essay, I’m sure I received a passing grade for it, but I think my teacher actually had the right idea that I should have instead focused on the movie War Games.

But now, a student in a similar situation wouldn’t have to settle for inferring people’s understanding of computer networks from a movie; now they could pick up The Modem World and get a serious historical account and analysis of the proto-internet, the internet shaped thing that existed before TCP/IP became the dominant communication protocol.

While the notion of BBSs isn’t new to me (I watched the BBS Documentary, read a bunch of Textfiles.com, and frequent SDF which is BBS adjacent) The Modem World was fresh in two important ways: insight and rigor.

Most accounts of the BBS world tend to be primarily sources; people telling their own stories. You’ll find them in the pages of 2600 and the like. The Modem World goes many steps further in teasing out the statistics, explaining how affordances shaped culture, and related the history to present concerns. In this regard it’s a standout book, comfortably sitting alongside a good Platform Studies volume, or Exploding The Phone.

As far as Rigor goes, look no further than the absolutely lavish end notes for a bibliography of BBSing. Never satisfied to rest on a hand wave, the author is relentless in finding actual contemporary sources for so many assertions. I thought that it was going to rely much more heavily on the BBS Documentary than it ultimately did, because the Author dug up so much contemporary material! I appreciate the serious treatment as opposed to what frequently is the type of rose-tinted retro tech light journalism you see out of outfits that shall remain nameless.