As I write, the E911 easily slips into the background like a boring lecture. It occasionally slips back into my consciousness, like a sermon intruding on a day dream. But unlike even the most boring talk, it quickly slips back int the sub-conscious. As I reach the end of writing this comment, I realize that it is has a subtle malignancy, especially in it’s deceptively coherent structures. And so, two thirds of the way through, I gave up entirely.

Thanks for your courageous reading, Cory.

I was around when all that went down. It still seems like yesterday when every BBS in CenTex was going through their text file collections to see whether they had the e911 document on their BBS or not….

The irony of all this is that we never saw the book published. The University Publishing House (which was organizing the whole thing) kept postponing the publication… 9 years later, I came across a listing in a Bulgarian Internet bookstore selling the book – but I don’t know whether it was our translation, or a new one, and anyway I wasn’t living in Bulgaria at the time and so couldn’t order a copy, so I don’t know to this day whether we could honestly claim to be translators :-) Not that it matters anymore.

And to think that I was counting on Bruce’s autograph on my copy – the publishers said they’d planned to invite him at the time.

It’s all water under the bridge now, but I still vividly remember the E911 Document – or “Документът Е911″ in Bulgarian – how do you translate an acronym if you have no idea what it means? – and that baby had lots and lots of them.

There’s a chunk listing the labor expenses (200 hours for a contract writer and another 200 hours for a “Paygrade 3 Project Mgr”), typing and editing time, “Order Labels (Cost) = $5.00″, and so forth.

But here’s the really fun part:

HARDWARE EXPENSES
VT220 $850
Vaxstation II $31,000
Printer $6,000
Maintenance 10% of costs

SOFTWARE EXPENSES
Interleaf Software $22,000
VMS Software $2,500
Software Maintenance 10% of costs

Yes, they included the entire cost of the hardware and software used to write the document (and the maintenance contracts). After all, don’t we all throw away our computers after each word processing document we create?

I’m pretty sure I grabbed this doc off a BBS because it was some kind of deal, looked at it and promptly filed it away somewhere.

Epic heroism in the reading, Cory. By the end I wanted to scream and jump out the window.

http://www.2600.com/offthehook/1990/0590.html

And the second show on this page interviews Craig Neidorf.

http://www.2600.com/offthehook/1990/0990.html

Phiber Optik later becomes a co-host on the show. He even calls in from prison during the time he spent there.

There was a project a couple of years ago where someone had put the Linux source code into a text reader and was broadcasting it over the net and on radio. Ah, here it is: http://radioqualia.va.com.au/freeradiolinux/. Now *that’s* boring.

And you don’t think injecting false faults into the process would be a problem? More generally, it’s a listing of who’s expecting a phone call from whom about what topic, which would be useful for social engineering.

If I remember the story correctly, the original had actual names and phone numbers, which the *hackers* considered too sensitive to publish – so they elided them, but Bell’s $10 version didn’t.