Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. Rucker has published twenty-five books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. He was an early cyberpunk and an editor at Mondo 2000. He often writes SF in a style is characterized as transreal. His most recent novels were Frek and the Elixir, a far-future epic about a boy's galactic quest to restore Earth's ecology and As Above So Below, a historical novel based on the life of the sixteenth century painter Peter Bruegel.  Rucker is a professor emeritus of computer science at San Jose State University, where he created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, higher dimensions, and computer games. He is presently working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, a nonfiction book about computers and the nature of reality. Rucker's website can be found at www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker or at www.rudyrucker.com.

The Place Has Really Gone Downhill
People occasionally ask why I don't run my own blog or my own BBS or message bases on textfiles.com. My answer, in a basic sense, is I don't have the time to run things correctly, as I think it should be. To ask me what my definition of "should be" is gets to the heart of the matter.

The online environment suffers from the same problems a lot of communities suffer from: power issues, political infighting, and a wavering sense of the sanctity and baselessness of the entire endeavor. These issues are human, not electronic; they happen in spelling bees, book adaptation efforts, and quilting. Trying to solve human problems with electronic solutions is hit or miss at best, but shouldn't be considered a huge surprise if it fails to do so.

About all I can do to contribute something helpful to this discussion is point out two rules I've encountered in studying this history. Community breeds controversy, and communication breeds contempt.

Descending even further into theoretics, and summarizing what some people fill their college careers studying, the core goals of most communication technologies are not to foster conversation, but to prevent controversy and conflict. Phones are designed for end-to-end communication over the same wires as millions of other calls without a conflict. Phone conferencing, an incremental change in the experience from a person-to-person call, requires a heap of added features to allow the "conference operator" to function and maintain order. Ethernet, I probably don't have to go into much detail about, but the same issues apply: avoid conflicts, avoid things interrupting other things.

From the first moment a "Sysop" decides what's going to be discussed or what the name of their BBS or blog is going to be, there's a steady set of restrictions, rules, goals and mores that get placed upon the forum. And with all of that imposed order, the natural process of decay begins. I'd compare it, in some way, to swimming; you land in the water and begin paddling. Paddle (maintain) at the same rate, and you'll stay afloat. Stop pouring energy in, and you sink. Pour too much energy in and you end up with an out-of-control splashing maniac. It is that ability to balance and to be a part of things while not overdominating them that's so difficult to keep around.

And again, it's not the controversy-of-the-moment that causes the problem. From about five feet away or further, many of the controversies are distinctly entertaining, but they're far from it for the people involved. That's because the controversy is besides the point; it's the group mind-set that's being fought for, the way things will be for the group at large. If you truly believe there's a "there" there, then you've got to buy into every aspect of it, leaving you in some amazing positions to defend.

The unspoken words are the ones that define a place, even an electronic one, but they're never clearly stated: we are all alike of a way, we are all huddled against the darkness, we are here for this moment but that moment may end in an instant. That's what keeps us coming back, and if we find those feelings betrayed, based on whatever internal scale we measure them by, then we feel the place is "lost".

Throughout the interviews I've had with people about their experiences with BBSes and related discussion groups, I've gotten a very wide spectrum of thoughts on the art of online conversation. Some ruled their boards with an iron fist, while others remember logging onto a BBS where the sysop hadn't logged on in years. (There are still a handful of BBSes out there, still up, still having their phone bills paid, just running alone, on autopilot. Bless them.) And in many cases, the BBS software itself (or the blog software or the discussion software) contributes or hinders the style of order that the community will express. The reason that I have over 700 BBS programs listed on the documentary site is not just because there were so many platforms to program them, but because the balance of the software and the hardware against the very root of humanity's nature is a problem, a difficulty, far deeper and greater than any specific issues of the moment.

The cycle is often stated as "birth, flourish, death" for a community, but it's almost always "birth, flourish, change, change, change (...) death". With each change comes nostalgia for how things were and comparison between now and then, when perhaps the best thing to do is consider how things are now compared to how they'll eventually be.

Then, I think there'll be a lot to discuss.

posted by Jason Scott at 3:02:55 PM | permalink

Five Things Worth Looking Into
Instead of filling up this bar with some very long, very intensive descriptions of events and things that not everyone would have an interest in, let me quickly give you a handful of informational tokens, flush with links and left as an exercise to learn about if it interests you.

PLATO. It doesn't stand for anything, although they tried to back-tack some acronyms on it. To some, it's the first BBS. At the very least, it's an impressive technological feat, allowing a thousand users to connect to the same computer space, starting back in the late 1960's. You can trace Lotus Notes, Castle Wolfenstein, Tradewars, Hack, and a bunch of other concepts to this system. Brian Dear has absolutely, unequivocably risen as the Mack Daddy of PLATO knowledge, and is working on what will probably be the best book that will ever be written on the subject. Update: Brian Dear wrote in that in fact it has always stood for "Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations" and did from the very beginning. The "Tacked-on" myth is just that. Schooled!

Infocom. From its inception to well into its existence, Infocom was the best game company in all of history. They produced a world-class product from day one, ensured it could be released instantaneously on over a dozen platforms (with no change in the quality of the experience), and brought to the world a cascade of worlds and memories that are still shared by many, many thousands. If Floyd still makes you cry and darkness makes you think of Grues, you're in the club. If not, it's pretty easy to join.

New Old School Hackery. It's understandable if there's a lot of interest in the video game systems of yore, and that the original games might find themselves copied from cartridges to transferrable images, but when you first find out that people are absolutely knocking themselves silly shoehorning games into these very old platforms, you just have to marvel. People have ripped the technical specifications as far as they can possibly go and that doesn't slow them a bit. Right now, you can buy new Atari 2600 game cartridges. How cool is that?

The Technological Assistance Party (TAP). Before 2600 Magazine and definitely before Phrack magazine, TAP magazine rose from the Youth International Party and for well over a decade gave you some of the most subversive, strange, and hackerish information around. Maybe it all seems quaint now or maybe even irrelevant, but that magazine had everything going for it before the editor's apartment was firebombed. To be honest, a good solid website will accomplish the same goals of the original magazine, but if you don't learn how it was done back then it's much harder to avoid the same mistakes now. And wave to Abbie Hoffman as you go by.

Steven K. Roberts, The All-Time Classic Journeyman Hacker. So let's get this straight. Steven Roberts sold all his stuff, built a recumbent bicycle loaded over with the best gear he could get at the time, went out on the road, and started to send out missive after missive to Compuserve from all over the country. He travelled thousands of miles, wrote about all his experiences as they happened, and lived a dream that many have had, and lived it well. Yes, he's real. Yes, it happened, and he wrote a book about it, a book floating around the top space in my collection. Steven K. Roberts, I hope everyone learns your story.

Discuss

posted by Jason Scott at 1:53:44 AM | permalink

Have you met Curt Vendel today?
There's the usual layer of nostalgia: you played an Atari game or two or perhaps owned a 2600 and some cartridges. Then there's the layer below: you check on ebay for cartridges and collect them, maybe even pick up the occasional full-sized game to burn through some ready cash. And there's a layer beyond that, where you pick up old vintage Atari posters or a t-shirt or maybe even the occasional obscure artifact like an Atari Asteroids Halloween costume.

Even there, you'd have nothing on Curt Vendel.

One of the things I do once I get my hands on a new subject to research is working my best to exhaust all the available data sources, then going after more obscure indirect sources that might reveal more: knocking up shareware CDs for sale on ebay to get additional versions of a BBS program, for example. Or finding a website that posts information that isn't related to the subject, but mentions it indirectly, which gives me some vital name or event which I can search for and find even more interesting. Once I get into one of these runs it takes me pretty far, pretty fast. Naturally, this would occasionally put me into contact with Atari, which has not only a long history (Williams/Midway and Gottlieb do as well) but had such interesting amounts of employee and idea churn over its decades that people correlate all over the history of computer games and computers at large. And the thing is, wherever I went, Curt got there first.

I'd find what I thought were golden, obscure internal Atari VAX message postings, and Curt had been involved in the project. I'd find some neat old articles on bulletin boards and it was Curt had the original magazines. And it was Curt who had access to the golden stuff, the neatest of the items, the ones I thought didn't exist. If the term "Atari 1450 XLD" has any meaning for you, Curt's Ownership of one should come as a bit of a surprise. In fact, Curt has what seems on all fronts to be the largest private collection of Atari Memorabilia, information and documents in the world.

I interviewed Curt for my documentary because I wanted people representing as many of the major platforms of the early 1980's as possible. (Atari, Commodore, Tandy, IBM, Texas Instruments, and so on.) Who better to discuss the draw of Atari than someone with so many examples of it?

(The interview went very well, by the way.)

It turns out that in fact I'd met Curt at the Vintage Computer Festival East, where he had a number of Atari artifacts I'd never seen or heard of, including oddly colored joysticks and a light pen. We talked a bit then, but the documentary wasn't full in my mind then, just an idea being kicked around, and I was a pure tourist, someone delighted that so many interesting items were around so close to my home.

Curt is not just a mere warehouser of Atari; he is truly a curator. His website, Atarimuseum.com, is completely packed with information, pictures and documents covering pretty much all aspects of Atari. Curt understands more than most the magic this company built up in marketing, engineering, and all-around approach to the concept of "computing for the masses". That's a very etherial thing to grasp onto enough to present to folks, and I think he's captured it.

So here's what I'm getting at. Having collected nearly everything there is to find about Atari (although I'm sure Curt personally feels he hasn't), having amassed a collection reaching into the thousands of individual items, Curt's natural and distinct goal is to digitize and present as much of it for the public's consumption as possible. To give it historical meaning, to get it saved for posterity, and, through his attendance of computer festivals and conventions, give people who grew up so influenced by Atari the chance to see how many incredible things this company had to offer. Instead of locking it away to covet on his personal time or show to a few arbitrary individuals, he's opened it to the most folks he can on a physical level and provided (through his website) the opportunity for anyone who didn't know until five seconds ago they needed to see it, the chance to see all of it.

I can't think how it gets better than that.

Discuss

posted by Jason Scott at 1:32:24 AM | permalink

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