NULL Interview! (Part 3)

In the final part of my ridiculously long interview for NULL emag, we chat a bit about my BBS, Distortion, and my efforts to collect and archive scene history, and a bit more about the BBS scene, past, present, and future.

Continued from part 2…

Distortion is a cool BBS with some nice art. What is it that makes a BBS cool?

Thanks! There’s a variety of things that can make a system worth checking out in my opinion. A customized setup with nice art and/or some insane, custom modifications is certainly high on my list, but you need content too. That can be anything from really nice, curated file areas, to a great local message area. I’d throw an active door game community onto that list too. Something that I really used to like back in the day were systems that had really unique content, whether that be a distro site for some unusual zine or group or something, or maybe the HQ of some sort of prominent scene figure. I’ve called some amazing boards back in the day, and we’re really fortunate that we have some great telnet systems still around these days.

One of the things I really like on Distortion is the section with all the history/information about you, Distortion, Mystic BBS, Gutter, etc. I don’t think there are too many BBSes that do that and the history of the scene is disappearing to oblivion. Should we do something about it? Find a way to record things down? Right now, for someone new to learn about the scene, they pretty much have to watch the “BBS Documentary”, read many of all these textfiles.com files, and read many emags (hopefully) from 16colo.rs. Should a group make an effort and record the history in a more productive way?

Thanks for noticing! For the record, that’s another good example of the kind of unique content I like to come across. That’s part of why I did that on Distortion. The other reason being as you’re implying, the preservation of this kind of history. I’ve always been kind of concerned with documenting the scene. There’s a few reasons for that. On a basic level, that’s how I tend to learn. I try to really understand things – I break them down, form associations, etc. which leads to what sometimes feels like a more academic view of certain things others might take for granted. The other reason may have something to do with coming to the scene so late, feeling like an outsider that very much needed to learn about the culture, and then having it dissolve right in front of my eyes. It was like “hey wait, there’s all of this culture here? and now it’s disappearing!”

I became kind of obsessed about this pretty early on with files in particular. It didn’t take me long to start noticing how I could find some files on some systems that I couldn’t find anywhere else. Whether this meant particular versions of particular software, or unique files associated with certain groups, zines, mags, software, etc. I started “collecting” the files that were interesting to me, particularly those around underground BBS software, doors, modifications, and source code. At some point, this turned into actively calling long distance and leaching file areas. When my participation in the scene shifted to mostly being on the Internet, this grew to include arranging leach sessions with other SysOps and searching for obscure web and FTP sites. Eventually I had put together a collection that was filled with a lot of fairly rare, esoteric files and, using the resources I had with demonic.net, I ended up putting them all on a public FTP site to “pass it on” as it were. These days I can easily trace a lot of files on places like archives.thebbs.org back to coming from my collection. I don’t think a lot of people outside of Demonic ever knew about my involvement in this, though Radman gave me kudos for my efforts in the readme on his Dark Domain ACiD artpack archive DVD release, which felt like more than enough recognition for my efforts.

From attempting to obtain the source code from a BBS author who ended up discovering that he had lost it due to failed tape backups, trying to track down specific files I was after, like finishing off a collection of missing zine back issues, to my own numerous instances of bad luck with hard disk failures and other incidents over the years, I noticed how utterly fragile this digital-only content was when not distributed or, maybe worse, horded. My efforts turned more from a focus of putting together a great collection of files for my own greedy purposes to actually saving files from total extinction. I created a local message base on Distortion called “scene archaeology” to discuss this and continue to try to obtain copies of people’s setups, file bases, unique files, etc. While my efforts have mostly dried up over the years, I’ve got quite a lot of stuff these days, though I honestly haven’t gone through and sorted it as well as I used to do. It’s mostly just huge unsorted dumps of files. I owe a lot of that to others who have attempted to archive files in a similar way as I used to. People like Jas Hud and his huge BBS warez torrent that was floating around for a while, to Jason Scott’s archives in places like software.bbsdocumentary.com, textfiles.com, and archive.org.

In summary, I feel like it’s important that we try to preserve this stuff, less risk it being gone forever. I urge anyone reading this who might have an old backup tape, zip disk, old stack of floppies, whatever it may be, that has some old BBS file systems, BBS backups, or even your own personal archive of source code or WIP files if you don’t mind sharing them, to put them somewhere so they’re not totally lost. Hell, I’ll take them and add them to my own collection for that matter – you can email me at jp(at)demonic.net. 🙂

Finally, this is another reason why I like emags and ezines. Similarly to Distortion’s numerous bulletins about the history of the system and some of its associated groups, these things really help to snapshot a moment in time and (hopefully) save it for future readers.

How were relations between sceners back in the 90s?

Since we were almost all late pre-teen to early adult males, it was… ever read Lord of the Flies? 😉

Actually, I think the fact that so many of us had the brash attitudes that come not having fully developed out of a childish narcissistic worldview meant that while sure, there was plenty of conflict, often over petty bullshit, and dumb stuff like the tribalism that came with scene “groups” and other grouping that came from things like allegiances to our favorite PCs, OSes, and BBS software, it also meant that most of us dealt with each other head-on rather than there being a ton of passive aggressiveness.

It’s also tricky to really explain the nuanced layers and levels of respect and notoriety that came with gaining reputation in the scene. People were typically fairly respectful of those who they saw as having more scene cache, be that a higher profile or maybe just raw talent, than them. It wasn’t as simple as “if you’re not in the scene you’re a lamer. If you are, you’re my equal.” The obvious bad part of this whole thing was that it could be tricky for newbies to get involved without constantly unintentionally disrespecting people by breaking some unwritten rule or custom and getting a much worse reputation than being unknown, maybe even getting ostracized in one way or another. There could also be a lot of “hazing” type shit that came with people learning the ropes, particularly when it came to underground boards in the dial-up days. It could be a bit of a process. On the flip side, once you started to get known and make connections people were generally pretty cool with you.

Can you describe how things were back then with the underground scene? I mean, today everyone expects to be freely added to a network, freely download tons of files, etc. Things were different back then. Can you give us a glimpse of the past?

Story time!

There was this 2 node elite warez board in my local scene that I found on several local BBS lists, but was almost always listed as private, or with a note saying there was a system password or new user password, or some other obstacle I had to get around. So, the first hoop I had to jump through was actually finding the correct numbers and cobbling together a list of potential access passwords from all of these old ass BBS lists.

So, I finally call it up and end up having to use a “call back verifier.” A call back verifier was a third party door or modification (I can’t think of any systems off of the top of my head that had this as a built-in function, actually) that would attempt to verify that the user entered their real phone number in by then calling the user back. They worked in a variety of ways, but often you had to answer the call with your terminal and then enter some sort of information to authenticate the session, flagging your number as validated. This wasn’t anything new to me, as call back verifiers were semi-popular with PD boards as well. Probably more so, even. The main point was to be able to uniquely identify you as a user, especially since few SysOps had caller ID at the time, and some of them took duplicate accounts very seriously.

So, I go through that process and then I’m greeted with something I’d yet to encounter in my short BBSing career: new user voting. Most NUV systems work by forcing new users to fill out what was usually an extra questionnaire form. Not knowing what the form was even for, I just half-assed it, and actually, in the case of this BBS, the questions were more like a quiz than an application, meant to test your knowledge on the underground scene. Shit like what “DOD” or “FSW” stood for. I was utterly clueless about warez and cracking groups at this point, so I did a shit job of completing the form on top of rushing through it. What happens in NUV after this is that subsequent callers are shown your completed form and then asked to vote on whether or not to accept you. That’s how validation was done. This could sometimes last a couple of days depending on how active the board was and how many votes were required. How this went really depended on the culture of the specific bulletin board system – some would happily thumbs down anyone they didn’t know or didn’t like for whatever arbitrary reason, while others would pretty much vote to accept anyone who applied that didn’t put anything too boneheaded on their form. In this case, I was down voted and then locked out of the system. Ugh.

Now, I was a hard headed kid, and now that I’d had a glimpse into this strange new system that was seemingly safeguarding something cool, I really wanted in. Getting denied only served to make me want in that much more. I impatiently waited a few weeks and then called back and applied with a different handle. This time I took my time and paid attention to how I filled out the form and did a reasonably okay job of completing it, despite still not knowing the answers to a lot of the questions. A more meticulous SysOp, or maybe just a better designed call back verifier, might have caught me as a duplicate user since I had to use the same number, but in this case I got in, and somehow got voted in. I honestly didn’t think I stood a chance, but there I was. I immediately located the file system and found it to be a treasure trove of multi-disk pirate group releases. Holy shit… games!

Except, that’s not the end of the story. Not unlike some private torrent trackers, you had to maintain a certain upload/download ratio (in this case, I believe it was handled with a “credits” system in which you were awarded a certain amount of credits as a new user, and per day, and more importantly, by uploading validated files.) So then I had to raid my meager file collection to try to get enough credits to snatch the good shit. I think I ended up resorting to nabbing files off of some of the other, less elite underground systems in my area just so I could turn around and upload them for credits there.

Finally, one day after trying to download a bunch of shit and probably being all out of credits, or perhaps time (your daily time limit was a much bigger deal in the dial-up days) I hung up and then immediately received a phone call. Since the SysOp had my real phone number due to his call back verifier, he took it upon himself to call me for a quick chat. I’m sure I was fucking shaking in my shoes, but he ended up being a very cool dude and hooked me up with some credits. He eventually went on to become quite a good friend and as an added bonus, from there on out, upgraded me to a “leech account” giving me unlimited credits. My days of putting effort into being a faux-productive member of the local warez trade were over, at least on that board.

Do you think those kind of “user evaluation” features should be enabled again? Should BBSes and networks be more “closed societies” with strict invitation requirements, etc. like it was back in the 80s-90s?

I think that’s highly debatable. There are pros and cons to that kind of thing, and I think most of us, being more measured adults, probably see more value in the pros of keeping it open, especially with the relatively minuscule user base of the scene as a whole. Having any society at all is probably more important than it being a closed society. 🙂 Distortion was actually a closed system with an NUP for a very long time, and even today I don’t auto-validate my new users, though I more or less accept anyone.

What do you miss today in the scene?

Oh, so much!

I really miss having insane amounts of free time to really deep dive into to the innumerable projects and interests I have. For instance, I’d love to have the time to really invest into getting better at ANSI – I strongly feel that, these days, if I kept cranking out work to the degree that I might have been able to as a teenager (if not for being distracted by numerous other interests) I could actually end up being a passably decent artist.

More existentially, the sense of wide-open, endless possibilities; mysteries to solve, systems to learn, and an infinite amount of adventure that had always been a part of my infatuation with computing (online and otherwise) is largely missing from my life today. I supposed that comes with devoting so much of my life to it for the past ~25 years. That sense of wonder, of adventure, was so much a part of the magic of computing and especially BBSing to me back then. Plugging a phone line into my modem for the first time was like the captain of a spacecraft pointing his vessel at some random patch of space and punching the accelerator – I never knew what I might find. Sure, probably a lot of nothing, or at least nothing very interesting, but that possibility was absolutely intoxicating.

For the record, I maintain that there’s even more to explore, to learn, and to invest in on the Internet these days, but just as my journey has lead to that whole feeling being mostly subdued, most people who are now growing up with the Internet being a normal part of their lives likely won’t feel that way either. Rather, they take it for granted. It’s still all there for those who seek it out, however.

Do you think that the scene is dead, is going to die, or has transformed into something different?

Let me re-frame that a bit. I think the scene as it existed in the 80s is certainly dead. As it existed in the early to mid 90s? Yeah, dead. Even as it existed in the mid to late 90s and early 2000, it’s dead. It’s really something else now, but it’s hard to argue that it’s not still very much a thing. In fact, in its current state it’s hard for me to imagine that it won’t endure to some degree in the same way as it has in the last 10-15 years. I probably wouldn’t have said that 10-15 years ago!

Do you think that today’s BBS scene and BBS software has some opportunities to grow and evolve or has it taken the path of no return? 🙂

Yes! The scene has definitely already slowly evolved over time. For instance, the greater integration with modern social media platforms (the ANSI scene largely revolves around Facebook right now, for instance.) This has resulted in more of us seeking out real-life meetups and a renewed interest in attending competitions and parties and really, just turning the whole thing into a more mainstream hobby.

On the software side, thanks to the work of some of the current active BBS developers, we’ve finally started moving from telnet to SSH which is something many of us have wanted for years and years now. It’d be hard to predict exactly how things will continue to evolve, but I feel like we’re all still waiting for a true “next gen” take on the traditional BBS software that both actually comes out (most of the semi-recent efforts on this front that I’m aware of have never been fully completed) and people actually adopt. Until then, we’ll remain making these kinds of tiny, incremental steps to modernization like those taken by software like Synchronet, Mystic, and x84, for example.

There is Mystic, Synchronet, Enigma, Magicka, Titan, Iniquity and more BBS software being actively developed. There has also been some small “movement” between/in networks like Arak/FSX/Fido… does this all mean that the BBS scene is going through a revival?

Nope! I’m afraid it just means that our little “retro computing” niche continues to be a fun, active hobby for those of us involved in it, which is great. The word “revive” is a little odd for me – I mean, as I said before, it certainly isn’t or hasn’t been totally “dead”, just changed. When I think of what a true “revival” would look like, it would be BBSing becoming a (if not THE) prominent way we interact online, and I’m sorry if I come off a little pessimistic here, but I can’t see the greater populace of the Internet suddenly trading in their Twitter and Facebook accounts for telnet or SSH clients. 🙂

After all these years, what is it that makes you continue to be involved with BBSing, ANSI art etc. Is it nostalgia, or the “magic” of textmode? 🙂

Definitely the nostalgia. It certainly goes deeper than that, probably on some kind of a psychological level – maybe that lingering infatuation I talked about earlier never really left me? I really think that for most of us that are still active, there’s something about our time in the scene that deeply affected us, one way or another. I mean, most of us were involved in some of our most formative years after all. It would be interesting to know whether most of today’s sceners would have considered themselves as especially prone to nostalgia before their time in the scene, or if their inability to let go of it led them to become more nostalgic in general. Maybe many of us don’t even consider ourselves to be all that nostalgic to begin with?

That said, I came across this great quote recently, and I wish I could remember it verbatim or even where it came from, but it affected me insofar as my recent involvement in the scene goes. While it was surely much more poignantly phased, it was something to the effect of “you shouldn’t deny yourself the things that made you who you are”. I immediately thought about this “hobby” of ours and how I should more fully embrace spending time on it without any apprehension, making more of an effort to invest my time and energy into it. That goes for all of my friends in the scene too, and anyone else who might be reading this. If you still love this stuff, and it means something to you, keep doing it!

NULL Interview! (Part 2)

In part 2 of my epic interview for NULL emag, we talk about my current and past projects including Iniquity BBS, Darkness 2.0, and Gutter, along with a bit more on the art scene.

Continued from part 1…

Lately you’ve become a member of ArakNet and started helping with Phenom projects. Does this mean that you are becoming active again in the scene? Did you ever stop? 😉

My involvement in ArakNet isn’t really about any of that. Rather, I recognize Smooth’s huge efforts and contributions in recent years to promote all things scene related, from running boards, putting out great ANSI (and even some nice Amiga ASCII lately) forming Phenom and putting out mods and doors, and of course running Arak. It reminds me a lot of what I was up to in the late 90s, except that he’s a better artist and coder than me. 😉 So, on the one hand I wanted to support Arak, but I also wanted to be involved in some of the great conversation going on there. Distortion, being Zer0net’s HQ, has largely avoided losing focus by adding too many other networks, but occasionally another “othernet” comes a long that I feel like compliments Zer0net well and has a lot to offer me and my users.

I haven’t really participated in any Phenom products nor have any of their members worked with me on Darkness or anything else, though I wouldn’t say that’s off the table either. My activity as of late, like my work on Darkness 2, is mostly personal, but my interest and involvement is definitely on an upswing as of late. I have a lot of plans for other projects. For instance, I’m planning on giving Distortion a major refresh pass soon, I’ll be putting out a new Zer0net infopack to celebrate our 20th anniversary, as mentioned, I’m working on some new mods and code that could end up being some of the first new Demonic releases in many years, if I should decide to dust it off, and I’ve just recently started working a blog/ezine, which I’ll be using to document all of these things (and hopefully expand on having some more interesting content beyond that later on.) So while I’ve always been “active” to some degree (beyond keeping Distortion and Zer0net going, mostly by releasing art) I’m definitely spending a lot more quality time on other things lately, and I’m pretty happy about it.

What’s Iniquity? Why did you stop development on it? I see that Phenom has started the development of Iniquity 3 and you are a part of it. How is that going?

Iniquity was an underground scene focused BBS software developed in the mid 90s by a dude named Fiend. I’d been dabbling with a lot of the scene related software, stuff like Vision/X and Oblivion/2, when I first stumbled across Iniquity 1.00 a23 and soon after a25r2, and I instantly fell in love with it. It had a ton of great features and an awesome customized feel right out of the box that all somehow felt more than the sum of its parts. Finding Iniquity was the moment I knew I definitely needed to setup my own BBS, and the moment I started really trying to learn how to mod. It just totally clicked with me.

Iniquity’s history is pretty storied. I won’t go into the whole thing, but Fiend stopped developing it, dumping out an a26 release that, while buggy as hell, showed glimpses at some real genius, like his IPL scripting language and TextFX graphics support. The source eventually got leaked and a cabal of Iniquity devotees not unlike myself took it upon themselves to try to “finish” it, if you will, putting out Iniquity 2.00. They released the code too, which I ended up playing with in 1999, making a lot of little bug fixes and minor improvements to, mostly for my own purposes, and when the calendar rolled over into the year 2000, some much needed Y2K fixes. Unfortunately I lost my latest and greatest version of the code not long after my last release thus ending my run of unofficial patches.

Anyway, it soon became clear to me that what Iniquity really needed was a port to native Windows and Linux versions, a built-in telnet server, etc. to be worth putting a lot of time into and I didn’t think I had the programming chops or the free time to take up such a task myself. I made efforts into helping others work towards porting and continuing Iniquity, including sharing my old code and trying to organize a team, but little really came of it. One effort, in cooperation with Spec of Theoretically BBS, actually seemed like it might bear some fruit, as Spec managed to get out an incomplete port of Iniquity to WIN32 using Virtual Pascal, complete with its own telnet daemon and DOOR32 support. But it was quite unstable due largely to a half completed attempt to move the message bases to JAM format, so he deemed this only a prototype, ceasing development on it in favor of doing a proper re-code of it in FPC. We dubbed this new version Iniquity 3. He made a big push early on but work on it soon petered out. While he’s continued to dabble with it over the years, little has come to light.

At some point, maybe 2 years ago, Ispyhumanfly (who was a Zer0net SysOp and supporter from way back – awesome dude!) reappeared on the scene and with that, had plans to start a new, modern take on the classic BBS software, and particularly had his sights set on reviving Iniquity. He reached out to me out of respect for my previous work on it (especially my work with Spec on our version of Iniquity 3) and I updated him on my involvement and pointed him to Spec for his blessing, and that’s about the sum of my involvement in the project. I definitely wish him luck with it, and if it gets further along, will be glad to contribute to it, but for now that’s about it.

For my part, I’ve recently been considering using Iniquity again for another setup I’m planning on working on, which will surely lead me to continuing development on my 2.x fork as I find more bugs that need squashing.

What else are you doing in the scene nowadays?

I’m actively working on finishing Darkness 2.0, and I still run Distortion and Zer0net. I also still occasionally contribute ASCII to Impure and Break as well as ANSI to Blocktronics. Those are my main focus areas.

My involvement has waxed and waned widely over the last almost 20 years, though that has mostly been due to a lack of free time and competing interests, as mentioned. I’ve started work on a new blog at https://jackphla.sh where I intend to write about a lot of these subjects in a similarly long winded fashion as I’m doing now. 😉 I’m also considering putting out an old school text version just to give NULL some competition!

Tell us more about Darkness 2.0. When is this coming out? What should we expect? Who is involved in the project?

Originally Darkness started as an exact Legend of the Red Dragon clone at a time when its development had entered a lull, and then it became its own thing, though the design didn’t move much beyond LORD in a different setting with some additional features inspired by other games. I had plans (or at least ideas) to flesh out a lot of those systems, but my work on the game gradually slowed to a stop before I got much of that done. Between that, some bad design choices, some unfixed bugs, and an incredible amount of typos and other cringy text, the final state of Darkness isn’t something I’m particularly proud of. The thing is, a lot of people in today’s BBS scene know me mostly from Darkness, and even still run it, and in that state it’s a bit of an embarrassing legacy to leave behind.

I’d always wanted to revisit Darkness and thought about it a lot over the years. I knew I wanted to come up with a different design than the cookie-cutter LORD clone 1.0 was, and that might require a slightly different, more interesting theme as well. I just couldn’t ever come up with anything I was happy with. Finally I just said “fuck it” and started working on what I called Darkness 1.10 which was just going to be a huge bug fix and cosmetic overhaul release for Darkness 1.0. As I got deeper into it, I decided that I had so much work to do I might as well just start over from scratch. That’s how Darkness 2.0 came to be.

So I took a lot of what I learned since the original Darkness – more coding and technical knowledge and experience, more influences from other sources, work on other (unreleased) door games, and some new ideas of what I might do with the design and the theme of the game, and got started. It’s not just a new version, it’s a total re-code and a total redesign (although one still highly influenced by the original Darkness.)

Here’s a short rundown of what to expect:

  • It’s still a LORD clone, but with huge changes to the overall gameplay structure including no more random, unfair deaths, a more challenging way to attack sleeping players, an item collecting/trading system, distinct areas of the world with varied enemies and events, etc.
  • The setting/theme and presentation is reworked to be a bit more serious and mature than what my teenage-self came up with back in the late 90s. Thank god. That, and there’s now a bit of an overt post-apocalypse vibe rather than being straight up cyberpunk.
  • Another aspect of the presentation, influenced by another game I had been working on that was sort of a hybrid between LORD, MUDS, and Rogue-likes, Darkness 2.0 has much more verbose descriptions and a lot more of them too. I’ve also included proper spelling and capitalization as an added bonus. Heyooo!
  • Integrated configuration/player editors for online editing (and better portability.) Seems kind of important in the Internet age!
  • A very simple scripting language (inspired by a combination of RTSoft’s REF, Batch, and some other similar scripts) to replace more complicated IGM creation. Right now this lets you add custom events, but I’ll probably expand it in future versions to a more IGM like “other areas” menu again.
  • A lot more!
  • Unlike Darkness 1.0, which technically stopped development before it even left beta, after the 2.0 release, I plan on continuing to support the game, releasing semi-regular updates for the foreseeable future. Like RTSoft’s updates to LORD, I plan on including new content (items, enemies, events, etc.) with every new release. I already have a lot of that content more or less ready, in fact.

For now, Darkness 2.0 is all me outside of sourcing some new ANSI from some art scene people and of course, enlisting people to help with testing. Darkness 2.0 is currently feature complete and right now I’m concentrating on making various tweaks related to difficulty and balance based on early tester feedback, as well as making a final cosmetic pass on it, then it’ll go into a closed beta. It should be available to play on DoorParty first, so keep checking there!

You were involved in one of the most popular emags of the art scene, Gutter. It seems clear that emags are dead now. Why do you think this happened? After all, groups that published emags in the past still exist and there are still some very talented artists around. Why did this aspect of the scene disappear?

I doubt you could pin it on a single thing, honestly. I mean, a stand out issue for both emags and ezines for me is that there’s a lot less interested people these days. Back in the day there were a hell of a lot more people who were participating in the scene as end-users or “consumers” if you will than there are. Now, most people still in the scene are directly involved in running boards, creating art, mods, code, etc. In other words, we’re our own audience, which makes the whole scene more insular.

There are other issues too, from the technical like the shift away from DOS in the PC scene and the shift away from trusting unknown executables/binaries in computing in general. The spread of more and more operating systems and architectures makes text more appealing for portability, and there was actually a pretty cool, separate “ezine” scene that splintered off for a while there. That might be still around for all I know, as I was never all too involved in it. Speaking of separate scenes, there have always been other emags and ezines that didn’t necessarily cross directly over to us in the BBS scene. The demo scene had their own disk mags, H/P groups had their own zines and text files, of course, and in the mainstream blogs, vlogs, podcasts and social media platforms assumed many of those same roles emags and ezines used to fill.

One more aspect is that it’s just always been a lot of work. Not just the coding, but the writing. I feel like there’s always been less of this stuff out there then it seems like there should have, even when the scene was much, much more active. It’s just not that easy to create written content, especially content that other people will actually want to consume.

All that said, there’s still very much a place for emags and zines in the scene in my opinion.

Have you read NULL mag? With your experience in the field, what do you think about it?

I have! I know you want to expand NULL more to have more authors and more variety of content, kind of like the classic European demo scene disk mags, but what I like the most about NULL is that it feels very personal. It’s your thoughts, opinions, and interests, dumped out into text. That is very appealing to me, as it’s almost like some insight into someone else’s perspective. Even the topics I’m not interested in, or maybe disagree with, are still fun to read because of that. It’s very “old school” to me in that sense.

Gutter was very much the same way, since 99% of the written content was from Filth. Everything about it was distinctly him, and he seemingly had (and still has) a gift for that kind of expression. In fact, come to think of it, almost all of my favorite emags and zines were the same way. They all had distinct styles that allowed you to have some sense of the author’s interests, sense of humor, and sense of who they actually were.

Why did Gutter stop? I mean… I know that Filth was doing the writing and you the code stuff, but weren’t there any others to help keep it alive?

We intentionally killed it. While we were actively releasing it Gutter was extremely popular in the ANSI scene and Filth wanted to end it while we were on top, so to speak. We figured 12 consecutive issues was a damn good run, so we stopped there, goals met! Other than the fact that I missed reading it and seeing all of the amazing art contributions we got, I didn’t have any regrets. Sometimes keeping things going in some sort of diminished way ends up doing a disservice to its memory, and I think that would have eventually been the case with Gutter, especially if Filth wasn’t contributing as prominently.

I’d add that I’m absolutely sure Gutter influenced a lot of other scene people to write and with that, Natedogg and I releasing the source code to the engine was, in some weird way, a more fitting way to extend its legacy. We helped other people put out their own emags with their own flavor while still having a little bit of the “Gutter DNA” all up in it. I’m not sure how many emags ended up being released that used the Gutter code, but there were definitely a few. FUBAR is one good example I can think of off the top of my head, and now NULL is being built on top of it too. We love it!

After all this time, in 2018 you released an anniversary pack about Gutter. Was this a sign of nostalgia or maybe a hint that you want to start making Gutter again?

I can’t speak for Filth on that, and it was mostly his doing, but for my part, it’s definitely all about the nostalgia. I do wish we could have put it out as an emag, but I think maybe that was more involved than what he had in mind. If anything, it was more a showcase of the amazing art submissions we had for the mag over its short lifespan. So, no, it wasn’t any sort of prelude to a Gutter re-launch. 🙂 That said, it’s pretty clear from Filth’s writing in the anniversary pack that he totally still has it!

What is ANSI art all about to you? Is it just “beautiful colors”, making things that would imagine to be impossible with just 16 colors and some text chars, or delivering a message to those who see it? I mean there are some very good ASCII/ANSI-ivists out there, that also pass a social message to the scene… should we see more of that?

I don’t feel like a “message” has ever been a vital component of ANSI art beyond the generally expressive nature of art, especially as it was largely created by bored teenagers and young adults with a dizzying array of teenage and young adult problems to be inspired and influenced by (which meant that there was often some emotional subtext going on.) That said, my feeling on the topic has definitely changed over the years. In the 90s, textmode art to me was totally utilitarian. Even the GREAT stuff, ultimately, was there to decorate BBSes and textmode programs. I think it was less that I didn’t “get it” and more that I just appreciated its practical uses more. Nowadays, thanks to my own better understanding of art, but also the efforts of artists in groups like Blocktronics, I see ANSI as a legitimate art form that goes far beyond just manipulating text. So, to give an appropriately abstract answer, I suppose the answer to that, is that ANSI art is all about whatever the artist wants it or feels it to be about, and that is something powerful.

What’s your favorite ANSI group and why?

OOooh. Now that’s a question I don’t get asked too often! How about 5, chronologically?

Well, ACiD has to be on the list because, as with many of us, they were the first ANSI packs I ever encountered and continued to put out consistently excellent work for a long time, and I still can’t get over how amazing and influential some of that original Lord Jazz stuff was back then.

I’ll also always have a soft spot for CiA given the years I spent with them and some of the incredible artists we had.

Next, AWE would be my more esoteric, hipster answer. Given my focus on BBS modding and code, I quickly developed a soft spot for amazing font work and AWE really opened my eyes to the possibilities and an appreciation for just how high the ceiling really was, and when I first started to (badly) draw ANSI, AWE’s quality was really what I aspired to. I’m still nowhere near that, so I guess I still aspire to it, really. 😉

Next, I love a good “supergroup” and Legion’s short but amazing run in 1998 totally blew my mind. Looking through their packs now in 2019, they actually still blow my mind.

Finally, what can you say about Blocktronics? Some of the best artists EVER have contributed to B7 over the years, and their packs quickly transcended your average (amazing) art scene shit to become genuine works of art. Every Blocktronics release is incredible and I’m proud to (occasionally) have my rather amateurish efforts bringing their overall quality down. 😉

Continued in part 3!

NULL Interview! (Part 1)

In what will hopefully stay this blog’s ultimate monument to my ego for quite some time, Xqtr has graciously allowed me to re-post this interview that I did for NULL emag, originally appearing in issue #6. I went a little overboard on answering and editing all of this together, so I’m happy to be able to use it here as well. Besides, writing all of this was part of what inspired me to start this blog, and it touches on quite a lot of the topics that I hope to eventually cover in more detail in future articles.

Haven’t heard of NULL? It’s a modern effort to revive the more or less extinct emag format. It’s filled to the brim with personal thoughts about the BBS scene, interviews with sceners, and some very handy modding and coding howtos and snippets too. The whole thing feels very old school, and it’s awesome to see something like this being released in 2019. Speaking of which, Xqtr just released issue #7 a few days ago. Run it in your browser via 16colo.rs and/or download it and all of the previous issues over at NULL’s github.

NULL font by Alpha King

Anyway, this interview is so epically massive that I’ve decided to chop it up into three parts to keep each one more inline with my typical article size. This first part talks a lot about my origins in the scene, including my involvement in the BBS modding and art scenes, programming and “real life”, H/P antics, and Zer0net!

When did you begin to use BBSes and how did you enter the scene?

My brother bought me my first modem in spring of 1995 as an early birthday present (somewhat selfishly, he wanted to use it as much as I did!) and we started BBSing heavily right away. I had been pining for a modem since long before I ever had a decent PC of my own, so I wasted no time jumping into the deep end. Not having AOL or the like, my brother and I started out favoring graphical PD boards – we had a pretty nice Excalibur BBS system in our local scene, as well as a nifty ROBOboard/FX system, both of which were much easier to digest than the seemingly esoteric world of the text based boards. Soon though, I found those other boards to be much more alluring and started calling them almost exclusively, while my brother stayed in PD easy-mode land outside of the occasional game of LORD.

By the end of 1995 I’d learned quite a lot about the scene, from calling countless local (and not so local) systems, somehow surviving the traditional rite of passage of racking up massive phone bills, participating heavily in message bases including my first forays into Fido, playing plenty of door games, leaching a ton of files, starting playing with numerous BBS software in an attempt to learn how to setup my own board, checking out numerous art packs, reading zines and emags, and of course countless text files, etc.

It quickly became clear to me that to make a name for yourself and really be a part of the scene you had to contribute in one way or another. In all of my playing with BBS software something clicked for me with creation of simple animated graphical mods (replacement screen templates, etc.) so I set out to join the modding scene in an attempt to exploit my newly discovered “skill”. As a side note, this is also around the same time I started drawing ASCII, even though I had no idea what I was doing. 😉

Unfortunately, by the end of 1995 I’d also witnessed my local BBS scene go from what I can imagine was close to its peak activity, to being almost entirely dead. 1995-1996 was an extremely dramatic (traumatic?) time for the BBS scene in the United States, with almost everyone jumping ship to the Internet and more modern iterations of online services (CompuServe, America Online, Prodigy, etc.) with wild abandon. It was incredibly weird for me – seemingly as soon as I’d fallen in love with the BBS scene, it was just… gone. I couldn’t help but to be left a little heartbroken, and with a lingering infatuation at that.

I knew from some of the zines and emags I had been reading that the scene had a major crossroads, as it were, on something called “Internet Relay Chat”. Again, financed by my brother’s selfish interests, I got my first ISP account in early 1996 and jumped on to IRC pretty much day 1. That was when I truly joined the underground scene.

What were your first steps once you actually got into the scene?

I joined TRiC as a modder because they were a highly respected modding crew (though mostly focused on Renegade BBS) with a strong semi-local presence in my area code in the form of senior member King Jamez and his BBS, Zyklon B, which was one of the last truly nice underground systems around there. Still, I don’t remember exactly why now, but it seemed pretty clear to me that TRiC was dying, or at least slowing down, so I also joined the Iniquity focused modding crew Thought Surfers shortly thereafter, as I was mostly working on mods for Iniquity.

Once I got on IRC I hooked up with a scene people, some of whom were artists, and some of whom encouraged me to continue the weird ASCII stuff I was playing around with at the time, which led me to briefly crank out some terrible stuff with the Brazilian art group iNSOMNiA. This was strictly a learning period for me – I was figuring out how to convert my weird style of post-oldschool ASCII into stuff more closely resembling the cool warez scene file_id.diz and info headers I saw (and liked!) and also drawing a lot of newschool ASCII based on TheDraw fonts and other people’s artwork. The latter was strictly lame stuff, in other words, but it led me to develop the skills I needed to move on from there.

Getting on IRC back then was really pivotal to my further involvement in the scene, since it let me “network” with tons of people from all over the world, and actually feel like a part of a bigger scene rather than some distant, outside observer, which I definitely felt like by the end of 1995.

It seems that you were a busy guy. 🙂 What groups and/or projects you were involved in?

Well, I don’t think anyone wants to read the entire list as it goes on and on, but some highlights starting from where we left off with my last answer: I soon got accepted to the legendary CiA, which was a total validation of potential as an ASCII artist and introduced me to a lot of other awesome artists. From there I dabbled with other groups, including helping run CiA’s breakaway ASCII division, Hazmat. I also participated in Serial, and later joined Impure. Still, more recently I’ve drawn for Break (though continuing to participate in Impure!)

The whole time I tried in vain to draw ANSI too, but it never really clicked. I finally started putting out some stuff I liked in the 2000s. You can see some of my more recent stuff in Crisis, Roots, and now Blocktronics packs.

My modding “career” is more ridiculous. I bounced around between a lot of groups, such as a Project/X, FSW, Sinister, and Taura. Some of these groups were putting out stuff I considered much nicer than anything I was capable of. Whether it being nice art or impressive code, I saw value in a lot of this stuff. More value than the template style work I was doing. Sinister was one of the most important experiences I had, since I ended up being a senior member of that group and learning a bit about running things. The aftermath of that group’s implosion soon led to me start Demonic Productions in 1997, using my experience and numerous modding scene contacts to attempt to build somewhat of a supergroup, as I saw it.

The rest is more muddled. I coded and later compiled Gutter, an art scene emag with my long time friend and collaborator, the amazing ANSI artist Filth. I co-founded Zer0net, an underground scene focused echomail network that is still around today, somehow. I began working on an epic project in the form of Darkness, my Legend of the Red Dragon style door game. I was involved in testing and developing numerous BBS software of the era, most notably Iniquity. I’ve also been a supporter of Mystic since the early days and like to think my involvement highly influenced it in the old days. I was heavily involved in trying to collect (and share!) rare BBS scene related files, though eventually these efforts got overshadowed by other, better managed projects. Of course, near the center of all this is that I’ve also been running my BBS, Distortion, since the late 90s as well.

Did you feel overwhelmed by all these projects at times?

Interestingly enough, not really! It always felt like I had an almost limitless amount of free time back then. In fact, I was bored as hell a lot of the time, which, more than ambition, is probably what led me to dabble in so many areas. Maybe that was a case of undiagnosed ADHD though. 😉 Even when I was in college, juggling school, a part time job, and heavy involvement my local punk scene, I still had time to work on Darkness and spend too much time on IRC.

Of course, that all changed when I got my first full time job. I’ve been pretty overwhelmed by my drive to dedicate free time to my various hobbies, including anything and everything BBS related, since then.

So, do you consider yourself to be a coder, an artist, an organizer/manager, maybe all of those? 🙂

I’d have to say all of the above, with some caveats. For instance, I don’t necessarily feel like a true artist, not like someone like Filth or a lot of the other guys still around today. It takes me a lot of effort to try ANSI and my focus is still far more on the technical than the expressive. ASCII comes a lot more naturally for me though. As a coder, I’ve never been an amazing programmer, but it is something I really enjoy to this day. For most of the 90s I was still very much figuring out WTF I was doing, but I had plenty of awesome people to be inspired by and to learn from. As an organizer/leader/facilitator, I’d say that this is something that comes naturally to me because of some aspects of my personality more than it is a role I usually seek to fill. I’m someone that’s just compelled to try to bring order to chaos and make shit happen, I guess. On top of all of that I seem to have a strong urge to “create.”

From what I’ve seen in your projects/mods you are a Pascal guy, correct? Do you know other languages? What is your background in computer technology?

I started dabbling a bit in BASIC and Batch (who didn’t back then?) but didn’t really dig into trying to learn to code until I joined the scene and saw all of the awesome stuff a lot of modders and coders were working on. I mean, just like seeing my first ACiD ANSIs and being completely bewildered by how what I was seeing was even possible, learning that some of my favorite BBS programs and demos were made by people around my age blew me away, as did the seemingly limitless possibilities. I’d say the aforementioned King Jamez was a big influence to me starting out, as were less approachable people like Fiend, the author of Iniquity, and Seth Robinson, the author of LORD. All of these guys had one thing in common: Pascal.

So yeah, like I mentioned, I was really still learning about coding in the 90s. I mostly learned by finding source code and ripping the shit out of it, and just trying to figure it all out on my own. It was a different world, with a lot less documentation and tutorials available, a lot fewer examples to learn from, etc. I started out working on simple utilities like scene group application programs, then moved on to doors and BBS scripts, then things like readers and e-mags. I was lucky to have a lot of friends in the scene who were far better programmers than I who could give me tips when I got stuck or simply couldn’t wrap my head around certain concepts. I owe Natedogg from Demonic in particular a whole lot of credit in that respect. This all finally culminated with Darkness, which, outside of the door library I used for communications (created by Natedogg, actually!) was almost entirely my own creation. I was pretty damn proud of myself for figuring things like multinode and IGM support out on my own.

At around the same time, I graduated High School and started working on an AAS degree in Computer Science. I ended up taking a lot of programming electives since it was something I was into leaning more about – I took a couple of Visual Basic classes as part of my degree and several extra C++ classes. I also taught myself PHP and SQL at around the same time while pursuing a job opportunity. I was just a couple of credits shy of graduating with a second programming focused degree, actually.

I was doing a lot of PHP work for awhile, and had a brief foray into professional programming mostly working on ASP Classic and Java. I’ve worked as a sysadmin and network engineer since then, which means my coding is mostly centered around automation scripting, when I get a chance to dust it off, and Python is my language of choice these days. Pascal is still my first love, however. There’s just something so simple and natural about coding in good old procedural Pascal to me. Of course, given how I learned it, a lot of my old, bad habits tend to come back out when working with Pascal, but whatever. It’s a hell of a lot of fun!

So yeah, I went on to get a BS in Information Technology and have something like 10 active certifications related to system administration and networking, and I’ve worked in and around IT since all the way when I was a high schooler back in the Demonic days of 1997. I definitely owe a lot to my time in the scene. I mean, the discipline required for self-studying for a challenging technical certification goes back to my days trying to figure out how to setup BBSes, or some random Internet servers, dabbling with Linux, or figure out how to code some tricky routine in Pascal, all in relative isolation, and I don’t question that my management style (at times in my career when I’ve been a manager) owes a lot to lessons learned running or helping run groups and projects in the scene.

Were you involved with the HPAVC scene?

I would say I’ve always been interested in the scene, but not really an active participant. Like most of us curious kids, I was naturally drawn to those “forbidden” subjects. As soon as I started calling boards, I started collecting old text files and zines. Of course, I quickly discovered that hacking was a lot less glamorous than movies and TV shows made it look, but I was introduced to phreaking, which felt more accessible, actually useful, and less risky. In fact, my scene alias, Jack Phlash, is very much inspired by those kinds of classic, cheesy hacker handles of old like “Captain Crunch” and yes, the “Ph” is fully intentional. 🙂

Over the years I dabbled in setting up confs and toll frees, running prank calls, voicemail hacking, war dialing, red boxing, and a variety of relatively mundane phreaking related shenanigans. I had some local friends who did some of this stuff with me, which was always a ton of fun. We also had some little text zines we’d put out, but nothing that ever went very far. Most of my h/p energies were spent keeping up with numerous zines and text files over the years, and sometimes providing ASCII art for them.

It’s funny, because at times, a big part of my aforementioned career in Information Technology has been working with telephony, including old school, big iron PBX phone switches and more modern SIP based VOIP systems alike. The 16 year old phreak in me would sometimes get inappropriately excited to have root access and the opportunity to do relatively deep dives into these systems. I mean, the power at my fingertips was the type of shit I’d fantasize back then, though of course in an entirely different scenario. I suppose I could make similar statements about the security aspects of my job, though that has always felt far more practical and less exciting than working with phones.

What about Zeronet? it was a very cool HPAVC network and very popular back then. How things going today?

Zer0net’s heyday as the one of the most active “othernets” out there, and a premier one at that, has likely come and gone. Still, even to this day we often have strong spurts of good conversation, and still maintain and add to a respectable nodelist – I think we have over 30 awesome, active nodes currently. There have been times over the years that I’d considered closing the doors, handing the reins to someone else, maybe another network op, but as it stands right now, I feel pretty good about the whole thing. In fact, the 20th anniversary of our first public infopack release is coming out soon, and with it I’ll be releasing a long overdue, newly revised “living” infopack that I intend to maintain from here on out.

We’ve always had competition from other networks, including some that seem to be straight up rip offs of Zer0net, but they’ve always come and gone. Occasionally some cool ones show up that I’ll even throw support behind myself, but Zer0net just keeps trucking along!

Continued in Part 2!

—
1. ak67-null.ans by Alpha King from Blocktronics: Dark Side of the Block (2019)