| Nostalgia |
[Apr. 22nd, 2009|12:32 am] |
I am really missing the old local Citadels right now. WWWA, Cathode Cathedral, Satellite of Love. Names few will remember, but I know at least slowbob will probably be getting a warm tingly feeling if he's glancing this over.
Cit-68k, Cit-86, GremCit's, Cit/UX's, MacCit's and Macadel's. Whatever. Sure, there were your major BBS's and C-net's and WWIV's and boards with focuses on files, games, maybe even multi-line chat - but the breed of Citadels excelled at communication in a way no other BBS's could touch. In a way, it's unsurprising - Citadels evolved organically, they were not written with a purpose to fulfill, the first Citadel started as a text adventure game; one feature enabled users to leave a message for other players. That little excursion from the core of intention soon proved to be more popular than playing the game itself, and in turn the software evolved to facilitate what the community cared about; the community was not built around molding their ways to the software as so many are now.
I miss *knowing* everyone with whom I would chat, and for whom I would write. No random crawler archiving our messages for posterity. Strangers were interrogated until vetted; and it was generally easy to do since few called who weren't local. And if they were calling LD and they knew how to phreak, they were probably worthwhile enough anyway. Regardless, anyone was welcome to tool around in the public rooms but only those trusted friends (and I really mean -friends- not some meaningless term for a digital association) made it into the sanctuaries where the real conversations happened.
If they turned out to be a troll, an asshole, bad blood boiled, or simply an untrustworthy idiot. Sysops would twit them. A twitted user could log in, enter messages the system would make it look like everything was fine. But behind the scenes, the message would be discarded and no one would have any idea the twit had even existed. Far better than actively blocking someone to their knowledge thus raising their ire; and with the power of giving everyone the same ignore list - good users were never troubled by the twits; and twits never knew they were getting the short end of the stick. Ignoring the trolls as it were wasn't a form of advice, it was a double ended technological implementation, without social fallout.
I miss the -thread- of conversations. Even the layout of information is so much simpler and smarter than most systems today. Start at the oldest unread message and work your way down to the most recent, just like we read things in English: top to bottom. None of this backwards show me newest messages first and let me try to ascertain when I've finally started rereading things I read last time. When someone chose to contribute - append that message to the tail within the flow chronologically. No needless crap of people answering the same question someone else has already answered because you were made to read other people's responses before you were provided with an opportunity to respond yourself.
And Citadels had one feature that people probably can't even comprehend today if they never experienced it. .Terminate Abort Sure sure, Cit/UX doesn't have it. Well not public releases of Cit/UX anyway. Young Republican (RIP) hacked in support for the revival of SoL along with me figuring out how to jump to it via ssh via crude efforts. TA'ing as we called it essentially would clear all the message pointers; making it like you'd never connected that session. Useful for occasions where you had enough time to connect and skim, but not enough time to formulate a proper replies; which turns out is often enough. But don't sacrifice the conversation - come back to it later when you've got a chance to really contribute; like putting a bookmark a page or two from where you've read so that you can be sure to reread that part later when you're not distracted.
We may have had simple line editors, but god - so much better than dealing with stupid escape codes or reserved characters.
Our networking was crude, but we managed, across continents and even oceans sometimes; and of course oceans of a different sort - variant software implementations (Deadman wrote the Cit-86 to Gremcit networking code that linked us to his board after he switched coasts; but we kept in touch with nightly syncs over illicit pc-pursuit accounts). And the anti-vortexing helped alleviate a problem that most people deal with today - repeated messages rebroadcast on endless nodes. Networked rooms could be tagged such that their networked nature was clear, and you knew if you'd checked one on one board you didn't need to check the same room on another board. None of this failed syndication and intractably implemented aggregation without even comprehending the problem an aggregator should be trying to solve.
Digital communications today are archived duplicated EULA'd appropriated analyzed aggregated datamined and more, even as the messages themselves are of an increasingly banal nature. Astute researchers spend more time analyzing the relationships of the parties interacting and how they can model or map those than they spend actually -looking- at the communication. And the same is true for many people who choose to use these new mediums. The citadels, ephemeral as the storage upon which they were written (sometimes even on dying floppy disks) contained a culture and a conversation that was, to me at least, so much more intimate than anything I could even imagine existing today.
And yes, things change and evolve - but is it the community that is driving it anymore? Big business here, startup over there all looking for consumers. So rare is it when the community is the driving force now; actively implementing a better world not passively digesting or -demanding- what they wish to see from those "on high" whom are given undue credit.
Years before the FSF the GPL, rms and all kinds of political evangelism; Cynbe ru Taren whom I knew only by the citation of Jeff Prothero released the source as public domain.
The legacy goes on. Cit/UX has continued to evolve (far from even when I last used it when YR was running SoL on it) into a robust groupware platform; apparently still at the behest of its community. I am tempted to fire it up; I can only assume that all the functionality is still available from the fundamental text interface, even if it now offers caldav, groupdav, imap, all manner of web front ends and client support.
But this isn't so much about the present as it is about the nostalgia; and really of truly vetted and trusted communities and means to communicate digitally in a time where prying eyes hadn't been conceived or at best were embryonic. A time of small fiefs of communication among friends with walls to protect them. Vibrant and full of potential and optimism.
CItadel is a real hacker's code. Which is unsurprising seeing as it got its start from someone who wrote one of the first hacker's codes:
http://muq.org/~cynbe/hackers-code.html |
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| Comments: |
Digital nostalgia... This post made me smile. :)
Ahh, this post takes me back. I miss WWWA almost every day. My nostalgia got so acute out here that I actually purchased the Final Zone 2 Turbographix game just to listen to the music and remember us filming Roman Slaves down by the wharves. "Reach for the top! Never give up! Fight to the death with Bazoooookas!" so many people I wish I could catch up with. Legion O.D.D.? what I would give to have another epic coffee session, followed by some Creature from the Black Lagoon Pinball. Last time I saw him he was working for Blockbuster in Pacific Grove. Total random encounter, renting something with my family. Tried to arrange a later meeting, but it never happened. Disappeared shortly afterwards. If you're out there buddy, give us an email! YR? poor YR. I feel so sad and guilty about him. Should we have tried to get him out of Monterey? I don't know. Complicated, I don't even really know what happened exactly. Both Dan Rather and I pay our respects. Well, at least I do. Dan Rather's been talking shit about both of us for years, and I hear has gone totally Neocon. I did find relics of one surviving agent out there. You're not going to believe this, but he wishes all interested parties to bite something, can't quite recall what it was.. http://www.hoby.net/otl/Crank.htmlFr0oTy times. | |
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