Interview with Tom Jennings
From Driscollwiki
02:50:00 -- end of art thing 04:01:00 -- end of fidonet
Q&A with Tom Jennings
- May 1, 2010
- MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA
- Moderator: Kevin Driscoll
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Blurb
Tom Jennings
Nothing is inevitable about the internet we inhabit today and no one knows this better than Tom Jennings. In the 1980s, he developed a radically decentralized network of hobbyist BBSes that connected thousands of people around the globe at a time when access to the internet was restricted to only a select few military and university personnel. Tom also witnessed the emergence of commercial internet culture in the early 1990s as the founder of TLGnet, a queer punk ISP responsible for WIRED magazine's first internet presence. Operating under a variety of guises, he has since tangled with the science and technology of the Cold War and the history of computation; produced land art involving Google Earth and road trips through desert; and built an array of hacked and restored automobiles (vintage rally cars == "art with rigor!") From Fido to 4chan, Tom brings a lively and provocative perspective to conversations about internet culture that is not to be missed.
Moderator: Kevin Driscoll, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, USC
Transcript
Kevin Driscoll: Welcome, this is a Q&A with Tom Jennings. My name is Kevin Driscoll. I'm going to quickly introduce Tom and then we're going to jump into it conversation-style. It looks like we have the right size crowd that if we say something that you want to know more about or if we say something incorrect and you want to fix it, you should raise your hand and jump in.
Tom Jennings: Sure. In fact, if want to move to the front - if you're actually induced to get in arguments, you can move to the front where you can argue better. I'm fine with that.
KD: Move around. If you want to move back ...
Audience: No!
TM: Now they just feel like they're on the spot to make a decision. We'll just stare at you.
KD: You have the whole time to make a decision.
KD: This is a magazine that was delivered to my house recently. It was in the midst of us talking about what sorts of things we were going to chat about at ROFLcon II and I thought it was an appropriate artifact to bring to you today. This is a picture of two well-known, well-capitalized folks and it says, "Geek power. How hacker culture conquered the world." Kinda interesting article. It's a where-are-they-now by Steven Levy referring to his book from 1983-1984. Checking up on people that he had originally identified as parts of the hacker culture of the time. It was interesting to see who was in the article and who was not included in the article - which people could not be found. And I wondered, "Where are all the people - where are the people that led us to what we have now? Where are the people that contributed to the 'world weird web' that we heard a little bit about yesterday?" I wanted to know where all the radio hobbyists were, where were the people that learned electronics in the military, where are the people that had a day job who messed around with microcomputers at night... And then I realized how lucky we were to have Tom coming to ROFLcon because I think that Tom's experiences have crossed a lot of different areas of culture some of which don't seem very technological at all but all of which contribute to the kind of culture we're celebrating this weekend.
Tom's often known as "the FidoNet guy" because back in the 80s, a time when very, very few people could get on anything that resembled an internet, he developed software that enabled us to have what essentially became a people's network - a network that was independently run by people who had BBSes in their homes and it was outside the authority of large universities, military institutions, and we'll talk a little bit more about how the architecture mirrored some interesting ideological conditions that you wouldn't necessarily find at a place, maybe, like MIT.
But Tom didn't really stop there - again, we're just barelling through. This is the cover of a fanzine that Tom worked on - little bit overlapping with the Fidonet stuff - and we can see how in Homocore, which was a queer punk fanzine in the Bay Area, some of the same kinds of humor, like the cut'n'paste aesthetics that we value in ROFLculture, so to speak, have a long history that is found in all sorts of spaces that don't necessarily seem so technological.
But this feeds right into - (TJ laughing) - Tom's like, what is that stuff! I didn't --
TJ: No, no. I remember that particular image. It came out of a shooting magazine. I used to go shooting, too.
KD: -- we can talk about guns, too --
TJ: -- consistency is not a virtue for me.
KD: TLGnet is The Little Garden. This was an ISP that started as a group of friends sharing an internet connection and led to a very radical business model that really upended the kinds of competition in the Bay Area. They provided all kinds of services and didn't dictate what the people were going to do with the internet connection that was coming into their home and business. But Tom also kept up the lulzy side. This is a photo - it's a little dark - but this was a --
TJ: Oh that's night time.
KD: -- night time in the bathroom! This was supposedly a webcam that pointed at a toilet all around the clock. People were constantly refreshing the page trying to see when somebody would actually be there going the bathroom. But if someone actually did refresh it all day ...
TJ: Yeah, it was basically a Connectix camera. I took a single shot, shooped it three grayscale and cron basically copied it over. I put a bunch of text around it. I made Time magazine and they called it "the beginning and the end of culture."
(Audience laughter)
Q: Is there a way to turn the lights off the screen?
TJ: Good point (claps) I command you!
KD: Once in a while...
TJ: -- That didn't work.
KD: Tom also pioneered domain squatting as the person who owned christian.org and christian.net.
TJ: Oh gosh. There's a lot of people that do that. And do a much better job than I do. Actually, that previous image I found on a sticker on a telephone pole at 16th & Valencia St. [in San Francisco]. It's just - I don't know why - it's not so funny anymore. Somehow it was really funny ...
(Laughter)
KD: World Power Systems is an organization, shall we say?
TJ: Stolen from some criminals --
KD: mm hmm
TJ: -- who are in jail and do not need it anymore.
KD: World Power Systems has a website: wps.com and a lot of the images that I'm pulling up you can find them in context on wps.com which is an archive of a lot of Tom's work but also some of Tom's archival work because Tom, recently, more recently, has been engaged in a lot of material reconstruction, reassembly of different technologies from the Atomic Age - would that be fair to say?
TJ: Twenty years - since 80s...
KD: Since the 80s. So we can talk about that a little bit, too. These are the kinds of cars Tom drives. It seemed like a good way to punctuate this point: to say that he eats his own dog food. (TJ laughter) This isn't just chatter. This is really everyday life on the wheels with Tom. And this is just a really beautiful image.
TJ: Yeah. Beautiful images. They're horrible but they're just wonderful. How can you not find the beauty in it? Well, from here anyways...
KD: That's the end of my opening remarks. I thought I could give you a chance to correct me everywhere I was wrong and then we'll jump into it.
TJ: I tend to go off on tangents. Let's see if we can stick to the program here.
So, Fidonet. Everyone likes to talk about, (dorky voice) "Oh, the internet, er, goes back the ARPANET..." In fact, the internet didn't exist, for all practical purposes, the internet did not exist up until the early 90s, really. And before 1995, hardly any human being, any mere mortal, was connected to it. Therefore, it was the realm of research, couple of grad students. It didn't really have any impact on culture. It certainly didn't have any impact on pop culture. But what did happen in the late 70s was computer bulletin boards. You can read about them. Most of the stories about computer bulletin boards are, (old man voice) "when I was a kid, we had to walk through 10 miles of snow to get to - ", you know, whatever the hell. And there is a lot of that stuff and we'll try to avoid that because it's obvious and boring.
What was interesting about bulletin board culture was you basically had little bits of hardware and new-fangled computers and, if you were lucky, a modem, and you were able to make, basically, platforms for culture. And a lot of it was obviously nerd culture because it was just hard enough to get anything to run at all.
KD: I thought that we would jump to just one technical detail about the architecture of Fidonet --
TJ: When I did Fidonet, I wrote a bulletin board called Fido which was cross-platform, which was a little novel at the time, and had this germ of an idea about multiple machines interacting. So I cobbled up, with a friend of mine in Baltimore - I lived in San Francisco at the time - Fidonet, which was basically a way of transmitting - passing messages from bulletin board to bulletin board. As soon as it started operating, it became obvious that I needed to have a structure for it. Basically, being sort of a punk rock anarchist weirdo, Fidonet was designed explicitly to anarchist principles. Anarchist principles meaning like Paul Goodman, if you want to google it, Paul Goodman, I should look up the name, "Reflections on the Anarchist Principle" -- don't worry. It's only a paragraph long. It basically describes what I mean by "anarchism." Anyways, it has sort of the ideological underpinnings of severely decentralized culture. We had really limited resources, so we knew who had to pay for things - which is not part of a lot of internet culture stuff, especially early on.
KD: Who has to pay for things?
TJ: Hm?
KD: What kinds of things would people have to pay for?
TJ: You had to own a computer, which was fairly expensive. Modems were even more expensive. At the time, the Judge Green decision - which was the breakup of the telephone system - happened on January 1, 1984, was actually a huge boon. When I sat down and did the arithmetic, it turns out that making a coast-to-coast phone call in the middle of the night in United States was 25 cents a minute - which was really expensive. Minimum wage was like 4 dollars, right, so 25 cents was a significant amount of money. But I figured out that at 1200 baud (TJ makes transmission sounds) you can actually transmit a page of text in a - I don't know, whatever number, whatever time it was - in a minute, for 25 cents, you can actually send a substantial amount of mail. That was the economic underpinnings for, "yeah, yeah, this is feasible if I can actually make a protocol that does all the right stuff."
So I proceeded to do that but the architecture, um, basically being queer - and later, being a queer punk, which didn't really pop up until later, a few years after this time - you know, I never got support from anybody. There was no - basically, you got a hostile environment. That sorta soaked into my psyche. So, basically, I made a bulletin board network that you could control the costs, you couldn't - you fundamentally could not be stopped from sending - now you don't have to read anything and you can throw away anything away that comes to your site - no one could physically stop you from transmitting. That is not the case of USENET or the internet. USENET, if you look at the bang - you know, UUCP's addressing protocol is name-bang-name-bang-name - send it to you, and you send it to her, and she'll send it to him - well, if someone along the chain doesn't like your message phbt! out it comes! You can't do that with Fidonet and that was built in from the start - and it was later undermined by my lack of oversight and other design factors (laughter) hey, you know, what can you do?
KD: Let's just throw out some numbers. People tried to estimate the size of Fidonet --
TJ: -- oh! that was fun! --
KD: -- which is interesting math. We were looking at some numbers earlier and people were estimating in the early 90s between 15,000 and 35,000 nodes...?
TJ: Yeah, I can summarize it really quickly. Actually, I remember some dates. May 1, [1984], there was like 15 hosts. By a month later, there were 50. By the end of the year, there was a 160. By the next year, the software started crashing because we ran out of - I forgot to check the end of the tables. (laughter) Um, I learned to do that later very quickly. Anyways, another year after that it was in the 4-digi- it was in, how many is that?, 5 digits! And then it peaked at 35,000 systems - in the one thing called "Fidonet"! - I think in 95? Something like that?
KD: What do you mean "the one thing called Fidonet"?
TJ: Well, we talk about - even I talk about - "The Fidonet" but there was actually, there was the Fidonet technologies and you were free to take a copy of the software for free and do whatever you want with it so there were lots and lots of Fidonets. The US Parks Department had one. All sorts of businesses had one. They were just all over the place. There was, of course, people split off that hate each other and they split off i-hate-you-nets. There was W3 which was a different sort of emphasis. There were a lot of Fidonets. We estimated - we counted! - 35,000 systems in The so-called Fidonet at about 500,000 users and there was at least that many more not aligned with anybody. So Fidonet kinda peaked right when the internet was becoming do-able at all and then - in hindsight, at least - a very predictable roll-off in numbers.
The built-in anarchism - I don't want to bother with some of the tedious documents - but yeah, it was pretty explicitly anarchist and punk rock, sort of, and I was a little bit loud about it so it kind of limited - not its technical development - but it's economic horizon. It didn't get a lot of publicity. It got a lot of users and the technology was exported all over the place. It was used in the continent of Africa and all kinds of places. It was involved in Bosnia stuff, in third world stuff, in Russia still...
KD: What's the technical advantage of Fidonet that would make people there use that instead of something else?
TJ: It squeezes a hell of a lot of performance out of the world's crappiest hardware! (laughter) You can do real - technically speaking, it's a store-and-forward system. It's not real time. How are we doing for time?
KD: We're good.
TJ: Ah, there's a giant clock there. You know what's funny. If you look at the timeline of things, it's like, if you were raised in the era and look at the new stuff, it's sort of obvious. But looking back, if you were used to using forums or, heaven forbid, 4chan, you wouldn't even be able to detect the existence of a conversation in a Fidonet echo. Most of the boards were single-threaded so you'd call up on a modem and that board was busy until you hung up. And then the next person would call. Conversations would take an hour, a day, a week, a month to unfold. Now when you see them in print, all filled with usual codes and stuff, you don't really get a sense of that but, going forward, it worked at a really different speed, a vastly different speed. And that kinda changed the culture of things, the nature of things.
KD: Cool. I think that's a - we were talking about that as an interesting connection between something - so I was looking on the archives of Homocore and I strongly encourage all of you to google, look on wps.com because there are hi-res printouts you can check out of the fanzine and something that is immediate that you'll notice is - From issue 1 to issue 7, the presence of letters in this fanzine explodes. In the first couple issues, there's a couple pages worth of letters, and by the last issue, we're talking like, 10 pages of really small type, of letters from kids all over the country. Which underlines that the fanzine culture and the Fidonet culture have similar temporality. These messages can't happen in the course of a second. They have to take a little while and there's some processing and passing along of things that happens. You were doing these kinda at the same time. How do they feed into each other?
TJ: They kinda overlap. Fidonet became a HUGE deal. It sorta took over my life. It's funny, I look back for cultural content for this thing. I didn't really have it. I have almost no record of the thing. I spent most of my time in all this (blrmp) mind-numbing stupid bureaucratic crap. I forgot we had a bottom-level protocol called "diet IFNA". IFNA was a horrible bureaucracy that ended up in a lot of lawsuits and diet means cut down to the bare minimum ... Just the naming brings back this horrible, crazy bureaucracies ... you know, (unintelligible) all sucks ...
KD: But why didn't the kids who were writing to Homocore just go on a queer Fidonet and ... ?
TJ: In 1993-94, nobody had a computer. I'm sorry. Well-off, middle-class people who get magazines written about them - or for [them] - were the few people who had computers. No punk rock weirdos and nobody on the street. And no kids. And no college students moving around. You didn't have a computer unless you were, you know, relatively monied. And even less of them had a modem because the modems were a pain in the ass, even in that day, to manage. That was when they were starting to become a lot more managable. I mean, I can't remember the models but they were now available for around 100 bucks or 200 bucks.
KD: Were the computers a big part of producing the actual fanzine?
TJ: The Fidonet culture didn't really get a lot of punk rock traffic and, to tell you the truth, by 1993, I was pretty sick of working on Fidonet and I was segueing my ass out of there - and over into TLG stuff later. But the punk rock - queer punk stuff for me started in the 80s when I moved there in November of 83 and I took the subway into the Castro District and came out of the subway and MDC is playing in the street on Castro street and I thought, "Fuck yeah! I'm in the right place!" And it was totally great.
KD: What's MDC like to see on the street?
TJ: Oh they became friends of ours and we hung out with them. They were really fun --
KD: -- but describe it. Like, what did you see when you saw MDC?
TJ: They come up and there's a stage - oh no, was it MDC or was it Dead Kennedys? I forget. It was one of those two. They were loud. They were goofy. They were absurd. They were ridiculous. They were kinda not really hardcore. They were kinda loud and funny. All the funny got strangled out of punk by the macho hardcore stuff ... which I don't subscribe to. Jerome Cacha (sp?) is punk. Macho bald-headed skinhead guy: not punk. That's my definition. He was a lot more fun, believe me. That was actually the last - that is the last punk show in the Deaf Club ever - if the Deaf Club means anything iconic to you. Which is a place for, well, deaf people to go. And they hosted punk rock shows because they didn't mind the noise (laughter) and they could feel it in their chests. So they were like, "You guys are great! This is great!" It's loud enough where it's going "boomp boomp" (pats his chest) and they're dancing and we're all having fun. (laughter) It was really great. It was a great place.
KD: It's funny browsing through some of the pages of Homocore because the names immediately jump out. And some of the way like queer punk is historicized, you wouldn't expect there to be like this show with Fugazi and Operation Ivy and then there's like drag queens in between it. How did that all come together? I mean --
TJ: There's this guy named Donny (sp?) the Punk, who's now dead, but he said, "Hardcore is the worst thing that can happen to punk." Punk was where all the weirdos went, especially in San Francisco. I think less so in New York. It was just goofier and more ridiculous and everyone had been basically ignored and had to make their own culture. And, um, my friend - so it's funny. People would flock to San Francisco thinking, "Wow! We came for all the Homocore queer punk culture!" and we were like, "Really? Where is it?" (laughter) And they're like, "No! It's like -- " and it's like, "Oh no ... it's just me and Deke! We just did this zine ..." Homocore became this face of a culture that didn't yet exist until people were tricked into thinking you know, we didn't know it was being made. (laughter) It was really cool.
And then fans would send in this artwork and we published - I have to say, I'm proud to say - we published every single letter ever sent to Homocore that was in the slightest legible! (Two thumbs up) Cool. Hate mail. Homophobic mail. Hey! We published it all. It was great. And we published, I think, every single piece of (funny voice) poetry (laughter) and actually the one thing that's not online is the bad poetry issue. Which is, we asked our publisher, who hated us, "What's the largest single piece of paper that you can do?" which does not lend itself well to archiving. It's, you know, it's uncut newsprint (stretches out his arms) and we used every single font that - oh, and Fidonet, er, Homocore is typeset in TeX, not LaTeX, but in TeX. (Sparse, enthusiastic applause) So it's scrunchy scrunchy. OK, that's where my macho comes out. My macho comes out in stuff like this.
KD: -- Programming macho is what you're saying --
TJ: Programming macho. So Homocore overlapped it. The punk crowd just didn't have time for computers. It was too much money. It was too intricate. It required too much attention. Mostly it required too much money. And when, you know, we had seven people living at 666 Illinois - which we would actually get our friends to address letters to "6 6 6 Illin' Noise dundundun" and the post office would deliver it!
KD: -- Bless them --
TJ: The post office is totally punk rock. (laughter) They would deliver the weirdest shit and still get it to your house. It was great. And we made up a street address. Our whole household of seven people made 40,000 bucks I think in 1992 or 93. We were having a swell time. It was great.
KD: We went back and forth writing our blurb for our talk. And in it, I had said, like, "Oh, you know, there's this thing, TLGnet, blahblahblah." And Tom wrote me back, and he was like, "Blurb looks good. You should probably mention that TLGbwr is a 'queer punk ISP'." So here's your chance. Explain what makes this a 'queer punk ISP'?
TJ: I should mention, just so you can google it if you care, Homocore was inspired by an actual network, meaning a human network. I'm not that retrograde. I just thought I'd throw that in. The 88-89 Anarchist Survival Gatherings were amazing. They were an amazing counter-cultural moment that kinda reflected 60s stuff. It's very old-fashioned even by today's standards. We came together, bunch of people just went there and we're like, "Wow. You're queer. And punk? All at the same time? And smart? Not a complete freaking idiot? Wow!" And we went back, it was in Toronto, went back to the US - the Americans did ... maybe some Canadians went back - and we all did our THINGS that were end up making sort of queer and radical culture. For me, Homocore was one.
Anyways, so I was doing Homocore, and it kinda came up and went. The letters column was a psychic drain of enormous proportions. We were like the only support group for people being fucked over by psychiatric doctors and lunatics and it was not a good time. It was a good time for style but not much else. So that also kinda lived it's life out and the queer punk thing started spreading more and Deke and I were basically sick of doing it. It was a lot of one dollar bills and postage stamps. It didn't really make any money. It funded itself. We did about 10 or 20,000 issues total, I think, over 3 or 4 years.
So at the same time, I was sick of Fido and I wasn't making much money, voluntarily, and I had friends John Gilmore and Tim Pozar had been doing this internet share. Basically, they got a lease line. Actually, it was John Gilmore, Steve Crocker, and one other person who said, "Hey! Wow! Real people can get on the internet for only 5,000 dollars!" It turned out to be 15,000 dollars and they got a 56k leased line and a router and some computer gunk and they stuck it in 814 University which is an apartment building in Palo Alto. With a leased line that went off the TIS which is somewhere, there, Silicon Valley.
KD: What kinds of things would they - why would they even want to go on the Internet?
TJ: USENET, binaries, work, you know ...
KD: How did they know about it though if -- ?
TJ: They were all university geeks, basically. I wasn't ... but they were. And I think I had a dialup with them so we did this thing - the technology at the time was basically leased lines which were unthinkably expensive and the phone company wouldn't put one in a house, basically. They would, actually, but you really had to talk them into it. But what we did use, we called "nail up". I would get two phone lines. Dedicated phone lines. One in John Gilmore's basement. Where the installer was very puzzled why eight different people had a phone line in John Gilmore's basement, in his garage. And I had one in my weirdo apartment, in my warehouse. And what you'd do is you'd dialup and stay connected 24 hours a day. There was nothing to say you couldn't do this. The phone company deprecated it but - tough luck. Over which I did 2400 bit per second SLIP so I had SLIP 24 hours a day. 2400 doesn't sound like much but what it was was a 24 hour a day connection to the internet which was pretty goddamn hot for 1991 or 92.
Anyways, that was the background so I was like, "Well, what can I do? I'm looking for a little money so ... " Well, we have this internet share thing and we're all too busy to manage it. And I, basically, to make a long story short, I ended up offering to manage this share of a half-dozen things which meant collect checks from all the idiots who won't pay and send them off to Steve Crocker to pay our share of the bill. And I basically got about 400 bucks a month out of this, which was pretty nice. And a free internet connection with which to monitor it. I had to drive over to Gilmore's house to reset the homemade routers and all that crap. I ended up adding more and more people and making more and more routers. It turned into a real thing, like, dozens of members. And then the C.O.R.E. split happened. They sort of de-research-ized the internet and handed it over the internet to the evil mouth of government - I mean, of industry, and --
KD: --- and so you became industry?
TJ: Well, actually, no. Then John Gilmore got into an argument, as he is wont to do. He got into an argument with Rick Adams from UUNET who ultimately said, "Find another service provider." We got kicked off the internet. He didn't pull the plug because we were to big too pull the plug on at this point. We went shopping around. We finally got through my friend Randy Bush, a connection to MCI's brand-new government internet service because, you know, this was the research and education network but they were kinda thinking about maybe, almost being internet commercial. So we got a pipe to them and a T1 - we had two T1s. We had an atomic system number - 2914, nice low number.
Anyways, we became a real ISP. And we're still freak weirdos. Not, like, punk queer weirdos. We were just some nerds, too small to really notice so therefore, we got to grow in the dark and we accumulated a lot of address space. I don't know if you guys know that the coin of the realm of the internet is the number of routes you have, the number of objects, and all this crap. So we ended up with quite a few hundred of networks and then it became obvious that this was a business and we started growing like crazy, and then it wasn't me, and then it was ... I had to rent an office. We had co-lo's in San Francisco, San Jose. I'll skip a lot of boring technical development. We ended up with a 45 megabit double-triangle around the Bay Area. We had tendrils to Hawaii, San Diego, Rainnet in Portland (sp?) which was Randy Bush, Deutsche Telecomm through a pop in New York. We chased MCI out of a 200-mile, 100-mile radius around San Francisco on price. We were charged 800 bucks a month a la carte, all you can eat. Free to re-sell - still a radical policy, cannot do it. We set quasi-national policy for a couple years de facto by selling 800 dollar a month T1. It's only 600 now. 800 then was INSANELY cheap.
KD: I think the economics and the tech is one side of it but --
TJ: -- but the cultural part. So it's not me. I needed some help. Turns out, there's not a lot -- you would think that alternative culture would have a lot of technical skills because that sort of maps today. Alternative culture at the time really meant, people who really aren't employable. I was employable because I had these weird technical skills. Lot of my punk rock friends, believe me, were plenty smart and way, way, way outside any economic machine. Well, I hired them. They're my friends. It's like, Put your money where your goddamn mouth is. I actually had money now again because my income fluctuates. I had an income. I started hiring my friends. They didn't have skills? We taught them and they self-learned.
After a half-dozen of my friends were working, we had to hire a little more cold. We followed the Rainbow Grocery model. Rainbow Grocery was a hippy anarchist truly-collectively run grocery store. What they would do is they would hire somebody at sort of a middling, not very good, hourly rate and if they caught on, they liked the culture - (makes a zipping sound) - [we? they?] paid them. We started out paying like 8, 12 bucks an hour - which wasn't bad money, it was like 6 or 8 bucks an hour everywhere else - and if they worked out, we salaried them immediately and just skyrocketed the price. I think we spawned a half-dozen to a dozen actual network engineers from dead nothing.
We were basically fairly out and obviously queer and punk and massively technically competent. What we did was we made everything absolutely clear and transparent. We published all of our technical information. We disambiguated AT&T's, Pacific Bell's T1 line. Technics, we told [unintelligible] on the line, how to interface it, how to make your own routers, how to make your own cables. It doesn't sound like much but at the time it was extraordinarily arcane - it's still a little arcane.
KD: How do you think that this compares to services on the web who have open APIs and encourage downstream business growth? You know, they open the data and ...
TJ: The radical part is that, you know, we're living in the United States and it's a hyper-capitalist state at this point. Money is ... if it doesn't make somebody economically independent. In other words, if it doesn't give you a job that you can live on, it's empty talk. This was the difference between a lot of the cafe punk rock culture and us at the time. Even in our other stuff like Homocore and Hit and Run - we did punk rock hit and run shows. We'd just rent a generator and a truck and show up in a parking lot and play until the cops made us leave. They were very nice. - It's like, you know, just shut up and do it. We just went off and did it. We only got arrested twice and we were just detained. The payoff was always so great.
We had money and it's like, "We've been talking about all this radical culture. Well let's freaking make some. Let's hire our friends ... " and we also let people re-sell from us which is absolutely verboten They would do things that we couldn't do. They would go into peoples' houses and into their businesses to install networks. We also didn't care if you had a queer image site. We didn't do any censorship of any kind. We actively, believe me, we gave a lot more favors to people that we liked than to people who didn't need it. Our early customers were - the list is pretty substantial. It's on that website somewhere. God, NVidia, MTV.com, Wired magazine. I mean, we had big chunks, I mean we had big chunks in San Francisco. But we made it, we were transparent in every way. It was pretty fun for a while.
KD: Well let's move, can you give the more detailed story of the toilet?
TJ: Webcams have always been fun. There was this company called Connectix that made this - it was one of those sweet-spot things - it was a little ball. Design-wise, really clever. It was the size of a golf ball. It was this flimsy, plastic thing with a USB cable - I think it was USB, was it USB? --
Audience: Serial?
TJ: -- was it serial? You're right. It must have been serial, parallel. USB just soaked in. Serial interface, special driver. But it was a camera! A little black-and-white camera. That was the image quality. I mean it wasn't very good but it was like 99 bucks, if I remember right. It was cheap and it had a little plastic stand. And they were kind of a revolution in their own way because it was like, images. There was no way to practically stream video. This is when I was living at 55 Rondell (sp?) on the Mission Street. I think it's Little Garden days. Anyway, the timeline is a written down somewhere.
I don't know what possessed me to do it but I took my laptop - I actually had a laptop in 1993. It was very cool! I think a friend of mine still has it. It's like an Apple 520c or something. It still runs.
I run to the bathroom and took a picture. Then I went and used whatever Photoshop equivalent to make three grayscales and then I just used cron to rotate them based upon the time of day.
And then I made a webpage that said, (dude voice) "Dudes, look! It's our bathroom! Click here and see us take a shit! Ahahaha." You know, that kinda stuff. This is not done on the internet. The internet is cool. It's the future and stuff. So, it got a lot of traffic. It got a stupid amount of traffic because the internet is small. This is 1993 or so. And then, Time, they didn't name me or anything but they said (serious voice), "There's even a toilet on the internet! This is clearly signaling, you know, the end of culture and stuff." But it was a hoax. It was a total hoax because I didn't actually mount the camera and there was no way to stream live video like that.
It's on my webpage. It was pretty funny at the time.
KD: Let's take a moment. We've been gabbing for a while. Maybe we can grab some questions from the audience. We're going to do this low-tech fashion so you'll have to shout it and then I'll repeat it into the mic and then everybody can hear it. Does anybody have a question? We can ...
Q: What happened to - NVidia doesn't use TLGnet anymore. What company swept in and took over some of that business and why?
TJ: Oh my god, well, it was slightly comical. Don't forget, there's dot-com and then there's the internet, and they're not necessarily the same. They kinda overlap. We're actually like the internet. We actually made money. Like, cash. We didn't have a business plan in the standard sense. There was no time for one. We didn't go into this looking like this. Anyway, we were making like, when we were sold, 150-180 thousand bucks a month, clear cash, pure profit. (Makes explosion sound) We paid all our punk rock friends. We had full health insurance coverage at four employees and, it turns out, it's not that expensive - everyone's lying. And besides, they're your freaking employees. If they're not there you're not making any money and they're not happy. It's like (throws up his hands) ... anyways, I'll stop that.
We were going to die from scale. We were an AS. We had multiple connections. They were all high and fast. There was no freaking way were going to survive the next wave and we knew it. We didn't have the capitalization for buying gear, which we were already buying it in six digits. We'd buy 50 or 60 or 70,000 bucks worth of Cisco gear. Also, we were clever. We bought used, created memory ourselves, and did all that shit because Cisco tried to make it sound like, (serious voice) "Oh, no, you can't do that. Inserting a SIMM chip is very complicated." (laughter)
Anyways, we sold out. That's what you do on the internet, right? We sold to - this is quite hilarious - we sold to Best, who I worked for for a short period of time, Best Internet that got bought by Highway (sp?) that got bought by Verio got bought by IIJ, Internet Initiative of Japan, all in a year. Like, ga-bang-ga-bang-ga-bang-ga-bang. We had many suitors. They all loved us. Almost none of them had cash. We took CASH. We went for CASH.
KD: -- Yen? --
TJ: A bunch went for, "Oh, we'll give 50,000 shares of this company that went out of business 6 months later of course." We took cash. Yes. We were very conservative.
KD: In front. In a blue shirt.
Q: You talked about, in the era of Fidonet, computer access, there was a high price point. You had to buy a computer, you had to buy a modem. What sort of people were on Fidonet?
KD: High price point for computing during Fidonet. What sort of people were actually there?
TJ: Yeah, I wish I could remember some prices just for actual price points. Unfortunately, in the United States, mostly middle-class nerd guys demanding immediate attention from me and nothing scary. But I ignored them. I'm teasing but it was sort of true. Very early on, when it was technically challenging and interesting, we were just so hunkered down in the bunkers trying to make it work that everybody was just of one mind, in one sense. The anarchist overlay notwithstanding, most people just saw it as really cool technology and wanted to play with it. Cool.
Later on, when they were more affordable and there were enough computers with a modem attached and they were configurable enough and Fido made it so you had a lot of canned configurations. You can borrow our config or whatever.
K-12.net started on Fidonet. K-12 was a Fidonet conference or a series of conferences. That was at the point where Fido was sort of turnkey. Where you could get some nerd to go into your house or go into your school and set up a computer and all these kids could use it. That gave people enough slack to start, like, flame wars and stuff like that.
And then it was basically, you can't swear, this computer's in my house, kinda stuff.
But people behind the Iron Curtain. God, what a quaint phrase that is. Eastern European, oh, that's quaint, too. Those things once existed. Life was a little more interesting. Fidonet in Poland and Fidonet in Estonia. was really important and they would bundle up. And one of the advantages of Fidonet and some of the follow-on protocols, that I didn't write, like Binklyterm and all the Opus protocols, Wazoo and all that stuff. They could get on and get off the phone line in 10 seconds. It's like, dial, connected, get tone, have mail, no?, hang up, pfff. Fidonet was usually a two-way exchange, like, here's mail, do you have any mail for me?, here's some files for you, do you have any files?, i have a list a files, give it to me, pft pft pft, off the net.
And you could do this on party lines. During the Apartheid era, the anti-Apartheid universities in South Africa were blockaded like all the rest of South Africa. What do you call it, when you cut everybody off? Can't think of the word. Brain fart. They were all off the net, off UUCP, so they used to tunnel over Fidonet over party lines.
Outside the U.S., Fidonet was taken serious, like a real protocol and my friend Randy Bush who did the RFC technical documents that describe the protocol, that will make you all sleep if I utter another word about it, um, he deployed it with NSF grants in Africa, countries in the north part of South America who's names escape me - I'll remember tomorrow. They basically put a Fidonet site in the university as entry level technology for educators to communicate. When they got money and got established, then they could get more grants, and then they would get UUCP and stuff.
Fidonet was one of those enabling technologies and I didn't do that stuff directly. Randy did that.
KD: You can read Randy Bush's technical documentation on textfiles.com which is not boring. It's actually really fascinating to read, especially if you're interested in how protocols might be developed differently and how protocols might encourage different kinds of communication between users.
TJ: Yeah, Randy's a cool guy. He's an actual red diaper baby, meaning his parents were Jew Commies in New York. He was a child of the 60s - he's, I don't know, twenty years older. So you know, he grew up as a child of the 60s to radical educator parents and he just carried it forward. With Fidonet stuff, it became this enabling technology for all kinds of these NSF projects. He said, "Well I'm going to give back and actually do the protocols."
The protocol is another odd thing. It wasn't open source. It was open protocol and it was closed binary. It was a weird world then. It was shareware.
KD: I can see some questions in the back. I'm going to go to the back and then come down front again. So I can see a hand with a white t shirt maybe.
Q: You can argue with me on this and that's fine. Having used Fidonet and having used contemporary web interfaces, I kind of view this ancestry happening between BBSes and contemporary web 2.0 environments but, you know, obviously the anarchism that existed is either warped or changed. I was wondering if you could talk about how you view that in the contemporary web.
TJ: Actually, yeah, that's pretty interesting. I can tell you about how I failed flat on my face. I will not show you some of my embarassing documents. I had this basically but really it didn't extend too far into the tech but basically there were bulletin boards
4:00:19
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Title
Q&A with Tom Jennings, ROFLcon II, 1 May 2010, Part 1 of 3
Q&A with Tom Jennings, ROFLcon II, 1 May 2010, Part 2 of 3
Q&A with Tom Jennings, ROFLcon II, 1 May 2010, Part 3 of 3
Description
Nothing is inevitable about the internet we inhabit today and no one knows this better than Tom Jennings. In the 1980s, he developed a radically decentralized network of hobbyist BBSes that connected thousands of people around the globe at a time when access to the internet was restricted to only a select few military and university personnel. Tom also witnessed the emergence of commercial internet culture in the early 1990s as the founder of TLGnet, a queer punk ISP responsible for WIRED magazine's first internet presence. Operating under a variety of guises, he has since tangled with the science and technology of the Cold War and the history of computation; produced land art involving Google Earth and road trips through desert; and built an array of hacked and restored automobiles (vintage rally cars == "art with rigor!") From Fido to 4chan, Tom brings a lively and provocative perspective to conversations about internet culture that is not to be missed. Moderator: Kevin Driscoll, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, USC
Tags
fidonet, bbs, internet, history, isp, roflcon, roflcon2, roflconii, jennings, wps, computing, punk, queer, fanzine, diy
