I had forgotten just how great, how amazing this record was in 1987, and it's still that great today. 4AD was an amazing label for a long while.
Lonely is as lonely does, lonely is an eyesore. LONELY IS AN EYESORE compilation.
Here's an interesting take on USENET vs. FidoNet ECHOMAIL -- exactly the same and totally different, and their mutuality, and centerless vs paid storage. From a BBS sysop's POV.
https://techheart.life/articles/usenet-in-2026-bbs-sysop-comes-back
LOL!! Here's a completely fabricated, completely wrong, nonsense history of FidoNet! What a crackup!
She even fabricates a "lightweight cryptocurrency" -- fidocoin! lol URL fails.
Almost nothing here is correct! What an idiot! Obvious slop.
https://gabriellataylor.com/2026/09/18/fidonet-1984-the-birth-of-a-pioneering-bbs-network/
Maddening: I cannot find a simple file repository of "all" Fidonet nodelists, 1984 on. Most seem hidden behind "node lookup" fronts. Someone must have one! aargh.
The downsides to decentralization, lol.
If I find them I'll copy and put up the dumbest straightforward download page possible with them all.
The weird weather has given us an unusually warm night, clear sky, which makes me want to take some mushrooms and go on a long bike ride. Instead, I'm going to bed.
Now all three of my desktop computers have SSDs for system and home, and a large (2 to 4 tb) spinny rust drive for hourly increment backup.
Today two of them are making the little noises that computers are supposed to make, mouse-like scritchings and tickings, quiet enough to not be annoying but audible enough to be reassuring that they are busy working. It's quite nice actually. One's moving data to the other, so the noises are interrelated but not the same. Very organic sounding.
John Ganz today:
"One’s personal opinion of Omar’s character or her politics is immaterial. This is a serious assault on the constitutional order being carried out through the executive branch’s legal and bureaucratic machinery. Perhaps the reason that the public response is so tepid is that we have so long taken for granted—or simply no longer understand—just how fundamental the questions involved really are. This move strikes at some of the most elementary assumptions of a free and republican government, principles so basic that we scarcely imagined they would need defending: that political opposition is legitimate, that the executive cannot determine the composition of the legislature, and that citizenship is not a privilege held at the pleasure of those in power."
"My mother is upstairs, she is very ill. She is dying."
"Oh, I'm so sorry to hear."
"Yes. She has been dying for six years. We are getting used to it."
Delta wing fighter aircraft over los angeles. Fucking LOUD.
Sharing peanut butter on crackers with dogs is always funny.
Recycling. Hmmm the mass of the finished product appears to be larger than the original core... neato to watch anyway
From a comment on a random web page:
Great article, AL! (sorry for the capital L, but this way it doesn’t look like AI).
Leor Zolman wrote the BDS C compiler for CP/M. He was perfectly suited to the era, open, friendly, had no idea what he was doing but made great things.
Here's an email? from him in 1982 regarding his compiler package, available from Lifeboat, a once-significant distributor:
Date: 09/04/82 11:00:03
From: LEOR
Re: update policy
Simply, my policy is that ANYONE who EVER pays real money for BDS C, purchased ANYWHERE, is perfectly entitled to copy anyone else's newer version with my blessings. Note that NO ONE should EVER have to go to Lifeboat for updates...PLEASE tell your friend to join the user's group so he can get the newsletters and CHEAP updates. You should join and do likewise, if you haven't already!
And here's a bit of (tech) history he wrote in 2002, years after BDS C was a viable product, but for a recent final release.
This requires some back knowledge that if you are a 21st century programmer and don't know background and the history, this README doesn't flatter Leor. To me it's the opposite, everything good about the era and especially Leor. You will have to make the effort to conjure that 1974..1982 microcomputer world -- when they, we, were coding from scratch, from chip datasheets, on hardware designed from scratch, from chip datasheets, all with a mission to make computing available to everyone. EVERYONE.
Reinventing the wheel was not only allowed de facto as it always is, but encouraged. We can do better! In spite of the omissions and lack of (compiler) education Leor wrote a very functional C compiler perfectly suited to the time; the binaries for the two-pass compiler are 15K and 20K bytes.
I think rewrites from scratch, of entire systems, is a good idea. This corporate mode of huge code bases patched and patched creates bloat, not spareness. It didn't used to be this way. And doesn't have to continue.
Heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses.
What, exactly, is pizazz? And do I really want any?
Here's a rare (as in, no one saved echo conference content that I know of!) random sub-conversation from a FidoNet Echo Conference, which is FidoNet's homegrown distributed equivalent of a usenet newsgroup. They were gatewayed bidirectionally for some years. We just called them echo's.
The SEEN-BY and PATH lines are normally hidden by the reader. 1:125/111 was my BBS.
https://www.inglevale.com/tomj/werdz/history/fidonet-history/security.txt
FidoNews vol 8 #48, page 4 article titled "number nine, number niine..." referencing the Beatle's song REVOLUTION 9 (we're old).
This is still a radical and freeing idea, that was stomped out of FIdoNet by reactionary assholes.
The FidoNet nodelist, appears to be a literal /etc/hosts for the FidoNet (some 35,000 systems at its peak) but it was in fact assembled from hundreds of fragments compiled by each net (city or rural cluster, world wide) and collated "upwards" for assembly and distribution. It became reasonably sophisticated, with diffs etc. It was assembled anew weekly.
Number Nine was a proposal to allow the assembly of the nodelist at the point of use -- completely eliminating the heirarchy that had grown to manage it.
The idea was to use an "echo conference" (think: usenet group) to distribute fragments, with encryption to satisfy the very paranoid FidoNet culture.
It was shot down by hierarchists.
The end result would have been a truly, utterly, decentralized network, impervious to outside forces to stop any node from communication (node == instance == host). No hierarchy at all, beyond the "natural" (sic) clustering of BBSs based upon population density.
Lol, there's also a polite "article" by an newly cooperative Steve Winter.
(I'm vetting a folder of old files for the VCF Montreal talk, mostly to refresh my memory (ugh, lol, I would rather not, some of this) and I'll post amusing things as I find them. Much of it was interpersonal stuff (flames, complaining, the usual).
Mute me if it annoys you.