Excerpt

Exactly fifteen years ago in the summer of 2005, I began documenting all my old BBS and computer-related memories in a bunch of files that would eventually become Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie. Today, a decade-and-a-half later, I am putting the finishing touches on its follow-up, Commodorkier: New Tales from an Old Dork.

Commodorkier is intended as a companion piece to the original book. For several years I've wanted to go back and comment on some of the stories I included in Commodork. I never imagined a book full of old stories about old computers would itself become outdated, but over the years it has. Sometimes when flipping through Commodork, I find myself arguing with my own words! Like everyone, I'm a different person than I was fifteen years ago. People and opinions change over time.

About a year ago, I started a list of all the things I wish I could go back and add to the original. Some of my old stories were missing details. Others could be updated by mentioning new advances in technology. My urge to update the original was so strong that I started a new document and began writing updates to the original book's chapters in it. These were more than simple grammatical errors; they were entirely new stories. Just as I had done fifteen years ago, these stories grew to the point where they became complete chapters. My original concept was to insert these new chapters in between the old ones and re-release Commodork, combining the old stories with the new. After trying it, I found that the hopping back and forth between the old and new timelines was confusing and disruptive to the flow of the narrative. After some internal debate, I decided to extract the new chapters and compile them as their own stand alone collection. Each chapter in Commodorkier directly relates to a chapter in the original book. While you can certainly enjoy Commodork without this companion work, there would be little value in reading this before having read the original.

When I began writing Commodorkier, I wasn't exactly sure what the final product would look like. Would it be a series of disconnected responses, or all new stories? By the time I finished it, I realized the end result is a little of each. This book is a combination of stories and facts I left out of Commodork (either intentionally or unintentionally), errors and corrections, updated information, and lots of brand new stories. I don't know that it tracks as smoothly as the original, but I did my best to once again weave similar topics together. If you like reading movie trivia on IMDB or enjoyed VH1's Where Are They Now?, this is the book for you.

The original seeds that blossomed into Commodork weren't intended to be a book at all. In the early 2000s, I was an active member of Digital Press, an internet forum dedicated to retro video games, arcade games, and computer games. I visited the Digital Press forums ten times a day for several years, and over time I saw the same topics being posted over and over again. Several times a year, excited new members would join the forum and post "conversation starters" that had been done dozens of times before. "What was the first video game console you owned?" "What was the first arcade game you played?" "Did you ever own a modem?"

Some of those topics came up so frequently that I decided to compile my own personal list of answers to them. My idea was that each time one of those topics reappeared, I could open up my document and simply cut and paste the same responses each time. Let's face it, a person can only tell the same story about how they got Pac-Man for Christmas so many times before losing his or her mind.

In a Microsoft Word document, I began writing down paragraph-length responses to the most common questions. Over time, the stories grew in length as I revisited them, adding details each time I did. Then, I began writing down other old gaming-related memories. Although it wasn't my plan at the time, almost all of those stories found their way into the pages of Commodork.

As my Word document full of stories continued to grow, I considered posting them all on a website. I envisioned a wiki-style website that would be all about me, which sounds super-egotistical when I put it that way. The inspiration for this format was a website called the Big Fun Glossary.

Big Fun was a dilapidated old mansion located in the outskirts of Charlottesville, Virginia. The first inhabitants of Big Fun were three young women known collectively as the Malvern Girls, although at any given time it seems half a dozen or more people found themselves crashing or semi-permanently residing at Big Fun. Dozens more visited Big Fun to party (and crash) there on a regular basis. The inhabitants of Big Fun threw parties, created art, and consumed massive amounts of recreational cough syrup. One of the house regulars, a young man named Gus, captured the essence of Big Fun in a document he referred to as the Big Fun Glossary. The glossary contained hundreds of entries about people and events. What began life as a physical notebook soon became a 50+ page electronic document, which in turn was converted into a website in 1996. The Big Fun Glossary remains online today, exactly as it appeared back then.

Each glossary entry on the website contains hyperlinks to multiple other entries. The result is an interwoven mesh of stories, references, definitions, and inside jokes. Because the entries are presented alphabetically rather than chronologically, readers are constantly presented with stories that contain characters they haven't yet been introduced to. Of course, each person's name links to an entry about them, and each person's entry contains hyperlinks to additional stories they are featured in. When I first discovered the Big Fun Glossary, I must have spent a month going through the site forwards and backwards, reading every single entry a dozen times.

As my own collection of stories continued to grow, I considered posting them online in a similar hypertext-heavy format. Just like the Big Fun Glossary, I imagined a site with entries full of people, events, and stories blended into a single web experience.

But as I continued to write and organize my stories, something popped out at me. The memories, when placed in chronological order, presented a logical story arc. The beginning of my childhood roughly coincided with the introduction of home computers, and the end of my childhood roughly coincided with the end of the BBS era. With that revelation, Commodork became more than just a disconnected collection of one person's memories; it became a journey. In that moment, those random stories became a memoir of sorts. Without that revelation and alignment of the two timelines, Commodork would have remained a collective of fragmented stories posted on a blog, rather than the book it eventually became.

To see how much has changed since I first published Commodork, one only has to read the last line of my original introduction and find the link to my MySpace page. Hah! I don't know why it bothers me so much to have such an outdated link in a book about outdated technology, but it does. If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that today's technology will seem outdated five years from now, and laughably ancient in ten. I've updated my original book with links to my Facebook and Twitter accounts, but I'm sure ten years from now we will surely be laughing about those as well.

The funny thing about technology is that it's hard to imagine brand new gadgets becoming outdated. Around the time I published Commodork, I received my first USB thumb drive. After many years of storing data on floppy disks, Zip disks, CD-ROMs, and DVDs, USB thumb drives felt like something from the future. Imagine, data hanging from your keychain! All of those previous storage methods instantly seemed antiquated and fragile when compared to a plastic stick so small it could be stuck in a pants pocket. My first USB stick held 64MB (yes, megabytes) of data and cost $599. Today you can buy a 64GB (gigabyte) USB stick for around $20 at Walgreens. You can find them in the checkout line next to phone charging cables and packs of bubble gum.

(By the way, that never gets old — comparing new technology with old technology, specifically methods of storage.)

It's easy to imagine the ways technology will improve, but far more difficult to predict technological paradigm shifts. Back when floppies were my primary method of storing data, everybody knew that someday floppy disks would probably be able to store more data. What I couldn't fathom back then were USB thumb drives. And after I got that first USB thumb drive, predicting that thumb drives would eventually increase in capacity was easy. What was hard to predict was that a few years later, people would be storing their data in the cloud and accessing it both remotely and wirelessly.

Here's a funny example. Shortly after the release of Commodork in 2006, I drove to Chicago to attend the Emergency Chicagoland Commodore Convention. During the drive, the center console of my truck looked like a high-tech military command center. Front and center was my laptop, with a collection of wires running from it. For power, the laptop was plugged into a giant converter I bought at a truck stop. So I could listen to mp3s, I had a cassette-shaped converter from Radio Shack that plugged into my truck's tape player (the other end connected to my laptop's headphone jack). For navigation, I used a USB GPS that connected to my laptop and displayed maps (from a CD) on my computer's large screen.

But how would I check email and keep in touch while I was on the road? I had that figured out, too. Once every two hours, I would look for apartment complexes located near interstate exits. Once I spotted one, I would exit the interstate, park inside the apartment complex, and scan for open wireless routers. (Yes, I was "that guy" your IT person warned you about.) Once I found one, I would quickly send/receive mail and check to see if anything required an immediate response before continuing on my way.

(For the record, nothing looks more suspicious than a guy inside a pickup parked in a parking lot with a laptop on his lap.)

During one of these stops, I literally said out loud to myself, "someday there will be an easier way to do all of this." I specifically remember thinking that this would seem archaic someday in the future. I just couldn't imagine what it would be.

In 2008, two years after that trip, I purchased my first iPhone. I had owned a couple of cellphones prior to that, including the Nokia 5160 (the one with interchangeable face plates) and a Palm Treo 650, but the iPhone was in a league of its own. A single device roughly the size of a deck of cards became my method of checking email, listening to music, and navigation. Smartphones changed everything.

Surprisingly, there have been many breakthroughs in technology related to the Commodore 64 since I published Commodork. I can't believe how many hobbyists continue to develop and release peripherals, accessories, and software for such an old machine.

One thing that has greatly improved over the past fifteen years are the multiple methods available to transfer data to and from original Commodore floppies. Back in the mid-2000s, the primary method of transferring the contents of Commodore 64 floppies to a PC was by using what is referred to as an x1541 cable (or one of its many derivatives). This specialized cable allows a vintage Commodore 1541 disk drive to be connected to a PC's parallel port. Then, using software designed to run in DOS, data could be transferred back and forth between Commodore floppy disks and a PC. I am making all of this seem simpler than it was to get working. At a minimum, performing this black magic ritual required owning an x1541 cable, a working 1541 disk drive, and a PC that ran DOS and had a compatible parallel port. There was a certain amount of dedication and perseverance required to get all of these things working in concert.

In 2011, Retro Innovations released the Zoom Floppy, a USB card that allows vintage 1541 disk drives to connect to modern computers. Using updated software, it became much simpler to move data between the two formats. Trust me, it's a lot more convenient than keeping an old dedicated 486 running Windows 98 around for the same purpose.

Possibly the biggest and most amazing breakthrough in Commodore hardware came in 2008 with the arrival of the 1541 Ultimate (or 1541U). The 1541U is a device that plugs into the cartridge port of a real Commodore 64 and emulates a 1541 disk drive. SD card slots (and later, USB ports) allow Commodore owners to play emulated disk images (D64) on real hardware without converting them to physical floppies. And by slaving a real 1541 to the device's serial port, programs could easily be copied between physical floppy diskettes and emulated disk images.

There is no way for me to describe how mind-blowing this was. For the first time ever, a person could download a virtual D64 disk image from the internet, save it onto a USB stick, insert that stick into a real Commodore 64 and access the disk. Literally, mind-blowing.

For fear of sounding like a commercial, that's not all the 1541 Ultimate could do. It could also play cartridge and tape images. Its successors, the 1541 Ultimate-II and II+, contain an ethernet port. It can also emulate a printer, saving Commodore print jobs as PDF files. It even has a speaker that simulates the sounds of an authentic disk drive!

In 2016, Gideon Zweijtzer, the man behind the 1541 Ultimate, released the Ultimate 64. The Ultimate 64 is an FPGA-based simulation of the original Commodore 64, complete with a 1541 Ultimate-II+ built in. The board is designed to be installed inside a vintage Commodore case, and comes equipped with ethernet, USB, and HDMI ports, along with the original tape, cartridge, A/V, and serial ports.

I could go on and on about all the new Commodore 64 accessories. Over the past few years I've purchased everything from newly created Commodore 64C cases (made from the original molds) to wireless modems, allowing my C64 to wirelessly communicate with the internet.

It is a testament to the original machine that people are not only creating new peripherals compatible with the Commodore 64, but that a market for such devices even exists. Who would have thought that in 2020 people would be buying peripherals for, much less still using, an 8 bit computer released in 1982. Commodore has a fan base like no other.

In the appended introduction to Commodork, I talked about what doors had been opened for me since the release of the book. There, I mentioned that I had signed and sold books at the Oklahoma Video Game Exhibition (OVGE) and the Emergency Chicagoland Commodore Convention (ECCC). I also mentioned that I participated in a panel at DefCon about self-publishing, where I sat on stage in between Myles Long (from the Cult of the Dead Cow) and Rad Man (from ACiD). The following year, I spoke on stage about self-publishing at Notacon, a hacker conference/demoparty that was held in Ohio. The following year I was invited to speak to a class of future video game programmers at a local college.

My presentation at Notacon was particularly nerve-wracking. Fifteen minutes before taking the stage, I was people-watching in the lobby of the venue. As the crowd began to filter in, I saw Emmanual Goldstein (editor and co-founder of 2600: A Hacker Quarterly) with the infamous hacker Bernie S., Jeri Ellsworth (a legend in the Commodore scene), author Joe the Peacock, comic book artist Ed Piskor, and many other recognizable faces pass by. I had done several presentations before, but never one to a crowd with these credentials. To say I was nervous was an understatement.

Thirty seconds into my presentation, my throat was dry and I made a crack about needing a Rum and Coke to drink. I thought I had offended a man in the front row because right after I said that, he stood up and walked out. A minute later he returned to the room, walked up to the stage, and handed me a Rum and Coke as I stood next to the podium! This got a big laugh from the crowd. I had my drink, and the rest of my presentation went off without a hitch. Later I learned that the man who had purchased and handed me the drink was none other than Drew Curtis, the founder of Fark. I'm telling you, that was some room!

Despite being to a bigger crowd, I wasn't as nervous during my presentation on self-publishing at DefCon. For that presentation I was part of a panel, which took a bit of the direct spotlight off myself. As previously mentioned, the other two members of the panel were Myles Long from the Cult of the Dead Cow (one of the most infamous hacking groups of all time) and Rad Man, one of the founders of ACiD, one of the most famous ANSI art groups of all time. I'm sure very few people in the auditorium that day showed up to see me.

After our presentation concluded, the three of us were ushered to a second room, where we were expected to do a mini meet/greet with conference attendees. A few other cDc members along with members of the cDc's Ninja Strike Force came to show their support. Delchi (cDc-NSF), Jason Scott, and many other names I recognized came to this second room to talk, mingle, ask questions, or simply hang out. In 1994, I had driven from Oklahoma City to Houston, Texas in hopes of (among other things) meeting members of the Cult of the Dead Cow at a hacker conference. Twenty years later, I had been inducted into the Cult of the Dead Cow's Ninja Strike Force and was hanging out with cDc members at the world's largest hacker conference. I suppose every author has a different definition of officially "making it," but this might have been mine.

The biggest surprise that came out of writing Commodork were my podcasts. Around the time I published my book, I read that a good way for authors to build an audience is to create a podcast. I spent a sizable chunk of my childhood playing records and pretending to be a DJ in my bedroom, and thought that a podcast about all the things I loved sounded like a blast. I decided my podcast would be about old computers and video games mostly, but didn't want it to be specifically limited to the Commodore 64. The result of this brainstorming was You Don't Know Flack, a podcast "full of stories about retro gaming, retro computing, video games, arcade games, and technology from a guy who was there, and still is," as the introduction bumper goes.

Here's a funny story. Because I had no idea how to start a podcast, I drove down to my local library and searched for books about podcasting. There was only one on the shelf — a bright yellow copy of Podcasting for Dummies. I spent about two hours in the library reading through the book and making notes on a piece of paper. That's how it all began!

I originally launched YDKF as a way to promote my book, but the podcast took off and had a life of its own. In its peak, each episode of You Don't Know Flack had thousands of listeners; far more people than ever bought Commodork. Throughout the years I've launched several other podcasts including one about Commodore 64 games (Sprite Castle), one about arcade games (Cactus Flack's), and one about bad movies (Multiple Sadness). It was through another podcast, Throwback Reviews, that I met one of my best friends, Sean Johnson. My podcasting output comes and goes in waves. At one time I was rotating through shows and releasing one a week; other times I've only managed to squeak out one new episode a month, and I've only released one or two over the past year as we continue to settle into our new home. My intention is to set aside a dedicated podcast space in the near future and return to the microphone. So many projects, so little time.

In 2006, self-publishing was a relatively new concept. People had been paying vanity presses to publish their books for years, but the idea of publishing your own niche book and providing it to the public was just becoming a reality. Even more groundbreaking was the idea of people paying money for ebooks. Amazon had not yet dug its bloodsucking fangs into the medium yet; because of that, DRM (digital rights management) hadn't really solidified. The upside to this was that people could purchase and download ebooks, transfer them between machines and devices, and read them any way they wished. The downside was that without DRM, it was impossible to keep people from pirating books.

It was Jason Scott who gave me the best advice in regards to my concern that people would pirate my book, which was "make a good product and people will pay for it." For the most part, he was right. In the updated introduction to Commodork I added my PayPal account information in hopes of enticing guilty pirates into sending me a few bucks. Several readers have taken me up on my offer and electronically sent me a few bucks for my hard work.

I'm not sure why, but many people believe that everything they read should be free. Maybe it stems from libraries, and people's experiences with borrowing books without paying to read them. Authors are rapidly finding themselves in the same spot musicians found themselves in twenty years ago with the release of Napster. People are so used to listening to music on the radio for free that downloading those same songs through Napster didn't seem like such a big deal. Napster changed the entire recording industry. No band can make a living today selling albums without income from ticket sales and merchandise. Profits from the sale of music are largely secondary. Likewise, many authors are spreading out into writing "how to" books and presenting at seminars. They're not doing those things because they prefer them to writing novels, I can assure you.

For the record, the absolute worst thing in the world is when people email me, admit to pirating my book in the first line or two of their message, and then attempt to strike up a conversation. I email every single reader that contacts me except for those people. Those emails go straight into the trash. It's bad enough that people will steal a three-dollar book it took me a couple of years to write. There's no need to rub my nose into the fact.

By and large, most people are great. Most of the people who are nostalgic like I am don't think twice about paying for my books and supporting me on social media. I love talking to people after presentations and interacting with my readers and podcast listeners. For many years of my life, it was all about the warez. Today, it's all about the people.

At the time it was published, Commodork was the longest thing I had ever attempted to write,by far. I had no idea what I was doing. Today I have a master's degree in professional writing; back then I was just winging it, putting things together the best I knew how, in a way that hopefully made sense to readers. Knowing what I know now, are there things I would have done differently? Of course. From the original font I used to the way some of the chapters were organized, there are plenty of things I would change if I could go back. That being said, there's no denying that Commodork was a labor of love. It was my love of the Commodore 64 and BBSes that drove me to put the story together, and your love of those same things that have kept it alive all these years.