Now I’m thinking that I can’t send him a link to the story because he’s going to think I excluded him or never considered him to be a significant friend. As a matter of fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that, while he was ‘in the scene’, he was also one of the truly inspired/inspiring people I met during those incredibly creative times. And here’s the scoop on Michael…
People look back and say the music of the 70s was ‘off the charts’ in terms of creativity, innovation, and it’s really easy to understand why when you take the time to listen. It was a ‘coming out party’ for the baby boomers as much as it was a ‘generation gap’ moment for those that preceded us. Moving away from Doo Wop, Country, Rock and Folk, the sounds on the radio were impossibly different. Chuck Berry may have brought electric music to America but it was the Woodstock lineup (including those that didn’t play there), that embodied the creative explosion that occurred. Bands like Quicksilver Messenger Service, Ten Years After, Iron Butterfly, etc. pulled musical expression into a new place that millions of young people dramatically embraced.
Well, Michael wasn’t about music. He was about the other revolution that was happening just beneath the surface at the time. He was all about innovation and technology. Around the same time that Steve Pfeifer introduced me to computers, Michael was already on the cusp of things. He was innately curious and entrepreneurial at the same time. I remember the story of him visiting somewhere in South America (I think it was Brazil but it could have been anywhere), and being unable to find a bulb for his flashlight at any reasonable price. The bulbs were a penny or two in New York so he goes home and fills a suitcase with these little bulbs and heads back to Brazil. I don’t remember the outcome, but I don’t think he got rich. More than likely the Brazilian authorities seized the bulbs saying he hadn’t filled out the proper paperwork, then sold them and made a fortune themselves. But the point is that Michael wasn’t about the hippie culture. He was about being smart and creative.
This was before Windows was a thing. It was a time when MS-DOS was still being compared to PC-DOS and there were no such things as graphic interfaces. It was all keystrokes all the time. ASCII and DOS commands ruled the fledgling internet and the biggest things revolved around modems and dial-up speeds. In 1981, Hayes invented the ‘smartmodem’ and nothing was ever the same after that.
The Smartmodem was an otherwise standard 103A 300 bit/s direct-connect modem, but it was attached to a small microcontroller that watched the data stream for certain character strings representing commands. This allowed both data and commands to be sent through a single serial port. The now-standard Hayes command set included instructions for picking up and hanging up the phone, dialing numbers, and answering calls, among others. This was similar to the commands offered by the internal modems, but unlike them, the Smartmodem could be connected to any computer with an RS-232 port, which was practically every microcomputer built.
“The introduction of the Smartmodem made communications much simpler and more easily accessed. This provided a growing market for other vendors, who licensed the Hayes patents and competed on price or by adding features. Through the 1980s, a number of new higher-speed modems, first 1,200 and then 2,400 bit/s, greatly improved the responsiveness of the online systems, and made file transfer practical. This led to rapid growth of online services with their large file libraries, which in turn gave more reason to own a modem. The rapid update of modems led to a similar rapid increase in BBS use, which was helped by the fact that BBSs could control the modem simply by sending strings, rather than talking to a device driver that was different for every direct-connect modem.”
What is a BBS? Well, to me, it means Bulletin Board System. And when I was introduced (by Denis I think) to Michael, a whole new world opened up to me. It was as radical as taking my first hit off a joint. In 1985, Michael had created a BBS based in his loft in lower Manhattan called The Invention Factory. It was one of the first of its kind and, again, was pre-windows or any other graphic user interface. It was all about communication and totally primitive by today’s standards. It was the wild west of a digital revolution. Everything was new and anything seemed possible. And Michael had thousands of people connecting to his Invention Factory BBS. Yes there were forums and other internet platforms but the BBS was easy to use, easy to connect to, and literally a window on a new technology.
Here's a link to InfoWorld, a magazine that gives a glimpse into that time and place. https://books.google.com/books?id=YToEA ... &q&f=false
Michael was the SYSOP (System Operator) and as time went on he must have had a hundred phone lines installed in his loft (literally in the shadow of the World Trade Center). I remember putting my PC on auto-dial and waiting an hour to get connected. It wasn’t uncommon to get a $100 phone bill for BBS online time.
Then came the Mosaic browser, Windows, and America Online was born. My first reaction was “This graphics thing is for dummies. Real computing is done with keyboards and computer language. This is the dumbing down of something truly wonderful.” Windows? Not for me! I stuck with MS-DOS until the bitter end. Michael, though, saw immediately that there was no comparison between the clunky keyboard driven communications and this new platform that was accessible to everyone. The future of computing was the graphic interface. It took a few years, but the BBS universe was completely coopted by AOL and all the keyboard driven interactions became ‘old-school’.
At the time though, I could see that Michael was at the forefront of some new unseen universe. Who knew then? Michael seemed to know. And his excitement was contagious. Anyhow, we were all players in those days and we all had our addictions. Some were addicted to mind-numbing drugs, others were into psychedelics, some became obsessed with money. Michael wasn’t any of those.
He was obsessed with innovation and the amazing new world of communications that we were about to enter.
How much of his obsession was funded by ‘the business’? Some for sure… Did it matter? Hell no! He was into a new world that went beyond pot-induced mind-bending. Anyway, his world changed radically on September 11, 2001 and he’s now living happily somewhere in Brooklyn. I’m betting he reads a lot and knows more about the social aspects of digital technology than anyone around.
Now if only I could beat him in WWF… just once…
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