So this morning, I get a WWF challenge from an old friend… I’ve played
him before, without much success, but hey… it doesn’t take much time or
energy to play the game and I’m past the point of ego limitations (at
least as far as WWF goes). So I accept the invitation and then begin
thinking that he’d appreciate reading the story I’ve managed to put
together. Then I realize that he belongs in the story and for some
crazy reason, 100% oversight, I never wrote him in.
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…
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
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