Ornoth

I was probably 15 or 16 years old when computers first started appearing at the consumer level.

In the late 1970s, these were mostly for playing games. I played Pong (1972) and Asteroids (1979) on the first arcade consoles; Air-Sea Battle (1977) at Sears on the Atari VCS; Carriers at War (1984) on the Apple ][, and Crush, Crumble and Chomp! (1981) on the TRS-80.

My first experience using a computer for anything other than games was the University of Maine mainframe in 1982, long before the invention of the Web (1989) or even the TCP/IP protocol (1983) that heralded the creation of the Internet.

This was a time when card punches and readers were still being actively used. Students preferred to do homework on paper-fed teletype terminals like the DECwriter II rather than video display monitors, because they would still have a printed record of their assignment if the mainframe crashed and lost their work. It would be years before the first IBM PC model would appear on campus.

It’s a fair question to ask: with no games and no Internet, what did we actually do on the university computer?

Herein lies an interesting tale. You see, before TCP/IP, IBM had created its own networking protocol called RSCS, and in 1981 – a year before I arrived at UMaine – RSCS was used to connect computers at UMaine, Yale, CUNY, and a handful of other colleges in an academic network known as BITNET. BITNET allowed users at different sites to send programs and data files to one another, exchange email, and send interactive messages, and it would eventually grow to over 3,000 universities across much of the developed world.

In 1982, the idea of being able to send an instant message to someone across campus – or even across the country! – was incredibly compelling.

But RSCS messages weren’t all that. An incoming message would interrupt whatever you were doing, whether that was running a program, archiving files to magnetic tape, or composing a term paper. Each message was separate; there was no concept of an ongoing conversation, and there was no way to include anyone other than the sender and one recipient.

TeleVideo 925 terminal

That all changed in 1983, when one of our university’s computer center staffmembers took an example program from a magazine and ran it on his mainframe account: WGH@MAINE. The program was what we called “a chat machine”; users across BITNET could sign in and send messages to it, and the program would echo those messages to all the other signed-in users. It was the ultimate ancestor of later services like Chat@PSUVM1, Relay@Bitnic, IRC, and Discord.

And its use spread like wildfire among the undergrads. If you were a smart kid who wasn’t into partying, then hanging out on a chat machine was how you spent your time. I devoted endless hours with a cadre of other geeks in the mainframe’s “user area”, idly hanging out on these early chat machines, conversing by text message with an increasingly familiar set of students from random sites across the world. I joined several other Mainers in making the trip down to New York City to attend the world’s first ChatCon meetup in 1984.

These days, I still retain a deep sense of nostalgia for those early days, and keep a few of the memories alive in odd, eccentric ways. Not only does my laptop’s “Terminal” window open in the classic green-on-black of a monochrome mainframe terminal, with the standard CMS “Ready;” prompt, but it also paints the default character-graphic VM/370 login panel. I wish one of my friends still had a copy of the old CAPS/UMaine login panel: an outline of the state of Maine, done in asterisk characters!

My Terminal window also uses the same idiosyncratic font-face as the huge old IBM 3278 terminals of the day. That’s kind of an indulgence, because I never used one… The only 3278s were kept inside the mainframe machine room; lowly student users like me only had access to TeleVideo 925 or 955 terminals… And no one has bothered to port those terminals’ fonts to modern Truetype or Postscript files!

One of the attributes of those mainframe terminals that I recall most fondly were their industrial-strength keyboards. They were of the same vintage as IBM’s “Big Iron” mainframes, long before “planned obsolescence” was a thing. Those keyboards were built to easily withstand a decade of student use, or a direct thermonuclear explosion, whichever came first.

Those old 4½ pound mainframe keyboards were so different from the flimsy, commodity rubber membrane actuated keyboards you get today, or the 1.4 pound Apple Magic Keyboard with its little scissor switches and a mere 1.15mm of key travel. And frankly I really missed the typing experience of a solid, durable keyboard with mechanical switches.

So now I have to admit… This whole nostalgia dump was really just a lead-up to this: I recently bought my first mechanical keyboard.

Now the first thing I’m gonna do is warn you: if you get intimidated by too many choices, selecting a mechanical keyboard is a complete morass! You’re absolutely inundated with choice, beginning with what size keyboard you want, and what keyboard layout. Then there’s tons of different keycaps to choose from, coming not just in different colors, but with different heights and profiles. Next there’s hundreds of different types of switches, with different travel, activation, and sound profiles. Mechanical keyboards are – unexpectedly – one of those incredibly detailed, technical areas that enthusiasts love to submerse themselves into, for reasons known only to the cognoscenti.

Saving you all the drama, I chose a Keychron V6 Max. I wanted something really traditional: a full-sized keyboard with dedicated function keys, arrow keys, and a number keypad, similar to the original IBM Enhanced PC keyboard, which is probably the most famous keyboard in history. The V6 Max is also wireless, which I prefer, given that I often type with the keyboard on my lap. And it’s sturdy, weighing in at 4.47 pounds, only half an ounce lighter than my beloved TeleVideo 925!

I kept the stock keycaps, which are a nice two-toned blue, with reddish ESC and ENTER keys. The keyboard has modes for both Mac and Windows, as well as dedicated keycaps for both OS’ idiosyncratic command keys.

Not knowing much about switches, I ordered two sets: the Gateron Jupiter Brown and Gateron Jupiter Banana, but I quickly opted to run the latter, which have a more satisfying sound, which will hopefully not perturb my housemate.

Other features… The keyboard is customizable with industry-standard QMK or VIA software. It also has a handy dedicated volume/mute knob on the top row just to the right of the F12 key. Like many modern keyboards, it comes with (often maligned) programmable LED backlighting, which I’ve set to simply flash blue underneath each key as it is activated. I also bought a nice clear plastic keyboard cover to put over it when not in use.

Having had it for six weeks, I have to say that it’s been a pure delight, and I find myself looking for reasons to sit down at the keyboard and bang away on it. In fact, I enjoy typing on it so much that I’ve been thinking about setting up a Discord text chat for a gathering of BITNET friends to revisit those old days when we used to spend hours upon hours typing to one another across the ether (hence the reminiscing about chat machines, above). And fair warning: another way I’ll satisfy my rejuvenated enthusiasm for typing is to produce more longwinded blogposts like this one!

I’ve only had two minor niggles. I had one bad switch – which happened to be on my ‘s’ key – that would register a double-strike about half the time. However, that was easily remedied by swapping the switch out. The other niggle is one I’ve had in the past with several other keyboards: the little rubber feet on the ends of the keyboard’s prop-up legs always seem to come loose for me, requiring an end-user application of superglue to stay put.

So after all that, the bottom line of this post was just to spend time gushing about having finally bought myself a quality keyboard. I’ve been dealing with garbage chiclet keyboards ever since I left college back in the late 1980s, and – given the amount of time I still spend sitting at the computer! – I was way overdue in treating myself to a higher quality input device.

And I’ll type, type, type till my baby takes my key-board away…
(no apologies to Brian Wilson)

As DargonZine’s founder and former editor, I was asked to make a few comments as they completed their 24th and began their record 25th year of online publication. I thought I’d share my responses here, in case anyone is interested.

Why did you start Dargonzine?

DargonZine, which was initially called FSFnet, really began out of my desire to exchange ideas, tips, and techniques with other writers. I was attending college in the backwoods of Maine, and there really was no one I could have those kinds of focused conversations with.

At that time, BITNET was just coming into being, and several of my peers had founded electronic magazines that focused on computers or humor. But at that time there was really no online forum for fantasy and science fiction fans.

Having edited a fiction-based magazine in high school, I immediately recognized the value of combining this newfound communication technology with my personal needs as a writer. I could attract people like myself, who sought a serious, focused online writers’ group, while entertaining hundreds of fantasy readers by freely distributing the writers’ output online.

Twenty years before the term “social networking” was coined, we realized the power of bringing aspiring writers together and sharing their works with supportive readers, and that formula has been the basis for DargonZine’s success.

Did you ever imagine it would still be running, 25 years later?

During the early years, obtaining enough submissions was a constant struggle, and it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that DargonZine had enough writers to ensure that issues came out on a regular basis. So for many years our focus on getting the next issue out superceded any inkling of how long the magazine would survive.

However, as the few older e-zines folded, by 1995 we had clearly become the longest-running electronic magazine on the Internet. At the same time, we had an established core group of long-term contributors who were willing to do whatever was necessary to keep the group alive. Only then did we start thinking about DargonZine having a future beyond the next two or three issues.

What were the early days of Dargonzine like?

Most people don’t realize how primitive the Internet was in 1984. This was ten years before the first public Web browser was developed, before IRC, predating even commandline FTP. The only service available was text-only email.

The “Internet” was limited to a couple obscure places that would pass email between two incompatible networks. The only sites on the Internet were major colleges and large government contractors, and the only people who had both access and the technical knowledge to use it were computer science students and computer center staff.

At that time, there were virtually no public gathering places on the Internet (pun intended). One of the only ways to find people was to register your name, email address, and interests in a central text file that listed a few hundred “Bitnauts”: tech-savvy Internet users. DargonZine’s first two mailings were sent to users on the Bitnauts List who had listed science fiction or fantasy in their interests.

Back then, when connections between universities rarely exceeded 9600 baud (15 minutes per MB), sending a couple hundred emails at once could bring the entire network to its knees. FSFnet was one of the first users of Eric Thomas’ Listserv software, which addressed this problem by multiplexing email and file distribution to make more efficient use of BITNET’s star topology and slow network links.

What advice would you give to others who want to start a long-lived webzine?

There are two crucial elements in making your e-zine work: the subject matter, and your dedication to it.

Because you’re competing with everyone else on the planet, your e-zine needs to be the single best source of information on your topic. If you intend to put out a magazine about Star Trek, your zine has to be really exceptional in order to stand out among all the other sites already out there. That’s incredibly difficult, but I’ve seen it done.

The other option is to focus on something newly emerging, like steampunk fiction or digital video recorders or GPS phones. If you’re the only zine that deals with your topic, it’s much easier to become the recognized authority in the field. This is what DargonZine did back in the early days of the Internet, when there were no other writing groups or fiction zines online. If you do this, you just have to make sure you do it well enough to discourage anyone from starting a new zine to compete with you.

The subject matter is what will get your zine off the ground, but your dedication is what gives it longevity. I’ve see hundreds of zines and newsletters fold after putting out four to ten issues. Usually there’s a honeymoon period when there’s lots of content and both the editor and contributors are very motivated. But in short order the editor discovers that the pipeline of submissions has run dry and there’s actually a lot of technical drudgery in preparing and distributing issues. It’s here where the editor’s passion and devotion to the subject matter makes the difference between a zine that quietly fades away into obscurity or survives and goes on to enduring greatness. And, really, if you’re not working on something you love to do, you shouldn’t be wasting your time on it.

And if you’d like to impart any anecdotes or anything else, please let me know!

Although the Internet allowed DargonZine’s contributors to work closely together in a virtual sense, our writers have always been physically isolated, spread thinly across the globe. In fact, during our first decade we didn’t see any value in meeting one another in person. Even when that changed, we spent two cautious years meeting in small groups before inviting all our writers to our first open DargonZine Writers’ Summit in Washington DC in 1997.

The ensuing DargonZine Summits cultivated lasting friendships and generated an unexpected amount of enthusiasm among our contributors. Since 1997, we have held annual meetings each year in different cities around the world. The Summits are a balance between working sessions focused on improving our writing, fostering personal connections between writers, and sightseeing in the host city. Although we were skeptical of their value at first, the Summits have proved to be one of the most rewarding, inspiring, and effective activities we’ve ever provided.

While the date is approximate, this is essentially the 20th anniversary of my founding of FSFnet, the electronic magazine which evolved into DargonZine. It’s by far the longest-running electronic magazine on the Internet, and its mission—to help aspiring amateur writers improve their craft—has been my real “life’s work”.

What follows is an email that I sent to our writers’ discussion list in observance of this event. I thought it appropriate both to archive it here as well as to share it with anyone who is interested, as it is without question one of the most significant events of this year for me.

With that said, here’s the message…

Going to college in northern Maine isn’t very pleasant, especially in the dead of winter. The sun has fully set by 4pm in the afternoon. The average daily temperature is 18, made worse by the wind that sweeps the bare, exposed hilltop university bare of anything but ice. The nearest town is twenty miles away; the nearest city, over 235.

Perhaps that’s why the students and computer center staff at the University of Maine were at the forefront of the nascent BITNET network, back in 1984. Desperate for any contact with the rest of the world, UMaine saw the development of the first Internet chat machine, the second automated network information service, the first registry of network users, and a half dozen of the Internet’s first electronic magazines. Perforce, we became the leading edge of the burgeoning international computer network; there wasn’t much else to do, after all…

I recall well the day that I had the idea for a BITNET-based fantasy magazine. It was between Christmas and New Years, during that lull between semesters when there’s no one on campus. Even the hardcore hackers I hung out with had stayed home due to an immense blizzard. The only people around were myself and one of the computer operators, a friend and fellow writer who came out of the glassed-in machine room to chat.

About six years earlier, I had been responsible for putting out an collection of poetry, art, and fiction for the New England Tolkien Society, a premium annual to complement our cheap monthly newsletter. I wondered whether an electronic magazine focused on fantasy and science fiction could garner enough submissions to survive. My friend Murph, the computer operator, was enthusiastically supportive, and even promised a story or two. So within a day or two I distributed what I called “FSFnet Volume Zero, Number Zero”, a bare, baldfaced plea for submissions, which went out to 100 people in our BITNET user registry, the Bitnauts List, who had listed fantasy or science fiction as an interest.

The response was very encouraging. Submissions started coming in from a handful of interested parties, and one interested reader designed a much better masthead than the one I’d used initially. After an early dip down to about three dozen subscribers, readership steadily grew into the hundreds. At the end of our first year, I brought our many separate writers together for the first time and proposed a radical concept: a collaborative milieu that would permit us to write related stories, sharing characters and places and events.

My motivations and expectations when I founded FSFnet were really twofold. First, I wanted to write. Second, I wanted to find other writers who were interested in talking about writing.

FSFnet and DargonZine achieved and far exceeded those goals. Looking back at it, my goal of merely talking to other writers seems a bit unambitious. In the interim, DargonZine has become a dynamic family, featuring both lifelong friendships while warmly welcoming new members. Even today, after the advent of bulletin boards, the World Wide Web, cellular telephones, and all manner of pervasive computer- and network-based technology the social aspect of the project remains one of the most powerful, vital aspects of our mission.

But there have been so many surprises along the way. Over time, the quality of our writing and our critiques have consistently improved. I’m proud to look both backward and forward and feel a great sense of pride in some of the tremendous works that I’ve had the honor of publishing. We’ve helped a lot of writers, and in return they’ve shared with us some truly wonderful works of fiction.

Of course, quality is often matched with quantity, and I don’t need to tell you about the volumes of writing we’ve printed. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that I would ever look back and count four hundred stories. Anyone who has tried to go back and read all our back issues knows firsthand that we’ve printed enough material to fill about two dozen paperback books.

And then, of course, there’s longevity. If you’d told me in 1984 that I’d still be putting this beast out when I turned 41, twenty years later… Well, that would have been quite a surprise.

Another thing that has surprised me along the way is how much people have sincerely cared about the magazine, as reflected in their comments, their demonstrations of emotion, and the effort they’ve put into making it work. The devotion and faith that our writers have had for the project has probably been the most humbling thing in the project to me, because it’s really touching that people believe so strongly in something that I had a part in creating and continue to guide.

And the final surprise for me has been that DargonZine has become, to some degree, as what I’d call a “leadership engine”. The project long ago became much more work that one person could administer. For many years, our writers’ devotion has prompted them to accept responsibility for small projects that further enhance the project’s purpose. As they execute those projects, they learn how to express their visions of the future, build consensus behind their initiative, get and keep the ball rolling, and bring it to fruition. Whether it’s running a Summit or updating our maps or character descriptions or whatever, it’s been rewarding for me to give our writers a place to test their leadership skills: practice using skills which might aid them in their careers and interactions in other organizations.

There has, of course, been a great deal of change in the past twenty years. Back in 1984, the Internet didn’t even exist! Even the networks that would eventually combine to create the “network of networks”— ARPAnet, Usenet/UUCP, BITNET, Decnet, and others—were little more than a dozen sites each. Email existed, but no World Wide Web. No electronic images existed in any fashion; text was the only interface, and email was the only way to communicate with another computer user. No compact discs, no cell phones, no laptops, no PDAs, no MP3 players, no ATMs, no GPS, no digital cameras, not even color computer screens. We still had computer card punches and readers at UMaine, and most students preferred to work on paper-based DecWriter terminals because they didn’t trust monochrome CRTs. Today’s technology environment is as different from 1984 as the Wright brothers’ flyer is from the Stealth Bomber.

On the other hand, some things just don’t change at all. In many ways, DargonZine’s challenges remain the same as they were on day one: having an adequate number of writers and enough submissions to fill a regular publishing schedule. And then as now, readers are really more of a side-effect than a priority.

And, just as that December day was back in 1984, today is actually a unique and pivotal moment in our history. In a matter of weeks, we will finally break the longest spell we’ve ever gone without an issue, and we’ll do so by publishing the first of many Black Idol stories, which is itself one of the most important events in our long history. We are desperate for new writers, and hopefully the publicity that the Black Idol generates will bring in a new wave of writers who will become the project’s backbone for the future. Our Web site desperately needs an overhaul. We need to bring in new readers to replace those we’ve lost over the past years. Both the arc and Dafydd’s epiphany have gotten us thinking about how to collaborate more closely and more effectively. After failing to get our new writers involved, as evinced by the number of people who are getting dropped in the current participation review, we are completely reassessing the value and tactics of our mentoring program. After years of just coasting along, happy with the status quo, we are currently both in great peril, and on the verge of tremendous changes, and it’s definitely an interesting time to be part of the project.

For more than a decade we’ve owned the right to call ourselves “the longest-running electronic magazine on the Internet”. But every single day we increase that longevity record. The fact that we’ve been around a decade longer than virtually any other online publication further underscores how very special what we do really is.

Since day one, I’ve known where to lay the credit for the magazine’s success. Here are some quotes from FSFnet 0-0, that initial mailing wherein I defined what FSFnet would be. I think they were absolutely prescient, because an unimagineable twenty years later, these statements are just as true as they were that wintry evening back in 1984:

FSFNETs success depends on reader contributions and efforts.

Please, FSFNET can only work if people are willing to contribute to it.

The more people who read it, the more people will submit quality work, >the better FSFNET will become.

This is your fanzine, more than it is mine. It is up to you to keep it >going. I have merely brought you together. Now it is your turn.

Some of you have been here virtually since day one. Dafydd (my erstwhile editor, most prolific writer, and overall curmudgeon), Jon (my conscience and good friend), and Jim (my last surviving co-founder and recurrent agitator). There’s simply no way that I can say enough to thank you for how much you’ve helped the magazine survive and thrive. People have long looked up to you as the soul of the project, and I do, too.

Some of you—Rena, Pam, Victor, and others—came on board in a wave a few years ago, and you have all pulled a lot of weight. You joined the project and thought of yourselves as newbies, but you very quickly were asked to become project leaders, and you’ve done an excellent job, rejuvenating the project when it was at a point much like today, when we needed new ideas and energy to replace the departure of several outgoing veterans. I thank you all, because you’ve taken on so much. The project survived and came out of that stagnant period stronger than ever, and the zine is what it is today because of your hard work.

Our newest crop of published writers includes Liam and Dave, and I couldn’t be happier with you guys. You, too, have provided an infusion of energy when the project really needed it, and you have also stepped forward to become leaders, like the generation before you. I hope that you stay with us for the long haul, because we really need active new writers with a passion for improving the way the magazine works, and I really see you as agents for positive change. You’re the people with the insight to ensure that we set up policies and procedures that enable us to effectively integrate and inspire the new writers who will be showing up in the coming months, and that’s the most important job anyone can do right now.

And the new folks who haven’t been printed yet. You haven’t been part of all this history, but I really hope that you will help create DargonZine’s future, because DZ’s success is very much more in your hands than it is our veterans. There’s always turnover in the project, even amongst the Old Ones, and we’re always looking for people with the vision to help us improve the project, and the enthusiasm to make it happen. I really hope you make the effort to be active in the group, because you are really what the project’s all about, and you’ll have to step up and help lead us soon enough.

For each of you, I want to thank you for what you’ve done for the project, whether you’ve been here twenty years, twenty months, or twenty weeks. As I said twenty years ago, all I’ve done is give you a forum; DargonZine’s success—and it has been a phenomenal success, achieving far more than I ever anticipated—has been entirely because you cared about it, believed in it, and worked for it.

As I have said countless times, DargonZine isn’t my creation. Sure, I had a couple good ideas a long time ago, and I send out the emails and crack the whip to keep everyone moving, but ultimately DargonZine could survive very easily without me. On the other hand, there would be absolutely nothing were it not for dedicated writers like you.

Together, we have created something amazing, something that has lasted longer than anything of its kind. We have learned a ton from one another and helped amazing number of writers, and we’ve created a very tight-knit community. I’m honored to be one of the people within this circle, and I thank you for everything you’ve done to make it what it is today, and to create the future that I see before us.

So please join me in raising a glass to twenty years of collaboration and camaraderie. Then get back to your story or your critique queue, so we can get started on our future!