I got a call from Cade Metz (@cademetz) a day ago about Randy Suess having passed and an obituary about him being written for the NY Times. I gave him all the information I had, gave him Ward Christensen's e-mail, links to all my research/artifacts on him. nytimes.com/2019/12/20/tec…
Randy didn't want to have a thing to do with the BBS Documentary. I'd been working under the assumption that he wasn't going to be in it. (Ward Christensen was ready, willing, and did 5 hours of interviews across two days.) It happened because a saint of a man intervening.
His name was Peter Zelchenko @pzelchenko and he was my sherpa to getting an interview with Randy. We holed up at a nearby bar, Peter called Randy, offered pizza, and we came to his place with my camera. Randy took the pizza, sat with us while eating it, then did the interview.
The entire interview is Randy talking to Pete, while I recorded it. From that, we got the answers I cut into the BBS Documentary, and because of clever editing it looks like Ward and Randy are completing each other's ideas, but they hadn't talked in years.
The NY Times used one of my screenshots of the interview: bbsdocumentary.com/photos/130rand… and here is the total raw footage of the interview: archive.org/details/bbs-20…
I'm glad I could help direct Cade in several directions, but a real shoutout to his obituary doing Randy such justice and giving him such a sendoff. He was not a really warm guy, but he loved computers and technology and he ran a BBS of one sort or another for 40 years. Kudos. 
(That illustration is from IEEE Spectrum, and yeah, I guess my photos of Randy are so ubiquitously out there as "the" ones, the illustration even has the same shirt color.) Here's the IEEE Spectrum article: spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/c…
