Some days at Internet Archive, I bump into people who were part of legendary companies and endeavors, who played a role, major or minor, in products that still hold warm feelings for a generation of people.
I bumped into one, and mentioned I'd love to interview him. He said no.
He told me that he wouldn't ever go on record about the company (a prominent one, believe me) or anything about it, because he was ashamed of his role in the success of it and the costs associated with it. He didn't like rosy looks back that forgot that.
He did tell me a story.
During a particularly difficult and intense amount of work at this company, what we'd call crunch now, one of the main engineers of the project had a breakdown. Complete and total, and was checked into a psych ward on observation because he was suicidal and spiraling.
Time for JASON SCOTT WANT ADS, where I have a small number of "can anyone help" tweets and I just roll them up into a thread.
Hey, so, I want to be able to have stuff move around a screen real-time in a window from simple commands (move this .jpg around a screen and float into a file folder icon) that I can use for an animated twitch stream. ANY ideas? Processing just seems way beyond my skills.
My stepmom's synagogue (reform) has 1,800 high holiday books, excellent condition, they'd like to give to another synagogue instead of burying - is there one out there people know of who would benefit?
I don't know how many people were paying attention to this, but Disney attempted to break a massive amount of contracts and provisions when they bought Marvel and 20th Century Fox
Indicated that because they weren't the ones who negotiated the contracts, they weren't liable for them and they weren't in effect. This was such a insane attempt at rewriting the concept of contract law that I think it went nowhere
American Healthcare Follies: I took two statins and had bad reactions. I was asked to please take one more statin before The Miracle Shot, so I did and I had a REALLY bad reaction I'm still recovering from. Why did we do the third? Insurance companies insist on three.
Why do they insist on three? Because the Miracle Shot is significantly more expensive than the statins so insurance companies want you to truffle-pig through every probably-not-great medication before you settle on, you know, the gold-quality thing that will Just Work.
The Miracle Shot, for people who care, is Repatha.
But that's another circled date in the Jason Doesn't Forget calendar. Instead, let's just talk a bit about Mark Herring, who was a fantastic guy, one of the real good ones, and the creator of the QWK packet, one of the most genius aspects of BBSing to be invented at the time.
FidoNET is another one - allow postings from messages from different boards to swap at night so the reach of people was increased exponentially. But QWK packets were a whole other deal altogether.
Since only one person could use most BBSes at once, time and bandwidth was scarce.
This is how I found out why Mark "Sparky" Herring, creator of the .QWK packet, BBS Documentary interviewee, never got back to me last year while we were talking aboit sharing some of his archives.