[Chris J]

Quote:

All the fun I've missed not reading Hi-Fi magazines over the years. I only joined Head-Fi because the pads on my MB Quarts had gone flat and I thought I should buy something new and different.

How's that working out for you?

 

[warrenpchi]

Quote:

Quote:

All the fun I've missed not reading Hi-Fi magazines over the years. I only joined Head-Fi because the pads on my MB Quarts had gone flat and I thought I should buy something new and different.

 
How's that working out for you?

 
LOL! 

 

[mikemercer]

I needed to say THANKS to everybody who's been PMing me about wanting to read this story.
 
I'm working on it, and finding that's its a really emotional place to go back to as I write.
But with Harry's blessing, and knowing he wants the story to be told, I am keeping at it!!
 
I found my original W2 from Pearson Publishing LTD from 1995!  My lawyer suggested I find
some proof I worked for the former company - since I will NOT be commenting on Absolute Multimedia,
the magazines current owner.
 
I think it's pretty easy to prove our dedication to HARRY, and that we worked our tails off because
he made us believe in ourselves AND him.
 
Plus: You know my total earnings from Pearson Publishing LTD for all of 1995?
$490.00
 
But that didn't stop us!  We kept things afloat through any means necessary.
Frankly, I'm surprised nobody ever wrote anything thanking the small team that stood behind him.
I still need to find out the names of two editors that were there during my tenure.
 
Michael Gaughn (now with Sound & Vision) was the lead editor behind Harry, and man did he work 
day and night trying to keep that magazine going!!  We all did.  My mother was, in Harry's own words,
one of the only copy-editors that he approved of!  Pretty funny.
 
I'm gonna try to finish the story this weekend

 

[regnaDkciN]

Your mention of the W-2 sure brings back memories. At just about that time (maybe a couple of years earlier) the family-run computer-game developer I worked for ran into some pretty bad financial trouble when a couple of our major publishers decided they didn't feel like paying us for work already completed. With the prospect of having to close the doors, pretty much the entire staff volunteered to take 50% pay cuts until we were back afloat. We didn't mind, because we loved the company and the types of projects we were working on. Incidentally, a side-"benefit" to this was that, needing new projects to keep us going, several of us would hit C.E.S. every January to pitch the company to publishers -- and, needless to say, for me to spend as many "off-hours" as possible in the high-end rooms at the old Sahara, including hanging out with many fellow members of The Audiophile Network, many of whom would go on to write for TAS and Stereophile.

 

[Steve Eddy]

Quote:

...and, needless to say, for me to spend as many "off-hours" as possible in the high-end rooms at the old Sahara, including hanging out with many fellow members of The Audiophile Network, many of whom would go on to write for TAS and Stereophile.

 
TAN, eh? Do I know you? I was TAN's Technical Director (i.e. the person who dragged Guy kicking and screaming from the old Apple IIe he was running TAN on and got it up and running on a PC platform with some real BBS software).
 
se

 

[regnaDkciN]

Quote:

...and, needless to say, for me to spend as many "off-hours" as possible in the high-end rooms at the old Sahara, including hanging out with many fellow members of The Audiophile Network, many of whom would go on to write for TAS and Stereophile.

 
TAN, eh? Do I know you? I was TAN's Technical Director (i.e. the person who dragged Guy kicking and screaming from the old Apple IIe he was running TAN on and got it up and running on a PC platform with some real BBS software).
 
se

You probably do -- James Walley, usually found there, when not discussing audio matters, teamed up with Lonnie Brownell in political debates versus Doug Blackburn and Yogi Saxena.

Since I now seem to be traveling down Memory Lane, I'm recalling two technological "developments" of the time that made that pre-Internet board workable for me: PC-Pursuit, which allowed long-distance data calls to selected locations for local rates, and a name-long-forgotten program for the Commodore Amiga (!) that let me download all new TAN posts since my last call, read and respond off-line, then upload my responses the next time I called. Needless to say, there were times when I called three or four times daily, to do the upload/download routine.

It's funny...I was just thinking about TAN this morning -- how, in its primitive-by-Internet-standards way, it was one of the greatest "cyber-communities" I've ever been a part of, not just in talking about equipment and music, but in actually becoming real and important to each other in a way that having 700 Facebook "friends" can never duplicate. I found myself recalling the words of "Bob Dylan's Dream" -- "Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat/I'd give it all gladly if our lives could be like that." It's a shame TAN couldn't survive the Internet age.

 

[Steve Eddy]

Quote:

You probably do -- James Walley, usually found there, when not discussing audio matters, teamed up with Lonnie Brownell in political debates versus Doug Blackburn and Yogi Saxena.

 
Ah, that name rings a bell. And I definitely remember Lonnie, Doug and Yogi.
 
Quote:

Since I now seem to be traveling down Memory Lane, I'm recalling two technological "developments" of the time that made that pre-Internet board workable for me: PC-Pursuit, which allowed long-distance data calls to selected locations for local rates, and a name-long-forgotten program for the Commodore Amiga (!) that let me download all new TAN posts since my last call, read and respond off-line, then upload my responses the next time I called. Needless to say, there were times when I called three or four times daily, to do the upload/download routine.

 
Yeah, that was something of a godsend. It came a bit later. As technical director, I was getting a percentage of the TAN subscription fees. They ended up being around $600 a month. But I usually spent that much and more dialing into TAN.

 
Quote:

It's funny...I was just thinking about TAN this morning -- how, in its primitive-by-Internet-standards way, it was one of the greatest "cyber-communities" I've ever been a part of, not just in talking about equipment and music, but in actually becoming real and important to each other in a way that having 700 Facebook "friends" can never duplicate. I found myself recalling the words of "Bob Dylan's Dream" -- "Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat/I'd give it all gladly if our lives could be like that." It's a shame TAN couldn't survive the Internet age.

 
I know what you mean. Here locally, there was a very nice 64 line BBS which was not only a great cyber-community, but also a great local community as members there routinely had get togethers in real life. But once the Internet hit the public, that came to an end as everyone "evaporated."
 
It is a shame TAN couldn't survive the Internet age. Sadly that was Guy's fault. While he did a lot of talking, he moved at a pace that would have glaciers shaking their fists at him telling him to get out of the way. When I first discovered TAN, it was about 1986 or 1987. Guy was running it on an old Apple IIe. The software was so primitive, the "message areas" were really nothing more than a text file. You had to display the whole thing and see if there were any new messages appended to the end. This was at a time when PC-based BBS software was pretty mature and readily available. I contacted Guy and said I liked what he was trying to do, but that he REALLY needed to upgrade the system to something PC-based.
 
Instead, he kept trying to talk me into becoming a northern California "node" for TAN. He'd send me an Apple IIe and the software, and then at night the two systems would call each other and update the messages. I kept turning him down and kept after him about getting TAN on a PC. It was probably two years before he finally gave in. He bought a PC, sent it up to me and I pre-installed it with QuickBBS, set up TAN and sent it back down to him as a turnkey, which I managed remotely from here in Sacramento.
 
Before that, TAN was little more than discussions between Kinhluan Nguyenngoc and Dave Carpe. Once it was switched over to the new software (which was later upgraded to a multi-line TBBS system), it really took off.
 
I left TAN several years before the Internet became public. TAN languished as a dialup BBS for several more years, as Guy was always so slow to change anything. And when he did finally attempt an Internet version of TAN, he insisted on keeping it a subscription system. His justification was that it kept out the riff-raff. Of course the Internet was all about "free stuff" so it was doomed from the start. Even back in the BBS days, I tried talking him into dumping the subscriptions and instead fund it via the online store and advertising. But he would have none of that and TAN just died on the Internet vine.
 
Here's a little memorabilia for you. JA saved some archives of some of the message areas on TAN. He sent me copies of them several years ago. So if you'd like to take a stroll down memory lane...
 
http://www.q-audio.com/tan.zip
 
I pulled up one of the Community Square files and did a search on your name. Here you are talking to Myles about the Giants back in 1992.

 
Msg#:10896 *Community Square*
11-27-92 01:24:58
From: JAMES WALLEY
  To: MYLES B. ASTOR
Subj: GIANTS
I've heard of ranging pretty far afield, Myles, but this takes the cake!
I'd have to agree with you about the Giants neglecting the defense.
As a result, it is safe to say that they are now a truly offensive team.
Oh, well, it could be worse. You could be here in Seattle, and have
to deal with the Hee-hawks. The joke around here is that Billy Joe Hobert
(who was just declared ineligible at UW for accepting a $50,000 "loan") is the
only "pro" quarterback in town...
 
se

 

[longbowbbs]

I enjoyed the old BBS days (Hence my handle) I ran a multi line BBS for several years. I remember the thrill when I received the my US Robotics Courier's....56k! ah, state of the art.

 

[Steve Eddy]

Quote:

I enjoyed the old BBS days (Hence my handle) I ran a multi line BBS for several years. I remember the thrill when I received the my US Robotics Courier's....56k! ah, state of the art.

 
HA!
 
Have you ever checked this site out: http://bbslist.textfiles.com/usbbs.html
 
But yeah, back in the day, TAN was the place to be. For audio, I think the only place that rivaled it was CompuServe's CEFORUM. And as James said, Stereophile and TAS recruited a number of writers from there. It was from there that the late Gordon Holt recruited me to write for his rather short-lived Video Theater magazine venture (well, newsletter really).
 
se

 

[longbowbbs]

Quote:

Quote:

I enjoyed the old BBS days (Hence my handle) I ran a multi line BBS for several years. I remember the thrill when I received the my US Robotics Courier's....56k! ah, state of the art.

 
HA!
 
Have you ever checked this site out: http://bbslist.textfiles.com/usbbs.html
 
But yeah, back in the day, TAN was the place to be. For audio, I think the only place that rivaled it was CompuServe's CEFORUM. And as James said, Stereophile and TAS recruited a number of writers from there. It was from there that the late Gordon Holt recruited me to write for his rather short-lived Video Theater magazine venture (well, newsletter really).
 
se

What a trip down memory lane! We even had a local Sysop club to meet and exchange ideas and learn about different BBS software.
 
Gordon was fantastic. I read his work for years. Nice to see Head-Fi spring up out of that original community.

 

[Steve Eddy]

Quote:

What a trip down memory lane! We even had a local Sysop club to meet and exchange ideas and learn about different BBS software.
 

 
Not to mention exchanging pirated software.

 
The BBS get togethers here were called MUPTs, for Modem Users Pizza Thingy. Not sure if that term originated here though.
 
The only current connection I have to those days is the guy that's hosting my website. He had that large 64 line system I mentioned previously and also had one of the first BBSes in Sacramento, running on an S-100 system under CP/M. He saw the writing on the wall though and became one of the first local ISPs.
 
Quote:

Gordon was fantastic. I read his work for years. Nice to see Head-Fi spring up out of that original community.

 
Not sure I quite follow that last part.
 
se

 

[warrenpchi]

Looks you guys might have a lot to catch up on... PM maybe? 

 

[Steve Eddy]

Quote:

Looks you guys might have a lot to catch up on... PM maybe? 

 
Then who would we annoy?

 
Point taken. Sorry.
 
se

 

[regnaDkciN]

Looks you guys might have a lot to catch up on... PM maybe? 

In other words, "**** and stop bothering the rest of us"...? Got it.

 

[warrenpchi]

Quote:

Quote:

Looks you guys might have a lot to catch up on... PM maybe? 

 
Originally Posted by Steve Eddy /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
Then who would we annoy?

 
Point taken. Sorry.
 
se
 
Originally Posted by regnaDkciN /img/forum/go_quote.gif

In other words, "**** and stop bothering the rest of us"...? Got it.

 
Honestly, it wouldn't bother me in the slightest.  In fact, feel free to include me in the PM chain.  I might not chime in too much as I haven't the foggiest idea what you guys are talking about.  But I enjoy history.  I just mention it because of the whole off-topic thing.