Or: The day after the music died
It was a dreadful morning, 20 years ago today, when my mother burst into tears and into my room with the following news:
“Freddie Mercury died last night.”
The newspaper carried this short article on the front page’s bottom fold:
Well, that’s that then.
I’ll never see Queen perform live.
Indecision knows no boundaries.
Two years ago I wrote about how my tape collection had, as part of the process of elimination and digitization, actually ballooned to more than tenfold its original size. Wheat and bran had been separated from the chaff — although no negligible amount of the former has been dropped off on my desk since then.
Spurred on by Discogs now finally supporting all manner of record companies, manufacturers, studios and related entities (beyond mere labels, irrespective of how we used to fandangle them), I’ve begun entering that serendipitous stockpile of cassettes into the database.
At first I just ploughed through a choice selection to test the new fields and features, and method has slowly emerged from the initial randomness: “Oldies” are now largely processed, and Polish and Indonesian pirate tapes are also dealt with.
From the dept. of “Stupid things you’ve always wanted to do…”
Take one retired microwave oven. Shove it in the attic. Forget about it.
Clean up the attic. Rediscover the old microwave oven. Haul it down. Store it in the basement. Make a mental note of it being there.
Collect junk. Sort junk. Store selected junk items in the microwave.
Find time. Grab a camera. Grab a pen and notepad. Jot down a recipe for disaster.
First up would be the obligatory “CD in the microwave” stunt.
See the results of the experiments here. (Updated 15-12-2013)
Photo credit: hmvh DOT net
According to some definitions, a blog is –
…a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer; also : the contents of such a site…
…an online journal where an individual, group, or corporation presents a record of activities, thoughts, or beliefs…
…a type of online diary that someone makes available to other people on the internet. (A very popular way to communicate one’s personal details without any social interaction.)
Very well then. So I’ve been effectively blogging since around 1995 — spewing crap to an imaginary audience before it became known as blogging. Fine. Whatever. Nobody reads what I have to say anyway, my words are shrouded in obscurity, little more than a fart in a tea cup. Bulletins and nonsensical non-sequiturs have recently been retro-fitted into the blog’s timeline detailing a personal descent into madness. But who cares? Influence = 0.
Or: The illustrated, unadulterated, and shamelessly long-winded personal memoir of a ten-year journey through the South African BBS scene.
Before there was ubiquitous, fast, and mobile access to immersive, graphic-intensive, and intrusive social networks and forum communities like Facebook and 4chan, there existed version 1 of a World-Wide Web. Even before the WWW, there was an Internet.
And before that — there were Bulletin Boards.
This is the story of one such relic.
This page will not only reveal the sordid history of the HMVH Corporation BBS, but also where its SysOp came from and the environment he operated in. It’s a story that’s reflective and relevant to the author, and it’s taken him more than seven years to be able to write this very post in the manner that it appears here and now.
“I was a SysOp, and this is my story.”
Bonus Feature: A crude simulation of the BBS exists here.
Photo credit: The HMVH Corporation BBS
However geographically isolated, politically shunned, and somewhat technologically delayed the country may have been, South Africa most certainly had a vibrant and flourishing BBS community. At its analogue peak during the early 90’s it could easily keep up with those in more technically proficient territories.
bbs.hmvh.net is a memorial page (an entire subdomain, in fact) dedicated to anecdotes, bulletins, documents, essays, images, lists, memories, nostalgia, photos, and related matter recollecting the South African bulletin board scene of the 80’s and 90’s.
This is an active project. Content will be added as it is discovered and processed; there’s still a batch of old CD-ROMs to rummage through and documents to scan.
Enjoy!
Newspaper scan by hmvh DOT net
If you were to visit singer Madonna‘s official website, you’re likely to instinctively enter madonna.com into your browser’s address bar (or google it).
And you’d be quite correct.
However, until a few years ago that wasn’t the case.
A cybersquatter named Dan Parisi had claimed the madonna.com domain name for his own fiendish purposes during the dot.com bubble days. Meanwhile, fans and followers of the real Ms. Ciccone had to be content with the less attractive madonnaweb.com address, and this is what the main image on the index page looked like on the 5th of August 1999:
When the music industry caught on that this Internet thing wasn’t just some passing fad, Madonna’s legal machinery sprung into action and wrestled back the far more valuable madonna.com domain in a landmark intellectual property rights case in October 2000.
Why am I mentioning this?
No reason. I just re-discovered this old image in my archive and felt like sharing it.
Screenshot from the hmvh DOT net archives
