Dick:

What a hell week. A hell month! I’ve had your letter here for nearly three weeks, and I’ve been too miserable to write back. To a large degree it’s just existential angst. What do I want to do with my life, etc.

Then I had the worst thing possible happen to a computer. My crappy DOS machine (286, 8 yr old drive...) Disk went flaky. Big deal. I do regular tape backups. Only – the Friday before the disk died hard, I noticed the backup taking forever. So I popped in another tape, and it failed! So I made a one-off copy of the critical data (tax and business records for The Little Garden, and my personal taxes).

The disk crashed. Both tapes are unreadable. And the diskette had an error (two, actually) in the critical data file! Talk about shit luck!

Turns out, the tape drive was all plastic, and the head was loose! So probably the tapes are simply NFG. Pozar lent me his QIC-40 drive, and I just foudn software for it today, but I have little faith it will work.

It also had all of my Fido Software everything on it. All my libaries, etc, though that’s no great loss. I had already copied to my unix box what I considered the most important: all the history files, old documents, etc. The mushed-up Fido sources are OK, though as useless as ever. (I never saved v12u sources, as I didn’t have enough disk and tape to keep everything... what a mistake.)

The root of the problem is that I split my computing resources between two utterly incompatible systems; unix and DOS. My unix system is just fine, with real backup (tape drive made of metal, etc) and a real standard tape format (DC-600XLs, those giant klunky things, 60MB each).

As far as BBSs go: I have been considering it again. You won’t be pleased though. Likely I’ll put up some modems on my unix box, rather than the DOS-based BBS thing. The good news is, I have a BINKLEYTERM in native unix C. So you could FidoNet me.

I’ll take a radical departure here also: while I might have some really limited free access, probably I’ll find ten or less people willing to pay $15 per month for a unix shell account with full Internet access – FidoNet too. No more will I do stuff that’s just a big load (though I’m sure that unless I’m careful, people will get EXPECTATIONS about what I’m doing...)

So I’ve been depressed all week, thinking about what happens come tax time and I don’t have 6 months of records. I can recreate some things (my last operation was to reconcile both checking accounts, which I did with $0.00 error) and I have all the major receipts, and some customer payment records. What fun to recreate!

Your offer of that damned IBM laptop is tempting – I sure could use a reliable DOS machine in the house. Not that the NCR is unreliable – hell it’s fine! But it’s utterly mobile, I don’t think the damn thing sits for more than 5 - 6 days at a time before it gets dragged to some site to debug some piece of junk network, or to a meeting or cafe for plain old writing. I’m writing on it right now, matter of fact.

But I can’t promise to run a BBS on it. I have had this terrible habit of allowing my projects to take over my life. And right now, I don’t know what I want to do. So I’m thinking slowly on even the dialin port, how do I want to arrange it, etc. Since there’s so much general BBSing around here, that’s already being taken care of, I may simply try to take care of a few choice people who want access but don’t have the $$$ for a commercial account, but will pay enough to cover phone lines, etc.

The damned Rambler – found the carburetor casting was bad! Emissions were way off. It’s fine now, jsut about perfect. It took four hours on a smog computer and a road dyno. 65 hp at the wheel at 70mph. Not bad. I now have to get the mileage back up to snuff, it’s pretty terrible. Ended up chasing down every thing in the engine except oil system – cam design, I even degreed it in. Compression checks (145 +- 4 lbs, same as when I checked last, two years ago), intake manifold no leaks, etc. At least I know it’s in perfect machanical condition.

Bought rugs for it finally – JC Whitney still has them! I bought the top of the line, $110, and they just dropped in, decent quality. Car’s a lot quieter. I got my roof-mount aux. tank, 10 gal., quick-connect and all that for road trips. Have yet to mount it. So much for my 1992 tax refund! (First one I got in probably 10 years!)

Well not much else to say. Been intentionally making my life on the slow side. Though the city’s getting a little bit meaner. Plain old poverty.

Speaking of which, I have some questions. OK so you are probabl ytoo young to remember all this, but maybe you can recall facts from later.

OK, when the big depression hit – did it all happen in a week? People had houses on Monday, Sunday ont he street? Or did it take a month? Year? Two years?

OK, so Joe Schmoe (ex-)businessman loses his shirt, his house, etc. If he ended up on the street (well gov’t handouts, or work programs, or an actual bum) did people sneer at them? Were they dirty? Where did people newly-poor sleep? Eat? Did people better-off get ”spare change?” ’ed at every street corner? Did they give people quarters (OK, pennies or nickels)? Did they line the streets selling stuff like clothes, household goods, etc? (Like is going on here, you’d think it was a bazaar, wll I guess it is).

Just curious. Us people one- or two-generations removed get these filtered stories ”bad in ’29...” etc, and you’d think that it was this orderly thing were everyone just tsk-tsk’ed and brought strangers into their house to feed, people selling pencils/apples/etc and everything was otherwise apple pie etc.

The brains in the seat of my pants says that’s probably a big lie – that lots ofpeople became BUMS, and drank, and did stupid crap like steal things and get mean and nasty. AS WELL AS all the people who genuinely helped out, etc.

Something tells me, I don’t think today’s version is at base much different than before. I can tell you, from visiting a fair number of cities in the last two years, there is no ”recession” that’s ”jsut about over”, its a damned sluggish depression. There are at least 10,000 people on the streets here in SF!

OK there’s lots of shiftless, thieving conniving bums on the street. What else is new. However no one would argue that there are FAR more now than in ’80 – or 70. What – is it all of a sudden an attractive proposition to be a bum now?! I know for a fact it was fairly easy to get food stamps, welfare, etc in the 70’s – I know lots of weirdo artists and beatnik-types that did it routinely. You would not belive how arbitrarily DIFFICULT it is even to get the most basic foodstamps etc now – the stories I hear I almost wouldn’t believe if I didn’t know the people, half of which work in the ”social services” world, one a reasonably-high-placed person for Soc Sec.

Hmmm I just ranted at you. Sorry. Just something that’s been bothering me, thought you might have some factoids from elsewhen. I smell a rat.

Well I better quit while I’m ahead. If you really have laptops clutterig up your now-neatened up Avion, I’d sure as hell would put it to good use! At this point I don’t know what I want my relationship to FidoNet to be.

Oh I forgot, the local liberal/lefty rag did a really stupdi article entitled ”Orgnizing Cyberspace” (sic), in which the author basically stated that FidoNet was the network of choice for the Aryan Nations, and that it was gasp! unmonitored! The author also was utterly clueless as to how FidoNet worked, claiming it relied upon the internet for it’s connectivity. Sigh. She also gave no other examples of FidoNet use!

Did you see the amusing but inaccurate caricature of me on the cover of this month’s BOARDWATCH? A pretty pedestrian history of FidoNet was included. I have to write to Jack soon to ”thank” (?) him. It’s funny, and flattering.

Well hell, later I guess…