August 4, 1989

PARANOIA EXPRESS: I got up at the crack o’dawn on Friday and took a cab to the 3220 Gallery, home of Henry Dakin’s high-tech Information Central, to witness a live video broadcast from the floor of the Galactic Hacker Party in Amsterdam. The broadcast was engineered by Programmer’s Network co-founder Craig Larson. Some 1,200 hackers (expected attendance was 500) gathered in The Paradiso Lounge for the closing ceremonies on Friday afternoon, where notable hackers such as John Draper, Patrice Riemens and members of Chaos Computer Club gathered to hear the first draft of a new hacker manifesto.

They resolved, among other things, that:

“… The free and unfettered flow of information is an essential part of our fundamental liberties … Information technology shall be open to all, no political, economic, or technical consideration should be allowed to impede this right … Government shall be fully accessible to all people at all times. Information technology shall enhance the scope of this right, and not impede it … Information belongs to people, and is made by the people. Computer scientists and developers shall not be allowed to develop into a caste of privileged and unaccountable technologists …”

At one point, Riemens interrupted the proceedings to read a telegram signed by Dutch PTT (Telephone & Telegraph), saying that “all telephone lines from Paradiso in Amsterdam would be cut at 4 p.m.,” because attendees were using the “network user identifications,” or NUIs, too heavily. (NUIs are a state-granted access code that let you telecommunicate in European countries.)

“What we experience here is telecom absolutism,” said Riemens on-stage. However, a technical support person at Paradiso later said that the telegram itself was a hack, faked via a telex receiver online at Paradiso. Other rumors from the floor said some younger hackers were hitting bank networks from the workstations set up inside Paradiso, unbeknownst to GHP organizers. I’m sure we’ll be hearing much more about this as the news filters back over the Atlantic and fact is separated from fantasy.

WOOF, WOOF: I never dreamed when I first wrote about FidoNet back in 1984 that the world’s first network of electronic bulletin boards (BBS) would end up with 5,000 nodes all around the world. Fido Software was started by San Francisco’s own Tom Jennings, the programmer-skateboarder-altruist who made Fido code freely available to the great unwashed back in the early ’80s. (He does charge a fee if you want the commercial package.) He’s also become a legend all over the world in the on-line community for being instrumental in setting up a global network accessible to regular folks.

FidoNet now has its own convention, FidoCon, this year from Aug. 24-27 at the Holiday Inn Park Center Plaza in San Jose. There’ll be two days of seminars and workshops by various notables in the BBS world, including Jennings, Phil Becker, author of the highly-regarded TBBS software and a panel discussion on international FidoNetting. For info, write FidoCon ‘89 at P.O. Box 390770, Mountain View, CA., 94039.

SHOE DROP: Any day now, German PBX giant Siemens and IBM are expected to hammer out final terms of the Rolm Corp. sell-off. Things are not pretty at Rolm’s Santa Clara HQ, as anticipation grows about who’s gonna get the shaft and who’s not. Watching the separation, says one observer, is “like watching a car crash in slow motion.”

It’s kinda sad. Rolm, who’s making some kind of product announcement on Tuesday, really created the informal college-campus atmosphere, regarded all over the world as prototypical “Silicon Valley culture,” that some say spurred Rolm to its great success in the PBX market. Competition hit Rolm just about the time IBM entered the picture, trying to buy success in telecom and whomp on the also-monolithic AT&T Corp. Of course, AT&T’s been just as unsuccessful trying to compete against IBM in computers. There’s a lesson lurking there …

ELECTRONICS SHUFFLE: The venerable industry magazine Electronics, in print for more than 50 years, was officially sold last week (for an undisclosed price) to Cleveland-based Penton Publishing, itself a veteran publisher of such magazines as Machine Design, Materials Engineering and Automation.

Luckily, the magazine’s staff of veteran reporters and editors remains mostly intact. Jonah McLeod, a senior editor based in San Jose, says only three staffers resigned as a result of the sale.
Penton’s involvement may signal an end to the Electronics Shuffle. McGraw-Hill, the original publisher which first considered selling the magazine in 1985, finally sold it to Dutch firm VNU in early 1988. Not a year later, VNU announced its decision to sell.

Sal Marino, president of Penton, negotiated the sale over the past four months. “Believe it or not, I’ve been pursuing this acquisition since 1963,” he says. “But it always seemed there was some other party willing to pay more.”

Marino’s attitude is unusual in the cutthroat world of magazine publishing, where the term acquisition ought to be spelled axe-quisition. “(The current staff is) very able and knowledgeable,” says Marino. “We don’t like to make an acquisition unless we get good people with it. Now it’s just a matter of throwing a little water on the soil and watching it grow.”