Mages & Modems is a memoir by writer-podcaster-developer vga256, and one I enjoyed very much. As soon as I began reading it, I could tell that the author and I had come from similar places, in spirit if not geography. I could relate to so much of what I read in his stories. He and I were among the young people watching the PC industry explode—from a distance, but still swept along by the promises it offered, and longing for what came next. In the book, vga conveys that feeling in a deeply personal, funny, and often bittersweet way, drawing thoughtful connections between the computers he used in his youth and the people who influenced him as he grew.
I was one of the kids who, by way of Something Dad Brought Home From Work, first got my hands on a personal computer keyboard around age seven or eight. I had no idea back then what a marker of middle-class privilege that machine—a discontinued TI-99/4A older than I was—would reveal itself to be. But 10 PRINT “BRENDAN IS COOL” 20 GOTO 10 and Blasto quickly infected me with a desire for faster and more capable computers. As it turned out, that was a chronic condition that gave me recurring symptoms for decades to come.
It took me a long time to get ahold of the brake on that hedonic treadmill. Each shiny new toy was surpassed by the newer and shinier successor. But something has changed as I have made my way into middle age, and I have felt my interest in new technology slacking. The prevailing direction and cost of things these days don’t help matters. I care little about the features that the newest toys offer, and I don’t much feel like paying the people who profit most from them.
Are there still machines out there I want to collect? Oh sure. But it’s been a while since the things I want to do with computers were hindered by speed or capability. I could spend the rest of my life happily using the creative software and playing the games that run on the devices I already have.
So more and more I find myself thinking about preservation, repair, and sustainability when it comes to electronics. It turns out that other people feel the same way, many of them under the umbrella of permacomputing. It was by way of learning about that movement that I discovered the work of vga256, who among many other things developed the tomotama design philosophy.
This is why, even before Mages & Modems came out, I was hoping to interview vga about his writing! I’m glad that he agreed to discuss the book and his other projects with me. I’ve edited together the following from our correspondence. All images are linked to their sources. This one is on the longer side, and it includes a new story from vga that didn’t make it into his book!
When I found your site last year, I started with a link from Brian Crabtree of nnnnnnnn.co to the beautiful and longstanding wabi tek sabi by Tom Jennings. By coincidence he had just added a callout to your old site, Tomodashi Industrial. You’ve since moved from Tomodashi to Tomotama—so that was a fairly narrow window for me to have discovered your work!
I saw the transience of digitally mediated connections as a running theme in the book, like your brief time as a co-sysop of the Lily Pad BBS, or your drifting apart from the friends you swapped games with in elementary school. How did it feel to return to those relationship memories and try to fix them in time through your narrative?
Wabi tek sabi! I too stumbled upon Tom’s wonderful aesthetic theory, in my case after connecting with him on mastodon. I knew about his work in the BBS world (creator of FidoBBS/FidoNet), but only later came to appreciate his writing on aesthetics.
Exploring my childhood relationships from the perspective of an adult, who is now the outcome of them, was usually embarrassing, and sometimes painful. Childhood is primarily about learning how to be a person, and around other people learning how to be people. That process is messy, and involves making a lot of mistakes, hurt feelings, and sometimes with irrevocable consequences. It’s easy to say to yourself, “Ah, but I was just a kid!” and brush away old hurt feelings or shame or guilt. But for me, one unkind word or mean-spirited act will haunt me for years, and sometimes decades. Writing it all down in an uncensored manner was my attempt at showing that these things were all real to me and not just figments of my inner world.
That all said, I sure as heck had a lot of fun goofing off with computers as a kid, and it brought me endless joy remembering the hilarious stuff my friends and I got up to with them. When it was all written down, I had this long document that was a mix of laughter and pain, and no longer a tangled web of memories in my head.
You and I are from different countries, but we are close in age, and my young life in rural Kentucky seems like it had some things in common with your own experience in the Canadian North. It felt so familiar to read about a sense of longing for digital excitement as a kid in a small place where few people shared my interests. My mother, like your own, was a graduate student when I was a teenager; her dial-up access to the university system gave me my first access to email and MUDs, and I have my own share of wince-inducing memories about tying up the phone line and sending regrettable messages.
So there was a lot for me to nod along with as I read, in particular a sense of growing up as personal computers first took off. Who did you imagine as your reader, while you were working on the book?
Rural Kentucky! I believe you are the first person I’ve spoken to from Kentucky – awesome. It is difficult to explain to someone who has grown up in a city just how important a dial-up connection in the 90s was for some “farm kids” (as we called ourselves). What was your first memory of gaining dial-up access to your mom’s university shell account?
I wrote Mages & Modems for other people like me, who grew up with a thirst for sharing their excitement about computers, and I suspected might have went through the same kinds of experiences as kids. But I also wrote it for my own family. I’m the only person in my family fascinated by computers – and while my mother, sister, and wife all politely tolerate my obsession, they’ve never understood it. I hoped these stories might help them understand what made computers exciting to me as a kid, and today as an adult! Finally, I wrote it for the handful of friends (both online and offline) I grew up with – many of whom I am still friends with today. I didn’t want us to lose those indelible childhood memories.
You know, your question about that dial-up account made me realize something: my first online experience was all about email. I was never a BBS kid—I just never stumbled onto any of them—but I liked emailing with people, albeit from my mom’s address. That must have been a little confusing, but email addresses weren’t free in the early 90s! And I think I was not alone in viewing a household’s only address as a part of the family computer, and so something to be shared. Man, typing this out is not making me feel any younger.
Anyway, it took me a few decades to figure out that I might enjoy writing an email newsletter, but in a way this project is a return to my origins. Email was where I started on the internet, and at times I wonder if it might also be the end of me.
Interesting! I honestly hadn’t thought too deeply about e-mail over the years, but you’re right – having your own e-mail address was a huge deal in the 90s. Like you, I used my mom’s university e-mail address for years. Which reminds me of a story I forgot to tell in Mages & Modems, which you just reminded me of…
Back in ’94, I got a Texas Instruments TI-85 calculator. It was their top of the line graphing calculator, but I got it (instead of the TI-82) because it had better programming capabilities. Thanks to Yahoo, I learned pretty quickly that the TI-85 had an entire community built around coding and hacking it, at ticalc.org. The community’s mainstay was its TI-calc listserv, which ran a mailing list for its different topics (programming, hardware, BASIC, etc). I wanted to learn more about Z80 Assembly code, so I subscribed my mom’s email to the assembly programming mailing list.
For years my mom got daily e-mails about Z80 Assembly. She’d leave them in her inbox for me to read, and I’d delete them after I was done reading them. (A family computer inbox, just as you describe). In ’97, I graduated from high school and brought my computer with me to university, and got my own personal e-mail account. My mom, for the first time ever, was using her own email account as her own instead of sharing it with me.
She must have got a bug up her ass to clean house, and decided she was sick of the TI-85 Assembly language e-mails. She didn’t know how to unsubscribe from the listserv, so she sent a salty message to the listserv admins…
To whomever:
My son is not living here any longer and I would truly appreciate not getting any news from A85. I have no interest in your jargon, I don't read the stuff and I am very tired of seeing your messages.
This is the 3 times that we have asked for this removal. It would seem to me that if you are such an organize assembly you would get your "...." together and do as you are requested.My mom flamed Assembly-85! I found that e-mail 30 years later when I was fixing her ancient Toshiba 4800CT laptop, and her copy of Eudora still had all of her e-mail from 1997.
I remember wondering what you ended up doing with your graphing calculator! And your that email of your mom’s is amazing. Her elided profanity is somehow more intimidating than it would be typed out.
Relatedly—in the book, you describe a high-school flame war that you and your friends got into with some Christian school students on Usenet. It included this amazing message you sent just to stir the pot:
To any Atheists out there, I would like to be your penpal.
That really got me. I kept laughing at it and had to highlight it in my reader so I didn’t lose it. It’s almost like a prototypical Dril tweet. It’s quite poetic in its own right, and also so funny as a way to kick off a ragebait thread on a mailing list for children.
LOL ragebait wasn’t a word or a concept back then, but that’s certainly the tone it was written in! I was most definitely trying to get on the nerves of the hardcore Christian kids in my school (and elsewhere). I believe the local parlance for that kind of behaviour in the 90s was being called a “shit-disturber”. I was definitely one of those.
You just relaunched your podcast at cd-rom.ca, and it’s been fun to see you exchange notes on Mastodon with Misty De Méo of… cdrom.ca. I don’t want to assert that we’re in a CD-ROM renaissance or anything, but I do think the format is due the same physical-media championing that vinyl, cassettes and DVDs have seen in recent years. What aspects of the medium and the era informed your desire to start this new project?
Hahaha… I felt really bad for grabbing a domain so close to Misty’s, but it was incredibly difficult finding any CDROM domain that wasn’t already taken!
Right now, we’re seeing a big resurgence of physical formats in music. People are paying unbelievable amounts of money to have freshly-pressed vinyl and cassettes from their favourite labels. CDs are growing in popularity, but are not at the collectible level that we see in vinyl and cassette. Minidiscs – a format that I adore – is now getting new life with young people who are discovering their parents’ players and shoebox of discs. I’d love to see CD-ROMs return to the public eye, especially in the wake of Sony recently announcing that they will no longer be printing physical media for their games after 2027. As a lifelong gamer, this is the end of the road for myself and Sony: the only games I buy are ones distributed on discs, and I don’t buy digital downloads.
The problem I see is that few people have CD-ROM drives anymore. Just try finding a laptop with one! I suspect that in the near future we might see CD-Rs specifically make a comeback as a kind of mixtape shared between friends. For my own software, I’ve been quietly stockpiling floppy disks and CD-Rs so I can release physical media some day. I even bought a horrendously heavy 8-disc CD-ROM burning tower for the job! I believe strongly that when you buy software, it’s yours, period. No subscriptions, no phoning home for a license check. Physical media is a great way to ensure that people get what they paid for.
One thing that struck me on your Tomotama “about” page is that you’ve worked as a narrative consultant for NHK World-Japan. I’ve gotten a lot of joy from shows like Trails to Oishii and Japanology Plus, and the name of this newsletter is my own mangled homage to Japanese cinema. If I understand correctly, the word “Tomotama” translates to something like “sphere of friends” in Japanese—do you have a connection to the language that inspired that choice? Could you tell me a little about the work you did for NHK?
A fellow NHK fan! What a small world. I just learned what “Kaiju” means – that’s a new word for me, thank you. How were you introduced to NHK World? I was lucky, for a short period of my life, to have access to cable TV – and one of the channels was a Canadian rebroadcast of (American) PBS, which featured NHK World for one hour every Sunday. For two years, I religiously watched that NHK World broadcast every Sunday morning, until my cable subscription lapsed. After that, I was hooked, and found myself watching the few online streams I could find.
A few years ago, I was sitting at the kitchen table and needed a name for my new company. I had been watching an NHK doc, “10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki”, and remembered him chuckling that Studio Ghibli had no deep meaning for him, and was named after an aircraft he liked. Up on my wall was a set of dirt cheap and colourful Costco knives that I bought almost 20 years ago and still adore: they had “Tomodachi” printed on the side. I liked that they meant, simply, “friend”. Unfortunately, Tomodachi Life turned out to already have used the name for years, so I mangled it to look slightly different. It now translated to “friend-soup”, which was ridiculous.
After a couple of years under that name, I was concerned that someone might think I am trying to sound or be Japanese, which was not my intent at all. I simply admire the culture as an outsider. So I changed the name to sound more ambiguously acultural, breaking it down into simple phonemes that sound more like a drum beating than any word in particular, if that makes any sense? to-mo-ta-ma. I love that in Japanese, those phonemes still relate to friendship, but it is no longer explicitly a Japanese word. (Sigh. My wife just pointed out that tomotama might translate to ‘friend-egg’ in Japanese. I can’t win!)
The work I do for NHK World is via its International Monitoring Program – which acts as a kind of barometer for how the broadcasts are perceived by people from other cultures/nations. Monitors are paid to watch NHK programs, and then write up short blog-sized responses to them, and submit them to NHK’s (internal) review system. The program’s producers use the feedback they get from monitors to restructure/rewrite/reformat programs. It’s a fun way to see and write about NHK broadcasts, and keeps me current on changing Japanese culture.
Actually, it was a pair of Canadians who got me into NHK! I have never met my friends Steve and Gerald, who live in Vancouver, but I am often happy to take advantage of their excellent taste.
Maybe I’m reaching here, but there is something about the connection between PBS and NHK that brings to mind the “Utopian Scholastic” aesthetic. It arose from a very positive, optimistic view of digital technology as a way of disseminating knowledge, conveyed with a kind of polished presentation that gave it an air of reassuring authority. In retrospect there were many things to question about that authority and its implicit perspective, but I still find a lot of beauty in that work.
You’ve discussed this kind of thing before, as in your podcast episode about Undersea Adventure, and just last week you uploaded the contents of a Doring Kindersley clip-art CD to the Internet Archive. You’re looking to build an “Encartapedia” on cd-rom.ca as well—what can you tell me about your plans for that project?
Oh heck yeah. The Utopian Scholastic aesthetic (which was a newly coined term to me) was a huge part of my upbringing in the 90s, and left me with a deep respect and excitement for learning. In gaming, Mobygames took that role over – not so much with the aesthetic, but more with the “reassuring authoritativeness” of its database. I do a lot of research on gaming, and whenever I run into some forgotten MS-DOS game, it almost always has a Mobygames entry.
Except for one glaring problem: Mobygames doesn’t cover Edutainment, Education, or Productivity software… which programs like MS Encarta/Dinosaurs/Oceans/Magic School Bus/etc, Dorling Kindersley games, and Knowledge Adventure programs, all fall under. There’s a dearth of information about these genres, and I just wanted a place where I could post some box cover art, do a quick writeup on what the program was about, and show a few screenshots. In other words: an encyclopedia entry!
I begged other people to build one a few months ago on Mastodon, and while everyone agreed this was a great idea – nobody wanted to do the heavy lifting. Including me. Building a database from scratch, and then having to maintain it – honestly, sucks. I set it aside for a few months until recently, when I added some new features to kiki – the website construction kit. The new wiki features make it a lot easier to add a new page, add some tags to it, and upload images – exactly the kind of stuff necessary to create an encyclopedia page.
So over the next few months I’m going to add a few Encartapedia pages, and turn on public editing so other people can edit/update pages. The hardest job, for me, is to give the website a Utopian Scholastic UI design so it has that sense of reassuring authority.
I have been in a little in awe of people who can conjure that kind of work out of design software since I was a young person. Of course, back then I didn’t know about the warez scene you discuss in the book! How did that kind of illicit software access affect your creative interests and skills as you grew up?
Oh, piracy was a huge, huge thing for me as a kid. I don’t think developers/publishers understand just how important having access to high quality creative software like Macromedia Director and Adobe Photoshop was for me, when I was 14 years old. I didn’t have the documentation for them of course, but thanks to having infinite amounts of time on my hands, I could explore my way through any piece of software and figure out how to make my own things. Not that any of the things I created were “good” – but they were critical tools for learning how to make good things. It put me many years ahead of other kids, who wouldn’t run into those software packages for several years, in a university setting.
Moreover, these programs set the standard for what I wanted out of software decades later. We still don’t have anything even close to the developer environments (IDEs) we had in the 90s with MS Visual Basic, Borland Delphi, or Macromedia Director, today. People running Unity and Godot have no idea just how difficult their lives are, compared to what I had when I was a kid. For that reason alone, I started building an IDE that is user-friendly, and based on the kinds of UX that made me excited about creating things as a kid. I’ve called it Exigy.
Speaking of your software! I have my own site built with kiki at https://wwwww.blog/html.com, and I’ve enjoyed using it to feel like I’m tinkering with the kind of homebrew CMS I once put together myself—though kiki has more features than my old sites did. But aside from one anecdote about creating a personal page for a class project, Mages & Modems focuses less on the early Web than on the communities you found on bulletin boards and IRC. What other sites did you put together over the years?
As a kid in high school, I made at least three other websites in bare HTML at the time – around 1994-1995. One was a fan site for the film Independence Day, which I made in advance of the film coming out that July. It was a blend of HTML and Macromedia Director/Shockwave for tiny video clips I had stolen from the official trailer.
Another site was a fan site for the upcoming film Jurassic Park: The Lost World, around the same time. In that case I learned how to use a pirated copy of 3DS Max, and rendered my own in-world objects from the book as faux ‘found objects’ you could click on and get more information about on the website. I was heartbroken when the film turned out to be nothing like the book, and I took the site offline the day after I watched the movie, haha.
The third site was made in the summer between graduating high school and beginning university – around 1997. I became absolutely enamoured with (the game) Fallout 1, and patiently clipped out every single object in the game with a pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop. I posted all of the objects in the game (guns, ammo, medikits, etc) and presented them as a kind of online database with a UI meant to look like Fallout’s. Again, all HTML with no programming whatsoever.
My first web programming language was Perl, which I used for “CGI-BIN” scripting if you remember that ancient term. I learned that in the late 90s, to help my uncle with his web design business. He was a fine artist, and had no programming expertise, so he contracted me to do small coding jobs like guest books and application forms for him. A few years later, I was introduced to PHP when I began blogging with web-based software called Movable Type in the early 2000s. As a new grad student, blogging got me into a whole heap of trouble with my university department, who did not appreciate having their internal politics displayed publicly on the web. That story is probably for a new book about the web someday!
