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Gutted

NeXT

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 22, 2008
Messages
8,096
Location
Kamloops, BC, Canada
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I make these blogs and actively maintain a Photobucket account so that people can see my ongoing projects form start to finish and get an idea on how to do it themselves.
However I can only assume that I've pissed some god off somewhere and not a week will pass where something makes my life miserable. Breakdowns, stolen equipment, payment miscalculations, job loss, organ failure. You name it. Why have I not killed myself from being so constantly miserable? I don't know.

I needed a way to deal with my depression. My councellor recommended I try working on more electronics projects and showing them off, given how one of my videography projects were so immensely successful. Starting back in the final days of 2013 I decided that someone should put up on hackaday a teletype navigating to retro.hackaday.com, of course I believe just plugging the terminal into a host machine directly is cheating, so I decided that instead I would use two modems (both of which being Hayes Smartmodems) and dial over a landline to a host machine. At the same time I wanted the whole job to feel like it was factory stock. Crazy amounts of dedication went into grafting parts together and making it all fit nicely in the teletype and of course, it was all documented and photographed.

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On occasion I was able to get external help from two electrical engineers in the UK and the Netherlands but for the most part I was ignored and forced to carry out a large amount of my engineering and repairs on the teletype machine through trial and error. Extremely time consuming, but I had no choice.
A working prototype of my idea was tested successfully in February 2014 and this paved the way for the rest of the idea.
As of last Monday the wiring was 95% completed and overall the project was 80% finished. There was several bugs remaining in the control string logic, the auxiliary power controls had to be mounted, there was a remaining issue where nobody was willing to tell me how the Irix operating system handled and forced port baud rates and the command transmittinf Pro Mini needed to be programmed. I leave for a weekend and come back to this and this.

My work went viral. Everyone's chatting about it, the video has tens of thousands of views. Too bad I'm not mentioned once. In fact, I'm not even whispered at all. My work has been stolen. All the publicity I was expecting and was getting ready to brace for is gone.
Great, the epitome of a hipster has gone ahead and proven that Hipsters are still in fact, dicks and now even if I finish my own work I get nothing out of it.
A few hundred views on a video after six months? Probably.
An article on hackaday? I'm optimistic.
Fame? None.

At this point my idea is "old news". I don't even want to finish it now. There's just no point. Congrats. You made a modem interface and you went online over a phone line. Too bad you're late. It's been done. Sure my councellor will say I did an amazing job but she's basically a robot. She's not doing her job is she's not constantly trying to act positive.
Thanks Portland. I blame you for this and I'll be billing you for this Jack Daniels.



****ing hipsters......
 
...So after this began to blow through, the man himself got in contact with me. As it turns out, no, I WAS in fact late for the boat.

Late by at the very least, a full three and a half years.

I checked to make sure nobody else had already done this. I swear. There was nothing! To have this blow up in my face so badly still doesn't reassure me anymore. I failed.
I've decided that in light of the situation I'll give up on the project completely as it's wasting time at this point. Sorry folks.
 
Not sure what someone could possibly say to help matters, other than "I'm sorry you feel like someone stole your thunder"?

Honestly what I take away from this is that getting something onto the hackaday website just might not be the greatest of all possible honors nor might it be particularly hard; the video and blog entry are very nearly a year old and by all appearances ended up on Hack-A-Day just because someone there happened to stumble across it. Notably the HaD article writer didn't even realize that the 25th anniversary of the web was *last March* and opened their post with "We’re not quite to the 25th anniversary of the world wide web, but that doesn’t mean the greatest (blawblawblaw) a bit early." Honestly it seems like something of an overreaction to abandon restoring your teletype/etc. just because somebody splattered some old news on your favorite blog. Evidence seems to suggest that you could just take a video of yourself doing something else with it and get that on the same stream. (Cobble up a script to hit a "photo of the day" site and spew JPEGs translated into ASCII art to the terminal at 300 baud or something. They'll love it, just going by how impressed they were with the guy using an ASR-33 to send SMS messages.)

I don't mean the above to sound dismissive, disappointment is a natural thing here, but... I dunno, isn't this whole "old computer thing" something you're in for fun? Outside of some very edge cases it's probably the wrong place to look for fame and/or fortune.
 
Hey NeXT! It's the bastard that wrote that hackaday post here. I wouldn't put too much stock into what I write. That guy is probably going to end up being a one-hit wonder (and I would question the legitimacy of the 'hit'; I seem to remember scrounging for posts that day). You, on the other hand, consistently put out great stuff.

If I were you, I'd keep plugging away at the ASR. Submit it to Hackaday and It'll go up. Don't let that be your motivation. You're probably looking at extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation here. Here's a life hack: ignore extrinsic motivation.

Email me if you want to talk. I think we might be doing an event this year in the Pacific NW. If I'm out there, I'm going to have to get you a beer.
 
I do apolagise for sounding a bit rough repeatedly but man, it hurts.
I'll try and hope that this eventually blows over and I can progress on one of my other projects.
 
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