thirteen rooms · one phone line · 1993
This is where the name came from, and it is the reason there is a website at all. Everything on the other side of this page — the design work, the code, the thirty years of it — happened because a bulletin board did something it was not supposed to do and somebody noticed.
I had contacts at thirteen recording studios and none of them could talk to each other. Not in any organized way. If you wanted to know whether the room across town had a particular microphone, or whether a producer was worth booking, you asked around, and asking around took a week.
Studios had just started putting computers in the control room, for automation and synchronisation and sequencing. Everybody treated that as the end of the idea. It struck me as the beginning of a different one. If the rooms have computers in them, connect the rooms.
I got hold of ResNova's NovaLink Pro, which was Macintosh bulletin board software, and I learned NovaScript, which was how you told it what to do.
Bulletin boards at the time were text. Green or amber, eighty columns, menus made out of numbers. That was simply the medium, and nobody was fighting it.
My mother is a graphic artist. I had spent years in Photoshop by then. It did not occur to me that the box was supposed to stay text.
So I set out to find how far NovaScript could actually be pushed, and the answer turned out to be considerably further than anyone had bothered to check. Rich interfaces. Animation. Graphics that moved — on a bulletin board, down a phone line, in 1993.
Nobody was doing it and nobody expected it. You dialled in braced for a numbered menu and got something that looked like it had come off a workstation.
The board had a companion system called art-link, which was another of my ideas, and which I am going to have to go and look up before I write another word about it — because the details are in a box on an old server, and my memory of 1993 has already been caught fabricating once this month.
Word got around. The developers at ResNova heard what was running on their own software and rang me up to ask what exactly I had done to it. I gave them a demo account.
They were, by their own account, blown away. They offered me a job.
Then they handed my name to a company in Detroit called Quality Computers, who hired me to build a system called TheLinq, connecting the Detroit school systems.
That is the hinge. The whole second half of my working life is downstream of it, and it happened because I would not accept that a text medium had to stay text.
network13.net was registered on 3 October 1995, and the site went up the following year. The studio network was phased out in favour of web design as the work diversified. That is the polite version.
The honest version is that the web turned up and started doing in public, for everybody, what I had been doing in private down thirteen phone lines, and there was no longer any reason to keep dialling. I do not think I was sorry about it. It was the same idea with the walls taken off.
The domain has been continuously registered ever since, and it was never really dark. Only the web server died. The mail kept running — admin at network13 dot net has been my primary address since the day the name was registered, and it worked straight through the thirteen years when there was nothing behind it.
There is a comment in the JavaScript on that 1996 home page asking anyone who borrows the code to drop me a line, and it gives that address. It is still the right address. It has been the right address for thirty years. I have written it out longhand here for the same reason everyone wrote it that way back then, which is the one thing about the internet that has not improved.