WHAT THESE .WAV FILES MEAN
 ==========================                        March 21, 2002
 Jason Scott, TEXTFILES.COM

 In 1984, BBS users often passed along to each other strange and weird phone 
 numbers, codes, and other such information that might be of interest to other 
 users. This allowed several things; one of the people might be able to go 
 further into the system and tell each other, and as a bonus, the myriad phone 
 numbers calling from all over the place would make it impossible to blame just 
 one person should the jig be up.

 I was 14 when I saw someone announce on a BBS that there was a voice mail 
 system to check out at a 202 number (the rest of the number has been lost to 
 time). I went on the system, took great delight in the way it worked through 
 my touchtones (phone mail was a novelty for teenagers in 1984) and within a 
 short time, I'd snagged my own box.  The original owner had used his own phone 
 number as the code, so it wasn't a great feat. The original owner's name was 
 "Alan", which comes into play, below.

 Naturally, I wanted to test out my system, so calling two of my favorite 
 boards, The Safehouse BBS in Minneapolis and The Restaurant at the End of the 
 Universe in New Jersey, I nonchalantly invited folks to "give my phone mail 
 system a call" and check it out.

 To my delight, people started calling in and leaving messages. Some patted my
 back for my "hack", some invited me to their BBSes, and some threatened my 
 life. The voice mail system couldn't hold a ton of these, so I got my little
 Radio Shack phone tap and recorded the messages to tape.

 Seventeen years later, I found the tape again, and played them. When I hear 
 them, I'm back in my kitchen in NY, tap on the line, pressing through the
 day's haul of messages and saving them for posterity, some unknown reason
 I'd not quite worked out. Oh, and my hair really looks bad. 

 I'd been thinking about digitizing them for a while, and I finally sat down 
 one day and did it. The recordings are terrible, in some cases nearly 
 illegible, but they're my memories, and I wanted to share them. 

 Some quick explanations for weird things you hear on the tape:

 - The owner of the mailbox was named "Alan Johnson". I didn't understand the
   system well enough to remove his "short name" from the recording; I just
   wrote over the main "please leave a message" recording. So folks who really
   played with the system would hear my name was "Alan", so they called me that.
   My name isn't Alan.

 - My handle was "The Slipped Disk". Some people call me "Slipped" or "Slipped
   Disk" in the messages.

 - Some of the kids, paranoid enough that they were wary of leaving their
   voices on a tape somewhere, talk by breathing inwards instead of outwards.
   It makes them sound a little weird.

 As a postscript, I kept this voice mailbox even as I moved several times, 
 went to a bunch of different schools, and even as I graduated from high school.
 It wasn't until 1989, when I was 19, that I one day called the number for 
 "my" voicemail and it had been disconnected. Five years, I had that box. 
 It gave me such a sense of worth and power, and I can't explain that, even
 now, but when I was growing up, it was one of the things I could depend on.
 Thanks to whoever told me about it, and thanks to Alan, for never quite 
 trying to figure out why he couldn't get his voicemail working.

                                             - Jason Scott
                                               TEXTFILES.COM