I entirely misjudged how long it would take me to drive to Los Angeles,
and by the time I got in, it was very late. It was late enough
that Rob Swindell's wife got on the phone when I called in and said it
would probably be a good idea for me to sleep somewhere, and not risk
crashing the car pushing myself. As it was, I was less than 20 miles from
their house at that point, so I went for it. Rob and his wife were very
gracious to have me show up so late for an interview, and although the
footage doesn't demonstrate it, it is in fact not an appropriate hour
for people to be showing up with cameras.
That situation aside, the interview with Rob went very well. He is the
creator and the continuing developer of Synchronet, which makes it one
of the only commercial packages to both switch to free software and still
be maintained by the original developer. While I've interviewed a lot
of developers who used to work on their packages, many have either
lost the rights or no longer do work on them. Therefore, his perspective
is a little different.
We covered a number of subjects, including his days with WWIV boards and
the boards that affected him, up to the running of his BBS company,
Digital Dynamics, and their part of the BBS industry. He was less than
enthused about how his company was treated compared to other companies,
but came away from the whole thing with a positive outlook ("it supported
me and some employees for a couple of years"). His infant daughter sat
in on the interview (that is, she slept nearby) and his cat had a few
things it wanted on camera as well.
It was a solid interview, and a great addition.
