By Friday morning, I was already in an excellent mood. I'd arrived in Chicago
the previous evening and stayed over at Jim Leonard's house. Also known as
Trixter of Hornet, Jim and I share very similar outlooks on computer history
(although we focus on somewhat different aspects of it) and our conversations
(always online) have been spectacular. From a distance, we seem to be the
same person in terms of mindset, and so it was excellent to finally meet face
to face and spend a few hours talking. An absolutely great time.
When I first told people I'd be travelling throughout the midwest in January,
everyone warned I'd be trapped in some sort of ice floe somewhere, unable
to get my rental car out and basically perishing clutching my camera. I'm not
ruining the suspense to say that this didn't happen, but it did start snowing
on this morning, and I thought all the predictions might come true.
Dr. Ripco (Bruce Esquibel) was one of the first people who I contacted when
I started pre-production on the documentary and was one of the first to agree
to be interviewed. He also told me he could likely scare up the original
Apple II that the Ripco BBS was running on in 1983 until it was seized by
the FBI in 1990. I thought it would make for really nice to have someone
being interviewed with the BBS he's being interviewed about next to him.
In person, Bruce turned out to be older than I thought; I have no idea,
since he'd run his BBS from 1983 and onward, and mentioned living in both
Texas and Illinois, that it didn't occur to me he might be older than I was,
but that may just be because he sounds younger on the phone. A lot of this
is his energy and forthrightness in talking, which comes across very nicely
in the interview. One thing that has worked out well with the documentary
is that a lot of the folks who've volunteered turn out to be engaging and
friendly in the interviews, dismantling years of portrayal of computer
people as freaks, jerks and cats being herded by big business to get anything
done.
Bruce and I talked about running Ripco, going through Operation Sundevil,
starting an ISP (Ripco became reborn as an ISP in the 1990s) and other
opinions on computers and BBS people. It was a solid time, and I headed out
into the snow happy that my long Midwest haul had gotten off to such a great
start.
