[Coco] Hex Star... here we go again.

[Roger Taylor]

I guess what some are saying is that there's a certain social grace 
that seems to be preferred by the masses for entering a new community 
and going about the business of creating your online "profile" or 
image to the others.  For example, in my case, as the author of the 
Rainbow IDE (which spawned from my Portal-9 IDE) supports almost 
every vintage CPU out there, yet the first little e-mail I sent to a 
well-known Vectrex author was seen as sp*m in his eyes and he wrote 
me back asking not to do it again.  I was shocked and told him that I 
would *never* contact him again and that my e-mail was intended to 
personal only, which it was.

I had been trying to translate this guy's JPEG viewer to 6809 for a 
while and was aware of who he was long before he knew who I was.  I 
was actually trying to introduce myself to him and let him know of a 
great tool I created that could possibly help him or his following 
community create even more games.  Not that it backfired completely, 
because I didn't take it too much further than that, but had I came 
into "his" domain, perhaps a mailing list, and started blasting them 
with what I had to offer before really ever establishing my presense 
in a formal way, I fear that it would have hurt my Rainbow IDE 
potential to the Vectrex community.

So I decided to just sit back and wait.  It turns out that some 
Vectrex coders e-mailed me asking me about it, followed by occasional 
purchases of both the Portal-9 and Rainbow IDE by numerious Vectrex 
coders.  So I let the trickle-down theory work on it's own and hoped 
that the gurus would brag a little about the software to their 
followers, etc.  Nothin' wrong with that.

My mission is not unlike what you claim yours is, to give to the 
vintage communities, but I found out very quickly to not waltz into 
these unknown domains and challenge the already well-known 
established gurus of the CPU they hold so valuable.  Yes, I want to 
be able to do that in a friendly way, to help sales and get the IDE 
on more coder's computers, but in my case it seems like more harm 
would be done than help.  And judging by the sales I've made over 
time, my choice to not bother these guys directly was probably a good one.

It turns out that simply by being a RegNow affiliate, that over a 
little time your software will spread quicker than wildfire around 
the globe to all those hundreds of sites that link to, or fetch, the 
standard PAD file now in use for defining author's products for 
sale.  So, every day, I discover that there are an seemingly endless 
number of software sites that have my titles listed precisely as I 
defined in my PAD file.  This process alone satisfies me enough to 
not risk posting those "could this be sp*m?" messages in all the 
vintage forums, etc. and upsetting so many people.

I know my case is different, but the fear that I have of joining 
communities for the sole purpose of selling my idea must be valid 
since I am witnessing so many comments towards your ventures when we 
really haven't gotten to know much about you yet either.  Don't take 
any of this person, though.  I'm just trying to help everybody 
understand why these things happen sometimes if the first impression 
goes over bad.

Anyway, most of the guys here are long-time CoCo"nuts", yet, we still 
get new members all the time, thankfully.




At 05:58 PM 7/14/2007, you wrote:
>On 7/14/07, Rogelio Perea <os9dude at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>><ranting..>
>
>
>I am very sorry that you do not appreciate my services. However there are
>many more people who do appreciate my services and actively use them. It is
>quite important that one or more people take on the task of mirroring this
>software as I am doing as otherwise there is the possibility of a single
>point of failure, and if there's a single point of failure that means that
>at any time the files in question could simply disappear and greatly harm
>the community. While some people may unfortunately dislike what I am doing
>there are many more who do enjoy my services and thus I plan to continue on
>as despite a few people much of the community is benefiting from my service.
>My servers purpose will only get more important and critical as time goes on
>and the vintage computing files become increasingly harder to locate
>threatening the vintage computing hobby's durability. I am aware that the
>Ira archive issue was very controversial and has obviously lost the respect
>of some members of the community but as time passes I have no doubt that
>everyone will eventually learn to appreciate the services people like me
>offer and it is my hope that more people will join with me on the mission of
>mirroring all the files encompassed by the vintage computing era so that
>there will be a continually decreasing chance that the files will ever
>disappear.
>
>In case you haven't already, you may find it useful to read my server's
>mission statement either via the welcome message shown after logging into
>the server or via the server's website at http://vintage.tsfsc.com.
>
>--
>Coco mailing list
>Coco at maltedmedia.com
>http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco


-- 
Roger Taylor