penguicon! Sandman! GEnie!

Several people have e-mailed me this, which was in Neil Gaiman’s journal this morning:

I’m going to be a guest at Penguincon next year, mostly because it struck me as something fun I could drag my son Mike to that he’d enjoy as much as, or more than, I would, and because Terry Pratchett had a great time last year. It won’t be a usual SF convention, and the guests include lots of people I’m looking forward to meeting in the flesh, like the Slashdot people, and Wil Wheaton, who long before he was an uberblogger I knew of as The Guy Who Started the Sandman Discussion On Genie…

It blows my mind that he’s looking forward to meeting me. Neil Gaiman’s been transformed from A Guy Whose Work I Really Love into A Guy Who Has Inspired Me And Made Me Want To Be A Better Writer, so I’ll be working extra hard to not be a complete geek when I’m there.
I love that he mentioned GEnie! That was my first ever Internet experience, in the old SF Roundtable.
The first time I logged on, I was sitting at a menu prompt, and I kept getting messages from people welcoming me to GEnie. I had no idea how the system worked, so I just typed (In all caps, of course) at the menu prompt. It looked something like this:

menu.prompt>HI THERE. I DON’T KNOW HOW TO DO ANYTHING HERE. WHERE CAN I GO?
menu.prompt> Error! You didn’t use a command!
menu.prompt>IT TOLD ME I DIDN’T USE A COMMAND. WHAT SHOULD I DO?
menu.prompt> Error! You didn’t use a command!

It went on and on like that until I ended up in the GEnie version of irc, where I learned that typing in all caps wasn’t cool like War Games, but was totally lame, like Short Circuit.
When I was using GEnie, I was the biggest Sandman fanboy on earth. I even created a character in GEnie’s MUD-like thing called “Morpheus,” who I described as “a tall thin man with black hair, pale skin, and piercing black eyes. You think you’ve seen him in a Dream.”
Man, just the mention of GEnie brings back a flood of memories. I spent hundreds of hours on GEnie over the years, at speeds up to 2400 baud. I bet an archive of my sf roundtable discussions would be really horrifying to me, because I was at the hight of my teenage lameness then. I don’t think I ever spoke in AOL kiddie-speak, but my idiocy and ignorance about everything in the world really shone through.

Discover more from WIL WHEATON dot NET

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

53 thoughts on “penguicon! Sandman! GEnie!”

  2. GEnie… I remember GEnie. 🙂
    I actually downloaded my first copy of Linux (30+ floppies) from GEnie. Ow. The GEnie bill was mucho large that month. 🙂

  4. I LOVE The Sandman Comic series. I can’t deside which is my favorite sibling, but Delirium is pretty cool, I kind of made a charactor similar to her a while back. In fact Delirum is inspried by Tori Amos, another love of my love ::le sigh:: That is so rad that your going to get to meet him and that he mentioned it. I hope you have a blast and take losts of pics and stuff! !
    p.s. forgive spelling I just woke up and am heading out the door to work!

  6. I remember those days. The excitement that surged through my veins when I witness a visible increase in scrolling rates after moving from a 300 baud coupler to a 1200 speed demon.
    The awe of feeling that this is exactly what Matthew Broderick felt like in War Games, when he broke into the Whopper (Mainframe done your way). All I was doing was chatting with other dweebazoids. 2400 baud modems came packaged with braggin rights in those days.
    Memories of the golden age before the internet. Baud Town, Club Playhouse, the Annex, CompuServe. Ahh, life was simple back then.

  9. You’re really going to like meeting Neil. He’s so sweet and personable and so very kind.
    I met him on the American Gods tour a couple years ago, and was thrilled, but what really bowled me over was the way he treated my kids. He told them how happy he was that they had come so far to meet him and how glad he was that they liked his work – and he *meant* it.
    They’ve all but built a shrine around their signed copy of The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish.

  10. I miss Genie, too. Wil, remember that what you think of as your geekiness is usually perceived as enthusiastic friendliness, and that’s always welcome.

  11. Ahh yes, the smell of the plastic as you open up that brand new 1200 baud modem… the thrill and excitement of installing it, and then the drivers without some unknown “plug and play” thing… The Thrill of starting up your Lcom and signing on and seeing the BBS log in screen fly by at what was then the fastest speed possible… Sitting in the chat room and actually not having to wait for your words to finish uploading so you can check your spelling. LOL… No such thing as the world wide web, just an very unused internet to shell to and local BBS users to play Trade Wars and Crossroads with.
    Ahh the good ‘ol days.

  12. I understand oh-so-well those geeky fan moments: “Oh my fuggin’ God, so-and-so wants to talk to *me*?”
    Just think, Wil: one day someone will say the same of you. Could be the very next time you go sign autographs, even. 🙂

  13. Screw GEnie. CompuServe was what it was all about baby! I was 5 years old and flying high on a 300 bps modem on my Atari 2600 XL. I can remember downloading Groilers encyclopedia articles so slowly that I was reading ahead of them as they came, and thinking to myself, “Why would someone ever want a 2400 bps modem? The articles would come in too fast to read!”

  17. I can actually recall coming home from the (now non-existent) Devonshire Downs Comp-Swap, where rows and rows of Asian vendors were pawning their high quality “Imported from China” wares on unsuspecting nerd folk. It used to get so crowded, you could barely move. I used to call the real (hard-core) uber nerds, Deodorant Right Activists.
    I came home with a brand new Zytel 1200 baud modem. “Same as Zoom brand, 15 dollar cheaper!” $179.00 (Zoom was over $200). I remember that every time I turned that peice of shit on, I smelled silicone cooking. At first, I thought to myself, maybe this isn’t a good thing, and finally came to my senses when I realized that smoking silicone is a small price to pay for blinding modem speed.

  18. I think we would all be embarrassed by archives of our first forays into the internet community. I didn’t use aol-speak or abuse the capslock key, but…yeah, well. It’s embarrassing.

  19. Gosh Wil, now you’ve got me all nostalgic for GEnie, too. Not SF though, it was Disney Roundtable for me back then.
    GEnie wasn’t our first, though. We did some local BBSs and Q-Link first.
    Ah, nostalgia. 😉

  22. Oh, great Ghu. GEnie. My first online home.
    Believe it or not Wil, I not only remember you showing up on GEnie a few times, I remember you in the RTCs a few times. ‘sokay. I was a fanboyish geek thrown into the middle of pros myself…
    Just for the record, though, you can sleep easy about having any of those posts show up on the net. I was a staff volunteer for a few years, and you didn’t have any “special archive files”. Many an obnoxious pro (and a few fans that became pros) on the other hand….
    There was the one female pro who was a bit chagrinned that you kept calling her “chick”, though :^

  23. GEnie was nice, but I remember those 1200 baud days on the Star Trek forum on CompuServe. Sigh…
    (BTW, I’m the ConChair for Penguicon – and we DO have some folks that are looking forward to meeting you like you are to meeting Neil. )

  25. These people are not lying. Mr Gaiman is a gentleman and a scholar… he also does a damned funny impression of William Shatner. I met him in Charlotte last month. The plan was that I would interview him for JIVE magazine (http://www.jivemagazine.com) before his reading that night, but the man was dreadfully sick with something three steps above a sore throat. So the interview was cancelled. Instead, we sat and he had two cups of piping hot tea while talking about nothing.
    Class, I tell you. Absolute class.

  26. Hehe. I remember GEnie. And I remember when you were on GEnie, sort of. I remember when I found out you were on, I sent you an email to pester you with script ideas (I was a teenager then too), and got back the canned ‘leave him alone’ response from the admins. So if you were lame, I was lamer. Sorry ’bout that a decade late.
    I remember subscribing to GEnie because of some game. Can’t remember the name, wasn’t Morpheus, it was a sci-fi mud, and included some ‘galatic trader’ type mini-game among other things. It was pretty cool for its time I guess.

  29. don’t be so hard on yourself!…you have have to live through your own idiocy and ignorance before you can get to the place you are cool and informed…otherwise you would be too scared to ask the questions…or ever learn to express yourself in an intellegent way…i think whatever you did in those youthful days turned out to be great preparation for the cool and wise man you have become.

  33. Ooh Ooh, read “Good Omens” when you get the chance. Both Gaiman AND Pratchett wrote it. Also, my sis told me just the other night that they made a Brit miniseries out of “Neverwhere.” I’m gonna try and rent it when I have the time.

  36. Not to sound like to big of a nub but sweet zombie jesus!!! Gaiman’s nothing short of a god. How did you avoid a full blown coronary? You know,before this post you were my geek equal(excluding the whole “trek” thing, lol) but now, you sir, are my geek GOD.

  41. Wil, a word to the wise on the geek-out factor when you meet Neil: go for it. Get it out of the way right off the bat. Just tell him, “Neil, I’m going be a slobbering fanboy for about a minute here, then we can talk like human beings.”
    The tactic has worked for me with a couple of comic book artists and Trace Beaulieu from MST3K. Had great conversations with all of them, and even ended up singing karaoke with my favorite artist of all time, George Perez!

  43. Ah…GEnie! It does bring back memories. I don’t recall bumping into yourself, or Mr. Gaiman (though I do recall seeing many other ‘industry’ types: Peter David, Michael Stackpole, Aaron Alston jump to mind). While I did visit the SFRT on occasion, I was more freqently found in the TSR RT (page 125??), and Chat*Lines (page 400??) (I was staff in both areas for a few years). Ah, the joys of Aladdin and TurboTerm.
    Was the game you played Morpheus in called ‘Gemstone’? That’s the most popular game that pops into mind. Someone else mentioned the ‘Trader’ style game which I think was called ‘Federation II’ or something.
    Paul
    formerly: GEnie’s Stoneson

  44. Like WOW, too cool to be remembered for Genie!
    I am way looking forward to meeting you at Penguicon…..I will be the Token Hot Middle Aged Babe.
    :)Francine

  45. I still miss Genie. The level of conversation there was far above what shows up on a lot of other forums. And to this day I’ve never found a better place to discuss SF…
    Somewhere among the piles of old discs I have, there are collections/logs of old conversations. I should dig through them sometime, just to find all the dumb stuff I said…
    dt

  47. That’s so cute! I’m active at this gaming site called Avidgamers and we have people every day who aren’t quite sure what they’re supposed to do, write in all caps, and unfortunately… use chatspeak, strange abbreviations, etc.

  48. I’ve been reading your blog for eons, but this is what finally inspired me to say something. 🙂 GEnie was my first online experience, back in college … I remember clearly the first time I ran across “WILWHEATON” somewhere on the SFRT (it was probably Neil’s topic, come to think of it), and I thought “wow, this is so cool, Wil Wheaton actually hangs out here with the unwashed masses!” 🙂 Not to mention it was rather validating to know someone else my age was out there on the boards. Sometimes I felt so young in the SFRT!

  49. I remember spending a lot of time on
    GEnie in the forums, particularly the ST:TNG forum. I remember your tirade after Gene R. died.
    I probably still have transcripts, printed out on dot-matrix paper, stashed in a box… somewhere.

  50. *sighs* GEnie was great – I miss it so! The RT discussions, the slow languishing script of the modem, staying up until dawn because of friends on the West Coast since ’email’ wasn’t quite there yet.
    Gemstone was a terrific game! I’ve lost track of our old crew: Carroam, Gio, Aerielle, and myself… but we had fun. *sighs*
    Thank you for bringing the memory!

Comments are closed.

Related Posts

Recent Posts