Electric Avenue - An Interesting Failure

Welcome to the last episode of Quick Hits, the only podcast that gets you smartenized.

Today's episode, Electric Avenue, an interesting failure.

Okay, folks, let's wrap this up.

Time for one final episode and then on to the next thing,

which is electric.

Which I will tell you about in a bit.

I started this podcast back in 2005 when I was excited about the idea and was putting

out shows about twice a month.

Around 2007, I was doing about one per month.

Eventually, it was one every other month or so.

In 2012, I stopped doing them entirely.

Four years later, I wondered if anyone was listening, so I put one out with

a message that said,

asking people to email me if they were still listening.

I published it on a Tuesday night around 10 p.m., and I planned to announce it on social

media the next evening.

When I got home from work the next day, before announcing it, I found my email was full of

replies.

Two of them were sent just 45 minutes after I published it the night before, which I found

amazing.

After four years, late that night,

they saw it, grabbed it, and listened to it immediately.

And that inspired me to do more of them, but I was getting bored with the process.

I put them out once or twice a year, and then once a year, and that's where we are now.

Once a year is pretty ridiculous, so now it's time to wrap it up and do one final episode

so it can die with dignity.

However, this isn't the last you'll hear from me.

I have a new YouTube channel that's buried so deep in the YouTube community.

You can't find it with a simple search.

I'll tell you about it and how to get to it in the closing comments of this show.

This last podcast isn't about politics or religion or statistics or advice.

It is a story of the olden days, the early to mid-90s.

There was a subculture back then of dial-in BBSs, and it popped into existence in the

early 80s.

It flourished.

It flourished for a while, and then was extinguished by the internet.

This is the story of my part in that subculture, a history lesson of sorts.

Let's go.

Every once in a while, I'll open my email, and someone has sent me a picture they've

found on the internet.

It's a picture that's been out there for a long time.

It's a photograph of one of those electric LEDs.

It's a picture of one of those LED roadside signs, and it says on it, Electric Avenue

Closed.

And whenever anybody sends me that, it always makes me smile.

For two reasons.

First of all, it means that there's somebody that I knew 20 years ago.

And also, it reminds me of one of my most interesting failures, the 21-line bulletin

board system named Electric Avenue.

Now, for some of you younger listeners, I need to do a little bit of a glossary here

so that you can understand the way things were back then.

Electric Avenue existed from about 1990 to 1995.

First of all, it used modems back then.

This was pre-internet.

We used modems to dial up.

They were 2400 baud, 1200 baud.

And they sounded like this.

And that meant that you had connected to a computer on the other end.

Nothing at all like the modem you're used to having with your instant-on internet sitting

in your living room.

This thing plugged in.

It went into the back of your computer.

And there were a couple different ways that you could do online things back then.

One was through commercial services.

There was CompuServe.

They were probably the best known.

They charged $12 an hour to connect.

And now again, this is in 1990 dollars.

There was Genie, which was General Electric's offering, with a G-E capitalized.

And they were all text-based.

The only graphics that you got were ASCII graphics.

Now, I'll refer to ASCII graphics a few times here.

And if you don't know what they are, I would suggest a quick Google so that you can see

them and see what they were like.

They're basically making graphics using ASCII characters and nothing else.

They were a step below the 8-bit graphics that we all know.

So you go on Genie.

That was...

$6 an hour for 1,200 baud connections and $18 an hour, again in 1990 dollars, for a 2,400 baud connection.

A BBS was a bulletin board system where you would connect to another computer.

Genie and CompuServe weren't really considered BBSs, although technically I guess they were.

But there were also a lot of hobbyists out there.

At its peak, there were about 80 or 90 of them in my area.

And they would set up a computer at home, and you would dial into it and get a busy

signal, and then dial into the next one and get a busy signal, and then dial into the

next one, and it would connect.

You'd hear that funky modem sound.

And then you could go in, and there would be message bases, and there would be files

that you could download, games, software, all types of things.

And there would be online games that you could play.

And then there were multi-line BBSs, and they were fairly rare because they were expensive

to run.

You had to pay for all those phone lines, all those modems, all that equipment, and

they charged a fee.

And that's what Electric Avenue was.

That's what Electric Avenue was designed to be.

One of the more annoying things when you went out on the hobby BBSs that were out there

was they were overrun by adolescents.

12-year-olds, 14-year-olds.

Well, they weren't bad kids.

They were just annoying to deal with.

And I wanted a place where grown-ups could hang out and converse and meet and do things.

I didn't want to call it an adult board because while there were definitely adult aspects

to it, and we'll get into that in just a minute, I wanted it to be just a place you

had to be 18 years old to get in, and then you had to be 21 to get to the actual adult

stuff.

And the other reason...

Behind that was no 12-year-old was going to pay me the 10 bucks a month I was charging

to have a full membership.

So I set this BBS up.

I started with 8 lines, and then that went to 12, and then 18, and then 21 in its heyday

before it died.

And the first time that I set it up, I used up all of the spare phone lines in my village.

The 8 lines, they had 8 lines spared, and I took them all.

And they were all hooked up to 2400 baud modems, which was state-of-the-art at the time.

And they were expensive modems, too.

You couldn't put a cheapo modem on something that was going to be running 24-7.

At the time, they were $400 a piece.

When you logged into Electric Avenue for the first time, you got 2 hours a day for, I think

it was 2 weeks.

I don't have all.

I don't have all of this written down, so I don't know for sure.

But you got 2 hours a day, I think, for 2 weeks.

And then it would cut you down to a half an hour a day, which I later made 20 minutes

and then 10 minutes.

So you really, you could get in afterwards and still see the party, but you really couldn't

participate in it very much because you got kicked out pretty quick.

You had just enough time to go in and pay, and sign up, and get a membership that would

get you in there.

It was $10 a month, $24.

$24.95 for 3 months and $89 for a year.

And when you were a member, you could log on anytime you wanted and stay on as long

as you wanted.

And my idea behind it was to end up with 500 paying customers, and then that would allow

me to make a nice profit.

I could, at that rate, probably make a living on it.

That was the plan.

As with so many of my plans.

And plans like this, it didn't work out very well.

But, before it died, it was a lot of fun.

There was a lot of stuff going on.

While I was setting it up, I had a couple of friends that were coming in and checking

it out, but I hadn't made any announcements yet.

And just before I was about to go public with it, I pulled behind a van that said on it,

Montgomery Ward's Electric Avenue.

Ugh.

I completely forgot that that was the name of Montgomery Ward's Appliance Department.

They sold appliances and substandard audio equipment.

But, before I did this whole project, I sat down with a lawyer and went over a bunch of

things, and he was a trademark lawyer, and one of the things I said was, look, you know,

there's this other place called Electric Avenue from Montgomery Ward's.

And he said, no, you don't have to worry about that.

He said, there's no cause.

It's for business confusion.

That's what makes the difference in trademark.

Nobody's going to confuse a dial-up BBS with an electronics department.

You have nothing to worry about.

And the logo is entirely different, too.

The logo, which I had asked a friend to create for me, I told him that I wanted it to look

like Joe Jackson's Steppin' Out sounded.

And so, he came up with this logo of two people.

Well-dressed, standing on either side of a Rolls-Royce.

And it was a pretty cool logo.

I really liked it.

So, the lawyer said I had nothing to worry about, and he was wrong, but we'll get to

that in a minute.

When you logged into Electric Avenue, the main street, and again, this is all done in

ASCII graphics, there was a street running down the middle, and there were all different

buildings that you could go into that would have different buildings.

Most of them had a sign on the wall that explained what that particular place was for.

It had files that you could download that were relevant to that particular place.

It had a chat room and a message base.

And so, you would go into these different rooms to discuss different things.

There was the park, which was where everybody hung out.

All the files were available.

From there, there was a main chat area there, general message base, and you could get to

all of the different message bases from there.

There was Hemingway's Cafe, a coffee house designed with writers in mind.

There was The Longest Yard, a sports bar for discussing sports.

Nelly's Next to New Shop, which was where people could buy and sell things.

There was the library, and there was no chat in the library.

There was no chat in the library, and there was no chat in the library, because you can't

can't talk in the library, and that had various online databases and lists of 800 numbers and

various things like that. There was Fat Bob's Rock and Roll Emporium to discuss rock and roll.

There was the Three Martini Lunch Club, where you went to discuss politics, business, and the state

of the world. There was Parent Planners. Now, this was, I thought, just one of the things that

worked out best. Even back then, abortion was a deadly subject. It got people upset. It got people

angry. And so, I made this room, this building, Parent Planners, and that was the only place you

were allowed to discuss abortion. If you were to discuss it in any other form, it would get moved

there. And that was it. That was the only place. And that actually worked out pretty well, because

by the time I closed it, it was a dead end. And so, I made this room, this building, Parent Planners,

closed the place. It had been running for five years. I think there were maybe a hundred messages

in Parent Planners, and the subject of abortion was not even mentioned anyplace else on the BBS.

So, that worked out pretty cool. The first Church of Dave, which was for religion, ethics, and other

matters of the soul. I think somebody on the internet has started a Church of Dave. Check

that out one of these days. We Be Computers and Stuff, which was where you discuss,

the technical things. The Arcade. That was where all the games were, or most all the games were.

And there were a lot of games, a lot of online games, a lot of card games, because they're easier

to render in ASCII. Games that you could play with other people live online. And that was a pretty

cool thing at the time. A lot of people subscribed just because of all the games that were on there

that you could play. And even when you were playing a solo game, you were still competing with other

people to see what was going on. And so, I made this room, this building, Parent Planners, and that was

where you could get the highest score. There was Gwendolyn's Castle, which was for people who

wanted to do Dungeons and Dragons and that kind of stuff. And that really didn't take off. I don't

know why. It just never did. There was the Bank, which is where you would go to update your

membership and buy more time, that type of thing. And the Post Office, which of course was for

email. And one of the things that I had that people loved,

was instant internet email. You'd log on to the BBS. You had actually two email addresses. One was

your regular email for people that were on the BBS. But you also had your name at

electricavenue.com. And when you put that out there, it instantly went out onto the internet.

And actually what it did was, it found an empty modem and dialed out to a provider

and exchanged emails. And it would send out your email and it would pick up any

emails that you had. And it would send out your email and it would pick up any emails that you had.

And it would send out your email and it would pick up any email that was waiting for anybody and deposit it

in their boxes. Now, of course, an internet email address has a value of approximately nothing.

They're easy to get. They're cheap. But back then, this was a way for people to get it. And some

people subscribed just for that. And then there was Tiger Lily's House of Exquisite Pleasure.

That was the town whorehouse. And you had to be 21 to get in there. And you had to prove it to

me. And I was like, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that.

I made people send me copies of their licenses to get in there. And probably three quarters of the

paying customers actually did that. Maybe even more. Maybe 90%. When you went in there, first of all,

there were files that you could download of pornography. Now, when you think of pornography

now, we think of things like Pornhub, where you've got high definition pictures with fluids flying in

all directions.

Back then, pornography was static GIFs that would take you 20 minutes to download. And I had a couple

CDs full of them. And there were some people that did nothing but download those. And it was just a

static picture. And some of them were slathered with the O'Henry BBS or some other BBS name on

the top of them. And I would change these out every couple of months. I'd buy a disc for 20

bucks and pop it in there and...

Oh, people were all excited. New porn. And it took an hour to download two or three static pictures. And like I said,

there were some people that that's all they did. That was the reason that they subscribed. And there was a game in

there called The Wild Side. The premise of The Wild Side was that it was a building full of rooms and you would go

through this building and you would find sex toys around and you'd pick them up. And when you found out that it was a

person in the building, you would attempt to have sex with them. And they would always say no. And then you would

soften them up by giving them sex toys. You'd use these sex toys on them. And then when you succeeded, you were

rewarded with a text file, a graphic paragraph or two of the sex act that you did. They were all

heterosexual. Nobody ever complained about that. And if that person was online at the same time that you were, you got

extra points. And you could do whatever you wanted. And you could do whatever you wanted. And you could do whatever you wanted.

And people would chase each other through. And, you know, one person would chase another person and have sex with them.

And then that person would chase them back. And it was an extremely popular game on the site. I don't think that feminists

would like it. But everybody that was on there did. So I opened this with eight lines and people started showing up.

And when those eight lines started to get saturated, I made it 12 lines. And when I went to 12 lines, it went from being an

online community to being a 3D community. Because people started having meets. They weren't scheduled by me. They were

scheduled by the members. And somebody would say, hey, party at my house Saturday. Here's the address. And bring beer and

come on over. And there were probably, in its heyday, at its peak, two or three different meets every weekend. Some of them were

private. But a lot of them, everybody was invited to come. And they were a lot of fun. And I'd go to them. And my handle on the site was

the mayor. And I'd go and I'd walk in. And everybody's like, hey, mayor. You know, it was like, hey, Norm. And there were people from all

walks of life.

Economic levels, all hanging out, having a good time. I know for a fact of two marriages and two divorces that occurred because of

Electric Avenue. And I think there were more. But those are the ones that I specifically know about. A lot of people got laid. I mean,

hey, you got mostly 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds hanging out. You expect that. And of course, that was one of the reasons people

subscribed.

It wasn't necessarily a pickup place. But people would go to the meets. And they would meet. And they would hook up. And I know of at least two

babies that were born to people who had met on Electric Avenue. So there's now some 22-year-olds, 23-year-olds walking around who wouldn't have

existed if it weren't for this place, which is pretty cool. One of the biggest mistakes that I made was putting a men's room and a ladies' room

in the sports bar. Only men could go into the men's room. Only women could go into the women's room. And this was before all this transgender stuff.

Nobody complained about having men's and women's rooms. The idea was that here's a place that guys can just go and be by themselves. And here's a place

where women could go and be by themselves. And inevitably, the men would talk about the women and the women would talk about the men. And there were a lot of

couples on the site. And you can probably guess why.

The guys would let their wives read what went on in the men's room. The wives would let their husbands read what went on in the ladies' room. So people that thought they were just

talking with the guys or just talking with the girls weren't. And so everybody knew what was going on. All kinds of fights and things broke out as a result of it.

Because guys would be in there talking about, oh, this one looks great. This one, you know, I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole.

And it caused a lot of problems and a lot of acrimony. And I just ended up closing them. So there wasn't an issue anymore.

I reached the point of almost 200 paying customers when I got it up to 21 lines. And I figured that 21 lines would absorb another 100 paying customers or so.

I had a $625 phone bill every month because of the number of phone lines that I had.

And it was just beginning to look like it was about to take off.

And then I got a cease and desist letter from Moncum Rewards lawyers demanding that I change the name, that I give up the domain name, and that I let them read everybody's emails.

This didn't work.

I did not sit well with the members of Electric Avenue who wrote nasty letters, snail mail, to Moncum Rewards, which was a really bad idea.

They decided to do it amongst themselves. I didn't realize how bad an idea it was from a legal standpoint.

And I went to a trademark lawyer, and the trademark lawyer said, well, again, the original trademark lawyer would not return my calls.

So I went to another trademark lawyer, and he said, okay, give me a huge chunk of money.

And we'll take a look at it.

And he came back and said, well, here's the deal.

Their trademark is only on the shape of their letters, not on Electric Avenue.

You are not infringing at all because it's an entirely different kind of business.

There's no room for confusion.

Your logo and their logo don't look anything at all alike.

So there's not a problem there.

It is named after a street, Electric Avenue.

You cannot trademark a geographical area.

And there were a couple of other reasons why they didn't have a case.

But it didn't matter.

They were not going to back down.

I offered to sell them the name and sell them the domain name.

Nope. Nope.

They could generate more legal fees by coming after me.

So after my lawyers sucked about two grand out of my pocket, I told them I don't have any more money.

I just don't have any more money to spend on this.

And only after I had spent that much did they sit me down and have a come-to-Jesus meeting and say,

look, these kind of cases take years.

It's going to cost you at least $125,000 in legal fees.

And it could cost you twice that.

And none of that will be recoverable.

So I had no choice.

I had to fold.

I had to change the name.

I had to hand over Electric Avenue to them.

Not because they were...

Not because they were legally right or had a right to it, but because they had more money.

It was a very valuable lesson.

It's got nothing to do with who's right, who's wrong, who's legal, who's illegal.

It has to do with who's got enough money to keep hammering you.

And I had to give it up.

It became Saratoga Avenue.

That, however, wasn't what caused the demise of it.

What killed it?

Was something that I hadn't foreseen at all.

When I started it in 1990, the Internet was out there.

It was available.

It was cumbersome and a pain in the butt to get on.

And once you got on it, it was clumsy to find your way around it.

You had to use search engines like Veronica and Kermit and Archie.

And the stuff that you could find wasn't all that interesting and wasn't all that cool.

And I figured it would become more useful.

But my vision was that people would use local BBSs for local friends and local community,

which is indeed what happened for quite a while,

and just use the Internet for occasional research.

What I hadn't foreseen was browsers.

There were a few kind of clumsinesses.

There were some fuzzy ones out there that came around in 92, 93.

Then Netscape hit.

And people that got on the Internet with Netscape

suddenly were seeing automated flaming, spinning logos

and little Scotty dogs running back and forth.

And things that simply were not possible with ASCII graphics.

It just looked so much cooler.

And you could go anywhere.

You could go and look around and go anywhere in the world with it.

And each month, the number of websites that were available doubled and tripled.

And each month, the number of people who renewed their subscriptions to Electric Avenue dwindled.

About a year or so after Netscape hit,

my numbers had gone from 200 paying customers to like 100 and then down to 80.

And I wasn't even paying the phone bill.

And so, reluctantly, I had to face reality.

The Internet was killing BBSs.

And it wasn't just mine.

All the local one-liners were dying.

Other multi-line BBSs in other parts.

Other multi-line BBSs in other parts of the country were dying.

And I had to shut it down.

I had to sell the $400 modems that I had bought for,

oh, I think I got about 80 bucks a piece for them on eBay.

I had two 8-disc CD changers that were double speed.

And so nobody wanted them.

I paid quite a bit for them.

They were worthless.

I actually just throw those away.

I had two grand worth of software.

No value at all.

And I shut it down.

And the people that were my loyal customers for so long threw me a big party.

And the highlight of the party, they carried out a black coffin labeled Electric Avenue

and played a dirge.

And some people said, no, don't do that.

That will offend them.

I thought it was funny as hell.

I thought it was great.

And so, after that, I was like, oh, my God.

I'm going to go to the store.

After it shut down, there were still circles of friends that still kept getting together

as a result of it.

But my goal to make a living at it was completely dashed, completely shut out.

I lost quite a bit of money over that period of time because it took like three years,

four years before it started paying for itself with the phone bills and the bills that I

had for equipment.

But it was an interesting failure.

And it was a fun adventure.

And I really don't regret doing it at all.

And I still have friends from Electric Avenue, people that are still friends.

And that's got to be worth something.

And that's it for the Quick Hits Podcast.

If you've learned a little something, if you've changed your mind, or even if you can just

understand a different point of view without necessarily being a fan of the show, I'd

love to hear from you.

And if you're not completely agreeing with it, congratulations, you've been smartenized.

So thank you for listening, all these years, folks.

I have no idea how many of you have been listening.

There are ways to set up podcasts so you know how many times they've been downloaded, but

I never did that.

So I don't know.

And downloads don't mean listeners.

I know I delete about 75% of the podcasts I download.

So, however many of you are still here, I've got something new for you.

President Bob.

You've heard me say, when I become president, I'll do this and I'll do that.

Well, President Bob is a YouTube video series based on that premise.

In a timeline slightly different from ours, Bob is accidentally elected president.

He has no experience, no qualifications.

And no idea what he's doing.

He hasn't built up any political favors and doesn't have any patience for the existing

process of getting laws passed.

Instead, he's abusing the hell out of executive orders.

Some of those orders are serious, some are frivolous, and he just doesn't care.

He's just having a good time.

The channel is named President Bob, and that's my handle in there as well, but it doesn't

show up in a YouTube search.

If you search President Bob, you'll be served up.

You can find some videos of Bob Dole's presidential run.

However, you can find it if you search for some specific titles.

President Bob Slap One Customer, that's slap in the singular, not the plural.

President Bob Slap One Customer will pull up one of the videos, and you can get to the

channel from there.

President Bob Oberlin, that's O-B-E-R-L-I-N.

You can pull up one of them.

Slap One Customer is easy to remember, so try that one first.

Success on YouTube is all about ranking.

If you get ranked higher, it's more likely they'll offer your videos to strangers.

If those people click on it, that raises your ranking.

But if they only watch it for a few seconds and then click away, that can lower your rankings.

It's all very complicated and YouTube keeps their ever-changing algorithm secret, but

a lot of it's been done in the past.

and a lot of it's been done in the past.

a lot of it's been done in the past.

figured out. I'm hoping all of you can help me raise the ranking and visibility.

300 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Getting noticed is

like dumping a cup of coffee in the ocean, pointing at the water and saying

hey look at my stuff. No one can find it. YouTube ranks a video and a channel

based on many different factors and one of the most important is watch time. If

you start a video and click out of it 10 or 15 seconds later, that's interpreted

as you not liking it and will lower the ranking. If you watch it halfway through

that will raise the ranking and if you watch it all the way through it'll raise

it even more. If you watch all of it and then watch another one from the same

channel, YouTube really likes that. Clicking like helps raise the rankings.

Subscriptions raise them even more.

Subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Hitting the notification bell is also a good thing. But if you were to just go in

and like, subscribe and ring the bell without watching anything, they may

consider that some kind of manipulation and it won't help and might even hurt.

YouTube really likes comments. It's called engagement and they love

engagement. Comments really help a video's ranking. So folks, if you like

President Bob, watch at least some of the videos over the course of the week.

If you're interested in watching more videos, please subscribe and ring the bell.

And please, please leave a comment. With your help, the channel can get successful

enough to show up when people search for President Bob.

One thing working against me is frequency. YouTube likes to see shows uploaded at least

weekly.

Some of the most successful YouTubers upload several times a week or more.

even every day i can't do that my output of one every two weeks isn't likely to change much

and there's a good possibility i'll get bored with this somewhere down the line

and releases will be as sporadic as this podcast has been but until then please stop by and give

it a try again search the term president bob slap one customer and you should be able to find it

many many thanks to all the people who have listened all these years

thanks to the aquamarines who let me use their song my wonderful shadow as theme music all this

time thanks to all of you who've written me at dave at davehit.com feel free to do that again

if you're so inclined and thanks in advance to everyone who checks out president bob and does

all that liking and subscribing and commenting stuff and as always

you

never forget that the quick hits podcast was a journal of one man's opinion

and should not be taken too seriously

you