I don't know if this quite qualifies as history (yet) but it's
definitely "local", and it certainly will be "local history",
so I guess this conference is as good a place as any:

What's this I hear about "M-net going away"?

56 responses total.

The login message on Saturday announced that M-Net was going away as of
the end of the Labor Day weekend.  Dave explained (in the login message
and in !party) that due to lack of support and the fact that he has to
move out of his house, M-Net could no longer continue.

Rumors about this impending event have been circulating for a month now.
Essentially, the word was that M-Net was not supporting itself financially.

On Sunday morning about 1am, the system suddenly stopped responding (I was
logged on at the time).  Callers would get a connect tone, but no response
from the system.  This morning, M-Net's phones don't answer.

I think this is it.

Anyone who cares about the viability of Grex should get ready for an influx
of refugees.

M-Net's up again as of now, noon, Sunday Sept 1.  But assuming that
the shutdown will be real and permanent this time, this item will
definitely qualify as one for the History Conference, and I'm sure
I'll have something to say from the perspective of my 7-year
association with the system.

predictably, dave has shut m-net off to guests and wiped them. patrons
are still "welcome." but the system's as dead as driftwood in the desert
and i doubt that patrons are going to be interested in renewing for
such a system so handled.

  Not that I had anything there that I'm really upset to have lost but it
was sort of a rude shock to go away for a week, come back, and learn that
M-net is gone away (presumably) forever.

I just logged on m-net befor I came here. Obviously, the system is still up.
But there are no geust accounts. They have been wiped clean. All there is
left is the patrons. But for how long.. I don't know.

I was a patron, and my account was eliminated.

Of course, my patronship should have expired some time ago.

I !talked to lmaster over on mnet earlier today.  He was telling me
that he is interested in injecting a little money into mnet, becoming
a partner with Dave.  There may be some hope for mnet, but I'm not
holding my breath.

Injecting?

        Dave said on-line that he'll continue to run some sort of dial-in
system as long as he has a Unix system.  A closed system doesn't hold much
interest for me.  I'll probably continue to log in every few days as long
as I can, just to see if he announces any new plans, but M-Net is dead at
this point as far as I'm concerned.
        There are about 70 accounts left on-line, including former staff,
patrons and various system accounts.

 M-Net was dead soon after DD bought it.
 
  He fancied himself as Superman, & M-Net was his own little 'Bottled City
of Kandor' to play with & manipulate as he pleased.

  Your compassion is touching, Tim.  Give it a rest, why don't you?

(I'll show compassing by not wasting time dealing with #11...)

Tim, I don't know you, but that was a cruel thing to say under any 
circumstances.

Griz

I've just re-read the response in question, & I think it is a very accurate
analogy. Other than that, I don't care to waste time talking about the
dead system.

Actually, M-net was dying before Dave bought it, and if Dave's purchase
sealed M-net's doom in the long run, in the short run, it did postpone
its fate.  It's sadly obvious, in retrospect, that Dave really did not
understand the system he had bought, but to be fair, I think very few
other people understood that at the time either.  The whole situation is
particularly unfortunate for Dave, who had basically trapped himself
with his investment and his loyalties.  But the example he turned M-net
into, and the time he bought, really did make grex possible.  There
is nothing quite like losing something that's always been taken for
granted to galvanize people into action.

I tend to agree with Marcus, particularly his last sentence. I find it hard to
imagine NOT having something like m-net or grex and I'm not even a hard core
addict.

Have no pity for the fool.  He makes his choices willfully.
I agree with tim.  If honesty is judged as cruelty, then is dishonesty 
desirable kindness?
Dave behaved foolishly and irrationally.  He discarded the advice of those
who knew better.  It was predicted that his method would bring no benefit
to m-net, and it has not.  He abused and persecuted people and the system
itself.  He was unfit to be a 'Sysop' and M-net was unfit to have a 'Sysop,'
Where is there room for sympathy in all of this?

        Because, right or wrong, Dave was doing the best he could for M-Net.
No one else was going to try to save the system, once Mike Myers decided
to shut it down.  Dave did that.  He spent a heck of a lot of money in the
attempt.  He deserves some credit for that, though in the end it turned
out he didn't have the ability to make it work.  Be charitable if nothing
else.

  Yes.  His intentions were good even if his execution was fatally flawed.
At the very least he bought M-net's users a year or two at the expense of
a great deal of his money and a lot of bitter feelings on both sides.  Now
that it finally looks like it's over, what possible good can be served by
personally vilifying him in a forum where he's not present to defend himself?

Speaking as a 7-year veteran and ex-staffer of M-Net, I have to
observe that much of what people have said on both sides is
perfectly valid, but I also shrug my shoulders and say "so what"?
Regardless of how you feel about how Mike Myers ran M-Net or how
Dave Parks ran M-Net, the fact is that in a very large sense
neither of them ever did really run it.  The users ran it; the
system was shaped by the people who called in and entered text.
The best measure of this is that even in the very worst of times,
even when frequent threats of shutdown were eroding the base of
financial support and it appeared that the system could go down at
any moment, M-Net retained the essential characteristics that
attracted me to it in the beginning -- it was a place where new
people continued to showed up and say amazing things, to open my
eyes to new points of view.

Case in point:  Some of the most active people on Grex right now
are folks who became M-Netters in the last six months or so.

Even though activity had slowed from the heady days of four or
five years ago, I have to say that right up to the very day that
newuser was shut down and the guest accounts wiped, M-Net was a
fascinating place to hang out.

        M-Net is still on-line, for those few who were patrons when it went
down.  There is discussion on how to go about bringing it back.  Dave
wants to get out of having the bills in his name, and favors a Grex-style
user group to take over the system.  Leather Master seems to want a closed
no-guests system.  There are five or six people participating in the
discussion, as of about six hours ago.  Anyone who wants to become a
patron and participate in the discussion can send mail to kite@m-net.  If
anything definitive happens, I'll post something about it here.

Actually, there was an effort made to talk some sense into Mike Myers,
and to negotiate some sort of transition to a group owned system, just
before Dave bought the system.  Not that there's much point in worrying
about the "what if"'s--Mike really was most anxious to get out the
business as fast as possible, and likely wouldn't have been very
interested in waiting 6 months - about the amount of time it took for us
to organize grex.

Very probably, such a reorganization would have taken even longer
anyways.  6 months before the sale, there were some very bitter
arguments online, about how things ought to be run.  There seemed to be
about two camps online, a "pro-control" faction, in favour of such
things as restricted guest access, more limits on allowable speech, and
a more fascist attitude towards troublemakers, and a "pro-anarchy"
faction that was more or less happy with the way things were, was not
interested in restrictions on speech, and felt that fascist acts
actually encouraged troublemakers.  At the time, the two groups were
about evenly matched, but with Mike leaning more and more strongly
towards the pro-control group.  What actually ended up happening,
though, is that the whole argument fizzled as everybody had their say
and got tired of the whole mess.  With a split of 50%, and people
arguing on what is more a matter of taste and values than anything else,
there wasn't much else to do.

It's a bit tricky to interpret what's happened since.  While Dave made a
valiant effort to keep things as they were, deep down, Dave has always
been "pro-control".  So it's certainly no accident that some of the grex
founders had been some of the more vocal "pro-anarchy" voices.  It's
tempting to ascribe M-net's subsequent troubles to Dave's increasingly
"pro-control" attitude, but that's certainly an over-simplification.  It
might be as fair to blame M-net's troubles on a distinct lack of focus
and consistency, trying to please everyone at once, and pleasing no one
as a result.  The 50% split seems to argue that there is room in Ann
Arbor for a much more tightly controlled system.  Perhaps that would be
a good niche for M-net, who knows?

Re #22:  Yes, my impression is that Dave move very quickly to
purchase M-Net, without involving or consulting others in the
decision or the negotiations.  It wasn't generally known that he
was buying it until it was a fait accompli.  That's why I think
it's not entirely fair to say, as some have above, that Dave was
the only person willing to take on and continue M-Net.  Had there
been more time and more openness about the whole process, some
other person or group of persons might have acquired it, or Dave
might have bought it but at a more realistic price.  But that's
only speculation -- M-Net morale was at a low point at the time,
as Marcus points out there were deep divisisions about the
direction the system ought to go, so M-Net might've been slow to
sell if Dave hadn't moved.

Regardless of Dave's position on M-net policy matters (and he's perfectly
free to logon here and defend himself), my biggest problem with M-net
was not Dave's decisions about such things as patron costs or shutdowns,
but his utter lack of business sense.  You don't get people to support
a system by continually threatening to shut it down (especially when
you keep backing out), being insulting, or trying to squeeze every
last cent out at the expense of goodwill.  One case in point was his
threat to start a "new" system and take the patronship money with
him, under the pretext that patronship contributions were a 'donation',
so you should shut up and not complain if you sent in money for a
1-year patronship that would turn out to be 3 months long.  (i.e.,
"Thanks, sucker.")  It took aaron pointing out that calling it
a 'donation' wouldn't stand up legally to change this
  
My reaction after a while changed from "I'm glad I sent in money since
I use the system so damn much" to "I'm glad I quit sending in money.
Let somebody else play slot-machine with patronships."

That's the "failure of faith" concept, and since it seems to have led to
M-net's financial difficulties, it certainly deserves a closer look.

In any successful business, one of the key principles is customer
satisfaction.  The customer must think they got their money's worth, if
not more.  That's true even of charity and non-profit organizations --
"save-a-child", WTVS, or the local church car-wash will get little money
if people don't trust them.  Of course, such organizations can count on
altruistic feelings to cover some or all of customer satisfaction.  But
customers of a commercial "for-profit" organization are generally far
more demanding and selfish.

M-net, as sold by Mike to Dave, was definitely organized "for-profit".
Dave liked that.  He hated the idea of financial disclosure, and liked
the illusion of increased independence and control "for-profit" implied.

Clearly, by ignoring customer satisfaction, Dave did a very foolish
thing, but it's equally certain that Dave just didn't wake up one
morning and decide to be stupid.  He obviously had some very convincing
reasons to do what he did, and it must have looked right above water,
even as the rocks of customer satisfaction ripped the hull of his ship
wide open to the cold depths of financial oblivion.

One reason is immediately obvious: M-net was a monopoly.  There were no
other serious competitors in the neighborhood.  Entities such as
Arbornet, Compuserve, UM/UB/MTS, etc., had very different customer bases
and did very different things.  A second reason is slightly more subtle.
It's a question of faith, and really splits into two parts.  Dave had
faith in himself - to do the jobs necessary to keep the system running.
And Dave had faith in "the community"--that the people who constituted
M-net would in turn have faith in M-net, and by extension, in Dave.
It's tempting to say none of these mattered at all, and they probably
weren't even true anyways.  But there is a great deal of truth in all
these things, and they really did make a large difference.

M-net was a monopoly.  That gave it a certain economy of scale, and also
meant it could get away with less than perfection in the customer
satisfaction department.  People often think monopolies mean high prices
and no quality, but in fact, every successful monopoly follows the
opposite principle - low prices mean no competitor can get started, and
decent quality means people don't find alternatives or do without.
M-net had a special handicap: the price of hardware is falling fast
enough that there is no way to keep prices low enough to eliminate
competition.

So far as Dave's faith in himself -- he was not unjustified.  He
certainly wasn't up to previous standards, but he was capable of over
90% of the technical stuff that came up -- and considerably more capable
than Mike Myers.  His worse failings were actually in people skills --
Dave was unable to keep most of the technical cadre that Mike had been
able to attract, and meant also that Dave had an extraordinary talent
for making bad people situations worse.  Had all other things been going
well, though, or even with slightly better people skills, Dave might
well have weathered this.  "Lack of people skills" is an
oversimplification - Dave has plenty of people skills, just not the
right sorts to deal sensibly with people who are very different from
Dave.

Faith in the user community is perhaps the most complex issue.  Perhaps
in part because there really isn't a "user community".  What M-net
really had was many different individual people, who sometimes coelesced
into loose associations based on common interests and beliefs.  But
there certainly was a lot of respect in the community for M-net, and
many people clearly were willing to extend a lot of respect to Dave,
since it was his system.  That meant, if nothing else, that Dave had a
lot of rope to hang himself with, and it also meant M-net was able to
coast along for close to a year despite major problems that would
probably have driven a lesser system into the ground in no time at all.
That there were really many individual people made for another
interesting problem: it really was kind of hard to figure out what
public opinion was, or actually -- it was very easy to read almost
anything into what the public said.  When there are 10 people in the
front row saying "right on, brother", and 30 people quietly slipping out
the back door, it's tempting to assume everybody agrees with you, when
in fact the people slipping out the back door may actually be quietly
cursing the day they met you.

These things weave themselves into more complex patterns as well -- for
instance, one advantage M-net had monopoly-wise is that many people in
the user community valued "one place" where everybody met, and did not
want things split up and fragmented.  But with the underlying failure of
customer satisfaction, things here came unravelled.  It was slower than
it might have been otherwise, but no less inevitable.  Indeed, when the
tide turned, all these factors started to work to Dave's disadvantage.
Faith confounded is a terrible thing to face.

        I would say Dave's biggest problem is that he never did know what he,
himself, wanted.  Given any consistent direction, at least some of M-Net's
financial backers would have stuck around.  It was the whipsawing, months
of peace followed by weeks of chaos, and inconsistencies of other kinds
which got to people.
        Dave was unquestionably the leader.  People needed and wanted one,
and anyway, with the power to do anything he wanted, and the willingness
to use it, and the generally high profile he put himself in, there's no
other way he could be viewed.  He never understood this; he thought other
people would support the system, independently of his operation of the
system.
        He also tried to force people to do what he wanted; through threats
and coercion.  He should have realized other people resent this kind of
treatment as much as he does himself.

        Analyzing Dave's motives and methods is all well and good.  It
doesn't accomplish much, though.  Perhaps it will help to educate the
junta who control this system into not making the same kinds of mistakes,
though personally I doubt it.  (Those four or five people aren't inclined
to these kinds of behavior, at least I hope not.  They are more likely to
deny that they exercise any sort of leadership; if they really believe
this and live by it, it will cause other forms of chaos.  When a decision
has to be made, someone has to decide, and to take responsibility for his
decision.  Herein lie my concerns for Grex.)

The junta?

Heck, this is a history conference, not a proposal to do anything at all
useful!  I very much assume & hope grex won't repeat history.  Life will
be very boring if that happens.  Almost the whole point of history is to
look back and try to analyze past situations in order to figure out what
happened and why -- as much just for the fun of it as anything else.

I would have to say Dave really did know what he wanted.  It boiled down
to two things.  (a) run the system his way, and (b) make his investment
back.  He also claimed he wanted to "save" m-net, but it's not clear
quite what he meant.  One could argue he really meant to "destroy" m-net
in order to "save" it--confusing, if accurate.  Dave never made any
bones about not liking "open access"--it was something he inherited with
the system, and not the way he really wanted to run things himself.
It's actually kind of surprising that he never discovered that the
newuser program on M-net had always supported a "user validation" mode,
where it does everything necessary to create an account except for
actually adding it to /etc/passwd.  The only thing that kept Dave from
making much more radical changes sooner, was that desire to make his
investment back.  Perhaps that's not quite true -- I think Dave really
did want to please everyone on the system also.  But a lot of people on
the system, whether they knew it or not, were there because M-net was
"open access"--and that's where the dilemma, in the end, was.   Dave
could not please people and therefore make his investment back, and run
the system "his way", at the same time.

        I don't think Dave dislikes open access; I think he just didn't think
it helped to pay the bills.  'Way back when he was running Kitenet, he was
on M-Net a lot asking people to send him money so he could do this or do
that.  He was always very concerned with finances.  Most Picospan users
aren't; they log on for fun, not out of concern for cash flow.

"Dislikes" is rather a broad term.  I don't believe Dave particularly
objects to other systems being run open access, so in that sense, you're
right, he doesn't completely "dislike" open access.  But at the same
time, for a system Dave himself ran, I think it's clear he didn't really
respect or understand open access.  A large part of his objection has
never been financial.  It's clear that he regards open access as an open
invitation for troublemakers, and that he objects to dealing with
troublemakers.  He's said as much, on many occasions, spread across a
considerable span of time, both publically and privately.  It's not
quite so clear just what sorts of troublemakers -- people who crash the
system?  People who make cruel comments?  People who are not nice to
Dave?

You would be right, however, in stating that most of the shutdowns of
newuser & guest access were related to financial crisis.  It certainly
made for a convenient scapegoat.  Unfortunately, financially speaking,
everytime Dave shut down open access, he was shooting himself in the
foot.  Shutting down open access meant no more new users who might get
addicted to the system and become members.  An even more insidious
problem was that, whether patrons realized it or not, one of the
attractions of m-net were in fact the guests -- with no guests, system
activity dropped way down, and with little activity, there wasn't much
reason to become a patron.  The first few times, it's quite true Dave
managed to flush funds out.  But you can only shoot yourself in the foot
so many times before you've got nothing left to stand on.

        I told Dave (and the rest of M-Net) that guests were a service
provided to make M-Net interesting for the patrons.  Users are the purpose
of a conferencing system, guests or anyone else.  Making money is not.
Dave seemed to overlook that.

i'd just like to point to the fact that a discussion similar to this
one is brewing on agora. perhaps somebody somewhere would like to link
one way or the other. 

From a personal perspective, I refused to dump money into M-net because it 
always seemed on the verge of being shut down or the rules were about to be
changed or something like that. I do contribute to Grex (although I am somewhat
sporadic in my payments - just ask popcorn) and will continue to do so because
I am utterly convinced that any decisions made will be in the best interests
of the system AND the user community. I never felt that way about M-net and I
think that if I (and others) could have felt that way Grex would never have
been born.

I'd like to see that this item remains purely historical in
content, so I don't want to see it linked anywhere else.

People seem to have a lot of ill feeling towards Dave -- I don't
think that particularly belongs here.  What's far more interesting
is to try to figure out why Dave did what he did.  It's not going to
make a hair of difference so far as Dave and M-net goes, but it's
good practice towards understanding the rest of the world.  Besides,
hate-fests are so tacky.

I agree with that sentiment.  As to figuring out the "why" of
Dave's actions -- to really know the "why" of a person's behavior
is an exercise in psychology, in which I'm not really trained,
but even though I can speculate and might even feel that my
thoughts are on the mark I don't think it's particularly
constructive to do so in public, so I won't.

As for M-Net in the context of "history" -- well, to judge from
current events, the final chapter hasn't been written yet.  There
have been so many premature reports of M-Net's death over the
years that one of these days I should learn to treat the latest
one as, to quote Mark Twain, "exaggerated".  M-Net might not be
history yet.

The whole eight-year history of M-Net from 1983 to the present
would be a fascinating tale to tell..

It might make an interesting book someday.

It was the summer of '84.  Lisa was off in Japan, but the spirit
of frenetic fun engendered by Czr and LisEmpire persisted.  We
were like little boys in a sandbox.  Orange Gopher, Jan Wolter,
Owen Medd, and me.  One of us discovered that PicoSpan would let
you create your own conferences and told the others how to do it.
We were off and running, creating hidden conferences in sub-
directories of subdirectories of subdirectories and challenging
the others to find them.  Nothing of substance discussed, of
course -- we were techie formalists, playing with the software
itself, finding out what made it tick.  Conferencing at its
purest.

Brian Orion was in high gear as well, skirting the edge of
acceptability as usual.  He did his own hidden conference thing,
but his conferences had a purpose.  He'd set them up and invite
his friends there to talk about high-toned type stuff.  Carol, OG,
Jan, a few others.

Mikey didn't like it.  He preferred things neat and orderly and
worried about disk space.  Worried about somebody posting an
illegal Sprint code somewhere.  One could understand.  The disk
did fill up once in a while, and a sysop in California had just
had his apartment raided and equipment confiscated over an illegal
Sprint code posting.  That didn't stop up, of course.  Little boys
don't stop doing something just because daddy says not to.  None
of us would've come close to publishing an illegal anything
anyway.

Summer ended, and while the fun continued, it was never the same
as it had been in that first summer of innocent discovery.  Owen
moved on to other things, and while the rest of us stayed around,
we evolved in different directions, became distant from one
another.  One can stay in Eden only for a season.

Winter/spring, 1984-85.  The era of the Glen Roberts Post-Picofests.
Nobody else seemed to want to have them.  So after dinner at whatever
restaurant, 30 or 40 folks would mosey over to Glen's house on State
Street near Hill and hang out for a few hours.  Sometimes Glen himself
was there, sometimes not.  He'd just leave the door unlocked if he
wasn't going to be around.

The younger folks liked to finish off the evening at the midnight
showing of Rocky Horror.  I always abstained, and have not seen
Rocky Horror to this day.

More often than not in those days, the Picofest itself would be at
the Parthenon, because Mike Myers liked the Parthenon a lot.
They'd set up a couple of long tables for us along the far wall,
enough for 40 people.  This was the era of *big* Picofests.

The glr post-picos were the forerunners of another series of
entertainments with which Glen was somewhat peripherally associated.
Circa 1987-88, he shared a house on S. 4th Avenue with M-Netters
Meg Geddes, Christine Ray (igor), and Andrea Zastrow (drea), a
house that became known as the Hotel Glur.  During seasons of
nice weather they'd have cookouts there on Saturday nights and
invite a bunch of people.  Fireworks and bubble-blowing were
featured entertainments.  STeve Andre was responsible for most
of the fireworks, as I recall, with an occasional assist from
Dave Parks.  Jan Wolter was champion bubble blower -- he produced
some bubbles large enough to encase the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Glen was actually not particularly closely associated with these
events either -- they were mostly Meg's and Chris's and Drea's thing,
and continued long after Glen moved out.

Fascinating...
(BTW:  I must pay attention to those dates on items.  My heart stopped
when I came across this item at first.  Then as I was reading it, things
didn't make sense.  Then I noticed the dates.)

I have often wondered about what happened to M-Net during my 4 year sabitcal
and the crew of people who I associate with it:  Mike Myers, GLR, MDW, Jan
Wolter and John Remmers.  Glad I stumbled onto it.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss