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| I'd like to thank Leslie Miller for her great article about Q-Link (and this web site), which appeared in the February 10, 2000 issue of USA Today. :-)
| Subj: QLinkDate:11/06/2000 6:20:15 PM Pacific StandardTime From:nnorris@icongrp.com (Nancy Norris) To:uncleal2@aol.com I remember QLink well - I was on it from the day after it went public, in 1985, until I stopped being a QGuide (after more than four years) in 1991 - when Steve Case decided not to pay the remote staff any more. (Not that he paid much - I think it was $2.00 an hour, and $2.50 for shift supervisors, who got to go ream out the Teens Only chat room frequently. It was the principle - he just didn't value the work that anyone put into QLink, or, ultimately, QLink itself. And I suspect that same attitude has carried over to AOL, which is why I don't use it.) I missed the closing - the modem in my C64 died shortly before that, and it was impossible to find another one by then. I still had the 300-baud modem, but my son had it in Illinois. I did the late night shift several nights a week, from 11 p.m. CST to 2 a.m., mostly as shift supervisor, but one night a week in the Help Room. I first signed on as Nancy, not knowing any better. After that first night in PC, I tried Max, hoping to ward off horny 13-year-olds and their OLMs. It didn't work. Neither did Grandma. At that point, I gave up and just sent very insulting OLMs back, and that DID work, for the most part. Grandma and her CARPetbag, or Chameleon, spent a lot of time in the Lobby late at night (and the Breakfast Club, if I could stay awake,) unless QGuide NN was on duty. Your description captures a lot of the magic of that time, but I think there's one tiny error - I'm pretty sure Quantum did acquire the Playnet system, but Playnet itself was around for at least a year after QLink went public. We were all expecting it to die any minute, but it didn't for a long time. When it did, we were inundated with new members - almost as bad as the week after Christmas every year. I noticed the names of several infamous baby hackers on John's list. Hopefully, they've grown up by now. [Note: I asked Nancy about a session of "Guess what the QGuide's initials stand for... keep in mind that she was QGUIDE nn..,] Actually, the "no nuts" wasn't my idea; it was one of the teenagers who infested QLink. They were constantly trying to guess just who I was (I kept it a deep secret, for obvious reasons, since I spent so much time in Teens Only throwing them off the system.) Somehow, they convinced themselves that I was a guy, late 20's to mid 30's. Actually, I'm NOT a guy and when I started as a QGuide, I was almost 51. (And no, I wasn't the oldest - at that time, there was a guy in his 70's. He left not long after I started.) Like you, I let the "no nuts" guess slide, because I had kind of encouraged their little game. And there were some off-duty QGuides there, but they were too busy rolling on the floor to complain. And they contributed some of the funniest guesses, too, but they were funnier to the people who knew me than they were to the general population. Some of the ones I remember were Naturally Nice, Never Nice, Never Naughty, Not Noisy...but No Nuts had to be the top. A lot of them included Norm - since I was a guy and that was the only guy's name the kids could think of that started with N. I can't remember whether it was Mikee, SkyLine or Beregond who let it "slip" that it was actually Ned. Sheesh - you're making me remember things I forgot years ago! Whether [that's] a bad thing depends on what it is, I guess. I'd really rather not remember the time spent in Teens Only. Except it was fun sometimes. Remember how OLMs tied up your screen so you couldn't type anything? Well, they used to OLM-bomb me the minute I appeared, so I couldn't give anyone a warning. And it never worked. I'm not as fast now, but back then, answering questions for three hours while making people behave, I typed about 100 words a minute. We used to have races in the Lobby late at night, and the only one who ever beat me was SkyLine. And he had a 1200 baud modem and I was still at 300 baud at the time. Sheesh, Al, you scared me! When I first starting reading your e-mail, I thought your QLink page was disappearing just as I had found it. Then I read on. You're right - AOL will never be like QLink. It's too big and too business-like. It will never have KsLass swinging from the chandelier, SkyLine selling (or stealing) everything in sight, Mikee whining and whimpering when people pick on him (which we did shamelessly to HEAR him whine and whimper) or Beregond serving whatever it was he served. I still miss it. That was a lot of Q-Link's charm - we had the freedom to be MORE real than we were in the real world. Poor Mikee! It was so much fun to pick on him, because he was so easy. As Grandma, I had a CARPetbag. (Remember carping?) I used to appear in the Lobby and stuff QGuide MW into the CARPetbag and then everyone ignored him until I let him out. I'm sorry I missed the Armageddon thing. We had a worse one - we used to appear as variations of SkyLine - drove him NUTS. SlyKind was the name I usually used, and I think Tom (Beregond/QGuide TR) was usually SkySlime. And there were SkyLine1, 2, etc. It started as retaliation for the night I came back from two weeks' vacation and Grandmas numbered up to about 15 suddenly invaded the Lobby. I signed off and came back as Chameleon and they did it again. So I created and deleted Grandmas and Chameleons up to about 200 so they couldn't use them again. (Most of them had four aliases they used frequently, so they only had one spare to play with and had to delete the Grandmas and Chameleons.) One funny sideline to that episode - one of the people in the Lobby that night was Granny1. I thought he was one of the comedians and snarled at him all night. Turned out he was a new member, named Frank Grandison (hence the screen name) and he had NO idea what was going on. And the whole two weeks I was gone, regulars thought he was me, being funny, and he didn't understand any of that, either. He thought everyone on QLink was insane except him. He later became QGuide FG. One former QLinker I'd really like to hear something about - Malakai. He hung out in the Help Room for months, and if someone asked a technical question I couldn't answer, he would OLM me the answer. One night when no one else was in there, we were talking about how easy it was to be something you weren't on QLink. And we each described what we thought the other was really like. We each thought the other was a 28-year-old guy. I was a 49-year-old woman, and he was a 16-year-old high school kid. I asked if he had a part-time job that paid his QLink bill. He said he worked at Sears, but used his paycheck to pay for gas and car insurance. I asked how he paid his bill then. (Sky had been warning all of us that the kid had to be a hacker, since he was online for 5-6 hours every single night.) He said with his royalties. He had sold several programs to Compute's Gazette. He started college a couple of years later, dropped out after one semester and went to work at QLink as a programmer. You mentioned your friends not understanding QLink - you should have seen my husband's disbelief. We went to Tom and Ginny's wedding in Chicago, and he told people about it for months afterwards. Tom lived in California, Ginny lived in Washington, D.C. They met on QLink, she visited him, he visited her, they decided to get married in the north [Chicago] suburb where her mother still lived. I had never seen either of them, but Sky had described Tom once as "a big cuddly blond teddy bear." When we arrived, a tall thin brunette answered the door and introduced himself as Tom. I immediately decided I really owed Sky another one. The conversation got more and more weird. After about 10 minutes, we finally figured out that it wasn't Tom the bridegroom we were talking to, but Tom the bride's brother. And he figured out we weren't Tom the bridegroom's parents after all. And about then Ginny came in and started pinning a corsage on me. It seemed I was the matron of honor and they didn't tell me because they were I afraid I wouldn't be there if I knew. They did tell Sky ahead of time that he was the best man. He claimed that the underpasses on the expressway flooded during a rainstorm right after we passed his neighborhood and that was why he arrived just in time for the dinner after the wedding. (Not quite in time - we shared his shrimp cocktail before he got there.) Yes, that's where the flamingos came from. Linni was planning this big get-together and a couple of days before 20-30 people were supposed to start arriving, her neighbors put a bunch of ugly pink plastic flamingos in their front yard. They were still there the next year, when I got to go to the picnic. I had just gotten a catalog in the mail that had some REALLY hideous plastic garden elves from Germany - I seem to remember one of them was riding a pig. We collected enough to buy her the whole set. They appeared in strange places during the first night we were there (as soon as Linni finally went to sleep) including the garage roof, peeking down over the gutters. We missed out on the really great thing, though. Someone had brought a squirt gun. The rest of us were unarmed, so I drove half a dozen people to the nearest Toys R Us in my van. On the way, we passed a garden shop that had a more-than-life sized plastic gorilla on its roof. And more on the ground for sale. But we were already past the entrance before anyone saw it. And on the way back, I couldn't get through the traffic. ::sigh:: One of the purchases at Toys R Us was a plastic fireman's helmet with a built-in siren. I can't remember just who we gave it to, but he was very pleased. Until he found out that every time someone pushed the button to start the siren, someone else felt it was necessary to put the fire out with a squirt gun. Or the garden hose. The best flamingo one was when we were beta-testing Habitat. At someone's request, pink flamingos were put in one of the vending machines. Linni's Habitat front yard was full of them. And whomever it was who programmed them into the machines made them extremely cheap. Everyone who went by bought her a few. [Permission to use this on Remember QLink...] As long as you promise not to use anything that will cause people to throw flamingos at me... Did I tell you about the QLink Marching Bandits? I got home from a community band rehearsal one night (I still play my alto sax every Wednesday night) and signed on. The usual crowd was in the Lobby and someone asked where I had been, so I told them. And SkyLine admitted to being a drummer. (Really - he played in jazz bands on weekends.) We had soon found several flutes, a clarinet or two, a trombone......I think someone even admitted to playing the oboe, God knows why. Within two or three days we had recruited about 14 people. Someone even volunteered to be the drum major. The plan was that while they were busy doing the parade and everyone else was busy watching it, SkyLine and I were going to rob the QLink bank. Unfortunately, we could never get enough of the band together at the same time, and when we came close, KsLass tended to fly off to the chandelier and start shooting at everything in sight. Other musicians had similar bad habits. And we weren't quite sure where the bank was anyway. Going back even further (must have been early 1986) it rained in the Midwest for days and days. So we built an ark in the Lobby. And started loading it with animals. But there was a problem with the elephants. At one point, someone's neighbors were complaining about them being in the driveway. A lot of things happened to those poor elephants. Someone finally sold them. (Maybe that was when Sky first appeared on QLink????)
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