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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: Q-Link and people Date: 4/17/99 2:31:25 AM Pacific Daylight Time From: tsr@atarihq.com (tsr) To: uncleal2@aol.com Hola, I stumbled upon your Q-Link essay and sort of let the memories flow through me. Forgive me if I ramble on awhile, or tell you stuff you know... (and feel free to use any of this mail you want on your page) I was on Q from 1988 (15 years old and 64c in hand) to late 92 when I got my $2000 486 computer and a Prodigy membership - so I guess I was lucky to miss out on the filebase deterioration, Super-Q bugs and so on that I heard about. I was "Hawk C2" for the duration (C was my friend Craig who made that handle, and 2 is.. well.. 2 =) we got stuck trying to find a handle without a number in it; it was hard even by 1988). Let's see, where to start? In chat I spent most of my time in either trivia rooms, the QGraph hangout place, or music rooms when SuperQ opened up. Oh, and whenever there were game show-style events in the Auditorium I'd usually show up there. Ah yes, QGraphics. You have an example Qgraphic photo on your page; I spent way too much time making those infernal 15x6 works of art. The QGraph room was a riot to hang out in. IIRC there were four QGRAPHs in total: QGRAPH Jon, QGRAPH Krz (Karz - he later mostly did Caribe stuff), and 2 others. QLink didn't allow you to use the entire C64 character graphics set - just standard lines and blocks; it wasn't until SuperQ that you got great innovations like forward AND -BACK-slashes! Even before SuperQ amazing things could be made in the middle of chat - I remember Karz doing odd isometric 3d cubes, little stick dudes fighting huge dragons... all in 15x6. And in the QGraphic forum (in Just For Fun I think) you could do full screen creations; for some reason I found that stuff really captivating. Although, when doing Qgraphics in a forum message board you could not use the left-arrow character (far upper-left key on the c64), since for some reason Q-Link took that as a carriage return in the forums. I screwed up a masterpiece or two with that. Argh. It's strange how the smallest little cue can bring up a wealth of memories. The main photo on the index page mentions Qpons; I had several tens of thousands of those by the time I quit Q. You could win them in events or just amass them through the use of plus-time things like People Connection, and could trade them for free hours and such. 50,000 Qpons made you a VIQ, giving you access to a special forum, some free hours ... and a T-shirt. I still have my VIQ T-shirt! It's an extremely cheap white polo shirt with "V.I.Q." monogrammed in red; I was too embarrassed to actually wear it anywhere. I suppose Quantum thought that anyone who could afford to garner 50,000 Qpons was rich enough that they wouldn't wear just any regular old t-shirt... One minute of plus-time (plus-time stuff was all the good stuff, like chat, email, most downloading...) was 7 or 8 cents, so one hour would be $4.80. Hence people getting $500 phone bills. I tried my absolute hardest to keep myself to four hours a week, usually on Saturday night. 4 hours a week, about 4 weeks to a month, adds up to around $85 a stinking month. It was fun, though. Some of the Auditorium events were neat. Many were hosted by RBAKER until '91 or so when he left (for AOL?). The ones that stick out include a soap opera-style show (very silly), a screen-name auction (using Qpons; i heard that AOL was doing the same thing now with real money...) and the aforementioned game shows. I was a contestant on a Wheel Of Fortune(?) style show a couple of times. Probably my greatest claim to Q fame was on one such show when there was a thunderstorm in my suburban Philadelphia home, knocking out power just as I was in the final round of a show. The next week I came on for the next show, and I was amazed to discover that there had been some question as to what prize I should get. I didn't realize I was eligible for any prize, but the MC put up this notice pre-show saying "HAWK'S PRIZE?"; there had apparently been some kind of vote and it was decided to give me Qpons instead of some c64 game. That really blew my mind, that people cared that much. Man are those days gone, heh... Other dudes I knew included trivia gurus RUSS20 and YoyoAugie, PartyNinja who I sometimes ran across in a lobby and BSed with, the various QMUZ's who I would annoy by requesting New Kids on the Block tunes, Jaggy who uploaded dozens of extremely amusing cartoons and animations made in BASIC, and - eventually - the couple of QPUZ's. SuperQ and all the SID music was really great; I really don't think there was a better chat system created until now with all the IRC programs and add-ons available. I still can't believe they put a music player -and- a chat client in 64k, downloading music and text in tandem, and still making it go fast on a 1200 bauder. I never got into Caribe - it was slow and simply ate up too much precious plus-time - but I became a huge fan of Puzzler when it debuted. The people who hung out there were mostly cool, and the fact that you could contribute puzzles of your own and make your own graphic face representing you in the game were great features. For my graphic I made a little stick figure dude riding a motorcycle that generated smoke when you won. In Puzzler, there were keys you could use to make your character frown, smile, close his/her eyes, waggle the tongue, etc. I got a little creative and made that graphic instead of a face, garnering the compliments of all the QPUZ's of the time. By 1992 I was calling out to local BBSes in tandem with Qlink; even by then there were still 6 or so C64 specific boards in the Philly area. After I got the PC I moved to Prodigy for a little while, until they switched to a pay-by-the-hour format. After that was NVN (National Videotex Network), a text-only service that I found had that same sort of small-town camaraderie that Q-Link had; NVN went bankrupt in '94. Since then I've been using local ISPs, and here I am now. I have a ton of NVN/Prodigy stories and old friends too, but that's besides the subject (now that DOS Prodigy is dead we might start to get some Q-Link style nostalgia there soon...). I still know all the old nicknames - Stoney, Bunny Serianni, Weezul, Rik Pierce - but where did they all go? In a way it's a little sadder than thinking about old friends in real life that you haven't seen lately, because you only knew these friends via their words, via the text they typed. It didn't seem real, almost, yet they became part of you just like "real life" friends. -kevin gifford
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