Interview: Eric Greene

Mr. Greene was a personal triumph that turned into a huge asset for the documentary as a whole. When I set off on the BBS Documentary project, there were a bunch of people for whom I held a special admiration or knowledge. In many cases, it was simply because in my early days as a pre-teen using BBSes around 1981, I was blown away at the magic of the BBS and wondered how these wizards were able to make these computers do these things. In other cases, I simply saw people's names a lot and thought they must be the most important folks in the world. Among these idols was the name GREENE. All I knew him as was GREENE of the GREENE MACHINE. In the late 1970's and early 1980's, BBSes were a weird enough and rare enough occurrence that you really could list them all in a pretty small file. While I don't have firm figures, I'll definitely commit and say they numbered in the mere hundreds at best (of those that didn't go up for a week for an experiment and disappeared forever). And of those hundreds, there were only a dozen or so BBS packages that got passed around and used by people beyond a bunch of one-offs. Programs like ABBS, Apple-Net, R/CPM, CBBS and BULLETIN 80 were about all you could find. And among them was GREENE MACHINE, written for the TRS-80 home computer. Like the early days of the car industry, nothing was out of bounds; every program had a different way of dealing with the world, everyone was sharing ideas (or borrowing them, they might say) and you really didn't know what you would get coming down the line at you once you called a BBS. And I knew that whoever wrote the GREENE MACHINE would be in the middle of it. I also knew that a "regular" BBS documentary would never, in a million years, think of trying to track down the author to talk to him, let along know what part he played in the early days. I was really hot at the time to prove that "my" BBS documentary would be different, and so it was a personal goal to find whoever made the GREENE MA