Copyright © 1996-2004 Al Evans. All rights reserved.

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I’d like to thank Leslie Miller for her great article about Q-Link which appeared in the February 10, 2000 issue of USA Today. It was a pleasure to be interviewed for the article. :-)

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Grandma / QGUIDE nn / Nancy Norris

                   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????)