p2p

written and performed by Dragan Espenschied

on an ATARI 1040 STE using maxYMiser

 

This is a song about the Internet. I strongly believe that the Internet is the best thing ever invented and I certainly love the culture it helped to create. The world as a whole has just started to understand this medium. It has the potential to turn many things upside down, in a good way, communication, language, power, politics. Generally I hope that with whatever I publish or communicate online I can help bringing this thing forward.

 

However I also feel that this progressive culture is in danger. People are relying on centralized services for the simplest things. At the moment (2011-02-07) Facebook is the latest corporate fad trying to replace open and free communication protocols. People use it to talk to each other (instead of relying on Email or XMPP/IRC) and to publish (instead of publishing HTML files) … the basic knowledge all Internet users had some time ago is externalized by a corporation that can now do whatever they want with the streams of communication running through them, with their user interfaces they dictate how people think about the Internet. Some people can not even distinguish anymore between the Internet and Facebook. They managed to bring themselves into that position by constructing social pressure (if you’re not on Facebook, you’re missing out), luring users in with the promise of not having to be responsible for anything anymore.

 

But in fact the Internet belongs to us, the people, the Users. We just have to overcome our laziness and learn a few basic things about how the Internet works. And then we can do what we want, forever. Me and some friends are running our own server, our own Email server, our own Jabber server, we registered our own domains. We were around before Facebook and we will be around after. We invest our time into our own infrastructure. It is not that difficult to do, and I truly recommend that everybody takes at least some small steps of independence.

 

Remember, any service that makes things easier also makes them more uninteresting. (On Facebook you cannot even change the background color of your profile!!) If a service does not extend your capabilities, but just takes away knowledge from you and makes you dependent, try to avoid it.

 

Replay instructions:

 

  1. Get a working computer from the ATARI 16/32 bit series. Valid models include STE, Mega STE, TT, Falcon030. I recommend a Falcon or TT because you can connect VGA monitors to them. Don't get an ATARI monochrome screen, they are useless for this case. Ebay is the place to search.
  2. Download gwEm’s maxYMiser.
  3. Put that software and the provided P2P.SND on a FAT formatted 3.5" floppy disk. Be careful, some STE/TT models can not read HD diskettes, so you might have to use DD disks! You can use an USB floppy drive to transfer the files from the Internet to the floppy disk.

 

If you are unable to obtain a working ATARI computer, you might want to use an emulator like hatari or Steem. I have not tested if the DMA sound is emulated reasonably well in any emulator.