Ken D, another ex-LSD member runs the Grapevine mailing list and had all this to say about a) What Pazza had to say, b) Info on why the original Grapevine disbanded.

Ooooh, it's just like the old days again, eh? Anyone remember Unity? :)

For those of you who don't know, I'll describe my involvement with Grapevine, past and present, and then I'll give my views on what's happening now and what should happen in the future. If you don't care what I've got to say, click that "delete" button NOW!

Simon, please pass this onto the big ex-boss man!

History

I started sniffing around the edges of the UK Amiga scene in the late 80's, doing mainly mailtrading. Anyone who was involved in the trading scene back then will remember there were a thousand and one different diskmags, some good (RAW, Deadlock), some pitiful (Satanic Rites - have I offended anyone yet? :). When the first few issues of Grapevine started appearing on intro and message box compilations, I didn't take much notice.

However, GV5 brought in the full diskmag environment, and I could actually recognise some of the names credited to writing the articles. The one article that prompted me to write my own stuff was Monty Python's article about his experiences in prison... the first GV article I remember being about more than just "the scene".

So I wrote a couple of pieces, one of which was the first of the long-running "Nostalgia Corners", and to my surprise it appeared in GV8. Writing articles is a hell of a lot easier when you know people are willing to read them, and for the next couple of issues I regularly posted a disk-load of articles off to Torch, the other GV editor at the time.

Around issue 10, I was asked by Torch to start "sub-editing" Grapevine; collate and edit submitted articles, formatting them into the familiar two-column format and discarding the crap (and by this time, Grapevine could easily afford to drop 1 in 3 of the articles being submitted). We (there were a few other sub-eds) each got our own, personalised copy of the article editor, hard-coded with IDs to stop it being distributed :)

Craig (Torch) quit not long after that. I think he went whilst he still had the enthusiasm, and he was quickly missed.

Grapevine rumbled along for a couple of years, and it was easily the biggest diskmag in the UK, and probably the world, even though it wasn't really about the scene any more. All the paper mags knew about us; we even had an article by an Amiga Format guy. As Paz says, it really was almost a legend. It set the standard for web mags, but no-one had quite the variety and depth of articles.

The release day of Grapevine was mayhem; even though I didn't have much to do with the distribution, I got a copy a couple of days before release, and most of the Amiga users in the area would visit on release day to get a copy.

Downhill

Things started to go downhill slightly towards the later issues. More and more of the articles were simply dumped from the Internet (hi "Cygnus" :). Pazza was busted for alleged copyright violation, and I always got the impression he wasn't quite as interested by that stage. Either that, or he got fed up copying 2,000 disks per issue.

I'd joined LSD "properly" by then, as a mail trader and fledgling modem trader. By issue 20, it was proposed that Pazza step back and let someone else take over. Oedipus was nominated to take over, and to be fair to Joe, I don't think he knew what he was letting himself in for. Issue 21 came out a bit late and after a lot of frantic phone calls. Think about it: 300 articles (and hard disks were small and relatively rare), graphics, music, intros, indexes ... when you're working so close to something so complicated, it's hard to get it right.

After that, it all went quiet. Joe's phone stopped working, and when we did hear from him, it was only to say that his Amiga was "temporarily broke" or he'd "be away from home for a few weeks". I sat and waited. Blue boxing (free phone calls, usually used to access US BBSs) had died, and Internet e-mail wasn't widespread: the only lines of communication were through UK BBSs, and even then it was a matter of luck trying to find the right user on the right board.

I heard very little for a year or so. I was in semi-regular contact with the then "UK Manager", and I'm buggered if I can remember his name. (anyone help? was it Axis ...?). Eventually I was contacted by a guy called Cyanide, who had BIG plans for Grapevine and the apparent backing of "The Management". He had a couple of coders ready to go, and had spent ages drawing (on paper) the design for Grapevine TNG.

It got to the early alpha code stages. I've still got a couple of the demo archives; they bring up a custom screen and display the menu, but that's about all. After that, it all went quiet again. Cyanide would send a "ready in two weeks" message to me on Digital Candy every now and again, but it never really went anywhere.

By this time, I'd completely lost contact with LSD, although I thought everyone knew where I was (my phone number and e-mail address haven't changed in 8 years). I thought most people would now have home Internet access, so I posted a few messages on newsgroups, looking for ex-Grapevine readers, LSD management or anyone who knew more about what was happening than me. The first couple of times, I got no response.

The third time, I was contacted by Fungus, who seemed to be in some kind of management role for LSD. WaD also contacted, and said that plans were already in the pipeline for some kind of Internet-specific Grapevine (I was never told any more than this). Someone even had the domain ellessdee.org registered for a while.

I started the mailing list as a discussion forum, to find out if people even WANTED Grapevine any more. It took off fairly well, but soon settled down to one or two messages a month. A couple of ex-LSD guys (Maximum, Sir G) stayed around for a while, but it wasn't really a high-volume list until now.

Plans

The Grapevine list was split into two groups: those that wanted a custom, stand-alone Grapevine, and those who wanted a web-based magazine.

I always wanted the former. Grapevine, to me, wasn't just the articles, it was the music, the graphics, the hidden texts and the feeling it was something a bit exclusive. The goal was to create a "client" for the Amiga, PC and Mac, and download the latest "issue" from the net - a big data file with all the music and articles, which the client would display. Unfortunately, this needs coders, and no-one volunteered. It would have been a perfect task to give to the group coders, if the group had existed.

The easy option was to create a web page. There's nothing to distinguish it from the billions of other web magazines, but it's all we've got.

What now?

Of course, people change. It's probably fair to say that most of Grapevine's readership was aged in their late teens/early twenties, and were mostly single guys devoted to their Amiga's. It's easy to write us (them) off as nerds, but there was a lot of talent out there, and nearly everyone loved Grapevine (except Darrol, but we'll forget about him ... Martin, do you still have the Lamer News files? Or the spoof reply I wrote as "Mr. Flay"? I'd love to see them again ...)

To my mind, there's NO point in starting up Yet Another Web Magazine as a Grapevine replacement without the Grapevine name. The whole point of the magazine is to get back the people who used to read and write Grapevine. Whether the current web page will or won't, I'm not going to get involved in :)

So, what now? Well, someone tell us: WHO are LSD now? I'd love to be part of Grapevine as it was, with the readers and the scene, but the Amiga's dead: it survives in emulation, but the native platform's long since been lost (yeah, Matt, you were right after all :). Getting the readers and the 100+ articles isn't going to be possible without something to promote, and if we can show a decent webpage, it might just lead to something almost as good as the old Grapevine.

In short: we don't want to emulate, impersonate or replace Grapevine, we want to _continue_ it.

Anyway, it was good to hear from Paz; I thoroughly enjoyed being part of Grapevine, and it brings back many many warm memories every time I hear the music from issue 9. And good to see the "(c) spelling mistakes" lives on ... :)

-- Kenny Anderson