Sanity's Edge was a bulletin board you could only reach by telephone. No modem, no screen: you dialed, pressed keys, and listened. It ran from 1994 to March 1997 on a dedicated 286 PC in a house in Tampa, Florida, built by a father and his ten-year-old son.
It started in the garage. In a box of odds and ends Max found an open retail box for the BigMouth voice card and its SDK: the card, the SDK software, paper manuals and all. He had already taught himself BASIC, so a development kit caught his eye and he asked his dad about it. “Well, son, let me tell you about SDKs...” was how he learned what one was. Around the same time he got his first computer, an 8086 with no math coprocessor, and his father taught him C on it with Turbo C: how to look up what a function does in the reference manuals, then arrays and tables in more than one dimension.
His father was a radio-station automation programmer who worked from home. He became the sysop, Dr. Null, and wrote the database backend. Max wrote a lot of the rest, including the menu structures, and was a user of the board and its co-creator: the asylum theme was his idea, and he coded the maze himself. He was user number 7, and went by Xela (Alex backwards).
The phone number, 813-989-1950, was Max's own line in his bedroom, wired up for the board; the house had three or four lines because Dad worked from home. Max designed business cards and a full-page flyer and handed them out. Anyone was welcome to call and register. Members paid a monthly fee, about five dollars as Max remembers it, and he opened the envelopes that arrived in the mail.
Callers were admitted to an asylum. Message bases were therapy rooms, the public forums were the “Men in White Jackets,” and every voice left behind became part of the fiction. Over three years the line took more than 26,000 calls and collected more than 46,000 voice messages from friends, schoolmates and strangers around the Tampa Bay area. His mother's voice is on quite a few of the recordings, including “What is Sanity's Edge?”, and his father's younger voice welcomes you to the Men in White Jackets.
Max's father passed away some years ago. Among his hoarded technology and data was a backup of Sanity's Edge, copied from hard disk to hard disk, then to solid state, and finally onto a CD labeled “Sanity's Edge” that Max's mother found and handed to him.
It took three generations of AI, and the Reverse Engineer Anything (REA) project, to crack it. ChatGPT 3, more than a year ago, did a poor job. Sonnet 4 almost cracked everything and built the first museum page, but that page was a bad recreation and the audio never played right. Then Claude Sonnet 5.5 with REA opened it completely: the audio codec turned up in Talking Technology's own converter inside the archive, the program and its logs were read directly, and every recording now plays as it did. The C source that was missing has since been rebuilt, function by function, from the machine code. Read how the code was cracked →
It was a shared creation, and now it has a chance to last. Thank you, Dad, and thank you AI.
The business card belongs on this page too. Photo coming.
