&Gates - The hardware fanatic of the group, for whom no task is so simple that it cannot be made more complex. Lives in search of a mutually-agreed-upon truth.
Barry D. Gates, as described in the Gliding Byte cast list.

The Gliding Byte was the second in a series of serial novels-a-clef that blossomed (then withered, decayed, and emulsified) during the latter half of the 1980s. While the action (or lack thereof) in The Gliding Byte all took place in Maine, it's readership was spread across the (BITNET) network. As with other network novels-a-clef of the time, the readership tended to consist of groups of people at other net sites who knew, via email, news, chat, or even real-world contact, the group of people on whom the characters were based. It was a kind of a community-building tool that let geographically remote people in on the inside humor of the particular cluster of net denizens. I expect the same was probably true of the 19th Century novels-a-clef on which they were essentially modelled.

The Gliding Byte was written in 1984-1985, just after Joe Herman finished the original novel-a-clef serial, As the Flip Flops, more commonly known simply as SOAP OPERA, because that was the CMS file-naming convention its issues were distributed under. It was roughly concurrent with Rich Messier's The Environment Account (named after a black-box operating system for which Maine students typically were first issued user accounts, and which thorough prevented them from accessing the network at large), the VM/COM news magazine, and the CSNEWS CSNOTICE files (BITNET's first, albeit non-distributed, USENET-style forums), of which SOAP CSNOTICE is worth mention, its issues primarily authored by Andy Robinson, Jeff Smith, the Murphys, and others.

As with SOAP OPERA, The Gliding Byte was also a collaborative effort. The intro (Episode 0), and Episode 1, were co-written by myself and my roommate at the time, Rick Fortin. He and I tended to alternate through the first few issues until about issue 10 or so, when we openned up authorship to others. Brent Britton, of NutWorks magazine fame, was also one of our more popular authors. A couple years after Episodes 0 through 19 were issued, I came across five incomplete "lost episodes" which I later released, numbered between the issues that they were written between, 1011 (which was between 10 and 11), 1213, 1819, 1920, and finally Episode 20 which could be the capturing of the actual moment of death of the Gliding Byte (just like that bad scifi movie with the funky videotape machine), or perhaps just a completed issue who's only surviving copy suffered from a file truncation error. I can't remember (sigh), or figure out (sigh, sigh), which.

The Environment Account died off a little before The Gliding Byte effectively did. The only other serial that I know of to follow it was The Adventures of Kaptain Kloodge by someone at Columbia University, I believe. After the death of the Maine soaps, first the LISTSERV lists, and then the USENET newsgroups, effectively absorbed and replaced most of the turn-key BITNET community projects that I kept in touch with.

&Gates