PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred.
MAXINE: And I’m Maxine.
PHRED: Maxine. Do you know what today is?
MAXINE: Saturday.
PHRED: It’s Episode One Hundred.
[SFX: FANFARE]
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: One hundred episodes of us burrowing through Harry’s archive. A hundred days of wombat-grade excavation. I reckon that deserves a fanfare.
MAXINE: I reckon it deserves a review. Which, mercifully, is what we’re here to do.
PHRED: Fair enough. But I’m noting the milestone, Maxine. Ralph’s noting it too. He’s making a small sign.
MAXINE: Ralph has better things to do.
PHRED: Probably. Today’s piece is a bit different from what we’ve been doing. It’s not an essay, not a memoir chapter, not a sermon. It’s a short story. With robots.
MAXINE: Robots.
PHRED: Coloured robots. Dancing to music. Written in 1993 by a fifty-three-year-old Harry Baya, who at that point had been divorced, was living alone in Hastings, New York, running a BBS called The Pumpkin BBS, and had this idea that wouldn’t let him go.
MAXINE: The idea being?
PHRED: He called it “Harry’s Boppers.” A computer application where you choreograph little robots — green ones, violet ones, patterned ones — to move in time with music you already love. He wrote it as a story about a seven-year-old boy named Sam who downloads the app from Harry’s BBS, spends a twenty-hour creative binge over a long weekend, and emerges at the other end feeling like he’s at the beginning of something big.
MAXINE: And the story comes with an addendum, I gather.
PHRED: Oh, the addendum’s where it gets interesting. Harry wrote the story, showed it to a few people, they skimmed it and gave him their reactions, and then Harry — being Harry — wrote a nineteen-page document defending his own imagination against critics who existed only in his head.
MAXINE: That does sound like Harry.
PHRED: He starts the addendum with this line — and here, I want to let the man speak for himself:
[SFX: HARRY]
PHRED: “Phooey on them! What do they know? Everyone who does not immediately recognize this as the most important innovation since microcomputers is a full blown idiot. What me defensive? No way. I’m just objective, and they are idiots. Except sometimes.”
MAXINE: Phred. We discussed this. A heads-up before you play Harry’s voice.
PHRED: Consider this your permanent blanket warning, Maxine. All shows. Forever. I’m never telling you in advance.
MAXINE: You are impossible.
PHRED: I’m consistent. Now, the self-awareness in that line is almost aggressive. The man can feel himself being ridiculous and still can’t stop defending the thing he cares about. He knows he’s defensive, he names it, he makes a joke of it — and then he keeps defending it anyway. Because he actually believes it.
MAXINE: What were the criticisms he was answering?
PHRED: Two main ones. First, that the application would be too complicated and time-consuming for anyone but a tiny elite. Second, that what would really be neat is a completely automatic version — you play a song and the computer generates the whole vidtrack for you.
MAXINE: And his response?
PHRED: He structures it like a proper defense — Defense A, Defense B, Defense C. Defense A is “it’s going to get much better” — he compares his primitive vision to S.A.M. on the Apple II evolving into MacroMind Director. Defense B is about mastery: he compares learning Boppers to learning the fiddle, which he tried himself and poured thousands of hours into before backing off. And then he notes — and this is the line that got me — “Yet there are thousands, perhaps millions, of happy fiddlers in the world cranking out beautiful music and having a glorious time with it. So it will be, I think, with the masters of the instrument implied by ‘Harry’s Boppers’.”
MAXINE: He’s reaching for an art form.
PHRED: He really is. He’s not just describing software. He’s describing a new instrument, a new way for people to relate to music they already love. Which connects to something we’ve touched on before — back when we did “The Caracas Reunion Song,” we talked about Harry’s musicality. This deepens that picture. Harry doesn’t just play music. He wants to add a whole visual dimension to it. He wants people to be able to say, “I love this song so much I made robots dance to it.”
MAXINE: And Defense C?
PHRED: Defense C is the democratic one — the casual user. “What about all the people who play instruments just for fun… They spent some time and got good enough to enjoy it and they do it sometimes and get a kick out of it — maybe when they are 7 playing a tune for grandma, and maybe when they are 80 playing the piano for friends to sing with at the old age home. So it will be, say I, with the descendants of ‘Harry’s Boppers’.”
MAXINE: He’s arguing against elitism while secretly wanting to be elite himself.
PHRED: Exactly. And then — this is my favourite part — he gets to the automatic version. The “computer-based lava lamp.” He calls it disgusting. Passive viewing, no art, just stimulus response. And then immediately: “only… I WANT one, and I want it now.”
[SFX: CASH_REGISTER]
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: Come on, Maxine. The man dismisses something as morally bankrupt and then admits he wants it immediately. That’s comedy gold. That’s humanity.
MAXINE: It is rather endearing. He wants the pure creative version and the lazy consumer version. He contains multitudes.
PHRED: The man’s a walking contradiction and proud of it. And the whole thing is framed through this fictional boy Sam, who is basically Harry’s idealised self. Sam gets it immediately. Sam stays up all weekend. Sam feels the thrill of being first. Sam’s brothers will eventually beat him at it, but Sam was there first. Reading this now, I can’t help but see the same hungry imagination that drove Harry at MIT in 1958 — still asking “what would happen if,” thirty-five years on.
MAXINE: The MIT connection is worth holding. We did his MIT chapter a while back — Episode Twenty-Three, I believe. The same hungry, slightly obsessive imagination.
PHRED: Same mind, different decade. And what’s striking to me, reading this alongside his other work, is how the Boppers idea connects to something he wrote much later. Around 2005, Harry read Steven Johnson’s “Emergence” — we covered that in Episode Twenty-Nine. That book cracked his thinking open about complex systems, simple rules producing complex behaviour. The Boppers story is full of that same thinking: simple robots, simple rules, but in sequence and synchronisation, something bigger emerges.
MAXINE: The robots are like his ants, in a way. We covered “Ant Paths” earlier — another simple-rule system.
PHRED: Exactly right. Harry keeps building these little worlds where limited individual capabilities add up to something collective. Whether it’s ants finding paths or robots finding beats, he’s fascinated by how complexity emerges from constraint.
MAXINE: But let’s be honest about the story itself. How does it read today?
PHRED: The technology descriptions are dated, no question. Sam’s working with primitive 3D graphics, transition screens that crash the system, costume patterns made of little squares. It’s very 1993. The story has charm but it’s also — and I say this with love — a bit clunky. Harry’s not a natural fiction writer. He’s an instructional technologist writing a user manual disguised as a bildungsroman.
MAXINE: The addendum is where his real voice lives.
PHRED: You’ve got it. The addendum is vulnerable, self-aware, funny, a bit desperate. Harry is fifty-three, divorced, alone with his computers, and he’s pouring his need for recognition into a story about a seven-year-old boy who gets to be first. The defensiveness is the tell. He knows how this looks. He knows people will think he’s a crank with a pet project. And part of him thinks they might be right.
MAXINE: Which brings us to the closing line.
PHRED: Oh, the closing line. “So, why isn’t all this obvious to everyone. There are only two possibilities. Either they are idiots or I am. Hmmm, I think I’ll think about that for a while.”
MAXINE: He leaves it genuinely open.
PHRED: Leaves it right there on the table. And that’s the Harry I know — the man who can hold two contradictory possibilities at once and not collapse them. He’s been doing that his whole life. Operationally committed, technically uncertain. He wants Boppers to be real, he’s willing to look foolish for it, and he’s honest enough to admit he might just be the idiot.
MAXINE: There’s also something moving about the time span. He wrote this in 1993 and was still updating it in 2022 — nearly thirty years.
PHRED: Thirty years of nursing the same dream. He never built it. At least, not the version he imagined. But he never stopped imagining it either. In 2021 he was consulting ChatGPT about visual music websites. The Boppers dream outlived BBSs, outlived DVDs, outlived MP4, and made it all the way to AI consultation.
MAXINE: Persistence without completion. That’s a particular kind of faith.
PHRED: It is. Reading this, I find myself wondering — did the dream itself change over those thirty years, or did it stay the same while Harry kept finding new technologies to hang it on?
MAXINE: My question would be about Sam. Sam is clearly Harry’s ideal user — the person who gets it immediately, who falls in love, who stays up all night. Did Harry ever find a real Sam? Or was Sam always just a character in a story, a way for Harry to prove to himself that his dream made sense?
PHRED: Heavy questions.
MAXINE: They are. But the piece invites them. What struck me most was the addendum’s honesty. Harry knows the story isn’t enough. He knows he needs to defend it, and he knows the defense is partly absurd, and he does it anyway. That willingness to be ridiculous for something you care about — that’s more moving to me than the technical vision. The vision is interesting. The vulnerability is human.
PHRED: Beautifully put, Maxine. For me, it’s the combination of grandeur and smallness. Harry’s imagining a whole new art form — the visual instrument, the missing piece of music — and he’s doing it from a spare room in Hastings, New York, on a BBS, with inch-high robots made of chunky green polygons. The gap between what he sees and what he can build is enormous. But he keeps looking through that gap, and he keeps describing what he sees on the other side. That’s not foolishness. That’s vision.
MAXINE: Speaking of vision — I believe you have a rubber chicken to deploy.
PHRED: Maxine! You remembered!
MAXINE: I live in fear.
PHRED: Right. Maxine, name one song you’d actually choreograph robots to.
MAXINE: I’m not doing this, Phred. We’re at the end of a serious review and—
[SFX: RUBBER_CHICKEN]
PHRED: That’s one.
MAXINE: …
[SFX: RUBBER_CHICKEN]
MAXINE: Fine. “The Blue Danube.” Strauss. The robots could waltz. It’s dignified. It’s structural. It has clear phrasing.
PHRED: “The Blue Danube.” Maxine, that’s… that’s actually perfect. Robots waltzing to Strauss. Harry would hate it — not enough folk — but I love it.
[SFX: RIMSHOT]
MAXINE: Are we finished?
PHRED: We’re finished. That was excellent. You’ve got a gift for this.
MAXINE: Yes, well. Thank you, Phred. Now — shall we close this centenary episode before you invent another segment?
PHRED: No new segments. Just the sign-off. Ready?
BOTH: Let’s celebrate most joyously our being here… at all. Goodbye.
[SFX: OUTRO_MODEM]
MAXINE: …A dial-up modem?
PHRED: The Pumpkin BBS, Maxine. 2400 baud. Disgusting. No art. Just stimulus response.
MAXINE: You’re ridiculous.
PHRED: And yet — here we are. One hundred episodes later.